Gods, Demons and Other Planes, How do they really work? Options

[Forefallen]

Hey Cavies

So I’ve been looking at writing some more dungeons whilst cooped up at home. I’m quite familiar with the whole ‘demon lords on their own plane can’t be killed’ and other such stuff, or that gods can only be killed by gods. It makes sense, but I’m not sure why. When people stay these things/pts app these things and such, how do you see it working? What about the plane makes the demon unkillable? What about being divine stops you being harmed by peons? I had a few ideas but they all seem superficial.

Additionally, other planes. How do people view them in Labyrinthe? Are other planes like stars in the sky? How do they work, how are they made?

This is mostly for IC reasoning, rather than stats, however I’d be interested in hearing everyone’s ideas about how the structure of the Labyrinthe universe comes together

Thanks!

Jack

[Kail]

I view it like the old Norse mythology of different planes all interconnected by bridges, if you're a troll, the nacht, pathways.

[BBB]

With the exception of the Mittlenacht most of that stuff is based on other mythologies and fantasy tropes. Which means there is no specific answer, which is kind of cool, as it allows a wide range of interpretations without being "wrong".

Jan created the Mittlenacht as a way to take a system with no written background or history worked on by loads of different referees and give it a coherent reason as to why things change or why certain histories got missed / forgotten / never made the final edit .

In essence the Mittlenacht is a thing of Primus and its partial mirror Secundus. In essence anything it was a clever way of explaining why campaign locations vanish after a certain referee stops reffing them. Over time Primus can "forget" places and their significance to Primus falls below a threshold were they just sink into the 'nacht / Secundus.

It meant when the Realm of Glass was originally written that stuff that was no longer actively used or didn't feature could have a good reason to have happened / was once there until restored.

It also allowed many alternative histories to exist and both be true, such as the Fey once ruling Primus before being displaced and drifting away from Primus. Or the make the Ancient Folk claim to have originally ruled Primus possible et cetera

Refs tend to use the 'nacht for slightly different purposes now and the codified history that came about after the 1st edition of the Realm of Glass (a lot through 15 years of Heroes) has meant its less relevant for its original purpose but is still a very cool solution to a specific past problem!

Within the Exostance all "worlds" / "planes" travel a circuit whereby every thousand years the new world is supposed to take its place at the centre of all things and be the "Prime" Plane. This is called An Age. At the end of what Primus calls the 1st Age the inhabitants of Primus (The Laiu or the scions I think) cheated and prevented the next world from taking its place so Prmus could continue its ascendance.

This was done again at the end of the 2nd Age (Big plot lots of PC action). This was not without consequence that caused the worlds on the edge that should have moved inwards to be stuck and start to decay to entropy. These worlds began to fail and fade. Unfortunately the peoples of those worlds, as people are want to do, anthropomorphosised (sp?) this phenomenon and gave birth to the World Eater. A force of Entropy that did as you imagined (lead to a lot of refugees in the first few years of the 3rd age!)

My personal views:

1. Higher Beings are tied to Geography regions, be it planes, worlds, cities, islands etcetera. Power is drawn from such place and in true Arthurian / Celtic Mythos style, the place prospers when its "Lord" prospers and the Lord draws energy and life force from such a place. Their life force cannot be truly extinguished whist that place exists.

2. Gods of "Concept" tend to exist in some for or another so long as that concept exists with sufficient force. This is why some gods are particularly fond of getting as many followers as they can to ensure the concept they represent remains strongly felt. Hope, Mercy being two obvious ones.

3. Gods as encountered are rarely what they truly are, what we encounter is but a portion of their power poured into a form that we can interact with, this form can be relatively easiy cut off from its true divine power by another god, i.e. "killed"

"Why can't Gods be harmed by Peons": Matter of scale I guess, same as why the 1k Warrior in AC 12 Immune to bruising can ignore the 1st level Scout...

Ok, that got a bit more rambly than I intended.

BBB

[Patch]

Hey Cavies

So I’ve been looking at writing some more dungeons whilst cooped up at home. I’m quite familiar with the whole ‘demon lords on their own plane can’t be killed’ and other such stuff, or that gods can only be killed by gods. It makes sense, but I’m not sure why. When people stay these things/pts app these things and such, how do you see it working? What about the plane makes the demon unkillable? What about being divine stops you being harmed by peons? I had a few ideas but they all seem superficial.

Well firstly I don't think that gods you can actually see and poke with a stick, are gods... at least not in the true sense of the word...

A god is an ineffable thing, a being of the purest focus and force, its not something that mortals can define or comprehend.

The gods that form PC's and Monsters are manifestations of divine will, they are thoughts of Gods made flesh... and you can't kill a thought, Most of the PC's can be beaten down and laid out I know Harpell can, but only another instrument of a god can actually force the ineffable part of the god to let go of that thought.

As for Demon Lords and the like I see them more like the primal spirits, it draws power from the plane, it is sustained by the existence of the plane and you cant kill it without breaking that link somehow... though again if you were sufficiently powerful you might be able to beat it down.

Additionally, other planes. How do people view them in Labyrinthe? Are other planes like stars in the sky? How do they work, how are they made?

Jack

I see Planes as infinitely sized spaces that exist within exostance, they are in effect much like planets within the universe, they are no connected as such but within the laby Mythos (assuming its not vastly changed in 20 years) broadly separated into higher planes (which includes heavens, hells, the elemental planes and demonic realms and other likely strange concept realms) and lower planes which are all the mortal realms and the places people live....

and Primus... which is special

Belief flows from Lower Planes to Higher Planes and Power flows from Higher Planes to Lower Planes... this belief and power flow through primus... which is why it is special!

The Space in between the planes is called the Astral... The Nact is the shadow a plane creates on the Astral, the Astral is a place of thought and so the shadow takes on a likeness but not a copy of the plane it is part of...

Away from the planes the astral is lots of empty grey (silver) space, not much lives there but things like the silver folk do...

Traveling from Plane to Plane is generally a mystic thing, like a spell or an NPV but trolls could build bridges across the Astral, concepts like the world tree stretch across planes etc...Taking the world tree as an example it is a representation of the flow of natural power from the Higher planes and belief in natural things from the lower plane... thus it stretches through most of the lower planes because they have a natural world... but its unlikely to connect to the realm of some demon lord because that does not have a natural law as such...

anyway that's my take

The above was pretty accurate 20 years ago as I had two sperate characters invest lots and lots of downtime studying it all (Harpell gods and Vrere Planes) but the golden rule that belief defines reality means it may have all changed now...

Patch

[Trickyz]

With the exception of the Mittlenacht most of that stuff is based on other mythologies and fantasy tropes. Which means there is no specific answer, which is kind of cool, as it allows a wide range of interpretations without being "wrong".

Jan created the Mittlenacht as a way to take a system with no written background or history worked on by loads of different referees and give it a coherent reason as to why things change or why certain histories got missed / forgotten / never made the final edit .

In essence the Mittlenacht is a thing of Primus and its partial mirror Secundus. In essence anything it was a clever way of explaining why campaign locations vanish after a certain referee stops reffing them. Over time Primus can "forget" places and their significance to Primus falls below a threshold were they just sink into the 'nacht / Secundus.

It meant when the Realm of Glass was originally written that stuff that was no longer actively used or didn't feature could have a good reason to have happened / was once there until restored.

It also allowed many alternative histories to exist and both be true, such as the Fey once ruling Primus before being displaced and drifting away from Primus. Or the make the Ancient Folk claim to have originally ruled Primus possible et cetera

Refs tend to use the 'nacht for slightly different purposes now and the codified history that came about after the 1st edition of the Realm of Glass (a lot through 15 years of Heroes) has meant its less relevant for its original purpose but is still a very cool solution to a specific past problem!

Within the Exostance all "worlds" / "planes" travel a circuit whereby every thousand years the new world is supposed to take its place at the centre of all things and be the "Prime" Plane. This is called An Age. At the end of what Primus calls the 1st Age the inhabitants of Primus (The Laiu or the scions I think) cheated and prevented the next world from taking its place so Prmus could continue its ascendance.

This was done again at the end of the 2nd Age (Big plot lots of PC action). This was not without consequence that caused the worlds on the edge that should have moved inwards to be stuck and start to decay to entropy. These worlds began to fail and fade. Unfortunately the peoples of those worlds, as people are want to do, anthropomorphosised (sp?) this phenomenon and gave birth to the World Eater. A force of Entropy that did as you imagined (lead to a lot of refugees in the first few years of the 3rd age!)

My personal views:

1. Higher Beings are tied to Geography regions, be it planes, worlds, cities, islands etcetera. Power is drawn from such place and in true Arthurian / Celtic Mythos style, the place prospers when its "Lord" prospers and the Lord draws energy and life force from such a place. Their life force cannot be truly extinguished whist that place exists.

2. Gods of "Concept" tend to exist in some for or another so long as that concept exists with sufficient force. This is why some gods are particularly fond of getting as many followers as they can to ensure the concept they represent remains strongly felt. Hope, Mercy being two obvious ones.

3. Gods as encountered are rarely what they truly are, what we encounter is but a portion of their power poured into a form that we can interact with, this form can be relatively easiy cut off from its true divine power by another god, i.e. "killed"

"Why can't Gods be harmed by Peons": Matter of scale I guess, same as why the 1k Warrior in AC 12 Immune to bruising can ignore the 1st level Scout...

Ok, that got a bit more rambly than I intended.

BBB

I agree with what Ian has said.

I tend to use the Exostance and my mind often flicks back to the Exostance map I saw once that kind of looked like an hour glass. When I set stuff, planes if they are near the outer edges they are often assailed frequently by the dangers in the dark. the skein of reality is thin here and I set my more out there stuff there.

The Closer to Primus I set a plane the more solid reality is and the closer it links to Primus.

I see the edges being constantly attacked and changing more entropy and decay. the closer to Primus generally the safer it is. belief has more definition here as reality is defined by belief the closer you are to the source of belief (Primus) the closer to what Primal beings believe is true is true.

So if I set a dungeon on Primus it follows all the rules, the further away from Primus the more likely rules are to be broken (non-standards) I hope its a theme people have picked up from dungeons but who knows. Should be obvious on dungeons where you visit lots of places doing smaller tasks.

Thats my take anyway.

[Alasdair]

Good replies above. A few additions:

Generally gods and deities draw strength from worship and in return provide power - mana from the dragons, spirits from gods, and natural power sort of a bit of both. So in a very real sense peons matter to gods, since the more and more powerfully they worship the stronger the godhead becomes.

There was a really cool idea on a 4d a few years ago: Chimes’ realm was where forgotten things got ‘stolen’ to. And we found a well protected hall that had the last shards of forgotten gods. My grey knight became a Paladin that day because he took in Zaphrayle a goodly god that gave of herself to the point of her own obliteration, nearly.

Set against this backdrop, demons generally trade in souls. A soul freely given offers massive power.

I’ve fancied running a demon extended length - the party are demons who must perform tasks and garner souls/power to be able to either escape from hell or take it over. (Perhaps all the item points go to the ‘winner’ with some facility to mete our IPs to other players as bargaining chips in the power game!)

And the context of a demon being invincible on its own plane is a well-established one. I like the idea of planes as holes within the Emmental of Exostance, each crafted by a maker and shaped by events. Due to the inevitable hierarchy, contol and coercion of a demonic power structure the person at the top has a far more direct bearing on their realm than in a more diverse place such as Primus. And it sort of stands to reason that they control, define and set the rules for how their plane works... including being unkillable on it as a general rule. That said, their lesser minions can (typically) only be actually killed (as opposed to banished) when on their home plane. This also makes it much easier to run long-term demonic plots... entering a pact with a demon *should* be easy, but ending a pact much harder. Such is the trickery and peril.

But the great genius in all this, as has been said, is the ‘Nacht, and with it the changing nature of reality, places and geography.

Make of it all what you will, and weave new stories into the fabric! Enjoy.