Divine Social Networking in the Age of Lost Omens
W. Brian Lane
TL;DR
This paper addresses how major editing and narrative events in Pathfinder’s Lost Omens—the Remaster's removal of alignment, Gorum's death during the War of Immortals, and the doubling of page counts in Divine Mysteries—restructure the core 20 deities' social network. It adopts social network analysis on two data sources, LOGM and LODM, constructing undirected weighted networks where edge weights are defined by $d_{ij} = n_{ij} + n_{ji}$, and applies metrics such as degree, strength, betweenness, closeness, density, along with cross-network measures like $NDC$, $NSC$, and $EEJ$, plus Louvain clustering to identify communities. The study finds that page-count expansion drives the strongest network changes, increasing density and centrality and enabling more inter-deity interactions, while the Remaster's removal of alignment has little detectable effect and Gorum's death yields only modest changes; Arazni’s rise contributes additional connectivity and shifts in centrality. These findings illuminate how publication decisions influence in-setting divine relationships and offer a data-driven approach to forecasting future lore development and campaign-world dynamics.
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.