Woo! Finally got my hands on War of the Immortals, and, hoo boy, there's a lot to go over. Of course the new character options and mythic rules draw the eye immediately, but the book also has massive impacts on the setting. That might not mean much if you normally played pre-written adventures or didn't have your campaign set on Golarion, but I eat that sort of lore right up.
Highlights for me include:
>We now know that the mysterious thing that escaped Gorum's armor upon his death was the Devourer, the big bad apocalyptic god of the Starfinder setting. We also know that it's evidently descended from Pathfinder's own big bad apocalyptic god. I like the connection between Pathfinder & Starfinder this establishes and it goes a long way to explain why Gorum wanted to ensure he was taken out before he could turn to the dark side.
>Animist class helps to establish various small spirits as a thing in the setting. Sure, you could always portray a druid as drawing on the small spirits of nature, but it just wasn't the same.
>Exemplar still looks insanely fun.
>Mildly disappointed that they put "blood" front and center for the Bloodrager compared to 1e's version, but 2e was rather lacking in character options to draw power from licking the blood of your foe off your blade so I can't complain too much. I am glad that we have character options for the demon hunting Matanji Orcs now though.
>Seneschal looks really fun to me. It might not give you the kind of power you'd expect from an archetype that ends with you evolving to become the type of patron that gives witchs & warlocks their powers, but it gives you options to fake it. Just imagine rolling into some farming village somewhere and "revealing" yourself to be an angel or a powerful fae or something.
>Mythic Callings mostly just make you better at doing what you're already doing. The real power comes from the Mythic Destinies you get at level 12. That said, there is one feat, Mythic Containment, which means you can put a full grown dragon into your pocket.
>I want a way to reskin the Archfiend mythic destiny. Having your own realm you rule over and can draw power from is cool. I just don't like that it's limited to various flavors of fiend.
>You can now have a monster hunting campaign in Absalom as strange creatures have been emerging from the Starstone Cathedral.
>Since the current day of the setting takes places after Wrath of the the Righteous the Worldwound has been sealed. This means that Mendev, a country located next to the Worldwound has had less to worry about extradimensional invaders. Or the did. With the godrain a series of towers with mysterious connections to the outer planes have appeared around the country. No invaders yet, but I'm still amused that they've gone from dealing with one extraplanar threat to possibly facing another one. (I see what you're doing their Paizo writers.)
>The Orcish Pantheon has been shaked up in recent days. Virtuous Orc dead can challenge their gods for their spots and a recent spate of such challenges have caused old Orc gods to fall and new ones to rise. Mostly I suspect that Paizo is using this to make the Orc gods less obviously evil.
>Ustalav has always been the spooky Halloween country. Since the godsrain various curses have started appearing in the country that turn people into vampires, werecreatures, living ghosts, etc only without corrupting the victim's mind. Conveniently this will provide players an easy reason to play such characters without needing them to be evil.
>Ra, Horus, Isis and the other Egyptian gods were put on a bus as a result of saving the world from a plot by a trio of hag goddesses. I suppose it was always a little awkward to have Egyptian gods about in a setting where most of the other gods are various flavors of fantasy gods.
EDIT: Oh, and the Dragon that decided to do a eugenics in order to ensure humans reach their full potential got arrested for dragon crimes. Though the godsrain activated a failsafe that started turning some of the population of his island into dragon people. (Which conveniently lets people use the Dragonblood versatile heritage introduced in one of the recent books.)
