Literal Gods

 Gods are big sky jerks.

That is what they seem to be and so that is what they are.

In the land of Overtia everything is exactly what is seems to be. 

Heaven is Up

Gigas Divinitas is the species we have come to call gods. They are native to the celestial sea of Ouranos. It is known that there are other species in the Gigas genus, such as Gigas Titanicus, often called giants who are thought to be native our sphere and this sea, but are suspected to be losers in some ancient cosmic war.

Basically, heaven is up. The gods live in the clouds and in the spheres of heaven.

There are all kinds of minor gods who have made their homes in sky castles and golden sky yachts. Your average god is a large humanoid creature with varying numbers of limbs, heads, and secondary features. The gods are shapeshifters but rarely use this ability to take on any shape but one that distinguishes them from other gods. Why would they want to appear like any kind of inferior creature anyway? 

For one of the endemic features of the gods is pride. All gods have God Complexes and this should surprise no one. The lesser gods are petty tyrants, bullying worshippers into praise and holding raucous parties on their sky yachts. Gratefully, the gods are mostly pretty distant, uninterested in boring mortal matters, and terrifically lazy. They can rarely be bothers to perform a divine act of judgement or even to protect their worshippers as they are meant to do.

Worship and Girth

The other important feature of divine life is worship. All worship fuels the gods and gives them their divine power. The more divine power they have, the bigger they get. I mentioned earlier that the gods live in the spheres of heaven. This is true, but the gods also are the spheres of heaven. The gods that receive the most worship have already ascended to heaven and have taken on forms appropriate for gravity, that being spheres. The sun in the sky is Sol the Bright Lord. The moon is Luna the Mother of Shades. All the spheres in the sky are the greater gods, this is why they all very clearly have faces.

Clerics and Treaties

In the Age of Night, mortals attempted to stop worshipping the gods and hid their dead from the Mother of Shades in an attempt to take power over their own destiny. The Mother responded in anger and mortals and the gods entered an all out war. This eventually ended the age as the Mother's forces failed and she called upon gods stronger than her, summoning the Bright Lord and heralding the Age of Day. 

In the aftermath of this, mortal resistance was destroyed along with most civilization being buried, yet the demand for worship for all the newly arrived gods was at an all time high. Mortals still had leverage and so agreements were crafted and the clerks who were meant to oversee this new bureaucracy of praise eventually came to be known as clerics. Still to this day clerics mediate disagreements on behalf of mortals as per the ancient treaties and pacts and are granted special amounts of divine power as compensation as per the 39th Treaty of Mediators, paragraph 6, subsections 1-53. These lengthy volumes of divine law have become holy scripture and many clerics have forgotten that the purpose of these agreements were for the benefit of mankind, to the surprise as no one.

Angels and Divine Power

Divine power is literally contained in the bodies of gods. It can be used to many different effects as you might expect. The primary nature of divinity is authority. The gods have taken a special place in the cosmic order and so are granted authority by the universal mind. Divine acts temporarily awaken the cosmic consciousness of both animate and inanimate matter. Many wizards have tried to crack the Secret of Divinity to no avail, but even the attempt often ends up with the wizard being flattened by a large rock thrown down from heaven. Good riddance.

Angels are the sustained granting of cosmic consciousness by the distribution of a select amount of divine power into one of the god's body parts, usually for a very specific purpose that the god is too lazy to do themselves. Basically, they take off an arm, eye, or other member and give it some divine power and usually but not always wings. For lesser gods and lesser angels, they do not have enough divine power to change their forms in meaningful ways and these poor divine messengers end up stuck as eyes or arms with wings if they are lucky. Also their jobs might vary widely. No one wants to be poor Moraliel who was a hand detached so some lesser god wouldn't have to wipe for themselves.

For angels created by greater gods, they often have the power to change their shapes and tend to take on ostentatious shapes of beauty or strangeness because why not? Greater angels can actually be more powerful than lesser gods. Angels, being literally the universe awakened are far chiller and more empathetic that their divine creators. 

Reproduction (Gross)

Gods bang. They bang often. The alignment of the heavenly spheres is most often an orgy and the grunting can be heard throughout the solar system. Gods are, however, not particularly fertile and so the birth of a divine child is pretty rare. Indeed, the major danger of getting on the bad side of lesser gods is not their own wrath, but the wrath of their parents when their kids come tattling. 

Death or the Lack Thereof

Gods don't die easily. Their bodies will disperse into divine power and reform eventually though this can take many years for lesser divinities. There are some ancient weapons from the Age of Night that are said to be able to permanently kill gods. Oh no, you better not go looking for those...

1d8 Character Ideas:

  1. A runt god, a lesser god born of lesser gods, standing just a little taller than most humans. What is your incredibly specific domain? 
  2. A legalistic cleric. Are you an idealistic activist fighting for the little guy? Are you a jaded opportunist trying to use the system for your advantage?
  3. An unfortunate angel created by a middling god. Unfortunately, you are stuck as some body part with wings. What are you and how do you feel about your creator? What purpose were you originally created for?
  4. A wizard trying to unlock the Secret of Divinity. Your work must be kept very hush hush. You don't want to get squashed like the last 20 guys who tried this same thing.
  5. An inanimate object who maintained its cosmic consciousness for an unknown reason after an act of divine power. How do you cope with the likely accidental nature of your own existence?
  6. A cosmic dwarf engineer: one of the small creatures who came when the gods moved into this part of the celestial sea. The dwarves of the mortal world do not remember that their people once built the mechanisms of the universe and helped craft the laws governing reality itself at the behest of the old lords of creation. Now these divine jerks have moved in and taken everything over and even busted up the unions!
  7. A sacrilegious anarchist intent upon completing what the Night Lords of old started! You want to stick it to the gods and tear them down from their thrones. Why?
  8. A historian of divine history and genealogy. You are the weirdo that is far too interested in the cosmic orgies and want to know where every god came from, their parentage, and what position was used.
This is one of a new series of blog posts I am going to do about a very literalist fantasy setting. I am going to try and remove as much of the spiritual and metaphysical stuff from fantasy as possible and just follow that strange logic to its end. We shall see more of the strange world of Overtia and what poor suckers live there.

Comments

  1. This is very good! I really like the Clerics and Treaties, and the myth of how Day came about, the idea that there are gods floating around outside our world that sometimes get called in, that Day in that way is more alien and eldritch than Night. I like the bureaucratic satire angle as well, and how that also ties in with the angels being like the more competent assistants to the useless boss. "Reproduction (gross)" also was funny.

    I'm excited to see more of this!

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    1. I'm glad you liked the myth of Day. It was definitely one of the most interesting parts for me but one that wasn't very funny. I'm very interested in the idea that there are much bigger conflicts going on on a cosmic scale, that the gods aren't the end all be all but just the victors in a war with whoever first made the universe.

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  2. Can you say more about what you mean by "literalist" and "spiritual and metaphysical stuff"?

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    1. This is a good question. Max of Weird and Wonderful gave me the word literalist for this setting. To me, that means we are interpreting the tropes of D&D fantasy the way a fundamentalist reads the Bible. I know my approach kind of veers away from that at some point but that's kind of what I picture the starting point for this project as. There are not other dimensions, Heaven is in the sky and Hell is underground. There are God's and they have a species. The souls of the dead go nowhere, but rather their bodies just fall over when dead and get up when a psychopomp comes around to pick them up. So much of fantasy relies upon other planes or magic is this ethereal energy. Divine power is the most metaphysical thing I want to do in this setting and it's literally stored in the bodies of gods.

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