this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Pathfinder 2e General Discussion
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Most of this is good, but I think renaming the geniekin heritages is a bit much. The old names are older than D&D and common enough in culture that there's no way there's a copyright issue
It's more an issue of if there is a risk of litigation, or potential avenues of it. Having less things potentially be targets helps differentiate a products identity more and have less 'weight' if it is used in court as evidence thereof.
Another benefit is this allows them to deviate from past/common tropes that people would expect from a "Shaitan" or any other renamed creatures based on knowledge from other systems or analogous creatures of myth in future writing - even if they still borrow from the latter in most creatures cases.
As far as I can tell the only geniekin with a name change is ifrit. All other changes are to the actual genies. And at least in principle I think the changes are good: ifrit and efreeti are just different ways to transliterate the same Arabic word, as are (and this is much worse) djinn and genie. AFAIK there is nothing relating to earth in the word Shaytan or to water in the word Marid. I don't know much about the new names, but at least the duplication was surely only there for continuity reasons (which are now a detriment rather than a boon).