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View Full Version : DM Help Trying to devise a cosmology [PF]



JusticeZero
2014-07-01, 04:15 AM
I'm working on my campaign setting mow, and I am at a loss on how to build the cosmology. I don't have a lot of the things that the stock cosmology is designed around. Could use ideas..
The setting is P6. It has no arcane or divine spellcasters. Period. Just psionics rules and PoW. As such, nothing calls on alignment, so I don't use it. There are no dark necromantic undead around. Most monsters are either aberrations or plants spawned from a disaster area. Players are humans. There are no Elemental spell effects, so I don't need Elemental planes, nor negative, positive planes or alignment planes.
The origin of the universe is described as pandeistic, so it used to be monotheistic and the god took itself out of commission when creating the universe. Specifically, lore states that the creating god decided it was too ignorant to advance itself, so turned itself into the world - at some unknown time in the future, it will wake up, reabsorb everything, then summon up the memories of everyone who ever lived to consult with to decide how to define itself.
This seems like it would leave me with the Astral, Ethereal, and nothing else, but i'd like to have a few ideas for things to add, since my knowledge of the Astral seems to indicate that it isn't all that exciting by itself...

NichG
2014-07-01, 04:51 AM
Your creator deity turned himself into the world. That's gotta leave a lot of the most interesting locations as actually being part of the world itself, rather than esoteric planes. Maybe if you still want something planar in concept, you can have something like Nobilis' separation between the mythic and prosaic - that is to say, over there is a mountain, but if you shift yourself into the plane of Divinity then the mountain is literally the spine of the creator deity. That said, that doesn't mesh well with psionics for me. It also means that the creation myth is literally true, which may be a bit dull.

It seems like the big thing is going to be answering 'what is psionics?' cosmologically. This is a big, standout power in the world and its the only such power (given that there's no magic per se), so somehow that seems like it should tie into how the world works. What if the 'creator deity' was actually a community of powerful minds that had lost their ability to have a physical existence due to some sort of event in their peoples' past - they were tricked into taking on a state of pure mental energy and then their bodies were destroyed by their adversary while they explored the universe or something like that. So they went and found this world and basically infused the world itself with their minds, essentially introducing the seeds for psionic ability in the distant ancestors of the people currently living there. Those minds are long-since mushed together and degraded, and have very little ability to actually remember things or manifest distinctive personae, but their hope is that the people of the world eventually become psionically active to a high enough degree that they can be reconstructed and re-embodied. Thus the creator deity legend, arising from the faint echoes in dreams of the minds that have suffused the world trying to tell their story to the psychically active, and accidentally starting a religion instead.

Fire Lord Pi
2014-07-01, 09:48 AM
Do you really need any more planes than that?

If I were you, though, I would make the material plane big. Really big. After all, if the creator wants the world to be full of ideas to subsume, then the world should be as massive as his power enabled him to make. This should lead to a lot of interesting world politics, especially with the constant exploration and discovery of this massive earth by the many world powers that be.

veti
2014-07-01, 05:38 PM
How does religion work in your world?

I know you've told us what the creator-god really did, but what do people think about it? Do they pray to it, do they have churches or temples, religions and cults and schisms?

After all, divine magic doesn't generally work in our world either, but that doesn't stop us.

JusticeZero
2014-07-01, 09:59 PM
Most people give tribute to the chantries - for business reasons if nothing else - and try to follow the guidelines in the text (at least loosely) and rely on the chantries for certain specific social services, which tend to result in people moving to monasteries for awhile for education and conversion to at least part time ministry positions.

Everybody in the area pretty much accepts the core "Revelationist" faith - named because the text describes the way in which this information was revealed to the first followers - and identifies as that. Most of them don't think about it much. Everyone agrees on the core text in which the theology is revealed, but there are a bunch of different branches that use their own interpretations and addendum texts; the first few chapters are the same, but the second half of the Text that people might have will have different chapters full of interpretations, correspondence, and specific exercises from the founders of their sect.

All copies of the Revelation are the same length, because of a note in the core book which defines how long the text is and the inviolability of the original text, presumably intended to prevent the text from being altered; however, that note was later interpreted in a way that allows a certain specific amount of added text to be included as part of the sacred text, though without protecting the extra text from change. Specifically, the restriction was written for scrolls which have writing on one side, but pages of books have writing on both sides and allowed the contents of the text to double. That happened some time back, and there's no easy way to undo it now.

Religion doesn't work, as in, you don't gain granted powers from it. A lot of the meditative techniques that the churches use are useful for training, but they have been shown to do that regardless of faith. Nonetheless, this is part of the original spread, because at the time it was created, it meant that there were a bunch of people who knew how to more predictably train people with powers rather than the haphazard accidents that were the norm at the time; they started out by doing so in return for conversion. Followers are expected to give a specific amount of tribute and to withold aid and business to people in the community who don't do so; giving tribute is seen as good policy for everyone regardless of faith or lack thereof as a result.

They still build temples and monasteries and teach people for free in return for service, which is particularly important for certain emergent ability types. Vitalists and Dreads, for instance, often result from rather violent origins and can also result in disaster; Wilders tend to cause a lot of damage without training. (If caught early enough, they can become Psions instead, but things often go un-noticed until it's too late.) In most cases, you can get the same training without the religious component, if your family has money or connections to pay for it. As such, they attract people who want education and training but can't pay the high prices of the schools, and the training is mixed with indoctrination into how to preach and find converts.

There is some crossover between the paid school types and the temple-trained types; they exchange notes and techniques and people, but the academies fulfill a different role than the chantries. City-state governments sometimes balk at the indoctrination of the chantries in its recruits and elites, but also balk at the costs of not allowing them to carry on their business.

Since everyone identifies as the basic religion, they generally assume they all more or less agree. Usually, The particularly devout sometimes have weird conflicts based on the conclusions of their interpretations differing; for example, there is a sect that feels it is their duty to spread any news of good things happening, and another small sect that feels it is important to censor and distort news of bad things to make them seem less comprehensible before being forgotten. Needless to say, they clash vigorously on some things in practice.

Grinner
2014-07-02, 04:55 AM
"Everything you see is a memory in the mind of God.
Everyone you meet is a thought in the mind of God."

Following the psionics theme, perhaps this god only made the world from himself metaphorically. In truth, nothing really exists. It's all just an elaborate hallucination on his part.

It's just a dream.

Edit: And if that's true, then you can do something interesting with Freud's theory of the psyche (id, ego, and superego). Perhaps each one would represent a different "level" of reality, kind of like Nobilis. The id could be some kind of cosmic, fundamental machinery; the ego could be mundane reality; and the superego could then be some kind of transcendent reality.