Mild ow and some thinking
Sep. 18th, 2024 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI hurt my wrist in my sleep, which is annoying because shouldn't you have to at least Do Something to get ow?
I'm hoping it'll fix in my sleep too but I write down when the ow started so I won't just ignore it.
I had a thought about ascension in Pathfinder but it's a bit of a walk from the text and not exactly of practical use
but
I was thinking that even very small gods can hear all their prayers. At once. All the time.
And to be a successful god they have to be able to understand and answer them?
Which is a span of control / attention span problem that *swiftly* gets carried away.
Wrath of the Righteous spoilers under the cut:
I mean it's worse than being moderator on a busy forum, because the stakes are more like calling 999, and there's no Authorities to hand things off to.
... pantheons make so much sense, gods of Golarion are specialists not generalists, why would any of them try standing alone?
The Mythic Adventures rules let you attempt becoming a god *very* early, but at the lowest levels it's geographically bound, and after that it still limits what spells you can give out, and the only *mechanism* for getting followers is still Leadership, which maxes out at 163 people and you'd have to have high level and high charisma to do it. So it's a busy meeting hall problem, but still kind of human scale? Only at level 20 you can get the capstone The Boss, and then it's 1630 people. Plus there are two magic items that double your follower count. Though being a deity that people only worship when they wear the right bling is... actually kind of hilarious.
Still. Long before everyone in the world has heard of the new god, they have an ansolute tsunami of data to process.
Wrath of the Righteous has a lot to say about demon lords, small gods of Sarkoris, and Nocticula. The DLC with Nahyndri kind of gives glimpses into what the experience of becoming a demon lord is like. Nahyndri didn't like it and kind of rejected the worship parts, which can be read as going Poorly, given the general deadness.
A demon Lord needs killing twice, because the first time they'll just come back in their personal realm. The Abyss responds to them, creating an area that reflects their interests and personality. Like the Midnight Isles are made from dead demon lords so they're very varied, but they're made by Nocticula so they have common elements too. Each isle is what's left of a lord, so they can become pretty sizeable geography. And the abyssal realms are made of, by, from, for, these beings.
The great beyond is made of soul stuff. Souls go there and become demons, but demons also become rocks, or buildings, or furniture. The great beyond is soul stuff all the way down.
And becoming a demon lord means you get a whole realm of the great beyond to make you part of it, as it is part of you.
So I reckon the thing that makes them able to answer all the messages is:
Every bit of that soul stuff was/is/can be a mind.
It was people and will be demons and the whole Great Beyond can think.
Ascension is the process of getting it to think it is part of you, and thinking with it.
And then you get a realm like the islands that is so fundamentally *you* it's more essential than your heart's home. Because it's that and then some.
But I was thinking that in the paper version of Wrath of the Righteous the heroes see Iomedae in her own bit of Heaven
and everywhere is decorated with her.
And that struck me as so rubbish. I mean, she has worshippers, do they not do cool stuff too? If she isn't proud of them then what's the point?
But no, she decorates with the Acts of Iomedae and asks her questions about them.
But Iomedae is ascended, and relatively recently for a deity.
What if it's easy to get lost in there?
To reshape the beyond, yes, but be shaped by it. By the incoming souls that believed in you, by the prayers of the living with their ideas of you, all aimed at a specific destination, an idea that may not match how you see yourself.
In the DLC with Ulbrig you meet a god of Sarkoris that is dying for lack of worshippers. There are people that believe they worship her, but they've been pronouncing her name wrong and getting the rites wrong and just generally aiming their worship wrong. And the dying god can choose to become the god they believe in, but that's a new being, a young god, that comes into existence on the dying breath of the old. Might have continuity of memory but is not the same person. Like angels getting reborn in heaven, they might remember bits of their old life, but it isn't who they are any more. (In Pathfinder, which has a very specific construction of the Great Beyond that all of Wrath of the Righteous hangs on.)
A god who ascends without being known, or a god who is known but known *wrong*, has a rough path ahead, and perhaps limited choices.
So a successful deity has to be so completely themselves they can stick to their own unique nature despite the wild variety in the new inputs.
And in the soul stuff landscape mind they're processing the new with.
Huh. Way to become one with your deity. Join their landscaping...
There are independent demons or angels, but some of them are made from multiple souls smushed together, and Arue didn't remember the mortal lives that made her. They can be kept quite in the dark by the deity they serve though, so if there's networked thinking going on they don't know of it.
I just find it an interesting set of possibilities. Power that depends on being known, and knowing themselves. Power that is the furthest thing from eternal, if they want to admit it.
But that's the small gods and the demon lords, the full deities are deliberately past stats and outside of all sure knowledge.
... imagine though, you're a new god, and you find out you have to be yourself so much it can persuade mountains to be like you. But to keep doing it you have to explain yourself clearly enough that you will stay well defined for as much as you can manage of forever.
... I keep thinking of gods dependent on like and subscribe.
... but the tragedy of communication and interpretation could pull the story of a new deity off in wild ways.
In Wrath of the Righteous, mythic power comes from crystalised demon lords amd starts out abyssal, but the choices lf the Knight Commander are the deciding factor in how that power manifests and who they become. So even if you start with a chunk of pure chaotic evil there are ways to purify it.
Demons are made of abyss and the abyss is made of souls and whenever you kill a demon on the material plane it spills aligned quintessence out all over the place and the world of Golarion gets that much more chaotic and evil. And magical and torn apart by the power.
But then tieflings get born. And tieflings have the power of free will, same as every other mortal, and free will reshapes the nature of souls. Tieflings make better choices, and they live and they die, and that takes the spilled fiendish energies out of the world with them when they go, and very possibly purifies the energy on the way.
... that's a line of speculation that could result in tieflings being treated *very* weirdly. If their choices are important to decontaminating areas soaked in demon blood. Important work. Someone will try and force what cannot be forced. Someone will want to hurry them out of the world sooner.
Dangerous thought then.
But aasimar do the same for celestial influences, pulling them out of the world and sending them where they're going.
Maybe. If that makes good stories.
Imagine though if you conquer a demon lord's realm and make it part of yourself. You've got the biggest job of renovation possible ahead of you. Rehabilitation. Redemption. For a whole realm.
Old goat head the demonlord took a chunk of hell with him when he went back to the abyss. Changed its nature, mostly. As it had changed his.
So if you wrest it from him, then what? Change it to follow you?
Maybe that's a bit possible on the azata path, did some good creative restorative things on that path.
But the most persuasion a new god could have over their realm is to tell it everything they know. Let it know them. Know it. Take it in by the knowing.
If a god is a good enough story, people want to be like them, follow them.
If a god is a good enough story, the great beyond reshapes itself to make a place for that story.
Potential.
I have a feeling like I've figured out a half a thing and need to keep turning it around and around until I see where to click it together.
But it's all tools and what you can do with them, stories and which ones can be told with these settings.
Seems like some very story in there.
I'm hoping it'll fix in my sleep too but I write down when the ow started so I won't just ignore it.
I had a thought about ascension in Pathfinder but it's a bit of a walk from the text and not exactly of practical use
but
I was thinking that even very small gods can hear all their prayers. At once. All the time.
And to be a successful god they have to be able to understand and answer them?
Which is a span of control / attention span problem that *swiftly* gets carried away.
Wrath of the Righteous spoilers under the cut:
I mean it's worse than being moderator on a busy forum, because the stakes are more like calling 999, and there's no Authorities to hand things off to.
... pantheons make so much sense, gods of Golarion are specialists not generalists, why would any of them try standing alone?
The Mythic Adventures rules let you attempt becoming a god *very* early, but at the lowest levels it's geographically bound, and after that it still limits what spells you can give out, and the only *mechanism* for getting followers is still Leadership, which maxes out at 163 people and you'd have to have high level and high charisma to do it. So it's a busy meeting hall problem, but still kind of human scale? Only at level 20 you can get the capstone The Boss, and then it's 1630 people. Plus there are two magic items that double your follower count. Though being a deity that people only worship when they wear the right bling is... actually kind of hilarious.
Still. Long before everyone in the world has heard of the new god, they have an ansolute tsunami of data to process.
Wrath of the Righteous has a lot to say about demon lords, small gods of Sarkoris, and Nocticula. The DLC with Nahyndri kind of gives glimpses into what the experience of becoming a demon lord is like. Nahyndri didn't like it and kind of rejected the worship parts, which can be read as going Poorly, given the general deadness.
A demon Lord needs killing twice, because the first time they'll just come back in their personal realm. The Abyss responds to them, creating an area that reflects their interests and personality. Like the Midnight Isles are made from dead demon lords so they're very varied, but they're made by Nocticula so they have common elements too. Each isle is what's left of a lord, so they can become pretty sizeable geography. And the abyssal realms are made of, by, from, for, these beings.
The great beyond is made of soul stuff. Souls go there and become demons, but demons also become rocks, or buildings, or furniture. The great beyond is soul stuff all the way down.
And becoming a demon lord means you get a whole realm of the great beyond to make you part of it, as it is part of you.
So I reckon the thing that makes them able to answer all the messages is:
Every bit of that soul stuff was/is/can be a mind.
It was people and will be demons and the whole Great Beyond can think.
Ascension is the process of getting it to think it is part of you, and thinking with it.
And then you get a realm like the islands that is so fundamentally *you* it's more essential than your heart's home. Because it's that and then some.
But I was thinking that in the paper version of Wrath of the Righteous the heroes see Iomedae in her own bit of Heaven
and everywhere is decorated with her.
And that struck me as so rubbish. I mean, she has worshippers, do they not do cool stuff too? If she isn't proud of them then what's the point?
But no, she decorates with the Acts of Iomedae and asks her questions about them.
But Iomedae is ascended, and relatively recently for a deity.
What if it's easy to get lost in there?
To reshape the beyond, yes, but be shaped by it. By the incoming souls that believed in you, by the prayers of the living with their ideas of you, all aimed at a specific destination, an idea that may not match how you see yourself.
In the DLC with Ulbrig you meet a god of Sarkoris that is dying for lack of worshippers. There are people that believe they worship her, but they've been pronouncing her name wrong and getting the rites wrong and just generally aiming their worship wrong. And the dying god can choose to become the god they believe in, but that's a new being, a young god, that comes into existence on the dying breath of the old. Might have continuity of memory but is not the same person. Like angels getting reborn in heaven, they might remember bits of their old life, but it isn't who they are any more. (In Pathfinder, which has a very specific construction of the Great Beyond that all of Wrath of the Righteous hangs on.)
A god who ascends without being known, or a god who is known but known *wrong*, has a rough path ahead, and perhaps limited choices.
So a successful deity has to be so completely themselves they can stick to their own unique nature despite the wild variety in the new inputs.
And in the soul stuff landscape mind they're processing the new with.
Huh. Way to become one with your deity. Join their landscaping...
There are independent demons or angels, but some of them are made from multiple souls smushed together, and Arue didn't remember the mortal lives that made her. They can be kept quite in the dark by the deity they serve though, so if there's networked thinking going on they don't know of it.
I just find it an interesting set of possibilities. Power that depends on being known, and knowing themselves. Power that is the furthest thing from eternal, if they want to admit it.
But that's the small gods and the demon lords, the full deities are deliberately past stats and outside of all sure knowledge.
... imagine though, you're a new god, and you find out you have to be yourself so much it can persuade mountains to be like you. But to keep doing it you have to explain yourself clearly enough that you will stay well defined for as much as you can manage of forever.
... I keep thinking of gods dependent on like and subscribe.
... but the tragedy of communication and interpretation could pull the story of a new deity off in wild ways.
In Wrath of the Righteous, mythic power comes from crystalised demon lords amd starts out abyssal, but the choices lf the Knight Commander are the deciding factor in how that power manifests and who they become. So even if you start with a chunk of pure chaotic evil there are ways to purify it.
Demons are made of abyss and the abyss is made of souls and whenever you kill a demon on the material plane it spills aligned quintessence out all over the place and the world of Golarion gets that much more chaotic and evil. And magical and torn apart by the power.
But then tieflings get born. And tieflings have the power of free will, same as every other mortal, and free will reshapes the nature of souls. Tieflings make better choices, and they live and they die, and that takes the spilled fiendish energies out of the world with them when they go, and very possibly purifies the energy on the way.
... that's a line of speculation that could result in tieflings being treated *very* weirdly. If their choices are important to decontaminating areas soaked in demon blood. Important work. Someone will try and force what cannot be forced. Someone will want to hurry them out of the world sooner.
Dangerous thought then.
But aasimar do the same for celestial influences, pulling them out of the world and sending them where they're going.
Maybe. If that makes good stories.
Imagine though if you conquer a demon lord's realm and make it part of yourself. You've got the biggest job of renovation possible ahead of you. Rehabilitation. Redemption. For a whole realm.
Old goat head the demonlord took a chunk of hell with him when he went back to the abyss. Changed its nature, mostly. As it had changed his.
So if you wrest it from him, then what? Change it to follow you?
Maybe that's a bit possible on the azata path, did some good creative restorative things on that path.
But the most persuasion a new god could have over their realm is to tell it everything they know. Let it know them. Know it. Take it in by the knowing.
If a god is a good enough story, people want to be like them, follow them.
If a god is a good enough story, the great beyond reshapes itself to make a place for that story.
Potential.
I have a feeling like I've figured out a half a thing and need to keep turning it around and around until I see where to click it together.
But it's all tools and what you can do with them, stories and which ones can be told with these settings.
Seems like some very story in there.