Creation Myths and Pantheons

[Gez]

I've used a sort of BDR there (belief defines reality).

Originally (well, not that originally), there was a few number of greater spirits that competed for creation. Making the best creature was all the rage at the time. There was a lot of creation in this time. And when some spirit had a good idea, the others plagiarized it (this explain the impressive number of humanoid species).

When they started creating sentient races, there came a problem. For them. Sentience came with religiosity, and soon various cults were created. Each specie created cults of their creators, each thinking they were the one and only creation of their own pantheon -- while they were in fact one of the many children of a small set of spirit.

So, the creator spirit of the human, dwarven, elven, gnome, hin, goblin, orc, and various others, races was adressed as being the whole human pantheon by humans, while being at the same time the whole dwarven pantheon, the whole elven pantheon, etc.

This induced schizophrenia drove them crazy until they finally simply bursted like bubbles and each shard of their fragmented personality became a deity on its own right -- but with much, much less reduced capacities.

Of course, this creation myth, one of the "truest" there is, is known by very few people. Each culture has its own belief, frequently incompatible, that can often be sumed up as "we are the chosen race, all other creatures are there to act as foes, slaves, or mere annoyance".

That's how I managed to conciliate the D&D world (gods works as stated in Deities & Demigods, there are several sentient races, etc.) with a roughly unified mythos.

 

[Greybar]

alsih2o said:

if one is valorous, evil, famous or brave enuf one can actually become a star upon dying.

The scary thing about threads like this is that they smack you upside the head with the fact that just when you thought you were being creative, you find that three other people are already doing the same thing...

So this is true in my world as well. The divine are like a broad parental tree. Hara Sunmother Everlasting and Tangri Moonfather Ever-reborn represent the top of the pantheon. Hara produced twelve daughters of her own will. Tangri dallied with those daughters, producing the large number of heroes collectively know as either the "Thousand Sons" or "Twelve-Times-Twelve Sons" depending on what tale is being told. Long long ago Hara and Tangri ascended into the heavens, and mortals see them everyday above. Later the Daughters ascended. Truely devout sunborn (women) believe they will become stars if they achieve greatness.

Too much more I won't say until some of my PCs actually get some Knowledge(Planes)...

John

 

[seasong]

I try to do something different with every campaign world I run, although sometimes something is soooo good, I have to use it twice . Here's one, sort of.

Ell'jaret

Belief Defines Reality. Each mortal has a certain amount of energy inherent to their soul. Belief shapes that energy - mages are essentially mortals who have refined their control over belief about certain things (I can fly!) and built up a larger store of energy. Most mortals, who don't have the time and dedication to become mages (or warriors - whose inhuman combat abilities come from that same energy), pool their belief with others of like mind into gods. Those gods take on traits of sentience and will, and then act on behalf of mortals, expending their own energies in return for prayer and constant belief. There is one Uber God, the Phoenix, who is the ultimate source of all soul energy, and who created the world by dying (although echoes of Her still pass down through the millenia).

Mortals only have glimpses of the truth of how things work, of course, and most view the Phoenix as a capricious force that sometimes appear in moments of great history, not the creator of the world. They also see the gods as separate from themselves, and the gods are inclined to help them to that conclusion.

Ell'jaret is also very over-the-top in power level, with mage wars levelling tens of thousands of square miles at a time, warriors moving and running so fast they become almost invisible, thieves who are so skilled they can slip through the cracks in a magical shield, and so on. In the last campaign I ran in Ell'jaret, they discovered that when a Phoenix dies (more than one!?) and creates a world (an egg), there is a species of celestial dragon that comes and lays an baby dragon in the Phoenix' planet, who will, when grown enough, wake up and consume the "egg". I've run this campaign off and on for about 15 years, and there has always been a sleeping dragon the size of a small continent in the southern ocean - this was the campaign when he woke up, and they had to kill him .