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paradox42's crazy cosmology
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<blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 5084782" data-attributes="member: 29746"><p>My prime world- the one all of this cosmic stuff was meant to support- was always designed with Epic levels in mind. Even back in 2nd Edition, when 20th level was really the limit and there was virtually no support for anything higher (except in Dark Sun, which I gladly borrowed from), I had NPCs in the world's backstory and metaplot who were over 40th level. Part of this was holdovers from 1st Edition, but another part of it was just wanting the world to be- in some ways- over the top.</p><p></p><p>But gods, I reasoned, should always be extremely high-level compared with mortals, and ideally the <strong>real</strong> gods (i.e., not the merely "half" deities that Demigods were in every edition before 3E introduced the concept of "Quasi-Deities") should be so powerful that they're simply beyond mortal reach. That did not mean, as the 2nd Edition developers and authors stated, that gods should be statless and beyond the game rules; the fact that I agreed with their reason but arrived at an entirely different conclusion was really a manifestation of my extreme attention to detail (which is a quirk of my everyday personality). I wanted to be able to figure out what would happen when one god directly fought another, among other things- so I needed stats.</p><p></p><p>The specific numbers, I arrived at because I got the idea somewhere (and I no longer, honestly, remember where this came from) that an avatar should always have 1/4 the hit points/hit dice of the main being. Avatars for my deities, I reasoned, should be high enough that they impress normal mortals, but not <strong>so</strong> high that real heroes would find them unbeatable. 100 was therefore just a nice, round figure that I could apply to the lower-echelon deities (i.e. demigods) to get 25th-level avatars. It was then a fairly obvious extension to continue the process tier by tier, up to Greater.</p><p></p><p>The Elders and Incarnations never got hard stats or rules applied to them during 2E, aside from one sheet of paper I still have stashed in my copy of The Primal Order (the core book); that paper only mentions their characteristics related to Greater & below deities, and shows how big their power pool is by comparison with such beings. It doesn't deal with hit dice at all. When the IH came around, I arrived at the present stat requirements by again just extending the table in a seemingly-appropriate manner- but I'm sort of getting ahead of myself here, because (as I did mention in a post on the Nehaschimic Dragons thread) Sidereals have HD requirements too, and the Elders and Incarnations were given stats to fill that gap.</p><p></p><p>Glad you like it, though. Part of the reason I've been going into deep historical detail in these posts is to show where all of this stuff came from- it's been building for over 20 years in my head, in some form or another. And the whole plotline that I ended the campaign with, the appearance of the Eternal being who created the Reality the PCs know, coming in and finding it wanting, getting ready to reset, and then the PCs making a plea for their existence, was something I thought up way back when I first came up with the idea of and rules for "Originals." As I told my players afterward, it was lurking in my brain that long waiting to come out, and they finally gave it the chance to "live" in a real game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="paradox42, post: 5084782, member: 29746"] My prime world- the one all of this cosmic stuff was meant to support- was always designed with Epic levels in mind. Even back in 2nd Edition, when 20th level was really the limit and there was virtually no support for anything higher (except in Dark Sun, which I gladly borrowed from), I had NPCs in the world's backstory and metaplot who were over 40th level. Part of this was holdovers from 1st Edition, but another part of it was just wanting the world to be- in some ways- over the top. But gods, I reasoned, should always be extremely high-level compared with mortals, and ideally the [B]real[/B] gods (i.e., not the merely "half" deities that Demigods were in every edition before 3E introduced the concept of "Quasi-Deities") should be so powerful that they're simply beyond mortal reach. That did not mean, as the 2nd Edition developers and authors stated, that gods should be statless and beyond the game rules; the fact that I agreed with their reason but arrived at an entirely different conclusion was really a manifestation of my extreme attention to detail (which is a quirk of my everyday personality). I wanted to be able to figure out what would happen when one god directly fought another, among other things- so I needed stats. The specific numbers, I arrived at because I got the idea somewhere (and I no longer, honestly, remember where this came from) that an avatar should always have 1/4 the hit points/hit dice of the main being. Avatars for my deities, I reasoned, should be high enough that they impress normal mortals, but not [B]so[/B] high that real heroes would find them unbeatable. 100 was therefore just a nice, round figure that I could apply to the lower-echelon deities (i.e. demigods) to get 25th-level avatars. It was then a fairly obvious extension to continue the process tier by tier, up to Greater. The Elders and Incarnations never got hard stats or rules applied to them during 2E, aside from one sheet of paper I still have stashed in my copy of The Primal Order (the core book); that paper only mentions their characteristics related to Greater & below deities, and shows how big their power pool is by comparison with such beings. It doesn't deal with hit dice at all. When the IH came around, I arrived at the present stat requirements by again just extending the table in a seemingly-appropriate manner- but I'm sort of getting ahead of myself here, because (as I did mention in a post on the Nehaschimic Dragons thread) Sidereals have HD requirements too, and the Elders and Incarnations were given stats to fill that gap. Glad you like it, though. Part of the reason I've been going into deep historical detail in these posts is to show where all of this stuff came from- it's been building for over 20 years in my head, in some form or another. And the whole plotline that I ended the campaign with, the appearance of the Eternal being who created the Reality the PCs know, coming in and finding it wanting, getting ready to reset, and then the PCs making a plea for their existence, was something I thought up way back when I first came up with the idea of and rules for "Originals." As I told my players afterward, it was lurking in my brain that long waiting to come out, and they finally gave it the chance to "live" in a real game. [/QUOTE]
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