Theogenesis

Once, there was a world.
This is known, though little else can be said. This world died and left our universe empty save the shattered remnants of that ancient world.
All was quiet in the universe, unchanging and lost. A place whose death had come and one which had been earned with a long life fulfilled.

And then there came change.
A visitor appeared, saw emptiness and left... but in his wake, he left a hole in our universe, and from it the chaos came. The form without substance, the stuff of creation and destruction, aether from the places beyond.

Change came to a world that wasn't.
The world was empty, the shattered remains the only thing left of the physical realm, but there were things beyond the merely physical that still existed. Echoes haunting the void, memories caught in the abyss, prayers left in the last moments of the world.

And that is what the aether found. Those long forgotten ghosts called out and the aether changed.

So the gods were born from the world before.

The World Anew
The gods floated free in the expanse and began to learn of one another. For a time, they were satisfied to find the company of others, but they were haunted by memories they did not understand. Lives that they had not lived, echoes of a world and nature they had no frame of reference for.

Haunted, they were driven to do something new, something they did not entirely understand. They were driven to create.
Gathering the wreckage of the eldest world, they each made a land, fuzzy memories guiding their hands as they put together things from a half-remember world they had never seen. When they were done, they showed the fruits of their labor to their kin and found it was... different than they would have thought. Seeing the works of their siblings, they also came to realize that their own lands were incomplete.

They used their power to stitch together the lands they'd made and so the new world was born.

To Learn of Oneself
With their world, came the knowledge that there was such a thing as change. What was once one thing was now different and that epiphany caused them to look at each other, suddenly overcome with the knowledge that they were different from one another, and left without answers to why. All the while, those haunting memories still pulled at the edges of their conscience, and so they retired to be at peace with themselves, meditating in those early days following creation. They would visit one another and try to share what they had learned, to share the philosophies that they had come to know.

As they meditated on the nature of the universe, they came to know balance. However, when they shared their discoveries, though they had reached the same conclusion, they had taken very different paths, and so each took the responsibility of keeping balance of what they had learned.
Order and Chaos, Life and Death, Thought and Instinct, and others...

They took upon their mantles and seeing their world in a new light... realized their work was not done.



So, that's the basic starting point. Ironically enough though, the first thing to do is... character building. To make the gods so that they can fill the world.
There are two things that I've been thinking about for it as well.
First is the color identity of the gods, which is... colorless enemy colors. Sounds confusing, yes?
When they are cast, you choose one color or another and they have abilities that will only turn on if they are a specific color. Since they are beings meant to depict the nature of balance, it felt right to make them colorless in their native state, having the opposite sides of their domains being enemy colors that they are caught between.

The second thing is that they are very philosophical in nature, and so they use avatars to interact with the world, independent beings meant to carry out their wills. The avatars though, are mono colored and represent only one aspect of their nature, and they themselves have their own wills so that they can best carry out their duties as they interpret them.

Everything else is completely without form right now. I have some ideas, but I want to involve the community in this, not just let it go on my own again.

So... first things first, we have to finish out the domains.
We have:
Order/Chaos - ?
Thought/Instinct - The World
Life/Death- Fate

Suggestions? Thoughts on the world's set up? Limericks?

I can't help but feel baited here.

Let's see...

There once was a world filled with gods,
But their ignorance put them at odds,
So they waited and thought,
About all that they'd got,
As they pushed their way through their facades.

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this, but I don't have any solid ideas yet. I think the first step, though, is to decide on the binaries and then the gods who represent them.

Well that is what I was leading with in the first place. Like I said, I have three of them sorted out.
The remainders are Blue/Red and Black/White that we need to assign concepts to.

I'm also pretty big on the fact that they need to be really large abstractions, fundamental concepts, rather than things like "the sun and moon"

Blue/Red could be Emotion/Intelligence. With White/Black, we could go with the community vs selfishness concept, but go with a wider view of it, something like community/solitude, or something like that.

Blue/Red feels like it treads too closely to Blue/Green's conflict of Thought/Instinct.

One of the things about these abstractions is how they scale out. The reason why Thought/Instinct becomes The World is because it invariably scales out to the conflict of Civilization/Wilderness and encompasses The World as a result.

How about sound/silence?

Void/Fullness ?
Heat/Cold ?
Creation/Destruction ?
Chance/Certainty ?
Denial/Indulgence ?

Sound/Silence doesn't feel like it fits the same motifs since one is the absence of the other.
One could argue that is true of life/death as well, but cultures usually associate death as a force, the same as life.

In the same vein, Void/Fullness sort of falls into that same category, but there's a bit of distinction. Fullness isn't a very elegant concept though. Void, as a concept, and... something better than "Something". The idea of the nothing and the something works, but definitely needs a better connection.

Creation and Destruction might work, but I feel like it might end up treading on the life/death dichotomy a bit too closely.

Chance/Certainty is essentially Order and Chaos in different colors, so that ends up treading pretty close to a pair.

Heat/Cold feels too mundane, too close to something "of the world" than some primal concepts. It does have the right sense of balance, but...

Denial and Indulgence is an interesting suggestion, but it's harder for me to imagine and might tread too close to the Thought/Instinct.

I was actually mostly borrowing the idea of Void/Fullness from Nihilumbra (a fun little short indie game that I believe is on Steam but also on the iOS app store). I don't really know what word to use as the opposite of "void" either, though. Fulfillment? Oneness? Gravity?

I thought of the blue/red interaction being the difference between fast and slow, but I don't know how to phrase that in a dichotomy. I can only come up with a sliding scale of speed.

I would think in this sense, the binary opposite of "Void" would be "Existence." As for the "Creation" and "Destruction," it could work if we made it an important distinction that that binary is about objects or ideas, where as the "life/death" dichotomy deals solely with the forces of the living.

I might suggest switching Thought/Instinct to Blue-Red (see the MTG color wheel) and freeing blue green if it is easier to fill.

Black/White could be something like uniqueness/sameness or something like it.

In which case Life/Death would be tied to Fate while Creation/Destruction would be tied to Entropy or Erosion? Am I reading you right here?

Oneness/Nothingness for white/black?

I think that's fair.

Could green/blue be fractal/geometric? That's probably a little too abstract. I actually am thinking in a visual manner, with green represented by a green network of vessels while blue represented by a straight line (an I-beam to be exact; not sure why -- also the green network is from a lung or kidney).

Abstract/Solid?

It almost feels comedic or ironic to consider green the abstract and blue the solid with the way they're often portrayed on cards. Of course, Wizards seems to have a hard time portraying green as much other than "Mm. Me forest. You bad. Forest must stay forest. Mm."

Yeah, that's a good point. Really, nature is sort of amazing symmetrical a lot of the time. Maybe we could play around with that. Or something with the natural order. Acceptance and denial, maybe?

That's actually kind of the reason I put them in blue and green for thought and instinct.
It represents both the wilderness and civilization, the balance they have to strike within the world.
Thought/Instinct is the drive to embrace that which improves the world, to elevate it, and acceptance of the natural world and what it has to offer.

Aside from that, it makes for a really interesting dichotomy that the druids that are worshiping nature worship the same god as the ones who make cities.