Divine Social Networking in the Age of Lost Omens
cs.SI
/ Authors
/ Abstract
The last two years have seen significant changes in the divine pantheon of the Lost Omens campaign setting of the Pathfinder Tabletop Roleplaying Game. First, the Pathfinder Remaster, necessitated by the Open Game License debacle, prompted the removal of alignment and an enrichment of divine identities and relationships. Second, the War of Immortals, kicked off by the death of one of the core 20 deities, shook up the membership and relationships within the setting's primary pantheon. These two changes prompted the reprinting of deity information in Pathfinder: Lost Omens Divine Mysteries, which updates and replaces the pre-Remaster Pathfinder: Lost Omens Gods & Magic. Notably, Divine Mysteries features double the page count profiling the core 20 deities. In this paper, we use social network analysis to examine the impact of these changes (Remaster, War of Immortals, and page count) on the relationships among the core 20 deities. In this analysis, each deity features as a node, connected by edges that represent the number of times each pair of deities is mentioned in each other's profiles. The results reveal a much richer, more connected divine network in Divine Mysteries than in Gods & Magic. We conclude by discussing implications for the Lost Omens campaign setting and areas of future development.