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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eosin the Red" data-source="post: 4414031" data-attributes="member: 168">I don't really do the gods thing. There are various "beyond human understanding" entities (or maybe those are explanations of natural order) who have active religions. The main proponents of the greater gods and the spirits that most would consider to be gods are actually a disparate group of angelic beings who have waged a war using mankind as proxy soldiers. There are four primary "camps" of these spirit creatures.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fenn: Great northern gods who are near giant status and carry the war forward in an up close and personal way.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Aesir: Calculating gods designed on a mix of Greek, Celtic, and Saintly influences.  They are the main religious figures and responsible for man's war against the Hungry Darkness.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Jann: Violent parochial gods who dominate the lives of their followers. The Jann lost their immortality and now subsist on a blood tithe to maintain their youth and power.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Re: Nature spirits who have retreated from the world but teach their human "children."</li> </ul>The Hungry Darkness is an unfathomable force that "infects" otherwise good beings. Demons, undead, and such are simply fallen spirits who have been perverted by the Darkness. Paladins serve an individual spirit and are the primary agents of the immortals in the world. They serve the agenda of their patron rather than an ethical stance.My goal is to design religions with some murkiness and lack of definitive proof. I also want to inject a taste of the mythos into the evil. I include the powerful angelic creatures as an explanation for totally larger than life characters or monsters. I want them to flavor the system as powerful but fallible and ultimately defeatable creatures rather than gods whom are a magnitude of power beyond mankind. If my world was Vampire the angelic spirits would be 5th Generation Antidiluvians. The design of supernatural evil is also meant to maintain a theme. Once again I'll use Vampire as an example: A game of mortals could fight multiple vampires from multiple clans and factions. From the players POV they see dead vampires not an overarching vampiric society with all its politics and factionalism. The same holds true in The Last Dominion, the Hungry Darkness desires only to spread its inhuman hunger across the world ushering in an age of utter desolation. Players oppose the Hungry Darkness by defeating the individual plans of undead villains even though those creatures have nothing to do with their unfathomable master. The design concept is a monolithic hydra. A central evil with many and varied heads to give the campaign and world a bit of variety and believability. Nobody wants to fight undead all the time but by creating an evil that encompasses all the supernatural elements you can weave unique encounters into the game without stretching credulity.  A lich and a demon lord may work together to accomplish some goal although one will not be happy about his position in the arraignment.  </blockquote>

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