User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 Godsrain panel transcript
Pre-panel intro
MICHAEL SAYRE: Hi, my name is Mike Sayre, and I'm here to introduce the Godsrain: Death and Renewal panel. I'm the design manager here at Paizo, and I am not going to be present with the other panelists today, but in some ways that's going to work out a little bit for you, because I'm going to use this time to talk a little bit more about what is in the War of Immortals hardcover rulebook, both in how it relates to the subject of this panel and how that'll kind of lead into some of the things the other panelists are going to be talking about.
War of Immortals
So the War of Immortals is both an in-world extended event and the name of the book. This opens with the death of Gorum, and you should be looking at some pretty cool art of that right about now.
Classes and archetypes
This event is actually what creates one of the two iconic characters who we have new classes for in this book, the exemplar and the animist.
The exemplar, Nahoa, is struck by this falling rain that is a mixture of godly essence and war blood, and it transforms him into a powerful new entity. Some of you got to see this in the playtest that we did late last year, and you'll get to see the final version of both of these classes in October when the book releases.
But there's also a story that frames this entire event, right? Gorum has died, this rain has fallen, the Godsrain has fallen and changed the earth. And in the wake of this, Nahoa feels a calling that pulls him and the iconic animist, Samo, south.
So right about now you should be seeing Nahoa being healed by Samo. And so this is a pivotal event, and this story is going to run throughout the entire book, introducing you both to each chapter and the concepts within that chapter and the next step of each journey taken by these iconics.
Eventually they'll head on to the next chapter of the book, Servants of Power. This chapter both opens with more of the story of Samo and Nahoa's journey and it introduces five new class archetypes. And these class archetypes are the avenger, the bloodrager, the seneschal, the vindicator, and the warrior of legend. Now you've probably heard a couple of these already, and you've had some guesses about what the avenger might be and I'm going to tell you, all of you have been wrong so far.
The iconic avenger is actually a familiar face who you might recognize, Zadim, who was the iconic slayer in Pathfinder First Edition. Now Zadim actually had a very strong religious theme to him and his purpose. And we have brought him back here in the form of this avenger class archetype, which is for the rogue class.
I'm just going to read a little blurb, a quote from Zadim in-world here, to give you an idea of what this class archetype is about.
- "For many years I killed without hesitation at the behest of a cult who claimed to serve the Dawnflower. My people are good, my goddess is good. Surely any actions I take on their behalf, no matter how grim, must also be good, no?
- Such was my thinking until I met Kyra, and she revealed the hypocrisy in my thoughts and in the actions of those who trained me and pointed me at my targets.
- I see now that the shadow I walked in was not cast by my goddess, but by her flawed mortal servants. I will be a blade for a goddess, but I will not kill for the whims of men.
- What then am I to do? What life is there for a man trained since birth to bring death, whose heart belongs to a goddess who demands that we offer redemption?"
So Zadim is also part of this theme of renewal that we see through here. We brought an archetype that I think many of you probably figured there was no room for in the game, reimagined it through the lens of the character, and are giving you all an opportunity both to meet this character again in a new light and play his themes through these new class mechanics.
If you've seen this art of Zadim here at this point, you'll also notice we updated and he now has a scimitar, bringing him a little closer to his goddess Sarenrae and embodying her a little bit better.
So each of these class archetypes speaks to the broader themes of the War of Immortals, the classes and types of characters who are going to participate in this event, and gives you new ways to express classes that might be familiar in ways that maybe are not.
Mythic rules
After this, we move along to chapter three, and chapter three is something that I know a lot of you are really excited about: the mythic rules. At this point in the story of Samo and Nahoa, they are in Belkzen, the hold of the orcs, and in this place the orcs themselves are dealing with some pretty significant changes.
Several orc deities have died, several new orc deities have arisen, and this is making Belkzen a very interesting place, both to travel through and from a religious perspective. You're going to get to hear a lot more about what's going on there from John Compton later in the panel when he talks about the upcoming Adventure Path Triumph of the Tusk. So I'm not going to spend a whole lot more time talking about it.
I will reiterate a little bit of what I said in the keynote about how the mythic rules are going to work. When your character comes into contact with mythic power, they gain a calling. There's a variety of callings, I think at least a dozen that you can choose from. Each of them speak to certain ways that you might want to use your mythic power.
They give you a way to regain mythic power, and the way to utilize it, and they speak to your ongoing story. Now these are not hardlocked like you might think of an archetype normally being. They give you access to a full suite of mythic feats that run all the way up to level 10. And these give you all kinds of different abilities. Eyes that see eternity, arms that cut the waves are some of the names of abilities that you might find in here. And you will kind of just piece together what the mythic story of your character is and what their mythic theme is as you put these pieces together.
You'll also get some generic mythic abilities. Mythic characters are very hard to kill. When their dying counter caps out, they don't die. Instead, they gain the doomed condition and their dying counter resets. So it is incredibly hard to keep a mythic character down for long. They've really got to be knocked down over and over again and really ground into the dirt before their story ends.
Mythic destinies
You'll notice I said that the mythic feats end at level 10 and you're going, hey, there's a whole 'nother 10 levels of this game. What gives, Mike? Well, that brings us into chapter four of War of Immortals, the mythic destinies chapter. And these cover the remaining levels.
This mythic system works a lot like the free archetype system spanning the entire breadth of the game from one to 20. And once you hit the second half of the game, you choose a mythic destiny. And this is a lot more thematically specific than the mythic options you've had so far.
For example, two of these mythic destinies, one of them we've already talked about, the apocalypse rider. And right about now, you should be seeing an image of Fumbus who has achieved the mythic destiny of apocalypse rider and is on his fearsome steed leading the way into this excellent set of mechanics for you. And you'll also see Feiya with him who has the arch(?) themed mythic destiny.
So not all of these mythic destinies are quite as grim and frightening as these particular two might be leading you to believe. They cover a whole swath of different characters and concepts and they allow you to really pick a very strong theme that will lead you into a type of immortality for your characters.
Some of these types of immortality are very specific. You live forever. Your character can no longer truly die. Some of them are more conceptual in nature. Every time you die, someone else will come and they will take up your mantle and for all intents and purposes, they will become you. The type of character you are, the type of mythic destiny you achieve, these are all choices that you get to make as you play with these rules and tell these stories.
Mythic vault
So after chapter 4, the book moves on into chapter 5, and this is the mythic vault. This is all of the tools that your mythic characters are going to want and need.
Now this starts with some new weapons and armor, including base weapons and armor. Types of equipment that mythic characters typically use that we didn't quite have in the game yet. So this helps round that out and gives you those kind of options, but it also includes a whole lot of very mythically specific stuff.
We have mythic artifacts, and some of these artifacts are things that your characters will use. Some of them are things that your characters might interact with and that serve as major story points as you go through the game.
We have mythic spells, and these are spells that mythic spellcasters can learn and utilize using a combination of their normal spell slots and their mythic power.
One of these is going to be the final fate of the locust host. So those of you who are familiar with Wrath of the Righteous might have an idea what this incarnate spell does. It's really cool. It's really exciting and is one of the many kind of fun toys you're going to get to play with here.
We also have mythic rituals, and these are bigger story-moving events. Some of them will involve literally changing huge swaths of the world if you complete the rituals. Some of them are tools that you might use to accomplish mythic stories, like literally bringing the ocean to life so that you can question it and ask it for assistance in completing your quests.
So a huge swath and array of tools here that carry you into your stories.
Then, finally, we're going to move into chapter six. Chapter six, the story that has been flowing through here with Samo and Nahoa, this is the culmination of their story, the completion of their journey.
Mythic monsters
By this point, you're going to have kind of an idea of what it is going to be like to tell a mythic story and play a mythic game by having watched as Samo and Nahoa have had their own mythic journey up to this point. To help you have your own mythic stories in games, this chapter includes a broad array of mythic monsters.
Right out of the gate, we give you half a dozen mythic templates. These are for all kinds of different monsters, whether they're strikers or brutes or spellcasters, and you can apply these to any kind of monster NPC to transform them into a mythic threat and an appropriate challenge for a mythic party.
We also introduce a bunch of very specific monsters who form a particular spot of the game world that stories can revolve around.
If you're familiar with our book, Monsters of Myth, these follow a fairly similar template. It tells you how they might be used in a campaign across all tiers of play, from ways that they might influence a very low-level party to ways that they might form perhaps the end boss or the key function of a high-level campaign, as well as full stat blocks for the monsters themselves, and all of the ways that you might want to interact with them. The items that they carry that you might want to use, the things they might teach you, the challenges you might need to surpass to reach them.
All of these various components come in play. So one of my favorite monsters in here is the immortal trickster. You should be seeing a picture of him bamboozling Valeros right about now, snatching away Valeros' sword as Valeros is dealing with some other lesser challenges.
The mythic trickster is not an inherently evil entity, none of these monsters are inherently evil in the way that you might think of, though some of them are certainly a lot more frightening and terrifying than others. The trickster might actually serve as a guide for characters who encounter him, and may push them along through their own mythic story, or he may be a threat that they themselves face. He's a very old, very clever being, he's not as powerful as he once was, and that's a little bit about what we talked about in his entry.
If he is going to be the capstone villain of a campaign, then him regaining his power might be intrinsically tied into the story of your mythic characters, or he might help them prepare to fight an even greater threat. And we like having this nuance and this structure because it speaks a lot to how you are going to want to run a mythic game, play a mythic game, and be a mythic character.
So, all of these various tools have been assembled here for you. You're going to have a really great story written by Liane Merciel to help kind of guide you through what it means to be mythic and what it is. And it's also going to hit these themes that this panel is talking about, death and renewal.
Death and renewal
We open with the death of Gorum almost immediately. We see that lead into a deep change in both the world of Golarion and this very specific character in the exemplar.
This interacts with the animist, and the animist is a being who talks to the spirits of the world, both the spirits of the natural world and the spirits of the civilized world. Our animist might talk to a being that has kind of formed from all the amalgamated memories of a dungeon where all kinds of deep events have happened, or perhaps a being that is itself the embodiment of just a volcano.
The world itself is changing and reacting to all of these events as you go through. There's a mythic gazetteer that you're going to run into in the What Is Mythic chapter that will show you how a lot of this has changed in the world. And then from all of these flowing events, all of these changes, you're going to end with a new kind of static state of the world, a new platform to build off of and tell new stories from.
And that is what my compatriots James Jacobs, John Compton, and Luis Loza are going to do as they talk to you about their products, the adventures that surround the Godsrain that surround these mythic events that will build toward new mythic events for you to interact with, and that have fundamentally changed the deities of Golarion both literally and the names and numbers that are out there, and in the way that they interact with each other.
So I'm hoping that all of you enjoy the rest of this panel I know the other panelists have a lot of really great exciting stuff to introduce to you and tell you about as we continue to tell this story about the changing world of Golarion, and all of the many, many ways that your characters can experience those changes and be part of those changes themselves. Thank you very much.
Godsrain: Death and Renewal panel
JON MORGANTINI: Hello PaizoCon. I am Jon Morgantini, community and social media manager, and I am here for the War of Immortals/Godsrain panel.
I'm sure you're all wondering what the heck is going on. Why is there stuff falling from the sky? Why is there a giant mantis? We are here to answer... maybe some of these questions.
Intro
But you're not here to listen to me, you're here to listen to my esteemed panel. So I'm Jon, that's even the background. Let's let the panelists themselves and tell you all about the War of Immortals.
JAMES JACOBS: Hey, I'm James Jacobs, I'm the narrative creative director for Pathfinder.
LUIS LOZA: Hi, I'm Luis Loza I'm creative director on the rules and more side of things for Pathfinder.
MARK MORELAND: And I'm Mark Morland, I'm not a creative director, but I am director of strategy, which does take some creativity.
JAMES JACOBS: So, yeah, that's who we are. Cool. So we're running a bit behind as people know so we're going to go a little bit in rush mode here. First of all, welcome to (?), as Michael was saying we are going to be telling a lot of stories about the Godsrain and War of Immortals in our Adventure Path and standalone Adventure lines, and in Org Play.
This is not going to be something we're just going to do one adventure or one Adventure Path with. This is going to be something that continues to inform the setting from this point forward in the same way that revealing the Runelords were in the ancient past is something that didn't just stick with Rise of the Runelords.
Prey for Death
JAMES JACOBS: So we're starting out, let's take a look at the cover for Prey for Death, that is one of the basis of the first adventure that we're doing with this new storyline.
In Prey for Death, as we've mentioned before, your characters are going to be playing agents of the Red Mantis assassins, and during this adventure you are going to be involved in this storyline that, at first tangentially but then full on right there on-screen, you are going to be witnessing and be to a certain extent involved in the death of Gorum. It's going to happen on screen.
It is indeed Achaekek who is the one that does the death blow. I can confirm that, that is not us being coy in the artwork, that is full-on it.
How it happens, why it happens, what's going on, whether or not your player characters get to figure this out kind of depends on them getting all the way through the adventure and how much your GM lets you see behind the scenes and all that.
But this is not something we're going to be quiet about. This, the whole plot and the behind the scenes, juicy details, is spelled out in Prey for Death. In fact, it's like on page 2 or 3, right at the start of the adventure. It explains everything so you'll definitely want to check that out if you can, I'm not going to spoil it here.
I'm not going to tell you where or how or when this event happens, because it is an adventure and I'm trying to preserve some of this stuff, or you know your player characters to uncover as you play through this campaign for this adventure.
But yeah, so that's Prey for Death.
Curtain Call
JAMES JACOBS: Then, over on the Adventure Path side we're going to continue telling stories about the events going on with Godsrain and War of Immortals and all that, starting with Curtain Call, which is—well let's throw up the cover actually for the second adventure.
We've written background. I've got here the illustration from the first cover, so the second one should be coming up pretty soon. There we go. Who doesn't like an Adventure Path where you're fighting a clockwork dragon in a steel-cage match?
But um, yeah, Curtain Call is the Adventure Path where your characters are putting on an opera based on the adventure you went on with your 1st to 10th level. This is a three-part high-level Adventure Path that is not mythic.
We do have plans later on, not this year but later on, to do mythic-themed adventures and stuff like that, but at this point we're mostly focusing on content that is narratively connected to Godsrain and the War of Immortals.
In Curtain Call, since you are putting on an opera there's a lot of whimsical stuff going on, there's like some party shenanigans, I think we've got some art of some of that stuff out here too. Things that your characters can get up to during this campaign where, you know, it's more fun and it's more, you know, not everything has to be grimdark.
And yeah, for example like combat is not your only option. There's a picture here of a, you know, something.
You don't have to actually fight dragons, you know, in order to get experience points for interacting with them. Sometimes you can like bargain with them or get them to work on your side or something like that. You're still gonna have the option to roll initiative, don't never fear about that.
But what's going on in Curtain Call is, at some point during this three-part Adventure Path where you go from 11th level again all the way up to 20th level, there is going to be the Godsrain and all of that stuff happens again, impacting the storyline and how your characters interact with that and how several of the gods in the campaign setting self-react to it is going to play a key role in how this whole thing ends up.
Beyond this, we're going to be going on with another one later in the year called Triumph of the Tusk, which also explores some of the impacts on the orc pantheon.
We will have a lot more to talk about adventures and Adventure Paths tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific time, where we talk about the Adventure Path Retrospective, so if you want to hear more about that, feel free to tune in at that point.
We'll be answering questions also after on Discord on this, but let me kick it over to Mark to talk real quick about a novel that we've got coming out.
Godsrain novel and short fiction
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MARK MORELAND: Yeah, so, last summer, just not not too long actually before we started playtesting the two new classes that are that are coming in War of Immortals, Jim Butler, the company president, went to Erik Mona, our publisher and chief creative officer, and said, Erik, I want you to put a novel on the schedule for 2024.
And Erik said, hey Mark, I want you to put a novel on the schedule for 2024.
And given that that we had this big event coming that was already in process, I sort of knew that if we were going to do a relaunch of our fiction line, which we haven't had for about seven years now, that we needed to go big or go home.
And I didn't particularly want to go home with fiction because I like fiction, and so I said, well then we've got to have a tie in with the War of Immortals somehow.
And so, what we came up with was a novel featuring our iconic characters. It's got Kyra the cleric, Merisiel the rogue, Ezren the wizard, and Amiri the barbarian, and they find themselves embroiled in a plot that seems like just another normal adventure that soon, when they witness a god die and one of them is hit with a godspark as part of the Godsrain.
They soon find themselves both capable of, and really the only ones able to, stop a major disaster in the world that has a multiversal impact. People have guessed it, I sort of hinted at it a little bit earlier, but basically the Godsrain sets a number of little dominoes falling that could result in Rovagug escaping.
And given that the gods, having just witnessed one of their own fall, are a little hesitant to get involved, and due to some other factors based on just some details of how his prison works, aren't really the ones who are able to stop him from escaping, and that falls to our heroes to use their new found mythic power to do so.
So, we went to one of our fan favorite authors from the Pathfinder Tales days, Liane Merciel, and said, "Hey Liane, you wrote on War of Immortals, right? And you wrote a bunch of fiction sort of telling the story of these iconics going through the Inner Sea region sort of dealing with their new mythic power and stopping or attempting to stop a large threat, who may or may not be on the image behind me. Do you want to write a whole novel about this?"
And she said, "Heck yeah." And so she put together a banger of a book that I really, really, really hope a lot of people read, both because we want this line to launch as big as it can, and success out of the gate gets us a higher likelihood of future Pathfinder novels as well. But also because I think it's perhaps Liane's best book, and I'm a huge fan of her previous work, so that should say something that I just want people to read because it's awesome.
So I'm really excited about that the book is called Godsrain, a Pathfinder novel. It comes out at the end of November and should be available just about everywhere.
We're going to have it in hardcover with this image as a wraparound dust jacket instead of, you know, just a front cover. We're going to have it in audiobook, and the details of who the narrator is for that are still something we're going to hold for later.
And then we'll have an ebook as well, and to support this we're going to have two ebook exclusives. One will be a short fiction collection called Before the Godsrain that's going to feature some of the short fiction that has appeared on the Paizo blog over the last few years, featuring Amiri and Ezran, Kyra, and Merisiel.
It'll introduce a new audience to those characters who may not already be familiar with them, but it should also provide some context for people who may have been so heads-down in their own campaigns that they don't necessarily know, you know, our iconic characters or their backstories or, you know, some of the lore that Godsrain builds on.
But reading that or knowing all that stuff is not required to understand Godsrain. One of our goals was that this book should not need an appendix or glossary at the end that details what all the words mean. Make sure that the book explains everything to the reader, so that new folks who pick it up off the bookshelf, which is our goal, will have all the context they need and not be completely lost.
We also have The Godsrain Prophecies, which comes out in September, that many of you probably remember from our blog earlier this year. We got a lot of buzz around people guessing which god was going to die by doing sort of a "what if" series of the psychopomp yivali, looking into this prophecy that came across her desk and being like, "What is this?"
And each of those prophecies detailed the death of one of our core 20 gods. And so we're going to be compiling those as an ebook to make them a little bit easier to read, and to get them out to an audience who isn't coming to the Paizo blog.
And we'll be adding some additional material to that, which will explore a little bit of, who wrote these and what's the deal behind the prophecies themselves, now that the mystery of which god is going to die is no longer something we can hold over all of your heads and taunt you with.
But, yeah, so that's what we've got in terms of fiction this year. And you know, as I said before, I've got a five-year plan for what I'd love to see for fiction going forward. I think that we have to show that it's a viable business, and you know that's part of why we haven't done fiction in seven years is that fiction is hard to sell and to make profitable, and so we want to make sure that if we're doing it that we're doing it right.
If you want to see more fiction, you know, not to beg, but pre-ordering this on https://paizo.com or at your local bookstore. You know the book's been solicited, they should be able to pre-order it from their distributors.
Now, that will go a long way to helping the book. Pre-orders are incredibly important because they show they show us and they show book buyers who are going to put it on shelves, that this is something worth carrying and worth doing and so. So that's how that's how all of you 'Finders can do an Aid action to help Godsrain be as successful as possible, so we're really looking forward to that.
And we're going to have a lot more info about that probably around Gen Con time just so that we have a few months of ramp up to it. But we'll have preview chapters and some stuff like that in the late summer and fall.
All right, and I think we have a Luis(?) to speak at least, so probably let him have a turn. Sure.
Divine Mysteries
LUIS LOZA: If you were here earlier, you probably caught the keynote and saw me talking about a little book called Divine Mysteries, which you've all seen the cover enough times you know what's going on with that.
So, let's look at some of the other art that is featured in this book.
Our good friend Yivali, who Mark mentioned just a bit ago, this book follows Yivali as she is exploring the nature of divinity throughout the setting. She is, as I've explained in other times, basically doing a big grad-school project to learn about divinity and how it works, and kind of understand, why do mortals worship gods, why do gods decide to give them power? Does she fully understand if she has it all correct?
Maybe, maybe not, but there's at least someone who's trying to do the work to try to explain it to, I guess, us, the dear reader, about it. But in doing so she's also collected a lot of information about existing gods. Our core 20 deities show up, Sarenrae and Arazni and Rovagug and all the likes get listed in here, and they get expanded entries compared to what we had in the past in Lost Omens Gods & Magic.
New deities
LUIS LOZA: But also, as we'll see in this next bit of art, we include several brand-new gods, these are gods that are brand new to this book. There's four of them here.
We have Atrogine, who's the god of curiosity, manifestation, familiars, and witches. We have Genzaeri, who's all about battlefields, modernization, negotiation, and tactics.
We also have Izuyaku, who's about balance, strength, health and hot springs, and one of my newer favorites is Emmeton Galardaria, excuse me, who is the halfling god of community defense, familial bonds, found family, repayment. And, of course, whose favorite weapon is the frying pan.
So, lots of fun new gods for anyone to worship, but as we're exploring all these divinities, there's also just so many other gods that aren't individual. Some of these are part of groups, you know, we've had pantheons and all these other groupings in the past, so we're getting a chance to expand existing groups of gods, like our demon lords, our empyreal lords, and monitor demigods.
So this next bit of art shows off three of these. One of these is Jerishall, who is one of the first arbitrators, it's one of the monitor gods, one of the aeon gods, who's all about fish(?), gravity, orbits, and planets and maintaining all of those, making sure they all work.
We also have here the empyreal lord Lalaci, who's about rainbows, relaxation, self-worth, and shade.
And then, you know, some of the more malevolent ones like Vulot, who's the demon lord of disguises, lies, and stolen identities, who might be showing up a bit more as time goes on. I think you'll be learning a little bit more about Vulot in the coming months, and his involvement in things; well, keep quiet about that.
But yeah, we're taking the familiar there, expanding on those, and then of course we're adding even more gods to the whole thing. We've had other groups that existed in the First Edition that didn't get a chance to get transitioned over to the Second Edition.
We are creating new groupings of gods here as well, so with this next bit of art we get to see these brand new groups of gods.
There are four groups here that are being represented. We have the sahkil tormentors, represented by Charg, who is the tormentor of catastrophic decline, detrimental complacency, and monsters. What a cool guy, I like him.
We also have the daemonic harbinger, Laivatiniel, who is all about anxiety, coddling, smothering, and parental love. So, very nice lady.
We have here Pahti Couatl, among the Couatl Tribunal, who is all about retribution, investigation, and rehabilitation, going out and defeating malevolence and evil, where you can find it.
And also we have Yrmidar, who is representing the giant gods. Yrmidar is the god of camaraderie, shipbuilders, and the hunt.
Pantheons and covenants
LUIS LOZA: So, we have lots of gods, as you can see here, lots of groupings that we get to show off here. There's an enormous chart in the back of the book that gives you details on all of these gods, there's just not enough space to fit every statblock right next to them.
We had to like, make a huge thing. If you looked at Lost Omens Gods & Magic, we have that same chart. Now it's bigger. It's got a lot in there.
But we decided that's not enough. We need to do more. We need to do even more groupings. In the past, we featured pantheons, which collected individual gods and gave them kind of a thematic cohesion, and we are continuing that tradition.
So this next bit of art includes, for the first time, the religious symbols for some of these pantheons. Pantheons didn't used to have them in the past. Going forward, we're going to try to make sure those have them, as well as, you know, an individual god having one, just so you have a representation, you can say, "Hey, this is what my holy symbol looks like."
And we have a couple of ones here. Some of these are brand new, like the Children of Night. They're all about vampires and things like that. And we have some familiar ones, like the Cosmic Caravan, who we've seen before now. They give a bit of art to represent them, to show someone who's kind of used to that. If you were playing Abomination Vaults, for example, they were part of the Player's Guide. And now you get a little bit more information on them.
We also have names for pantheons that have existed, but didn't have a proper name. In the past, we had our dwarven pantheon, which we referred to as the dwarven pantheon. Fine enough, but we decided to give it a name now, that is the Stone's Blood pantheon, which is all those dwarven gods together.
And then we also have some changes to existing pantheons, like Talons of the Godclaw is our updated version of the Godclaw pantheon. Who, if you remember, was Abadar, Asmodeus, Iomedae, Irori, and Torag.
But one of those is missing. Torag is not showing up for meetings anymore, and has sent someone in his place, which I'll leave for you to find out who that is later. But Talons of the Godclaw still exist, just without Torag, and interesting developments there, I think.
But if you caught the keynote, I also mentioned there's another type of divine groupings called covenants, which are brand new to this book. They're very similar to pantheons, but covenants draw power and grant power in a more unique way.
Rather than have a handful of gods, four or five gods come together and grant powers. There are sometimes entities that exist throughout existence, throughout our setting, that have a little bit of that divine power to be able to get that power out some way, usually by working with other people.
So, in this new bit of art here, we have covenants, they have symbols just like our pantheons do. And covenants might include the likes of the Breath of the Endless Sky, which is all about air, and their drawing. The sources of these powers include air elementals, jaathooms, spirits of air, and the Plane of Air itself at times.
All of these figures and beings come together and, by combining their power and potential, are able to grant power the way a god does. They're not quite a god, but you kind of worship the entire thing all at once, the entire covenant all at once.
We also have here the Good Neighbors, who are all about community service and solidarity, helping people out. Covenants can include deities as well, so this includes Cayden Cailean, Erastil, Sarenrae, Torag, but it also includes household spirits, so they're all working together for this kind of common goal of community service.
We have some more interesting ones like The Pandemonium. It's all about chaos, confusion, and pranksters, and they draw power from mischievous fey, protean shapers, and shape-changing spirits.
Finally, we have some of the more malevolent ones, more evil in intent, like the Shadow Cabinet, who's all about secret agendas and shadow governments and spies. That includes the likes of Thamir and powerful shadows. Rumors say maybe Norgorber is involved. Who's to say? I don't know.
I do know. I won't say.
There's a lot of interesting potential here. We've been running into times when we would talk about the likes of the god callers in Sarkoris, and there would be lots of gods and spirits and (?).
Should each of those have their own individual stat block? Maybe, yes, no, but it also means that we can't represent someone worshipping a bunch of spirits and groupings together, and now that we have covenants, we have that available for you.
Mortal herald archetype
LUIS LOZA: So, lots of fun options there for anyone who wants to worship things, and I think I'm going to also talk about one player option here. We have mentioned a bunch of different archetypes here, and one of these archetypes is the mortal herald.
I'm going to show off a bit of art of three different mortal heralds here for you. The mortal herald is the big archetype in this book that represents someone being granted divine power and being chosen by their god to represent them. It's a higher-level archetype. You don't get into it until about 12th level, and it represents someone that's just kind of really important to a particular god.
You don't have to be a cleric or a champion to be a mortal herald. You just have to be someone of significance to earn the title of a mortal herald, and with it comes a lot of great power and potential.
You gain access to divine powers and spells if you want. Depending on your feat choices, you can also do things like imbue your weapon with spirit energy, you can gain a Fly speed, you can add damage to smite your foes on behalf of your god. You can also do things like heal an ally for 100 hit points and get rid of, reduce(?) enfeebled and clumsy conditions. It's kind of real quick, once per hour.
Or even eventually cast the avatar spell to transform into the avatar of your god. Whether or not you have the potential to cast magic, you can still do this transformation.
And another fun thing about how this archetype works is it's also a mythic destiny. If War of Immortals has 9 mythic destinies, why not have more? Who says that they get to have all the fun? This archetype has the potential to give you additional mythic feats that tie into the mythic destiny rules, and give you even more ridiculous abilities, like the one that lets you teleport up to a mile away to where an ally is, and when you arrive, any enemies that are there suddenly potentially get stunned at the sight of you arriving.
There's a Flash of Omniscience that lets you instantly learn the resistances and weaknesses of a foe, or even the ability to eventually become immortal. When you die, your god will just pluck you, rebuild you, and let you back out into the world again.
Lots of really interesting stuff in War of Immortals. If you're interested to see who made it, who's still alive, who might have died or gone missing in this whole thing, there's information on that. There's also updates to the relationship to the gods and some of the stuff that's going on.
A lot of cool stuff going on here. I'd say check it out when it comes out in November, but I think that's all I had to share on Divine Mysteries at the moment. I don't know if we even have too much time left at this point.
Deity body count clarification
JON MORGANTINI: We have a couple of minutes, so I was going to grab a couple of them. Just for clarification, a number of people have been asking if they heard correctly. It is gods, plural, that are getting offed in the War of Immortals. Yes, you know that Gorum's getting it, so sorry, it happens. But he is not the only one, and that is something that we want to confirm here today, yes.
MARK MORELAND: He's the only member of the Core 20 who is going to die or change significantly. No, there's going to be some changes in the Core 20, but Gorum is the only Core 20 to die. I mean, we mentioned Verex is going away, too, as one of the orc gods. They will show up in the course of adventures, but at this moment, we're kind of focusing on Gorum because that's the big deal.
Prismatic Ray tease
JON MORGANTINI: As for the last one, I figure we've got time for one more. I am perfectly okay if you say that you don't want to answer this because I think it leads to more of a fun tease, but there's a certain group that people are very invested in and that we have been teasing a change to for a very long time.
MARK MORELAND: Abadar's Bank, you mean, right? People invest—
JON MORGANTINI: Of course, yes. People invest in—of course. What else would you do? How else would you invest in—
MARK MORELAND: The new interest rates have been declared for years.
JON MORGANTINI: But are they down or up? What is the economy? You can't kill gods in this economy. We don't have enough time. We want to say anything about that particular group or are we just going to smile snidely and then—
LUIS LOZA: Are you talking about a group that might involve Desna and Sarenrae and Shelyn?
JON MORGANTINI: That might be the group that I'm talking about, yes.
LUIS LOZA: I do like smiling. I think I'm just going to smile and nod and—
>> Okay, I see. I get it.
MARK MORELAND: They're all very nice ladies.
LUIS LOZA: Yes, they're fantastic to hang around.
JAMES JACOBS: They have a lot of creative director protection from big events too, so.
MARK MORELAND: Yeah, I will say this because I do like to be a tease and I want to hype the blog. Maybe, just maybe, delving a little bit more into them would be a cool thing for us to do in the month of June.
JAMES JACOBS: That's a good idea, Mark. That's next month, isn't it?
MARK MORELAND: Really? All right, okay. June 2024, right?
Next question. Yeah, June 2027 is when we'll give you an answer, guys. We'll eventually give you the answer.
JON MORGANTINI: We're not that mean. Well, maybe some of us are.
But I literally think that is all the time we have.
JON MORGANTINI: So this has been super fun to hang out with all of you and see some of our amazing art and drop some spoilers and be a little, you know, mustache twirly and like tee hee hee, we know what we're doing.
But you can absolutely hop into the Discord after this and ask us more questions. I cannot promise that anyone will answer anything, but you can certainly ask. That is your prerogative.
And up next, I do believe, is the Organized Play updates panel, so you want to stick around for that.
And it's just Friday, folks. We've got days more of this stuff. So there's all kinds of panels. We'll be pushing out the socials. You'll see all of the things.
So thank you very much for joining us for the War of Immortals panel, and we will check you all later.