Exchange of Realities

One of the best things about writing and gaming is that they take skill synergy like almost nothing else in the world does. No matter what you do or learn, odds are that some part of it can apply to the writing desk or the game table. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s obvious when you’re willing to think twisty, and sometimes it’s entirely unexpected.

Take biology. Micro, macro, medicinal, there’s a lot to work from—and there’s a lot to use. If you’re playing or writing in the real world, it helps you avoid slip-ups like putting polar bears and penguins on the same continent (seriously; someone in one of my writing classes pulled that at one point), having ferrets eating seeds exclusively… you get the idea. Not only that, if you want to do a storyline with some sort of biological threat, you know what you’re talking about. And of course, it can help you write convincing biologists, getting the jargon, the lab procedure and the material to something that doesn’t break a pro’s suspension of disbelief too much.

Then there’s biology in worldbuilding, particularly if you’re the type who sticks to ecosystems and how they work. While some people might settle for just creating newer and scarier predators, there are plenty of other things that a little knowhow can do: create prey animals as scary as the predators, figure out how the various species interact with each other when they’re not getting underfoot for travelers, estimate the impact of a given species on other species and figure out how to keep them from taking over, creating unique but logical behaviors for the critters to engage in and interesting little behavioral quirks—you get the idea. A little life science goes a long way.

Consider applying it to other sciences, particularly if you’re the kind who likes magical tech. People do this already, with things like car paint based on butterfly wings. But when magic gets involved, and when you’re willing to go microbiological, you can get a lot more variety. Consider, if you’ve played it, the City of the Ancients in Final Fantasy 7, where the architecture is very clearly inspired by conch shells. I’ve played a lot with the kinds of things you find inside a cell, like creating a transportation system based on motor proteins.

And every now and then, there’s taking something tangential and slapping it in. That’s one of the things I’ve had the most fun with; I once used the Inner Life of a Cell as a way to show people what a mindmeld with a vast and incomprehensible creature during interplanar transit might be like, I’ve named characters after enzymes because the names sounded cool, and I once had a character and three scenarios inspired by something I saw through a microscope during an experiment. It’s all about having an open mind and a little lateral thought.

Have you ever found new uses for biology in a story or a game? Share away!

Familiars: a perpetual presence on a character’s shoulder, not quite thinking in lockstep with the character but not entirely separate, either. I’ve written about familiars before. But that was about the familiar as a character in her own right; tonight, I’m going to talk about the familiar as an outgrowth of a character. (Needless to say, these techniques are best used by writers and by gamers under lenient GMs, as they assume the familiar and the character are being controlled by the same person.) Note: for purposes of this riff, I’m treating D&D paladin mounts and everything with a rating of 3+ dots in Exalted as a “familiar”, so don’t expect just small animals.

Of course, there’s the practical benefit to the familiar, whether that’s mechanical bonuses, sense-sharing, a spellcasting vector, an extra pair of eyes that can go places the character can’t, key-filching when the situation requires it, providing transportation, or curling up on someone’s lap (possibly even the character’s!) for a nice bout of cuddle-therapy. This one’s pretty simple to incorporate. If the character is accustomed to these advantages, we figure out how to express that; if not, we figure out how they learn. Pretty simple.

There’s also what the familiar’s species itself says about the character. Oftentimes, a warrior-type will be paired up with something large, regal and useful in a fight (horse, wolf, dragon, whatever), a spy will have something small and sneaky, a spellcaster will utilize something mysterious or symbolic, you get the idea. But you can also use an animal to play up an image contrast (giving a warrior a mouse or something similarly cute and semi-defenseless, for instance), to hint at yet unexplored facets to a character, to demonstrate a utilitarian mindset or a sense of drama, or to show that this character happens to be fond of this particular species.

And then there’s the care and upkeep of the familiar, how much said familiar sees that as its due, and what the owner thinks about it. These also vary; the familiars who can’t feed themselves are of course more justified in demanding assistance, though you wouldn’t know it to hear some who can and choose not to gripe. Others might insist on taking care of themselves more than they should, with corresponding responses from the owner. Protection also fits into this; in many cases, the owner will be far better than the familiar at keeping both of them alive.

While many people use familiars as being part of their owner, complete with similar personalities, differences in mindset between the familiar and the owner can provide a wealth of characterization and interest. Some people even deliberately design their familiars as foils to their characters, or find them acting as such (Shizuyo’s flamboyant nature, as contrasted with her human Amaya’s general emphasis on subtlety, was an accident, but one I found useful as time went on). This doesn’t just mean friendly bickering, either, though that’s always fun—one of my favorite uses for foil-familiars is having them do and say things their owner either isn’t allowed to or just plain wouldn’t do. And then there’s the natural conflict between the human and the animal’s instincts, particularly when trying to get a wild-raised familiar to behave in a civilization-appropriate manner. Even raised pets might have bad habits!

Any of these things can bring out aspects of the character that might otherwise be hidden. Give it a try!

I’m one of those people who tends to need to know how a world works ahead of time to function in it. Several questions an hour, most of the way through the session, poking and prodding until it all makes sense. But despite that, if given half a choice, any character I play is likely to be from as culturally terra incognita as I can get while still being acceptable within the game setting, and from many of the games I’ve seen I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard.

Why? What makes these not-yet-fleshed-out peoples so interesting?

One, it’s near impossible to get the cultures wrong. If they’re nothing more than outlines with a couple of general purposes, it takes a more than small amount of effort to come up with facts that don’t directly contradict what these people already are.

Two, the reason why they’re not fleshed out is as often as not because the GM’s not quite sure how to handle something with their particular schtick that isn’t making it pretty similar to a lot of other things that have displayed that schtick before. If you’re choosing them because of the schtick, you’ve probably got a decent image of how to play it anyway—and now you’ve got a lot of room to come up with how it manifests both directly in the area it encompasses and indirectly in related things. It leaves room for things like the semi-criminal culture making an explicit linguistic distinction between illegal-because-they-say-so and illegal-for-a-reason, or the race whose schtick includes being good with animals also being decent mediators (how else do you handle trying to keep the different species from gnawing on each other when you aren’t looking?) And of course, if this is a race/culture with schtick, that means you have a schtick to work with that’s unlikely to be duplicated by another (added bonus, right?) and if not, at some point your understanding of your culture will probably come in handy.

Three, even without an affinity for a specific racial/cultural/sub-cultural schtick, the act of creation is fun in its own right. While a role-playing game is at heart a collaborative endeavor, it’s easy to forget that in a lot of circumstances; after a while, the world’s defined enough that you’re mostly creating your own character, occasionally her relatives (depending on how plot-important they are) or contacts, but mostly just one person and one personal bubble worth of material. Even familiars and animal companions seem to vary; some people let you play your own, others insist on hanging on even to them. But if you’ve got carte blanche to offhand develop up a culture, that puts the ball back in your court and gives you a way to balance out what you can’t do.

For the worldbuilder looking for a creative outlet, the player looking to carve out a niche for her character, or the perfectionist trying not to run counter to the GM’s world, a race not yet fleshed out can be a golden opportunity. Have you ever gotten to try one?

While being able to assign a personality to an intelligent landform or building is a wonderful thing, we can’t neglect character development. Just because they’re inanimate by our standards doesn’t mean they can’t grow and change in their own right!

Photo courtesy of pale from stock.xchng

Some of the character development undergone by sentient location mirrors character development in more standard, motile characters. They interact with others, then grow and change according to those interactions. What they know about the world and how it works bumps up against how the world really works, and is confirmed or revised accordingly. Events, whether huge or seemingly insignificant, shake up their actions and affect their outlook. I’d expect these to be slower than the same character development processes in shorter-lived creatures when it’s a building doing the developing, and slower still in landforms than in buildings, but the overall process, once you account for mindset, shouldn’t be too different.

But there are other factors, mostly based on the fact that these are very long-lived characters with close ties to their physical form, innate structure, and purpose. These are likelier to have stronger, more reliable results, possibly over shorter periods of time than ‘organic’ character development would take.

Consider the natural processes common in today’s world, whether gradual or immediate. Glaciers cover land and then recede; rivers’ courses change, or they dig out canyons. Caves form and collapse; rock formations are carved out and then undermined by erosion. The flora and fauna of places move out, move back in, evolve or die out. What effect might this have on the location’s personality? One important question to ask is how tied the landform’s personality is to its physical form; when it undergoes changes, are they to the surface personality or to the underlying core? Does a forest replaced by a desert remember its thoughts working differently when it was a forest, or does it think this is how things have always been?

Buildings, on the other hand, were designed to be a certain way, and processes like aging or erosion that would merely change a landscape tend to actively damage the intelligence and sanity of a building. If a building seems to have a screw loose, odds are it literally has a few screws loose. Burning, or being flooded, can do interesting things to a building’s mindset. And when its operation depends on complex machinery that has been destroyed or neglected, well, unbalanced may be an understatement.

What happens when a building is repurposed? It’s a similar issue to what happens when a landform changes; is a purpose change superficial or nature-deep? This might depend heavily on whether a building’s intelligence is based on its construction or its contents; if it was built to be intelligent and its contents change, it’ll probably keep its original personality, but if its intelligence comes from what it houses, the change is going to be far deeper.

For more ideas, check out my riff on how gods are affected by changes in their domains; the principles are much the same.

Character development in intelligent locations can serve a number of purposes, including giving depth to the story and occasionally providing a plothook. What do you think?

Yesterday I talked about the factors that might affect a living building or sentient tract of land. Today, I’m going to get into what shapes the personalities of these amazing not-quite-creatures.

Photo courtesy of msjr from stock.xchng

The first step in determining a sentient location’s personality is its inherent nature. In the case of buildings, this is determined by the type of the structure and the purpose for which it was built. Castles built to withstand sieges will probably be more martial in temperament than, say, a thinking school, while a living market might be better at dealing with multiple inputs than a battle arena or more sympathetic than a prison, and a house might be both more willing and more able to anticipate the needs and feelings of its residents than most of the above. A sentient tract of land, on the other hand, wasn’t shaped deliberately towards a purpose (at least, not usually), and as a result is likelier to get its personality either from the kind of land formation it is or the magic/event which gave it thought. People whose worlds feature elemental systems might try to figure out what the dominant element in the location is and base the personality off the associated temperament, while others look at it in terms of fertility and habitability (so a high mountain might be aloof, an ocean long-thinking and preoccupied, a farmland warm and caring, or a desert prone to treachery). Bear in mind that there’s a lot of variety even in many of the kinds of landforms you’ll see; a cindercone volcano is likely to have a more explosive temper than a shield volcano, and a sandy desert might be more mercurial than a rocky desert. If there’s an event by which it was created, that’s often invoked, creating things like former battlefields that thirst for blood or god-touched grottoes that welcome and protect the faithful.

Then there are the creatures that call the place home. For most buildings, these will of course be the kinds of people they were built by, for or both, with their varying temperaments, and the building’s personality will reflect either its tenants or its personality clashes with said tenants. On the other hand, a land feature with its own mind is more likely than not to not have a sentient race as occupants, and thus its personality might be influenced more by its animal—or plant—occupants. Imagine a field that thinks like a herd of horses, or a forest like its pines—or if you’re feeling a little more quirky, what about a swamp whose personality is influenced by its swarms of small insects, or a still pool that’s starting to acquire an algal mindset. This can relate to contents as well (consider the difference between a library and an art museum), though that’s as likely as not to mesh more with original purpose.

One interesting question is how well it communicates with the characters. In general, people will expect buildings to be the most like their builders in thought process; overall, there will be more shared concepts and more similar thought processes than there might be with a different race/species’ sentient buildings, and those would be more similar to either set of builders than a place that was only briefly inhabited, or one that’s been left wild. Age might also be a factor; as buildings are generally younger and more prone to visible change over shorter periods of time, they’re likelier to be on the same wavelength as the transient creatures occupying them than would a mountain which has been there and thinking since the world was created.

Senses can create an interesting point of characterization both for the sentient location itself and as a source of commonality/disconnect with the characters. Sight is probable for buildings (or at least, buildings with considerate builders), but slightly less so for a landform (though one might make a case for a pool being able to see whatever’s reflected in it). Hearing will likely vary. I imagine taste to be a greater factor in bodies of water or landforms with permeable surfaces, though (as they get full exposure to anything that might diffuse into their liquid or seep into their soil). Touch is probably the most important, though not as useful for detecting flying creatures; scent is a bit tricky to justify, but can probably be done. Likely, a landform will have senses that don’t parse into the human experience very well, and trying to substitute for them without falling into standard sensory terms is difficult.

And of course, there’s the sentient location’s current objective(s); while it doesn’t have to be in line with the intended purpose, and in fact doesn’t need a purpose, it will often dovetail with or relate to the purpose. Sometimes they’re completely in line; a divinely created landform might be obsessed with its own purity, or a castle with defense. Other times, they’re anything but; an isolated ice cave that wants to acquire residents, or a sentient building that doesn’t want to follow its originally designed goals anymore.

Do these personalities have to stay static? Certainly not. Tomorrow, I’m going to go into what sorts of factors might affect a sentient locations personality once it’s been around for a while. Stay tuned!

Yesterday, I brought up the concept of settings as characters in the way that most writers see it. We speculative fiction writers and game masters can take it one step further, though; we can actually make our setting, or part of our setting, intelligent in its own right, and give it as much agency and personality as any of the living characters. In short, we can make a literal character out of one of our locations.

Photo courtesy of patkisha from stock.xchng

First, though, you need to figure out why it works for you to have a location as a character. For some people, a living setting allows the introduction of an older perspective without the power and breadth of knowledge that a motile character of the same age might have—or the ability and penchant for interference of such characters. The land can’t rise up and save the world, but it’s not unreasonable for it to have a good idea how the world is to be saved; what else would it do but advise the protagonists? For others, a living location is an unknowable antagonist, hard to defeat and harder to understand, and if it’s clever it can take ages for its targets to realize what’s targeting them (who’s going to suspect the earth below unless they already know the place can think?). Still others just enjoy the alien mindset that comes from being a hill or a castle. A warning for writers, though: be very careful using a living location as a narrator. If it’s too inactive, it’ll sound more like stream of consciousness writing, and there are a lot of people who are turned off by that style.

Know what the living location is doing in your plot? Excellent. Now it’s time to figure out why this place can think for itself. This step is technically optional; if you’re just exploring the question of “what if x were a living entity”, you can get away with not having an explanation. But for other settings, it’s a very good idea. In some worlds, massive amounts of ambient magic can bring forth sentience in the land itself. Others are awakened by huge events, like divine visitations or enormous massacres. A forest might be the combined feelings of its trees, or of its creatures (or both). In science fiction, one sometimes sees planets gaining thought, usually through a combination of ambient temperature and an overwhelming quantity of silicon in its composition. And of course, there are those buildings that are created or enchanted to be intelligent (by accident or by design), or people who by whatever means were fused with the world around them. There’s a lot of potential out there.

How much control does it have of what’s in, on and around it? Some sentient settings, usually tracts of land, have only limited control of themselves; they might be able to adjust their elevations a bit, shift a few rocks, maybe raise a tree root to trip someone or make trail markers disappear or point in the wrong direction. Similarly, some buildings might have minor control of what’s in the walls, but none of what’s outside or in the rooms themselves. Some, on the other hand, are highly powerful. A natural area with a great enough concentration of magic might be able to affect everything short of the laws of physics, doing everything from carefully targeted fires and windstorms to opening pits under those that displease it. Or one might be able to create constructs of its own substance (or outside materials if it can get them) to enforce its will in the world. An intelligent building might be created with mechanisms with which it can act on its needs, or supernatural control of aspects of its composition, interiors or grounds. And that’s just the standard ways in which an intelligent location can act!

Consider also communication, particularly if you’re planning the sentient location as an ally of the primary characters. In some cases, the intelligent location might be able to speak into the mind of someone on the premises. Others may be able to furnish information through dreams or visions, or “talk” through their control of their environs, leaving messages for those who know how to read them. Some might even be able to manifest in a smaller, living form, with which they might communicate. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be easy to make contact with them. Manifestation might only be possible on certain occasions, or the form manifested might not be able to speak the language of its visitors. Perhaps being able to engage with a visitor requires that the visitor perform a special ceremony. Places exist for a long time, and think in unique ways; are the messages a location with little control leaves in its features even legible to those with whom it wishes to communicate? Do they depend on a dead language, or require concepts that make perfect sense to a landmass but not to a person? Buildings have it easier, in that their communication is specifically designed, but what’s to say the builder wanted to make such communication straightforward?

These are just the basics. Tomorrow: How do these and other aspects (including history and population) of the location affect its personality?

So you’ve just picked up a new magic item! It’s one of a kind, blasted useful, and best of all, it does something none of your friends’ fancy artifacts does: it talks. Yes, you’re the proud owner of an intelligent and probably rather snarky magic item. But pretty soon, you’re going to discover the one disadvantage of part of your gear having a mind of its own—that mind isn’t always going to agree with you, and this item’s probably got the power to back it up.

How do we keep this from turning into as drawn-out a battle as any you’ve ever faced?

First, consider personality. Remember the difficulty you first had finding people who could tolerate each other well enough to even travel together, let alone trust each other with their lives? You’re dealing with the same potential problems here. A magic item and its owner with different ethics, different approaches to life, or even different ideas of what constitutes fun are probably going to clash—and if the item has telepathy beyond wielder-range or the ability to vocalize, the squabbles may extend beyond the two of you. With this one, just treat it like you would a standard personality conflict—and no, I don’t mean kill it and loot the corpse. It IS the loot!

Consider also its purpose. Magic items created towards a specific end tend to be particularly obsessive about getting their goals met; it’s part of their crafting. And even if you’ve picked up an item whose purpose you’d agree with, you might not agree on methods—for instance, the cloak that wants to make you a stable leader might not be as tolerant of traitors as you are. If the item’s interested in something you’re not so fond of, you might want to consider finding a way to frame your own actions as in pursuit of that goal, maybe even see if there’s some part of it that you can get behind. More importantly, you’re probably going to need to find some aspect of that goal that can help with your own cause, because magic items aren’t very good at give without take.

Then there are the ones who have track records with prior owners. Particularly good track records. Do you have any idea how hard it is to live up to someone else’s memory? “Ivory let me drink blood!” “Kyrie would have protected those people!” “You’ll never be the leader Seraphen was!” Worst is that those are the normal responses, and the whiny-kid-sound of them isn’t that big an exaggeration. On the other hand, some of them might be looking for someone different from a prior owner, and reminding them of That Person is going to open its own can of worms.

We can’t just let them walk (roll?) all over us. It’s time to take charge.

Be very cautious when arguing with a magic item; some have more leverage against you than others do. If you’ve got a weapon with even partial animation, you never know when it’s going to try to mess up your swing in battle. Some of them might even be able to assert dominance over your actions; intelligent magic items are not for the weak-willed! Even if they can’t assert personal control, they might be able to do things like increase their apparent weight or display their powers when you’re trying to be low-key. And then there’s the talking—you can’t get privacy, or the silly thing might get stolen. The standard talking ones won’t shut up (and may make a point of telling secrets or embarrassing stories about you, or just blurting things out at inopportune times), the telepathic ones won’t get out of your head, even the ones that just use images might hijack your dreams. And they’re stubborn; made to last can often mean made to be patient, particularly on older weapons.

This doesn’t mean you’re without options, just that you’re going to need to cultivate patience, skill and dirty tricks. If the item’s senses only function through you, cutting it off might be a very effective means of persuasion. Similarly, finding a place to lock away one that tries to take over your mind, even if you know you’ll come back later, could serve as decent leverage. If the two of you agree on purpose but not implementation, or if it’s extremely dedicated to its role in life, you may be able to threaten not to help achieve its goals until it changes how it goes about them. If worst comes to worst, the threat of destruction or reforging might also help it change its mind.

And don’t forget positive reinforcement. Figure out what it wants, and find ways to offer that in exchange for cooperation. I once saw someone offer a dread weapon its favorite kind of foe if it would teach him how to control it, and succeed. Some items talk about their previous owners just as a way to remember them; give them chances to do so in that light rather than just complaining about what they did that you don’t. And you can learn a lot from their tales; using the chance to spread those as a reward for good behavior will benefit both of you.

Dealing with a new magic item can be difficult, but knowing how to back up your position will give you a better chance of coming out ahead. Good luck!

Doesn’t everyone sometimes wonder what they’d be if they were an RPG-style monster? I did, as part of a coordinated RPG Blogger Bestiary… and I ended up with this.

The ravyn is a curious creature, both in look and in personality. Ranging in length from four to five and a half feet, it resembles a very large ferret with a distinctive crest of red feathers, and black wings that to some seem a bit too small to keep it aloft—not that that prevents it from flying. Its hands are highly dextrous, and its fingers exceedingly flexible. Its voice is capable of a wide range of impressions; when it speaks to humans or similar creatures, it will generally speak in an imitation of the first voice it hears, but with great facility in whichever tongue it chooses to use.

A ravyn interacts with an illusionary boulder, solidifying it and partly incorporealizing at the point of contact. 

Most ravyns are found alone or in pairs, wandering through the world—larger groups, known collectively as musings, have been postulated but are rarely seen unless one of the members is an infant. They are particularly fond of new information; some say they feed on it, and that eating normal things is more entertainment than necessity for them. (This rumor has not been verified.) As they understand and can imitate most spoken languages, it is generally a simple matter for a traveler to offer one a story in exchange for tidbits of information. A ravyn interacts in interesting ways with a good story; other listeners present claim that a story told around a ravyn seems more vivid, drawing its audience in and preventing distraction.

Most mysterious is these creatures’ interaction with illusion. This was first noticed when an illusionist, trying to hide from one in a rare fit of rage, had created the image of a boulder around himself to hide from it. The ravyn appeared to be completely fooled by the illusion, but, as it climbed onto it and settled down to watch for him, the illusion itself grew real around the illusionist, and it was only by a stroke of luck that he managed to dispel it. Fortunately, the ravyn at that time was somewhat insubstantial, its strikes doing him no harm; though it resolidified after the disappearance of the illusion, he was able to escape further harm. While it is assumed that this is similar to its effect on storytelling, this has not yet been verified because of the difficulty of distracting listeners from the story.

They are also shapeshifters, though they seem to have very few forms in their repertoire, mostly small animals; they have been seen as bats, assorted species of bird, and occasionally in the form of otters (usually when there is mud to play in).

The ravyn is a peaceful creature, usually not prone to rage and as likely to flee as to fight. The one exception is in the presence of clichéd stories or hackneyed prose. In the presence of such things, or when it is unable to flee, its fur stands on end, and it pulls a red feather from its crest and strikes out, slashing away at the offending material (or the offending storyteller, if such is present). Though there is little strength behind them, red quill attacks are often highly precise, and come in close sequences.

Rumor has it that these creatures meet in groups to discuss and improve upon the stories that they have collected. Though no explorer has yet managed to see such a gathering, some have occasionally stumbled upon signs that such may have occurred.

Many of the gods we’re used to in Western mythology either created their domains or just took charge of them—whatever happens to the domain, the god stays constant. But a common fantasy element is the idea of gods that are mostly tied to their domains—as the domain changes, so too does the god. These can be at least as much fun, and create nifty thematics. (Exalted players and STs in particular may wish to take notes.)

The most obvious version of this would be the god-powered-by-belief model memorably associated with Pratchett that TheZomb mentioned here. This is both the most straightforward and the most complex method, as the god is most likely what the worshipers believe hir to be. But this can get confusing—what if (as implied by the pronoun) the worshipers can’t agree on their god’s gender? What about personality? Appearance? Powers? Do they follow the majority? Do you end up with a patchwork god that tries to be everything at once? Do they alternate according to certain conditions?

Even I’m finding that a bit too complicated for my tastes.

Now, consider the god of a city. Its appearance and powers are probably thematic to the city itself—mercantile for a trade center, militaristic for a military town, pastoral for a farming village. You can base size and power on population, or maybe something else if you’re feeling clever, and general cleanliness on how clean/intact the city is—pretty straightforward, right? Excellent. Now try giving the place a nasty plague. Or slaughtering half the population. Got an image for what that might do to the god? Good. Those are pretty easy, but what about positive shifts? If you add a spectacular monument, it might manifest as a piece of jewelry in the god’s regalia. Create a library or university; might that make the god smarter? (I almost want to create a divine image generator and tack it onto SimCity to see what happens.)

Gods of natural features are pretty straightforward. Change the landscape, change the god. Pollute the landscape, dirty up the god. Have a war running through the place, the poor god has ringing ears, a foul disposition, and really bad battle odor. Plague the place with unnatural weather problems, and… well, see above, plus add the god feeling a bit loopy from all the Things That Should Not Be There.

Then you have gods of inventions and ideas. This is how you get the Pratchett effect without the complications—while they exist whether they’re believed in or not, they’ll still feel the effects if their domains go out of use. They’re also some of the most abstract of the lot, particularly the ideas. No shape, remember? History can be kind to such divinities, but it can just as easily be cruel—could you imagine how a god of the geocentric universe hypothesis might be doing in today’s world? What about a god of common courtesy? Modesty? Intelligent and reasoned debate on Internet forums? 8-tracks? Storyteller-based Aberrant?

A note: don’t confuse ideas with natural forces, unless you want vastly changeable laws of physics. I at least imagine the gods of natural forces as being the hardest to have an effect on—one can’t exactly go about changing how gravity works except in limited areas, right?

Bear in mind, just because a god can survive damage to its domain doesn’t mean it will stay functional. Sufficient damage might give it crippling injuries, or might do interesting things to its mental processes.

Changing world, changing gods—the concept is good for a lot of things. It makes the world more alive and the gods more approachable, allows for a certain amount of creativity, and can serve as anything from plothook to character limitation without requiring every deus to be treading very close to ex machina. How would you implement it?

(This post, as usual for this month-topic combination, written for RPG Blog Carnival.)

Yet more for RPG Blog Carnival .

Fantasy worlds and gods seem to go hand in hand; having or hinting at at least one seems to be practically the price of admission.

Now, this is fine. Except for the fact that there’s a lot more variety in the divine than most people give credit for, let alone use. Often, the god being used will be incomprehensibly powerful if not downright omnipotent, and probably maintain distance from the world. Which makes sense, since if gods that powerful were to start messing around in the story, they’d be insurmountable obstacles if antagonistic and seem like they’d just popped out of a machine if they approved of the protagonists. And gaming or writing, that’s not near as much fun.

So let’s vary it up!

In my experience, true gods come in three types of origin: Existing first, being created/born, or being believed into existence. The first are usually the most powerful, and usually credited with having created the world; similarly, they’re also the ones you’re least likely to hear from. The second are quite possibly the most common, and often considerably more involved in the affairs of the world than the first group—consider, for instance, the Norse or Greco-Roman pantheons. The third wouldn’t exist without their worshipers, and as such vary, in both power and tendency to meddle—though they’re likely to meddle just so people remember they exist.

Then you get to two other important traits—power, and knowledge. How much do your gods know, and how much are they aware of? Are they fully omniscient? Aware of what happens within their specific domains? Aware of what’s going on around them? The less a god knows, the more he can be plotted against and the less likely he is to see people deviating from his plans.

What about power? While gods that existed first tend to be if not omnipotent than extremely close, that doesn’t have to be the norm for the divine. For instance, the Exalted world follows an Eastern-esque model of a celestial bureaucracy, with gods ranging in potency from “Near-invincible and perfect” to “can be subdued by a PC’s ferret familiar with a lucky roll”.

Do these gods specialize? Do they represent concepts? Places? Cosmic forces? Do they represent these concepts because they created them? Because they maintain them? Because in some way they are them? If something happens to something a god represents, what happens to the god?

If you’ve got a pantheon (and in general, the more gods you have, the less powerful they should be), you’ll need to figure out how they relate to each other. Including, possibly, literally. Are they related? Were they created by the same individual(s)? Do gods of opposing concepts necessarily have to not get along? Do they clash anyway? Tracking pantheons can get downright kinky—just look at the Greek gods.

How human/equivalent thereof are they? Are they just impossibly perfect? Do they have human foibles, like (again) the Greek gods? If you have multiple sapient races, does each have one god? More? Do animal gods look like the animals they represent? Are they halfway between, either doing the head of one body of another thing like the Egyptian gods do, or talking the anthropomorphic route, or something else entirely? Do they do multiples of the above and shapeshift between them? If you have gods of concepts, do they have a vaguely human appearance, or do you have gods wandering around that look like statues, tangles of thread, tornadoes, blobs of lava? How do the ones that aren’t necessarily human communicate? Do even the ones that look human have their own quirky communication forms?

And those are just the basics; more detail later!