Malthesitic Fantasy Universes

[Michael Hopcroft]

The discussion of religious systems in RPGs make me wonder about campaigns where the deities are all hostile to life -- on other words, a Maltheistic universe where the purpose of creation is to create sentient beings so they can suffer or for some other evil reason.

There would likely be no good priest types, because they would serve evil gods. States that are actually concerned about citizen welfare might be smacked down by "natural" disasters. Divine Intervention is always hostile to the intents of humans. The afterlife, if there is one, is universally hellish for everyone regardless of their level of faith.

In such a campaign, the cards would be stacked against the PCs from the moment of their birth, yet they might still find ways to bring hope to the world. And if it is, in fact, possible to kill a god then trying ceases to be an evil scheme.

Thoughts?

[Ragnarok]

Sounds intriguing, but there are a few problems with such a construct.

1) If a deity were fully devoted to the agony of mortals, states as such probably wouldn't exist in the first place. States provide some level of ease and comfort for their citizens.
2) If said deity were truly powerful, then it would have no problem eliminating the PCs were they to try to kill the deity.
3) Unless the deity makes an exception for its priests, they would likely have to be masochists. In any event, there is not really a good incentive to follow this deity unless doing so buys you an exemption, which is likely to attract the ire and perhaps violent reactions of other townsfolk.

Therefore, here are some possible scenarios...

1) The deity is not really hell-bent on complete suffering, but just likes to throw a wrench in the gears from time to time. Sort of like a Loki figure.
2) The deity isn't that powerful to completely agonize the mortals, but does what it can. As a result, this deity would probably be easier to kill.


I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[BlackSword]

Sounds intriguing, but there are a few problems with such a construct.
From some of your comments two things sprang to mind.
1) DC's Apokolips and Darkseid. The ruler is cruel, violent, and near omnipotent. Those that follow him do so because it allows them power on the world. PCs would be either government workers trying to move up, or freedom fighters trying to free themselves, or the world of the rule.
2) Thinking of some Star Trek encounters, with powerful beings as 'gods' of a planet. Could be a malevolent being that was exiled from his people and choose a planet, or just a 'child' who doesn't know any better. Again priests would serve him as a way to (usually) be spared his wrath and have a level of power on the planet. The rest would be subjects. The being is not omnipotent or all-powerful, just orders of magnitude more powerful than people on the planet.

[Cancer]

I started working on an idea like this one about a decade back. It fell together easily, too easily. Basing the world off a slight distortion of what is known about the Meso-American pantheon and their blood rites -- where the point of the rites was to get divine inspiration through pain-induced hallucinations -- really didn't take much in the way of imagination in terms of the details, only the reasons and mechanics for the way the "gods" operated.

The problem is that you need to have a game-world reason for characters to hope and believe things can get better. In effect, you are casting the heros as nihilistic god-slaying revolutionaries fighting against everything. The entire priestly caste and nobility, having got into their privileged class by buying into the powers the gods pass on to those who feed them pain and blood, are going to fight to the death to prevent their own extinction, the more so if it's a one god, one city-state set-up (which is what I was working from).

When every man's (and god's) hand is going to be turned against them, the PCs are going to need powerful evidence that things could be different and better (and that's better in the felicitous sense, not just the peaceful nonexistence offered by nirvana or some similar end to identity and sensation). I found it all too easy to reach a condition where the player would find it challenging to care at all about what happened in the world, beyond simple destruction on as large a scale as could be arranged. And if the players aren't going to care, then it's a lousy world to play in.

[Ragnarok]

The problem is that you need to have a game-world reason for characters to hope and believe things can get better. In effect, you are casting the heros as nihilistic god-slaying revolutionaries fighting against everything. The entire priestly caste and nobility, having got into their privileged class by buying into the powers the gods pass on to those who feed them pain and blood, are going to fight to the death to prevent their own extinction, the more so if it's a one god, one city-state set-up (which is what I was working from).

When every man's (and god's) hand is going to be turned against them, the PCs are going to powerful evidence that things could be different and better (and that's better in the felicitous sense, not just the peaceful nonexistence offered by nirvana or some similar end to identity and sensation). I found it all too easy to reach a condition where the player would find it challenging to care at all about what happened in the world, beyond simple destruction on as large a scale as could be arranged. And if the players aren't going to care, then it's a lousy world to play in.

These are very valid points. I feel that a maltheistic setting would only really work if the deity was weak enough or non-committed enough to the point that the PCs, and at least a good chunk of the populace, felt like it could be eliminated. If the deity is really strong or has the vast majority of society under its thumb, then the PCs have a snowball's chance in hell to actually do anything about it.

[AlHazred]

Hmmm... In the real world, the Yezidis believe that the Devil refused to bow down to Man when commanded to do so by God (a scenario that also occurs in Islam) but the Yezidis revere him for it and believe he rules the world as God's deputy. He sets challenges and responsibilities before mortals to test their mettle, and not to inspire them to evil; the Yezidis believe that evil is the domain of mortals, not delivered by (or inspired by) any supernatural power, and a result of our flawed construction, being made of the dust of the Earth. Yezidis have received a reputation as devil-worshipers as a result. As the Yezidis are a Kurdish people, one may imagine they have experienced persecution for this belief.

I have in the past made settings (that were not intended to be constant adventuring sites but only stopovers) where the people were convinced they were being punished. I had a remnant people living in a series of barely-habitable caves and caverns of a hothouse version of an ecologically-devastated Earth. They lived in the filth and dust of a former great age, and told stories of how their ancestors had been tested in the past by God and had proven Unworthy, with the result that their descendants would be forced to suffer divine Wrath for all time.

I suspect that people are not only wired to revere deities, but to also see them as elevated, or "divine," and therefore beyond human morality. I think that if a religion developed that preached that the gods punished people constantly, that they would develop a reason for the punishment to be deserved, according to their morality and their society's ethics.

[Cancer]

It might be doable -- might -- if the PCs are following a "subverter god" who offers a peaceful afterlife and a devoid-of-human-sacrifice life in the living world. The offer would have to be somehow very convincing to make people risk everything to follow the cause, especially if (with gods bound to particular city-states) that was a deception by which the gods of rival city-states subverted their neighbors and conquered them, destroying the shrines (and presumably the cosmic existence) of those around them. You'd have to have something clearly different about a beneficent god who had finally decided to play hardball with the maleficent ones who had their turf staked out in the civilized world.

Even then, you would have to steer the PCs carefully so they didn't just turn into tyrannicidal mass murderers along the lines of the worst of the anarchists/socialist revolutionaries of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries.

[Lucius]

Warhammer

Lucius Alexander

Palindromedary

[Lezentauw]

The discussion of religious systems in RPGs make me wonder about campaigns where the deities are all hostile to life -- on other words, a Maltheistic universe where the purpose of creation is to create sentient beings so they can suffer or for some other evil reason.

There would likely be no good priest types, because they would serve evil gods. States that are actually concerned about citizen welfare might be smacked down by "natural" disasters. Divine Intervention is always hostile to the intents of humans. The afterlife, if there is one, is universally hellish for everyone regardless of their level of faith.

In such a campaign, the cards would be stacked against the PCs from the moment of their birth, yet they might still find ways to bring hope to the world. And if it is, in fact, possible to kill a god then trying ceases to be an evil scheme.

Thoughts?

I think in certain way, this is exactly how Dark Sun was setup. You had the Sorceror Kings, and the Dragon. They were in a sense the high powers of the world, and yes it can be ran as a pretty hellish campaign. As for true dieties, I don't remember there being any. Rather the priests got their powers from the elements.

[dmjalund]

You could have a god which needs worshippers for power, but hates the fact that he needs them.

[Curufea]

I think in certain way, this is exactly how Dark Sun was setup. You had the Sorceror Kings, and the Dragon. They were in a sense the high powers of the world, and yes it can be ran as a pretty hellish campaign. As for true dieties, I don't remember there being any. Rather the priests got their powers from the elements.

For that matter - the Ravenloft setting is much like this. The usually selfish goals of the various masters of their regions led them into obsessively pursuing it, and in so doing becoming a God of their own small patch of Ravenloft. All the Gods of Ravenloft are inimical - the PCs generally come from another dimension and are accidentally brought in.

[tkdguy]

Someone came up with a setting in Carcosa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcosa). It was meant for the original (1974) D&D game, but it can probably be translated to any gaming system.

Here's the link. (http://carcosa-geoffrey.blogspot.com/) I'm not trying to plug this game, but it has a concise description of the setting. Reviews are linked to the page.

I read a post where the only deities in that setting are Cthulhu and his ilk (Wow, I actually got to use that word!).

Edit: I think I should warn you that the original version has a lot of vile stuff (rape, torture, murder) included in the rituals described. The author himself admits that in the webpage. There is a "cleaner" version out as well that takes out most(?) of that stuff.

[Steve]

The example of this that comes to my mind is the Midnight setting. Here is the setting description from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_(role-playing_game)).

The setting of Midnight d20 is that of the fantasy world of Eredane 100 years after the dark god Izrador wins his war of domination. The game world centers on Eredane, a large continent with varied geography and inhabitants. It is generally an evil-dominant world, with the Church of the Shadow and its orc minions controlling the lives of the downtrodden humans. Elves and dwarves are hunted mercilessly, while the gnomes toil for the Shadow and halflings are often enslaved.

In an unknown time, there was a war in the heavens. Izrador was the god of corruption and turned many angels to devils and demons and fought the gods. He lost though, and the gods punished him by banishing him to Eredane for all eternity. But as Izrador fell, he managed to hold a force field, the Veil of Izrador, that banned the other gods from influencing the land.

When Izrador impacted, his first thought was of reaching godhood again, and what better way to do that than make all of the humans and elves and dwarves give him all their magic? Izrador has taken over the land. So now there is no magic in Eredane but His own, but Izrador was no longer a he; Izrador was an "it": the Shadow.

The world was not always like this, though. In the First Age of Eredane, an elven sorceress named Aradil came to the throne of the elves. She brought peace to them and this peace spread across the land, dawning a new age of peace and trade of magic and science until it seemed that magic would have no bounds. There was no dispute between the cultures, and customs were passed along. But 3950 years later, a new race came from an unknown land. The gnomes and halflings opened their arms to this new people, but these were Dorns who had lost their land across the sea due to the betrayal of King Jahir III. Hoping to claim land for themselves, they slaughtered all they found and wiped out most of those who had wished to help them. War had finally arrived.

The Dorns quickly struck to the elves and dwarves, and as the elves and dwarves were used to fighting undisciplined orcs, they were quickly outmatched by the war-hardened Dorns. But the elves and dwarves developed their tactics, and the sides were finally even and war tore Eredane apart for 300 years. But after this time, the dead began to rise again. The souls of the dead had no place to go, so they lingered and animated the corpses of the dead and made them hungry for flesh. (They were then called the Fell.) Many times, after a battle, the dead would rise and both sides would drop their weapons and flee these abominations. After a few years of these fighting these creatures, their resources spent, the races of Eredane adopted a new method of burying their dead and the rising of corpses was slowed to a trickle, and the land looked to a new age of peace and science and magic as the war had ended.

For 700 years, the land looked to new peace. Trade routes-reopened and the Dorns were finally trusted after 300 years of war. But the Shadow was not so quiet. It rose in army of terrible orcs, goblins, and countless other things. The Shadow knew that the elves were its greatest foe, so it attempted to destroy them quickly, but to no avail. For 5 days the races of Eredane fought, and the rivers ran red with blood and the forest groves turned to swamps with the blood of the orcs. And so the Shadow was finally driven back to the North.

And so was the dawn of the Second Age of Eredane, which began with 230 years of peace, growing economies and widening frontiers. A wall was built to face the North so as the Shadow might not come again. But it was a new one that came: The dominating Sarcosans with their steel and horses, which had not ever been seen until then. The Sarcosans had driven the Dorns out of the far-distant land Pelluria and wished to take this new land for their own. The Sarcosans liked the elven forest of Aryth and tried to conquer it. They came with catapults and attempted to destroy groves and draw out the elves to fight, but the elves placed wards around the trees and protected them. It took the Sarcosans 100 years to realize that the elves would not be drawn from the trees and they finally sued for peace. And they were not trusted for years even after that. And then again came a period of 800 years of peace, the longest lapse of peace since the Dornish invasions more than 3000 years ago. The Shadow then came again to Eredane.

The Second Invasion of the Shadow was made of a series of raids on the wall that was constructed to keep it out and it was breached in a number of places. The Shadow's army poured out as the last time, but it went in as many as eight places at once, so it further spread apart the races energies. Worse still, the dragons of Eredane aided the Shadow. For endless weeks, the battles raged with the Fell rising every night. All seemed lost for the people of Eredane, when a new army of dragons came from the South and fought the forces of the Shadow. When it was over, it was a complete loss for both sides. The orcs were scattered and the people of Eredane had lost all their faith and they quietly returned to their homes again, thus ending the Second Age and beginning the Third Age.

1000 years passed, and it was still no better. The races had been forever divided. The Dorns fought over the new kings, for all the rest had been slain. The dwarves were forced into the mountains by some still-resilient orcs and were confined. The elves knew the Shadow would come again, but the memory of the great battles were lost on the shorter-lived races. In the end, all the races but the elves and dwarves were reduced to tribes.

When the Shadow came again, he did not send a huge army, but he corrupted the minds of men. He promised men wealth and power in exchange for black promises of vengeance and death.

When the Shadow came again, he had already won the Last War. There was a battle that lasted a day that only acted as a speed bump for the Shadow. Now, there is no freedom, and any relations to dwarves or elves is punishable by death. In the land of Eredane, there are no trials or appeals. Punishment includes the whip, enslavement, or death and is carried out brutally and with no mercy.

[tkdguy]

I've heard the Midnight setting described as "Middle-earth if Sauron had won."

Of course, Michael Moorcock's Elric and Corum stories have the Lords of Chaos. The Lords of Law don't seem much better.

[dmjalund]

not to be confused with Malthusian Fantasy Universe

[Steve]

I've heard the Midnight setting described as "Middle-earth if Sauron had won."

That's pretty much the feel of it when you read through the books. Having the spirits of the dead trapped on the world (the Fell) gives it an extra nasty tone. I don't know many players that are up for fighting for pretty much hopeless causes.

[Mirgos]

IIRC Donaldson's Land in the Thomas Covenant books was built as a prison for Lord Foul by the Creator, & cannot be destroyed there - only contained, leading to the corruptions shown in the 2nd Chronicles.

[Peregrine]

That's pretty much the feel of it when you read through the books. Having the spirits of the dead trapped on the world (the Fell) gives it an extra nasty tone. I don't know many players that are up for fighting for pretty much hopeless causes.

Honestly, I see GMs interested in this kind of setting far more often than I do players. Wonder why that is... :whistle:

[Michael Hopcroft]

IIRC Donaldson's Land in the Thomas Covenant books was built as a prison for Lord Foul by the Creator, & cannot be destroyed there - only contained, leading to the corruptions shown in the 2nd Chronicles.

From what I've heard (not having read the books, just having hearsay), the protagonist is somewhat corrupt himself.

[AlHazred]

From what I've heard (not having read the books, just having hearsay), the protagonist is somewhat corrupt himself.The word "somewhat" has never been more egregiously used. :)

[AlHazred]

Of course, one could argue that the entirety of the Lovecraftian canon is devoted to the idea of gods for whom the existence of mortal men is either of no consequence, or an active irritation that will one day be scratched. Cosmic nihilism would be one way for such a world to "work."

[bigbywolfe]

That's pretty much the feel of it when you read through the books. Having the spirits of the dead trapped on the world (the Fell) gives it an extra nasty tone. I don't know many players that are up for fighting for pretty much hopeless causes.
We play CoC. We live for hopeless causes!

[Peregrine]

We play CoC. We live for hopeless causes!

I don't, and this is why.

de gustibus non est disputandum

[dmjalund]

There are no Taste Accountants

[Michael Hopcroft]

Nyarlyhotep doesn't want human minds with good taste....

[AlHazred]

We play CoC. We live for hopeless causes!Or rather, you try to continue to live for hopeless causes!

[bigbywolfe]

I don't, and this is why.

de gustibus non est disputandum

You don't play Call of Cthulhu because "There's no accounting for taste"?

[Peregrine]

You don't play Call of Cthulhu because "There's no accounting for taste"?

No, I don't play CoC because I don't play hopeless games.

"There's no arguing taste"; some people play CoC, some don't, and no one in either camp is objectively wrong.

[SKJAM!]

Spike Y. Jones' campaign, retitled "Madlands" for GURPS Fantasy. The "gods" range from not-terribly-helpful to actively malevolent, with most just being very alien. Actively worshipping gods is considered an insane activity by the locals, as it draws attention to you. Smart humans try to avoid contact with the gods whenever possible.

[Trencher]

How about a beastly god who is not allpowerfull but used magic and scienece to create humanity as food and slaves for his most favored children. The children could make great villains both boss monsters in the form of demons or huge dragons and evil races in the form of corrupt decadent elves or blood crazy orks. Or you could just make up your own children species. Some children might even turn away from their corrupt kin and god.

[Old Man]

There seem to be plenty of historical examples to draw from. The Mayans, IIRC, had to resort to human sacrifice to keep some highly unpleasant gods mollified. Shiva is bipolar at best (depending on which version you're talking about). And the Old Testament isn't exactly all kumbaya. None of these are bent on destroying humanity, of course, but neither are they highly benevolent.

[Markdoc]

There seem to be plenty of historical examples to draw from. The Mayans, IIRC, had to resort to human sacrifice to keep some highly unpleasant gods mollified. Shiva is bipolar at best (depending on which version you're talking about). And the Old Testament isn't exactly all kumbaya. None of these are bent on destroying humanity, of course, but neither are they highly benevolent.

Those examples are not even slightly benevolent: the best you could say is that if you get on their good side, they'll help you kill other people.

cheers, Mark

[Sir Ofeelya]

Those examples are not even slightly benevolent: the best you could say is that if you get on their good side, they'll help you kill other people.

cheers, Mark


You say that like it is a bad thing.

[dmjalund]

Although the Old Testiment Deity did lead them to a land of "Milk and Honey" where they promptly invaded.