Gods of the Seven Cities - Design Notes: The Gods

Be warned this is waffely half-formed brain spew about "the creative process" so if you're not into that their will be another class write up soon.

If you are into that I was aware that I mentioned a few concepts concerning the gods in the Asipu write up and realised it might be an idea to mention what the gods are and how they might work.

Design Notes: The Gods

I’d been toying with the idea of a fertile crescent bronze age setting and as usual I let a few inchoate ideas float around the old brainbox then I started researchings. The research, for me at least, was fun, but nothing really sparked until I started delving into Mesopotamian religion. The two pertinent things I learned are . . .

A - There isn’t a familial pantheon of a few related gods, but instead thousands of gods.

B  - Mesopotamian people thought of their gods almost as celebrities living glamourous or weird soap opera style lives.

. . . I’m paraphrasing a lot their but that was the gist.

Celebrities. Divine celebrities. Divine celebrities with hawk’ heads, snake’s claws, and super powers. Game on! This is where my early gaming influences kicked in . . .

A - The venerable Ken St. Andre often describes Trollworld, the default setting of Tunnels & Trolls, as LotR but in the Marvel Universe.

B - Golden Heroes and its nifty randomly generated super powers system.

. . . I would make the gods of the setting this legion of freaky animal human hybrid celebrities with randomly generated super powers.

It was a very short step from - a campaign set in early bronze age fertile crescent - to: this whole campaign is about the gods. About the gods and how the players have to deal with them.  Basically it’s D&D party vs supers.

Obviously, with D&D’s zero to hero progression PC vs Supers would be pretty one sided in an all out war situation. I decided instead that the gods would be antagonists to our heroes in the wider sense of the word.

To this end; one of the other “interesting” things I discovered about Mesopotamian religion was the idea that the gods created humans to do all the work. Stuff like farming, trading, building, etc. that they themselves found tedious. Humans toil so the gods can live in luxury and when the gods have had their share of all the produce and wealth created the priesthood divides the rest among the citizens based on their status.

At this stage I was still wondering and pondering what exactly is it that the party does in this setting. Then I remembered that various Mesopotamian cities had patron deities. Thinking back to the soap opera style plots the gods get involved in, I arrived at the idea of a cold war by proxy. Each city has a patron deity and each patron deity has its family of lesser deities all of them nominally, and I say nominally because it’s complicated, live in the ziggurat that is the heart of the city’s temple precinct. They cannot involve themselves in a covert all out war with their divine rivals. That would wreak too much havoc, unleash too much destruction in the world. So instead they have their human proxies, the player characters, act against the other cities.

This is also a handy way to bind the party together. The party are priests, nobles, lizardmen, soldiers, dragonfly warriors, thieves, and sorcerers. All from the same city and all working to forward their deity’s agenda. So trade wars, assassinations, political intrigues, spying, infiltration, heists, military action against other cities, possibly even conflict with a rival city's deities are the sort of things the party might get involved in.

1001 GODS

My original notes mention something like 1036 Mesopotamian gods, I’ve since discovered that scholars have recorded over 3000 named gods from various cuneiform sources. That’s a lot of gods.

I decided on a thousand gods, in fact the original working title was “The Thousand Gods of Ur-Kishad”. Snappy I know. The plan was to make the gods randomly generated, both their looks, and powers. It then occurred to me it was a bit rude to call a setting the “The Thousand gods” and then ask the gm to roll up a thousand gods, so I thought I better stat up a thousand, but I wanted to include the random god generation system, after all why should I have all the fun.

This is where the seven cities came in. Rather than having a thousand gods just randomly roaming the setting I could divide them up between cities. A quick bit of math gave me 143 gods per city which is 1001 gods total. I’m not sure how long it will take me to stat up 1001 gods, but once I've done the the first cities worth of 143 gods I’ll know if it’s viable. Even if I do write up all 1001 I’ll still include the god generation system as it should be fun to play with, and also replayability is a big thing I want to aim for in this sandbox.

In terms of mechanics I’m going to be looking at some of the high powered beasties from the the B/X E bestiary to get a good starting range of HD, AC, Dam, saves, and abilities. Dragons, Giants, Rocs, Dragonturtle, vampires, that sort of power level. Then I’ll give each god ten rolls on the powers table to see what kinda super powers they have, Obviously they’ll also have randomly generated appearance. Possible with the randomness skewing more towards the snaked headed dragon clawed eagled winged Babylonian weirdness.

The gods will also prolly be the only ones who can resurrect. I may actually have them as the only source of cleric magic. With maybe the Asipu able to access these via the god and their effigy. Not sure about that. What I do with B/X E's magic system is a subject for another post but it will be radically different to as written.

All the gods will have various levels of Bane and Boon that they randomly dish out to all those around them, and of course will alway cause a Save vs Awe roll when encountered finally each one might have some quirks, desires, agenda or some such.

Of course all of this is just ideas bouncing around my old brain box and things will, as they invariably do, change as I work on, and play the setting. Hopefully it’ll end up half decent like Readwald/Wulfwald and I’ll be pleased with it.