Gods: The Matter of Creation (Worldbuilding 2)

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Greetings, and welcome back to Of Gods and Gamemasters, a website about building worlds for speculative fiction, and various other roleplaying game topics. This episode is “Gods: A Matter of Creation” in which we begin to explore what sort of world the gods we came up with last episode would create. You should probably go read or watch episode 1, “Gods: Filing Off the Serial Numbers” if you haven't yet.

I'm Jack Kellum, @JackGogsbane on twitter. Support me on Patreon if you like what I do. I accept tips on Ko-Fi as well.

With the boring pay the bills stuff out of the way, on to the content.

Last episode we came up with 11 gods, making a pantheon from deities stolen from a wide variety of real world sources, and getting rid of the evidence, so we could use the bits we like without the baggage.

As a quick recap, we have Saevios, king of the gods, god of storms; his wife Caela, queen of heaven, goddess of knowledge and peace; Tellus, lord of the earth, god of nature and living things; his wife Marea, lady of the seas, goddess of the waters and grief, who acts as a guide to the afterlife, a psychopomp; Solis, the angry sun, god of the sun, as well as disease. He is lord of the underworld, where the sun rests in the hours of night; Ignia, mistress fire, goddess of forge, fire, healing; Lunos, the genderfluid non-binary moon deity, god of the moon, night time, mystery; and their long term partner in crime, Vulpos, the everchanging, god of trickery, shapeshifters, and magic.

On the other side of things, we have Interitus, god of war and tyranny, with his hangers on, Rixa, goddess of strife, and Metus, the nightmare, god of terror.

So what kind of world does that give us? Let's start at the beginning. Actually, like most myths, let's start just before the beginning.

We'll riff off the most common situation at the dawn of time. There's not exactly nothing...more like a formless something. Darkness and void, or Ginnungagap, a misty nothing, according to the Norse, or a vast, endless ocean. That last may actually be the most common, found in some Native American myths, some Hindu myths, the Japanese creation tale, and others. All of it, though, is basically the same: Chaos. Many religions also have primordial creatures predating the gods, although we'll keep that to a minimum here. No need for actual titans, as you'll see. (There's tons of things you could slide into this space if you want to, though, from Fomor to Great Old Ones...if there's a meaningful difference.)

In keeping with Saevios as king, we'll make him creator too, though that isn't always the case.

So. A lot of creator gods just wake up alone. No explanation is needed for where they came from. So we won't give one here. (Having a secret explanation in your world's hidden lore could be really cool though.) As I walk you through this, keep in mind that I'm following what I believe to be the character of the gods I've chosen, how they'd react in each situation. If you choose different gods, they act differently. Basically try to put yourself in their place and roleplay them as they progress.

Anyway. Saevios wakes up in the dark, floating in an endless, formless nothing. Let's have him make things storm god style...by getting mad. So, angry at the silence, and being alone, he slams his hands together and yells. The sound is so loud, and the sparks from his hands striking together, so bright, that the first thunder and lightning occur, and purely as a byproduct, the chaos separates into Sky, Earth, and Water, which also wake up, as Caela, Tellus, and Marea.

Like most such stories, they aren't alone. Out in the dark, something else wakes up. The demon-dragon thing we talked about in the first episode. We'll call it, Invidia, which means Envy, or Spite. Invidia wakes up angry. It hates itself, it hates everything else, but most of all, it hates the light and noise that Saevios just made and the noise the gods make talking to each other. (Shades of both Tiamat and Grendel, there). It goes after Saevios, tries to kill him. There's a huge battle, Saevios wins, and tears Invidia in half. Blood spatters everywhere, and from then on, spawns hateful monsters. Saevios tosses the bits out into the dark, and they land in what D&D would consider the Abyss. Once there, from the parts is born Interitus, first child of Spite. He then crafts his own servant children from more of the remains, and that gives us Rixa and Metus. We can clear up more cosmology later.

Meanwhile, back at Creation, Saevios and Caela work together to create a permanent storm to protect the outside of the world, mostly holding out the monsters. Maera and Tellus get busy making life. Both couples end up with kids. Solis and Ignia are the children of the sky, with Lunos and Vulpos the children of the earth and waters. Just riffing off fairly common mythic connections there. Pantheon families often make for more interesting conflicts than unrelated ones.

So at this point we have a world. But we haven't explained where the sapient species came from (whichever ones we want) or specific monsters (although the blood splatter makes a darn good general origin.

Let's stay pretty generic, cuz this is just an example piece. We don't need to explain every species all at once, just the ones with a big impact on our world. In general, a lot of monsters, especially aberrations and monstrosities, come from the blood of Invidia. But where do our PC's come from, and who are they?

We can go with the basic D&D species to start: human, halfling, dwarf, elf, and half elf. Most of the time, in D&D, the elves come first, followed by the dwarves. I'm not trying to get super special here, so we'll stick with that. We'll say that Tellus and Marea made the elves together, to look after their natural environments, which is why you have say, wood elves and sea elves. Dwarves come a good bit later, when Ignia needs helping hands. She crafts them specifically to obtain resources for her, and help her craft. Looking at the world, Saevios sees it's mostly empty, and he and Caela create humans to live where elves and dwarves do not. Lunos and Vulpos collaborate to make halflings: some of the time simple farmers, the rest of the time thieves and tricksters, they partake of both their god's natures. They live amongst any of the others.

Half elves come way later, as do other crossbreeds. Aasimar and tieflings have pretty much the same explanation in every setting, though they might stick out in this one.

As for Orcs, goblinoids, kobolds, etc? Members of the other races twisted by the evil of the blood of Invidia. Still doesn't make them inherently evil, but explains the urge, maybe, and the way others perceive them.

Dragons, on the other hand...here's where carefully crafted comes in. Interitus makes the chromatic dragons from pieces of Invidia, then Saevios and his family construct metallics to combat them.

A special mention here:Yuan-ti or some other kind of serpent folk. I really think these are the main servants of Interitus, and secretly behind the fall of the great Empire.

Which brings us very naturally to the end of this topic, and the beginning of the next.

Next Episode will Be titled: “Gods: Rise and Fall Of Empire”