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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    Default Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Various campaign settings and published worlds have different approaches to the level of interventionism and active presence deities or pantheons have in mortal life. The median standard is Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, where the gods are noticeably+visibly present in mortal affairs in addition to granting spells to divine casters. On the opposite side is a setting like Athas/Dark Sun, where there are no divine casters and the gods are essentially non-existent, so no one worships them. Ebberon presents a third combination, where divine casters can still draw power and gain spells from gods, but the gods themselves are impersonal and unapproachable.

    But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?

    It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.

    In a world like this, how will the emergence of religion differ from the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms standard? Would people even worship the gods at all when they see little benefit to doing so and few downsides to refraining? Will religion simply move 'down' a tier with powerful outsiders who can manifest materially and take directly attributable action being worshiped the way gods are normally while the 'actual' deities occupy the role an overgod would hold?

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Various campaign settings and published worlds have different approaches to the level of interventionism and active presence deities or pantheons have in mortal life. The median standard is Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, where the gods are noticeably+visibly present in mortal affairs in addition to granting spells to divine casters. On the opposite side is a setting like Athas/Dark Sun, where there are no divine casters and the gods are essentially non-existent, so no one worships them. Ebberon presents a third combination, where divine casters can still draw power and gain spells from gods, but the gods themselves are impersonal and unapproachable.

    But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?

    It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.

    In a world like this, how will the emergence of religion differ from the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms standard? Would people even worship the gods at all when they see little benefit to doing so and few downsides to refraining? Will religion simply move 'down' a tier with powerful outsiders who can manifest materially and take directly attributable action being worshiped the way gods are normally while the 'actual' deities occupy the role an overgod would hold?
    If the cosmic deities can "delegate" to "lesser" entities capable of acting on a more mortal scale, then it depends on how independent those entities can be with the power they thus have.

    If the entities have low independence, and can only act as intermediaries, then mortal religion will likely still focus on the cosmic deities.

    If the entities have higher independence, and can act of their own accord, then mortal religion will likely focus at least in part on direct supplication, veneration, and pleas at least in part at those intermediary entities.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2019-03-13 at 04:27 PM.
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    My gods are pretty similar to that. People interact with these gods pretty much only through priests, and the priests are very much alone the lines of the idea of "clerics of concepts".
    I had not thought of it before like this, but I think you could say that priests are focusing omnipresent forces to create magical protections for the people from disasters and monsters. Those omnipresent forces might not even be aware that they have priests as they exist on such a fundamentally different level. Though perhaps they might take notice of them in the way that a bee keeper recognizes the bee queens to be important and pays them a special attention while all the worker bees are identical.

    To many people this abstract protection from disasters isn't very satisfying, though. One options are mystery cults that are somewhat like philosophical clubs who see the source of meaning in life reflected in one of the omnipresent forces that are worshipped as gods.
    The other alternative, when you are looking to get some actual magical help for your village or you personally, is to approach and worship spirits, who are effectively very powerful monsters. When you want something specific done, you can go to a spirit's shrine, make an offering, and name your request, and the spirit might decide to use its power to help you or not.
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Various campaign settings and published worlds have different approaches to the level of interventionism and active presence deities or pantheons have in mortal life. The median standard is Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, where the gods are noticeably+visibly present in mortal affairs in addition to granting spells to divine casters. On the opposite side is a setting like Athas/Dark Sun, where there are no divine casters and the gods are essentially non-existent, so no one worships them. Ebberon presents a third combination, where divine casters can still draw power and gain spells from gods, but the gods themselves are impersonal and unapproachable.

    But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?

    It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.

    In a world like this, how will the emergence of religion differ from the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms standard? Would people even worship the gods at all when they see little benefit to doing so and few downsides to refraining? Will religion simply move 'down' a tier with powerful outsiders who can manifest materially and take directly attributable action being worshiped the way gods are normally while the 'actual' deities occupy the role an overgod would hold?
    So I'm basing what I'm about to say off life experience raised as a polytheist who's familiar with several other polytheisms in addition to the one I grew up with, but I'm not citing specifics because all my observations are based off the living religion I was raised with.

    Okay, so there's not really a formal term for this that I've encountered but in world religion "that which is worth ritual attention" breaks down like this:

    1. supernatural things that set up the order of the world at creation

    2. supernatural things that maintain the order of the world day to day

    3. supernatural things that solve specific problems when invoked

    4. supernatural things that will mess you up if you don't appease them or ward them off

    God-concepts and thaumaturgy are so different in each culture, though, that there are many, many combinations of these traits. Like a four-circle Venn diagram.

    Super duper generalization time:

    Pure type [1] deities develop the least worship culture in the sense of followers, home worship traditions, priesthood, and temples. Their stories get retold, there may be a periodic festival, but they're not the center of attention.

    Creator gods that preserve their creation through heroic deeds (monster slaying, casting down villains, granting boons to worshipers)--type [2] or both type [1] and [2]--tend to have a more robust temple cultures because everybody agrees that their epic feats are worth remembering, but also because the big "order of the world" gods tends to be celebrated by mortal rulers (chieftains and monarchs) who present their mortal-scale rulership as a reflection of the cosmic order.

    Gods seen as deeply interventionist--type [3]--tend to have a strong home worship and shrine culture, but that might not translate to lots of (big, expensive) temples or festivals because they tend to be "smaller" gods where there are redundant, regional miracle-providers that are effectively in competition...ward-off-disease goddess, cure-infertility god, culture hero that fights off evil.

    The biggest gods in polytheism tends to hit types [2] and [3] simultaneously for obvious reasons...they're perceived as making everything work. A thing you see a lot on the subcontinent is both a bottom-up process where a local interventionist deity [3] is declared to be a custom-made-for-a-purpose manifestation of deity that preserve the world-order [2]. And there are, of course, all the various heroes of legend who are viewed as full or partial avatar of a deity, built to solve a specific problem...but then develop a worship culture separate from the deity they emanated from.

    Type [4] tends to not have a worship culture, but rather a culture of avoidance and warding--atropophaic rituals and items, unless its a deity who's otherwise benevolent, but has some specific taboo that results in smiting. There are a lot of local shrine gods that create and remove a specific problem--generally a disease or bodily affiliction--that will have a few dedicated locations where the afflicted go to make supplication.

    That's a slog, but I prefer to show my train of thought and I'm laying it out to suggest that how religion would work in your setting would depend on some stuff beyond thaumaturgy--priest spells and miracles and such--and would have to do with mortal-level cultural understanding of their divinities, and how they understand the world in general.

    • If the pantheon's machinations are subjectively perceived as maintaining the order of the world, or people objectively understand that the pantheon is doing necessary if incomprehensible stuff, there will likely be a temple and festival culture in which their ongoing task is celebrated and their "complete" tasks are remembered. Though specific portfolios (like "The Sun" or "The Weather") will likely have more celebration and gratitude rituals on all scales of worship--personal, small shrines, festivals, temples, state endorsement.

    • If the gods are completely silent, articulating no ethos or directives relevant to their portfolio, worship traditions and belief systems would look more like "real life" ones...people would speculate about what everything "means," encode it alongside discussion of divinity, and the process of groups absorbing, propagating and altering those initial proposals would create a pattern of succeeding and failing sects that would diffuse across the land facilitated by politics, migration, and zeitgeist.

    • Religous workers are something entirely different, and since no one "hears" the divinities traditional religion can be much less homogenous, and there's no real stakes if traditions change or drop out. Festivals and rituals become a thing handled collectively, or by a tradition-holding position like a village elder or a secret society; and are more about community and capturing a feeling than "do A, then B--but never do C!--to talk to Corn God on the solstice." There would be worship traditions that attempt to assemble a positive philosophy that defines the worship tradition and justifies the position of full time religious practitioners. Absent direct inputs, these groups could go higglety-pigglety coming up with symbols, titles, what the central call to serve is.

    • If thaumaturgy is available--planar beings or saints or shamans--people will incorporate into ritual practice...offerings, sacrifices, supplication are seen as exchanges for the currency of miracles. Whether or not this kind of worship would become the kind of "big" temples-and-priesthoods worship that would supplant the gods is up for debate, and would probably come down to local circumstances relating more to demography and the perceived efficacy of the thaumaturge. The world is full of syncretic faiths where you treat with the small practical god on Saturday and praise the big all-encompassing god on Sunday, but there's also new religions that draw people in and make them discard everything.

    • If the gods have been clear that they're sending no messages, then there's no prophetic or charismatic traditions that can use connection to the divine as a stepping stone. If the gods are just hands-off...people are superstitious and pattern-seeking and will look for signs, and there will be people who believe they see signs and there will be people who say they see signs.

    • If mortals view the distant gods as affecting their disposition in the afterlife...whether or not its true...then in the face of the silence they will worship more intensely because (1) knowing deities exist, but (2) not knowing what they want from you is a special kind of existential terror that, um, has a long history of horrible results.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2019-03-13 at 08:16 PM.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    That is definitely helpful.

    Overall, I think part of my problem is that in addition to periodically slaughtering my sacred cows as my interest waxes and wanes with this project, I'm also burning the rope at both ends. I've got a cosmological origin story/reality that I've worked out and want to keep as much of as possible, but I also have a handful of already-thought-out cultures+religions that I don't want to have to reject, and part of the latter is that the different cultures have radically different religions which might look incompatible on the surface. Getting stuff to meet in the middle is tricky.

    From the cosmological angle, the big thing I'm trying to preserve is that the cosmic-grade entities/deities are inclined towards preserving the world, but very limited in their ability to do so without causing even worse damage. Imagine a human trying to keep an ant colony safe, but all they have are hand grenades and a sledgehammer. Mortals have less power, but can wield their power with a precision the gods can't begin to approach.

    From the mythological/mortal angle, I've got one henotheistic/inclusive monotheistic religion, one polytheistic pantheon religion, and one ascended-mortal ancestor-worship religion. I've also built a degree of afterlife-uncertainty into the ground rules of the setting, as no one returned to life can remember or describe what death was like. This allows the different cultures to believe different things, but I'm trying to avoid having any of them be authoritatively defined as right/wrong.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    That is definitely helpful.

    Overall, I think part of my problem is that in addition to periodically slaughtering my sacred cows as my interest waxes and wanes with this project, I'm also burning the rope at both ends. I've got a cosmological origin story/reality that I've worked out and want to keep as much of as possible, but I also have a handful of already-thought-out cultures+religions that I don't want to have to reject, and part of the latter is that the different cultures have radically different religions which might look incompatible on the surface. Getting stuff to meet in the middle is tricky.

    From the cosmological angle, the big thing I'm trying to preserve is that the cosmic-grade entities/deities are inclined towards preserving the world, but very limited in their ability to do so without causing even worse damage. Imagine a human trying to keep an ant colony safe, but all they have are hand grenades and a sledgehammer. Mortals have less power, but can wield their power with a precision the gods can't begin to approach.
    The meeting in the middle is whatever culture of encoded information... scripture, religious laws, explanatory myths and heroic myths, tell the mortals what the gods are, what the gods want, how the gods work. Since the gods are "real," the metaphysical problems they solve are "real," what they say and how it is parsed makes everything pivot.

    Ultimately belief systems are about people taking available information, filling in gaps with speculation, and trying to extract meaning from the mix of observation and speculation. From a fantasy-mortal perspective lack of intervention is a kind of theodicy problem variant where "why do The Bad Things happen?" has objectively-true answers. How religions are built up will depend on how mortals perceive that non-intervention, but with the added factor of how (or whether) the actual, factual gods communicate about the fact they literally can't.

    How straightforward are the gods about what they do, what they want to do, and what they cannot do?

    with the followup of:

    How often do they communicate with mortals to reaffirm what they're up to?

    If it's 100% clear that the gods can't intervene, but they're viewed as preserving the world or fight off some bigger threat, they'll be viewed as "good" and mortal religious culture will focus on (1) celebrating their effort, (2) speculating if mortals can help, (3) trying to draw conclusion about how to act as mortals, reflecting the effort of the "good" gods.

    If you want the gods to be acknowledged in the cultures of the settings, but also want there to be a diversity of opinion about religion, then establish that people understand the basic premise that the gods cannot intervene, but view the gods as exemplars worthy of speculation and study. The less the gods communicate, the greater the inflorescence of theories and guesses about how each god or all the gods would answer questions like "how to be" and "what is good." The state-of-play religious status quo reflects the cladogram-like branching of different perspectives...with the "winners" being the ideas that successful spread farther and embedded in culture deeper.

    If you want "new" intercessor beings to exist but not dominate the setting, just emphasize that the distant gods have a more deeply-rooted culture...having inspired people's personal rituals and ethics, principles of law and justice, etc...and as those values persist so does their prominence as deities. The intercessors become the Saturday-night deity you go to for practical solutions, the distant pantheon the Sunday-morning deity that shapes your worldview.

    The way I'm using language all sounds very positive and constructive, but that silence from above can be used to explain ominous developments. For example, if people decide that a plague or a disaster was in fact a "too big" attempt by a god to intervene (and there's no divine update that, no, that asteroid wasn't aimed) then religious practice could turn dark and reactionary. "Don't let X get so bad that the gods are tempted to blow stuff up/burn stuff down" would become a cultural theme that could justify prejudice, persecution...pretty much anything. If a myth develops that some spectacularly unusual event was a "too big" intervention that worked...like massive military upset or an unlikely hero slaying something enormous...then it would create a different kind of cultural shift where nations or individuals could claim a divine mandate.

    People try and find meaning in things to the point of apophenia; that's how your top and bottom join together.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2019-03-14 at 03:33 PM.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    So if I'm parsing right, the most important thing is for each culture to have an internally consistent set of explanations for the actions or inactions of the gods. That explanation doesn't have to be correct, particularly if the gods aren't intrinsically motivated to correct the beliefs of the mortals - it just has to be flexible enough to account for events potentially attributable to divine action.

    -The more communicative the deities are, the more homogeneous faiths and beliefs will be. True beliefs will have literal divine affirmation of their truth, eliminating those who differ from divinely stated fact. Good and Evil, as defined by divine authority, will be objective reality.

    -The less communicative the deities are, the more potential for diversity and eventually conflict from differing mortal perspectives. The popularity of differing faiths will be more subjective and dependent on their ability to convince people that their perspective is accurate.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    So if I'm parsing right, the most important thing is for each culture to have an internally consistent set of explanations for the actions or inactions of the gods. That explanation doesn't have to be correct, particularly if the gods aren't intrinsically motivated to correct the beliefs of the mortals - it just has to be flexible enough to account for events potentially attributable to divine action.
    Yes.

    Sorry if that was vague. Talking around real-life examples made it harder to articulate.

    -The more communicative the deities are, the more homogeneous faiths and beliefs will be. True beliefs will have literal divine affirmation of their truth, eliminating those who differ from divinely stated fact. Good and Evil, as defined by divine authority, will be objective reality.
    In...theory?

    It's a guess made on the basis of what happens in religious groups where there's one guy that's the voice of the divine.

    -The less communicative the deities are, the more potential for diversity and eventually conflict from differing mortal perspectives. The popularity of differing faiths will be more subjective and dependent on their ability to convince people that their perspective is accurate.
    Convince, compel, or coerce.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2019-03-15 at 03:21 PM.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Out of curiosity, is this an area of academic specialty/expertise for you? Or just a field of general knowledge you've absorbed from exposure to the aforementioned and unspecified RL religions? You've been very specific and informative without needing to make explicit references as a handicap.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Out of curiosity, is this an area of academic specialty/expertise for you? Or just a field of general knowledge you've absorbed from exposure to the aforementioned and unspecified RL religions? You've been very specific and informative without needing to make explicit references as a handicap.
    I studied anthropology and psychology in college, where my area of interest was social control systems that create organized violent movements. I quit formal study and have never worked in academia, but I remain an autodidact on relevant issues in history and current events.

    I also grew up traveling and around a very diverse set of people, and have been educated and participated in more than one religion, so I tend to ask a lot of questions and seek answers for things that people take for granted about society, faith, and the "big ideas" that underpin society.

    I'm glad what I wrote made sense, and I hope it helps. I'm sort of cribbing an academic vocabulary, but also just making stuff up based on personal experience and reading.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2019-03-15 at 03:23 PM.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?

    It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.

    In a world like this, how will the emergence of religion differ from the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms standard? Would people even worship the gods at all when they see little benefit to doing so and few downsides to refraining? Will religion simply move 'down' a tier with powerful outsiders who can manifest materially and take directly attributable action being worshiped the way gods are normally while the 'actual' deities occupy the role an overgod would hold?
    This is very close to religion in my own setting. The real movers on a practical basis are outsiders, whose own attitudes towards the handful of overgods shape the various religions, though even these outsiders are generally more distant and "cosmic" than say, a FR deity.

    Some of these outsiders have set themselves up into pantheons or established cults to themselves, while others have attempted to keep the faith, so to speak. The latter have established a handful of religions with very similar core tenets that still have differences and disputes because even for a celestial communicating with mortals is like playing telephone. Their active involvement still prevents active religious warfare and serious persecution between these "allied" faiths.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?
    Definitely.

    One possible example would be an apocalyptic cthulhu mythos setting set after the great old ones reawaken.

    (although it would not necessarily need to be a grimdark setting like the cthulhu mythos; this is just an easy example)
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.
    That sounds like most science fiction, modern, and historical settings. God or the gods do not act in ways that are readily perceivable (or that would convince a non-believer they exist at all), but there are still religions and lots of devout followers.
    Quote Originally Posted by MaxWilson View Post
    I've tallied up all the points for this thread, and consulted with the debate judges, and the verdict is clear: JoeJ wins the thread.

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by JoeJ View Post
    That sounds like most science fiction, modern, and historical settings. God or the gods do not act in ways that are readily perceivable (or that would convince a non-believer they exist at all), but there are still religions and lots of devout followers.
    '
    Pretty much, but it's far rarer in the high fantasy environment associated with D&D and similar games.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    I studied anthropology and psychology in college, where my area of interest was social control systems that create organized violent movements. I quit formal study and have never worked in academia, but I remain an autodidact on relevant issues in history and current events.

    I also grew up traveling and around a very diverse set of people, and have been educated and participated in more than one religion, so I tend to ask a lot of questions and seek answers for things that people take for granted about society, faith, and the "big ideas" that underpin society.

    I'm glad what I wrote made sense, and I hope it helps. I'm sort of cribbing an academic vocabulary, but also just making stuff up based on personal experience and reading.
    It is helpful, both answering the questions I did have and the ones I hadn't even thought to ask.

    With everything that's been said, I think it's time to lay out some specifics and see if they hold together. I'll try to summarize the key points as best I can to not infodump a whole multiversal backstory.


    Spoiler: Cosmic Backstory, or Why The Gods Are Distant
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    Cosmologically, the universe in this setting is the third consecutive creation of a now-deceased overdeity. After a universe of pure Chaos and pure Law both collapsed, it built the current universe as a balance between the two extremes. The current group of deities are the descendents/successors of the overdeity, and their primary concern is keeping the universe they live in from collapsing in turn. The complicating factor is that fragments or shards of the first and second worlds are still floating around in non-existence, occasionally colliding with the third world and manifesting as bizarre Far Realms-esque monsters. Since they run on incompatible, outdated sets of universal laws, their presence is inherently corrupting to the fabric of reality, and the warping effect grows more potent the longer they 'live' and grow stronger.

    -When this first started happening, the gods tried smiting the invading Outsiders directly any time they appeared. This was a poor decision, as not only did it cause significant collateral damage to the material world, it also permanently weakened that 'point' of reality and making it easier for Outsiders to break through there in the future.
    -Next, they tried creating powerful servants - dragons and fey - to do the fighting for them. This also failed, as while both races could fight Outsiders without the material collateral damage, their divine essence was still potent enough to leave scars on reality in a direct confrontation.
    -Finally, the gods tried again, this time diluting their own essence with elemental energies. The mortal races that resulted were both free-willed and capable of defeating Outsider manifestations without any lasting effects.

    So the end result is a world where mortals are, essentially, the gatekeepers against extraplanar invaders. It's in the best interests of the gods to protect them, but they can't provide major aid without removing the mortals' ability to do the job they are meant for. Any time a situation gets out of hand to the point where they are forced to act directly, it reduces the ultimate lifespan of the universe by an infinitesimally small amount.

    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.
    Last edited by The Glyphstone; 2019-03-16 at 03:19 PM.

  15. - Top - End - #15
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Are little-"o" outsiders a thing? Angels and whatnot?

  16. - Top - End - #16
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    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?

  17. - Top - End - #17
    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    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'.

  18. - Top - End - #18
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

    Greek mythology would seem to be what you're looking for - the gods delighted in directly interacting with mortals, and while they sometimes answered prayers they generally didn't imbue their priests with special powers. Egyptian mythology would be another example, where the ruler was a physical avatar of the supreme deity.

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