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Post by The1True on Jul 11, 2019 12:06:12 GMT
Some important religions and legendary heroes/villains
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Post by The1True on Jul 11, 2019 12:10:51 GMT
The Groundwater Deity:
Malrex- What's your thoughts about a groundwater deity? A forgotten one
Ice- you should expand this idea a bit. It sounds good but I am not exactly sure what you mean. Do you mean like a talking puddle of water that you can only access by digging down to the water table? One time I watched a video on the water table and that shit blew my fucking mind.
Malrex- Heh...ya, sorta threw that idea out there without an explanation...my brain has been hosed the last few weeks.
Basically--I have an idea and maps drawn up for a 'cliff' adventure with a series of tunnels. Deep within is a strange portal that allows entry into a temple/shrine of a forgotten Groundwater Deity...figured it could maybe be a short adventure if needed.
Ice- That's a super cool idea, I really like it! I would love to see a map. In my gooberish brain, it would be most interesting if instead of teleporting to the deity's shrine, you could just find the talking puddle groundwater deity itself and have a converstaion with it about anything that's on your mind. Maybe it knows some crazy spells and secrets of the DM or players choosing.
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Post by The1True on Jul 11, 2019 12:15:52 GMT
malrex I'd love to hear more about this Groundwater Deity. Especially since I uh rather rashly coopted him/her/it into my Bowmans Pastures settlement. Hope I havn't gone too far off the reservation there? I'm thinking some good synergy with your cliff-dungeon idea...
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Post by DangerousPuhson on Jul 11, 2019 12:22:17 GMT
Don't forget Zirax, the god of cabbage (from the minor adventure site that was posted: Minor Site 2 - Shrine of the Small God)
As for the groundwater deity, if we go with the whole badlands at the base of a giant mountain and adjacent to a large dried up body of water (see my comment in the Setting Geography/Placement thread), then it fits really well. The god probably retreated into the earth (scared into the ground by whatever wiped out the ancients?), and took the whole sea/lake/ocean/whatever with him when he did, leaving the place dried and desolate.
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Post by The1True on Jul 11, 2019 18:36:39 GMT
Oh yeah, the cabbage god is pretty good. Thought he was a little wacky at first, but I'm warming up to him. That's a staple and very important crop to a medieval peasant!
I like the way you tie that groundwater story with a pretty bow! Now how do we fit Arnaug's waterfall into that?
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Post by DangerousPuhson on Jul 11, 2019 19:16:09 GMT
I like the way you tie that groundwater story with a pretty bow! Now how do we fit Arnaug's waterfall into that? What if Arnlaugs is a north settlement, near/on the mountain so it still gets some of that rainfall, while Bowmans is far south, inside the twisting rifts? Exiles set off south trying to find water beyond the rifts (because there was once a great sea/ocean beyond it), but instead settled at Bowmans when they met the groundwater god.
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Post by grutzi on Jul 18, 2019 19:38:46 GMT
Idea I had after writing the last post in the Fort Havensparr thread:
Ages ago there was a great Water/Ocean/Sea/Waves/Life God that thrived in this region. To the south lay a big sea which was the central Nexus of power for this great god. The Vanished worshiped him/her, for the ocean was one of the pillars of their culture and wealth. Then the apocalypse of the Vanished happened and the Ocean was gone in an instant. Vaporised, vanished, teleported away ... who knows. This event was hard enough on the Water God but as it happened the Vanished all but lost faith in him that day ... all of them ... at the same time ... a whole cilvilization losing faith in their god. This strain proved too much even for a major deity and the Water god died that day under great pains. His body, soul and mind shattered by the event, his legacy forgotten by all. Now gods don't just die like you and me of course ... the death of a deity shakes the world and changes it forever ... and so it was with the badlands and the wastelands to the south.
So maybe all the crazy faith and divinity related shenanigans in the region (Bowmanns pastures, Fort havensparr, groundwater deity, ...) can all be traced back to the dead god. Imagine the whole area is flooded with some kind of slightly tarnished, even corrupted divine energy ... like fallout radiation after a nuclear power plant or atomic bomb goes off. The fallout of the death of a great god ages ago.
Everyone in the region in some way feels that. In some areas the energy is stronger (maybe a part of the dead god lies there?) so there are manifestations of faith and divinity in some form. In other areas there's just some random "noise" of divine energy.
We could use this to put some "houserules" or rather regional rules regarding faith and magic into the setting and to explain why some of the stranger things are happening right here.
- Other gods have a hard time communication or sending divine energy trough the "static" of the region so foreign priests and clerics have a harder time casting spells or doing miracles.
- If a person has a strong faith in something he/she may manifest some part of the faith into the world by drawing onto the higher divine energy level of the region
- "Small gods" (cabbage god?) are formed rather easily here when enough people believing in roughly the same thing gather together
- Some beings could sipphon off the energy to grow and change in unatural ways (the thing under bowmanns? legendary figures of myth?
- Distinct parts of the dead god are still active in the region (Groundwater deity)
I think this could help differentiate our setting from others and give it a rather distinct feel in that area.
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Post by DangerousPuhson on Jul 19, 2019 13:31:19 GMT
The question becomes: how do we communicate this without lengthy exposition? That is, how do we show the players this in a way they'll understand beyond "your divine magic is funky here, you don't know why until an old man explains that long ago a water god died etc..."?
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Post by The1True on Jul 19, 2019 20:59:50 GMT
I am loving that dead god idea. Let's jam with it for a bit before we set it in stone.
I don't think we have to write a novel to explain the divine magic deadening effects. Just add it to the list of Wasteland hazards. That said, why are we dumping on everyone but clerics of the Groundwater Deities and Small Gods here? Especially at low levels, that's pretty harsh. No one likes having there PC nerfed, especially for an entire campaign... Could this be something that builds up and becomes a serious problem for high level clerics of outsider deities later on? Or are you suggesting we trade a bit of spell-casting/undead turning for a roll on the table of weird regional divine surges?
I'm big on the Vanished being hyper-prehistoric. Could this oceanic deity be a god of the Primal Soup? A true god of creation?
I think it's important we know what dried up this ocean. Natural disaster? War in the heavens? The Vanished tinkering with powers beyond their control? The invasion of the Things from Beyond (they're going to need to get fleshed out soon, currently they're some kind of goo(?)). This will have a bearing on all kinds of artifacts, infrastructure and dungeon dressing.
I love the way this becomes an explanation for beings of exceptional power and instances of the weird and the unnatural in the region. That allows us to maybe not go gonzo, but definitely throw in some technicolour fantasy awesomeness from time to time.
But yeah, a lot of this context that we're coming up with at the moment never has to be published. It just gives us all the pieces of the puzzle and allows us to reveal the greater picture for those willing to thoroughly explore, bit by bit. Also, I'd love to support our product with enriched web content for DM's who need more backstory. Meanwhile, in the printed product we stick to terse description which means that frequently, weird things will happen 'just because' and maybe answers are out there to be found.
But yeah, this dead god really brings things together deliciously. Think of the waters receding at the end of the flood revealing the dead god's bones, which became the tortured rocks of the wastes. There's some real creative potential in there...
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Post by The1True on Jul 29, 2019 19:01:16 GMT
The blight that infested the Vanished is what killed their ocean deity. They summoned it to help or perhaps it went to them willingly in their need, but the blight was too much even for a god. Its death throws destroyed most of the infestation and the Vanished fled to other planes or into hibernation.
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