Elderberry's Ongoing Homebrew

I'm going to put in several posts the process of the homebrew, because I can, and I will, and I want to (it's a Survivor: Palau GUATEMALA reference).

So yeah, incoming text dumps.

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ABURY: Homebrew Setting

So I ran a D&D campaign a year ago and Abury was the fictional setting. I wanted a place that was fairly unique and avoided the basic plot. I started by looking over Rich Burlew's rules about D&D, which were 1. Humans dominate the world. 2. Gods are real and active. 3. Magic is real and can be used by anyone who learns it. 4. Opposite alignments fight each other. 5. Arcane and divine magic are inherently separate. 6. The wilderness is separate enough from the cities to justify 3 wilderness-oriented classes. 7. There are hundreds of intelligent species of creatures, but 99% of them are considered "monsters". 8. Arcane magic is impersonal and requires no "deal" with a supernatural being. 9. Beings from other planes of existence try to influence the mortal world, usually on behalf of gods/alignments. 10. Magic items are assumed to be available, and game balance proceeds from that assumption. 11. Magic is consequence-free.

Now starting out, the ones that I wanted to mess with most were 2, 4, and 5. But there's also two major points looming large over the whole concept of D&D: 12. Alignments are (usually) evenly matched and have equal access to resources, 13. There is a reason to choose evil. The implication must be that something in evil is desirable enough to compensate for the generally horrid afterlifes for all evil (and sometimes non-good) aligned characters. And that, to me, makes a good case for scrapping the idea of an afterlife entirely. So if it is replaced, there still has to be some manner of way to Raise Dead or Resurrect, because that's what various mechanics call for. But if I'm looking at a system where afterlife should be mostly nonexistent but the general status is in balance, there's a really easy method: Buddhism. Steal from concepts of Karma, reincarnation, and other traditions. And that's where the setting began.

So with the desire to use a more Buddhist method than Christian into cosmology and morality, the next question was how to deal with the class between the alignments, the divide between divine/arcane, and the implication of many static gods. I wanted especially to avoid the idea that gods were always things, because there's only so much a player (or villain) can do with deities of almost unmatched power floating around. It's hard to be concerned about potential genocidal, or omnicidal, villains while the gods sit in a corner capable of intervening. Furthermore, the evil gods interfere all the fucking time when allowed to. So how do we balance this? Well, the answer came with another game.

If any of you have played the Dominions series, one of the core mechanics is faith. Faith, when too low, makes it difficult to exert control over your realm's characteristics. It manages how many sacred units you can recruit every turn, how much morale your own soldiers will have, and if you lose all your faith - regardless of how large or powerful the rest of the realm is - you instantly lose. So what if the same is true here? The gods are "real" in the sense that they exist, but not in the sense that they are independent beings. Instead, there is one central deity - Abury - and many faces of that deity - much like Hinduism. Some are "good," some are "evil," some are "lawful," some "chaotic," but it's largely interpretation. Deities that cease to have large followers wane in power, deities that are universally worshiped become immensely powerful. This, in part, becomes a feedback loop wherein worship leads to power, manifestations of power lead to worship, which allows for greater demonstrations of power, and so on. So Abury steps in occasionally and uses his power to eliminate some goodwill for a deity to ensure that none becomes too powerful.

But equally the deity takes on characteristics of its followers. If tomorrow, the God of Elemental Fire's worshipers all decided that fire is a source of strife, conflict, and death and thus that fire is evil, yet remained followers of that God, the God himself would slowly drift towards Evil. He could intervene with the resources at his disposal, but unless stopped the cult of pyromania would take over and he would become an evil deity. The background will assume that most deities have gone through this process. Yet there's still the question of why they don't directly intervene, and that's where the power of Abury will come back in. To prevent the material plane from simply being a playground for would-be deities, a constant battleground between avatars of gods, Abury forbid direct intervention. Indirect methods are regularly used, but no gods or avatars of gods can travel out of their home plane.

To divert to the next question, what replaces the afterlife? Reincarnation is the simple answer, and the simple fix is that upon death a process begins of transferring a soul into its new form, based on its actions in the previous life. After a period, the soul is severed from its old history and is put into a new body. Various spells can prevent this process, of varying levels of difficulty, but one year and one day after a death, a soul cannot be retrieved by any means. This also gives an idea for a voluntary reincarnation mechanic that might come up later.

But this is the basis for the campaign: a system of various gods of varying strength, none of whom can directly intervene but all of whom fight in other manners, and all of whom are occupying some kind of position on a circle going from Order, to Good, to Chaos, to Evil, and back to Order. I'll get to the gods themselves in the next section.

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There are four major alignments and four elements. I would wager that, if forced to assign one element to each alignment, almost everyone would go with something like Fire=Evil, Water=Good, Earth=Law, Air=Chaos. I'm fine with the Air=Chaos because I really don't know how to make illusions and such lawful, but the others I want to flip. Earth will also be chaotic, Fire Good, and Water Evil. That's a pretty significant departure that gives some uniqueness to the setting. But if two are already chaotic, that implies Fire has to be Lawful as well as Water being Lawful, so Fire is going to be thought of as Lawful Good (so think Paladins using holy fire to purge undead, almost an inquisitional sense), while Water is going to be Lawful Evil (floods are regular but destructive, tides are predictable but often bad). I want air to remain fairly benevolent, so Air will take Chaotic Good (think more in the vein of Black Widow or Hermes) and Earth will take Chaotic Evil.

So to explain this more thematically, I envision a fire god that's big on paladins, knights, warriors, and warpriests - those at the frontline with fiery greatswords and flame strikes, burning away the enemies of good. I also envision them as somewhat of a forge god. They are the central deity for the military class and the professional soldiery, which means we are looking at a major god of fire and smithing. This is almost like Hephaestus, but I want try veer away from Roman/Greek as well as Norse figures as they are really overused even in D&D context. But I want to use a realistic name, so I'll turn to lesser known pantheons. The Slavic pantheon features a god of Celestial Fire and Blacksmithing, so I'll just borrow and make the first deity Svarog. He'll be the God of Knights, Chivalry, Fire, and Smithing, the natural choice for Paladins or Warpriests. The other major benevolent deity needs to offset Svarog, so let's look for someone who shuns iron and steel and resides in the clouds. That's a really fae image, so let's run with that and make this a full on Goddess dealing with illusions, magic, trickery, and other non-military means. There's a tradition in Lithuanian mythology of luames, sprites who reside in the clouds. I'll name her Lauma, Goddess of Fate, Illusions, the Fay, and the Clouds.

But now I have an interesting image, because the major benevolent deities are fire and air. That denotes smoke and it seems that a major tradition that would be logical are burnt offerings. That means that we need either a large tradition of hunting or large tradition of animal husbandry. So let's make two more gods, and make them both generic Good deities. One will be a hunting deity, I'll make him a god of hunting and archery, so lots of wind traditions as well. Almost like Zeus or Odin, this is a very father-figure god. I want to derive from Celts here, because the more I write the world the more I find that the major civilisation should be struggling to overcome a deep history of tribalism and in a struggle between becoming a respectable empire and their old history. In fact, I want the old history to be only a single major empire that instilled some sense of unity and common culture, but that fell apart soon after. It's situated like Germany following the Romans or the Carolingians, where there is some tension between older gods - like this one and his wife - and the new gods - Svarog and Lauma. But we also need the Goddess who accompanies the hunter god. She needs to focus more on domestic life (old gods, again), as well as being a general goddess for birth. I'll steal wholesale and name them Damona and Vindonnus, from the Celtic Goddess associated with cattle and the Celtic God of the Sun.

Next we will move to the evil deities. The first needs to be a water god, who is evil. The obvious choice here as well is to put him as a father of monsterkin, like serpents, squids, dragons, and other aquatic beings. This also gives me the decision that traveling across the water is going to be a major difficulty but also very necessary. But I want to build a natural challenge here, because it seems that this would be an old tradition of vengeance in this society. Revenge and the old Eye for an Eye method of justice will be his general purview. There's an old Finnish god that swore to stay at home and not engage in warband raids if his wife remains faithful but leaves after she breaks her vows, now known as a raider and a god of the seas. That's a nice inspiration and I'll name him Ahto. I kind of want rival gods to him, however, that look at other aspects of law and justice - since Svarog is a more benevolent approach to justice and order - so maybe two? I'll come back to that. The other evil deity is some earth deity. They are meant to be chaotic and evil, so I'm imagining them as a spiteful deity. More like a crone or a hag, someone who casts random afflictions on travelers or cause disasters against those they don't like. For now, I'll call her Idaeba as I look for any hag or crone goddess.

Now back to the pure lawful deities. Since I gave two Neutral Good, I'll balance out with two Law, Chaos, and Evil deities. The two law deities will have distinct roles, one dealing with the law itself and one with enforcement. So one is a passive judge who makes sure rules are upheld and keeps records, while another hunts down those who must be brought to justice. Neither is necessary benevolent nor kind, both are instead personifications of pure law. I'll name them Mother Holle and Skathi for now, I'll probably go in and add more flavour to them later. Moving to the chaos side, I like the general idea of law = civilisation but I don't want chaos to seem savage. There's an allure to nature and chaos, some temptation, and I want one god to focus on that while another deals with the kind of animal rage. I'll make them twins, actually, and really stress them as not being savage. I think a great way to do that is through names: Holle and Skathi are traditionally Nordic names, even though the Nordic vikings were not associated with strong rule of law, so I'll give very imperial sounding or Greek-sounding names to them. One will deal with magic, but the very wild and undisciplined kind, along with plants and flowers, charms, songs, and other bardic traditions. The other will be more close to a barbarian, a god of animals and beasts, the wilderness and the steppes instead of glades and lakes. I'll name them Kelaineus, God of of the Glade, and Aigikoros, God of the Wilds.

That leaves us with the Evil deities. Like good, they will be husband and wife, but with an incredibly powerful and cunning wife married to a destructive and temperamental husband (again, old gods). The wife is a lady of water, but the dead waters. She inhabits the swamps, the marshes, the stagnant pools, the fetid lakes, and other areas of rot and decay. She is a mistress of pestilence and acids, the foul groupings of water. And with this, she is the master of the repose. She controls most undead, she controls most of the utterly damned souls (more on that later), and controls the very domain of negative energies. Her husband is a purely destructive force, behind the earthquakes, who summons storms as demanded by his wife, and who causes droughts. All manner of natural evil stems from his capricious nature. These two, which will take the names Kebechet and Naheb-Ka, are considered the greatest evil by the Aburians and most adventurers will face their machinations in some form. But Kebechet has a long and tragic history, which will be covered along with the Eldest Gods (Carnax, Tzatza, Chiton, and Annake) in the post on the True Circle.

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One of the major issues of D&D, and similar systems, is very apparent to anyone who played Guild Wars (and most other MMOs) wherein even the most powerful of villains should be destroyed by over 9000 adventurers who happened to be in the neighbourhood. Eventually, simply based on how these games work, at best you'd have Neutral and Good aligned adventurers only. You might get some various levels of dickishness, but outright evil wouldn't be realistic. But we are a modern society, why not steal a concept?

In essence, the "True Circle" concept holds that, for various reasons, the gods can be changed. They are mutable forms. As stories of a god changes, the actual personality and the powers of the gods themselves will change. Equally, the True Circle holds that there must be a deity responsible for each domain, that is to say that even if all stories were to change at some point there must be a story of a God of Death, or a Goddess of Nature, of good, evil, chaos, and law oriented gods, and so on. Thus, as some gods wane in popularity, others tend to take over their roles. At times, this occurs naturally, like the rise of Svarog, while other times this is a deliberate effort by various gods, like Kebechet's changes (both dealt with in this post). As such, there tends to be a large deal of uncertainty about which particular cult or branch of any deity's church can claim primacy beyond whichever happens to be the most powerful at the time.

As a consequence, while officially Kebechet is a Neutral Evil deity, there are some realms where she is worshiped instead as a Lawful Neutral deity, focusing on her role as merely a part of the natural cycle of life, others that consider her a Chaotic Neutral deity, painting her as an unwitting bearer of plagues and pestilence, and some of the more fringe matriarchal societies even hold her as Chaotic Good, who see her use of poisons and the swamp as a natural equaliser. The truth is some mixture of all these cults, as originally Kebechet was a Lawful Neutral deity charged with upholding the barrier between the living and the dead, along with overseeing the process of preparing souls for reincarnation. She was a steady judge that carefully preserved the memories and actions of the past lives and, once finished, would mete out a judgement. But over time, she became more associated with death specifically and less as a judge of the dead. As various plagues struck, some cults propped up begging Kebechet to intercede and save them from death. She, being primarily lawful, refused to intercede nor allow her followers to intercede and break the natural cycle of life and death. Following a large plague that killed large portions of the population, many powerful kings and priests began attacking shrines to Kebechet, believing that she was directly responsible. Mother Holle and Skathi, at the time gods of relatively minor importance, instructed their priests to attack Kebechet as a mistress of death and plagues, a connotation that stuck. As more died, more rejected Kebechet as an evil deity and thus the former Goddess of Judgement became the Goddess of Plagues. Now, she seeks revenge on the followers of Holle and Skathi, as well as the kings and priests who rejected her, but still has tremendous following among the areas that were largely spared from the plague. Most "evil" deities have a similar history, but as most of the world sees them as evil, evil they remain.

Gods might also fade from importance. The Eldest Gods were the former gods of the elements, Chiton the God of Earth, Carnax the God of Fire, Tzatza the Goddess of Air, and Annake the Goddess of Water, but these became less popular as Svarog, Lauma, Ahto, and Idaeba became more entrenched. However, most are unaware of any besides Carnax, the former God of Fire. According to popular mythology, Carnax was a Chaotic Evil god who let fires rage across the world, untamed. The inhabitants of the steppes and plains dreaded the arrival of a sudden wildfire and with it blamed Carnax. But as fire became tamed and settlements less vulnerable to a sudden conflagration, the image of Carnax became less popular. The myth holds that Carnax was punished for failing at his duties, as the fires had threatened creation as a whole, and his punishment was to be demoted out of the True Circle, the standard pantheon of major gods, to be replaced by one of the minor gods of fire. Svarog, a relatively minor god, was chosen for his valour and his wisdom, being a virtual opposite to the behaviour of Carnax, and took over his responsibilities.

Because of these stories, it is a popular goal for villains of all stripes to become gods. It is well known that Svarog was originally the leader of a tribe who was elevated upon his death to godlike status and that his followers (primarily those from his tribe) had succeeded in spreading his cult, and so many villains aim to become powerful enough to make a case for their own godhood, potentially replacing a member of the True Circle. Others seek to destroy a disliked god by discrediting them among their followers or by associating them with various disasters. But armed with the knowledge that the paragons of any alignment might one day be elevated to even minor status as a god, many fanatics or unscrupulous ambitionists seek to make themselves deities.

For adventurers, this does mean that even a Good-Aligned adventurer might have cause to go against the desires of a good deity, or even assist evil deities, in the quest for godliness, while DMs should be encouraged to allow the interpretations of any deity to vary based on events in the game. If the main citadel of Svarog were to fall, it would be a massive event that would permanently stain Svarog or might remove him altogether. This might empower the other Good-aligned deities and give them a reason to not become involved, especially as direct interference is not possible.

Furthermore, those who are incredibly loyal followers might see rewards as the god uses what indirect methods they can to advance their causes. For evil deities, who have few followers, this can be powerful temptation. Knights of Svarog might compete with thousands for a reward, but a single adventuring party that assists Ahto could receive an even greater one for less effort.