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How in th nine circles of hell and Asmodeus's shining a$$ key is a druid an Apocolypse Rider? Like how does that make any lore sense?!!!
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Tearing down all of society on the back of your animal companion feels pretty classic Bad Guy Druid to me.
I can see that but an Apocolypse Rider wants to destroy everything, Nature included. Wouldn't it be against Nature's interest to grant power to someone who wants to destroy it?
Potentially the story for an Apocalypse Rider PC is that in the front half of their career they have dealt so much wanton destruction that Abbadon itself took notice and decided to endorse your further activities. Whether that *actually* means you want to fully commit to the cause of entropy depends on how the story plays out. Hypothetically you might want to be a kinder/gentler horseperson of the Apocalypse, since sooner or later everything has to end but there's no particular reason to hurry it around to happen any faster than it needs to.
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I don't know at all who the druid Apocalypse Rider we're talking about is, but it strikes me that decay is also nature, right? One of my pet peeves about typical druid depictions is that nature isn't just forests and edenic paradises. Nature is also decay and destruction, nature is also deserts (with its own forms of life and abundance that are just as important). I think it's fair to say that the majority of druids want to preserve the ecosystem (just like the majority of non-daemons don't want to destroy all life), but nature isn't just one thing.
If Nature indeed has interests (yes, it's a quasi-magical force that gives life to spirit-like entities, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything), I would be extremely skeptical of assigning it any singular and self-compatible set of goals. Nature wants the wolf to eat the deer and the deer to escape the wolf and the gut parasites to feed off both of them and the detritivores to feast on their bodies. Nature will happily destroy nature, and it's only that nature finds equilibrium between growth and decay that it doesn't.
Druids are often painted as stewards of this equilibrium, but they're also free not to care about it (beyond their anathemat against 'despoiling natural places') and simply focus their power on the destructive aspects of nature just as a storm druid focuses on elemental forces rather than living cycles. Fair, sooner or later one assumes that an omnicidal goal would eventually require despoiling natural places at some point (however fine that definition may be) but that strikes me as a matter for the druid to square off should they ever actually get far enough. Even if we never see anything like the blight druid--equally capable of acting as a steward of ravaged lands and as a bringer of creeping rot to end all things.
In the meantime, there's a lot of non-natural places to despoil, regardless what far-off future clash may come of the druid's values.
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One of the example potential Apocalypse Riders in the book is a druid who burns people's farmland and pits small communities against each other in order to fend off the encroachment of civilization.
That seems like "angling for the Horseperson of Famine" to me.
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One of the example potential Apocalypse Riders in the book is a druid who burns people's farmland and pits small communities against each other in order to fend off the encroachment of civilization.
That seems like "angling for the Horseperson of Famine" to me.
Oh, how neat! Yeah, that seems like the very kind of thing that an evil druid rider of the apocalypse would do. Oppose the encroachment of civilization by brute force and razing settlements like clear-cutting a forest. Strikes me as very "the leopards would never eat my face" in a way, except it's the leopards eventually being eaten by omnicidal monsters they teamed up with to get rid of all the humans.
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Eberron has a cruel order of druids called the Children of Winter, those who believe that the culling of the weak is an essential part of nature. They oppose civilization for how it allows those they see as unfit to survive, and are not above pretty explosive attacks on nations near their lands.
I think you could *absolutely* do a similar sort of thing for this hypothetical Apocalypse Rider Druid.
Maybe I'm thinking to deep into this and it just boils down to what a player and GM decide is both fun for the player and the GM will allow at his or her table.
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Maybe I'm thinking to deep into this and it just boils down to what a player and GM decide is both fun for the player and the GM will allow at his or her table.
One thing is that the examples in each Mythic Destiny are "potential individuals who might gain this mythic destiny" rather than "people who have this mythic identity."
Like one of the examples for the Broken Chain is "the entire Hell's Rebels party" and if you played that one you know that the PCs aren't mythic. But if they would have become Mythic, that would be the destiny that fits.
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One thing I think is missing from the Mythic rules (or at least guidelines) is how do you tell the story of a character who decides to turn away at the threshold of their Mythic Destiny. Like someone who deals so much wanton destruction that Abbadon endorses them, but they decide they don't want to throw their lot in with the destruction of all things, ultimately.
Like this seems like a reasonable story to tell, a la ("turns out, I don't want to be an archfiend") but I'm not sure we have the tools we need for it. I guess one way you could do it is "you choose not to take the immortality feat at 20 and take a lower level mythic feat instead."
I can see that but an Apocolypse Rider wants to destroy everything, Nature included. Wouldn't it be against Nature's interest to grant power to someone who wants to destroy it?
They must have really embraced decay to the absolute extreme.
Scouring the planet of life would let let life begin again, with a clean slate.
I'm not really into Mythic levels of play, but I like mounted characters:what kind of things does an Apocalypse Rider get?
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Just chiming in on where I think this (IMO correctly) intuited mismatch of Druid vs Daemon lies.
Daemons, and therefore Apocalypse Riders, are about the actual end, ending all mortal life. This is not any form of restart, nor a way to reform what is a perceived imbalance of nature. Daemons claim to only want *all* life to end, permanently. Animals, and even microbes, included.
That exact goal is spelled out explicitly, and it's been noted in-text that this is self-defeating; 0 mortals means no mortals can wash ashore from the river to become new Daemons, and no more mortal souls to eat.
This *is* fundamentally contradictory to any and all Druids that care about nature, even in the most abstract and distant sense.
Druidic "decay" and "death" is inherently about recycling and *not* about ending in the Daemonic sense. I'm guessing this is where Paizo's misstep happened. A Druid may burn crops for any number of reasons, but there is perhaps one reason I think we could agree is "anti-Druid." I cannot imagine anyone who is a practicing Druid, who would burn crops for the sake of the extinction of all life. Ya know, that one specific goal of the Daemons.
There is outright 0 "nature" that can exist in a "Daemons win" world. (it's a bit weird to think about, but animals are mortals too, in the sense that they have (weak?) souls, so even the "people are trash, let animals inherit the earth" Druids are incompatible.)
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Note that this *does* leave the "means to an end" style Apocalypse Rider Druid as the one potential example I agree with.
If some entity/force is offering a lot of power, and you were already going to be doing a lot of Horseman-adjacent activities (for a non-"Ending" goal), it seems possible a Druid may be swayed into taking such power, even when they know they disagree with that patron's ultimate goal.
Agree with Trip, a druid can't fundamentally agree with daemon ideology, if they do they're not a druid anymore.
However, an Apocalypse Rider don't need to fundamentally agree with the daemons, only to become a purely destructive force going forward. And since daemons whole deal is to prey on short-sightedness, I can see a druid falling for their tricks and taking their power, even with the strings attached, thinking that they'll limit their destruction to the "civilised" and spare the wild, so that the wild can reconquer what they lay to waste.
Basically, the idea for such druid would be that they don't break druid anathema because they're only destroying "unnatural" stuff, and won't break Apocalypse Rider anathema because they're not building anything... only passively allowing nature to reconquer the ruins they leave behind. And when they'll do so, they'll probably think that they "won one" over the daemons, got the power without trully accomplishing their end, and that the only cost is that they personally won't be able to enjoy the renewed nature (and that they are damned of course, but martyr for the cause I guess).
But daemons being daemons, I doubt such things could trully work for long. Such druid will inevitably be corrupted by all the destruction it's doing or end up forgetting what nature trully is due to the fact that they can never go back to it, twisting them until they become "druid" only in name. Even if they manage to stay true to themselves, the daemons will probably plan things so that the destruction they lay in their wake are blighted in such way that nature can never reconquer it, leaving "dead" zones in the world, even worse than when "civilisation" controlled this place. Things like having the druid destroy the equivalent of a nuclear reactor in their crusade against civilisation and technology, making the surrounding land unlivable for both the civilised and the wilderness.
And if the druid manage to avoid corruption, if they manage to cleverly avoid the traps laid out by daemons to use their destructiveness to further the "true end" of the world... then the Horsemen would probably end up cutting the power supply, or altering the anathema so it become "destroy the natural world too or lose your powers". After all, they don't have to uphold their end of the bargain, they're not devils, if a deal isn't working as they intend, they will alter or cancel it as they want.
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Many people end up supporting causes their ethos couldn’t possibly be compatible with based on another’s understanding of it.
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Druidic "decay" and "death" is inherently about recycling and *not* about ending in the Daemonic sense.
It is true that the druid is often described in terms of being stewards of balance. If we get a 2e version of the blight druid, this is indeed the version I want to focus more on--the 'deserts are also part of nature, not an evil that druids want to stamp out' style. Even so, the other half of my quote re: the creeping rot that will end all things comes directly from the 1e blight druid description.
One can argue that druids shouldn't ever have an appetite for destruction beyond what suits their philosophy of 'balance', but one cannot say that the idea of the violent druid has never existed in the lore. Certainly, if we never see the blight druid concept again (or if we see it, and it's entirely about the cycles food-scarce ecosystems like deserts and the ocean floor) it would suggest that the lore team considers this 'dark' druid a mistake, but until then, the concept of a druid who embodies nature's hungry, ruthless side exists.
Like, I hear you when you say truly ending all life doesn't sit easy with most druids as we've seen them in 2e. As you may have seen, I admitted that sooner or later the druid harbinger would hit a point of conflict between their two ideals. I see we agree more or less, there.
Leaving aside the question of daemons, I just don't think stewards of balance is the only thing druids can be. It seems to me like too many people default on one druidic personality type--the calm environmentalist who cares all about preservation and balance in all things. This suits the standard druid, but to say that druids cannot deviate from that strikes me as strange as suggesting that Champions or Clerics shouldn't worship demons because that doesn't match the kindly parish priest archetype, or the idea that Monks must always be perfectly disciplined and never resort to corrupt power.
Druids are fully allowed to focus on the cycle of predator and prey and then go about making themselves into an apex predator without a single concern beyond that, provided they don't destroy their own habitat. They don't need to worry, they are a part of the balance. This is because the balance isn't some fundamental trait of nature, it's the emergent property of hundreds of things working in their own self-interest.
It is well and normal that the average druid seeks to emulate this complex web of checks and balances and preserve it against disrupting forces (like invasive species, perhaps) but I would like to see also druids whose bond with nature is as pure and unpredictable as landslide, whose idea of balance isn't so stagnant as maintaining a permanent status quo, but rather constant flux and counterflux.
Nature is incredibly diverse, so why shouldn't its agents be?
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An apex predator destroys everything, and dies when it runs out of resources.
I would be remiss not to point out that while an apex predator could do this, this is not their typical roll in an ecosystem. In fact, re-introducing apex predators to an ecosystem can in fact be a way to preserve the balance--bringing wolves back to Yellowstone stopped the deer from overpopulating and stripping the greenery, which in turn allowed other things to grow. It's not that the wolves wanted to balance the ecosystem--they're just eating the food available and dying when they can't and the deer are just trying to get away and dying when they can't.
I'm glad the animal order anathema includes a provision for killing animals to survive, because in past editions I've gotten the sense that stock druids somehow expect no animals to die on their watch, which is just now how anything works. The 2e druid is a lot more of a practical environmentalist and I like that, but also nature is big enough that I don't think every druid had to be the same type of conservationist, they can just be parts of nature, as you say.
I think the reason this seems to be more of a "math outright does not compute" issue from my PoV is that when we say Druid, we mean the Druid class.
That means Druidic spellcasting.
Which is not magic inherent to the person a la Sorcery, nor magic carefully studied and woven via Wizardy.
Druids essentially are clerics for the collective life/magic of the natural world.
"As a druid, your spellcasting incantations might be pleas to the environment around you or the invocation of ancient vows; your hands might sway like willows or curl into clawlike shapes as your gestures direct your magic."
This also includes anathema that will sever your connection to that magic.
As stewards of the natural order, druids find affronts to nature anathema. If you repeatedly perform these acts, you lose your magical abilities from the druid class, including your druid spellcasting and the benefits of your order. These abilities can be regained only if you demonstrate your repentance with an atone ritual. The following acts are anathema to all druids.
Anathema despoil natural places, consume more natural resources than you require to live comfortably, teach the Wildsong to non-druids.
Your choice of druidic order adds further anathema, as detailed in the order's entry
Like, guys, yes there is some amount of leeway in a specific PC.
But "Nature Herself" will not care about the PC's justification for a Daemonically-powered killing spree. It will just cut them off and reject them.
If that PC acts in Daemon-aligned ways, they will be cut off from their Druidic source of magics.
Which is what I'd say defines a Druid vs a non-Druid.
Druids are not clerics that can always find a god with matching values. At some level, it is not possible to act as "an Apocalypse Rider" and to maintain a supernatural allegiance to the force of Nature.
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I agree with OP that, out of all the possible valid options Paizo could have used, they picked perhaps the one class that is outright incompatible with being an Apocalypse Rider, lol.
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In that case, I return to my original point: it is not in the least antithetical to nature to destroy. If we even assume that nature is a specific and sapient force and not more like a genius locus across all environments, the fact is the druid anathema says nothing about killing. It would be frankly impossible to play a druid in a pathfinder adventure if you couldn't kill your enemies.
The druid anathema says not to despoil nature and not to take more from nature than you need. There is no conflict destroying something that does not belong to nature or even to believing you can use the powers of an omnicidal entity in the short term.
Nature is not just forests and living in harmony. It is also red in tooth and claw. It is also a shifting climate that displaces thousands. It makes sense for most druids to want to maintain the balance of nature, but the balance of nature can't look the same for all places, and whatever sentience we ascribe to "Nature" itself is not going to be a kind and loving mother for all druids in all ecosystems. It really can't, or evil druids just never existed.
Again, the Rider Druid is an outlier, but the druid anathema isn't "don't kill people" nor is it even "don't think about the end of all things" (which we've seen is a genuine type of druid in editions past) it's don't despoil nature, which might eventually be a problem for the Rider Druid if they actually succeed in eliminating civilization, but not in the short term
The most likely Horseperson for a Druid to angle for would be the Horseperson of Famine, motivated by "the rabbit desperately wants the wolf to starve."
Pestilence, War, and Death are harder sells.
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Again, Daemons are not about ending civilization, they are about ending life as a concept.
There is no "organization goal" more antithetical to the concept of capital N nature than the Daemonic Horsemen.
Demons want to corrupt, and nature could theoretically exist, just mutated beyond recognition.
Devils want to enslave, and nature could theoretically exist, just imprisoned inside a glass bottle.
All despots and tyrants want there to be something left in order to rule over it.
But Daemons want to end life as a concept, including themselves. There can be no life-collective which we call Nature, and destroying this concept of "Nature" is the Daemon's explicit goal.
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If I were to intentionally sift through Golarion lore for a foe as explicitly anti-nature as possible, the one most anathema to the concept of serving nature, it would be the Daemons.
Literally Rovagug needs there to be something left to keep eating, and would not be as good a thematic antagonist. The only competition is Groteus, but because they are fine sitting there waiting, the best pick is still Daemons.
Even some foe from the negative plane would have their own "negative life" Nature counterpart.
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Again, it is always possible to invent a justification that satisfies the specific narrative desire of one's self.
My point is that in the general sense, as far as I know, there is no conceptual dedication / deal a Druid could make that could possibly be more anathema to the service of Nature than a Daemonic Apocalypse Rider.
*Literally* every other existing "evil cult" Druid would have an easier time justifying why it's not anathema, and why Nature has not rejected that character's claim to its power.
If the concept of an anathema is to have any meaning whatsoever, then there has to be *some* amount of incompatibility.
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At the end, it circle back to the same thing, the fundamental goal of Daemonhood is irreconciliable with druidic philosophy, because it demand a complete destruction of the natural order (along with everything else).
But it doesn't matter for the Apocalypse Rider mythic destiny, because it doesn't ask you to believe or to want to follow that goal. It only ask that you relinquish your soul, and only become an instrument of destruction going forward. A druid that seek power in order to face (what they consider) ennemies of nature may find it here, and as long as they focus all of their attention (and destructiveness) to these ennemies of nature, they'll respect both their druidic and Apocalyspe Rider vows.
The destiny is fine for druids, because it appeal to the druids that want to either take revenge on foes of nature, or to destroy them, while confident that the wild will reclaim it afterward. Wether they'll actually manage to avoid harming nature in their rampage is another story entirely.
Ironically, despite considering the daemons "the worse evil" for the Pathfinder cosmology, I think that Apocalypse Rider is far easier to justify as a member of a "good" party than an Archfiend. The Archfiend as presented feel like it only fit for characters that is at home with said fiends, someone that already was evil and whose evilness and mythic power mixed into giving them archfiend power, while the Rider feels like it could fit for any desperate character that want or need power and accepted to damn themselves to obtain it, something that work even for fully heroic characters (or at least, fully heroic until they became Riders, of course).
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The most likely Horseperson for a Druid to angle for would be the Horseperson of Famine, motivated by "the rabbit desperately wants the wolf to starve."
Pestilence, War, and Death are harder sells.
I'm not sure what would be difficult for Pestilence. Diseases are straight up parts of nature. Like, I don't hope we ever get a plague-bringer druid (which technically the 1e blight druid was part this despite its lore text being about recovering ecosystems and decay) as a playable character type again, but if there were a third organism order of druid alongside Leaf and Animal, it could absolutely be a Plague Order.
It's absolutely not my cup of tea, but a druid could very much focus on the role of disease and parasites in the ecosystem. There's no meaningful difference to nature whether a deer is laid low by wolves or by chronic wasting disease.
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Let me first say I thoroughly enjoy these kind of conversations. The beauty of a great roleplaying system is we can conjure any character we wish with the right rationale and play their story out.
When I designed the Apocalypse Rider, I wanted any character from any background to have a chance to take up the cause of Paizo's coolest bad guys. Sure, they need to have mounts and be ineffably evil. But you can get there from any class, and start with almost any motivation.
I think nature inherently includes death, and those aspects of nature devoted to killing are not concerned with the idea of balance. I also don't believe the game ever references a benign nature entity that deletes parts of nature. There are gods and elemental forces. As I understand, the balance of nature was struck by them after they forged the First World.
The Horsemen and their daemonic host serves to disrupt that balance and end everything. If you see them as an essential part of existence (some give life, some preserve balance, some must bear the office of taking that life away), then it's still fine for them to enact their part of that balance. They can do everything in their power to end all life because someone else out there is tasked with stopping them. Failure to pursue extinction is the violation of the druid's anathema because not murdering everyone is the same as allowing life to thrive. This becomes paradoxical because the strain on natural resources inevitable ends in famine of one or more types.
But I think it's more compelling to say that druids wield the power of nature and are not beholden to it. If that means we need an apocalypse druid that doesn't have the anathema than sobeit. But I'm not for telling any class they can't conceive a way to play the mythic destiny they want. And I'm not telling the Four there's a class out there that can never serve them. : }
It seems that the precise reason of the "incompatible" take is being mistaken / forgotten.
It's not about the actions of the Druid being against a **personal** anathema of the Druid's moral code.
The issue is that Druids are not like Oracles that get their magic without the consent of the their source.
Druids are very much "like Clerics for Nature." Nature, the collective agent of all life, is their sugar daddy. Countless mortals have asked Nature for power and been denied, even when they have the connection/talent required.
Nature's approval is required every single day a Druid prepares their spells.
The issue with Druid + Daemonic Rider incompatibility is because it's not the PC's own characterization nor justification that grants them magic, in pf2e Nature has real agency and approval / disapproval. When a Druid commits anathema, Nature is the one denying them power and demands penance/atonement.
In the same way that a Cleric of Pharasma is "never" going to be compatible with becoming a Daemonic Rider due to Pharasma's disapproval, so too is Nature never going to empower a Daemon-approved Apocalypse Rider.
It is because both the "reality" of Daemons, and the "reality" of Nature and their values are static and completely outside the PC's personal narrative, that makes this as "textbook" of an incompatibility as is possible.
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IMO, it just makes a mountain more sense for any anathema-incompatible PC to homebrew the Rider stuff itself into being something non-Daemonic and therefore compatible, than it does to have a PC constantly contradict the settings' lore as the table is just trying to play a campaign.
I strongly recommend one make up their own sub-Druid "of the fertilizing fire" or something else that cuts out all Daemonic references. Because, yeah, serving Daemons is also just a serious enough narrative problem that other PCs may outright kill/want to kill a PC Rider. The "biggest stretch" angle that IMO still works is to go the Noticula route and have the PC be associated w/ a minor deamonic figure that is explicitly breaking away from Abaddon's goals. My own plague rat PC has evolved into something like this, being raised/mentored by a Leukodaemon that was stuck on Golarion and isolated from Abaddon's influence for 6,000 years in Kho.
(And Daemons are by far my fav among the outsiders, who reveal so much about Phar's hypocrisy and tyranny, and a whole lot more about the god-mortal dynamic. But, I don't let that favoritism lead to silly things like justifying some of the most lore-breaking concepts one could invent, lol.)
It seems that the precise reason of the "incompatible" take is being mistaken / forgotten.
It's not about the actions of the Druid being against a **personal** anathema of the Druid's moral code.
The issue is that Druids are not like Oracles that get their magic without the consent of the their source.
Druids are very much "like Clerics for Nature." Nature, the collective agent of all life, is their sugar daddy. Countless mortals have asked Nature for power and been denied, even when they have the connection/talent required.
Nature's approval is required every single day a Druid prepares their spells.
The issue with Druid + Daemonic Rider incompatibility is because it's not the PC's own characterization nor justification that grants them magic, in pf2e Nature has real agency and approval / disapproval. When a Druid commits anathema, Nature is the one denying them power and demands penance/atonement.
In the same way that a Cleric of Pharasma is "never" going to be compatible with becoming a Daemonic Rider due to Pharasma's disapproval, so too is Nature never going to empower a Daemon-approved Apocalypse Rider.
It is because both the "reality" of Daemons, and the "reality" of Nature and their values are static and completely outside the PC's personal narrative, that makes this as "textbook" of an incompatibility as is possible.
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IMO, it just makes a mountain more sense for any anathema-incompatible PC to homebrew the Rider stuff itself into being something non-Daemonic and therefore compatible, than it does to have a PC constantly contradict the settings' lore as the table is just trying to play a campaign.
I strongly recommend one make up their own sub-Druid "of the fertilizing fire" or something else that cuts out all Daemonic references. Because, yeah, serving Daemons is also just a serious enough narrative problem that other PCs may outright kill/want to kill a PC Rider. The "biggest stretch" angle that IMO still works is to go the Noticula route and...
Maybe things can happen in Golorion that are not so clean cut or dogmatically so?
I would think anything that becomes a rider is truly its own special case, even to a presumed rule thought generally to be true.Maybe such a mythic character’s conviction is so great they have even convinced an aspect of nature. Or maybe by becoming mythic they no longer ask for permission or need permission to take natures power?
Again, Daemons are not about ending civilization, they are about ending life as a concept.
I think they only really care about sentient mortal life and the cycle of souls as a concept. They don't eat animal/plant souls (they don't have them), and probably don't care about the plants, vermin, and microbes remaining on a world devoid of sentient life, anymore than they care about the wind blowing or the waves crashing. It's movement without higher meaning.
A druid can work with that focus.
Again, Daemons are not about ending civilization, they are about ending life as a concept.
I think they only really care about sentient mortal life and the cycle of souls as a concept. They don't eat animal/plant souls (they don't have them), and probably don't care about the plants, vermin, and microbes remaining on a world devoid of sentient life, anymore than they care about the wind blowing or the waves crashing. It's movement without higher meaning.
A druid can work with that focus.
I'm pretty sure all life carries soul, and while sapient mortals have *enough* soul to maintain individuality as petitioners, that does not provide evidence that cats/trees/etc are without souls. (and examples of non-sapient plants & animals *becoming* sapient people w/o "soul injection" effects, who do travel the river of souls could be considered confirmation of that)
Especially when you start looking at things like magic spells and spirit damage, it seems that everything with inborn antipode-sourced life contains soul.
I would agree that in theory, Abaddon would not care about things like tides or even animated constructs. However, I do think it's rather unavoidable that animal and plant life is very much within Abaddon's "kill it all" list.
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Maybe things can happen in Golorion that are not so clean cut or dogmatically so?
Yes, absolutely. I already gave a real example with my own PC using the narrative device of a Leukodaemon that spent 6000 years in codependent survival w/ subservient mortals to change away from Abaddon's norms.
Maybe such a mythic character’s conviction is so great they have even convinced an aspect of nature. Or maybe by becoming mythic they no longer ask for permission or need permission to take natures power?
Not really, no. At least, not as you have phrased that.
If a Druid is defined by their Nature-granted power, then a Druid stealing Nature's power is by definition not a Druid, lol.
But that is a way to dodge the issue of Nature's approval, and actually engages with the real problem. That's enough to make a "not-Druid" Druid PC.
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And again, any justification that is specific to the PC's circumstance is irrelevant.
To some extent, Nature is an entity with judgement and agency. Every day, some Druid out there crosses a line, and Nature rejects them.
The way for any player/table to square the circle of that incompatibility needs to focus upon and address the issue of the PC's two masters being fundamentally, and violently opposed in a cosmic-scale struggle.
(which mostly means homebrewing said masters into being something/one else that is not what is written)
I was under the impression that all that's alive in the pathfinder universe have soul, even if animal/plants/nonsapient life have "smaller" ones. So daemons are indeed fundamentally opposed to all life, not just sentient one.
But also, even if I agree that druids are indeed akin to "nature's cleric", I don't think "nature" in pathfinder is as personified as gods are. It's not a single entity that take snap decision to cut off your power because "you sided with it's ennemies", like Pharasma could do if you sided with daemons. I think that for druids to lose their power, they don't just need to "take side" with something that's opposed to nature, they need to take action that oppose nature directly, they need to sever themselves their link to the natural world.
So I think that in a relatively small time frame (like for a single campaign that doesn't last long "in world"), a character could both have druidic and apocalypse rider powers at once. I 100% agree that at term, such power would corrupt the druid enought that their link to the natural world will be severed and they will lose their druidic power (such corruption could be represented first in game by them starting to lose the ability to understand windsong, as their link with the natural world grow more tenuous), but I don't think it would be an instant "become an Apocalypse Rider -> lose your druid license" deal like trip is saying.
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Nature is definitely not personified and not all living things have souls. At least not on game terms.
The rationale for a PC is relevant. It's a PC class. The PC's story is literally the only thing that matters.
SKR did a little series not long after leaving Paizo about minimizing absolutes. The game should never be about using an interpretation of one rule to lock a character idea out of a story.
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Whether or not all living things have souls, it definitely seems like all living creatures either have, or are, souls. At minimum, the existence of animal phantoms points us to the existence of animal souls. Perhaps there are exceptions (there seems to be some disagreement in the lore whether leshy characters should be considered to have spiritual essence and a soul, or are indeed purely 'vitae' entities) but that seems to be the general rule.
Even so, I would not see Nature reduced to being a single entity with a single opinion on all things. A druid can lose their connection with Nature and thus lose their powers, but Nature is not a singular being. If it were, it would be better to just give it a deity statblock with its own personality and opinions.
Like, at the very least, different orders of druid have different anathema. Unless these anathema are merely ideals held by the druid (in which case, why not all), then either the being called Nature selectively enforces its own rules depending what groups you sign on with, or Nature is more of a gestalt entity--not one thing but an ecosystem of things. I don't imagine Leaf Order druids commit anathema should they kill an animal unnecessarily, or if they allow themselves to become domesticated by civilization?
We know what causes a druid to lose powers, it's written in their anathema. To talk about other things that may cause a loss of power, we have to draw on our own knowledge about this quasi-magical force called Nature, which may or may not have unified goals or really care about what a druid thinks nearly as much as what they do... at which point it only matters that a Rider Druid doesn't despoil places of nature while on the warpath to slaughter the world, and doesn't consume more resources than they need.
Oh, and doesn't teach a non-druid the Wildsong. That would be an embarrassing way for a Rider to lose their powers considering the much more dramatic internal clash of ideals they were destined for.
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RPG Superstar 2013
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Creatures with Int 2 or lower definitely shouldn't have souls*. I think everyone understands the anathema and how it could apply to druid followers of the Four, but it makes zero mechanical difference to put druids in charge of their own ethos instead of having to say no.
The alternative risks relegating druids to a place where they actually can't be evil at all. If they represent the predatory side of nature, not evil. If they kill simply as a measure to restore balance, not evil. If they only work to undermine the spread of civilization, not evil. Druids need to be able to play the motivation their players want, until there's a version of druid that isn't a restrictive devotee.
But hey...maybe I can give us that.
Exception
I prefer to interpret it as literally everything that is alive has a soul, but nobody worries much about the ethics of "harvesting grain" and these sorts of low level souls are like plasma in the bloodstream and are simply made into quintessence when they reach the end of the road.