You are all GODS!!

[GlassEye]

Name: Ubariya, the Weaver Uncaring, the Mother of Unclaimed Souls
Symbol: A spider dangling from a strand of web
Home Plane: the Black Chasm: the walls of the Black Chasm are a fractured black stone supporting strands of web that form intricate and sometimes beautiful patterns. These webs exude a very faint, pearly luminescence that eternally evaporates in curling tendrils of mist and is the only source of light in the Black Chasm. Spiders of all sizes scurry freely along the webs on unfathomable missions and still writhing creatures dangle from the strands in clusters. The heart of the Black Chasm is an enormous and beautifully elaborate sphere of web where Ubariya weaves and lays her eggs.
Portfolio: Death and rebirth, shadows, spiders, weaving.
Worshipers: Spinners and weavers revere the Weaver Uncaring. Mothers, midwives and women in general follow her in her (re)birth aspect and beseech her to delay acting as bringer of death for those they love. Aranea follow her as do a sect of druids.
Cleric Alignments: LG, LN, LE, N
Favored Weapon: shortspear (represents a distaff)
[sblock=Ubariya, the Weaver Uncaring]

[/sblock]
Ubariya is the goddes of death and rebirth though in a different fashion than the One and the Many as she is only concerned with creatures that have souls and not with the natural world. Ubariya brings death to everyone when the weave of their life has been completed. Those who follow a different god move on to whatever afterlife that god provides for them but Ubariya claims the souls of those who are not claimed by any other deity. She is not a greedy god and the souls are wrapped and suspended from her webs where she feeds off their individuality. Once the soul is drained of the mask of personality the husk fades and Ubariya lays an egg, a purified soul, in her nest. When the time is right the egg will also fade and the soul will be reborn into the world.
Clergy:
Missions:
Churches:
Avatar:

 

[Myth and Legend]

Hoookay, here i go:

Special Traits
These can be any special ability possessed by a monster in the SRD (though not class features). Run special traits by the GM before taking it, just in case.

Yeah about those, the one that immediately came to mind was:

Immunity to Magic (Ex) A will-o’-wisp is immune to most spells or spell-like abilities that allow spell resistance, except magic missile and maze.

Now this is definitely the most broken ability one can get for 1 (one) Special Trait only! Notable mentions should also be:

Unearthly Grace (Su) A nymph adds her Charisma modifier as a bonus on all her saving throws, and as a deflection bonus to her Armor Class.

That can be stacked with the Paladin's bonus to saving throws and the divine bonus to AC. Also one Special Trait only!

Split (Ex) Slashing and piercing weapons and electricity attacks deal no damage to an ochre jelly. Instead the creature splits into two identical jellies, each with half of the original’s current hit points (round down). A jelly with 10 hit points or less cannot be further split and dies if reduced to 0 it points.

This will take a few points to make the Deity identical to an ochre jelly but... Making several copies of the deity all with their own spells, SLAs and attacks?

I can go on and on.. Point is, getting stuff from monsters can be unbalanced. I'd much rather have my Divine Feats and SDAs - and that brings me to my next point. Epic Feats vs Salient abilities.

Some do identical things, others are much stronger. Will we be getting Salient abilities later on? What is later on anyway? How will our deities justify their lowly demigod status? Are we all forced by the rule system to be newborn deities? I like Heliasillyel the way she is right now - an ancient Sun Elven deity. I'd be loathe to change her to a newborn Goddess.

Plus, we rare roleplaying GODS for crying out loud! Why are we starting at what is effectively level 1 for a God? If i wanted to be in another slow level 1 game i'd just join that. PbP is slooooooooooooowwwwwwwwww by the time we get 40 character levels the Internet will be gone :/ Especially if HM wants to run this as a regular game and award chunks of XP every 15 days. Why don't we start ad Divine Rank 6 and 20 Character levels at least? For the sake of simplicity? This will not be a simple game by any means.

For character growth? This is good, but we are not trembling farmboys and zealous Paladins. These are GODS, they have vast knowledge, power, they sense things in the future that are related to their portfolio etc. The way we roleplay them will not change, everyone will be doing their best to roleplay something we can never really comprehend (IRL at least i think none of you are Gods). Making the characters weaker does not make sense in a God campaign.

Back on topic with Epic Feats and Salient Divine Abilities. Here is a good example. I plan on taking 20 Bard and 20 Sorcerer levels. Heliasillyel is a Sun deity that loves beauty, song and dance.

So i can make her a really good Bard via several Epic Feats, or a perfect Bard via two SDAs - a mortal will never get his Bardic Music to spread in a several mile radius even if he gets all the epic feats.

Also it really takes planning - why take three Automatic Quicken Epic Feats so you can instantly quicken your 9th level spells, when a simple Quicken Spell regular feat combined with Automatic Metamagic Salient Divine Ability will do the job?

Point is, SDAs can often save your character the use of tons of epic feats to get a better effect. If we will be getting SDAs, tell us to plan accordingly. Similarly, grant us the one SDA Demigods get. In the DD book it says that a deity gets one SDA per Divine rank, plus bonus SDAs depending it's status as a deity. Rank 0's still get ONE Salient Divine Ability. (page 32 for reference)

Monstrous Size - All characters start at Medium size and may take Monstrous Size to increase or decrease their size by one stage. This special trait can be taken more than once to advance to larger or smaller sizes. For example, in order for a character to be Huge, they would need to take the Monstrous Size trait twice.

Purchasing sizes with Special Traits is useless since even at Divine Rank 0 a deity can get the Alter Size SDA and change freely from Fine to Colossal plus change objects as well. Again it's a matter of whether we will be getting SDAs or not.

(may add 5 and lose one feat or subtract 5 an add an additional feat)

Giving up one feat for +5 BAB? So you are saying that 5 BAB (which needs 10 STR or DEX depending on your choice of weapon to get normally outside of more levels) is cheaper than one feat, but to get 2 of any ability you need to spend a Special Trait? So give up one feat to get the effect of 5 special traits for free! (minus the damage for STR but who cares)

My whole point is, let's just stick to Deities and Demigods. These were the problems i found at first glance, imagine how many more there can be later on.

Not to diminsh CM/VV's work, but there is a reason why the official sources are good - they were done over the time of months by a team of people.

 

[Frozen Messiah]

@ Myth and Legend: Yes, it does have the opprotunity to go broke quickly but that is hwy the DM(s) are there. They wil look over it and will give it the go aheador not becuase with this system it becomes obvious very quickly who is trying to make and overpowered character or not. Immunity to magic doesn't mean much becaus us being gods we already have a massive amount of immunities and resistances to those things already, the others can easily be tweaked or banned again this is to the DM(s) to decide.

@Sunking: I personally like your idea because it is a nice balance between both of the camps that have sprung up on this thread. Being able to have HD buy makes for interesting opprotunities. I disagree with you on the idea that the gods seem the same because which abilities you choose (fluff and crunch wise) define your god incredibly and just because a magical god has a great attacks doesn't meean that he has to use them

Anyways I'm going to wait for the dust to settle until I make my god's RG sheet because there are no set rules at this time. If there are than can we please stop this arguing between he Homebrew camp and the Core camp so we can get down to actually playing these gods.

Not trying to offend, just trying to get this show on the road

 

[HolyMan]

Character gene rules have been posted and we will be using the hybird. ML thanks though for pointing out some abilities can be very bad, they are subject to DM approval and player (your) scrutiny. But what's the big deal about magic immunity don't gods start with SR 35+ ???

And if anyone what's to play a deity of oozes I'm to say no??

Making several copies of the deity all with their own spells, SLAs and attacks?

I would diffently give some kind of draw back, trust me

I am working on the Divine Rank, it will be based on number of worshippers so I'm thinking advancing will be quicker than you think. (Just do something godly in the middle of town)

Starting at lvl 1 godhood has led me to several ideals for this "campaign" I have low lvl ideals i don't think I can come up with a motive for higher Divine Rank deities to "adventure" still working out things.

Spend five trait points get +5 BAB and +5 damage and extra carrying/lifting capacity or...
Lose one feat and get +5 BAB or Lose +5 BAB and get a feat(non-epic)

My only point was a war god would have more BAB than the average god and a god of knowledge would have less (just another way to make the gods different)

The main goal is for everyone to have fun, and we will, just let me know when Deities and Demigods has a better way of doing things and I will listen. But for now (character creation) Divine Rank 0 and special traits to add flavor to characters is fun.

HM

 

[HolyMan]

@ GlassEye great concept and start Ubariya is ready for the IC and RG if you wish to try the homebrewed rules (they are posted n the RG)

@ FM also character gene rules are in the RG (I haven't added the fast healing limitation, but I will) So you can give a character a try after a few more we will geta feel if this is the way to go or twik somethings

@ SunKing well co-DM if you want to help check on characters I think a few will be posted pretty soon.

HM

 

[Voda Vosa]

As noted there, and as FM and HM said, not every ability could be purchased, or cost only one special trait point. That's what the DM is there for.
Besides, personally I don't care if an entire nation spend ages making a balanced system. And I'm not saying CM's god creation rules are better, I just think they are simplier, and more in the tune of this particular campaign. Note that HM has altered them notably in his Hybrid creation rules as he calls it.

 

[Frozen Messiah]

Thank you for telling me HM, I had no idea of this due to the continued arguments over ruling, thank you again

 

[HolyMan]

First character review and it looks like Rathan hasn't adjusted for the new base saves (now +20) or redid trait spending so i will come back to that another day have to go shovel snow.

Also I thought on it and we will not use Epic Save/BAB rules but will progress in your class and add those the same as multiclassing. It will make for stronger characters in the end.

HM

 

[Rathan]

*sighs softly...* well the rules keep changing a bit from time to time... I do believe I've got my Special Trait Points all worked out but I'll have to keep changing things as the rules change.... I may just wait to see what the final ruling is on character creation.... (unless we're all set and there will be no more changes that is)...

EDIT: As the rules stand now I THINK I've gotten my stats straitened out and my Special Qualities Points taken care of and back to jusr 20 spent now..

to ML.... to be honest really... rules heavy systems leave NOTHING to chance and nothing to the winds... to me.. that's no fun... WotC routinely sucks the fun out of SOME things by overdoing it with the rules.... I say HM and Sunking just slap some rules together.. agree on them.... and run with those.... that way they have a simple well balanced method of keeping things in line and the power to veto what they want and the knowledge of what rules we as players are playing with....

If no one else will say it... I will and this is not to be rude... it's just the truth.... either get on board with the hybrid rules the DM wants to go with... or get off at the next station... and that's not just a comment for ML... but to anyone not happy with the DM's decision.... plain and simple...

 

[GlassEye]

Ubariya is a spidery goddess. Her base form is somewhat humanoid but with spider characteristics added. Particularly, as in the image I posted above, large spider eyes and oddly formed arms and hands. In addition, (unlike the image) she has two extra pair of spider legs. Do I need to buy Monstrous Form (Aberration) [1 point] to get those changes from the basic humanoid form? And those changes are purely cosmetic until I buy special abilities (such as slam attack, climb speed, etc.), correct?