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paradox42's crazy cosmology
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<blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 5083885" data-attributes="member: 29746"><p><strong>Elder Deities and Incarnations</strong></p><p></p><p>So, now to discuss the two tiers of godhood that are <strong>greater</strong> than Greater, and yet less than Sidereals.</p><p></p><p>As discussed before, I had the notion during 2nd Edition that something above Greater Gods (but less than Overgods) must exist. This was because I had figured out even before 2nd Edition that, since gods were made of pure energy (as decreed, in fantasy terminology, in the BECMI Immortals Rules set), the beings <strong>beyond</strong> gods must be made of something else- something even more "fundamental." I'll save that for the physics post, but for this post it's worth noting in passing because it explains <strong>why</strong> I thought there had to be something in between. 2nd Edition had several racial deities for the races older than humanity, who were supposed to be even more powerful than the young gods of humankind (and elfkind, and dwarfkind... I could go on but won't). The prime example is Annam, the god who leads the Giant pantheon- one could also point a finger at Io, the ultimate god of Dragons, but I had already decided that Io and Ao were two names that looked too suspiciously similar to be coincidental (in other words, Io was an aspect of Ao, or vice versa, or both were actually avatars of a greater being "behind" them both- which would be an Overgod). The backstory of my multiverse at the time required that only three Overgods were left in any active capacity; one of those three was even (properly speaking) <strong>dead</strong> but still around secretly in avatar form. So, Annam could not be an Overgod. But he was clearly above mere Greater Deities too: so what the Hells was he, exactly?</p><p></p><p>This was the reasoning that led me to formulate the existence of Elder Deities. Annam was by no means the only one; I eventually slotted the Lady of Pain, the "original" Asmodeus, Cthulhu (who I desperately wanted at least peripherally involved in my cosmos because it could lead to such cool plots) and a few other similar beings into this category. The one thing they all seemed to have in common, besides their extreme power, was that all of them were extremely old, and all had few if any active worshippers left.</p><p></p><p>On top of this, I was reading (at the time) Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series, and found its idea of beings who represented the Absolute Pinnacle of a given concept in the universe to be very engaging. A modern reading of the series makes it pretty clear that the Incarnations of those books are Greater Deities at best, but I wondered what a being who was (and gained special power from being) the true, Ultimate Pinnacle and Master of a particular concept within the <strong>entire multiverse</strong> might look like. So I added that idea in to the mix with Elder Deities.</p><p></p><p>Fast-forward to 3.X, with my PCs about to jump off the mortal coil onto the great ladder of divinity. Elder Gods had not played much of a role in my game, and Incarnations (in my 2E conception) would rarely if ever so much as <strong>reveal</strong> their existence to anybody below deity level, so I hadn't needed to revisit the concepts before now. I had Ascension, and I had my new scheme for tiers of godhood: so where did these two sub-Sidereal tiers fit, exactly?</p><p></p><p>The table:</p><p></p><p>Elder God (25 DR): 600 HD, 1,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (26 DR): 600 HD, 1,300,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (27 DR): 600 HD, 1,600,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (28 DR): 600 HD, 2,200,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (29 DR): 600 HD, 2,800,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (30 DR): 600 HD, 3,700,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (31 DR): 600 HD, 4,600,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (32 DR): 600 HD, 5,500,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (33 DR): 600 HD, 6,400,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (34 DR): 600 HD, 7,300,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (35 DR): 600 HD, 8,200,000,000 QP.</p><p>Elder God (36 DR): 600 HD, 9,100,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (37 DR): 800 HD, 10,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (38 DR): 800 HD, 13,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (39 DR): 800 HD, 16,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (40 DR): 800 HD, 22,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (41 DR): 800 HD, 28,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (42 DR): 800 HD, 37,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (43 DR): 800 HD, 46,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (44 DR): 800 HD, 55,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (45 DR): 800 HD, 64,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (46 DR): 800 HD, 73,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (47 DR): 800 HD, 82,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>Incarnation (48 DR): 800 HD, 91,000,000,000 QP.</p><p>-----------------------------------------------</p><p></p><p>That dividing line at the bottom is, of course, the line between god and Sidereal. Rather than go through long-winded explanations of how I arrived at what the IH-compatible version of these beings would be, I'll just explain the scheme as it was when my PCs started to have a serious chance at <strong>becoming</strong> Elders and Incarnations themselves.</p><p></p><p>Elder Deities are beings who have reached the pinnacle of Greater Godhood, and still found the cosmos wanting somehow. They want to go beyond it, explore past what their already-lofty powers allow them, and perhaps even Become something more. Elder Deities typically know that the Incarnations are out there, and may have even met one or two, and now have their sights set on becoming Incarnations (or something still greater) themselves. An Elder Deity begins to leave its mortal religion behind, no longer taking an active interest in the day-to-day affairs of its Clerics or flock on any given world; as a result, the mortals begin to gradually lose interest in the faith themselves- and the religions shrink to the point of dying out altogether. An Elder Deity has often learned of the existence of Overgods/Sidereals, and also has often learned of the possibility of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/eternity-publishing-hosted-forum/267554-sidereal-ascension-methods.html" target="_blank">Sidereal Ascension</a>, and may be pursuing that in addition to (or instead of) Incarnationhood. Elder Deities can have up to <strong>six</strong> Primary Portfolios, but more often than not, at least one of the being's Portfolios is a Double, because that's the one the Elder is hoping to become the Incarnation of.</p><p></p><p>The Elder Deity template has never been fully statted out, but it's easy enough to just add on to Ascension: take Greater Deity, give it DR 50/Epic instead of 40, give them Maven + Omnicompetent (instead of just Maven), and finally, the most important part from a PC's perspective: give the Elder a bonus Cosmic Ability based on one Primary Portfolio. The Portfolio that the Elder chooses for this bonus Cosmic (and the being gets only one- never more than one) must be the Portfolio that the being intends to become Incarnation of, if he or she pursues that personal-growth goal; that is, once you pick your Cosmic at Elder Deity, you're locked in to going for Incarnation of that Portfolio later and can't change your mind. If the Portfolio you choose is only a Single, then you get the "Elder One" Cosmic Ability associated with the Single version of your chosen Portfolio; if you have the Double Portfolio, then you get <strong>either</strong> the Single Elder One <strong>or</strong> the Double Elder One ability- but not both.</p><p></p><p>Part of the reason this is so restrictive, I'll remark in passing, is that my game featured a "one esoteric" rule that says you're only allowed to get one esoteric ability for your present level of existence, ever, except for certain abilities of that next higher tier that don't count against the one-esoteric rule (example Cosmic Abilities from that list would be Cosmic Toughness, Cosmic Consciousness, and of course Extra Portfolio since deities in my setting are actually <strong>expected</strong> to take that one several times eventually). The bonus Cosmic granted to Elder Deities also doesn't count as your one esoteric, regardless of which ability it actually is, so it's enough to make any mere Greater Deity contemplating advancement salivate at the prospect.</p><p></p><p>Incarnations are something more different still. They're really almost an in-between state, twixt deity and Sidereal; the idea of an Incarnation is that in its chosen Portfolio, it is <strong>absolutely supreme</strong> within the multiverse. No other deity can match its power in the chosen field. And this is part of the requirement for reaching Incarnation in the first place: in addition to requiring the necessary QP and HD, before you can cross from DR 36 to 37, you need to meet a special Incarnation requirement. Put simply, Incarnations <strong>must</strong> have at least one Double Primary Portfolio, and the Double chosen is what they become Incarnations <strong>of</strong>. That chosen Portfolio must be one that the new Incarnation is the highest-DR deity in the cosmos of, or else the deity can't advance to Incarnation. The tongue-in-cheek example I gave my players is that (for example), if you want to become Incarnation of Cheese, then you have to have the Double Cheese Portfolio when you get the 800 HD and 37 DR for Incarnation, <strong>and</strong> there must not be any other deity in the cosmos who has 37 or more DR and the Cheese Portfolio. However, only Primary Portfolios count for that exclusivity clause- for instance, if a DR 40 Incarnation of Holes has the Cheese Portfolio as a Secondary, meaning that he can grant the Cheese Domain to Clerics but nothing else, then it doesn't count against you the new DR-37 Incarnation of Cheese. (Presumably that Incarnation of Holes prefers Swiss Cheese specifically.)</p><p></p><p>I also allowed an "out" for Incarnations of concepts that virtually require more than one individual, the prime example being Fate (which has, of course, three Incarnations of it).</p><p></p><p>An Incarnation of (X) is again based largely on the Greater Deity template, but gets DR 60/Epic, Maven + Omnicompetent, and has <strong>all four</strong> bonus Cosmic Abilities associated with the (X) Portfolio- both Single and Double. That is, the Incarnation gets both of the Elder One abilities, and both of the Old One abilities. Incarnations are allowed to have up to <strong>eight</strong> Primary Portfolios, among all their Secondaries, and that is the limit before Siderealhood.</p><p></p><p>Elder Deities and Incarnations are the only gods allowed to break the "Cosmic Ability" barrier in the Portfolios; all other Cosmics belong to Sidereals.</p><p></p><p>Next post, I'll explain my concept of physics within the realm of this game world; then I'll talk about Sidereals.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="paradox42, post: 5083885, member: 29746"] [b]Elder Deities and Incarnations[/b] So, now to discuss the two tiers of godhood that are [B]greater[/B] than Greater, and yet less than Sidereals. As discussed before, I had the notion during 2nd Edition that something above Greater Gods (but less than Overgods) must exist. This was because I had figured out even before 2nd Edition that, since gods were made of pure energy (as decreed, in fantasy terminology, in the BECMI Immortals Rules set), the beings [B]beyond[/B] gods must be made of something else- something even more "fundamental." I'll save that for the physics post, but for this post it's worth noting in passing because it explains [B]why[/B] I thought there had to be something in between. 2nd Edition had several racial deities for the races older than humanity, who were supposed to be even more powerful than the young gods of humankind (and elfkind, and dwarfkind... I could go on but won't). The prime example is Annam, the god who leads the Giant pantheon- one could also point a finger at Io, the ultimate god of Dragons, but I had already decided that Io and Ao were two names that looked too suspiciously similar to be coincidental (in other words, Io was an aspect of Ao, or vice versa, or both were actually avatars of a greater being "behind" them both- which would be an Overgod). The backstory of my multiverse at the time required that only three Overgods were left in any active capacity; one of those three was even (properly speaking) [B]dead[/B] but still around secretly in avatar form. So, Annam could not be an Overgod. But he was clearly above mere Greater Deities too: so what the Hells was he, exactly? This was the reasoning that led me to formulate the existence of Elder Deities. Annam was by no means the only one; I eventually slotted the Lady of Pain, the "original" Asmodeus, Cthulhu (who I desperately wanted at least peripherally involved in my cosmos because it could lead to such cool plots) and a few other similar beings into this category. The one thing they all seemed to have in common, besides their extreme power, was that all of them were extremely old, and all had few if any active worshippers left. On top of this, I was reading (at the time) Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series, and found its idea of beings who represented the Absolute Pinnacle of a given concept in the universe to be very engaging. A modern reading of the series makes it pretty clear that the Incarnations of those books are Greater Deities at best, but I wondered what a being who was (and gained special power from being) the true, Ultimate Pinnacle and Master of a particular concept within the [B]entire multiverse[/B] might look like. So I added that idea in to the mix with Elder Deities. Fast-forward to 3.X, with my PCs about to jump off the mortal coil onto the great ladder of divinity. Elder Gods had not played much of a role in my game, and Incarnations (in my 2E conception) would rarely if ever so much as [B]reveal[/B] their existence to anybody below deity level, so I hadn't needed to revisit the concepts before now. I had Ascension, and I had my new scheme for tiers of godhood: so where did these two sub-Sidereal tiers fit, exactly? The table: Elder God (25 DR): 600 HD, 1,000,000,000 QP. Elder God (26 DR): 600 HD, 1,300,000,000 QP. Elder God (27 DR): 600 HD, 1,600,000,000 QP. Elder God (28 DR): 600 HD, 2,200,000,000 QP. Elder God (29 DR): 600 HD, 2,800,000,000 QP. Elder God (30 DR): 600 HD, 3,700,000,000 QP. Elder God (31 DR): 600 HD, 4,600,000,000 QP. Elder God (32 DR): 600 HD, 5,500,000,000 QP. Elder God (33 DR): 600 HD, 6,400,000,000 QP. Elder God (34 DR): 600 HD, 7,300,000,000 QP. Elder God (35 DR): 600 HD, 8,200,000,000 QP. Elder God (36 DR): 600 HD, 9,100,000,000 QP. Incarnation (37 DR): 800 HD, 10,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (38 DR): 800 HD, 13,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (39 DR): 800 HD, 16,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (40 DR): 800 HD, 22,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (41 DR): 800 HD, 28,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (42 DR): 800 HD, 37,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (43 DR): 800 HD, 46,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (44 DR): 800 HD, 55,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (45 DR): 800 HD, 64,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (46 DR): 800 HD, 73,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (47 DR): 800 HD, 82,000,000,000 QP. Incarnation (48 DR): 800 HD, 91,000,000,000 QP. ----------------------------------------------- That dividing line at the bottom is, of course, the line between god and Sidereal. Rather than go through long-winded explanations of how I arrived at what the IH-compatible version of these beings would be, I'll just explain the scheme as it was when my PCs started to have a serious chance at [B]becoming[/B] Elders and Incarnations themselves. Elder Deities are beings who have reached the pinnacle of Greater Godhood, and still found the cosmos wanting somehow. They want to go beyond it, explore past what their already-lofty powers allow them, and perhaps even Become something more. Elder Deities typically know that the Incarnations are out there, and may have even met one or two, and now have their sights set on becoming Incarnations (or something still greater) themselves. An Elder Deity begins to leave its mortal religion behind, no longer taking an active interest in the day-to-day affairs of its Clerics or flock on any given world; as a result, the mortals begin to gradually lose interest in the faith themselves- and the religions shrink to the point of dying out altogether. An Elder Deity has often learned of the existence of Overgods/Sidereals, and also has often learned of the possibility of [URL="http://www.enworld.org/forum/eternity-publishing-hosted-forum/267554-sidereal-ascension-methods.html"]Sidereal Ascension[/URL], and may be pursuing that in addition to (or instead of) Incarnationhood. Elder Deities can have up to [B]six[/B] Primary Portfolios, but more often than not, at least one of the being's Portfolios is a Double, because that's the one the Elder is hoping to become the Incarnation of. The Elder Deity template has never been fully statted out, but it's easy enough to just add on to Ascension: take Greater Deity, give it DR 50/Epic instead of 40, give them Maven + Omnicompetent (instead of just Maven), and finally, the most important part from a PC's perspective: give the Elder a bonus Cosmic Ability based on one Primary Portfolio. The Portfolio that the Elder chooses for this bonus Cosmic (and the being gets only one- never more than one) must be the Portfolio that the being intends to become Incarnation of, if he or she pursues that personal-growth goal; that is, once you pick your Cosmic at Elder Deity, you're locked in to going for Incarnation of that Portfolio later and can't change your mind. If the Portfolio you choose is only a Single, then you get the "Elder One" Cosmic Ability associated with the Single version of your chosen Portfolio; if you have the Double Portfolio, then you get [B]either[/B] the Single Elder One [B]or[/B] the Double Elder One ability- but not both. Part of the reason this is so restrictive, I'll remark in passing, is that my game featured a "one esoteric" rule that says you're only allowed to get one esoteric ability for your present level of existence, ever, except for certain abilities of that next higher tier that don't count against the one-esoteric rule (example Cosmic Abilities from that list would be Cosmic Toughness, Cosmic Consciousness, and of course Extra Portfolio since deities in my setting are actually [B]expected[/B] to take that one several times eventually). The bonus Cosmic granted to Elder Deities also doesn't count as your one esoteric, regardless of which ability it actually is, so it's enough to make any mere Greater Deity contemplating advancement salivate at the prospect. Incarnations are something more different still. They're really almost an in-between state, twixt deity and Sidereal; the idea of an Incarnation is that in its chosen Portfolio, it is [B]absolutely supreme[/B] within the multiverse. No other deity can match its power in the chosen field. And this is part of the requirement for reaching Incarnation in the first place: in addition to requiring the necessary QP and HD, before you can cross from DR 36 to 37, you need to meet a special Incarnation requirement. Put simply, Incarnations [B]must[/B] have at least one Double Primary Portfolio, and the Double chosen is what they become Incarnations [B]of[/B]. That chosen Portfolio must be one that the new Incarnation is the highest-DR deity in the cosmos of, or else the deity can't advance to Incarnation. The tongue-in-cheek example I gave my players is that (for example), if you want to become Incarnation of Cheese, then you have to have the Double Cheese Portfolio when you get the 800 HD and 37 DR for Incarnation, [B]and[/B] there must not be any other deity in the cosmos who has 37 or more DR and the Cheese Portfolio. However, only Primary Portfolios count for that exclusivity clause- for instance, if a DR 40 Incarnation of Holes has the Cheese Portfolio as a Secondary, meaning that he can grant the Cheese Domain to Clerics but nothing else, then it doesn't count against you the new DR-37 Incarnation of Cheese. (Presumably that Incarnation of Holes prefers Swiss Cheese specifically.) I also allowed an "out" for Incarnations of concepts that virtually require more than one individual, the prime example being Fate (which has, of course, three Incarnations of it). An Incarnation of (X) is again based largely on the Greater Deity template, but gets DR 60/Epic, Maven + Omnicompetent, and has [B]all four[/B] bonus Cosmic Abilities associated with the (X) Portfolio- both Single and Double. That is, the Incarnation gets both of the Elder One abilities, and both of the Old One abilities. Incarnations are allowed to have up to [B]eight[/B] Primary Portfolios, among all their Secondaries, and that is the limit before Siderealhood. Elder Deities and Incarnations are the only gods allowed to break the "Cosmic Ability" barrier in the Portfolios; all other Cosmics belong to Sidereals. Next post, I'll explain my concept of physics within the realm of this game world; then I'll talk about Sidereals. [/QUOTE]
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