The Golarion Gazette

Yesterday, the heralds of Sarenrae announced that She will no longer require that Her worshippers be of Good alignment, ending a policy that has been in place since time immemorial. “We believe that Sarenrae’s blessing should be available to anyone who wishes to heal the wounded and fight evil,” said Sunlord Thalachos, Sarenrae’s angelic herald. “And in today’s world, conflicts are more complicated than just good versus evil – neutral or even evil people often want to fight other sources of evil. If we can turn the forces of evil against each other, that’s great for the side of Good.” Ilssrah Embermead, a leader in the Scarlet Triad, announced plans to have all of her evil organization’s clerics convert to Sarenrae so they could get access to Her fireball spell. “We think that following Sarenrae’s guidance will help us be more profitable – after all, it’s hard to make much money selling slaves unless you can get rid of the competition.”

Sarenrae is the twelfth of Golarion’s 20 major deities to “go alignment-free” in the last few months. The first deity to make the switch was Gozreh, who did it in an attempt to quell contentious political and religious disputes over whether new housing developments in Razmiran violated his anathema of “letting civilization intrude on the wild” or whether the issue was being exploited by dryads to preserve their property values. After the switch, worshippers tired of “confusing” alignment restrictions from other deities flocked to Gozreh, leading Nethys, Pharasma, and Abadar to quickly follow suit. In order to compete, other deities also announced similar plans, and religion watchers anticipate that within the next few months, all 20 deities will switch, effectively making alignment a vestige of history.

Some traditional worshippers, on the other hand, prefer the nine-alignment grid system and are unsure what will happen once the system is removed. The Pathfinder Society, already scrambling to deal with waves of accommodation requests following recent court decisions, expects that the new system is likely to lead to logistical difficulties and increased intra-party conflict. “It used to be that all we had to do was put Good people with Good people and Evil people with Evil people,” said Roberta Karabel, a Venture-Captain with the Pathfinder Society. “But now, we’ve got barbarians who don’t like magical healers, Sarenites who always want to strike down evil and Gorumites who won’t if they’ve surrendered – pretty soon, we’ll have to solve an NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem just to put an adventuring party together.