Ponderous Notes on Gods, Religions & Similar Creatures

-
There's a special conceit in Erce concerning gods - They are strictly for humans (and their related lawful races such as Dwarves and Halflings).

In D&D, it is common to find racial pantheons - The elves have their own pantheon, the dwarves, orcs and oozes and jellies all have their own racial deities.

I am not going that direction, because it's not what I am observing in European mythology as being the case and I think running with this a bit not only plays well into the themes I have set out for Erce, but also makes for some interesting angles for a game world - Curiously, given that I am cripping earth mythology here, I haven't seen much of this in fantasy.

So anyway, in places mythologies like the Nordic and Celtic ones, we see that gods is generally something connected to humans. Other beings like trolls, elves, dwarves, etc don't enjoy their favour or patronage. The supernatural races are as often, if not opposed, then subjugated to the gods. Moreover, some of these races are in fact beings of similar stature to the gods and in direct competition or conflict with them. Ie, the jotuns, though generally on the losing end, are often of similar power to the Aesir - But they are not gods and a big part of that is that they have no real relationship with humanity. Likewise with the Tuatha Dé Danann vs the Fomorians.

A god.

So in Erce, there are classes of immortal beings and gods are just one of a handful of these.  What sets the gods apart is that they are the only Lawful group and, having ascended from humanity, also have a special relationship with humanity.

The Sidhe Lords who rule the wilds are another group (and they are many), as are the Demon Princes of the Nether Realms, the Angels who live in (and as) the Stars of Heaven, the imprisoned Elder Horrors of the Underworld, the Dragons in Erce and even the transcendent, though little-understood, Elemental Elder Gods who made the world.

Not a god.

Also  worth noting is that, save for these Elemental Elder Gods, the gods of Erce are not transcendent beings in the way gods are often envisioned in fantasy. They are, like the Olympians and Aesir, quite fallible and not at all above liasoning with mortals out of petty human desires. You can stumble across an old god in the woods just on a walkabout - If you should happen to cross or insult one when so met, they will fuck up your shit. But equally so, if you are an epic high level adventurer, with just the right kind of bane, a clever strategy and some mythic magic items to amp your lucky dice rolls in the right setting - You might just fuck up the god's shit instead and exact a powerful boon from him in exchange for letting him off the hook. 

Gods may be immortal, epically larger than life and have cosmic world spanning spheres of influence over metaphysical themes - But they have hit dice, AC and personality flaws. And there are definitely beings in the Monster Manual, like the most powerful dragons on Erce (some who have their own cults and territories), that most of them would like to avoid meeting in a fight.

All this also means there are no real 'evil' gods in Erce (with a few insane-in-the-membrane exceptions) - That role is reserved for other cosmic groupings like demons and elder horrors. This also nicely circumvents the question of why a community would ever worship a god that openly self-identifies as 'evil'. They don't, cause those guys don't exist (of course, underground demonic cults and chaos clans abound, but that is not quite the same).

Guys like Morgoth are hard to find in Erce.
In general, playing up lawfulness vs Chaos and setting aside good/evil for a long stretch means I can play with the gods I do have in interesting ways. Some, especially the Old Gods, are not necessarily friendly to humanity. They can be egotistical, demanding, cruel, callous, vain and all the things humans are - and have goals that have little relevance to humanity and vice versa. And certainly some of them can show up as the antagonist of adventures. But 'evil'? Nosirree. These guys are all on the side of Law after all - A man may make war on his lawful human neighbour, but if chaotic trolls showed up, they'd join forces to defeat them first before returning to their own dispute. And so it is as well with the gods.

Up next - A blurp on the three different kinds of pantheons, how they are worshipped and how each pantheon and its adherents interpret the conflict between Law and Chaos.

Comments

Post a Comment

Top 6 most viewed posts in the last 12 months

The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

-
I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...
Read more

The 3 Mile Hex - The Natural Unit for Exploration

-
Image
There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...
Read more

In Praise of "Black Box" D&D

-
Image
when it comes to non-Advanced D&D, The internet, and in particular the OSR blogosphere, has deserved praise galore for the B/X sets for D&D. And whilst not quite as enthusiastic, the Mentzer editions for those Basic and Expert sets also get plenty of praise for its art and way of introducing the game. The Holmes set also has its fair of passionate fans. And of course the original brown booklets themselves. Of newer releases, the Rules Cyclopedia also has a large following of fans. One release that hardly ever gets a mention is the 1991 'black box', by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning. Actually, the Rules Cyclopedia was published as a sort of companion to this set. Together  they represents the fifth and final edition of non-advanced D&D. "The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" also labelled "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" It's short, 64 page booklet, so much the same as its predecessors, comes with a simple dungeon m...
Read more

Addendum: Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks

-
Image
My recent meditations on roll under ability checks and rant against the D20 unified mechanic has generated a bit of commentary and further clarified my own thinking on the matter. This post is an addendum to my  Using Ability Checks in B/X  article, seeking to further explicate why the "Roll Under" ability check truly is the best of ability checks. Earlier today, during my delvings into the blogosphere, I came across this box from  Quarrel & Fable , a Fighting Fantasy spinoff: First thing that struck me was how similar it was to my proposed resolution for Ability Checks . And secondly, it combined those thoughts with my memories of the old Fighting Fantasy  [FF] gamebooks and set my mind spinning into that cross section and how much I always liked the elegant simplicity of the FF mechanic. The best part about doing a post involving Fighting Fantasy is the chance to showcase some of the brilliant art in the gamebooks Now, I've given reasons already in prev...
Read more

How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

-
Image
It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides ...
Read more

The Fighter Across All Editions of TSR D&D

-
Image
Ok, it's time to get back to elf-games. And why not look at the class that is simultaneously the most beloved and under-appreciated class in the history of D&D? I was going to include assessments of WotC fighters too, but honestly, they end up being so different, and embedded into different systems, that it's like comparing apples and oranges. I would still like to look at the 3e fighter, as that has at least a little continuity with TSR D&D but I think that's for a different post on why feats aren't so bad after all and have a place in all versions of D&D... Moving ON , let's dig in: OD&D : Fighting-Men, as they are called. They get d6 hit die like everyone else, but they start at HD 1+1 and gain more HD as they level than clerics or magic-users (at level 10, the fighter has 10+1, cleric 7+2 and and magic-user 7). They have no armor or weapon restrictions. For weapons, this only matters in regards to which weapons are typically magical (swords, figh...
Read more