Hey Veeky Forums

>How do you make a cool/interesting Cosmology
Okay. So. You know Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Like how the entire universe is really just a shadow - a distorted image of pure, perfect concepts that are literally projected into 3D space?
Make that your setting's laws of physics.

From there, you can make your creation myth as poetic and unusual as you want because it's literally involving the intersection of concepts. You don't need to worry about gay shit like "the big bang" and "realism," because your setting's creation began in some higher plane where that shit means nothing.

Like, let's look at Norse mythology for a second. Ymir isn't really the world; he's not made of dirt and water and an iron core or any of that shit. He's some being from a higher plane of existence who was killed by Odin and his brothers; it's his projection/shadow that are the actual world.

Are humans really just maggots of the divine corpse? Well, if your setting is rather grimdark, and humans are making it even more-so, then that would be on theme.

This works really well if your setting has a spirit realm, only instead of literally everything having a spirit, it's the other way around, where every spirit has a physical manefestation (for example, you are just the physical manifestation of your soul).

My setting is basically half undead, so it needed a suitable creation myth.

>In the beginning, there was ONE.
>And ONE was alone.
>so ONE made itself into the world, and in doing so died.
>Its Bone became the firmament of the world, the earth and stone and law beneath.
>It's Blood became the vivacity of the world, spawning life and sea and hearts in men.
>It's Blight became the sickness of the world, eating away at bone and blood to ensure a future.
>Its Blaze became the mystery of the world, lighting the stars and burning in the minds of life.
>Its Brume became the mourning of the world, the cinders of the divine corpse that made the world mortal and true.
>And so ONE became Five.
>Bone became Ramatra Singh, the White God, the Grand Cenotaph.
>Blood became Kauvra'Sott, the Red God, the Prime Carnifex.
>Blight became Nag Shol Lun, the Black God, Liege of Rot and Ruin.
>Blaze became Tvenasz Set, the Blue God, the Starlight Gyre.
>Brume became Olakura, the Grey God, the True Crematrix.
>The world was a corpse, and in its shadow there was NONE.
>So NONE, the Ghostgod, the Antithesis, looked on.
>And so it was.

Ironically, this has very little to do with the day to day lives of the setting, which is set in a relatively 1700's technology level, but sometimes you want some metaphysics.

Does anyone want to hear more about it? I'd love to see what people would think of it, I've been trying to put it together enough to run a game for a while now.

Man wanks off into the pool of the cosmos, thus creating monstergirls

>My first rule is, NEVER telling anything concrete to players out of the game about cosmology, they are only getting confusing, often contraditory myths, legends and shreds of truth. Its theirs to piece together.
Good DM confirmed. I generally have the same rule.

I've gone though like 8 cosmologies and none of them really appeal to me yet. Here's a short list of changes I've made;

>Generic 'all the Gods created the universe' meme
>Actually demons made the universe and the Gods are the lawful invaders
>All the planets are Gods, the primary God is the planet where the setting takes place
>The natural world existed before the Gods; but the Gods created people
>The natural Order is now instead the Gods
>The Natural Order is the Bureaucracy of Heaven from Chinese myth that runs everything

I'm stuck at about that last point and haven't moved on.

Tell me user. I may or may not take your idea for myself

Entirely irrelevant.
Nobody gives a shit about that kind of stuff.
Well, nobody who actually cares about a good story.

In olden times, magic was but a foolish superstition held by the feeble minded, a narrative tool used by tricksters and other manipulators to make themselves seem greater than they were. And thus, a hundred cycles of Creation, Destruction and Salvation passed without magic and without change. This we call the Age of Equilibrium

Then, at the end of one such cycle - or at the beginning? who can tell where a circle begins and ends other than its creator... - Salvation left a crack in the fabric of the world. But what could exist beyond the world itself? Beyond all of existence? Nothing existed outside the world, and through the cracks, Nothing entered the world to become part of it. Through Nothing, came change. The first Fading ravaged that cycle and only through Salvation was it halted. Halted, not undone, for every cycle saw Nothing return and Fading taking place. What Salvation returned from the Fading, came back changed, perverted. Lands had their lakes replaced with acid sludge, mountains grew above the clouds and into Heaven itself, trees grew leaves on their roots... This we call the Age of Entropy.

Then came the Dark Ones, who returned as grotesque parodies of Men, with their flesh growing beyond its skin. Covered in robes of black to hide their shame, they were the first to teach Mankind the art of commanding the body beyond its natural limits, how to focus flesh, bone and blood into vile supernatural power. Thus, the Dark Arts came into being, and magic was a myth no more.

But alas, to use the Dark Arts means to succumb to them. With every spell extorted from their own bodies, more cancerous growths spouted from the skin of these dark magi. Slowly, they were consumed by a mindless hunger for flesh, human flesh, until they collapsed under the weight of their pitch black tumors. This we call the Dark Age.

The Dark Arts and those who practiced them were shunned, and the Order was formed, dedicated to purging the world of all dark magi - "sinners", who adored the flesh and its powers. The Order sought to ascend from the prison of the flesh, to leave behind their bodies and attain true personhood as beings of Soul and Soul alone. From their endeavors, the Holy Arts were born - the art of letting one's Soul travel outside the boundaries of its body to shape reality and see the unseen.

But every Soul still needs its body to remain complete. As the acolytes of the Order ascended and their Holy prowess grew, their bodies withered and decayed from neglect. Soon, they haunted their sacred halls as hollow spectres, wielding potent spells but devoid of any other memory. As time passed, the spectres lost their human shapes, turned into will'o'wisps and faded away from existence, taking their secrets with them. This we call the Lost Age, as many great Holy miracles were created by these first acolytes, but lost when they faded away with their knowledge unrecorded.

Now, Nothing is gnawing at the world once more, and with it the ancient magic arts have resurged. They say our Savior shall reveal her face to us soon, and usher in a new cycle. They say she is on her way to Hyldholm, to slay a terrible beast that has ravaged that kingdom. May her aim be true and her sword arm be steady.

---

The Holy Scroll of Creation

Alright then!

So the first thing about the world is that it basically splits into two halves. You've got the East, where things are more traditional victorian fantasy, where people have big fancy noble titles, people wear fancy hats and moustaches, and everyone HATES the west.
In the west, which is the primary focus of the setting, undead happen. No one is sure EXACTLY why A combination of the five gods feuding, and NONE passively creating them but literally everyone will rise from their graves at some point after death, amnesiac but with echoes of their former lives occasionally showing up.

The important thing to note about this is that it doesn't matter what condition the body is in when this happens. You WILL reanimate, even if you are a pile of dust (Which makes dust wights, who are cool). In addition, if you are in contact with other corpses or living things during your reanimation, there's a pretty good chance you'll kickstart their reanimation too, leading to a bunch of zombies in a fused together mass of bodies, who usually go crazy from the multiple brains and thought processes. Because of this, fucking with corpses is REALLY taboo, and also pretty dangerous.
There are also Coldflame undead, which are what happens when people try to use the Blaze to artificially induce undeath, with the grand goal of becoming a Lich, someone who is undead and retains their memory.

The five gods themselves are mostly forgotten by modern society, but the West is basically a giant dumping ground for all of the East's social malcontents, criminals, pariahs, like a kind of horrific undead-filled Australia. Occasionally they pick some people to use as proxies for their constant war for position, or get discovered and worshiped.

why wouldn't people in the west just maim the bodies of the dead and tie them up in their coffins so they're not a threat once they revive?

See the problem with that is twofold. Firstly, reanimated undead ARE intelligent. Quite a few major movers and shakers in the waste are undead, and a decent portion of the population of most cities. And secondly, they merge with practically any living material that can be reanimated, so a coffin just gets added to the mass.

And lastly, if somehow they no longer have a body at all, they still reanimate, just into the surrounding landscape. Which is usually a Really Bad Time, because things just got very Shadow of the Colossus, very quickly.

I dunno, this sounds unsustainable over more than a decade.

I think part of the point is that occasionally, catastrophes will happen where giant monsters will rise out of the earth if people aren't around to do something about it. A catastrophe every couple of years half a continent away won't do too much, especially if there are intelligent undead cities around to keep the order. It doesn't necessarily benefit them to have unintelligent monster rampages around, either, they'll be double-killed and have to go through the process again, losing more and more of themselves each time.

And if it's that easy to disrupt the status quo (just kill some people and tamper with their bodies), then there's some reason that it hasn't happened. Maybe the West is patrolled by druids, maybe the East operates colonial forts full of mercenaries to search and clean? Maybe there are super powerful wizards who basically spend all their time sending kill teams into the West to disrupt the growing evil before it spreads over the continent?

Sounds like a workable setting to me, honestly.

eventually there's gonna be so many people (undead or otherwise) that there won't be room for anyone anymore. imagine if EVERY SINGLE PERSON who ever died came back. shit would get crowded real fast.

Several maggots appeared on the corpse of some mysterious giant, collapsed in an endless plane of gray ash.

Those maggots ate away at the body, creating rivers and oceans where their chasms filled with fetid blood, and mountains where they piled the detritus.

The maggots got so engorged with the dead gods meat they grew strong and became the ancestors to man. Slowly magic seeped into the body from the ashen planes, turning the blood to ocean, flesh to earth, and bone to steel.

Today no one really knows they're living on the rotten back of some god that began dead.

In the beginning, the Gods came into the void and spoke the first word, which became the first name, which became the world.

With permanence given to the chaos, the Dragons came, raging against the Gods for tainting their existence with self

With the world, came the Giants, who forged and molded the immature world with their hands, giving the world shape. The Dragons now raged against the Giants, for giving their accursed self, vile form. The Giants and Dragons warred for eons. This was the Age of Toil, where magic was formed by the Giants from the ether, where the Gods formed their four tier heirarchy to oversee the world, and where the first mortals came into being in this freshly worked world, and where the Dragons learned to lie.

...

There's no proof of how the world came into being. The only things pointing to it are myths and legends that are contradictory, at best.

However, what my players DO know is that long, long ago, there was a race of all-powerful beings that lived forever unless killed via unnatural causes. They're called the "Ulri." The Ulri had a high council of rulers, each embodying a certain aspect of creation and life. War, peace, prosperity, fertility, and rain, to name a few.

But from the folds between dimension and time came.. Something. It's unknown if the man was the product of the magic or if the magic was the product of the man, but an Ulri, Krumenthangr, appeared that bequeathed magic unto the Ulri, giving them even more power than thought possible and gaining himself a seat at the high council as the lord of Magic. With this hindsight, their middling infrastructure could grow, but they needed labor. And so Man was created via magical means as a slave race, controlled by the Ulri and kept from magic as much as possible. They would serve without question.

However, soon the humans began to rebel against their masters, and war began between the Ulri and independent rebel human groups. Krumenthangr, having a change of heart, gave magic to the humans as well. The Ulri panicked and sent their entire race and civilization packing up, magically teleporting entire cities overnight to a distant world out of the reach of the now powerful humans. Man was left to be alone on the world they had dominated, the magic they had once had taken from them again by the sudden disappearance of the Lord of Magic.

Krumenthangr, despite being harassed and called out for aiding man, was not approached. He was too powerful at the time, and none risked the wrath of someone who could incinerate you with a thought. He went down to the human world and cut off a piece of his soul, magically infused and growing, planting the seed for a magical tree at the heart of the world.

The gods were furious with Krumenthangr for aiding their worst enemies, despite their warnings not to do so. The other lords tried to kill him. But he and magic were tied together inseparably, so while his body could expire, his soul would manifest a new one. He could not die. They tried to imprison him, but the thickest chains could not hold him back, escaping or breaking free every time. The Lords tried something new.

They captured him and beat him again. This was nothing new. But then their strongest wizards split Krumenthangr's soul into four pieces, weakening his magic greatly and entrapping it within notable items in his possession. They tried to kill him again, but his soul would not die. As long as magic existed, he could not be killed.

So the Lords of the Ulri took his memory, shattering it and sending it into the lowest depths of his soul, and confined his soul to the human world, cursed to live as a mortal forever. Living out a normal human life and then dying, before being reincarnated with no memories of his past. The lords, to take measures against the growing magic and to prevent his return, created a barrier, preventing the magic from becoming stronger in the mortal realm, effectively locking them into a Low Fantasy-esque world despite the growing tree at the heart of the world, preventing it from growing. Like the Lord of Magic, it could not be destroyed by any known means, so it was locked away.

My players don't know it yet, but one of them is Krumenthangr's latest reincarnation.

>the universe has always existed and always will
>it is ever changing
>it spawned conscious life so that it will experience the cosmos and then by dying return that experience to the universe
>there are no "gods" or "demons", just beings with different degrees of awareness

>In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

That's the way to start a fucking story. Its got a concret starting point, a prime mover and enough mystery to satisfy. If the payers want to know how? Let them figure it out. If they want to know why? That's just an opportunity for more roleplay.

First off

What sort of people are telling the legend? This is where we get started

>Hunter Gatherers?
>Pastoralists?
>Horriculturalists?
>Fishermen?
>Farmers?

Hunter Gatherers will lean on the animistic side. Little or no hierarchy. Everyone is equal, Mitukaye Oyasin. Nature is generally benevolent even if it has the bizarre blue-and-orange morality like storms, disease, and predation.

Pastoralists lean monotheistic or henotheistic. They view their God as a big shepherd in the sky watching over the flock.

Horticultural peoples have a few major gods, about equal in number to the various things they grow. These cultures absolutely dislike nature, but still respect it. The bush is always encroaching on their humble villages and gardens in the clearing. Very hostile.

Fishermen naturally have a myriad of water deities alongside some culture gods. Snakes are heavily associated with water beings.

Farmers tend to be your classical polytheists. Their world is full of both righteous and capricious deities of both human culture and nature.

City slickers lose their connection to nature and one of three things occurs. A deeper, more philosophical religion gains a big following. After all, since most immediate needs are met they start pondering things that an offering to the grain god can't answer. The meaning of life, a purpose after death, the nature of consciousness and reality, etc. This or they come generally superstitious. Failing that or sometimes blended together you often get atheism.

Now consider the people in their environment.

>What is something that seems infinite to them?
Fishermen & sailors might claim there was an endless sea until land was fished up. Herders on the plains might say it was a big void like the night sky. Hunter gatherers in the desert might say sand.

The initial creation process will determine how magic works in your mythology.

youtube.com/watch?v=ASa08VbK5V4

I regards to how the different places handle it, this is basically just one continent, so its not a massive population problem. The reanimation happens once, so undead can get double-killed, which helps keep population down.
Additionally the East as a whole pretty much sees the entire undeath thing as a horrifying abomination, and torches any they can find. One of the major factions in the West is actually a bunch of overzealous crusaders from the East who've decided that just getting rid of the the undead on their side isn't enough, and are torching everyone.

Honestly the major mitigating factor is that the West itself is pretty damn inhospitable. The way in from the east is through a desert of volcanic ash (Which is apparently plausible, so says a geologist friend?) and just gets weirder from there. Also the really big and important note about the reanimation is that there's no guaranteed time that it happens. You could reanimate ten minutes after your death, or ten years, or ten centuries. It's pretty much completely random.

A blood offering? Speaking magic words like "let there be light" or "Aum"? Transferring "mana" into something they crafted?

From there we can get a rough idea of magic works. You're emulating the primordial act of creation.

Don't be afraid of making your legends weird and contradictory. That's how they evolve naturally. And feel free to let the myths of neighboring cultures bleed into your legends.

The themes of myth are important: you're telling the dreams and nightmares of a people. What do they love? Admire? Hate? Fear? This will help you with everything from heroes to villains to plotlines to monsters.

Christians ask themselves "what would Jesus do?".

Hindus ask "what would Rama do?".

Muslims ask "what would Mohammed do?".

That's how characters in legends inspire.

It's no coincidence that the Greek creation story ends - and history begins - when anthropomorphic gods win a great war with the forces of primordial chaos. They exile some and adopt others, but the Titanomachy is in many ways a story about human-like beings bringing order and civilisation to a wild and untamed cosmos. The mortal world tends to reflect the divine world in a similar way: humans bring order and civilisation to a wild and untamed nature. The allegories are usually pretty obvious.

I like this kind of shit user. Proceed please, you have my attention.

There are several thousand separate multiverses, each created by a Great Mother (beholder god) who acts like a big mana pump and refines material from the inner planes into creatures (the vast majority of which are failures or nonfunctional) and landscapes so that it can go to the material plane, and then concepts from the material plane are siphoned off and create the outer planes.

The Great Mothers are attended by the original beholders, who help maintain it, throw out failed creations and stuff like that.

The Great Mothers themselves were created by the random chaos of the eternal Far Realms.

In a sense, every multiverse is like a little petri dish.

In the multiverse containing humans and elves and all that d&d stuff (they are incredibly varied, although all Great Mothers and beholders are almost identical), the Illithid are trying to destroy the Great Mother and replace it with a machine that will enable them to seize complete power and bring order to the chaos of creation that their logical minds cannot handle.

Oh and some beholders are sent to the material plane so that the Great Mother can witness her creations, as her vision is shared with all of them (the Great Mother herself is eyeless, she can only sense through her beholder)

Obviously in the d&d multiverse most beholders are batshit insane but this is not actually very common in other multiverses, where they tend to act more like spectators do

This is awesome as fuck. I love undead and the concept of a body in any condition reanimating, as well as the dust wights, is definitely interesting.