Aetrimonde

One of the things that I think is crucial to writing a campaign setting is to raise interesting questions and not give a definitive answer to any of them. As tempting as it might be to write a canonical answer to the big questions of the setting, authors have to remember that a published setting is intended to be a sandbox for other GMs and players to work in. A setting works best when it leaves plenty of room for a campaign to fill in the blanks and tell a unique story.

So I’m not going to answer some of Aetrimonde’s big-picture questions, like “how old is Aetrimonde’s planetary system” or “what does the colossal machinery in the Heavenly Realm do.” But that won’t stop me from discussing some potential answers and how they might make for an interesting campaign. Today, since I’ve lately been touching on topics related to Divine characters, I’m going to tackle one of the big ones: what are Aetrimonde’s gods? Finding a definitive answer to this question has consumed generations of Aetrmonde’s fringe theologists, and would make a great high-concept for a long-running campaign.

The Canon

There are a couple of things known about Aetrimonde’s gods (and if you want to change these facts, more power to you–but it might conflict with the campaign hooks I’m about to discuss):

• The gods are distant: they don’t have avatars, they don’t talk directly to anyone, and even their servants, the angels, are tight-lipped about them.
• The gods are associated with certain philosophies and creeds, and adopting those creeds can let mortals tap into divine power.

So what can we do, working within these facts?

Playing it Straight

The simplest way to use Aetrimonde’s gods is to take them at face value: they’re powerful entities with the quality of “divinity,” each of them embodying a different philosophy or concept, and they interact with Aetrimonde largely through empowering mortals whose beliefs are properly aligned with them.

The biggest question here is: why don’t the gods intervene more directly in the world? Why doesn’t Deum Militant lead armies, and why doesn’t Deum Harmonious prevent logging and mining from despoiling nature?

• Neutral Territory: The gods don’t intervene directly because they have agreed among themselves not to. Perhaps they’re simply tired of fighting each other when their interest conflict, or perhaps their interventions would risk destroying the world, or perhaps there are metaphysical consequences to intervention that they aren’t willing to suffer. A campaign could revolve around getting the gods to make an exception in the face of a world-ending threat; if the players are on board for it, you could also write a campaign about breaking the agreement between the gods and aiding their preferred deity in winning the ensuing struggle…consequences (literally) be damned.
• A Difference of Scale: The gods don’t intervene directly because they can’t easily do so: they’re so cosmically huge, and Aetrimonde so tiny in the grand scale of things, that for them to intervene directly would be like trying to remove one particular ant from an anthill…without crushing it. So the gods listen to prayers, and identify mortals who they can empower and guide to act in their interests on such a fine scale. A simple campaign in this vein might have the PCs trying to draw a god’s attention to some impending threat or overlooked wrong, and getting it to do something about it directly. A more ambitious campaign could let the PCs try to fix the entire system by pulling the gods down to a level where they can actually understand the mortal perspective…
• Cosmic Dead-Zone: The gods don’t intervene on Aetrimonde because they can’t do so at all: something about the world (or solar system, or plane of existence) prevents them from directly exerting their will. Perhaps it lies in a cosmic dead zone where divine powers simply don’t work, or it is under the influence of some eldritch quasi-deity from a previous cosmos, or the gods themselves did something that placed the world beyond their reach. A campaign based on this premise could involve this situation changing in either direction: the PCs might discover that the gods are becoming even weaker as Aetrimonde passes further beyond their reach, and set out to do something before the world is completely cut off from divinity…or it could be the opposite, where the gods are returning and the PCs must reckon with the consequences (intentional or not) of having divinities active in the world once more.

The Gods are Missing

What if the gods don’t intervene because they’re…gone? In this take on the gods, they used to be around, and perhaps intervened more often, but something happened to them.

• Gotterdammerung: The gods aren’t just missing, they’re dead, and all that remains of them are fragments of their power, which resonate with mortals who embody the creeds of the dead gods. Could the gods be brought back, a la Osiris? Could someone take up the shards of their power, beginning a new generation of gods? And most pressingly…what killed them, and what does it intend for Aetrimonde?
• Neglectful Creators: The gods made Aetrimonde, but they don’t care about it. Either it already served its purpose, or they made it on a whim and abandoned it once they lost interest. The echoes of their power still resonate with mortals following the appropriate creeds, but the gods themselves barely notice. What does it do to mortal society to know that they have no cosmic importance?
• Celestial Bureaucracy: The gods may be omnipotent, but they’re not omniattentive: they can only do so much at once, and with an entire cosmos to manage, they’ve had to delegate. Specifically, they’ve created a celestial bureaucracy staffed with angels and devas and all sorts of other divine servants. Of course, as we all know, bureaucrats never get involved in departmental politics or inter-service rivalries, so obviously the branch office looking after things on Aetrimonde must be working as intended…right?

The “Gods” were Misidentified

Perhaps there are no gods, just something that Aetrimonde’s mortals mistook for gods because they could draw power from them.

• Cosmic Forces: There isn’t any intelligence or consciousness behind Divine powers, but there is a truth to their creeds: contrary to Terry Pratchett’s Death, there is an atom of justice and a molecule of mercy. Mortals are tapping into these impersonal cosmic forces and mistaking them for gods…but is there a way to connect more deeply to them, or even control them, to become an actual god?
• Extraplanar Visitors: The gods are actually powerful, but mortal, entities that hail from another plane of reality, or a distant alien world. Their advanced grasp of technology and magic seemed godlike to primitive Aetrimondeans, and for reasons of their own (or even without their noticing), they began to empower mortals. What exactly did these alien visitors want when they first arrived? What do they want now? And could it be possible to take direct control over the mechanisms they use to grant powers?
• Eldritch Horrors: It’s well-known that there are many variations on the creeds acceptable to the gods of the pantheon. But the horrifying truth is that none of these creeds even come close to approximating the true natures of the gods: the creeds heretofore accessed by mortals are merely the ragged fringes of some vast and incomprehensible idea that a mortal mind cannot grasp…not without breaking. The sudden appearance of strange new doctrines and heresies could herald an alien god taking note of the tiny mortals drawing on its power…and attempting to reshape them into a better reflection of its true nature.

So there you have it: nine different treatments of Aetrimonde’s gods, each one serving as the setup for a different tone and style of campaign. As to whether any of them are the canonical truth for Aetrimonde…well, that would be telling.