Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

[The Glyphstone]

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.

It occurred to me after the fact that I forgot to ask a question. But I said 'meh', and let it float to see if anything resulted anyways. The Allochthon thing is interesting and might work as a descriptor - visually, though, I see something more like the functional world as an ice shelf or continent and the shards being icebergs floating in the ocean around it. If the currents happen to force a berg into a collision with the shelf, stuff 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?

Conceptually, yeah. The First and Second worlds failed for being too extreme towards their respective traits. Pure Chaos had nothing to give it coherency and it collapsed from a lack of defining structure. Pure Order had too much structure, a frozen and immutable bundle of infinitely conflicting paradoxes that shattered under its own internal pressure. The shorthand term I'm hanging on the animate shards are Anarchies (for chunks of Chaos) and Axioms (for chunks of Order).

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.

That's sort of the idea. An Anarchy is a manifestation of raw, primordial Chaos. Its presence weakens the underlying fundamental laws that keep reality orderly and consistent. An Axiom is pure Order, and unconsciously tries to override the surrounding laws of reality with whatever Laws it personally happens to be an embodiment of. Visually I see them manifesting differently as well - an Anarchy is going to initially look like a Gibbering Mouther or a Protean, an Axiom is going to be all sharp-edged planes and crystalline angles run through the lens of an M.C. Escher painting of impossible alien geometries.

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.

Lovecraftian was sort of the angle I was hoping for with the Outsiders, honestly. One of my strongest design goals has been to downplay morality and alignment as a cosmically objective force - good and evil, but not Good and Evil. Order and Chaos was boosted to fill that gap of providing stakes for a conflict outside the purely subjective mortal perspective, and the shards were the manifestations of that conflict. At this stage, the intent isn't to have the gods be as Lovecraftian as the things they are trying to fight against, so if it's turning in that direction I might need to dial it back a bit.

As far as individual shards, their primary motivation is simply that they want to exist and keep existing. Non-existence is a miserable state, and being banished/destroyed will return them to that non-existence. But the rules (or lack thereof) that defines them is inimical in one direction or the other to the stability of the 'real world', somewhere in the grey area between a fish on dry land/a human underwater and a less destructive version of a matter-antimatter reaction. They change the world around them to become more like what they consider normal, even as they're also changing to meet the new normal halfway. But even if they find a point of equilibrium, the distortion caused to reach it means a larger and even more disruptive shard can now force its way through the weak point and create a cascade effect.

"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.

Bearing with the above, and noting much if not all of this is not set in stone, I figure it's a gradually scaling effect depending on the size/strength of the shard. Barring the deliberate summonings by crazy people, a 'natural' breach is going to be a physically weak Outsider who doesn't cause any drastic changes to its environment - gravity is 10% weaker, anything red looks more purple, and will fairly quickly reach a point where it can survive if not 'fit in'. Unless it's smart enough to disguise itself (some are, some aren't), it'll still look obviously alien and unnatural. But the next Outsider(s) who manifest(s), drawn by the distortions emanating from the first one, will have a proportionately stronger effect. Maybe time passes faster around it, or metals have the strength of soft cheese, or the sheer 'wrongness' causes anything that sees it to be nauseous and dizzy. By the time you get to 'living flesh runs like candlewax and sprouts random eyeballs' or 'nitrogen is now a flammable gas', you're in the stages of a severe and possibly uncontrollable outbreak, and it's at this point that the gods will be considering stepping in if they think the problem has grown beyond mortal capability to contain it.

Ideally, the progression is slow enough that the world could conceivably still exist in a coherent and civilized state. A 'matured' outsider doesn't automatically spawn the next one up the chain, it just makes it more likely to attract another shard and increase the odds of it being a more potent shard.

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.

Mostly they're "things what you can stab" at the lower or early degrees of threat, though sometimes the aftereffects or side effects of their presence are as or more dangerous than the outsider itself. The permanency of effects is variable - generally I figure the active changes go away with the outsider, but anything that was changed doesn't naturally revert to normal.

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?

If by 'failed' you mean 'got so bad the gods had to smite directly', It's definitely something on the order of both. Incredibly physically destructive, ranging from 'very large crater' to 'didn't that used to be a mountain'. On the spiritual/supernatural side, the impact area is now slightly distorted, and future breaches in that area will start at a higher grade of potency. The number of times the gods have needed to go this far would, ideally, be counted on one hand, but what's left behind is unquestionably 'the wrath of gods'.