Gods of the Weirdways

There's an amazing post on Daniel Sell's blog which is for generating deities for your games. Personally, I think most of the fun is in making them up on the fly and seeing how those celestial or infernal babies learn to walk/run/slither/fly. But that said, I've also become really attached to a few of the gods I've generated from that table. So I'm sharing them here!

Espira, Lady of Metropoli
534: Cities
636: Dolls
114: Destiny
144: Blindness

Lady Espira is the patron Goddess of Irifice, City of Spires. She is the lady of cities and their dwellers all throughout the Spheres, protecting the civilised way of life. But her blessings are not given from any sense of goodness: such a concept is not easily grasped by Espira, who as a mortal knew nothing of love or compassion. Rather, her protection over cities is possessiveness, much in the same way a petty child with churlishly hoard her favourite toys. And that is what Espira sees, when she looks at the settlements she favours: dolls’ houses, to be played with and admired. Her games are part of what weaves the weft of fate and destiny in the cities, animating the streets and buildings with a life all their own and a path through time for the souls inside them. Espira herself is blind, just as Justice is, her attention limited in ways the mortal mind cannot understand.
            Worship of Espira inevitably involves some kind of theatre or play-acting, along with banquets and weddings staged for maximum dramatic effect. These rituals are all designed with the idea of keeping Espira’s attention for as long as possible, that the boons of her good mood may long continue.
           
Lady-Patrician Eliza (6/14/3) is the closest thing to a High Priestess that Espira has. Eliza dresses in a long, flowing dress that is patch-worked between the styles of a school-yard play-dress and a nanny’s long skirts. Eliza organises the entertainments and rituals, and communes with Espira in the Sanctum of Houses, a huge room filled with tiny model cities. Once a year the children of the city bring fresh toy houses and towers to the Sanctum, made from whatever they have to hand. The finest are brought in and added to the collection.
            Only Eliza knows the location of Espira’s most sacred space, an ancient and hallowed room in the depths of Irifice’s oldest district. Not much can be said of this sealed tomb- for a tomb is what it is, a little concrete cell with nothing in it but the mummified body of a girl, eyeless, and her little doll’s house.

Aspensi, the Owl
446: Animal Spirit
336: Riddles
635: The Afterworld
436: Malice

Aspensi is a great white owl who haunts the limbo-after-life, the great grey space overlaying the material worlds that uncertain souls sometimes find themselves haunting as ghosts. He is a wise and noble creature, to be sure, but has no interest in the living beyond their endings. He is rarely seen to be benevolent or kind, since his role in the limbo-after-life is to frighten and test those who have stumbled there. With riddles and tricks delivered by his owls, he hounds the ghosts of the living to some kind of conclusion.
            Aspensi is only really worshipped in the Barrow Hills, where he is treated with both fear and respect. Barrow Hills is a deeply haunted place, and the few villages that cling to life there are tortured by the moans of ghosts and the predations of ghouls and other corporeal undead. Kindnesses to the owls and the wearing of certain protective charms and sigils holy to Aspensi are thought to keep these restless dead away.

Fergan Son-a-Connah (8/18/3) is the unspoken human champion of Aspensi. He is primarily a hunter and bowman operating humbly in the woods just outside of his village, but he has been acting as shaman and witchdoctor in matters of the dead for his whole life, just like his mother before him and her father before her. Fergan is always followed by a great barn owl.

Banzion, Lord of the Edge-Feast
163: Banquets
643: Excrement
516: Zero
166: Vice

Banzion presides on his court at the edge of Nothing and Something, teetering on the brink of annihilation. Legend has it that he was once solely the lord of Feasts and Wines, in a time long before the current aeon. When his kingdom began to collapse and all that he ruled fell into nothing, Banzion laughed at the disarray and decreed he would have one final feast before his banquet-hall too was consumed. Reality granted him this last wish, and Banzion gleefully set his celebration in motion- and has been partaking of that same feast ever since. Of course, to keep the banquet going it must remain interesting, and so Banzion’s Edge-Feast has become a mess of flagrant vice and abhorrent messes as he and the guests seek ever-new ways to stimulate themselves. Banzion is invoked by those who wish to enjoy life at all costs, those who will selfishly pursue pleasure and the fulfilment of all appetites. He is the god of mouldering cheeses and mushy, overripe fruit. He is the god of perversions, and of balancing between here… and nowhere.

The Noble Paenn Fernandigras (6/20/2) is a practicing worshipper of Banzion. A fundamentally goodnatured man to all who meet him, Fernandigras is a morbidly obese little man who has become almost spherical. Unable to support his own weight, he is ferried around on a litter by his Morsels (5/6/1), tiny muscular men who wear white loin clothes and are always oiled, so as to escape his hungry, grasping hands. The Morsels are inhumanly agile as a result of natural selection: those who are not are ultimately eaten. Fernandigras enjoys his life immensely, touring the banquet-circuits of cities such as Irifice and Troika and telling long-winded and rambling stories which people know by now they have to endure listening to. 

So... what kinds of Gods and Goddesses have you been generating? 

For the Love of Language

The Spheres, the worlds, they are islands of materia amongst the immaterial. There is much more of nothing than something, out there in the vastness of existence. When the mortal sorcerers summon forth the forces of the void, they are prone to invoking the names of fringe gods who rest on the horizon between Real and Unreal things and calling out to the great abstract entities of worldly forces which drift (un)bodily through the maddening whirls between worlds.

But there are other forces which haunt the spaces between the Spheres, more pervasive and perhaps more dangerous. Language is a living thing, with a life cycle drawn as on planes and dimensions beyond our comprehension. Languages are strange creatures, if creatures they can even be called, which descend into the crude matter of our worlds to procreate and allow the linear time that exists in the Real to shape them somewhat, before they ascend again into the Unreal, the space outside of time, and give back what they have developed to their whole.

The Tongue-Tamer mages of the Carrikhan Islands believe all languages are one language, repeatedly coming back time and time again to the Spheres of Existence and disseminating itself from different vectors. The Tongue-Tamers study language exhaustively, hoping to find a few keystone phrases which will help them truly understand the divine being that is Language.

There are heretic Tongue-Tamers who claim Language is a genus, and that each individual spoken language is a separate entity out in the Unreal: these Tongue-Tamers invariably champion one specific Language at the expense of all others, treating it as a kind of patron which will grant them boons in return for loyal service in the quest for its evolution and elevation. Such Tongue-Tamers were employed by the Graze Imperials, during their quest to stomp out the ugly indigenous languages of the other islands. 

There are all manner of ordinances in the wizards libraries of Irifice concerning the correct way to communicate with Language/s, mostly wheeling and wondering around the inherent paradoxes of talking to creatures in a manner which those creatures are made of. Common consensus tends towards the metaphor of communicating with a man through body parts, and a strict warning that trying to comprehend the motives or even the passing thoughts of Language/s will blast apart the feeble reasoning capabilities of a mortal mind by completely eroding the operational context of an actual, physical universe. A conversation with a Language is a many-layered rabbit hole of metaphor and allegory, quickly losing any concrete foundation for the casual listener.

New Background: Tongue Tamer
The Tongue-Tamer Mages work endlessly to understand the true form of the formless, unlocking myriad mysteries within the linguistics of the otherworldly. In theory the Tongue-Tamers are masters of wordplay and wit, but in practice they tend to be poor communicators with outsiders too their order- it turns out that communicating entirely in a kind of multidimensional double-speak while you're at work can bleed out a little into your social life. Who knew.
Possessions- A set of woolly and uncomfortable robes, stitched full of your favourite words and sentences.
- 1d3 phrase-tomes of exotic languages

- A reading-sceptor, replete with oversized viewing lens on the top

Skills
4 Languages

2 Random Spell
2 Random Spell

2 Astrology
2 Second Sight

Special
You can use your deep and thorough understanding of Languages vectors through this world to tweak it's track for a short time. Use your Languages skill to change the meaning of one word for 1d6 hours. Since you do technically live in an existence formed solely of language this can on occasion affect the physical. 

Travel between Settings

There are infinite Planes and Spheres in the multiverse, all possibilities caught and bubbled from the roiling chaos of everything else. They are the rafts of pattern amidst Everything. They are the worlds on which stories are told.

Spheres are stories. When a character leaves the world they are from, they sign away their rights to that tale. For most, it isn't a bad deal: the majority of stories for natives involve working a long, hard life only to retire and die. The majority of roles are walk-on features. Some people have sacrificed their parts in grand and incredible dramas to see what else was out there. Many such people are sorely disappointed.

Parallel worlds exist, but you'll struggle to see them: when viewed from a cosmic scale, worlds that are similar up to a point of historical divergence tend to look the same. Their "wavelengths" collapse into one another, manifesting as a single world in the material sense. The parallel worlds are there, still, but the only sure way to reach one is the long way around: go back to the divergence and do things differently.

Travel between the worlds is often accidental. There are endless soft-spots and fuzzy borders, where there aren't enough living souls to pin the usual laws of reality in place. There are deserts of glass shards that join up reflections, from just out of view of the mirror. There is woodland so dense that when you get to the heart of a thicket, a full rotation on the spot has more than three hundred and sixty degrees in it, more than four cardinal directions to walk in. There are doors which open to the wrong world when the weather is a little queer.

Travel between worlds on purpose is often confusing. Time doesn't play well with different continuities, as though it struggles to keep so many things in mind at once. Golden Barges are a popular method of travel, but every culture builds them differently (and each is insistent that theirs is the "normal" kind). The one thing they have in common is a weird non-relation between their internal and external dimensions. Roll three times on the table below with a d3 and d6 to generate one on the fly.

	The Engine…	The Appearance…	The Quirk…
11	Probability-Smasher	Great Golden Ship with glass bubbles	Impossible for sphere-native souls to look directly at
12	Auto-Cartographic Realizer	Enormous rectangle of metal, featureless but for a door	Sings to sooth itself on long journeys or periods alone
13	Revelation Drive	Folding silver yacht, only visible from certain angles	The intelligence that is the engine’s functionality is evil
14	Plasmic-Separator	Great brassy bullet with submarine port-holes	The intelligence that is the engine’s functionality is a sop
15	Discordant Thought Engine	A perfect sphere with freakishly ideal dimensions	Has a long list of things that the engine may require to work
16	Spatial Re-Philosophizer	Rusty, battered, and extremely unflattering design	Has “favourite worlds” it will try to revisit
21	Recurrence Loop	Long, sharp and thin, with an array of antennae	Smells foul and makes any land it lands on infertile
22	Quantity-Qualifier	Blocky and bulky, with many added shapes welded on	Has an interfering spirit trapped in the interface-system
23	Fractal Surfing-Hull	Glittering and iridescent, like an inverted oyster	Can only travel to planes and spheres of a certain kind
24	Chaos Ingestion	Like a classic Galleon, but with a weird metal shell-top	Has the potential to explode if left inert for too long
25	Parallel Chronovore	Organic golden shape, like a grown boat	Will vanish into its own paradox forever if left unobserved
26	Elysian Reality-Wurm	Tree-like, but sticky with black ichor	Is actually a proto-sphere of its own, waiting to grow bigger
31	Profound Disconnection Engine	Dagger-shaped, with landing gear as its hilt	"Plays up to look cool" when there are other interdimensional ships near
32	Platonic Equator	Something like a helicopter and a solarium at once	Prone to tearing open chaos-dimension portals when the engine goes wrong
33	Satrian Crab-Power	Huge and gloriously steampunk	Is almost always coveted by intelligent beings throughout the multiverse
34	Hallucinogenic Reality-Broker	Impossibly dark and squat, with bat-wings	Is almost always feared by unintelligent beings throughout the multiverse
35	Aneristic De-Entropifier	A great flapping ray-shape, always hovering off ground	Generally erodes the quality of reality in places it has spent too long
36	Possibility Combuster	A hellish machine of chimneys and fire-grates	Has some bizarre set of creatures living on-board, always just out of sight

There are places where the Planes and Spheres naturally intersect, cities and monuments that are interplanar by their very nature. There are also places that just plain don't believe in other worlds.

Magic from one world may just not work on another. If you visit the same place by two different means, you may end up in two different places. If you find a way home, it won't really be the same place.

Myths & Rituals

The Homebrew rules below are intended to work with Troika! or AFF, since they deal with the Luck stat. If you're not playing with those rules I'd recommend switching out Luck for either a suitable Magic score or a saving throw that is appropriate. 

We start already with a big world: you flesh it out and pore over the details and develop it into the grandiose epic you know it ought to be. This shouldn't reduce the mystery, though. Just as soon as you've established rules, you should showcase those things that run counter to them- things that would be called exceptions if it weren't so that they are myriad, vastly outnumbering you in any of the wild spaces that exist beyond the little bubble you were so comfortable in.

This is the sort of game I like to run, play, or just idly daydream in or about. My posts have had a bit of a gap recently, and one of the main things stewing in the interim has been myth and ritual, and more specifically how to get the quality of those things across in-game. The character I use in my ever-to-be unfinished short fiction is driven to know more about the gods, goddesses and otherworldly forces that drive things behind the scenes- it is only natural, then, that I try to bash out some broadly corresponding rules.

I've been reading a lot about myths and dreams, and one of the notions that comes up again and again in the Jungian-derivative essays and various chaos-magician writers' works is that a ritual is a kind of theatre, acting out myth-themes to please or entice some supernatural being or force. I like this idea of ritual or myth as a narrative, some pattern which a given being is almost compelled to interact with.

Qualities for Otherworld Denizens

The sphinx is powerless to resist riddling any intelligent being she would eat. The god of thunder is drawn like a moth to a flame to any amorous activity that resembles his raunchier conquests. A summoned devil abides by a certain code of conduct- providing the summoner remembers to follow suit. These rules are not enforced by the physics of the universe or the mechanics of magic, they are the entity itself's weakness to the very fabric of their reality- narratives. A creature of this kind would have the quality Addicted to Narrative.

The dignitary from Faerie is easily coerced by bargains and trades. The High Priest of Banzion will always find himself inclined to excess and waste. A sorcerer with infernal blood finds herself absorbed by scenes of suffering. These creatures, through relation or extended interaction with supernatural forces and places, have taken on something of those forces qualities. They have gained the quality Susceptible to Narrative. 

The quality Addicted to Narrative is really reserved for NPCs, or perhaps as a temporary curse on a player, since it limits agency in the game. Susceptible to Narrative is a more fitting quality for a player character, offering rewards and drawbacks for certain actions performed or avoided. When a character encounters a scene playing out that the GM determines to be a narrative they are susceptible to, they can choose to resist or give in to the urge. Resisting requires Testing their Luck. Giving in will reward them with a Luck point.




What do you think? Is this stuff better just roleplayed, or is a bit of a guideline rule helpful?

Magic by the Milithaum

Magic is a bit of a problem for me.

Not in that I struggle to personally cast spells and work enchantments myself: you misunderstand, I am in fact a very competent wizard. Probably one of the most competent wizards you know. No, magic is a problem for me in that when I sit down to play RPGs, or even just to daydream and plan for RPGs, I don't know where to put magic. I want magic that abides by laws, has its own internal physics. I also want magic that is fantastical, and holds a real sense of wonder.

I think that's what draws me again and again to games and stories that hop between worlds. In my headcanon for any fantasy that covers a multiverse, magic is a refraction of ones' will through the lens that is reality itself- it is the focusing of the otherdimensional potentials that exist all around us, invisibly. Sometimes, I want there to be an implication that other parallel worlds are touched by our actions. Other times I want to be able to hurl fireballs without constant angsting about other worlds.

At the moment, what I want more than anything is a system that supports the stories I've been daydreaming about for over a decade in one form or another. I want a system that lets me and my friends play in the universe I already know better than any campaign setting. I think I found that system in Troika!, and now I'm just tinkering to stretch it around every concept I want it to cuddle.

So magic, now, is something I want to be big and broad and paradoxical. I like the spells in Troika: I like that they drain stamina to cast. Magic should have a cost. But as pointed out on the G+ once, this narrative-honest magic is pretty harsh in combat situations. It has a steep cost and a pretty low chance to do much against, say, the more traditional method of hitting things.

My current tinkering is in the direction of YSMV: your Sphere may vary. The world you're on may have its own way of doing things. In Snowcastles by Duncan McGeary the magicians can only use their magic in service of another. They are given a token payment which they retain while in service, and they give that back later. They can use magic out of service, but its described as being hard to do without a force of will and spending of power. That sounds to me a lot like Troika's stamina-cost is the standard way, but in this world there exists a sort of pact ritual that gives reprieve.

Then there are magic items. I have a system for magic items at the moment in Troika. Each item has a pool of energy, replacement stamina points that the item draws on instead of your own. Each item also has a spell or two that it "knows", that it can cast. Different items will react differently to using up their energy- maybe a scroll crumbles, the ink fades. Maybe the clay rod collapses and dries out. The silver sword of smiting will recharge though, one point of stamina for every hour of meditation.

This system also allows for items that just store stamina. Maybe you have to sacrifice stamina today to fill it up for tomorrow. Maybe you need to feed it the stamina of innocent victims by night!

I don't know, these are just ideas. Let me know what you think!