Pathfinder 2E Take A Look At Pathfinder Remaster's Edicts & Anathema

The new version of Pathfinder coming later this year dispenses with alignment and replaces it with edicts and anathema. Paizo has shared an example of what this looks like in the game with a preview of dwarf beliefs, along with a sneak peak at a brand new 17th-level dwarf feat.

Edicts and anathema appear in ancestry description and classes, with suggestions of 'popular' examples. For the dwarf they shared, the examples were:

• Popular Edicts create art with beauty and utility, hunt the enemies of your people, keep your clan dagger close
• Popular Anathema leave an activity or promise uncompleted, forsake your family

Additionally, the new Stonewall feat looks like this:

Stonewall [reaction] — Feat 17​

Dwarf, Earth, Polymorph​

Frequency once per day​

Trigger An enemy or hazard’s effect hits you or you fail a Fortitude save against one.​

​

The strength of stone overcomes you so strongly that it replaces your stout body. You become petrified until the end of the current turn. You don’t take any damage from the triggering effect or any other ill effects that couldn’t affect stone.​

paizo.com - Community / Paizo Blog

 

[payn]

I wasn't implying there would be 1 word to describe a NPC, they'd need to include a few to make it useful. But I'm not even sure how they'll represent the new system on a statblock, I just assume it'll use some form of descriptive words as a replacement for 2 letters representing alignment for brevity but who knows. Perhaps we'll see when Rage of Elements releases since that's supposed to reflect the new core concepts.

I will say I did like alignment to describe a settlement or kingdom. I remember using it quite a bit in my AD&D 2e Dragonlance campaigns to understand what type of society a village or town listed in a book was. I just never found it all that useful for individual people.

Paizo does a good job in the APs of describing, at least the big player NPCs, in their modules. It just occurred to me that despite the obnoxiously big stat blocks in 3E/PF1, alignment was only two letters of it!

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

How are edicts and anathemas supposed to be used and/or how are they replacing alignment?

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Yeap, I believe that both ability scores and alignment were legacy items in a boat Paizo simply didnt want to rock. Though, I think they are taking adcantage of the absolute turdshow that WotC has made of the OGL to slip these changes in and hope they can deflect the blowback in WotC direction.

I will miss them both, but ability scores more. That one really bothers me for some reason. I guess I would rather find more uses for the whole score than just reduce it to the modifier.