User:Oznogon/War of Immortals stream transcript

This page contains spoilers for the following products: Publicly announced details about War of Immortals and Godsrain.
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April 17, 2024 (Twitch, YouTube)

JON MORGANTINI: Gods do not die easily, nor do they perish cleanly. The death of a deity shakes the firmaments of existence, and all the worlds of spirits and mortals tremble in the wake of such catastrophic events.

Hello, I am Jon Morgantini. Thank you very much for holding on for us while we dealt with some technical issues on our side. I am Paizo's Community Manager and your host for today's exciting War of Immortals kickoff stream.

What is the War of Immortals, you might be asking yourself? Well, it's what its name implies, a war between immortals precipitated by the Godsrain, a cataclysm of mythic proportions in which one of Pathfinder's core 20 deities will die, and their blood and divine power will literally rain down upon the mortals below, bestilling upon them mythic power and a fraction of that god's now stolen immortality.

The War of Immortals event will span months of product releases beginning in July and change the setting forever. Ripples from this event will still be seen for years to come, and we're already planning further storylines that build directly on the prolonged period of conflict that follows the Godsrain, which we and the people of Golarion will refer to as the War of Immortals.

Be sure to stick around until the end of the stream for a very exciting announcement related to the long-term effects. But before we get into those effects, let's have a look at the immediate effects. At the center of the War of Immortals meta-event is the aptly named hardcover release, War of Immortals, which arrives in October. To talk more about this exciting release and the content players can hope to find within, I'm joined by Paizo's managing designer, Michael Sayre.

MICHAEL SAYRE: Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to the War of Immortals. As some of you may have noticed, the God of Sound was the first victim of this event. But fortunately, we're not gonna dwell on that too much longer.

In this book, we're going to explore all kinds of cool things that are related to this precipitating event—you see what I did there? 'Cause it's the Godsrain?—and provide you all with a full deluge—I'm still doing it—of new character options for players who want to imbue their campaigns with mythic power and cool divine options.

And cool divine options start with cool new classes like (the exemplar, and Nahoa, our iconic). He's not mythic yet in this particular piece of art, though you'll get to see what he might look like as he continues on his journey through the book of War of Immortals.

There is an entire narrative throughline in this hardcover that explores the journey of Nahoa and the iconic animist, Samo ... as they travel from the Lands of the Linnorm Kings all across the continent of Avistan and down into Garund, following a calling that is leading them into battle against a new Spawn of Rovagug rampaging across the world.

New Spawn of Rovagug? Yeah, that's right. We've got all sorts of crazy new monsters and things to throw at you. And we've got the vicious monster Verex-That-Was, who you'll see in this art piece depicting the Battle of Shatterskull Crest. You might be thinking, "Verex, maybe I've heard that name before 'cause I'm actually really into Paizo's lore," and that is a name that has come up.

Yeah, Verex the Despoiler used to be an orc god. Then he delved a little too deep, spent too much time close to Rovagug's imprisonment, and as he crawled away he despoiled himself and was exposed to the Godsrain. He turned into this horrific monstrosity that is a major creature, kind of leading into a lot of the events and causing some of the changes that you're going to see in this world.

But Verex isn't the only god who dies. "Of course he isn't," you say, "this is what we tuned in to see." Yes, because you see several deities are going to die in the course of these events, including one of my personal favorites who I was incredibly sad to murder, Sturovenen the Dragoneagle. See, when the Godsrain happens, there are bits and pieces of "redacted" that fall in various places, and one of those places is the Worldwound. So the Dragoneagle flies in and snatches up one of these "redacted", raises it up where it cannot cause further harm or be used by the demons gathering around the Worldwound to reopen it, and explodes in a giant prism of rainbows that everybody in Sarkoris sees.

And you're gonna find more and more events like that, and you're going to participate in a ton of events like that in the adventures that we have coming up. And all of these adventures and stories that you're gonna tell, they are gonna be enabled by all kinds of mechanics and new tools that we bring into play here, which you're gonna see in this book with this amazing cover for the War of Immortals.

Whoa, what's that you're hopefully saying right now? That is Szuriel, the Apocalypse Rider of War on her badass steed, doing what the Apocalypse Rider of War does best and getting involved in a war. This scene that you see with our iconics here actually does take place in the book because more and more of these gods and deities, they're getting directly involved in things on Golarion in a way that they haven't for a while, since another dead deity used to be kicking around on the surface of the world and doing his thing.

That's all I've got for you at the moment. I will be back to talk a little bit more about some of the other surprises we've got coming your way, but for now I'm gonna go ahead and toss it to Jon so that Jon can introduce you to our next analyst.

JON MORGANTINI: Thanks, Mike. The fallout from Godsrain and the events of the War of Immortals aren't going to be constrained to just the hardcover, however. And a number of our published adventures are also going to explore the after effects of this event and how it affects the setting. To talk more about the first couple of them, 'cause, yes, there's more than a couple, I'm pleased to welcome Pathfinder narrative of creative director James Jacobs.

James, you're muted. There's a mute button. Huh. (laughing)

JAMES JACOBS: Oh boy, hey Jon, thanks for the introduction. Sorry about that. Hey everybody, we do have a lot of adventures coming up and it's pretty exciting. We haven't been able to talk about these yet really, but yeah, the first of the adventures that we're gonna be releasing is in July. It's our first hardcover standalone module, Prey for Death.

Starting with this volume, in fact, all of our standalone adventures are going to be hardcovers and at least 128 pages. So we're gonna be able to do longer adventures that have more of a chance to tell their stories or investigate things, sort of like I guess what we did with the remaster of Crown of the Kobold King. So I guess technically this isn't our first hardcover. So first brand-new hardcover module.

Anyway, so Prey for Death. This is the adventure where the player characters play Red Mantis assassins. And so you're gonna be playing assassins sent out into the world to assassinate somebody important, and I'm not gonna do too many spoilers. You'll figure this out pretty soon. It's a pretty high-level adventure path, or adventure, a standalone adventure. You will end up at about 17th level at the end of it. And you'll wanna check this one out for sure.

I'm not saying exactly why this is part of the War of the Mortals storyline, but for us for sure, it very much is. And so we've got Achaekek, who of course is one of the big deals for the Red Mantis assassins. And he's not the god we're killing now. He's not one of the core deities anyway, so. Anyway, so Prey for Death will be out pretty soon. That'll be the kind of the kickoff for this whole storyline that we're gonna be doing.

And then after that, we're going to be transitioning over to the Adventure Path line. Seeing a lot of people assuming that we're gonna be doing just one adventure path for the War of Immortals. It's a bigger storyline than that. It's just like back in the old days when we did Rise of the Runelords, then we went on and did Shattered Star and Return of the Runelords and other stuff. And this is an event that is gonna shake the world so fundamentally and change everything in a way that is so significant, that we're gonna continue doing more and more stories about the War of Immortals and the fallout of what's going on.

And the first one of those that is going to impact this is the Curtain Call Adventure Path. This one launches in July. First volume is called Stage Fright, and this Adventure Path starts out before all of that stuff is going on. And the plot line here is sort of a little bit more whimsical than we normally do for adventures. You see, in the background here is actually some art from the second volume, where you've got Fumbus here offering some dinosaur diplomacy up to a curious spinosaurus.

Curtain Call is the Adventure Path where your characters put on an opera based on the adventure you went on when you're first to 10th level. And so there's a lot of diplomacy and stuff going on. It's a three-part adventure path that debuts at Gen Con and we'll wrap up in September.

And it kind of builds up toward what we're going along with the War of Immortals and Godsrain again. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but not only does "redacted" have what is going to happen to that "redacted" individual during this adventure, other gods are going to be involved in this whole thing in ways, 'cause this is a big deal. It's going to affect deities on all sorts of different ways. And your high-level player characters are going to be on screen interacting with a lot of these deities in ways that are going to be pretty fun.

Anyway, so that's Curtain Call. It's also not the only adventure path that we're doing for this.

Like I said before, we're also starting an adventure in October and an adventure path called Triumph of the Tusk. This is a lower-level adventure path goes from I believe a 3rd to 11th level. This adventure path is—we're just brand-new announcing it right here—this is an adventure path where the player characters are in the Hold of Belkzen and they're dealing with a lot of the fallout and situations that arise from the shakeup that we were talking about earlier with with some of the orc deities dying and everything kind of changing around. So that's going to be a fun adventure to check out that really delves into the aftermath of Godsrain and all of that event. That will be the adventure path pretty much.

Going forward, one thing that I do want to mention also is these first two adventure paths, Curtain Call and Triumph of the Tusk are really focusing on the narrative elements of War of Immortals, the death of the god and all of the stuff going on. They're not specifically built to be for mythic characters. We are going to get around to doing mythic adventures at some point. I'm excited to do that sort of thing. But like I said before, this is not something we're just going to do once and then move on. These are going to be themes going to be continuing exploring throughout the next year and beyond that. So to find out more, you're just going to have to stay tuned and find out more.

So I guess that's pretty much all I've got to tease about the adventures that we're going to be doing for the rest of the year. Back to you, Jon.

JON MORGANTINI: Thanks, James. I cannot wait to play those or throw them at my players, or a combination of both.

Now this next tease isn't new. It's closer to returning. It's a product that we will give Pathfinder fans yet another way to experience the storyline for War of Immortals. To chat about fiction, I'm joined by our Director of Brand Strategy, Mark Moreland.

(chuckling)

MARK MORELAND: We are being cursed by the God of Sound, which we really need to invent at this point because clearly we're getting a sign from the gods that that's a thing that we got to worry about.

Anyway, so longtime Pathfinder fans likely remember the Pathfinder Tales line of novels that we published between 2010 and 2017. In over three dozen novels, Pathfinder Tales presented adventurers and anti-heroes of the author's creation, fighting evil or skirting the line themselves. And from this rogues' gallery emerged a number of fan favorites who returned for series of adventures. Varian Jeggare and his loyal bodyguard Radovan, Torius Vin and the crew of the pirate ship Stargazer, the charlatan Rodrick and his intelligent sword Hrym, the former Nidalese shadowcaller Isiem, and more.

What these books allowed us to do for the first time was to tell stories set in the Age of Lost Omens that had protagonists, and through these characters explore the setting with a sense of excitement that a RPG rulebook just can't provide. Now I'm overjoyed to announce the return of Pathfinder novels in the form of Godsrain by Liane Merciel that will release this November.

Now unlike prior Pathfinder novels, Godsrain will be a hardcover release for the optimal sensory experience of reading. And it will feature a few familiar faces among its core adventuring party, the Pathfinder iconics Amiri, Ezren, Kyra, and Merisiel. Over the course of Godsrain, these beloved Pathfinder characters will witness the Godsrain, and at least one of them will gain mythic power in the process. In a race against powerful rivals set on releasing an existential threat upon the world, Kyra and friends will have to use every tool at their disposal, including firsthand blessings from one of the surviving core deities to prevent an event, an even greater disaster than the mere death of a god or a few gods.

In anticipation of Godsrain's release, we'll be publishing two electronic books as preludes in September and October. The first of these is one many viewers of this stream will likely already be familiar with, The Godsrain Prophecies by Erin Roberts. While the bulk of this content is available now on the Paizo blog, the ebook will include exclusive new content to further the mystery of the prophecies and explore the enigmatic seer who penned them.

In October, we'll release Before the Godsrain, a collection of short stories and flash fiction featuring the four iconic characters at the novel's heart. Readers who are unfamiliar with the iconics or the Pathfinder setting can pick up this ebook to get to know Amiri, Ezren, and Kyra and Merisiel through reprinted and new material designed to bring them up to speed on these beloved characters.

That's all that I've got. So I'll toss it back to you, Jon, and we'll see what else is next. I think that's all that everyone came here to learn, right?

JON MORGANTINI: We're good. Now that we have that announcement, people are good to go.

I swear, this is a sign from the universe. I don't know what it is, but yeah, that's probably everything that everyone's here for. So I was just going to head down to the local supermarket and grab a sandwich.

But actually, seriously, before you bring out the pitchforks, there's a lot that's going to be shaking up the status quo in the Lost Omens setting. To give us the down low on what's going to be happening, let's bring on Pathfinder rules and lore creative director, Luis Loza.

LUIS LOZA: Hello, everybody. Guess who's not muted this time around. Everyone else seemed to, like, really pick up the pace. I know we had tech issues, and it seems like we are kind of caught up. So that means I can take my time now, right? I can slow down. No one's really waiting on anything. We'd have a nice chill little time.

No, actually, no, let's talk about something you probably already know about. Let's go to our first slide here. It's the cover for a nice little book called Lost Omens Divine Mysteries.

With all this talk about gods dying and things changing, some of you are jumping in for the first time with the Lost Omens setting and learning who these gods are only to see maybe some of them die immediately after. So we figured we put a book together to collect as much information about the gods as we could and present all of that to you and show you, you know, who these gods are, what they're all about. Their stats, if you're a cleric, maybe give you some cool options for, you know, worshipping them and all that.

But also there's the opportunity to really learn more about the setting. So we sent out one of our most important figures. If we want to go to our next slide. A little, little nosoi by the name of Yivali, and she's been tasked with doing all this work, collecting all of this here for us and really doing the work of figuring out who these gods are and learning about all of these things.

She's been tasked by Pharasma to learn what she can, as she's doing kind of her, we'll call it like her grad-school thesis to graduate to become a full-on psychopomp that then helps people out in the afterlife.

And she's learned a lot of things, not only is she learning who gods are, she's learned, you know, who someone like Asmodeus is, or who someone like Desna is, to gods who are already safe so don't even look into that. But she's also learned some additional secrets.

If we go into our next slide, she's trying to figure out just how gods work, and maybe learning some of these secrets about the gods, right? What causes a god to happen? How does mortal become a god? And we're seeing here on the screen, probably one of the most notable instances of this happening. This is Iomedae touching the Starstone. And we're not going to tell you exactly what happens when you touch the Starstone, we're going to like start hinting at it, we're going to start peeking just a little bit behind the curtain to understand how gods work.

There's a lot of in-world essays written by Yivali that kind of explain what she's figured out, as best as she understands how a god works. And from there, of course, she's also gone on and met lots of different gods. As we go to our next slide, we can see that she actually, probably against standards and regulations for Pharasma's court, has been interacting with some of these gods. She's talked with someone like Chaldira here and some of the other gods along the world, and is getting a chance to really understand who these gods are. And we're hoping that through her work, you'll be able to read this book and also understand who the gods are.

But along the way, she's also met a lot of new faces. This next slide gives us just a couple of new faces that Yivali has met along the way.

We have new gods like Aleph, who is a god of darkness, but more benevolent than you're kind of used to seeing with darkness. There's also, on the opposite side, Nin, one of our new vampire gods, who is into a lot of strange things with vampires, like figuring out how to remove their weaknesses. Like, eventually, with enough time, Nin's followers can figure out how to walk out in the sun.

They also have newer gods that have ascended, like Mahja Firehair here, who is up there among the ranks of the orc pantheon to offer guidance and support through her own means. And then we also have even really interesting gods, like Zjar Tovan, who is a living weapon who is a god and is all about weapons in battle and stuff like that, who's just kind of more—we get to see some really interesting stuff out there with the kind of things here.

So lots of cool gods that Yivali gets to meet, lots of cool gods that she gets to introduce you to, and lots of cool things you get to learn along the way. But of course, I mentioned earlier, there's character options, and I think my next slide has a little hint as to what might be coming in this book here.

We have three different character options being showcased here. One is a battle harbinger, which is a new class archetype for clerics. The battle harbinger is all about battle, and you lose a little bit of spellcasting capability to make up for really cool capability in battle.

We have a new archetype, the Rivethun emissary, who's all about contacting spirits, ancestors, things like that, and tapping into divine powers through means that aren't just through that of a god.

And we also have the Palatine detective, who works with the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye, and interesting things have been afoot with the Esoteric Order, and as of late they have access to divine power in really strange and unique ways that we'll talk about more in the future. But that is another class archetype for the investigator, who gets access to spellcasting through own unique, mysterious ways.

And I think that's all the slides I have for today.

We also have, of course, other stuff happening in the Lost Omens line. You might have just seen the Tian Xia World Guide, then Tian Xia Character Guide will be coming out in a couple months after that. And Divine Mysteries will be coming out later this year around November, and we can then from there go on and explore and see what happens to the rest of the setting.

But that is the big thing. We're talking all about guides. Let's give you another guidebook, and let's look forward to that.

But I think that's all I have to talk about for today. So I'm going to send it back to Jon. There might be one or two other things we want to mention before we go.

JON MORGANTINI: I don't know. I feel like we've had such a full and complete stream by this point. I can't imagine what anybody else would want to talk about. That's all the products that we have to discuss for today's stream.

But there's going to be a lot more fallout from Godrain and War of the Immortals. We have many more things to talk about in the future as they, as they progress. But, you know, there really is, there's another exciting announcement that I'm really glad to finally get out in the open.

And I think, Mike, you might have something that you want to say to the people.

MICHAEL SAYRE: Yeah, I certainly do. So we've talked about the Godsrain and the War of Immortals, but what is the natural fallout of immortals fighting? Right? Well, when gods start fighting each other, their followers also have a tendency to start fighting, and people all over the world tend to get sucked into encounters like this.

So we're going to be playtesting two new classes coming to the game in 2025. And we're going to start playtesting them on Monday, April 29, in just under two weeks.

What are they? They are the intelligent and clever commander and the beefy and heavily armored guardian. You are going to get a chance to check out these new entries on the front lines of battle in the very near future.

So, you know, that I think is maybe everything, right? We told them that this was the most exciting thing we had to talk about. I can't think of anything else.

Sounds about right. Yeah.

JON MORGANTINI: There was one thing. We did a poll. And I'm pretty sure that we have a piece of art for the poll if we wanted to bring up that wonderful pie chart for data nerds.

So as you can see—you're not looking at me right now. This is the results of a poll. Twenty-five percent, 25 percent of you think that for some reason, Lamashtu is in danger.

That's—I was actually very proud. We had over 4,000 responses. Thank you very much. I am putting those numbers very tucked away very safely as your community engagement specialist.

It's been a pleasure to see all of you voting and caring so much about what terrible thing might befall a specific deity, whether it's a banana on the top of the stairs, or it's getting out of bed wrong and tweaking their back, you know, these things happen. (?: That's what got Aroden. MORGANTINI: It was the bananas.)

I'm curious now if anyone's opinions have changed. So let's pump your opinions into chat for a second because this is what they call vamping, kids. I am delaying things intentionally to be a little bit of a jerk.

?: Also, if you give me any of the gods' names in chat, I have a counter that will tell you how many times you've said it, but you do have to spell them correctly.

?: Amazing technology.

JON MORGANTINI: Is there anything that anyone else—this is your last chance because, you know, we're going to be wrapping up the stream here in a second.

LUIS LOZA: Yeah, I talked about setting stuff, and we were rushed earlier, but now there's a second. War of Immortals features a setting chapter, doesn't it, Mike?

MICHAEL SAYRE: It does. Yeah, and I hear it was written by a few really cool people.

Michelle Y. Kim, who was recently hired as an adventure developer here at Paizo. This guy, Luis Loza, who I've known for a while, pretty talented creative director.

I think, what was that guy's name? Erik Mona. I think he even wrote some of that setting chapter. Well, yeah.

LUIS LOZA: So if you want to learn a little bit about the ramifications to the setting, you can look forward to that in War of Immortals as well. Yeah, I think that covers everything I wanted to say.

JON MORGANTINI: Have I done enough vamping? I mean, I feel like chat's literally about to vibrate through the Internet and strangle me.

?: I think for your own safety, I think.

So don't perceive me on the Internet. All right. If you're all ready. Oh, here we go. Giving a drum roll, and the answer is:

?: It's live.

?: Do we all say it at once?

EVERYONE: Gorum. Gorum. Gorum will be the one dying.

?: Hey, what's that? What's that coming out of his chest? What the heck is that? I don't know.

?: I guess people have to wait and find out, huh?

?: Yeah, I guess he needs a wider tie to try to cover things up.

?: I hope he prepared mending this morning.

JON MORGANTINI: Yes. All right. It is Gorum, our Lord in Iron himself.

Now, now that we've gotten that out of our system. The how, the whys, the whens, all of this is yet to come. We're not that nice. But know that it's going to be on screen at your tables. And not just around the imaginary digital conference tables that we have here at Paizo being fully remote.

How does Gorum's death impact your player character? How is Amiri going to cope, probably with punching something? So what about the orcs of Belkzen? And what will the Godsrain of his blood, divine essence, and shards of armor leave in their wake upon Golarion?

You're just going to have to keep playing to find out.

Thank you very much for joining us on this stream and through the technical difficulties.

The hype has been amazing to watch. You all have been super into this whole thing and reading through The Godsrain Prophecies and all of your theory-crafting and postulating. We wouldn't be able to do any of this if you weren't so invested and so excited.

Some members of our community have set up a Godsrain post-game stream on the We're Stronger Together channel. So we're going to be raiding them in just a second. So if you want to geek out about the news, continue to speculate, stick around, talk here in chat, talk on the Discords, talk in the forums, and we will all be right there with you having so much fun.

On behalf of Mike, James, Mark and Luis, and the rest of Paizo, I've been Jon Morgantini, your community and social media manager. Have a good one.