Right, this is gonna be … long.
I wanna pitch some campaign ideas at folks and I want you to hurl them back at me with critique if there’s an issue I have missed.
- Of Gods and Mortals:
I am thinking of a three-tier divine system. Outer Gods, Inner Gods, and Nature Spirits/Kami/Elementals.
- Outer Gods
The Outer Gods or Supreme Beings are four entities so far removed from mortal comprehension and so massive in scope that attempting to contact them directly, especially without their permission, causes you to explode. No save. Even their creations could scarcely dare to rebel even if they all united for that one, singular goal, and even the Inner Gods are not entirely sure of what the purpose of the Great Cycle really is.
The God of Space, the God of Time, the God of Creation and the God of Entropy.
The God of Space creates and manages all four states of existence (solids, liquids, gasses, energies) in Creation, the God of Time ensures that all of those things are when and where they need to be at that specific moment, the God of Creation turns those states into what is required for their Cycle to continue, and the God of Entropy recycles all of those states into raw matter for the Cycle to reprocess as required, and destroys that which could threaten to destabilise the Great Cycle.
These Four Outer Gods or Supreme Beings are responsible for the next two types of ‘Divinities’ in the setting, that most Mortals are more familiar with, and it is only with their influence, or by stealing the Divine Essence of another, that a Mortal can be raised to Godhood. And so long as the ‘Inner Gods’ handle the duties that they were Ascended to take care of, the Outer Gods don’t care who is doing it, they just need it to be done as they’re too large, too macro-focused, to be handling the ‘minute’ duties of tending to each and every single life-sustaining planet
they’ve created.
- Inner Gods
Raised from Mortals, Magical Beasts, Elementals and even, in rare occasions, the Undead, Inner Gods are given a narrow focus in which they wield immense power, and a divine mandate to wield that power in service of the tiny part of the Great Cycle they were Ascended to guide and protect. Inner Gods can manifest on the Material Plane, but doing so renders them vulnerable and ‘mortal’, to an extent considering they are still ‘Gods’, and as such after gaining Immortality and great power, many Inner Gods prefer to remain as beings of pure psychic energy on the Astral Plane and perform their duties either through Mortal proxies or gradual magical influence rather than risk losing it all.
Of course, being entities of pure psychic energy also means they’re vulnerable in turn to each other, and two Inner Gods of opposing natures and ideologies who come into contact will begin to ‘neutralize’ one another to the point the weaker will be cancelled out, and the stronger will be weakened so badly that another rival might be able to swoop in and simply destroy them with ease. This led to the Inner Gods using their Material Plane forms for creating Mortal spawn known as Demi-Gods, entities that are born with a fragment of the Inner God’s essence tied to their bodies that renders them very long-lived, exceptionally powerful and, for better or worse, tied to the Domain of their Godly parent.
So long as the Demi-God endured, even if their divine parent was destroyed in the Astral Plane, the shard of divine power within the Demi-God would feed upon the faith and psychic energies of the ‘faithful’ and would eventually renew itself upon consuming enough psychic energy, returning to the Astral Plane as a new entity, not entirely the Divine Parent nor the Demi-God child. Assuming such a catastrophe did not strike their parent, upon death, if the Demi-God pleased their divine parent, their spirit is uplifted and transformed into a Celestial, a Fey, an Elemental or a Fiend, depending upon the nature of their divine parent, and if they didn’t, they would simply be destroyed, or cast back down to be reincarnated and try again.
But in doing so, the Inner Gods created a problem. The Supreme Beings are so large on both a cosmic and metaphysical scale, they don’t register their creations in the same way that beings native to the Material Plane do. Demi-Gods just ‘read’ as extensions of their divine parent, and if that divine parent is slain during any of the countless ‘Wars in Heaven’ that brew between immortal and very powerful beings all following divine mandates that often run at cross-purposes to each other, the strongest Demi-God is simply put in to replace the missing ‘main body’ and the Supreme Beings move on, much like replacing the batteries in your smoke detectors, you don’t care about the battery itself, just that it holds the charge and it works.
And the Demi-Gods got wise to this and manipulated their Divine Parents into a cataclysmic war on several worlds and their associated Astral Plane ‘positions’, resulting in hundreds of Inner Gods wiping each other out and their Demi-God children rising to take the thrones … except none of them knew about the divine mandates and just started doing whatever they wanted, because that was what they’d seen their divine parents do, and the majority of the Demi-Gods had been treated as fail-safes at best, and disposable pawns at worst in the games of contempt and spite that the majority of the Inner Gods had fallen into over their long millennia of rivalry with one another.
And with their duties not being fulfilled, the Supreme Beings showed up to change the batteries again and finally took notice of the ‘bugs’ in their Great Cycle, and thus released a ‘patch’ to fix it.
All existing Inner Gods were turned into a two-part being. A corporeal form on the Material Plane known as an Avatar that contained the Inner God’s consciousness, and completely spiritual being in the Astral Plane that was the ‘God’ and contained their power and divine mandate. All the Demi-Gods that already had doppelgangers or shared Domains with more powerful Demi-Gods were cast out and hurled outside of reality before they mucked up the Great Cycle any further, as the Supreme Beings really didn’t care about the minute, only that the Great Cycle continued as intended and there were no other problems.
In the new world order, the Avatar could be defeated, but so long as the ‘God’ in the Astral Plane remained, the Avatar would be reborn, but now, it would not be the same being, rather the soul would be reincarnated at random amongst the Mortal Races or Magical Creatures that were most closely linked to the Inner God’s ‘domain’ at the time of their reincarnation, and would grow to adulthood and sometime between then and their death, would ‘Ascend’ and become the new Avatar, with their own personalities intact and access to all the memories, experiences, and the explicit instructions on their new role hard-coded into their Astral half.
Naturally, the devastation on a global scale caused by the Supreme Beings reaching down and turning the power off and on again was immense, causing extreme environmental damage and reshaping continents, setting Mortal civilisations back by centuries, if not more, in the disaster itself, as well as the losses incurred trying to rebuild their societies and cultures in apocalyptic scenarios.
Many of these ‘Second Generation Inner Gods’ are absolutely horrified by what they’ve done, but they’re also still incredibly powerful, nearly immortal and extremely territorial, and have worked very hard to build and rebuild the societies of their faithful, and what few pantheons do exist are either extremely tightly knit, or only work together because they’re too closely matched in power and internal fighting would cause them to lose what they have painstakingly rebuilt.
- The Kami, the Elementals, the Nature Spirits
The Inner Gods and their ‘inheritors’ are not the only agents of the Supreme Beings, although they are the most powerful. Arising from natural or accidental situations where specific magical energies combined in a condensed form and a life-form survives exposure to it, in the case of the Nature Spirits and the Kami, or powerful Elementals who have developed sapience and amassed enough magical knowledge and power to reach down into the Material Plane and gather followers for themselves in an echo of how the Inner Gods function.
While far less powerful than an individual Inner God, the Kami/Nature Spirits/Elementals outnumber them by a thousand to one, are far more ‘approachable’ by the average Mortal, and have a more natural life-cycle, meaning they tend to be more in tune with, and again more approachable, than a quasi-immortal God-King or -Queen who will randomly die and throw the whole theocratic society they were the center of into outright chaos, spend twenty years or more missing while the faithful scour the world looking for the ‘signs’ of their rebirth, then get replaced by an entirely different person, who might not even be the same ethnicity, race or gender for that matter, and then decide to completely re-write the rules of your society, or refuse to be a part of that society in general, and turn their power instead to aid your rivals and enemies because they’re closer to this new incarnation of the Avatar’s view of how the world should work.
As such, faiths involving the Kami/Elementals/Nature Spirits tend to be both less powerful in terms of magical prowess, but control larger areas than the City-States or nations where the Avatars of the Inner Gods hold court. Many Kami and Nature Spirits strive to act as advisors and wise council to the Inner Gods, knowing that if they screw up again, the Supreme Beings might just decide to reset the Great Cycle and start from scratch, while others, specifically powerful Elementals and the Nature Spirits and Kami most badly affected by the destruction of the First Generation of Inner Gods, see their very existence as a threat and seek to supplant them, first by killing the existing Avatars, and then co-opting their Reincarnations, either raising them directly to be less territorial and hostile to other Immortals or near-Immortals, or trying to possess them and replace the consciousness within the pre-Ascended Avatar and take their position directly.
- Mortals and the Call of the Divine
If there is one thing that is universal, it is that nobody wants to die. Even if life sucks, most people will want to continue on because if you can just make it to tomorrow, someday, somehow, you might find a way to make things better.
Throw in the ability to hurl fireballs with your mind, divinity that is literally within reach and living knowledge that the mantle of true, actual Godhood can be transferred or stolen, and you have a highly volatile situation where very arrogant, or evil, Mortals will rise up and strive to take the mantle of Godhood for themselves, either because they ‘deserve’ the power, or because they’re convinced they can do a better job.
Something I want to put to my players is that divine power is indeed well within their reach, with the destruction of the 1st Generation of Inner Gods having scattered fragments and shards of divine power across the land. Most of these gave rise to new Kami and Nature Spirits, or were recovered by the faithful of the 2nd Generation of Inner Gods, but enough exist, and have been altered enough, that divine and quasi-divine entities cannot easily assimilate these shards without issue, or taking time to do so safely, which they don’t need as they have whole nations of people who worship them and provide just as much power anyways.
Players can attempt to absorb these shards, not becoming Gods themselves, but ascending (eventually) to the rank of a lower form of Kami, with a vastly extended lifespan to go along with it, or be used in magical rituals as a catalyst that vastly boosts the power of the ritual. Hell, taking these shards back and auctioning them without the God-Kings and -Queens hearing about it can make them filthy rich and earn them the respect and good will of the absurdly wealthy, the ambitious and those who would rebel against a cruel or tyrannical God-King.
Alternatively, turning in these shards to slowly be processed until the God-King, -Queen or Pantheon can absorb it safely, or be locked away due to it being inherently corrupted and dangerous to all forms of life, can also benefit the players and not risk them being put in the crosshairs of the army of faithful zealots who serve and protect the Inner Gods’ ambitions and agendas.
- Once we were Gods, now we are your Doom
The surviving members of the 1st Generation of Inner Gods and their rebellious Demi-God children, who were cast out of reality by the Supreme Beings, survived in a pocket of Un-Space, not a part of the Supreme Beings’ Great Cycle, but still connected it in strange and unnatural ways.
Being cast out also severed the 1st Generation’s connection to the Great Cycle and the Supreme Beings, but it did not strip away their Immortality. Trapped in a place where time did not flow in linear fashion, where matter was amorphous and unstable, where nothing could truly die nor could it ever live, these outcast immortals slowly and surely began to mutate into the antithesis of the Great Cycle, becoming the first Demons. With nothing to do to pass the time, no longer able to die, unable to leave, these newborn ‘Demons’ turned on each other, consuming one another first in desperate, then in sadism, then simply because, in their madness, they knew no other way to live.
And endless darwinian nightmare of constantly mutating, constantly dividing and merging super-predators, forever chasing the echoes of what they once were, and what they once had, fueling an endless hatred and jealousy for the Material Plane and the ‘usurpers’ who now rule it. And those few Demons who retain their minds, or who developed intelligence in the bizarre ecosystem they now inhabit, funnel that insane hatred and aggression to trying to find ways to tunnel back into the material plane and finally feast upon the endless bounty of mortal souls and divine essence so long denied to them.
- Made by Nature, Raised by Gods
One of the things that constantly defines, and thus limits, most Mortal Races in fantasy is that specific Races, Ancestries, Heritages, whatever you want to call it, can trace their origins back to a specific Divine entity or creature, and the nature of that entity often dictates the ‘nature’ of that Race, for good or ill.
Orc in D&D are tied to Grumuush, and being a Chaotic Evil entity, Orcs were treated like subhuman entities even when they were trying to just live in peace. Elves have more origin stories than nearly every other race, but most tie them to being Corelleon’s followers who were banished to the Material Plane for choosing a ‘single’ form and thus violating their God’s doctrine of eternal change and adaptation, and thus despite so many issues in Faerun being due to Elven shenanigans, are put on a pedestal because of that lineage. Other settings too often put a huge amount of weight on the origin of the race, putting good and evil in as a genetic factor rather than a social and cultural choice, both on the individual and the collective.
But if we take the Divine out of the equation of the ‘rise’ of Mortal Races, and instead make the various sapient races as the result of a naturally intelligent species being exposed to magical forces that will inevitably create a fully sapient race given time, the right environmental pressures and enough luck, that removes the whole ‘genetically evil’ angle that came through from Tolkien’s writing and the 80’s and 90’s interpretations of his work that formed the basis of most popular modern fictions.
The Gods, naturally enough, meddled because divine arrogance is inevitable, especially when said Gods see themselves as the natural masters of all they survey. But because they’re not involved in the actual creation of said races, merely the modification of them to serve certain roles and goals, it takes away the ‘weight’ of Divine origin from most races.
Let’s take the Ancestries from Daggerheart, a system I am quite enamoured with recently, as an example.
https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/daggerheart/ancestries
Setting agnostic races without divine origins means they can be plugged and played right out of the box with minimal trimming from the Game Master and can be reflavored as the players desire to fit their character concepts. Orcs in one part of the world might have been touched by the God of War to become the bulwark of her army to hold back the shambling legions of the God of Death, while Orcs in another part might have had the hand of the God of Fire and become the foremost smiths in their corner of the planet, but fundamentally, they’re still the same race and have the same drives, but their culture and way of thinking is what has changed, not some innate “I must eat the babies!” genetic trait encoded into them at the dawn of time by Fullskucker the Girthy for his divine pokemon contest with Andro of Genus and his All-Eevee All-Elf nonsense.
Rather than ‘making’ the races, and because Inner Gods or Avatars in this theoretically setting have great power within a very limited scope, such as a God of Mountains might have ultimate sway over what is a mountain, where mountains are, what the mountain does and produces, if it is a hill, a mountain, a valley or a volcano, outside of these parameters, it is just a nearly-Immortal, ageless, absurdly powerful spellcaster with more hitpoints than Gojira and more plot armor than Batman. Exposure to certain magical energies could certainly alter these races, and interbreeding and other chicanery could alter them in turn, but overall, the race did exist, can exist, and will exist without the Gods that they have come to worship, and it is the culture of that race, in all its form across all these worlds, that decides if they are ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’, not some nonsense genetic heritage dating back to two primoridial clots of divine power smacking each other around and never getting over it.
- Riddles of Steel and Sorcery
- Hate the Slayer, not the Hyperborea
I love the gritty, primal, unforgiving atmosphere of the Conan novels. I have come to hate Conan himself as a miserable mary sue for the author to live out the fantasy of pumping-and-dumping his way across a swords-and-sorcery version of prehistoric Earth in a loincloth, and everybody either suffers his wrath or slavishly obeys him because said loincloth does not contain his, err, ‘wrath’ all that well.
But a setting where society has just barely clawed its way back from the brink of perpetual savagery, and sharpened sticks and fire as the height of technology, appeals to me because it offers such an interesting twist on traditional fantasy settings. The trade routes are not safe, the comforts of civilisation are a rare and precious thing, dinosaurs and megafauna roam the land alongside mythical beasts and magical creatures and can serve as the mounts, pets and battle-companions of the players and NPCs alike, a setting where magic is this raw and dangerous thing, held up both as divine in its own right and also taboo for the harm it has done, both when wielded with intent and when left to run wild on its own.
A world where the ruins of civilisations left to molder for so long even the Gods struggle to recall their histories hold the secrets to rebuild society, or to drag it, howling and screaming, back into the abyss. A world where the line between God and Demon is a blurred mess at best, and the petty politics of Court and Church blend together into a treacherous morass of morally dubious and ethically dangerous minefields. Where the very calamities of the past have tainted the tools that once were so commonplace, and Mortals and Gods alike have had to adapt and find new ways to reinvent these tools for this new, raw and healing world.
Where iron and steel are rare not because the ore is difficult to find, but because all of the divine chicanery has infused most veins with crystalized divine power, and unless the ore is treated to handle these explosive knots of frozen power, the smithy could explode just turning ore into ingots. Where Bronze has replaced Iron and Steel as the most common metal, and many have turned to bone, ivory, fangs and claws for tools and weapons, lacquered and treated to retain their sharpness, their hardness, and possibly the properties their former owners may have wielded in life. Where knowledge of how to forge Iron into Steel makes you valuable on a national level, and the knowledge of how to forge more advanced alloys like Dwarven Black-Iron (Adamantite) or Elven Silver (Mithril) might make you targets for abduction, or assassination, to either claim or protect those secrets from other, rival nations.
Where despite all the horror, the loss and the harshness, there is hope. The world will heal, the Gods are humbled and spend enough time amongst the common folk that they are no longer quite so distanced and uncaring of the Mortals they rule over, where the spirits of earth and fire, forest and field can be touched, spoken too and looked to for guidance and inspiration. That for the players, it isn’t just going home with a wagon groaning with a kingdom’s ransom in gold and treasure, but going home to the cheers of the crowd that their farms won’t be burned and salted, their homes will stand tall and untouched, their people will be fed and safe this season, and many more yet to come.
- Magic is primal, chaotic, and nurturing
The biggest issue with magic is that it can’t just solve everything, because then why are nations not just forcing as many mages, priests and scholars out as they can to wave their magic sticks around and end hunger, drought, disease, war … tax evasion?
Rather, magic is powerful but inherently chaotic. The ability to even wield magic safely is the biggest success most schools or academies might claim, but true mastery of the higher forms of magic is quite rare and very difficult, and by dint of this, those who can do more than just conjure light or summon minor spirits are incredibly valuable in the eyes of society, both their own native kingdom, and those of the nations around them. This also makes it far less appealing to share this knowledge freely as every successful student is one more rival for funding, influence and social standing, but the other side to this coin is more spellcasters who have advanced knowledge means if you can agree to work together, your chances for increasing your magical knowledge and power increases exponentially.
Magic in the ‘wild’, that which is not artificially channeled or re-directed, tends to accumulate in liminal spaces, or natural ‘hollows’ where it will grow thicker and thicker, either assuming a physical form as it ‘crystalizes’ under the pressure of its own growing mass, or spreading out like a localized flood, irrigating natural ley-lines or washing dangerously across the land, spreading chaos and spontaneous evolution as it does so. This can lead to more conflict for the players to resolve, or engage in, as they struggle to balance the needs of their peoples against the healing of the world around them, and the needs of the locals around these sites that may have come to rely upon this chaotic cycle to sustain themselves or their life-cycles. Claiming these ‘Dungeons’ to harvest the mana-gems that ‘grow’ within them is profitable and will guarantee a steady stream of magic to their nation, but in doing so, they might be starving the surrounding area of an abundance of magic, and without that magic, life around the Dungeon may start to falter, or even go rogue since it has evolved and adapted to need that steady supply of excessive magical energies.
There is more, but dear God, I think I’m gonna strain a lot more than peoples’ scrolling fingers if I keep going in one single burst.
What are your thoughts?