Tell me about the cosmology of your setting

Humanity is not, of course, the only intelligent species on the face of Alterra.

Indeed, everyone knows at least something of the various immaterial entities which interact with humanity - God is in his heaven and Dictates at his mysterious discretion, and though the number is inexact there are dozens of types of spirits, phantoms, and shades which parlay with those at the fringes of civilization and society.

However, what is curious about those entities lesser than God but closer to our experience is that they do not frequently associate with each other - there are little partnerships or communities among them, nor villages, cities, or states.

While it is demonstrated that they have and can make tools, there are curiously nearly no discarded artifacts left behind by the phantasms, of any variety. Their use of technology seems limited to interactions with humanity, often as gifts or levies - though at times they demand items in turn, these are almost never seen again.

There is one exception, however - there is a variety of phantasm known as the Saurians of which there is plentiful archeological evidence sourced from millions of years ago - unbeleviably durable structures and tools buried alongside the petrified bones of their once material bodies. However, no Saurian lives on today, and their existence as phantasm can only be confirmed by more learned individuals in the esoteric arts.

They're all major organ systems of an over god's body, that rebelled and more or less ripped him apart when they disagreed with him over something.

Supposedly the over god had a partner whom left to make her own universe, and might one day return, but for now the gods from the old over god are too busy struggling against each other to concern themselves with the future like that.

Ah, but now hell comes into being. The Gods eventually encountered a problem. The souls they had originally created, the Heavenborn, were perfect in every way, but their random recombinations were sometimes deeply sinful. (How could the concept of sin thus exist? Another high--level quest hook. ) Thus a new dimension was created, into which souls could be dumped after leaving the Cage. It varied as much as the heavens did, and leaving it without permission was impossible. The end result was that the Heralds gradually wound up reabsorbing a lot of their older leadership roles, shifting from being clerics to royal advisors, to spies, to generals, to assassins.

War wasn't inevitable. The fourteen races gradually started inching towards conflict as their mortal clergy and the secular Empire that contained them all started experiencing friction. Abruptly, however, a series of 'seemingly unrelated' armed conflicts blew the fuck up, and the war started.

The Spireling race was first to go. Their drive to invent new magic was unending thanks to the dictates of the cruel, petty God which created them, Vill. Vill drove them on and on, until they created the mightiest spell ever devised... and it backfired. Vill and both of his demigods instantly died, and the Spireling race vanished into thin air, as did their heaven and hell. (6)

The war ground to a halt as the world suddenly realized that the Gods could die, races could be ERASED, not just killed. It started up again a generation later thanks to massive covert ops by more or less everybody, and when the dust settled, 97% of the world's population was dead, all but three demigods were dead, every single God was dead, only Humans and Elves were left alive, and all twenty-eight afterlives were destroyed. The demons died in the psychic backblast from the dying Pantheon.

Three thousand years later, the world is all but healed, but the Gods are still dead. Politics and commerce are now the fuel of world interactions, not religion.

That's the story. I've written a Quest here on Veeky Forums, four novels, and a few short stories in the setting.

I'm planning to write my very own homebrew setting. It's gonna be my first too. It goes something like this :

>the "world" the pc live is one of the many parallel world that exists. Each stacked upon each other.
>all those world have their own sun, but they share the same moon. As such, the moon is rarely seen.
>each "world" is relatively small, around the size of europe. On the border is an infinite sea of mist and clouds, making a smoky wall.
>this "border" is moving and operates as the frontier between each parallel world.
>it's a source of a strange magic that mutate and change perception of reality, almost akin to magic.
>As such, the center of the world is almost devoid of magic, but the further you go from the center, the stronger the magic gets.
>Worlds have limited lifespan. They only exist within the smoke border, and the worlds gets smaller every century.
>Sometime the cloud wall goes away, showing wastelands and ruins.
>Each parallel world is a plane in itself, and travel between them is possible but dangerous as it necessitate opening a "cloud/smoke" portal.

Here's for the setting, now to the cosmology.

My current setting is a mixed bag in and of itself. I had a previous setting I've come to not like as much, but there's parts I really like, so I'm taking those and making them fit in the newer one I do like.

The newer one used to be based off of different metal genres but gradually became its own fleshed out world, informed by a lot of other fantasy stuff and Veeky Forums threads discussing ideas. It still retains the basic outlines of the metal setting it was but with a lot more detail.

>cosmology
It's a reverse/inverted gnostic universe - the spiritual realm is a stagnant chaos controlled by a Tyrant Godhead, at one point, somehow, the Demiurge escaped with seven archons and a bunch of spirits, Demiurge made the material plane out of its body and the archons guard it and the 30 layers of the Firmament from the Godhead which seeks to bring it all back into the chaos. The aim of the material realm is to act as a haven for souls to reincarnate forever, but this is easier said than done when the enemy is all around at all time. The far north is utterly corrupted and forever in darkness, winds blow down there across the world and make monsters appear wherever there is darkness (a state of being for lightless places called The Deep). There's also the problem of Gnostics who seek to escape the unnatural material realm. There's plenty of native spirits and beings, too, souls which incarnated not as humans but other stuff.

>gods
There's no gods per se, like a traditional pantheon. There's the archons, but they never get involved, ever. They're too busy fending off the Godhead. The things people worship as gods are old non-human spirits of power, ancestors and other such things.

>planes/outsiders
The upper layers of the Firmament are utterly lost and corrupted and dreamers sometimes visit this place which make Nightmares. Other than that, there's the various Deeps in the world which are their own weird places. And of course, the infinite chaos of the spiritual realm.

>The "smoke" dimension is a place where things are born and things go when they die. As a new parallel world is made, people begins to emerge from the smoke wall to populate it. The "smoke" dimension also harbor incredibles and rare creatures, rumored to be able to eat up worlds.
>those creatures usually appear when a world is near its "death", and killing them helps a world survive just a bit longer.
>those creatures are seen as ennemy of civilization, people of all race see them as devils and things to be destroyed.
>they are usually forgeting the fact that they too came from the smoke.
>humanoid sapient creatures also inhabit the smoke dimension.
>those are called "tricksters" or "observators" by the world's races. Their main defining trait is that they have pitch black eyes and communicate to people through their dreams.
>they can give powers to people through dreams or physical occult manifestation.
>those very rare people given powers usually end up becoming mages, sorcerers, witches and necromancers.
>they go live on the border of the world, where reality is more maleable and so that their power are usable.
>they are no "gods", and no "demons" in those parallels worlds, only tricksters giving people a shape or power that could look like godly powers.
>immortality can be gained from a bargain with a trickster, but they only offer slow aging.
>everything in those world is mortal and having short life-spans : 50 to 150 years for each creature.
>As there is no godly being, only outsiders seeking to communicate with civilzations, churches and cults are aimed towards very pragmatical and concrete cooncepts : Ancestors, determinism, resisting temptations, dead ones and living ones.
>"divine" magic is a manifestation of someone's zeal and will appearing when they near the border of the world : a place where crusaders and monastic order thrives.

Now to the races

I'm still working on the races, but I'm trying to keep the "no long-lived races".

>humans are divised into many different ethnicities : the one living in the center of the world are "normal" and the further you go towards the border the weirder they get.
>You have the classical medieval european ones, but you also have norse-barbarian sea-faring type of humans who have zebra or panda looking skin : white and black stripped or spotted skin.
>they worship ancestors, fire, draconic beings and death.
>they have orders designed to become uncorruptabe beacons against the tricksters.

>Orcs, goblins and hobgoblins shares the same ethnic group. They look more human than monsters except one is buff, one is small and gnarly and one has the longest ears.
>they form intelligent societies. Orc are nomadic, worship ancestors, bones, battle and blood. Goblins worship their broodmothers and the moon but reject human civilization the hardest, Hobgoblins are very martial oriented and follow a strict "your body is a temple" philosophy, except they also see pain and battle as important philosophical notion.
>there is also savage and primitives bands of greenskins roaming the lesser known parts of the world.

>Dwarves inhabit mountains, hills or construct complex half-buried city in the plains.
>they are dwarf-like, except fire, stones, earth and animals play an incredible important part of their religions.
>they have a shamanic culture where boars are seen as sacred animals and forest are inhabited by strange bark spirits.
>they are known to have made steel-wood.
>the moutain dwarves takes the stone and fire fascination even further. Some dwarf clan petrifying their old ones to become eternal statue watching over the clan.
>Deep-dwarves takes demonic traits.

>Elves are just a different ethnic group to human, they are litteraly just humans with pointy ears and a slicker physique.

Here goes my world, /ddg/. What do you think ?

I appreciate the effort to break away from the traditional D&Desque world, certainly. Is the smoke powered by something, or is it just 'there?'

Question: could some enterprising adventurers hitch a ride on the moon through the various parallel worlds?

It's kinda just "there".
If you were to enter the smoke dimension, by walking in the smoke wall for example, you would be transported to a place where you would walk on a infinite flat plane made of stormy clouds. You could see the night sky over your head, and sometimes one of the sun dawning over a stormy formation.
There would be a feeling of familiarity with the place, like a deja-vu sensation.
After a while you would emerge from the smoke wall in another parallel world.
An exact replica of yourself would also emerge from the smoke wall of another parallel world, possibly your original one, but you wouldn't be able to know that and the replica would just be that : a replica.

Inside the smoke dimension i where the most monstruous and terrible creature are made : manticores, hydras, owlbear and chimeras. Things that look like they mutated.

This is also where the tricksters dwells. They are true outsiders, who seems to take interest in the material worlds for reasons that could range from simple curiosity and playfulness to full on foul and destructive intent.

Something I stole from Pathfinder, the drunk human who did something on a bet only to wake up the next morning to find he accidently fulfilled a prophesy and became a god. Theres just something funny about a down on his luck drunk hero suddenly finding that he became a cosmic deity by accident.

You bet.
The moon is a place in the setting : it's a silent and barren white world that travels slowly over the sea of clouds and storms, dominating every world.

I still need to decide what's actually on the moon. The king of the trickers would be too obvious, so I'm thinking about some kind of otherworldy guardian, possibly even your very own double or more like your "original" self, that would test you so that you would become able to create your own parallel world by manipulating the clouds themselves, from the moon.

Or something more simple thant that : it is the only place where one can reach true immortality.

Cool. What did you think of mine?

It feels like the moon is very important, as it's the one constant in the entire multiverse, the only truly unique thing. Does it hold the multiverse together? Is it something else alien to the multiverse since it's so unique? There's a lot of really cool mystery you could almost leave unexplored. The moon could be any number of things, a source of all kinds of myth and belief. It's the part that really intrigues me the most because it doesn't seem to have answer, and that's really cool. You can go there, but...what happens if you do? Are the repercussions immediate? Or even noticeable? Or are they long term?

These threads are the best for those little really really neat ideas that get you thinking, and they get me really excited good job, user, this is cool shit

I found the idea of normal looking demon interesting, as it makes the idea of becoming a demon something almost desirable if you want to become a master of your craft. Could PC become demon without realizing it because they are "just that good" ? Could they become new demon after the rest died ?

The multiple planes I imagine takes after their god-creator. So it gave me quite a bit of an Age of Sigmar vibe I don't know if it's intended or not.
Do they still exist, even though the gods are dead ?

Thank you friend, I was a bit shy of talking about my setting as english is not my mother's tongue.

I think what you say confirm why I'm hesitant about giving a meaning to the moon : I want the moon to be the thing that is common to every world without them realizing it : the moon could literraly just disappear out of the sky because it now rose over a parralel world.

Goblins would be the one race that would see the moon as some kind of a divine or godly thing, giving powers to the worshipers (where tricksters are the true origin of those powers).
Humans, orcs and dwarves would see the moon as a good or bad omen, depending on the associated culture.
The moon, white as bone for savage orcs, meaning a good omen. Or the moon, unchanging and petrified, a bad omen for nomadic orcs.

That kind of stuff.

Following up that last post :
You're actually making me think about making the moon a dramatic thing.
Inside the sea of cloud and smoke there would be places, extremely little pocket worlds the size of a big island where they are so far removed from the multiverse that the moon would shine over them constantly.

A giant white disc shining over decrepit castle on a snowy mountain. A place created from the memory of an incredibly ancient king who entered the sea of smoke. Inhabited by the creatures of the clouds, I think they would make some nice settings for one-shot adventures :
>PCs go to sleep in some inns.
>malevolent tricksters communicate through their dreams and lead them to that "remote place"
>they must relieve the memory of the ancient king on this place, with the moon constantly shining over them
>if they do, they MAY come back to the same parallel world.

No, demons are explicitly created by contracts. You have to do die to do it, and only the Gods could create them.

The concept is an ancient one, I actually took the idea from an ancient Greek theological topic. The word demon originally referred to beings just like that; the idea of tormentors in the afterlife came from a much more recent Christian translation of an ancient Greek tome about nature spirits that associated demons with illness.

The way it works is that if all three divine beings of a race (God, male demigod, female demigod) die, the whole race ceases to exist, and if the entire race goes extinct, the three divine beings die too, and the psychic backblast kills all their living demons and whatever sentient spirits the Gods created to keep their children company in heaven. (Angels don't exist, but things like Nymphs, Pathguards, Watchers of the Tormented, etc).

There is a demon inside a magic prison shard, which was like a prisoner transport the size of a thimble, which the PCs can find in a high-level adventure hook. He's the only one who both survived the psychic backblast from the dying Gods and remained sane thanks to the demigoddess of his race still existing. No in-game being knows this. If he is restored to his shrine, he gains more power than any other beings left in the universe, and even gains the power to Sanctify Priests and otherwise bestow powers the demigods don't have.

And the Age of Sigmar thing is accidental. I've been developing this world since I started the book series five years ago, Age of Sigmar came later.

Furthermore, the demigods have their hands full. With the afterlife destroyed, there's nowhere for ghosts to go after they enter the Steel Cage. Demigods can force ghosts in if they find them wandering around in the wilderness, but since ghosts can't be destroyed by anything but divine power and there's no Heralds, Clerics, Priests, Paladins, Demons, or Shieldbearers left, only an Avatar that happens to actually, physically SEE a ghost can attack it. The demigods can't read minds, hear prayers, or anything like that unless their Avatars can physically see the target, and even then they can't actually grant prayers (though the Gods could have, under certain circumstances.

The demigods also ordered some mortals to assemble enormous weather machines powered by their own divine might, to keep the world habitable after the Collapse, the final war in which all the surviving races and divine beings died except for them, the mortal humans, and the mortal elves. Most of the demigods' power is tied up in maintaining the Machines, closing the remaining Chaos Rifts that opened in the mortal world during and before the Collapse, destroying ghosts (including the ones they're forced to absorb from the now-extinct races). Long story short, if a member of the extinct races was in a ghost form (so they weren't sucked into the Cage naturally like they were supposed to be for some reason) when their species went extinct, that means they were left behind without a corresponding divine being, and they're driven instantly and violently insane.

I think I like that. The moon's a mysterious other thing that doesn't quite work or exist like the other stuff, it's a weird thing that just exists apart from everything else. Maybe it's natural, maybe it isn't. Everyone believes it's something different. I personally believe mystery gives settings life. When everything is explained and has a place, you have very little room to expand without changing other stuff, but if there's a little mystery, if some stuff isn't explained, there's always room to introduce new, strange things.

Pocket realms sound REALLY cool, by the way, just drifting in this smoke dimension. Imagine being moon-bound explorers who explore these smaller realms and eventually create realms of their own memories by mistake. There's a lot of potential in this, I think.

I wasn't expecting how motivating your coment is, it really makes me feel pumped about pulling my back and writting that homebrew setting.

As it's my first one I'm still a little intimidated by the thing : where to start, when to stop and should I also think of a "system" with numbers and skills and dice rolls.

Feels like I should concentrate on the fluff for now. I'll be sure to get back to Veeky Forums if my setting is exciting for people.

The particular world I'm DMing takes place in:

The world was crafted by two dozen or so "Great Sages", whom were created by an almighty god that oversaw everything. Another, darker god, corrupted some of the sages and caused a global war among the sages and the dominant race of the planet.

The world was ultimately sundered, continents blown apart and reshaped and the dominate race destroyed (would be a precursor to elves). From the chaos many new races were born, evolved or developed. Over the next two thousand years they settled across the world and began anew. Not many people know this, save for the oldest of elves. And even then their stories have been skewed in to mythology and fairy tales.

The planes and outsiders are 5e standard.

Does that means only elves and humans are playable in this setting ? Can you encounter the ghost of a harpy, a dwarf or a goblin in the physical world ?

Oh, and planar travel is completely impossible. Not only are there only two planes left (the Steel Cage, where everybody wakes up the instant after their soul is taken in death if they don't become a ghost, and is a small steel cell with ambient light, each person gets their own with no way to communicate) and the mortal planet. So even if you could planeswalk, there's nowhere to go. It's not like the Forgotten Realms, where living elves can travel to Arvandor while alive, live there until death, then climb up out of their dead bodies as an eternally idealized version of their living self.

In the Pre-Collapse material, you can play any of the fourteen races (and MAYBE, if the DM allows it, one of the non-sentient races that inhabit the afterlife, but they're nothing more than spiritual robots with no free will to speak of and no personality at all, and you'd have to be an amazing roleplayer to pull it off). Post-Collapse games only allow humans and elves. They are physically indistinguishable aside from elves having fewer skin tones, more eye and hair tones, and leaf-shaped ears. Mega ultra spoiler: That's because the template for elf spirits wasn't actually created in this world. It was stolen from another setting, and damaged en route to this one. Now the path through the Chaos back to the other universe is gone, and even the Gods couldn't find their way back. That's why they didn't pull out and leave when the mortals started whipping out Godslayer weapons: they had nowhere else to go since they had tied up so much power in the thirty planes they had made and were hopelessly lost in the Chaos. Elves also have natural bonuses on Charisma checks and are, in-universe, friendlier, while human characters have bonus resistance to ice and cold (and ice magic) and are, in-universe, more able to withstand sudden changes in weather.

Derp, missed the second question. Yes, ghosts of the other races can still be found, which is a HUGE problem since not only are they thousands of years old and insane, but a Gnome inventor found a way to WEAPONIZE them and a bunch of weaponized ghosts escaped his lab and fused with hideous flesh-reaping robots in the process. One can level a village by itself. Ghosts can also enter Chaos rifts and temporarily survive, while mortals would instantly cease to exist if they tried (though the most powerful mage in history did manage to do it once by ignoring some rules about time travel while the demigods silently looked the other way. The ghost he went in there to fight was called the Horror Engine, and destroying it took a week of agonizingly painful Chaos immersion by the mage in question).

In the world of Myrum, existence is nestled inside of the waking dream of the ancient Elder God Vrosvac, a gentle and powerful creature that felt he pain of the Elves as they were preyed upon by the Eldrich Horrors of the Cosmos (as the Elves are Immortal and can actually walk through space), and so Vrosvac brought them into his mind and his dream of a world perfect for them. It was not however, for it was lifeless, and so the Elves sorrow once again touched Vrosvac, and he dreamed of himself within their dream, so that he might sooth their sorrows. The Elves lived within his great body of living glass, shaping him into a city without equal. They were still lonely, the Elves and Vrosvac alone, and so he prepared one final gift, birthing the Old Gold King, the lord of the land, Daegamesh, the lord beneath, and the Fairy Queen, the lady of the unseen. These three created the many races of the world, and there was joy and prosperity, for the dream had let the Elves forget what sorrow meant. It was not forever, for while the Elder Gods could not oppose Vrosvac directly, they hated his power, and saught to bring him pain and ruin. A Human man named Wraxx was corrupted by their promises, and Avarice tainted the world. Wraxx began to study magic, and slowly his research darkened. For years, he tried to fill the hole that had been cut into him by the Elder Gods, yet no love or wealth could satiate his hunger. Only power and domination could ease his pain. And so Wraxx struck at the Elves, and Vrosvac's avatar, blind without his beloved mortals tied to his avatars heart, fell asleep. Wraxx tapped the heart, and from his malice and hate spewed forth Orcs, Demons, and other monsters known colloquially as "The Corruption", creature which can only destroy and ruin.

The living dream aspect is cool.

I'm glad I could help! I always the love the small, cool details in stuff that set other settings apart from the rest, and it deserves to be worked on.

Honestly, most of the settings I make, even if they're just simple ideas that never get fully fleshed out, they're usually just for me, just for fun, or to write stories in. I think fluff is most important first, bring the setting to life and then figure out how to move around in it, how you might play in it.

All of my settings are based off of a central concept that grows outwards. For example, is me, it was originally based off of metal subgenres, but from that one idea, it grew outwards into a much more detailed setting that incorporated parts of OTHER settings. It's good to have a starting place and I think you have yours, a multiverse of parallel worlds and how they interact. From there, I think maybe design some worlds that currently exist in the multiverse, you have so many parallel realms to play around in! One could be a brand new world, one could be on the verge of destruction, stuff like that.

Thanks! Party are currently outside of the dream fighting Nubulas, they accidentally did 110 damage in a single round to a Boss and it tore the dream with how hard they hit it. Shot them into the void. They're gonna hitch a ride with some Elves riding a comet back to reality.

Not much beyond stealing a creation myth from my tribe.
The moon was just a nice rock once upon a time.
The story starts with a bored sun and a beautiful woman. Every day the woman would go outside and do her daily chores and everyday the sun would shine his gaze on her more than most.
The sun, infatuated with the woman, shone too brightly for too long and the people noticed. Droughts began and days ran too long. The people tired, thirsty, and starving asked the spirit teller why these things had fallen unto them.
The spirit teller communed with the spirits of the land and they told him the why their people were being singled out by the suns gaze as no other peoples were recieving his attention just so.
The spirit teller learned of the suns infatuation with the woman and hatched a plan.
The woman would go to the sun and the suns overlong gaze would burn only her and not the land they lived on.
The sun in its sadness would return to its proper place, sad but contained, and the world would be happy.
So the spirit teller told her of a medicinal plant far in the forest, several days away from the people and thus the sun several days away from them, that would preserve her youth forever.
The woman being a woman leapt at the chance to be the envy of her people's women, forever.
Thus the Sun seeing his chance at meeting the woman in private jumped down from the sky to sway her heart with his words.
The woman bore but a moment of the Sun's gaze before melting into the wrinkles of an old woman.
The sun realizing his mistake fled back to his unreachable place and vowed off the fleeting beauty that is women, having seen what they will become.
The women, fearing the worst after having felt the burn of the Sun's gaze, fled to the nearby lake and peered into it to see her new visage.
What she saw shocked her beyond her years and in her senility picked up a nearby stone and threw it at the sun with all her might.

The women, being of feeble body and mind, threw the rock haphazardly and now it flies untrue and out of time, but ever chasing the sun who now runs from the rock.
That rock is the moon and as its chase wanes and waxes from the sight of the Sun so too does it wax and wane in sight to us.

Stereotypical tale for my tribe of not pissing women off cause while they might not actually do anything you'll be running from them for your life.
The moon in my setting is just a really fuckhuge rock in shape and size and the sun is sentient and doesn't shine 24/7 all the time so occasional DoubleNights exist or LongDays and you Hags are an issue as the woman in the story is the original and she burns her ill gotten children like her at birth.

Thanks for the advice, friend. It really means something for me.
It's almost six in the morning and I didn't expected to be kept awake by so many new ideas. Guess having the occasion of speaking about my setting sparked new ideas and makes me want to work it more and more.

On the topic of parallel worlds interacting between them i'm thinking of a way to have recursive events or characters. For example, in one world, the human king Balthazar was the one to unify the lands under one crown. In another, the dwarven king Bazadhar was the one to create the under-earth roads, linking all dwarven domains togethers. In another, the orc king Bakkadar was the one to unify the nomadic tribes and roamed the human territories.

Something like that : a template of a character who would appear again and again in many ways in different parallels world.

I was also thinking about making the end of each parallel world feels like a place "crumbling down" : shafts would open on the earth who would lead to the sea of cloud should you fall inside one or mountains crumbling down the sea, raising a wall of smoke and dust who would mix with the sea of cloud itselft, distorting reality.

God damnit, I need to sleep, but I have so many new ideas now.

That tale has a real mythical feel to it, like an old story or creating myth a group could really have.

Good job user, it's a really nice tale. Has that "legendary" vibe to it.

>deites
each race has their own little pantheon

>elf expy
view everything as being a shard of the Divine Origin that the universe spawned from, with Avatars (beings of immense magical and physical presence) having larger 'shards' than the average thing in the world and give deference to them. not so much as worship, but healthy reverence and respect
>goblins
Ancestor spirits that crop up to give direction to them though forcefully taking a host for a brief period of time
>dwarf expy
after being ousted from their mountain homes by the goblins, they took it as them being abandoned by their belief, which was just them all being living extensions of the mountain Avatar (which is the actual mountain range itself) and turned to understanding their new home, the largest forest on the continent. im trying to go for a newage and new faith druidic feel for them with them abandoning their previous faith, with them still trying to get a feel for what is right and wrong since their world and culture got turned upside down after getting beat in by a bunch of goblins.
>minotaurs
haven't gotten them down quite yet

>humans
hoy boy, here we go

>pre-exile
no real worship, but just a general set of morals that bound people together, closest thing to actual worship is borrowing faith from other races

>after exile
long story shot, giant ass war with other races pushed them to leave the continent. during that war, the heir to the then loose human empire, now just known as The Prince, the Lord of Lantea (a mage who was really, stupidly good at summoning and binding creatures, and making really cool stuff) and the Knight (which is all that is concrete that people know about her) led and held off the non-humans for close to 150 years. they form the basis for the new human faith, each a pillar of society. they have their own minor virtues and servants (all summoned by the mage after he re-arranged the starts to create constellations to fuel the summoning.)

cont.

I sat down with Eversor, the Towergirls artist, and we had fun designing how the stone and brand the Heralds get would eventually grow and cover their skin, and how the Gods would have to program their races' members not to find it frightening and unappealing when they realized it would be.

It got pretty detailed.

I remember this webcomic. Umm, ctrl alt delete or something?

the Mage was really good at giant ritual magic on a grand scale, but was awful at everything else barring astral magic like most humans. the Prince kept the kingdom together, always managed to at least win something from every victory, and was all around a cool dude. the Knight, aside from being the greatest warrior in the Human forces, led the actual armies in the field. historical erotic authors constantly state that the relationship between the Knight and Prince was greater than all in the land. and still there are some that belive that the Knight was a mighty Avatar bound in human form by the Mage and forced to fight for them. but such stories are disregarded, for no Avatar could be bound in such a way, and if one could, they would suffer no human to control them

A sort of continuity between worlds, that could be really neat. Worlds near each other having similarities, but worlds far away from each other being very different. Little similarities and differences here and there, I like it. Template characters, or even events in the history of each world. Makes me think of some of the crazier stuff in the Elder Scrolls games where cosmic events play out in various ways and characters fill these mythic roles.

I like the idea of a world literally crumbling, going back to the smoke and cloud, all the creatures and magical events that could appear and happen. It could be a slow crumbling, it could happen fast. Maybe it's different for every world.

And I'm glad this helped! I love talking about settings and details, people always come out with good ideas in them. Sleep well, user, and dream!

We'll, there's the origin story, where 9 powerful beings fled to the planet to escape being consumed by something.

The most powerful of their number, one whose mere presence instigated the metaphysical concept of entropy, betrayed the others in the belief that the planet's natural inhabitants could grow even greater than the 9, given proper nurturing; this instigated a war between the 7 who were trying to improve their odds of survival, the 1 who thought that the mortals could come to surpass them (metaphorically 'passing the torch' to them), and the 1 who tried to pacify his family's turmoil.

Eventually, the Greatest was defeated, his body being used as the foundation of the ruined planet and held in place with veritable towers of black metal. The Peacebroker was hobbled, but otherwise allowed into the world, as the 7 couldn't find it in themselves to punish him as much as the 1.

The 7, realizing at some indeterminate time that their mere physical presence was a lure for the things they had fled from in the first place, wove themselves into various concepts to both avoid death, and to prevent the deaths of those who dwelled on the planet natively: for example, one united with the concept of 'barrier', and is thusly present in some capacity at walls, houses, hospitals/battlefields, ect.

They also bound themselves in magic and music.

The Old Gods were the heroes of the world. The men and women who shackled the primordial chaos into livable, farmable land. They built the world as an island, floating on a sea of that same chaos, kept back by the seal created by the Gods' rule. They ruled as Kings and Queens of a vast empire for a thousand years, with the greatest among them all, the Red Goddess, crowned as their empress. Heresy against these Immortal godkings was punished by exile to the fringes of the continent, beyond vast gates to keep any heretics from ever returning to paradise.

These heretics, sealed off from the rest of the Empire, developed into kingdoms of their own. They fought one another, claimed territory, and prospered, largely forgetting about the world behind the great gates. They elevated new Gods and Goddesses to new thrones. These heretics ended up as the only survivors. Inside the Empire's borders, the Gods and Goddesses began to go mad. A new being, not part of the original union, rose up and swayed worshipers away from the Old Gods. Eventually, even they came to worship this new Yellow God. Their thrones abandoned, the gods allowed the fragile bonds holding back primordial chaos weaken. The land descended into war and madness, and the chaos seeped up from the ground. The souls of the dead were caught in this miasma and rather than returning to the spirit world to be cleansed and resurrected, they were immediately returned to the world still dirtied by the world and the great chaos they had been contaminated by. Thus, goblins and other horrors began to be born, driving the few remaining humans even further towards destruction.

The thrones must be filled, otherwise the tiny island of life will disintegrate completely.

Let's start from the beginning. Before then, even.

God was a merciful, one, true, jealous God. She loved her people much, but soon they turned away from her, seeming to have outgrown faith. Lonely, she created another, an equal, to work on the stars while she created the worlds her people would travel, paving the road ahead of them. This new god, in his infancy, was not allowed to create life. He hadn't yet understood the gravity granting life brings. After words changed nothing, the two loving Gods fought. Eventually, the infant God was the first thing to meet nonexistence.

In Nonexistence, the infant God realized his binds were no longer, and he created life freely, to his merriment. He created little Gods. A God of fighting, a sparring foe. A God of justice, of his own brand. A God of magic, to empower his people. A God of welfare, following an objective, utilitarian morality. And a Goddess of Love, the one he hated but made anyway. One day he will return, lay waste to her people, and prove to her he can make a strong people. He will not know why she cries.

Those who wish to stop his plans he damns to Gamaya, an underworld which bears the Dragon, an idol of God's worst foe, who torments to embed images of suffering at their hand. Only heartfelt prayer and true regret will return you home. Or by digging your way back to the surface. He rewards perserverence, except when it harms him greatly. One escapee learned the conflict between the Old God and the Infant, and killed the Goddess of Love to usurp her power. Never has God been so angry. Love's minions of deep emotion are demons, God's passionless creatures angels.

Cosmology is fucking boring, and an unnecessary shackle to one's worldbuilding, if the players aren't actively engaging with it.

I'd rather leave the specifics of how the world came to form, and where all the peoples came from, completely undefined. That way, I can make up whatever shit I like off the cuff, without having to worry if it's contradicting anyexisting fluff.

There are only two true Gods, Esh and Enn.
All others are lesser deities, who arose from their power.
There were many, many deities, and their legends were myriad, and their powers were immense.
Every race other than mankind was made by one of these "lesser" Gods, and tied closely to their divine essence.

But then the Outsiders came to the world, and warred with the Gods.
At the end of the war, only Esh and Enn were left, with the world a ruined mess.
Divine power has truly died, with no Gods to listen, and most of the secrets of Arcane Magic have been lost, but it is being rekindled.

Tragically, it was Magic which drew the Outsiders to the world.
And the more it is used, the more likely others will notice.

There are these things that are called ghosts, for a lack of a better word. People can be found places, doing something simple such as waving to passerbyers on the side of the road. Should enough people experience this same effect, to the point where they tell the same story, it becomes one. The memetic agreement of one's existence fabricates it. Perhaps at one point it did exist, promptly going about their business moments after an encounter, and the other encounters are of their ghost, which seems to always be exactly the same every time. Sometimes, it is not people that are ghosts in this memetic sense. Bars and taverns have a habit of becoming ghost taverns, populated, tax paying establishments that are static in population and timeless in era. Time is not well understood and poorly measured from the outside, so many report no time passing when they entered and left the bar, or perhaps years going by or even backward. No one knows what creates this phenomenon. Few ever notice.

>Multiverse
>Each universe is either a sentient being, or at least has sentient aspects (gods) that can manifest physically
>Universes are at war with eachother to steal heat and extend their existence.
>"Demons" are actually the gods of other universes attempting to infiltrate, sabotage, and steal from their enemies.
>Human beings are constantly producing mana from their souls, which subtly reverses entropy.
>When the gods/demons discover this, humans become their main currency/resource over which they struggle and negotiate with eachother over.
>The gods in our universe are all either dead or regenerating their physical forms from massive wounds inflicted on them when the precursors got fed up with being cosmic poker chips and waged war on them (which also resulted in their own extinction).

All this would be a mid-way revelation for a kind of sci-fantasy setting.

Why are gods such dicks, every time they exist in almost all mythology ?

Is there any setting with a Dr.Manhattan kinda godly figure ? A god who just don't care about things around him but who would still be able to discuss philosophy with ?

Metron
Boccob
Mellifleur

The standard 4e Forgotten Realms pantheon, but I did make one major change due to something I read in the 5e DMG - Zehir is actually the Mulhorandi/Egyptian god Set, not that it’s widely known.

During the Spellplage he recreated the Imaskari barrier and everyone without one of their "Manifestations" currently on the ground was sealed outside once again, hence their disappearance. While Bast/Sharess is unaffected due to her connection to Sune and such, the Horus-Re manifestation is outright killed by Set while Mulhorandis being destroyed. Set then sets himself up under the name of Zehir, and takes Sebek as a Exarch (also under a different name) when he realizes he overlooked the crocodile god still had a material presence in the world at the time.

Cosmology is the reason why anything is anything in your setting. There's a balance between autismal levels of microdetails and broader swathes of description that inform what you go on make up as you play. Otherwise you're just making a pointless mess where anything can happen and that's boring. It's when the rules of the world are broken or bent that drama is created.

I would have actually pulled a triple twist by incorporating 3e lore so that you could have Sseth pretending to be Set pretending to be Zehir.