Worlds to Travel - Godsbound brainstorming.
🕑 Added 2024-10-01 19:42:02 +0000 UTCSo, it's been about 24 hours since the poll was put up. While I will leave it up for people to continue to vote on it since 18 is not everyone, it has more or less landed in Science Fiction.
So, a little background about Godbound.
Godbound is a game made by Kevin Crawford. Kevin Crawford is responsible for the creation of other games such as "Stars without Number", "Worlds without Number", Cities without Number", and a handful of others. They are generic settings on the whole, but what makes them popular is the use of OSR, which is basically old D&D rules modified for modern use.
The Settings he makes, while generic enough to be anywhere, even your own works, are compelling due to what settings he does put into them as a base setting. World building is wide enough to give a full flavor, but shallow enough not to bury you in detail and minutia.
Godbound itself is a unique setting as it is what you get when you take Whitewolf's "Scion" (makers of World of Darkness) where you play a demi-god descended from old gods in the modern world and fighting off titan Spawn who seek to destroy the world, and ramp it up to 11.
The following is from the first page of the game
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Heaven has fallen. The world is broken. The Throne is empty.
More than a thousand years ago the Former Empires ruled in glory.
Wonders beyond imagining littered the nations of that ancient age,
even the least of men and women living with the luxury of a Bright
Republic oligarch. Hunger, sickness, ignorance, pain… all the blights
to which mortal bodies are heir were banished by the marvels of the
Former Empires.
The agent of this mercy was the might of theurgy, the terrible High
Magic uncovered by restless scholars of the old realms. With the
secrets of theurgy at their disposal, sages were able to lay impious
hands on the very levers of creation, manipulating cosmic powers far
beyond the birthright of mortal humanity. The deep powers of the
Creator were at their disposal at last, ready to glorify their kindred
and exalt their causes.
And they had many causes. Bereft of material want, the Former
Empires found other reasons to struggle. It was no longer enough to
have a full belly and healthy children. The newfound might of theurgy
would help them bring righteousness to neighboring realms that
disputed the wisdom of their ways or the justice of their laws. Evil
and corruption would be purged at last, and all the grieving sorrow
of their misguided or malevolent neighbors would be healed by the
light of their glorious truth.
Of course, every one of the Former Empires had its own truth to
uphold. Their people wanted for nothing, but their material wealth
simply left them to crave more intangible things. It was not enough
that a neighbor was willing to keep the peace; the neighbor had to
agree with them, had to submit to their laws and their ideals. And
if this submission made their former neighbors into new subjects of
their rulers, was it not a fair reward for a valiant pursuit of justice?
No one knows how long the wars tore open the nations of the old
world. Some say they lasted centuries, others think it was only a few
years before the ancient theurges sought to end matters. There would
be no more fighting. The theurges would use their arts to ascend to
Heaven, and there put their causes before the One. God alone would
determine the true way that humanity was to live.
The angels fought desperately to keep back the invading theurges,
but they were too few to withstand the human sorceries. A hundred-
odd armies marched at the theurges' sides, great engines and
terrible war-beasts grinding the celestial legions before them. Countless
mortals perished, but the angels were driven back at last, forced
to flee from Heaven and seek refuge in the fires of Hell below.
The triumphant theurges approached the holy heart of Heaven, the
Throne of God where the creator of all would answer at last. And
yet when the great doors were opened, when the thousand Names
were spoken, when the burning wings of angels no longer veiled the
sanctum, the Throne stood empty before them.
God was not there.
The theurges scattered in confusion and wrath. Some were bitter,
and swore that the Creator was never there at all, and that the One
was merely a trick of angels. Others wept in terror, crying out that
their impiety had led to God's abandonment of them. Most, however,
saw not an emptiness, but a possibility. If God was no longer on the
Throne, was there not room for another?
The Last War below did not cease, but it changed. Throughout
the Former Empires, theurges and theotechnicians labored to forge
new gods, Made Gods, fabricating them from shards of plundered
celestial engines and stolen artifacts from the house of God.
Unimaginable power was poured into these hollow shells. Holy exemplars
of their nations' ideals were enlisted to embody this force or fuel the
golem-gods they created, and in time these Made Gods strode forth.
The destruction they wrought was incalculable. God after god
stormed the halls of Heaven, searching for more power in its crumbling
engines and broken wonders. They fought each other on earth,
churning up nations, and battled each other in Heaven's gardens,
breaking loose shards of the celestial city. As they scavenged the celestial
engines, the world began to crack beneath them, the Former
Empires splintering into scattered realms that drifted away from
each other in the darkness of Uncreated Night. A few reckless Made
Gods even attempted to seize the Throne itself, but their sacrilege left
only their bones. They were not prepared to usurp the place of God.
There was no last battle. There was no ultimate struggle that marked
the end of the Last War. There was only a slow winding-down over
centuries as the Made Gods died. Some perished from the perils of
Heaven, slain by vengeful angels or destroyed by powers they did not
understand. Others were killed in battle, slaughtered by rival Made
Gods or undone by the energies of mighty mortal weapons. A few simply
became lost, trapped or hidden away in a shard of broken Heaven,
far away from their home and their people.
The Made Gods are gone.
Now there are only the heritor nations, the crumbled fragments
of the Former Empires eking out a meager existence in the far-scattered
realms. The wonders of the former age no longer function, and
the theurgy that once shook Heaven is now a brittle, capricious art
wounded by the very destruction it caused. Kings and commoners
alike must live in a world that no longer welcomes them.
Every year, things grow a little harder. The celestial engines among
the shards of Heaven are often broken and always ill-kept, now that
the angels have fled. Seasons grow uncertain and nature grows whimsical
or malicious. Sickness comes at strange times and monsters are
birthed in hidden places. Sometimes the skin of the realm puckers and
splits, a Night Road erupting into the realm from some fathomless
depth of Uncreated Night. Creation unwinds slowly, but without halt.
But there is a new thing in the realms. Ordinary men and women
are being touched by ancient power. The lost Words of Creation
are igniting within the flesh of common humans, imbuing them in
a stroke with the power that once required a Made God's shell to
contain. It started only a few short years ago, but these "Godbound"
are said to be the blessed by the descending fire of the fallen Made
Gods. Their holy workings and celestial bindings are falling free from
their dead husks, and descending to the earth to catch on mortal souls.
Heretics of the Unitary Church whisper that it was a plan of God
that it should be so, that these Godbound will redeem the sins of
their ancestors and restore the world that was broken. Others say that
they are merely cursed ones, damned to relive the terrible Last War
that destroyed the Made Gods before them. Yet in the present hour
they are only men and women who have been given something more.
You are Godbound. You have inherited the holy fire. Whatever your
past life, however meager a soul you may have been, the light of the
Words has found you. Your world is slowly fading and the beasts of
its twilight hour are rising up from the dust. Your people cannot hope
to stand against them.
Will you be their savior, or will you be their epitaph?
============================================================
The setting of Godbound, that is the realm of which the game is set, is beyond fucked in more ways than one. The realm is literally falling apart at the seams, with few if any willing to fix it.
Angels stormed Hell, and purposefully destroyed the engines of repentance and salvation so that souls sent to hell would suffered eternal torment for their actions against heaven.
Parasite Gods are Godbound who became addicted to the power given through worship, and sought to force people into worshipping them by force, and are more often than not, completely insane monsters with the power of a demi-god possessing apotheosis.
Magic users seek out lost Theurgy, magic of such power that it controls the very conceptual force of existence itself. Fire becomes whatever you say it is, darkness becomes alive, and eldritch beings are born from the minds of men.
The Night Roads, the paths between dimensions and realms are haunted by creatures of the void, and what survived the fall of the Empires, including realms created and maintained by still existing Made-Gods. They are however, immensely dangerous, and the rules of laws of reality we take for granted, are merely optional there. Night Roads lead to other worlds, an always in places where terrible events occurred, for its echo has left a mark that fractures reality.
Those mortals lucky, or unlucky enough for the engines of creation to land upon them and grant power that God made, have alot of work either way. Assuming they survive long enough to go from merely a Demi-God to a full out god. Perhaps even an Arch-God of an entire realm.
The realm of which Godbound is set is one in need of heroes to restore what was destroyed.
By extension, so does the rest of existence, to one degree or another.
The first three chapters of the SI story is setting the stage of such a thing.
So...if the character leaves the realm he currently is in, it will lead him to any possibility. The question is what realm to go to.
Comments
GundamChief
Technically Star Wars is too, but I know less about the setting than I'd like. The Old Republic era is closer to my speed than the clone Wars, Empire, or Post-Empire era. the the idea of appearing in the lower levels of Coruscant appeals to me since it's a hellish wasteland down there.
Wildebranch
Technically, 40K could be considered Sci-Fi (? Haha, but you also have things like Stargate, Starcraft, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Babylon 5 and so long.
