Rate My Creation Myth: The Sacred Game

[Falconer]

I'm working on this setting for my tabletop group, and the idea for the Sacred Game came about as a way to justify the various workings and assumptions of the Pathfinder RPG rules--why there are nine alignments that are a part of reality, and artifacts of doom and a dozen kinds of elves and whatnot. I've worked out this sort of creation myth that explains how the campaign world came to be how it is, and what it is and why.

First, as you tend to with creation myths, you have God. The Pantokrator, the Form of the Good, the Big Kahuna, the Light. Here we'll call him All-Father. Anyhow, he begins to create the world, and to assist him in this creation he makes the gods (little g). After the multiverse and all the planes and the rocks and oceans and such are created, the All-Father creates man.

Man is temporal and has free will, like the gods. And the gods look at man, and see that he has no idea what he's about. He sleeps in the cold and rain, he tries to eat rocks and jumps off things trying to fly like the birds. So the gods step in and teach man how to go about things.

Some of the gods taught men to hunt and to gather; they taught them to know the paths of the herds and to live alongside nature. They were taught to stick by their blood and kin, and to organize themselves into clans and tribes and houses. Others taught men how to till the soil and build city walls. They gave to humanity laws and honor, and taught them to love the city and nation above the self. The gods came together in pantheons to show their teachings to humankind, and together the gods created Law and Chaos.

Once worshipping the All-Father alone, men began to worship these gods that taught them so much. They petitioned them for blessings and favors, and sent up their prayers and offerings. This pleased the gods in a way that nothing else had. It fed them and gave them strength.

And so the gods began to covet the prayers of men.
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This is where I don't have a lot of the details hashed out. The idea is that the gods kind of become prayer-addicts, and start to fight amongst themselves for the love of mortals along another line: Good and Evil. So begins the War in Heaven. Legions of monsters are unleashed and artifacts of unfathomable power are forged as weapons. The gods increasingly ignore the pleas of mortals. At its climax this war nearly destroys humanity and the young creation. The All-Father steps in, and ends the war. He institutes the Sacred Game; for their insolence and cruelty, the once-omnipotent gods are stripped of much of their power, and many are shackled to their planes with chains of pure metaphysics. As a penance their fate is bound to that of the mortals whose prayers they at once coveted and took for granted. So they must strive till the end of days, through ages of ages, in saecula saeculorum.

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And so cycle the ages. Through an abyss of time, millennia of millennia, gods and factions of gods wax and wane in power, as do their mortal worshippers. Like cosmic seasons, Ages of Good follow Ages of Evil, Time of Law and Time of Chaos. The Sacred Game continues.

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So that's the background for the setting, the meta-narrative. Basically after having made the world and such the gods are stuck playing a game of Populous against one another, till the end of time. Like the Greek gods in Jason and the Argonauts, creation is a vast game of chess, and heroes and monsters and whole civilizations and religions are their pieces.

There's some details I'd like input on.

Like in any game, the Sacred Game has rules. Most of these rules are unspoken and meant to justify why the gods exist and are active and even the good ones are perhaps a bit petty, but they don't personally go around throwing lightning at everything that threatens their plans. That's why there's clerics and paladins and things.

One such rule I'm thinking is that the gods cannot create life. But there are loopholes: they can alter life that already exists, they can (ahem) copulate with mortals, they can animate unliving things with their own essence, etc. So a lot of the crazy fantasy things like orcs and elves and undead and dragons are the result of the gods finding increasingly clever and convoluted ways to make new stuff to throw at rival gods, and come-here-human-this-won't-hurt-a-bit-I-swear.

See, but changing mortals things (especially humans) makes that mortal race of orcs or elves more inclined by nature towards the god that created them; they have some of that god's essence in them, and so their prayers actually don't help the god as much. But raw human souls, with the All-Father's own essence, can only worship the gods of their own free will, which is what gives their prayers so much kick. So a god can't just make a whole army of orcs to worship him and be content; he's got to use them to make the humans worship him. Also the prayers of other gods' creations and outsiders are very powerful, which is why the gods prize things like LG succubi or CE gold dragons or whatever.

Also a lot of the gods are served by outsiders, be they angels or devils or whatever, who are basically very tiny, comparatively weak gods; being smaller, their chains fit looser and so they can sometimes escape them for a bit to go on errands or fulfill their own schemes. I'm thinking there will be a tribe of True Neutral outsiders with no god, so they've decided to go it alone and hire themselves out to whatever deific power will pay them the most.

A last thought is that there may be a god or two that has no outsiders to serve them, and so they have to get creative. Like say you've got a god of undeath with no devilish servants or the like. So when a cleric of that god makes a zombie or skeleton or vampire, what's animating the corpse is literally a little divine fragment of the god of undeath's consciousness. Stronger undead require bigger fragments, which is why stronger undead tend to also be intelligent undead. And things like liches are literally a sort of perverse divine union, where the soul of the necromancer is merged with a fragment of the undeath god. They get immortality and power and knowledge beyond comprehension, but their will is literally united with the god of the undead, which is why liches and the undead generally are never anything but evil.

Oh and since zombies and skeletons are powered by their god, necromancer cults might treat their mindless undead as servants and soldiers, but they might consider it blasphemous to, say, raise up a zombie just to set off traps. And divine-caster necromancers probably really hate arcane necromancers with an undying passion.
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So yeah, one thing that I hope this demonstrates is how useful creation myths are. You can sort of play out the consequences logically and it can tell you all sorts of things about how your setting functions down to little quirks like the necromancers I pointed out.

Anyhow thank you for powering through my walls of text and peculiar desire to apply my knowledge of theology to D&D (well, Pathfinder). I'd really like input, ideas, and criticism. Best regards.

[Kasanal]

This is a very creative way to justify game mechanics. Very nice work!

[the_david]

I never understood why the gods would need worship. This may be my religious background, but it just seems silly to me.

Now in the Great Wheel Cosmology (And also in Paizo's Great Beyond) there's a reason that the gods need worshippers, but not worship. It's a little bit hidden, and maybe this is just my interpretation but to me it makes a little bit more sense.
You see, the gods use outsiders to fight each other. Good against evil, but also evil against evil. (Like the Blood War.) Now ofcourse, outsiders don't just appear out of nowhere. To create the lowest form of outsider (Also known as a petitioner) a god needs a mortal soul of one of his worshippers. The outsider can then progress (In one way or another, depending on the outer plane.) to a stronger form. Ofcourse, in the process the soul is stripped of most or all of his memories.
To me it's obvious that the gods just need the souls of their worshippers. This theory does bring some problems with it. One of them is that gods are supposed to be powerfull. If they can create mortals, why can't they create outsiders? The other problem is that it really doesn't matter if you're on the side of good or evil. The gods are just using you for their evil purposes. The good gods are just a little bit nicer about it. (Although the same goes for gods that need worship instead of worshippers. They're still just using you.)

So that's it. A theory on why the gods in D&D/Pathfinder need worshippers instead of worship. Note that the gods need worship theory doesn't add a reason why worship powers the gods, while the gods need worshippers theory does add a reason why gods need worshippers. I'm not saying it's a better theory. It's just a theory with better arguments that's also based on D&D lore.

[Mechalich]

Basically after having made the world and such the gods are stuck playing a game of Populous against one another, till the end of time. Like the Greek gods in Jason and the Argonauts, creation is a vast game of chess, and heroes and monsters and whole civilizations and religions are their pieces.

The one issue you have here is that in this world the players are the gods, which means that unless your player characters are gods themselves there's a considerable amount of nihilism inherent in this setting. That actually resembles Greek Myths to some degree, so maybe that's what you want, but it is something to be careful of.