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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grover Cleaveland" data-source="post: 2694704" data-attributes="member: 34932">I started out with the D&D red box and moved, at an early age, all the way to the gold box, and I spent quite a while happily exploring the D&D Immortals cosmology. Several years later I wrote my own (much, much simpler) divine-level rules as part of an idea I had for an epic campaign where Apollo was systematically exterminating all the other gods in the multiverse. I discovered The Primal Order after that and was pretty intrigued by it, although I never played it. The main problem with it is that it depends, on a fundamental level, with converting followers to your faith, and there doesn't seem to be any fair way to adjudicate that.It seems like the only way to run a campaign based on TPO is to either have your gods exploring and claiming entirely new planes where there's no competition, to share planes but split them up completely evenly, or to settle all disputes over territory with combat or some other contest of skill rather than appealing to the mortals directly. There just aren't any rules for determing how many characters your clerics covert in a day - and it'd probably be too much bookkeeping if there were, unless you write a program to automate the process. There are suggestions, of course, but there isn't a way to do it objectively, especially if multiple PCs are competing over the same world.I came up with a few possibilities. One was to play Risk, or some other war game, to determine who conquers a given world and how much of it. That could be fun, but it seems like there should be non-military means of spreading a faith. I was also intrigued by the game Aria, where players play nations as well as people (a little like Birthright, but the focus is on collaboratively building fantasy worlds from the dawn of history onward). It seemed to me that this game was tailor-made to be run with The Primal Order - you spend a few sessions developing worlds, and the fates of your PC deities change accordingly. Then maybe there's a few sessions focusing on divine intrigue or epic quests, then spend some time advancing the worlds in history again.I haven't actually tried this - I looked through the rules and pretty much gave up. But it's on my list of possible things to one day do. I think TPO looks like it'd work better with Aria than D&D.I suppose you could judge a religion's popularity purely on the charisma of the god in question, so in cases where a nation isn't forced to convert under fear of fire and torture the god with the most points in charisma will win most contests, with bonuses and penalties for various factors, but that seems rather simplistic. And I know you're going to inform me what your amazing solution to this was - or, more likely, tell me that you have an amazing solution but I have to buy your book to find out what it is - but I'd rather you didn't. I seem to dislike most of your ideas; not because I'm dogmatically opposed to divine or epic-level games, but just because they're bad ideas. However, I must say that I think your <a href="http://www.immortalshandbook.com/freestuff2.htm" target="_blank">Hit points to divine rank</a> chart is outrageously fun to play with. It doesn't make any rational sense, but it allows me to go through all the 1st edition stuff I have and assign arbitrary divine ranks to things. For example, Mad Monkey is a lesser deity, Dragon Claw is a supported demigod, and Black Leopard is a demigod. Neat! And the three goblin deities in Dark Folk are two supported demigods and a demigod. And the dwarven pantheon in Mayfair's Dwarves book are all either supreme or greater (that is, greater or intermediate) deities. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's really fun to do. It's like astrology or numerology!</blockquote>

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