Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
Different cultures and religions have varying beliefs on the identity of the gods, their nature, what morality or laws of behavior they expect - ultimately, the gods don't really care about that stuff nearly as much as mortals think they do. The only universal constant all faiths share is that Outsiders Are Bad, though they don't all agree on exactly what Outsiders are - their true nature as reality-corroding horrors is fairly obscure lore, particularly since they are so diverse in appearance and abilities few people realize they're all the same sort of entity. Kill them if you can, run away if you can't, and definitely don't try to deliberately summon them. It's generally understood that the gods care about their mortal children, but expect them to solve their own problems - no helping out in purely mortal disputes, even with people from a rival faith or culture.
The ur-question: by providing this description, are you looking for further "analysis" of what religion would look like, or creative reading of specific things might happen given the scenario parameters?

Go read about the Tzitzimimeh and the New fire ceremony. Mesoamerica eschatology and cosmogeny...with cyclic, failing worlds and autosacrificing gods creating new ones...rhymes with the ideas you've got going on.

Also worth looking at: Mike Mignola's interconnected comic series: Hellboy, BPRD, and Abe Sapien, which imagine an Lovecraftian apocalypse scenario where "regular" people face a complete alien, transformative force and try to fight.

Not a great anime, but go look up the visuals for Noein: the creepy universe-invading monsters have excellent designs that aren't the typical deep-sea-creature-buffet that outside-the-universe stuff always ends up as (thanks, Herbert).

Oh, and look up the word allochthon: it's a geology term, but I think is has potential as a descriptor for your reality shards.

Also look at Jorge Luis Borges: Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius specifically, because it's about the "leak" of a fictional reality into "real" reality...not in horrible ways, just a thing that happens.

So...asking questions because I've got a lot of ideas, but want to approach that in a way that addresses your need:

Since they are formed from shards of dead creations, do they have Chaos and Law inclinations (or motifs) that orient them as different kinds of thing, that in turn informs what kinds of problems they create for mortals?

Do individuals shards possess qualia such that the danger they pose to the mortals corresponds to some fundamental nature?

I think it adds something if shards have traits that aren't necessarily understandable to mortals, but are consistent. So each "incident" has a separate flavor, but in some twisted way beyond the world toward an alien "Order" or "Dynamism."

I mean, from a mortal-scale perspective these shards are going to be the things that drives cultures. The ancient stories would be the equivalent of the Ramayana, the Anabasis of Xenophon; the language of incidents would embed itself in philosophy, in history, even in comedy. To the best of raconteur's abilities, each incident would have an accounting...and probably a sobriquet...and scholars and mages would pour over details try to "get" what happened.

For that matter, can shards possess consciousness or intent, or develop it as thy interact with the new world? Can they enact plans or coordinate?

I ask because the current description comes close to cosmic horror, where the "big" creatures are outside of understanding and thus have no morality relative to people, but also no goals relative to people...but's that's not necessarily the situation, or ideal. Presumably the world is set up in a way that players can understand--and thus undermine and defeat--these events, and the Lovecraftian "they don't want anything, it's just happening" flattens the cut-and-thrust and hero versus antagonist a bit.

"Corrupting the fabric of reality" manifests...how? I'm going to guess that each shard-incident has different effects, but:

how variable is the scale;
how variable is the manifestation;
how variable is the escalation in both speed and shape?

This ties in with the above question, because I'm trying to get a feel for what the "catalogue" of Outsider events and beings is:

The equivalent to natural disasters.
Mysterious new and unnatural formations replacing natural features, regions with different natural laws.
Plagues.
Mutations of flora, fauna, and sapient beings.
Critters, ranging in size from gremlins to Grendel to Gojira.
Stuff that messes up the minds of sapient beings but doesn't change them physically?
Beings that can pass as "normal" mortals and infiltrate society.
Junji Ito stuff: abstract threats that are non-localized, like...an alien language that slowly rewrites the mind of the speaker, or an unnatural season in which undead plagues are much more likely.

I did short shrift on what I labelled type [4] divine entities ...but these shards count as such, and the more there are, and the more variety in which they manifest as a threat, the more both religion and society are going to emphasize spiritual hygiene.

Fighting them and avoiding "corruption" by them is going to bend cultures and religions on a case by case basis...at the time frame that's the game's state-of-play, it will be the incidents centuries and millenia ago that form the basis of religious and philosophical understandings of what Outsiders mean (even if the assessment is wrong), and if there are ritual and/or moral means to fend them off.

Last question:

What's the damage from a failed divine intervention look like? Is is something that physically transforms the environment, or is it damage on some supernatural/spiritual level?