Hey Everyone!

PLEASE TO EVERYONE ELSE NOTE THERE ARE *SPOILERS* HERE. (Also please excuse my absence, I've been fairly busy lately!)

Well, most of my work was done altering it to fit a more standard 'traditional fantasy' path, and also expanding on how the government and stuff of Spira works. It always felt weird that there were only like.... seven or eight towns you could go to, so the first part of the expansion was to try and work out how those all fall into more traditional governmental agencies and adding smaller, less well-protected/less-well-built settlements to the map for the players to visit.

The aeons have become gods to fit Pathfinder's Eidolon system, and let me tell you, writing the story alterations that that caused has been FUN. Now, instead of people who willingly gave themselves to fight Sin, the Fayth are now the true pantheon of Spira, usurped by Yevon.

I had a fun conversation with someone about how to invoke a false deity, and it actually ended with me changing how clerical magic in the setting actually works. The whole 'top-down-deities-grant-you-spells' thing that's assumed by most Pathfinder players is still assumed to be the way the world works, but it's not. Deities draw power directly from worship, and that worship has power in and of itself. The ghost of Yu Yevon isn't exactly up to granting spells, but his worship does grant his clerics, those whose worship has sparked the growth of divine powers within themselves, special power.... especially since most of them would probably have been some other kind of magic user. This allows priests of Yevon to get around the pesky alignment rule... since most of the populous worships him as Lawful Neutral, and his priests are worshiping him at more of a True Neutral sort of status (it's the religion itself that's Lawful Neutral... set up by some Neutral Evil clerics). The fact that Yevon isn't a true god, but instead a figurehead raised by his religion, has allowed me to do some neat and interesting things with the plot, which is one of the things I've been exploring.

Like, for exmple, the insidious way that the gods are imprisoned... since worship grants power and alters things metaphysically for the gods, everybody being taught to believe that the "Five Lesser Gods" really ARE lesser, and worshipping them only subserviently to Yevon, means that they themselves have become less than Yevon... on two levels. Most of Spira worships Yevon, but not all of Spira has a patron God or Goddess. So Yevon gets more worship, the Five get less, the Five lose the power of worship, and they also get the double-whammy of being placed below Yevon on the cosmic totem pole, meaning they have to obey him and his commands that are left from when he was alive.... like imprisoning them. (More on that below). Yunalesca was a smart (and vengeful) bitch when she set all this up - the entire Yevon religion is in some ways a means to prevent the gods from breaking free and smacking Yevon a new one.

Regrettably, I did have to take away some of the more interesting parts of the setting, such as Dream Zanarkand (which didn't really fit with the new direction of the story) but figuring out how to replace them was incredibly fun. Instead of Summoning a phantom city out at sea, Yevon used the souls of half his city to bind the gods themselves so they couldn't stop him from creating Sin, and half his city to power his Eidolon into the monstrosity known as Sin.

'Secret' aeons have become cults operating around or outside of the Yevon religion; the Magus sisters have become a threefold goddess of magic, where Anima is now a martyrous deity of torture, self-flagellation, and pain. Trying to decide whether to include Yojimbo and if so, how.

I read a fanfiction a while ago that centered around a cult of Sin and I've always thought that, what if that DID exist in FFX? I mean, you have this giant crazy hungry thing that literally holds life and death in your hands. It might seem to be somewhat intelligent, because it attacks in patterns that are identifiable, it has a personality influenced by whoever became the Final Aeon (more on how that works a little later), so I'm fairly certain there are some heretics out there who pray to it instead of Yevon, since praying to Yevon hasn't stopped "the dragon", but maybe if you pray to Sin enough it'll just leave you alone (kind of the rationality of ancient people worshipping volcanoes).

The Final Summoning had to be changed in order to work mechanically with Eidolons, and I had to write up mechanics in case my party actually decides to try and go for it. They're still very tentative but they'll be up in the main thread. Basically it lets you rewrite your Eidolon's pool and gives it the abilities and stuff of whatever guardian you use for the summoning, in effect fusing your guardian's soul with the eidolon. In essence, in my version, the summoning of Sin was a final summoning using the power of half the souls in Zanarkand (the other half were a corruption of that ritual and used to bind the gods).

I expanded a little on Al Bhed culture, some of which is still being fleshed out. I've also added a tribe of humans to explain both Lulu and Paine, who look LITERALLY NOTHING LIKE ANYBODY ELSE YOU EVER MEET IN THE GAME. They  had to come from SOMEWHERE so.... obviously it's one of those peoples living in a place on Spira you never go.

As for the psychological effects, I'm sad that my brain hasn't gone further in that direction other than the existence of the Cult of Sin, although I think it speaks to them that the Cult of Anima exists, as well. The philosophy of the Anima priesthood is that "Life is pain", a very apt kind ofmentality in a world wracked by Sin. I'm sure I'll end up exploring it a little bit in-game rather than in my notes, since it's the kind of thing I have a tendency to inject into any setting.

I also find it amusing that the nihilistic philosophy of the Anima cult, which is basically that Si is never going to go away and no amount of praying can change that, and that Spira's cycle of death is never-ending and using it as a metaphor for the meaning of life, is actually the closest to being right out of all of Spira......