"Well, breadth-first, I do remind myself.  Deep dive on that can wait.  Trying to figure out what I'd preferentially ask somebody from Absalom, besides a non-local view on - whatever the ass people here are doing - okay, the Starstone.  Were people possibly lying to me about that?  Because the version I got, Aroden came across a giant glowy rock that could've been used to produce, like, a hundred of Iomedae, and put up a huge warded magical containment fortress around it so that only worthy people could get through, one of whom is the god of crime and one of whom is a guy who did it on a drunken bet.  Is there a sane version of this story."

"People weren't lying. People who speculate a lot about this kind of thing speculate that existing gods have some kind of veto power over new gods ascending, and the protections Aroden placed either prevent the existing gods from interfering with the ascension of new ones, or satisfy some negotiated condition that allows Aroden to aid the new gods - which would of course now not matter, as Aroden is dead - or that the deaths of most who try in fact power the ascensions of those who succeed, or that Norgorber and Cayden were concessions in exchange for Iomedae, or that the Starstone in fact can ascend a fixed number of people - or a fixed number per period of time - such that rationing it makes sense."

"Hmmm.  Now that is interesting."

Obvious thoughts that Keltham isn't going to go into, because breadth-first examination:

- If the Starstone is being rationed, why Cayden Cailean and Norgorber?  Just the first ones through when the winning ticket came up?  Has anybody kept a record of number of Starstone-entrants and deaths between ascensions?
- Aroden was ascended by Starstone, but seems to have been much more powerful than Iomedae.  Did he get more of what the Starstone can offer, if the fortress rations it?
- What if Aroden was trying to create as many human gods as possible such that Cayden and Norgorber being potential successes mattered more than their future alignments or domains?

"Somebody supposedly an oracle of Nethys - who may have actually been that, if the person who showed up to take her was the real Nefreti Clepati, which she proved by predicting a fairly random future fact - told me that Earthfall shattered prophecy for the second time, with the first time being Rovagug, and that after Earthfall the gods took the last fragments of twice-shattered prophecy and made a prophecy about a Lawful Neutral god who'd use the Starstone to make Golarion their domain and then contain Rovagug forever.  Which Aroden saw coming, changed himself to match the conditions of, and then Aroden's death shattered all prophecy in Golarion forever.  Is that plausible?"

" - we don't have much in the way of records from the time of Rovagug, but the fact there was a war with lots of gods on both sides is suggestive that something was interfering with prophecy, usually you see them pay each other to sit it out. I've never heard the claim that Aroden specifically tried to be the god the prophecied Age of Glory was about as opposed to, well, being the god the prophecy was about all along. It is true that Aroden's death shattered prophecy and that everyone thinks that's permanent, and Abadar - and for that matter Asmodeus - are acting like it's long term, making long-term investments in new methods of intervention on Golarion."

"People in the Conspiracy - the face Cheliax presented to me - seemed to think - well, maybe it was just that Carissa seemed to think - that unleashing Rovagug was game over, that it would inevitably destroy everything.  Is that conventional mainstream academically-respectable theology?  I would think that if the last set of gods managed to seal Rovagug, and all the gods who fought on Its side are now dead, and there've been some new gods since then, you'd expect that releasing Rovagug would just end with It being sealed again?  What do people think they know and how do they think they know it?"

"I don't know much about Rovagug. To my knowledge there were not human civilizations on the face of Golarion when Rovagug first reached the world, and that if there had been, the war that sealed him would probably have killed them all, and possibly just killed every living thing on the planet's surface. There are new gods but that doesn't mean that the aggregate strength of all the gods opposed to the destruction of the world exceeds what it did at the time; the new gods are mostly very weak, compared to the ancient ones, and I don't know if the ancient ones have more or less power than they did then; it might be that the expended resources they have never since regained, not even now. No one has good information on this; it is expensive for the gods to communicate their secrets, and it's hard to imagine under what circumstances any Church would consider this information decision-relevant.

There was a prophecy that some threat greater than Rovagug would appear eventually, and that Asmodeus would unleash Rovagug, hoping that Rovagug would consume that enemy and then be possible to contain, or that they'd weaken each other, and that instead Rovagug would consume everything and that's how the universe would end. But prophecy's broken, and I don't know if that one was ever very definite."

...you'd imagine not, since otherwise Asmodeus would be taking an action known to Asmodeus to lead to failure?

Huh, there's a flash of anger in Keltham's thoughts at the mention of that god.  Keltham may actually be angry here.

"Anything else in the set that includes Rovagug, the Starstone, and Pharasma?  It sounds like those are three known things from outside the local universe.  Is there a fourth?"

"There are many other Outer Gods of a class with Pharasma, supposedly, but their concerns are so alien to us that they mostly cannot even be comprehended, and Pharasma prevents them from doing whatever they'd do with this star system and these souls and these afterlives if unimpeded. The Starstone's not from outside the local universe, it was created when several gods sacrificed themselves to slow the moon that collided with the world when Earthfall happened."

"I thought I read a version that - something else was coming and the gods collided a moon with it to try to stop it, but that didn't work, it just smashed through the moon?"

"The account I'd heard was that an underwater civilization on Golarion tried to pull an asteroid down onto Golarion to destroy a surface civilization they were at war with, thinking they'd survive it. They miscalculated, and it would've destroyed life on the planet; the gods moved the moon to deflect it, and then sacrificed themselves to slow the fragments in their collision with the world. But 'something from outside the local universe' played no particular part in it except in the sense that all asteroids are from very far away. It was initiated by a Golarion civilization, deliberately.  

There are many other examples of things from very far away impacting Golarion, of course. Famously something landed in Numeria long ago and the gods put up a bubble around it; no one who enters is ever possible to communicate with or get information about again, including in an afterlife. And I've heard it claimed Baba Yaga is from another universe."

"If you pull down an asteroid that's massive enough and fast enough to shatter a moon on impact - a reasonable civilization wouldn't expect to survive that impact in the first place, that's not the kind of calculation that's easy to screw up if you can redirect asteroids at all.  And also you wouldn't expect the asteroid to have a core piece left over that turned people into gods when they touched it.  And the whole thing sounds like maybe agents weren't choosing optimally, which makes it sound prophecy-shattering, which you wouldn't expect random asteroids to be.  You can imagine entities from Outside sending in something like, an uplifter.  Or maybe a poisoned gift, a Starstone that uplifts cooperative civilizations that will eventually trade with you, who'll be grateful for the help, but if the local civilization starts fighting over the Starstone instead of just using it on everyone, it's also very easy to weaponize - we've got a whole subsection of literature about that, how aliens might send us gifts cleverly meant to destroy us -"

"Sorry, going depth-first again.  What's known about the larger universe that includes Outer Gods and not just, it sounds like maybe this whole local region of reality is inside a bubble that Pharasma is maintaining?"

"I have never heard of any indication that Earthfall involved problems with prophecy except that the algothulls died and didn't expect to, and I think you... might be operating from a wrong conception of what kinds of mistakes civilizations make when they're smart enough to avoid them.

There are also other examples of the death of a god leaving magical residue that enables other entities to ascend, there's a famous case in Tian Xia, so my understanding was always that the death of the gods in Earthfall left the magical residue that made the Starstone, which is what you'd expect to happen insofar as you have expectations about that anyway.

I don't know anything about the Outer Gods beyond that there are entities like Pharasma, which are not comprehensible or wise to try to comprehend, and Pharasma maintains this universe and largely discourages their intervening here."

No, sorry, even for Golarion, 'in order to strike at your enemies, redirect an asteroid towards your planet, using careful orbital calculations, which on arrival will be going fast enough to blow right through your moon and shatter it' is a bit much.  A much smaller moon than dath ilan's, presumably, but still.  You need a certain basic level of competence at doing calculations like that in order to redirect asteroids and get them on target at all.

"Are there any known instances of helpful interventions from beyond, any signs that we have friends out there?  Or is it all things like - something landing that has to get enclosed in an anti-infohazard barrier, Dou-Bral getting inverted to Zon-Kuthon, possibly the Starstone -"

"We don't have friends out there. That is the closest thing to a consensus that exists about the Outer Gods."

...oh, right.  There's another way to guess that prophecy was broken during Earthfall.  Keltham was rationalizing too fast on account of Ione having told him where his answer would end up.  There are multiple pieces of evidence here, he'll probably find more later.  He doesn't need to leap on individual points as decisive arguments.

"Abadar paid Zon-Kuthon to go into the Plane of Shadow for 'as long as the sun was in the sky'.  The book I read presented it as a surprise gotcha when Earthfall blotted out the sun.  If the gods knew about Earthfall, Abadar wouldn't have chosen that term or been caught be surprise... actually, that sounds like Zon-Kuthon maybe knew about Earthfall coming... counterargument, maybe the agreement wasn't meant to last any longer than it did and both sides knew that..."

"But, yeah, I buy that we don't have friends out there.  Just to be explicit about it, though, any known inhabited other stars, alien species?"

"Yes, it's believed there are lots. Abadarans like publishing papers about how to have trade relationships with them in principle but it's probably too dangerous in practice, absent Abadar's specific assurance it's safe in a given case."

"Believed there are lots?  How do you end up believing but not knowing?"

"Well, every planet in our star system is inhabited by aliens of one stripe or another, and sometimes distant stars wink out, or behave oddly as if being altered by some deliberate intent, and some petitioners in Axis are not from Golarion, though we don't have enough communications with the other planets around our star to rule out that all of the mortals with souls live on different planets in this star system and the other star systems have only gods and mindless beasts and whatever sent the thing that landed in Numeria. I would be very surprised by that, though."

"Are there other entire planes, like this one in having mortals in them and their own set of star systems, that are not this plane, but part of Pharasma's bubble and connected to Her afterlife system?"

"There could easily be, but I haven't encountered specific evidence of that."

"You'd expect the afterlives to know about it if there were aliens from lots of different planes showing up, they'd know whether they remembered constellations consistent with being in the same galaxy as everyone else."

"It's not at all obvious to me that people would remember constellations in such a fashion as to usefully figure that out, especially since in many worlds the stars might not be visible, or everyone might live underground. But even if Axis did know whether all of the aliens come from the Material Plane and demiplanes originating from the Material, the gods are prohibited from sharing all the secrets of the universe with us; we cannot simply pay Axis for a book of all they know of the universe, even if we could afford it."

"They literally can't tell you how large your universe is.  That seems like a bit much, frankly."

"So, yeah, what's up with the prohibitions on afterlives telling the mortals - just about literally anything, it sounds like - whose idea was it, is there a reason?"

"The explanation I always found made the most sense to me is that, for any god, at least when prophecy yet endured, there were a hundred words that they could speak, that would turn all mortals to their service; and the gods who did not approve of mortals being so manipulated bargained for communications to be too limited for that, which means limited indeed."

"And there's no carveout for telling mortals... how to mine spellsilver, or make huge quantities of acid, or the other things they'd need to know to lead better lives than this.  Question mark?"