Xefas
2014-04-10, 08:38 PM
For those curious about the system, we have a discussion thread. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?323694-Mythos-Inspired-Homebrew-Discussion) The first post is incomplete, missing the Bellator (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?336731-quot-Today-is-victory-over-yourself-Tomorrow-is-your-victory-over-lesser-men-quot&p=17173024), among other things. This post is intended as a fluff piece that will likely only make sense to those that are already familiar with the classes. Don't be afraid to post a line in the discussion thread if you want to know more.
Anyway,
What About Those Other Titans?
This homebrew material is meant to work in conjunction with the "Mythos" classes and cosmological expansion, my contributions of which can be found in my signature. These setting tweaks introduce creatures known as "Titans", who warred with the Gods in the days before the Great Wheel, Greek-mythology-style.
However, they are more complex and alien creatures than the Gods themselves. Which brings us to the pre-existing notion of "Titans" in D&D; the chaotic outsider-giants, who amount to being very large narcissistic humans with some fairly tame spell-like abilities. For the purposes of the Mythos classes, and associated setting alterations, these creatures are known as Primal Giants, an ancient creation of some of the first deities, who engaged in the war between the Gods and Titans. However, the Gods having not yet mastered the imposition of stability on the pre-Wheel maelstrom, created the Primal Giants quite close to the very chaos they fought against, and most eventually turned and sided with the Titans. Nearly all of these traitors were killed in the war, or executed for their treason afterward, but perhaps one or two titanic loyalists still yet live. Those loyal to the Gods settled in Arborea and Ysgard, as settled as such creatures can be, and participated in the creation of many of the Giant races that inhabit the Wheel today.
A Basic Overview
A Titan is not a creature of flesh or blood, and predates many of the modern notions of what defines a creature. They are living narratives; self-defined truths with enough gravity to escape the grinding impossibility of the Far Realm. In a chaotic primordial maelstrom without rules or physics, space or time, definition or nothingness, the only things that could find purchase enough to thrive in the cosmic foundations were rivers of consistent ideas and concepts. The first story to become aware enough to declare its own existence, and thereby exist, became known as the Empyrean. With his heart of white fire, he became a beacon for more stories to follow him, and eventually an entire tribe of likewise things amassed in the chaos, and began to create. They knew themselves as Titans.
The form a Titan takes is unique among the myriad creatures that have existed since, often referenced, occasionally imitated, but never fully replicated - in that they live as many different things simultaneously, all different, but all equally part of them, even though some parts are less important or vital than others. The following is a standardized list of selves that an adult Titan exists as, though each individual Titan may have one or more non-conforming traits, such as the Empyrean having two hearts, or the Monster having a unique, condensed soul compendium.
One Theme
One Principle (Also known as their "Heart")
One Stage (Also known as their "World-Body")
One Thesis (Also known as their "Incarnate Self")
A Soul Compendium containing: 7-12 Premises (Also known as Upper Souls)
Somewhere between several thousand and a few billion Notions (Also known as Lower Souls)
Many dozens, potentially more than a hundred, Mythos
In addition, a Titan may partially exist as zero or more Anthols; these are special amalgamated creatures that are both individuals, and part of a Titan, discussed later.
Of course, these are the specifications for a fully grown Titan. Like most mortals, Titans are formed as very rudimentary things, but gifted with boundless potential. As they grow, their potential solidifies, and they eventually reach the apex of what they can become on their own. Because Titans predate the concept of rigid, linear, universal time, they do not grow by simply aging; they grow by iterating on and expanding their story, supplying it with nuance, embellishment, and emphasis.
When a Titan first comes to be, it is in a Larval stage, existing very simply as its own Incarnate Self, with a few core Exceptional Mythos to define it. Once it has found enough individuality to extrude a Principle, it begins to manifest Fantastic Mythos and becomes an Infant. At this point, it begins to produce Premises until it can birth its Legendary Mythos and become a Child, and then on to Exalted Mythos and the beginning of the coalescence of its Theme, to become an Adolescent. Between the Adolescent and Mature stages, their Premises begin to create Notions, and their Stage begins to take shape, as they master Sempiternal Mythos. Once their Stage is complete, and they have created their first Immemorial Mythos, a Titan becomes an Adult. Beyond this, the greatest of Titan-kind may become Elders, and reach into their most eminent, Xenocosmic Mythos.
This is a state that a few Titans were capable of touching upon briefly, but the Empyrean was the only one to have created his own, permanent, Xenocosmic Mythos. Outside of true Titans, the first deity and Lawgiver, the Sun, achieved this lofty station before his own downfall.
Theme
A Titan's theme is malleable in its youth and soldifies over time - its purpose is to state, very plainly, what the Titan's story is about.
For example, the Monster's Theme is "enraged violence, brutality, and terrorization". When a creature intentionally physically harms another creature out of any kind of anger, they are telling the Monster's story. When a creature embraces savage, barbaric, and unnecessarily cruel behavior, they are telling the Monster's story. When a creature uses violence or the threat of violence to inflict emotional trauma on other creatures for their own pleasure, or the furthering of their own goals, they are telling the Monster's story.
Originally, a Titan's theme would have died with them. There were no "default rules" to the maelstrom of chaos before the Wheel - if the Monster had died, then the maelstrom would no longer have held stories of gratuitous, hot-blooded violence. The concept would no longer have held enough weight to continue existing. Conflicts could still arise in the Titans' stories, involving cold-blooded, calculated sadism, or angry verbal debates, or friendly tussles, but they would lose the potential for most instances of sudden, angry butchery.
However, the great, seemingly infeasible at the time, goal of the ancient Gods was to create a multiverse of substance and consistency, with rules, and physics, and laws. They could build it, of course - they were great builders - but the maelstrom offered no solid foundation upon which to construct their house. They found this foundation in the defeated Titans, unraveling their stories, spinning apart their skin, and sewing it back together in forms they found more pleasing, creating all the worlds and places and ideas that they liked. Unfortunately for the Titans, this left them in an eternal nightmare state, where their almost-corpses still yet convulse upon the strata of a monument to everything that they hate. Their killers and tormenters play games and fight wars and raise families on the Wheel of their desecrated flesh while the Titans themselves scream silently between stitching made of their brothers and sisters.
The black lining on this pitch-black cloud is that the Great Wheel now sustains their Themes and, by association, the Titans as well. If the Monster were killed, utterly and truly, obliterated to the tiniest mote, unshaped and unmade, the Wheel would still sustain his Themes - the world of the Gods will always have its violence and terror. And, because the Theme still exists, the Monster's Mythos will still exist, and so a new Monster will inevitably come to be, identical to the old one, or perhaps even greater. This gives the Titans a curiously durable immortality beyond any other creature, so long as the Wheel stands.
Principle
A Titan's heart functions as something like its biggest fan. It is a separate creature from the Titan's Incarnate Self, but resonates powerfully with all of the Titan's ideals, providing it with adoration and inspiration, encouraging the creation of new Mythos, and administrating the functions of all of the Titan's other selves.
In terms of vitality, a Titan can survive the complete death of its Principle, though it is an intensely destructive act, one which can completely shear parts of a Titan's Mythos off of its narrative, and may even corrupt the Titan's story in gruesome and fundamental ways. Fortunately, killing the body of a Titan's Principle is rarely sufficient to ensure the Principle's death; often it can simply be reconsistuted by the Incarnate Self. If their heart is truly killed, a Titan will have to create a new heart, eventually, though it will not be the same as the last, and the Titan will never be the same again.
At higher levels of power, a Titan's heart may become complex enough that it must split itself into its own Incarnate Self and Stage, though they are never as vast and impressive as the Titan's own version of these things.
Mechanically, a Titan's Principle always has some amount of the Titan's Mythos, though never all of it. It will tend to pursue other expressions of power that resonate with the Titan, but that the Titan's Incarnate Self is too busy creating Mythos to indulge in (the Monster's heart is a fan of the Tiger Claw Martial Discipline, for instance).
Stage
A Titan's world-body is a physical environment that they have created to host their stories. At the Stage's introduction, it may only be the size of a town, or a city, but once a Titan is fully grown, they will have something on the planetary scale on which to play. The environment itself is reflective of the Titan's nature, and perfect for telling the Titan's story, though potentially inhospitable to creatures that do not revel in the telling of such tales.
Rarely can a Titan's world-body act directly; it must rely on its other aspects to defend, grow, populate, and make use of it.
The Titan, Mutation, had a Stage in the form of a planet dominated with writhing jungles and sinister oceans, often with places where the two biomes mingled, in which all living things underwent rapid, explosive evolution, consuming one another in an endless cycle of change for change's sake, with no goal or ultimate purpose. For every fish, there was a bigger fish, and when a fish had reached perfection, they would continue to feed and to change, losing their perfection, degrading themselves with weaker traits, evolving to lesser forms, and being consumed by another. Death was not the greatest fear for them; stasis was. Better to be consumed and become something else than to spend an eternity in perfect spirit-crushing stagnation.
The destruction of a Titan's world-body is typically just as deadly as the death of a Titan's incarnate self, though it is often a trickier prospect. If the Stage is a town - where does the town end, and that which is not-town begin? If you burn down the town's buildings, does the soil still count? Where does the town's providence end within the very earth? Truly destroying a Stage involves destroying it unambiguously, and Titans can be quite ambiguous indeed.
Thesis
A Titan's incarnate self is the method by which it attempts to know and understand itself. Just as a Human tends to think of its "self" as its brain, because the processes of its mind feel more personal than the billions of other, equally intimate and equally important, processes its cells are performing at any one time, a Titan tends to think of its Thesis as its most personal "self", hince the informal name. It is, after all, the part of the Titan that exists first, so it can be easy to become attached.
A Titan's Thesis is responsible for creating each of its Mythos, and accumulating the life experience required to iterate on the story and grow more powerful capabilities. Operating its incarnate self requires a staggering amount of a Titan's conscious effort, and so adult Titans often choose to put their Thesis into dormancy, allowing their consciousness to flow out and over all of its Stage and Premises, and its senses to extend out to touch on various Notions and Anthols. From this perspective, the weaving of stories is much easier.
The Titan, Design, had a Thesis with a very peculiar and unique shape, though it would be instantly recognizable, at least in part, to any modern denizen of the Wheel. It had one head, two arms, and two legs, connected by a central torso piece. Today's mortals would call this a Humanoid shape, after the various Demihuman races that populate every inch of the Prime, while immortals are more likely to call it the Divine shape, as the vast majority of Gods take this shape as well.
It was Design's nature to seek perfection, and he believed this shape to be the perfect expression of physical form. To his great dismay, his unquestionable emperor, the Empyrean, did not choose to take such a shape, and to suggest that s/he should do so would be the gravest kind of insult. But Design was a crafty Titan, and skilled in social manipulations - over millennia, he created concepts for festivals, and gifts, and etiquette, distributing them amongst the other Titans until such things became ingrained in them. Dogma extrapolated on these ideas to make formalized religious ceremonies and rituals, while Ephemera's souls held grandiose sporting events and other physical competitions for her pleasure, and even the Maker would tear himself from his great works to summon his guild-masters for an annual night of sensible merrymaking.
Last was the Empyrean to embrace these ideas, not for lack of interest, but because s/he could not abide that any party be an equal to hi/r own or, more unthinkably, greater. Hi/r souls toiled frantically over a great period of time but, when everything was perfect, the most lavish banquet was thrown in the House Empyreal, at the Seat of the Cosmos, where the comforting emptiness of the king's self lay outward and beneath as the spiraling solar system in which the other Titans orbited hi/r, and the scar in the Far Realm from which they had fled stretched overhead in its infinite cornucopia of colors and textures.
With the twin hearts of the Empyrean seated at their thrones, gifts were offered to them, and Design's gift was his perfect form, the two-armed, two-legged, one-headed shape that he adored - knowing that the Empyreal Lord and Lady could not refuse a beautiful gift so earnestly given without breaching the etiquette they had already subscribed to, which would have been disgraceful indeed. They took the gift, as they must, and assumed humanoid shapes tailored to their liking.
And so it was that Design became the almighty arbiter of vogue in the maelstrom, and an outlandish majority of the Titans' souls and selves clamored to him to devise their bodies for them. Soon, creatures without this shape were being defined by their lack; and when the Gods arose, this particular shape was so ubiquitous in the chaos that birthed them that they, too, took it for themselves, and made mortals (and a great many immortals) in their image. And this is why most intelligent species look exactly the same; Humans, Astral Devas, Balors, Worms That Walk, The Lady of Pain - if one looks just about anywhere, they find the same old design, with a few tweaks here and there.
For this reason, most Titans' have a "Humanoid" Thesis, and most of their souls, if intelligent, also tend to default to at least partially humanoid physical traits. Few cosmic tropes have as much inertia as that shape.
Soul Compendium
Without actors, what story can there be? This is where the teeming masses of a Titan's lesser souls come in. Notions are mass-produced species of spiritual creatures that are necessary for a Titan to tell their story, with each adult Titan hosting multiple species for different roles. They are always weak in comparison to the Titan itself, often not all that distant from the power of future mortal races, but their forms are many.
One group of the Maker's Notions were the Mudgara, made to be his smiths, carpenters, masons, engineers, and other assorted craftsmen. Huge, multi-armed, resilient to heat and fatigue, and brilliant multi-taskers, they were perfect expressions of the ideal they represented. Meanwhile, the Taksani toiled as apprentices, assistants, and students - smaller, weaker, made less intelligent, it was their role to serve and aspire, though their nature necessitated that they rarely, if ever, truly grew to be greater. Together, they told stories of clever, hard-working artisans that overcame obstacles from within themselves and without to forge wondrous things, and those menial servants who fetched water and stoked bellows and carried large objects that could then feel honored by association.
If the Notions are actors, then a Titan's Premises can be compared to directors. Vastly more powerful than any individual Notion, and utterly dominant over them, Premises are born from a Titan's Heart, and then go on to design and create Notions according to their sensibilities. They administrate, organize, and regulate, for whatever analogue that Titan's nature has. For example, the Premise of Mutation, K'Saya was a series of massive ooze-filled pits in which floated thousands of strands of fanged wires, not unlike jellyfish tentacles. Lurching through the morass of Mutation's Stage, it drew in and consumed all those Notions that had evolved to become too difficult to be easily consumed by other Notions, but too weak to continue evolving at a satisfactory pace (for example, Mutation did not particularly relish stories about massive immobile shells that could hibernate for millennia without food, living without really doing anything). In Mutation's hierarchy, this is an administrative position.
Of course, with increased power comes increased importance to the Titan's overall being. The death of a Notion is completely undebilitating to its greater self. Complete genocide of a Titan's people is, at most, a setback (though none of them exactly laughed about it when the Monster decided to visit someone's world-body in force). The death of a Premise is, however, debilitating to a Titan - not nearly so much as their Heart, but the pain is great nonetheless, injuring their Principle, Thesis, and potentially their Stage as well. Much like a Titan's Heart, killing a Premise for real is easier said than done, as the destruction of their physical forms can be reversed by the time and effort of the Heart itself.
Mythos
Each of a Titan's Mythos is a single building-block of their narrative self, a collection of words and effects that defines them, whether through determining their shape, their personality, their capabilities, their spiritual structure, or some other aspect about them.
When a creature other than a Titan obtains one of their Mythos, they have collected a literal piece of that Titan and bound it to their real, physical self, an action that, for those that have not been enlightened to the source of their power, is completely undetectable and unknowable. A Teramach that gains a new Mythos only feels as though they have become more powerful in some way - the fact that they are becoming part of an archaic story-monster is beyond their scope to understand.
Note that there are many basic proto-Mythos that are beyond mortal creatures to obtain, not because they are too vast or powerful, but because they are redundant to their nature. Each Titan has a few Mythos that allow them to think and to move and to have mass and so on. These are the things a larval Titan pieces together as part of the process of being born. A Human, or an Elf, or what-have-you is already made with these things as an inherent part of their existence by virtue of being created as a citizen of the Gods' Great Wheel, and so these proto-Mythos are impossible for them to grasp, save for one esoteric case.
Anthols
As previously noted, it is possible for a creature other than a Titan to obtain one or more of a Titan's Mythos. Before the Great Wheel, there were constructed life forms known as Anthols. Beyond a Titan's Incarnate Self to grasp, these were living masterpieces built by Premises and Notions, then granted a spark of mythic power by the Titan's Principle. They were strange things, marveled at even by other Titans as symbols of opulence and objects of jealousy - while they existed as part of a Titan's story, the other part of them was built of a primal ur-reality, not so real as those creations of the Gods, but more real and stable than the Titans. What's more, they had true free will, and were able to act and think and create entirely beyond the story of the Titan they were formed from, inspiring feelings of guilty, fearful entertainment in the primordial host.
The vast majority of these primal Anthols were destroyed in the great war between the Gods and Titans, and they were exceedingly rare to begin with. A few escaped notice long enough to find a hiding place somewhere in the Great Wheel, and even fewer managed to survive to the current day, mostly the ones too weak or clever to have their titanic nature easily discovered.
Of course, with the rise of the Great Wheel, another altogether different variety of Anthol came to be. The unwoven titans that suffer between the cogs of the multiverse are bleeding, and their blood occasionally collects in the heart of a mortal creature. It's not power that's given, or granted, or gifted, though some may refer to it as such. It is power that's earned, whether by actions that one takes, or has taken, or would take, or will take - even with the linear time imposed by the Wheel, mythic power defies reasonable expectations. This person is a hero, and the legacy of the Titans is theirs by right, however it is claimed.
But Mortal Anthols are stranger still than their primal kin. They have a potential capacity that the Titans themselves thought impossible - they can obtain and combine multiple primordial narratives within the same vessel. For example, a Teramach could, through unconscious will, draw on and learn one of the Empyrean's Mythos, becoming a scion of two Titans simultaneously. The full cosmic ramifications of this ability are unknown, as no Mortal Anthol with a predilection for combining multiple types of Mythos has ever reached the threshold where their power has gained enough gravity to shape the world through its nature alone. Would they create a new Titan, born of two or more "parents"? Would they be torn apart by two mutually exclusive forces grown too large to hold together any longer? Would they become some terrible mutant abomination? Would the Great Wheel be broken and blended together as two of its foundational stones are threaded into one another? None can guess with any degree of authority.
New Feats
Broken [Mythic Patron] Amalgam
Although you already host the tale of one mythic being, you have unconsciously drawn on your spiritual breadth and strangeness of character to entwine yourself with another narrative, embodying it as you do your first, though to a lesser degree.
Prerequisite: One Mythos
Benefit: This feat is actually a template for multiple different feats with similar effects. Broken Monster Amalgam, for example, is a different feat than Broken Iron Amalgam, though each has the same effect, but with one concerning the Teramach and the other concerning the Bellator.
Choose one Mythos-granting class that you have levels in. Select three Exceptional Mythos and one Fantastic Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to that class.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing three new Exceptional Mythos and one new Fantastic Mythos from the same patron each time.
[Mythic Patron] Anthology Conflux
You have become something alien and otherworldly to those who know how to see it, a deformed anomaly in the cosmic strata where two rivers of power intersect without disruption.
Prerequisite: The corresponding 'Broken [Mythic Patron] Amalgam' feat, One Fantastic Mythos
Benefit: Like its prerequisite, this feat is a template for multiple different feats with similar effects, each one concerning a specific Mythic Patron.
Select two Exceptional, two Fantastic, and one Legendary Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to the Mythos-granting class you previously chose for the effects of this feat's prerequisite, as well as all of [Mythic Patron]'s Excellencies.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing two more Exceptional and Fantastic Mythos, and one Legendary Mythos from the same patron each time.
[Mythic Paton] Essence Analect
You have reached a perverse kind of perfection in your misshapen spiritual advancement, making you an amusing enigma that could incite interest in even the greatest mythic beings. Were your degenerate nature to grow any further, if it even could do so, it would almost certainly turn that amusement to fear and distrust, even in otherwise allied creatures.
Prerequisite: The corresponding '[Mythic Patron] Anthology Conflux' feat, One Legendary Mythos
Benefit: Just like its prerequisites, this feat is a template for multiple different feats with similar effects, functioning only for a specific Mythic Patron.
Select one Fantastic, two Legendary, and one Exalted Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to the Mythos-granting class you previously chose for the effects of this feat's prerequisites.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing one more Fantastic, two more Legendary, and one more Exalted Mythos from the same patron each time.
Anyway,
What About Those Other Titans?
This homebrew material is meant to work in conjunction with the "Mythos" classes and cosmological expansion, my contributions of which can be found in my signature. These setting tweaks introduce creatures known as "Titans", who warred with the Gods in the days before the Great Wheel, Greek-mythology-style.
However, they are more complex and alien creatures than the Gods themselves. Which brings us to the pre-existing notion of "Titans" in D&D; the chaotic outsider-giants, who amount to being very large narcissistic humans with some fairly tame spell-like abilities. For the purposes of the Mythos classes, and associated setting alterations, these creatures are known as Primal Giants, an ancient creation of some of the first deities, who engaged in the war between the Gods and Titans. However, the Gods having not yet mastered the imposition of stability on the pre-Wheel maelstrom, created the Primal Giants quite close to the very chaos they fought against, and most eventually turned and sided with the Titans. Nearly all of these traitors were killed in the war, or executed for their treason afterward, but perhaps one or two titanic loyalists still yet live. Those loyal to the Gods settled in Arborea and Ysgard, as settled as such creatures can be, and participated in the creation of many of the Giant races that inhabit the Wheel today.
A Basic Overview
A Titan is not a creature of flesh or blood, and predates many of the modern notions of what defines a creature. They are living narratives; self-defined truths with enough gravity to escape the grinding impossibility of the Far Realm. In a chaotic primordial maelstrom without rules or physics, space or time, definition or nothingness, the only things that could find purchase enough to thrive in the cosmic foundations were rivers of consistent ideas and concepts. The first story to become aware enough to declare its own existence, and thereby exist, became known as the Empyrean. With his heart of white fire, he became a beacon for more stories to follow him, and eventually an entire tribe of likewise things amassed in the chaos, and began to create. They knew themselves as Titans.
The form a Titan takes is unique among the myriad creatures that have existed since, often referenced, occasionally imitated, but never fully replicated - in that they live as many different things simultaneously, all different, but all equally part of them, even though some parts are less important or vital than others. The following is a standardized list of selves that an adult Titan exists as, though each individual Titan may have one or more non-conforming traits, such as the Empyrean having two hearts, or the Monster having a unique, condensed soul compendium.
One Theme
One Principle (Also known as their "Heart")
One Stage (Also known as their "World-Body")
One Thesis (Also known as their "Incarnate Self")
A Soul Compendium containing: 7-12 Premises (Also known as Upper Souls)
Somewhere between several thousand and a few billion Notions (Also known as Lower Souls)
Many dozens, potentially more than a hundred, Mythos
In addition, a Titan may partially exist as zero or more Anthols; these are special amalgamated creatures that are both individuals, and part of a Titan, discussed later.
Of course, these are the specifications for a fully grown Titan. Like most mortals, Titans are formed as very rudimentary things, but gifted with boundless potential. As they grow, their potential solidifies, and they eventually reach the apex of what they can become on their own. Because Titans predate the concept of rigid, linear, universal time, they do not grow by simply aging; they grow by iterating on and expanding their story, supplying it with nuance, embellishment, and emphasis.
When a Titan first comes to be, it is in a Larval stage, existing very simply as its own Incarnate Self, with a few core Exceptional Mythos to define it. Once it has found enough individuality to extrude a Principle, it begins to manifest Fantastic Mythos and becomes an Infant. At this point, it begins to produce Premises until it can birth its Legendary Mythos and become a Child, and then on to Exalted Mythos and the beginning of the coalescence of its Theme, to become an Adolescent. Between the Adolescent and Mature stages, their Premises begin to create Notions, and their Stage begins to take shape, as they master Sempiternal Mythos. Once their Stage is complete, and they have created their first Immemorial Mythos, a Titan becomes an Adult. Beyond this, the greatest of Titan-kind may become Elders, and reach into their most eminent, Xenocosmic Mythos.
This is a state that a few Titans were capable of touching upon briefly, but the Empyrean was the only one to have created his own, permanent, Xenocosmic Mythos. Outside of true Titans, the first deity and Lawgiver, the Sun, achieved this lofty station before his own downfall.
Theme
A Titan's theme is malleable in its youth and soldifies over time - its purpose is to state, very plainly, what the Titan's story is about.
For example, the Monster's Theme is "enraged violence, brutality, and terrorization". When a creature intentionally physically harms another creature out of any kind of anger, they are telling the Monster's story. When a creature embraces savage, barbaric, and unnecessarily cruel behavior, they are telling the Monster's story. When a creature uses violence or the threat of violence to inflict emotional trauma on other creatures for their own pleasure, or the furthering of their own goals, they are telling the Monster's story.
Originally, a Titan's theme would have died with them. There were no "default rules" to the maelstrom of chaos before the Wheel - if the Monster had died, then the maelstrom would no longer have held stories of gratuitous, hot-blooded violence. The concept would no longer have held enough weight to continue existing. Conflicts could still arise in the Titans' stories, involving cold-blooded, calculated sadism, or angry verbal debates, or friendly tussles, but they would lose the potential for most instances of sudden, angry butchery.
However, the great, seemingly infeasible at the time, goal of the ancient Gods was to create a multiverse of substance and consistency, with rules, and physics, and laws. They could build it, of course - they were great builders - but the maelstrom offered no solid foundation upon which to construct their house. They found this foundation in the defeated Titans, unraveling their stories, spinning apart their skin, and sewing it back together in forms they found more pleasing, creating all the worlds and places and ideas that they liked. Unfortunately for the Titans, this left them in an eternal nightmare state, where their almost-corpses still yet convulse upon the strata of a monument to everything that they hate. Their killers and tormenters play games and fight wars and raise families on the Wheel of their desecrated flesh while the Titans themselves scream silently between stitching made of their brothers and sisters.
The black lining on this pitch-black cloud is that the Great Wheel now sustains their Themes and, by association, the Titans as well. If the Monster were killed, utterly and truly, obliterated to the tiniest mote, unshaped and unmade, the Wheel would still sustain his Themes - the world of the Gods will always have its violence and terror. And, because the Theme still exists, the Monster's Mythos will still exist, and so a new Monster will inevitably come to be, identical to the old one, or perhaps even greater. This gives the Titans a curiously durable immortality beyond any other creature, so long as the Wheel stands.
Principle
A Titan's heart functions as something like its biggest fan. It is a separate creature from the Titan's Incarnate Self, but resonates powerfully with all of the Titan's ideals, providing it with adoration and inspiration, encouraging the creation of new Mythos, and administrating the functions of all of the Titan's other selves.
In terms of vitality, a Titan can survive the complete death of its Principle, though it is an intensely destructive act, one which can completely shear parts of a Titan's Mythos off of its narrative, and may even corrupt the Titan's story in gruesome and fundamental ways. Fortunately, killing the body of a Titan's Principle is rarely sufficient to ensure the Principle's death; often it can simply be reconsistuted by the Incarnate Self. If their heart is truly killed, a Titan will have to create a new heart, eventually, though it will not be the same as the last, and the Titan will never be the same again.
At higher levels of power, a Titan's heart may become complex enough that it must split itself into its own Incarnate Self and Stage, though they are never as vast and impressive as the Titan's own version of these things.
Mechanically, a Titan's Principle always has some amount of the Titan's Mythos, though never all of it. It will tend to pursue other expressions of power that resonate with the Titan, but that the Titan's Incarnate Self is too busy creating Mythos to indulge in (the Monster's heart is a fan of the Tiger Claw Martial Discipline, for instance).
Stage
A Titan's world-body is a physical environment that they have created to host their stories. At the Stage's introduction, it may only be the size of a town, or a city, but once a Titan is fully grown, they will have something on the planetary scale on which to play. The environment itself is reflective of the Titan's nature, and perfect for telling the Titan's story, though potentially inhospitable to creatures that do not revel in the telling of such tales.
Rarely can a Titan's world-body act directly; it must rely on its other aspects to defend, grow, populate, and make use of it.
The Titan, Mutation, had a Stage in the form of a planet dominated with writhing jungles and sinister oceans, often with places where the two biomes mingled, in which all living things underwent rapid, explosive evolution, consuming one another in an endless cycle of change for change's sake, with no goal or ultimate purpose. For every fish, there was a bigger fish, and when a fish had reached perfection, they would continue to feed and to change, losing their perfection, degrading themselves with weaker traits, evolving to lesser forms, and being consumed by another. Death was not the greatest fear for them; stasis was. Better to be consumed and become something else than to spend an eternity in perfect spirit-crushing stagnation.
The destruction of a Titan's world-body is typically just as deadly as the death of a Titan's incarnate self, though it is often a trickier prospect. If the Stage is a town - where does the town end, and that which is not-town begin? If you burn down the town's buildings, does the soil still count? Where does the town's providence end within the very earth? Truly destroying a Stage involves destroying it unambiguously, and Titans can be quite ambiguous indeed.
Thesis
A Titan's incarnate self is the method by which it attempts to know and understand itself. Just as a Human tends to think of its "self" as its brain, because the processes of its mind feel more personal than the billions of other, equally intimate and equally important, processes its cells are performing at any one time, a Titan tends to think of its Thesis as its most personal "self", hince the informal name. It is, after all, the part of the Titan that exists first, so it can be easy to become attached.
A Titan's Thesis is responsible for creating each of its Mythos, and accumulating the life experience required to iterate on the story and grow more powerful capabilities. Operating its incarnate self requires a staggering amount of a Titan's conscious effort, and so adult Titans often choose to put their Thesis into dormancy, allowing their consciousness to flow out and over all of its Stage and Premises, and its senses to extend out to touch on various Notions and Anthols. From this perspective, the weaving of stories is much easier.
The Titan, Design, had a Thesis with a very peculiar and unique shape, though it would be instantly recognizable, at least in part, to any modern denizen of the Wheel. It had one head, two arms, and two legs, connected by a central torso piece. Today's mortals would call this a Humanoid shape, after the various Demihuman races that populate every inch of the Prime, while immortals are more likely to call it the Divine shape, as the vast majority of Gods take this shape as well.
It was Design's nature to seek perfection, and he believed this shape to be the perfect expression of physical form. To his great dismay, his unquestionable emperor, the Empyrean, did not choose to take such a shape, and to suggest that s/he should do so would be the gravest kind of insult. But Design was a crafty Titan, and skilled in social manipulations - over millennia, he created concepts for festivals, and gifts, and etiquette, distributing them amongst the other Titans until such things became ingrained in them. Dogma extrapolated on these ideas to make formalized religious ceremonies and rituals, while Ephemera's souls held grandiose sporting events and other physical competitions for her pleasure, and even the Maker would tear himself from his great works to summon his guild-masters for an annual night of sensible merrymaking.
Last was the Empyrean to embrace these ideas, not for lack of interest, but because s/he could not abide that any party be an equal to hi/r own or, more unthinkably, greater. Hi/r souls toiled frantically over a great period of time but, when everything was perfect, the most lavish banquet was thrown in the House Empyreal, at the Seat of the Cosmos, where the comforting emptiness of the king's self lay outward and beneath as the spiraling solar system in which the other Titans orbited hi/r, and the scar in the Far Realm from which they had fled stretched overhead in its infinite cornucopia of colors and textures.
With the twin hearts of the Empyrean seated at their thrones, gifts were offered to them, and Design's gift was his perfect form, the two-armed, two-legged, one-headed shape that he adored - knowing that the Empyreal Lord and Lady could not refuse a beautiful gift so earnestly given without breaching the etiquette they had already subscribed to, which would have been disgraceful indeed. They took the gift, as they must, and assumed humanoid shapes tailored to their liking.
And so it was that Design became the almighty arbiter of vogue in the maelstrom, and an outlandish majority of the Titans' souls and selves clamored to him to devise their bodies for them. Soon, creatures without this shape were being defined by their lack; and when the Gods arose, this particular shape was so ubiquitous in the chaos that birthed them that they, too, took it for themselves, and made mortals (and a great many immortals) in their image. And this is why most intelligent species look exactly the same; Humans, Astral Devas, Balors, Worms That Walk, The Lady of Pain - if one looks just about anywhere, they find the same old design, with a few tweaks here and there.
For this reason, most Titans' have a "Humanoid" Thesis, and most of their souls, if intelligent, also tend to default to at least partially humanoid physical traits. Few cosmic tropes have as much inertia as that shape.
Soul Compendium
Without actors, what story can there be? This is where the teeming masses of a Titan's lesser souls come in. Notions are mass-produced species of spiritual creatures that are necessary for a Titan to tell their story, with each adult Titan hosting multiple species for different roles. They are always weak in comparison to the Titan itself, often not all that distant from the power of future mortal races, but their forms are many.
One group of the Maker's Notions were the Mudgara, made to be his smiths, carpenters, masons, engineers, and other assorted craftsmen. Huge, multi-armed, resilient to heat and fatigue, and brilliant multi-taskers, they were perfect expressions of the ideal they represented. Meanwhile, the Taksani toiled as apprentices, assistants, and students - smaller, weaker, made less intelligent, it was their role to serve and aspire, though their nature necessitated that they rarely, if ever, truly grew to be greater. Together, they told stories of clever, hard-working artisans that overcame obstacles from within themselves and without to forge wondrous things, and those menial servants who fetched water and stoked bellows and carried large objects that could then feel honored by association.
If the Notions are actors, then a Titan's Premises can be compared to directors. Vastly more powerful than any individual Notion, and utterly dominant over them, Premises are born from a Titan's Heart, and then go on to design and create Notions according to their sensibilities. They administrate, organize, and regulate, for whatever analogue that Titan's nature has. For example, the Premise of Mutation, K'Saya was a series of massive ooze-filled pits in which floated thousands of strands of fanged wires, not unlike jellyfish tentacles. Lurching through the morass of Mutation's Stage, it drew in and consumed all those Notions that had evolved to become too difficult to be easily consumed by other Notions, but too weak to continue evolving at a satisfactory pace (for example, Mutation did not particularly relish stories about massive immobile shells that could hibernate for millennia without food, living without really doing anything). In Mutation's hierarchy, this is an administrative position.
Of course, with increased power comes increased importance to the Titan's overall being. The death of a Notion is completely undebilitating to its greater self. Complete genocide of a Titan's people is, at most, a setback (though none of them exactly laughed about it when the Monster decided to visit someone's world-body in force). The death of a Premise is, however, debilitating to a Titan - not nearly so much as their Heart, but the pain is great nonetheless, injuring their Principle, Thesis, and potentially their Stage as well. Much like a Titan's Heart, killing a Premise for real is easier said than done, as the destruction of their physical forms can be reversed by the time and effort of the Heart itself.
Mythos
Each of a Titan's Mythos is a single building-block of their narrative self, a collection of words and effects that defines them, whether through determining their shape, their personality, their capabilities, their spiritual structure, or some other aspect about them.
When a creature other than a Titan obtains one of their Mythos, they have collected a literal piece of that Titan and bound it to their real, physical self, an action that, for those that have not been enlightened to the source of their power, is completely undetectable and unknowable. A Teramach that gains a new Mythos only feels as though they have become more powerful in some way - the fact that they are becoming part of an archaic story-monster is beyond their scope to understand.
Note that there are many basic proto-Mythos that are beyond mortal creatures to obtain, not because they are too vast or powerful, but because they are redundant to their nature. Each Titan has a few Mythos that allow them to think and to move and to have mass and so on. These are the things a larval Titan pieces together as part of the process of being born. A Human, or an Elf, or what-have-you is already made with these things as an inherent part of their existence by virtue of being created as a citizen of the Gods' Great Wheel, and so these proto-Mythos are impossible for them to grasp, save for one esoteric case.
Anthols
As previously noted, it is possible for a creature other than a Titan to obtain one or more of a Titan's Mythos. Before the Great Wheel, there were constructed life forms known as Anthols. Beyond a Titan's Incarnate Self to grasp, these were living masterpieces built by Premises and Notions, then granted a spark of mythic power by the Titan's Principle. They were strange things, marveled at even by other Titans as symbols of opulence and objects of jealousy - while they existed as part of a Titan's story, the other part of them was built of a primal ur-reality, not so real as those creations of the Gods, but more real and stable than the Titans. What's more, they had true free will, and were able to act and think and create entirely beyond the story of the Titan they were formed from, inspiring feelings of guilty, fearful entertainment in the primordial host.
The vast majority of these primal Anthols were destroyed in the great war between the Gods and Titans, and they were exceedingly rare to begin with. A few escaped notice long enough to find a hiding place somewhere in the Great Wheel, and even fewer managed to survive to the current day, mostly the ones too weak or clever to have their titanic nature easily discovered.
Of course, with the rise of the Great Wheel, another altogether different variety of Anthol came to be. The unwoven titans that suffer between the cogs of the multiverse are bleeding, and their blood occasionally collects in the heart of a mortal creature. It's not power that's given, or granted, or gifted, though some may refer to it as such. It is power that's earned, whether by actions that one takes, or has taken, or would take, or will take - even with the linear time imposed by the Wheel, mythic power defies reasonable expectations. This person is a hero, and the legacy of the Titans is theirs by right, however it is claimed.
But Mortal Anthols are stranger still than their primal kin. They have a potential capacity that the Titans themselves thought impossible - they can obtain and combine multiple primordial narratives within the same vessel. For example, a Teramach could, through unconscious will, draw on and learn one of the Empyrean's Mythos, becoming a scion of two Titans simultaneously. The full cosmic ramifications of this ability are unknown, as no Mortal Anthol with a predilection for combining multiple types of Mythos has ever reached the threshold where their power has gained enough gravity to shape the world through its nature alone. Would they create a new Titan, born of two or more "parents"? Would they be torn apart by two mutually exclusive forces grown too large to hold together any longer? Would they become some terrible mutant abomination? Would the Great Wheel be broken and blended together as two of its foundational stones are threaded into one another? None can guess with any degree of authority.
New Feats
Broken [Mythic Patron] Amalgam
Although you already host the tale of one mythic being, you have unconsciously drawn on your spiritual breadth and strangeness of character to entwine yourself with another narrative, embodying it as you do your first, though to a lesser degree.
Prerequisite: One Mythos
Benefit: This feat is actually a template for multiple different feats with similar effects. Broken Monster Amalgam, for example, is a different feat than Broken Iron Amalgam, though each has the same effect, but with one concerning the Teramach and the other concerning the Bellator.
Choose one Mythos-granting class that you have levels in. Select three Exceptional Mythos and one Fantastic Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to that class.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing three new Exceptional Mythos and one new Fantastic Mythos from the same patron each time.
[Mythic Patron] Anthology Conflux
You have become something alien and otherworldly to those who know how to see it, a deformed anomaly in the cosmic strata where two rivers of power intersect without disruption.
Prerequisite: The corresponding 'Broken [Mythic Patron] Amalgam' feat, One Fantastic Mythos
Benefit: Like its prerequisite, this feat is a template for multiple different feats with similar effects, each one concerning a specific Mythic Patron.
Select two Exceptional, two Fantastic, and one Legendary Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to the Mythos-granting class you previously chose for the effects of this feat's prerequisite, as well as all of [Mythic Patron]'s Excellencies.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing two more Exceptional and Fantastic Mythos, and one Legendary Mythos from the same patron each time.
[Mythic Paton] Essence Analect
You have reached a perverse kind of perfection in your misshapen spiritual advancement, making you an amusing enigma that could incite interest in even the greatest mythic beings. Were your degenerate nature to grow any further, if it even could do so, it would almost certainly turn that amusement to fear and distrust, even in otherwise allied creatures.
Prerequisite: The corresponding '[Mythic Patron] Anthology Conflux' feat, One Legendary Mythos
Benefit: Just like its prerequisites, this feat is a template for multiple different feats with similar effects, functioning only for a specific Mythic Patron.
Select one Fantastic, two Legendary, and one Exalted Mythos belonging to [Mythic Patron]. You may treat them as if they belonged to the Mythos-granting class you previously chose for the effects of this feat's prerequisites.
This feat may be selected multiple times, choosing one more Fantastic, two more Legendary, and one more Exalted Mythos from the same patron each time.