I currently don't have the internet for youtube, so I didn't watch it nor recognize the thumbnail (nor have I watched any of the like three videos Keeper linked in the last 15 minutes or so).


Also, all this talk of a melancholic trickster just makes me think of my recent good run-in with The Dark Knight's portrayal of the Joker and Two-Face as beings of chaos. Giving it a millisecond of thought, Two-Face seems the closer comparison for our Order/Chaos god, but I am definitely not going to argue comics to you guys.

Another millisecond gives me the idea of Doc Scratch. A purposeful trickster who pulls all the strings to bring about the timeline which he wants, but is well aware of how many other timelines there are and how chaotic it all may be.

Like I said, I think it would be interesting if he specifically had the most antagonistic relationship with "Life/Death as Fate."

But seriously, seeing him developed as a sort of Pagliachi who subverts to mask his own fears and issues is a rather original take on it all.
This is why I think group projects are so great.

@Luna: I don't think a god who interacts so directly to influence the timeline, or even acknowledge other timelines, is where we should go.
One o the aspects of this ties into the fact that these are very much large scale cosmic beings, so it is more grand twists than meaningful influence.

The gods, as we've been working on them, are such large beings that they don't actually understand the material world they created. That's why they made the Avatars to interact with the world for them. Which actually does some interesting things now that you bring it up. The Avatars of Chaos and the Avatars of Order could play some interesting things in manipulating events on the scale you're talking about.

I won't lie, I read the latter half of that post in an Irish accent.

But I just brought it up as a talking point (and brief synopsis on the character of Doc Scratch) rather than saying you should integrate timelines -- it wouldn't be right in a Magic setting. Mostly.

I don't really have much else to say on the matter tonight, though, so I bid you all bonne nuit.

So, reviving the work here, The idea of the god of fate being a callous being appeals to me. For one, it plays close to the idea that life is cruel, which helps drive home the trickster angle that we have brewing for the other god we've talked about.

The question is, how best do we want to demonstrate that life don't care. I mean, there are plenty of practical reasons to say it, but what does it say about the GOD?

You know, I've had a character in mind for years that I have never done anything with that might relate. Basically, I had him envisioned as a man who made a deal with a devil or god or something for incredible power at the cost of all caring, making him, for all intents and purposes, completely apathetic. He's basically incapable of caring about anything, but to make him work, he's still susceptible to whims.

So, to adjust this to the personality of a god, it might not be cruel, necessarily, just indifferent to an extreme. If the whim strikes to act, the god acts, allowing for rare moments of great blessing or great devastation, or anywhere in between.

The really interesting thing here, though, is what happens during the split to the lesser gods, who will likely care vehemently about their aspects, which I find sort of intriguing.

Well, I assume you mean avatars rather than lesser gods, because... well, only one group of gods.
It feels like it could work, though since everything is manipulated through the avatars, they are likely directly the creation of those whims.

Which I feel would say a lot about their role on the world. Most of the avatars of the other gods would have some purpose, but since they've just sort of been... passively wished into existence, they'd have so much less agency.

And that actually says some really interesting things in the idea behind the meaning of life and death.

See, this is why group sourcing projects is so fascinating and useful.

Yeah, the avatars. I've sort of been thinking of them as lesser gods, for the purposes of power-level descriptions in my head. But avatars they are.

Anyway, we could always achieve that disconnect on the next level down, too, with the avatars and their various mortal acolytes (or whatever we decide). But I agree with you, the disconnected, apathetic god of Life and Death makes a very interesting counterpoint to a melancholy trickster god.

Well, with the avatars, we have each of the avatars representing half the domain, so the avatars of life would just try to help where they could, but never quite know what they're meant to do. The avatars of death being sort of capricious assassins says something about the futility of things.

At some point, I feel like we'll have to start designing the symbology and ideas behind the images of the gods.
So far though, we have the basic thrust of two of the gods down, playing off of them basically. The question is where does that leave us with the others?

Okay, so quick run-down. What do we have and what do we need for the gods?

We have, in theory at least, the domains and origins.

That's all.
We've got a general concept for two of their personalities, though little in the way of fleshing them out, but that sort of goes into developing histories and how they reflect upon the world, which should come later anyways.

Sure. I just wanted to know which three we still needed to develop and what their aspects were.

Well, the Solitude/InterconnectionOne/All needs a better title for the domains, but I think we all pretty much agree on the concepts behind them at least.
Aside from that, we have One/NothingCreation/Void, but the problem there is that the act of creation is what tends to come up rather than the noun.

And lastly we have, nominally Denial/Indulgence, but that one doesn't scale to the cosmic state as elegantly as the others we have.

Honestly, though, that might be something we can play with. I mean, the other gods all sort of have a place that they can fit into pretty much from the outset. So maybe there's a way that we can use the fact that Denial/Indulgence doesn't have a place (at first) as part of the god's character/personality. For instance, this god might be the only one interested in the state of the plane in any real sense.

Well, I think a few more opinions on the matter might give us a better sense of what we can do, because right now I'm sort of adrift with the concept.

I like it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to utilize it.
Though as I'm thinking of it, I think it might have been something different. I think Creation/Void might have been our B/W choice while Solitude/Connection was our U/R.

I know we'd had problems with the G/U, though the ultimate domain being "The World" was nailed down. I think that might have been the One/All that I've mistaken because it... kind of overlaps with some of the other concepts we're dealing with.

Now I'm still reading through this stuff, but if Denial/Indulgence isn't cosmic enough could you get a similar vibe from Nullity/Existence.

Also with Solitude/Connection, I think Solitude/Unity sounds better. The word just has more weight to me.

I think for me Denial/Indulgence doesn't provide quite the same difficulties because I see it as very related to the Gnostic stuff I've read and studied and worked with artistically. Like, we might not see it NOW as fundamentally a part of the fabric of the universe, but I think for the Gnostics and other early Christians and even folks like Milton, these concepts were embedded in the foundations of all worlds... though not, necessarily, always expressed in the same way on the same side. Yaltabaoth is sort of a god of Indulgence in that he believes himself to be the one true god and creates the world in reflection of that self-proclaimed magesty, but he's also a god of Denial in that the humans he creates are forbidden the same powers that he has, because if they achieved true knowledge of the nature of the world they would ascend beyond it and defeat him. There's an undercurrent of these questions in Milton as well. Like, the real curse of Hell is that no matter how the Devils amuse themselves, they're ultimately still bored and purposeless. They indulge without meaning.

What I'm getting at is that for these writers, Denial and Indulgence is part of the fundamental moral grounding of all creation--particularly for the Gnostics for whom the world is a diseased creation formed of an indulging denier.

This suggests to me a God at war with Zirself, possessing of much but desperately jealous. I guess the question is of what to assign Zim... the most obvious thing seems to be "Will." The personality provides the initial conflict with the other gods even before we have creatures capable of possessing a will.

The problem is that this sort of approach ends up skipping a lot of the rest of the philosophical aspects of the pantheon and their genesis.
While the essential concept of the Divine vs the Nondivine does an admirable job of illustrating it, it isn't immediately something apparent about the nature of the universe itself.* The indulgence of the god's power doesn't function because it comes AFTER the creation of the world, as well as the denial coming BEFORE the creation of life, much less sapient life.

Aside from that, we run into another issue that these beings aren't moral authorities.

*I mean, I guess the same can be said of the idea of the U/G god, but at this point I'm really not sure where we stand on it.

I mean Yaltabaoth isn't a moral authority either. That's kind of the point.

I don't know, I guess I just don't understand where you're drawing the dividing line between what is and isn't acceptable, so I'm not sure how useful I can actually be to this.

In no way do I mean this as any sort of commentary about anything you've said, but I honestly feel sort of bad that I've made you feel that way.

I'm not sure if I can really verbalize everything that I want to say, in part because it's very abstract, even in the head.

No, don't feel bad, I just think I'm not quite grasping what you're trying to do, exactly, and it might be because what I'm thinking of as fundamental to the universe, based on my sort of literary background and interests artistically, maybe aren't meshing up with what seems obviously fundamental to you? It's just not clicking for me somehow, which is a little frustrating >_<