a Deity focused magic system
Jun. 17th, 2015 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI mentioned before that the me-alike in many magic worlds worships Janus. I've had plot bunnies since Buffy that wandered really a long way from Buffy.
I know Buffy took the two faces, used an unusual statue where one of the faces is definitely feminine, and did a whole insides to outsides physical transformation thing, but that's not conventionally associated with Janus. Cool, but, not a primary aspect.
Janus could see past and future, and was deity of gates and doors, being the doorkeeper of the gods.
So the obvious spells are to keep doors locked or people blocked from going through them, like a vampire who can't come in without being invited, or to open doors even if the owner thought they locked them. Plus the whole Gate college of magic that just opens a door between the caster and anywhere. Including other dimensions, since Janus has access to all the other deities. Way powerful, many ways to drop someone into a plot.
But I like the subtle ones too. I was going to do a bunch of stories of really low power magic, where the only power is the 'seeing past and future' bit. Janus sending visions.
Limitations would be that the caster can't see them alone, has to work with someone else, and both of them will see one past and one future vision of the deity's choosing.
That would mean that whoever you were working with could see a bit of your past, and you would see some of theirs. You also both get the glimpse of the future, no hiding or lying about it, though obviously you can lie and bystanders have to sort it out between them which of you is telling the truth or if you both are but perceived it differently. And they could be proper immersive visions of the sort where you relive bits of life, which a lot of people wouldn't be keen on signing up for anyway.
The amount of trouble you could get your characters into that way is limitless.
And it wouldn't be an easy way to get them out either. Even if those particular visions always came to pass, there'd be questions of interpretation and context that wouldn't be answered until you get there.
And if visions are always definitely going to happen then, again, a lot of people don't want to know.
So there's a lot of answers for the 'why didn't they just ask god' question, aside from the usual 'god didn't feel like telling them a thing'. Which is good because otherwise it's all just cell phones with no bars. If you're really legit unsure you even want to ask, that's emotion stuff, much better reason for a lack of communications.
The visions powers would be handy for investigations, but not completely instant answers, especially if there's limits like can only show your own personal past and future and can't be used on murder victims.
The gates powers would either be the sneakiest cat burglar of all time or awesome at jailbreaks. Jailbreaks from other dimensions even. Like getting Lindsey out of his hell dimension.
Looked at from a more or less mainstream Christian perspective it's a giant not cool to break someone out of hell, because God did the judging, The End.
Looked at from a number of other perspectives, like say belief in a just and loving deity, hell is just creepy bad.
And if you believe in reincarnation then the Christian idea that there's a hell that's forever is just the worst. Like, there are hells in reincarnation schemes I know of, but they aren't eternal. They're more like jail with added badness. So you do your sentence and get out again. That was more how I understood Angel getting sent back from hell, he'd just been there long enough, they booted him out again. In the usual scheme then the soul would get sent back to be reborn, but weird magic had bound his soul into an already dead body, so they just threw the lot of it out. All done, time served, debt paid.
So I've got an idea for story that has pagans going around breaking people out of 'hell' dimensions because Not Cool, everyone should get as many chances as they need to learn and grow and stuff. Which has obvious drawbacks, but, lack of eternal hellfire.
Then their enemies would include sincere good guys as well as epic bad guys.
Also idea for what demons are: I don't want to think of them as seperate races ala Star Trek, that's not much to do with choices and hells the way the rest of the stories about demons are. They could be races but they wouldn't be demons if they were.
Soooo...
Demons as humans in a pyramid selling scheme. Instead of paying for their own crimes they're trying to get other people to pay for them. If they sell the idea strongly enough then the next layer of people goes out and tries to get people to pay their debt, etc etc etc. Only that doesn't really work, so they have a whole suffering thing going on and don't want it, and really they should at that point think 'hmmm, how about we try not being evil', but history suggests quite a lot of them will just try doing it again harder. If they can leach off the works of the living and make their afterlives that much more comfortable, they'll do it, even if it only postpones actually paying back and getting out to comfort again. Especially because there's whole huge segments of the world who think hell is permanent anyway and therefore that anything that makes it a tiny bit better for them is the best they can get. So all they're doing is pulling other people down and locking them in, but they've got this explanation framework that makes them think there's no other way.
But any deity could get that soul out of there, if they'd acted correctly according to that deity. So the Christians would need to repent, it's really simples, there's plays about how it's pretty stupid to lock yourself in to a contract with the devil because heaven forever is so much better. Other deities would have other criteria, but if you're cool with them, you get to go to their afterlife, then reincarnate later. So everything demons do, and get people to do for them, and tempt people into doing, is so they don't notice how easy it is to do good instead and not in fact end up in hell. Contracts and the way GURPS pacts work only when you use magic for selfish evil purposes, that's only to keep people from noticing there's always a way out.
The way out involves leading a virtuous life and dedicating your life to some kind of higher power, but it's a way out. And some varieties of Christianity I know of are fine with realising at the last second, as long as it's sincere repentance.
Actually for other religions where hell is temporary you'd improve your situation even if you weren't a particularly good follower. Though of course for Christians then all the pagan deities are a trick and another way to end up in the eternal-hell. But for the purposes of story, nope, lots of deities with different afterlives, no problem. Like, in Christian terms, even trying to be a good worshipper gets you a purgatory instead of a hell. You can work your way through it.
The idea that all the 'hells' of reincarnation religions are purgatories, and that 'hell' in the permanent sense is a trick built around getting people to not even try getting out, that's where the story would happen.
The magic system I was thinking on with spells being the swap for offering your life to a deity... I was thinking two layers of offerings, to dedicate one's life to one's deity in this life and the next. Only in a reincarnation scheme they don't actually mean when they get reborn again. That would be rude, the next person has their own thing going on. It's more like, if you live a good life by the standards of that religion, you get in to their idea of heaven. And you can hang out there and relax. Maybe you're waiting for someone, maybe you had a rough time and need to unwind, maybe it's just that the idea of endless summer works for you. It's cool, you can stay. Until eventually you go get reborn.
But if someone offers their next life to service, to a particular deity, then instead of hanging out being chill even if they're a perfect worshipper they're going to spend a lifetime doing what they're told and working hard. And hopefully they're someone who can enjoy doing that and they offer it to a deity they're a good fit with. But they've made the promise now, so, that's going to happen.
So magic, anyone's magic, comes from offering powerful spirits your service in this life and the next. Some of those dudes are selfish and just want to make their own lives better and mostly keep recruiting because if they stop then they'll have to notice it kind of sucks being them. Some of those spirits are trying to be helpful and look after people. Either way, letting their magic flow through you to make stuff they approve of happen kind of gets you in the habit of acting like they would, and eventually thinking like they would. You've got free will, but it's easier if you align your will with theirs, they can do all the heavy lifting that way. So demons get more demonic because they're being more like the boss. And their boss is whoever first thought of making other people go to hell instead of feeling it himself. Or possibly whoever managed to take that position over, since it is a collection of not nice people.
People using magic to be selfish are trying to make their own current lives happier, knowing they'll have to pay for it later. People using magic to do like their deity wants them to, which generally means to do things that help lots of worshippers, they're putting a lot of hard work in so they can get a nice rest between lives later. But some of them either need something huge right now or are so invested in the work that they legit want to keep doing it as their happy place, and they make another offering of their next life, and get more deeper magic back.
There would be spirits who are lying liars who lie, spirits who skip the small print, and spirits who set out the price up front and let people weigh it up. The truthful ones would get annoyed at the lying ones.
How the spirits get started would be a great big argue. Like, there's rules in GURPS for apotheosis, there's no particular bar to starting out human and ending up a god, and the definitions of god, spirit, and demon are like good, neutral, evil. Not necessarily different in kind, just alignment.
So demons would be dead people that suck up all the offered worship and use that power primarily to make their own lives awesome, with a bit of flash to prime the new guys and keep the donations flowing.
But then good guy spirits could be the exact same, only more generous, more helpful, actually following through on their promises. Only there would be people who say nope, they're more perfect because they're a different order of creation, they're just gods that were always gods and that's why they can be better even when they're given all that power.
But someone deciding to set out and be a good and generous god... that's such an interesting story. It's all about being a good boss. What's the necessary qualities of a good boss?
Like, you want your deity to leave you free will, but you want your boss to kind of give you a hint what your company does to make the shinies that keep all your employees alive.
And if omniscience isn't one of the powers of deity, just maybe higher levels of skill and more power to pour into some standard spells like divinations and mind reading and so forth, ever deity is a gamble. Like, there'd be some big successful firms, but there'd be new startups too, and they might get big or crash out.
But if you happen to have power, like if you arrive in the afterlife and your friends are willing to post you some power every day, then what do you do with it?
Also, are there two magic systems, where one uses a sort of raw power and the other just kind of asks spirits nicely, or is it all spirits all the way down? Then being a big deal spirit would just be about getting more spirits to follow you. Some big spirits would do it by punishing a few and getting the others to scamper around trying to avoid punishment, others would do it by being nice and helping them all, except they'd need like taxes where they get a little work from each to do things that are for the good of all.
So then the gods thing is just like the politics thing only it don't end.
It's all different story generators with different metaphors built in.
If you start with only one being sitting in judgement, then you do right or wrong, the end.
But if you've got entire courts and pantheons going on, lots of different standards standing right next to each other, then that gets complicated.
Hence drama.
I know Buffy took the two faces, used an unusual statue where one of the faces is definitely feminine, and did a whole insides to outsides physical transformation thing, but that's not conventionally associated with Janus. Cool, but, not a primary aspect.
Janus could see past and future, and was deity of gates and doors, being the doorkeeper of the gods.
So the obvious spells are to keep doors locked or people blocked from going through them, like a vampire who can't come in without being invited, or to open doors even if the owner thought they locked them. Plus the whole Gate college of magic that just opens a door between the caster and anywhere. Including other dimensions, since Janus has access to all the other deities. Way powerful, many ways to drop someone into a plot.
But I like the subtle ones too. I was going to do a bunch of stories of really low power magic, where the only power is the 'seeing past and future' bit. Janus sending visions.
Limitations would be that the caster can't see them alone, has to work with someone else, and both of them will see one past and one future vision of the deity's choosing.
That would mean that whoever you were working with could see a bit of your past, and you would see some of theirs. You also both get the glimpse of the future, no hiding or lying about it, though obviously you can lie and bystanders have to sort it out between them which of you is telling the truth or if you both are but perceived it differently. And they could be proper immersive visions of the sort where you relive bits of life, which a lot of people wouldn't be keen on signing up for anyway.
The amount of trouble you could get your characters into that way is limitless.
And it wouldn't be an easy way to get them out either. Even if those particular visions always came to pass, there'd be questions of interpretation and context that wouldn't be answered until you get there.
And if visions are always definitely going to happen then, again, a lot of people don't want to know.
So there's a lot of answers for the 'why didn't they just ask god' question, aside from the usual 'god didn't feel like telling them a thing'. Which is good because otherwise it's all just cell phones with no bars. If you're really legit unsure you even want to ask, that's emotion stuff, much better reason for a lack of communications.
The visions powers would be handy for investigations, but not completely instant answers, especially if there's limits like can only show your own personal past and future and can't be used on murder victims.
The gates powers would either be the sneakiest cat burglar of all time or awesome at jailbreaks. Jailbreaks from other dimensions even. Like getting Lindsey out of his hell dimension.
Looked at from a more or less mainstream Christian perspective it's a giant not cool to break someone out of hell, because God did the judging, The End.
Looked at from a number of other perspectives, like say belief in a just and loving deity, hell is just creepy bad.
And if you believe in reincarnation then the Christian idea that there's a hell that's forever is just the worst. Like, there are hells in reincarnation schemes I know of, but they aren't eternal. They're more like jail with added badness. So you do your sentence and get out again. That was more how I understood Angel getting sent back from hell, he'd just been there long enough, they booted him out again. In the usual scheme then the soul would get sent back to be reborn, but weird magic had bound his soul into an already dead body, so they just threw the lot of it out. All done, time served, debt paid.
So I've got an idea for story that has pagans going around breaking people out of 'hell' dimensions because Not Cool, everyone should get as many chances as they need to learn and grow and stuff. Which has obvious drawbacks, but, lack of eternal hellfire.
Then their enemies would include sincere good guys as well as epic bad guys.
Also idea for what demons are: I don't want to think of them as seperate races ala Star Trek, that's not much to do with choices and hells the way the rest of the stories about demons are. They could be races but they wouldn't be demons if they were.
Soooo...
Demons as humans in a pyramid selling scheme. Instead of paying for their own crimes they're trying to get other people to pay for them. If they sell the idea strongly enough then the next layer of people goes out and tries to get people to pay their debt, etc etc etc. Only that doesn't really work, so they have a whole suffering thing going on and don't want it, and really they should at that point think 'hmmm, how about we try not being evil', but history suggests quite a lot of them will just try doing it again harder. If they can leach off the works of the living and make their afterlives that much more comfortable, they'll do it, even if it only postpones actually paying back and getting out to comfort again. Especially because there's whole huge segments of the world who think hell is permanent anyway and therefore that anything that makes it a tiny bit better for them is the best they can get. So all they're doing is pulling other people down and locking them in, but they've got this explanation framework that makes them think there's no other way.
But any deity could get that soul out of there, if they'd acted correctly according to that deity. So the Christians would need to repent, it's really simples, there's plays about how it's pretty stupid to lock yourself in to a contract with the devil because heaven forever is so much better. Other deities would have other criteria, but if you're cool with them, you get to go to their afterlife, then reincarnate later. So everything demons do, and get people to do for them, and tempt people into doing, is so they don't notice how easy it is to do good instead and not in fact end up in hell. Contracts and the way GURPS pacts work only when you use magic for selfish evil purposes, that's only to keep people from noticing there's always a way out.
The way out involves leading a virtuous life and dedicating your life to some kind of higher power, but it's a way out. And some varieties of Christianity I know of are fine with realising at the last second, as long as it's sincere repentance.
Actually for other religions where hell is temporary you'd improve your situation even if you weren't a particularly good follower. Though of course for Christians then all the pagan deities are a trick and another way to end up in the eternal-hell. But for the purposes of story, nope, lots of deities with different afterlives, no problem. Like, in Christian terms, even trying to be a good worshipper gets you a purgatory instead of a hell. You can work your way through it.
The idea that all the 'hells' of reincarnation religions are purgatories, and that 'hell' in the permanent sense is a trick built around getting people to not even try getting out, that's where the story would happen.
The magic system I was thinking on with spells being the swap for offering your life to a deity... I was thinking two layers of offerings, to dedicate one's life to one's deity in this life and the next. Only in a reincarnation scheme they don't actually mean when they get reborn again. That would be rude, the next person has their own thing going on. It's more like, if you live a good life by the standards of that religion, you get in to their idea of heaven. And you can hang out there and relax. Maybe you're waiting for someone, maybe you had a rough time and need to unwind, maybe it's just that the idea of endless summer works for you. It's cool, you can stay. Until eventually you go get reborn.
But if someone offers their next life to service, to a particular deity, then instead of hanging out being chill even if they're a perfect worshipper they're going to spend a lifetime doing what they're told and working hard. And hopefully they're someone who can enjoy doing that and they offer it to a deity they're a good fit with. But they've made the promise now, so, that's going to happen.
So magic, anyone's magic, comes from offering powerful spirits your service in this life and the next. Some of those dudes are selfish and just want to make their own lives better and mostly keep recruiting because if they stop then they'll have to notice it kind of sucks being them. Some of those spirits are trying to be helpful and look after people. Either way, letting their magic flow through you to make stuff they approve of happen kind of gets you in the habit of acting like they would, and eventually thinking like they would. You've got free will, but it's easier if you align your will with theirs, they can do all the heavy lifting that way. So demons get more demonic because they're being more like the boss. And their boss is whoever first thought of making other people go to hell instead of feeling it himself. Or possibly whoever managed to take that position over, since it is a collection of not nice people.
People using magic to be selfish are trying to make their own current lives happier, knowing they'll have to pay for it later. People using magic to do like their deity wants them to, which generally means to do things that help lots of worshippers, they're putting a lot of hard work in so they can get a nice rest between lives later. But some of them either need something huge right now or are so invested in the work that they legit want to keep doing it as their happy place, and they make another offering of their next life, and get more deeper magic back.
There would be spirits who are lying liars who lie, spirits who skip the small print, and spirits who set out the price up front and let people weigh it up. The truthful ones would get annoyed at the lying ones.
How the spirits get started would be a great big argue. Like, there's rules in GURPS for apotheosis, there's no particular bar to starting out human and ending up a god, and the definitions of god, spirit, and demon are like good, neutral, evil. Not necessarily different in kind, just alignment.
So demons would be dead people that suck up all the offered worship and use that power primarily to make their own lives awesome, with a bit of flash to prime the new guys and keep the donations flowing.
But then good guy spirits could be the exact same, only more generous, more helpful, actually following through on their promises. Only there would be people who say nope, they're more perfect because they're a different order of creation, they're just gods that were always gods and that's why they can be better even when they're given all that power.
But someone deciding to set out and be a good and generous god... that's such an interesting story. It's all about being a good boss. What's the necessary qualities of a good boss?
Like, you want your deity to leave you free will, but you want your boss to kind of give you a hint what your company does to make the shinies that keep all your employees alive.
And if omniscience isn't one of the powers of deity, just maybe higher levels of skill and more power to pour into some standard spells like divinations and mind reading and so forth, ever deity is a gamble. Like, there'd be some big successful firms, but there'd be new startups too, and they might get big or crash out.
But if you happen to have power, like if you arrive in the afterlife and your friends are willing to post you some power every day, then what do you do with it?
Also, are there two magic systems, where one uses a sort of raw power and the other just kind of asks spirits nicely, or is it all spirits all the way down? Then being a big deal spirit would just be about getting more spirits to follow you. Some big spirits would do it by punishing a few and getting the others to scamper around trying to avoid punishment, others would do it by being nice and helping them all, except they'd need like taxes where they get a little work from each to do things that are for the good of all.
So then the gods thing is just like the politics thing only it don't end.
It's all different story generators with different metaphors built in.
If you start with only one being sitting in judgement, then you do right or wrong, the end.
But if you've got entire courts and pantheons going on, lots of different standards standing right next to each other, then that gets complicated.
Hence drama.