Here is my thinking on the deities of Heartbreaker.
The world was designed by rational beings and thus behaves according to rational logic. However, as multiple beings were involved in the creation of the world what is rational and logical shifts depending on which gods have authority at that time and place. The world is currently dragging its way out of a major shift in godly authority. This is due to the god war which brought down the last great empire on the world.
Basically when you support your god it allows you to "break" the current laws of physics as you now operate, to some extent, within your gods preferred paradigm. There would need to be some touch points though, things like time and space would need to still work and the rest of the laws of physics would exist, but on a sliding scale of godly preference. There would need to be some sort of groundwork, that is agreed upon by all the creator gods.
When you are in an area where your god/pantheon does not control supplication difficulty is increased...or you take mental stress to reduce it(max you can take brings it down to baseline). Supplication has no direct skill. You must create advantages to have a bonus on the roll. Supplication advantages are ritual, cleansing, sacrifice...and need to think on this. Miracles are basically when physics goes sideways to your advantage for a scene...maybe, perhaps there are certain stunts you can only get through supplication to your deity, or deities.
The rules of gods that I have worked out.
Gods control a raw, primal, creative magic.
Gods can be born or/and made.
Gods can die(this was a surprise when they discovered this, some interaction of gods and their creation allows for this outcome).
Gods cannot unmake something gods have made.
Gods do not(or cannot) take thier gifts back.
That is what I have, so far. Now the questions I must ask. Is morality external to the gods, or created by the gods? If external, what enforces it? If the gods created it, what makes one morality better or less relative than any morality created by man? What are the ramifications of gods that work the way I ave outlined them working? I am going to keep working on this, but I would love to hear your thoughts on the answers to these or any other questions you might raise.
Having read most of the conversation on Google+ and this post, I had several thoughts. Building off of a Moorecock's work, the gods could simply be part of a larger, ever-changing world that is several steps above our physical world; the Cosmic Balance serves to lay a ground work for creation (immutable, normal,. or standard physics) with which all beings are expected to comply -- including the gods.
ReplyDeleteThis also strikes me as an interesting view of the paladin; something akin to the eternal champion. The paladin may fight on the side of a god or gods, but the paladin ultimately champions that balance and the idea of humanity. I can think of two very influential fantasy settings where the main struggle is between order/stability/rigidity and chaos/instability/change; in these works, humans are portrayed as the race between, the race that can choose which side to serve, being either equal parts law/chaos or having been created by the balance itself as the ultimate expression of harmony between the two opposing forces.
As far as druids go, I played in a campaign where an evil priest argued with a party druid that either: (1) the gods made everything and so the druid is worshipping a creation rather than its creator or (2) the gods are born of nature, and thus just as much part of the food chain as any other creature, therefore their goals are as natural as that of any other creature at the top of the food chain. Building off the second assumption, druids could be seen as being more mundane and secular than priests and paladins, less concerned with the cosmic balance and the gods than with day-to-day existence; similar to druids in DarkSun, who were protectors and mediators of the land and nature.