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Gilda
2016-09-07, 03:20 PM
Hi all,
I'm running a D&D campaign set in the Late Bronze Age. The PCs are interacting with Greek mythology, but I want other mythoi to be true as well. Can you help me brainstorm ways different mythologies could dovetail?

Gaia and Uranus were created from the split halves of Tiamat's corpse. (But how are Gaia and Uranus compatible with Egyptian theogony where Earth is a male named Geb and Sky a female named Nut?)
Corollary: the ur-Tiamat killed by Marduk was planet-sized and the 5-headed dragon is a reincarnation.

Hades and the Sumerian underworld are different regions of the same world. (But where do dead Egyptians go?)

Tartarus has the geography from Dante's Inferno.
Corollary: Norse Hell is specifically the frozen last circle of Hell.

Other thoughts?

Vinyadan
2016-09-07, 03:29 PM
The Egyptian gods are the memory of when the greek gods got scared of Typhon and turned themselves into animals.

dmnull
2016-09-07, 05:26 PM
Here is one idea, not sure if works for you game.

All of the different gods could be shards of a greater Deity that used to exist, but was destroyed by some cataclysmic (like getting hit by an asteroid, or other deity that left). The different parts they formed from could be different aspects (like fatalism for Norse, heroism for greek, ect.) giving them their different flavors. The different afterlives/godly homes could be the result of these aspects interacting with the greater lower and higher planes.

Zaydos
2016-09-07, 05:51 PM
Hades and the Sumerian underworld are different regions of the same world. (But where do dead Egyptians go?)

Duat which as a sort of shadowy reflection of life is probably part of or closely connected to the Asphodel Fields of Hades, a little nicer of a region (but nowhere near as nice as Elysium).

On that note Helheim is closer to the Asphodel Fields (chilly but not wholly frozen, filled with mist and shades of the once living not condemned to torture so much as a shadowy, worse version of life) than to Dante's 9th circle.

Jay R
2016-09-07, 08:31 PM
Here's the all-inclusive mythology I put together for a recent game.

There are two gods called together The Uncreated. Separately, they are The Lord and The Lady, and nothing is known about them.

Their first children were the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the winds. These four are either the creators of our world, or the stuff of which it was created - it's not clear which. They are, of course, the essence of the four earthly elements, the embodiment of the elemental planes, and the structure of the world. There is a fifth one, representing the quintessence, but since that cannot exist on our changeable and imperfect world, he/she has no influence here.

They have an abundance of names. The Sun God, for instance, is known as Apollo, Aten, Ra, Tonatiuh, Surya, Helios and many others. Similarly, every earth goddess is known to be the true earth, born of The Lord and The Lady - even those with known other parents, or those with no parents, like Gaea. Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

The children/creations of these four are the only gods who will answer prayers or interact with the world directly. They include all the pantheons that have ever existed.

Except Lovecraft.

The Lord and The Lady have been identified as the embodiments of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Male and Female, or Light and Darkness, or any other opposing concepts.

Wars have been fought between those who believe they represent Good and Evil, and those who insist on Law and Chaos.

Wars have been fought between those who believe The Lord and The Lady hate each other with a hatred surpassing any passion on earth, and those who believe that they love each other with a love more true than any mortal could ever know.

Wars have been fought between those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Good and The Lady is Evil, and those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Evil and The Lady is Good.

All of the above will be available knowledge to the players. Here is what they will not know.

No arcane or divine magic will successfully find out any fact about The Lord and The Lady. I have three answers, all completely true, and mutually incompatible.

1. The Lord is Fate, and The Lady is Luck. Neither can exist without the other, and each action in the world, from a sneeze to the fall of an empire, is a victory of one of them over the other.
2. They are Yin and Yang, and the heart of each beats in the breast of the other. They represent complementary, not opposing, forces. Each is in fact all of the universe except the other, but neither one represents any specific principle (not even male and female), and whichever one represents goodness in one situation might be the evil in another. Together, they represent wholeness and balance
3. They are the Creators - the mother and father of the world, which they birthed and/or created for some great purpose which is not yet fulfilled.

No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

Oh yes, and the fifth child of The Lord and The Lady, representing the Fifth Element? It turns out that he's not the stuff of the heavens, but of the hells. His children and descendants are all the demons, devils, and daemons. His creations are the evil spirits of the underworld. No, he's not out to conquer the world or destroy it or anything of that sort. He just likes to see war, strife, and pain.

Mr.Sandman
2016-09-07, 10:55 PM
Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixtyears of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)


These two lines sound like something Terry Pratchet would have written, and I almost woke my wife laughing. Thank you sir.

JeenLeen
2016-09-08, 11:53 AM
In old World of Darkness (oWoD)'s Demon book, they try to make the competing oWoD mythologies co-exist by stating that, in the past, reality was just more malleable. Evolution happened at the same time that man was created as one man and one woman. There's no difference betwen a few thousand years and a few million/billion. Yes, Prometheus stole fire and brought it to man; yes, some caveman figured it out. (And in more oWoD:) yes, the competing views of mages, werewolves, and vampires are all true and all happened at the same time. It was just that more than one thing could be happening at the same time. There wasn't a distinction between literal and mythological/symbolic back then.

I'm phrasing it worse than the book does, and I find it rather unsatisfying (if cool) myself, but that's an idea one setting with multiple, contradictory mythologies used.

arrowed
2016-09-09, 09:18 AM
The Lady is a deity on Discworld, and plays games with Fate...
As for dmnull, I suspect they are referring to Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere.
I personally think the original poster's world might suit an 'animism' approach (stealing that term from the 3.5 deities and demigods). There are spirits everywhere, that are the embodiments of quasi-material concepts like a 'storm' or 'river'... they interact, and breed, and might take on a mortal form, and the more powerful ones are worshipped as gods. Now, the bigger a perceived concept (like the size of a river or the earth itself) the more powerful the spirit is... but there can be more than one spirit for such a big object, like Gaia and Geb both being spirits of the earth.
This fits with the Greek idea of nature spirits like dryads, and the loads and loads of Egyptian gods. For Norse deities though, I would probably express the Aesir and Vanir as super-high-HD/level-giants, since they're expressed in myths as being more like very powerful humans than primordial forces.

nedz
2016-09-09, 01:38 PM
The thing is these Myths are all very similar because they kept swapping memes back in the bronze age. Now the speed of communication was a lot slower but this is a thing which has always happened.

The way I handle this is to have neighbouring regions follow different pantheons much like Ancient Greece adjoined Ancient Egypt. That way All myths are true, just in different parts of the world.

Flickerdart
2016-09-09, 03:08 PM
Each corner of the world had their respective gods create it in whatever way they felt appropriate. Then they all got smashed together into one big planet by an overdeity/cataclysm/overpublicized crossover event. Or sort of gently drifted together. This also covers your various "world is flat" cosmologies - it used to be, but now it got slapped on to a 3D planet. Each pantheon takes care of its own domain, and things that pass through multiple lands (like rivers or the sun) are "handed off." There could be god clashes on the borders, as Thor and Zeus each try and show off with their biggest lightning bolt.

Note that many gods are just palette swaps of other, similar deities, and the same goes for origin myths and cosmologies. Almost everyone in Europe had some kind of World Tree situation, for instance.

You can keep the various planes separate. Hades is a different place from Hel.

Vinyadan
2016-09-09, 03:32 PM
If you want a horrible story to cover for this, you can go with the webcomic Wayward Sons.

Skitcher
2016-09-10, 01:47 PM
Each corner of the world had their respective gods create it in whatever way they felt appropriate. Then they all got smashed together into one big planet by an overdeity/cataclysm/overpublicized crossover event. Or sort of gently drifted together. This also covers your various "world is flat" cosmologies - it used to be, but now it got slapped on to a 3D planet. Each pantheon takes care of its own domain, and things that pass through multiple lands (like rivers or the sun) are "handed off." There could be god clashes on the borders, as Thor and Zeus each try and show off with their biggest lightning bolt.

Note that many gods are just palette swaps of other, similar deities, and the same goes for origin myths and cosmologies. Almost everyone in Europe had some kind of World Tree situation, for instance.

You can keep the various planes separate. Hades is a different place from Hel.

I'd say that that is probably the best approach. I've been toying with some of these ideas too. I want the Valkyries to come for dead dwarfs and humans who worship Odin, but I want to include equally cinematic death occasions for others as well. I was thinking that it might be fun to have a bunch of ghosts of individuals that changed religions and were not accepted into their new afterlife paradigm. e.g. Hel won't have them and Hades turns them away. I choose to leave the world origin stories as allegories, because they all conflict like the OP's problem.

Maybe the gods dispute territory where there is crossover worship. In the borderlands, you may have to make offerings to several gods for any effect, or roll the dice that you got the attention of the right god. I understand that the premise is that they are all true, but the original problem here is that they are mutually exclusive and the multi-world crunch approach may be the only way to resolve that without negating one set of myths or the other.

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2016-09-10, 04:57 PM
With the specific Geb/Gaia Uranus/Nut issue, why can't they be the same person? Why do the gods have to have permanent binary genders?

Kish
2016-09-10, 05:02 PM
With the specific Geb/Gaia Uranus/Nut issue, why can't they be the same person? Why do the gods have to have permanent binary genders?
Thank you. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who blinked at "the equivalent god in a different pantheon is a different sex and thus insurmountably other."

Zaydos
2016-09-10, 05:49 PM
With the specific Geb/Gaia Uranus/Nut issue, why can't they be the same person? Why do the gods have to have permanent binary genders?

I can point to at least two world myth systems with examples that very much don't, one of which had a god (no dess) be a mom, and according to one myth (that was explicitly full of lies mixed with truths) many times over.

nedz
2016-09-10, 07:37 PM
With the specific Geb/Gaia Uranus/Nut issue, why can't they be the same person? Why do the gods have to have permanent binary genders?
Quite — what does gender even mean to a deity ?
Also, there is the concept of aspects — i.e. Geb/Gaia Uranus/Nut are really just different aspects of the same.

I can point to at least two world myth systems with examples that very much don't, one of which had a god (no dess) be a mom, and according to one myth (that was explicitly full of lies mixed with truths) many times over.
The similar pantheons are found in geographically contiguous areas because you cannot swap memes if you have no contact.
Also you have the rationalisation continuum:

All objects have spirits which explain their natural behaviour.
All objects of the same type are aspects of the spirit which inhabits all objects of that type because they have the same natural behaviour.
(I will omit the further extension of this chain of reasoning because of forum rules)

Basically because Trees, Rocks and Rivers are everywhere, then so are gods of Trees, Rocks and Rivers, etc.

Zaydos
2016-09-10, 07:46 PM
The similar pantheons are found in geographically contiguous areas because you cannot swap memes if you have no contact.
Also you have the rationalisation continuum:

All objects have spirits which explain their natural behaviour.
All objects of the same type are aspects of the spirit which inhabits all objects of that type because they have the same natural behaviour.
(I will omit the further extension of this chain of reasoning because of forum rules)

Basically because Trees, Rocks and Rivers are everywhere, then so are gods of Trees, Rocks and Rivers, etc.

Not sure why you quoted me here since I didn't mention that the pantheons were similar (in fact they very much aren't), nor was I actually talking about geographically contiguous areas. I was talking about one deity who shows up as both male and female because we can trace the assimilation of male and female gods together in their case and they still occasionally are female in myths due to that, and the other was from an area roughly 8,500 km away (> 4,500 miles) and is in no particular way similar.

My point was that deific gender being morphic is not unheard of even in vastly different pantheons, so having them present as different genders in different regions is believable.

TripleD
2016-09-10, 09:03 PM
Building on the "world's shmushed together" idea above, K.A. Applegate once wrote a series called "Everworld". The idea was that some time in the past, all the gods got together and decided to create a new world just for themselves. This lead to some truly bizarre situations. At one point they main characters cross over from the Greek to the Egyptian territory, and one of them points out it should be impossible to have a twenty-degree difference in temperature between the front half of your body and the back. Or when they fight a Satyr and, upon cutting it in half, just find a simple pouch-like structure for holding food and wine since, they figure, the gods didn't actually know or care about cells, organs, etc. and just sort of magic' it into existence.

It doesn't quite solve the initial problem (even in the book series they never explain how there can be two gods who created Earth) but if it were set in a world like that, you could at least explain how that world came to be.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-10, 09:28 PM
To me, if you want "all" mythoi to be true, then there has to be another layer underneath that reconciles or allows all the contradictions.

All the different creation stories can't simultaneously be objectively true, for example.

Zale
2016-09-11, 03:44 AM
Not sure why you quoted me here since I didn't mention that the pantheons were similar (in fact they very much aren't), nor was I actually talking about geographically contiguous areas. I was talking about one deity who shows up as both male and female because we can trace the assimilation of male and female gods together in their case and they still occasionally are female in myths due to that, and the other was from an area roughly 8,500 km away (> 4,500 miles) and is in no particular way similar.

My point was that deific gender being morphic is not unheard of even in vastly different pantheons, so having them present as different genders in different regions is believable.

Yeah, Inanna alone has like eighteen different versions; more than a few are male. Lady was super-popular in the middle east.

The main issue I have with saying, "All gods of X are the same god." is that some of the gods of X are very, very different people.

Apollo and Ra may both be involved in the sun business, but they have very little else in common. (Also there is way more than one solar deity in the ancient Egyptian religion. Several deities have associations with the sun, or with Ra.)

Even the two systems of mythology that are most alike- the Greek and the Roman- have some very different characterizations of gods.

Mars and Ares are very similar, but they're also considered very differently by their respective cultures. Ares is often treated as a joke, or at least negatively, while Mars is treated as a much more dignified figure.

Minerva and Athena are similar, but they both focus on different areas and are very different individual as a result. (Minerva certainly doesn't offer people victory in battle like Athena does.)

Squashing together pantheons usually leads to a very shallow depiction of all the gods involved; as someone with a really strong interest in old religions, I find it the most boring possible way of going about this.

Vinyadan
2016-09-11, 04:10 AM
Or when they fight a Satyr and, upon cutting it in half, just find a simple pouch-like structure for holding food and wine since, they figure, the gods didn't actually know or care about cells, organs, etc. and just sort of magic' it into existence.


I think that's a quote of an Athenian tradition attested in the works of Plato, people in the market sold these empty statues with the shape of satyrs that could be opened like a matrioshka and had stuff (images of the gods, for example) hidden inside them. Since Socrates was ugly but had so many interesting things inside of him, Alcibiades compared him to one of these satyr statues in the Symposium. I guess the modern writer wanted to make a joke based on that? Or it's an interesting coincidence.


To me, if you want "all" mythoi to be true, then there has to be another layer underneath that reconciles or allows all the contradictions.

All the different creation stories can't simultaneously be objectively true, for example.

A layer proposal:

Whenever a god is cut into pieces, his all-pervading divinity makes it so that the whole of reality is also fragmented. Each fragment contains a version of all the other gods, as well as mortals and things. When the god is put back together, the fragments of reality are also reassembled into one: in this new reality, the varieties of mortals from different fragments exist as different peoples, while the gods from different fragments remain as competing entities with slightly different aspects.

I'll call this theory "Multiplication by Osiris". :P

And it gives a practical reason why sacrificing gods (Osiris, Dionysus) was seen as a work of renewal. In the end, it would be the first step towards repopulating the world with men and gods, the second step being finding the pieces and putting them together. Looks like an interesting setting for a campaign, actually ;)

nedz
2016-09-11, 04:59 AM
Not sure why you quoted me here since I didn't mention that the pantheons were similar (in fact they very much aren't), nor was I actually talking about geographically contiguous areas. I was talking about one deity who shows up as both male and female because we can trace the assimilation of male and female gods together in their case and they still occasionally are female in myths due to that, and the other was from an area roughly 8,500 km away (> 4,500 miles) and is in no particular way similar.

My point was that deific gender being morphic is not unheard of even in vastly different pantheons, so having them present as different genders in different regions is believable.

Ah, sorry — I thought you were making a different point.

Grinner
2016-09-11, 05:57 AM
To me, if you want "all" mythoi to be true, then there has to be another layer underneath that reconciles or allows all the contradictions.

All the different creation stories can't simultaneously be objectively true, for example.

There's always the possibility of a "blind men and the elephant" scenario, though. If you regard myths as historical records, there's little reason to hold them as being one hundred percent complete accounts of past events. Plus, you then get the experience of syncretizing myths from across the world into a single, coherent whole.

Jay R
2016-09-11, 07:35 AM
To me, if you want "all" mythoi to be true, then there has to be another layer underneath that reconciles or allows all the contradictions.

All the different creation stories can't simultaneously be objectively true, for example.

My spoilered mythos above had the following explanation:


No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

My general approach is that if a question is unanswerable, then don't answer it.

Cosi
2016-09-11, 09:18 AM
Why is it important to reconcile at the level of the gods? The people who actually worshiped the Greek or Egyptian gods didn't feel any need to do that, so why should you? Just accept that some people think the sun is a guy called Apollo, some people think the sun is a guy called Ra, and some people think the sun is a guy called Tonatiuh. You underlying layer can just be reality, where the sun is a giant ball of fire. This has the added benefit of not forcing you to think about the physics implications of the sun being a dude in a chariot.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-11, 10:21 AM
Why is it important to reconcile at the level of the gods? The people who actually worshiped the Greek or Egyptian gods didn't feel any need to do that, so why should you? Just accept that some people think the sun is a guy called Apollo, some people think the sun is a guy called Ra, and some people think the sun is a guy called Tonatiuh. You underlying layer can just be reality, where the sun is a giant ball of fire. This has the added benefit of not forcing you to think about the physics implications of the sun being a dude in a chariot.



In a setting where the deities are just ideas that people believe in and they're not real, that works fine. It's a reflection of our real world.

However, in a great many fantasy settings (books and RPGs) the deities are very real entities -- to the characters and societies therein, they are absolutely real.

Some setting-creators want to have real deities AND capture the IRL aspects of multiple faiths/religions/pantheons. There are some potential conflicts and contradictions that they're trying to work through here.

Cosi
2016-09-11, 01:15 PM
However, in a great many fantasy settings (books and RPGs) the deities are very real entities -- to the characters and societies therein, they are absolutely real.

Some setting-creators want to have real deities AND capture the IRL aspects of multiple faiths/religions/pantheons. There are some potential conflicts and contradictions that they're trying to work through here.

Nothing about my suggestion requires that gods not be real. A 13th level Druid can modify the weather and call lightning. His existence is in no way dependent on the existence of other 13th level Druids (unless you're playing with the rules from some older edition where Druids advance by death match).

In this paradigm, Zeus isn't the abstract part of the universe that makes lightning happen. He's a dude, who lives on Mount Olympus with his wife Hera and a bunch of relatives with names like Ares and Apollo. You can go there, and talk to him (or murder him, or rob him, or whatever). He has some lightning powers and can control the weather on at least a regional scale. Sometimes he impregnates a mortal woman who gives birth to someone with some superpowers, which are sometimes lightning based. And Thor is similar, except he lives in Asgard with people named Loki and Odin.

And so on for Ra and Vishnu and Quetzalcoatl and various animist spirits and any elder gods you want to include.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-11, 05:27 PM
Nothing about my suggestion requires that gods not be real. A 13th level Druid can modify the weather and call lightning. His existence is in no way dependent on the existence of other 13th level Druids (unless you're playing with the rules from some older edition where Druids advance by death match).

In this paradigm, Zeus isn't the abstract part of the universe that makes lightning happen. He's a dude, who lives on Mount Olympus with his wife Hera and a bunch of relatives with names like Ares and Apollo. You can go there, and talk to him (or murder him, or rob him, or whatever). He has some lightning powers and can control the weather on at least a regional scale. Sometimes he impregnates a mortal woman who gives birth to someone with some superpowers, which are sometimes lightning based. And Thor is similar, except he lives in Asgard with people named Loki and Odin.

And so on for Ra and Vishnu and Quetzalcoatl and various animist spirits and any elder gods you want to include.

The phrasing "Just accept that some people think the sun is a guy called Apollo, some people think the sun is a guy called Ra, and some people think the sun is a guy called Tonatiuh. You underlying layer can just be reality, where the sun is a giant ball of fire." strongly suggested that the deities in question are just things people believe in, and not reality.

Cosi
2016-09-11, 06:12 PM
The phrasing "Just accept that some people think the sun is a guy called Apollo, some people think the sun is a guy called Ra, and some people think the sun is a guy called Tonatiuh. You underlying layer can just be reality, where the sun is a giant ball of fire." strongly suggested that the deities in question are just things people believe in, and not reality.

It could be parsed either way. If you wanted to, you could have the gods be high level characters who live in places like Olympus or Asgard (like they are in Percy Jackson or Marvel). If you wanted to, you could have the gods be metaphors that people venerate (like they are in the real world). Even in the PHB it's not specified whether the church of, say, Venca is worshiping an actual dude or not. The high level characters model is probably better, because then you can kill Kronos and take his stuff, but it can go either way.

The "underlying layer" bit is intended to be a response to your call for an underlying layer of truth that reconciles the various mythologies. IMO, the best version of that is to have the underlying stuff be as close to real physics as possible because it minimizes your need to answer questions like "if we aren't using Newtonian Physics, how fast do a bunch of small objects tied together fall" or "if the sun is a chariot, how do orbital mechanics work". Because those questions are annoying and dumb. The idea is that gods would be like high level casters in D&D: possessed of reality-warping power, but not fundamental forces of the universe.

Jay R
2016-09-11, 06:28 PM
Nothing about my suggestion requires that gods not be real. A 13th level Druid can modify the weather and call lightning. His existence is in no way dependent on the existence of other 13th level Druids (unless you're playing with the rules from some older edition where Druids advance by death match).

In this paradigm, Zeus isn't the abstract part of the universe that makes lightning happen. He's a dude, who lives on Mount Olympus with his wife Hera and a bunch of relatives with names like Ares and Apollo. You can go there, and talk to him (or murder him, or rob him, or whatever).

Sure, you can have such a dude. But unless every other god accepts that Zeus is the chief of all the gods after he killed his father, he is just a dude names Zeus. You're preserving the trivial parts by tossing the godly aspects.

The word "pantheon" means all the gods. If you have more than one, then you've denied the essence of a pantheon.

You can have powerful creatures called Zeus, Odin, and Blind Io, living in places called Olympus, Asgard, and Cori Celesti. But unless Olympus is the only home of the gods, Asgard is one of the only nine worlds that exist, and Cori Celesti is in the center of the Discworld, then those places, and those beings, aren't the ones described in the myths.

Yes, do it, and have fun. I described my version of this in the fifth post in this thread. But don't kid yourself into thinking that you've preserved their myths. These aren't gods; they're dudes. If they all exist, then none of them are what their myths claim.

Cosi
2016-09-11, 06:37 PM
But unless Olympus is the only home of the gods, Asgard is one of the only nine worlds that exist, and Cori Celesti is in the center of the Discworld, then those places, and those beings, aren't the ones described in the myths.

Yes, do it, and have fun. I described my version of this in the fifth post in this thread. But don't kid yourself into thinking that you've preserved their myths. These aren't gods; they're dudes. If they all exist, then none of them are what their myths claim.

Where exactly does Norse mythology say anything about whether or not Zeus exists? I recall a lot of smiting giants and some boning of horses, but very little commentary on Zeus's existence. For the overwhelming majority of people, the fact that Zeus lives on Olympus and smites people with lightning is sufficient for most people to say "yeah, totally Zeus" when asked, even if Thor is over there smiting people with lightning.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-11, 06:53 PM
Where exactly does Norse mythology say anything about whether or not Zeus exists? I recall a lot of smiting giants and some boning of horses, but very little commentary on Zeus's existence. For the overwhelming majority of people, the fact that Zeus lives on Olympus and smites people with lightning is sufficient for most people to say "yeah, totally Zeus" when asked, even if Thor is over there smiting people with lightning.

Jay R is right -- that's ignoring 90% of the content of the mythology and taking a list of names and powers as the whole of the religious faith ( but hey, that's the really bad thing that most D&D and other RPG settings with gods do -- present an entire religion as a list of super-NPCs with neatly divided sets of influences and powers ).

The old Norse religion and the old Greek religion, just using those two examples, make a lot of mutually conflicting, contradictory claims. Zeus isn't "a guy with lightning", he's THE GOD OF LIGHTING, and KING OF THE GODS. Right there he's conflicting with Thor (thunder being close enough) and Odin.

The Norse creation story and the Greek creation story can't both be true. The Norse and Greek afterlives can't both be universally true, at best they can be specifically true in a limited way. Ragnarok is a very specific claim about the future of the universe that's not really compatible with most Greek religious philosophy. Etc.

None of this is a big deal in a world where it's all just things people believe. As soon as it starts to become some sort of objective fact, you have mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive "facts".

Zale
2016-09-11, 11:13 PM
I'm reminded of a scene (http://gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1120) from Gunnerkrigg court in which a character (Called Jones) mentions how many powerful mythic figures (who all exist) all claim to have placed the stars in the sky. She notes that none of them are lying about it, but she can emphatically state that the stars have always been in the sky.

Basically, all the myths are true. The world was formed from the flesh of a primordial giant. It was born of a cosmic egg and spoken into existence in seven days. It formed over eons from a disc of dust and rock. It was made by a group of twelve bumbling adolescents during a really long game.

These are all true. That this seems contradictory is only a flaw in mortal understanding, rather than an inherent paradox.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-11, 11:36 PM
I'm reminded of a scene (http://gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1120) from Gunnerkrigg court in which a character (Called Jones) mentions how many powerful mythic figures (who all exist) all claim to have placed the stars in the sky. She notes that none of them are lying about it, but she can emphatically state that the stars have always been in the sky.

Basically, all the myths are true. The world was formed from the flesh of a primordial giant. It was born of a cosmic egg and spoken into existence in seven days. It formed over eons from a disc of dust and rock. It was made by a group of twelve bumbling adolescents during a really long game.

These are all true. That this seems contradictory is only a flaw in mortal understanding, rather than an inherent paradox.


Sorry, but "Mortals simply can't understand" is never going to be a satisfactory answer -- a paradox is a paradox, a contradiction is a contradiction, and two mutually exclusive claims cannot both be true by their very nature.

azaph
2016-09-12, 03:51 AM
Sorry, but "Mortals simply can't understand" is never going to be a satisfactory answer -- a paradox is a paradox, a contradiction is a contradiction, and two mutually exclusive claims cannot both be true by their very nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism
There are some pretty good reasons to think true contradictions probably *are* a thing.
Minor thing, anyway. More relevantly, I haven't seen much mention of syncretic beliefs, which would seem like a good place to start, with things like the Roman system (they used the idea that, eg, Odin and Zeus are different aspects of the same person)*. You could probably mix in a kind of bastardisation of Hindu beliefs to explain why you end up with the mentioned blind men and the elephant scenario - gods have different relations with different peoples, and that can lead to inconsistencies in how people seem to act, let alone gods, who can be a bit alien.
Discworld does this kind of thing too, actually, with the whole 'Blind Io is all the thunder gods, he just wears a false beard'.
Another source is early Christian beliefs, which tend to be fairly henotheistic in places - their obvious thing is that you have old beliefs being slotted into Christian faith as liars and demons. Which works fairly well really given that even most gods weren't around at creation - from memory, Gaea and Uranus were around, but they don't tend to talk much. Ra is ambiguous, but at least can be said to have come into being a while after the world (depending on which gods you end up merging). Odin WAS around for the creation of the world, but a fair bit of stuff seems to have predated that (there was, apparently, at least somewhere for a cow to stand), so you could probably argue that he actually only created a local area, and isn't being entirely honest with people. In short, a combination of 'the gods are note entirely reliable sources' and 'most of them probably don't really know anyway' can get around a lot of the creation-myth conflicts, with a good chance you'll never have to figure out what really happened.
*EDIT: Poor phrasing, the 'merging' idea is pretty common, I mean that the Romans actually put specific effort into how to do it, and are therefore useful.

arrowed
2016-09-12, 04:52 AM
A variation on the smushed together earths idea: Midgard, Egypt, and Greece (and Italy?) are separate planes, but finite in size. Where the 'edges' of the planes are one of two things happens: either they border another plane, or there is an end of the world, as appropriate to the region's mythology. For example, the plane of Greece borders the plane of Egypt, so it is not uncommon for Greek heroes to have adventures in Egypt. However, the earth in Greece is a primordial goddess called Gaia, while the Egyptian earth is a guy called Geb. Each plane has it's own distinct underworld and other mythic locations like Mount Olympus and the place where Atlas holds up the sky. This means that different parts of the world can have different gods and even different cosmologies and origin stories, but still connect. It will probably require you to decide which variation on Greek myth etc is true though.

azaph
2016-09-12, 05:27 AM
Italy

To possibly expand on this suggestion, unless someone has any better ideas, Italy would probably have to be some kind of hub-world (which would jibe nicely with what Rome actually was, and with the fact that 'Italy' wasn't really a thing for a lot of history). Rome* obviously did have it's own mythology, but it ends up being so blurred with that of the Greeks, Egyptians and Celts, that I can't see how you'd separate it out again, and still have players recognise it as Roman.
(Other possible domains: given that the mythologies are a lot less famous, 'generic Celtic' could probably cover most of the non-Germanic bits of Western/Central Europe and 'generic Slavic' would probably work OK for Eastern Europe.)
*The only bit of ancient Italy people can be relied upon to actually know a fair bit about.

Flickerdart
2016-09-12, 10:10 AM
Maybe the paradox of existence is what makes magic possible? In our boring world that has one true history (regardless of how different groups remember it, only one timeline happened) there's no such thing as D&D-type gods or magic. But in this setting, with conflicting truths, there are gods and magic!

Maybe the existence of the supernatural is literally each mythology trying to win out over the others. Zeus is the king of the gods to Greek clerics, but Odin is the king of the gods for Norse clerics, and everyone else tries to avoid bringing up the subject in their vicinity. Depending on which pantheon gains an edge, the origin of the world is whatever they dictate.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-12, 10:22 AM
Maybe the paradox of existence is what makes magic possible? In our boring world that has one true history (regardless of how different groups remember it, only one timeline happened) there's no such thing as D&D-type gods or magic. But in this setting, with conflicting truths, there are gods and magic!

Maybe the existence of the supernatural is literally each mythology trying to win out over the others. Zeus is the king of the gods to Greek clerics, but Odin is the king of the gods for Norse clerics, and everyone else tries to avoid bringing up the subject in their vicinity. Depending on which pantheon gains an edge, the origin of the world is whatever they dictate.

That works if one is willing to accept retroactive causality and a non-objective universe, in which even the past changes to reflect the present.

There are a lot of other consequences that arise from that world design decision, and one would have to be willing to extrapolate and accept those consequences.

Thinker
2016-09-12, 01:26 PM
I think that the easiest way to do it is to have some boundary exist where one religion's truth becomes reality. Maybe areas where one religion is by far the most dominant, its truths become evident. Thus, Greece would have Zeus, Hera, Typhon, etc. while in India you would have Vishnu, Krishna, and Shiva. In areas where there is no dominant religion, weird things happen and various combinations of combined beliefs become true. When one group conquers another, its beliefs either become adopted and adapted by the conquerors or snuffed out, but either way it affects reality.

Trying to fit every religion as being 100% true is impossible, but if you're willing to be fluid with it, you can probably make a go of having something that works OK.

Gilda
2016-09-12, 02:04 PM
Hey everyone!


More relevantly, I haven't seen much mention of syncretic beliefs, which would seem like a good place to start, with things like the Roman system (they used the idea that, eg, Odin and Zeus are different aspects of the same person)*. You could probably mix in a kind of bastardisation of Hindu beliefs to explain why you end up with the mentioned blind men and the elephant scenario - gods have different relations with different peoples, and that can lead to inconsistencies in how people seem to act, let alone gods, who can be a bit alien.

Actually, Tacitus identified the chief Germanic god as Mercury, not Zeus. Note that Woden's-day is called Mercredi in French, and similarly in other Romance languages.


Another source is early Christian beliefs, which tend to be fairly henotheistic in places - their obvious thing is that you have old beliefs being slotted into Christian faith as liars and demons. Which works fairly well really given that even most gods weren't around at creation - from memory, Gaea and Uranus were around, but they don't tend to talk much. Ra is ambiguous, but at least can be said to have come into being a while after the world (depending on which gods you end up merging). Odin WAS around for the creation of the world, but a fair bit of stuff seems to have predated that (there was, apparently, at least somewhere for a cow to stand), so you could probably argue that he actually only created a local area, and isn't being entirely honest with people. In short, a combination of 'the gods are note entirely reliable sources' and 'most of them probably don't really know anyway' can get around a lot of the creation-myth conflicts, with a good chance you'll never have to figure out what really happened.

I'm definitely incorporating Christianity, as I want a setting usable for all historical periods. Likewise, I don't want to use a flat earth cosmology, as that would mess things up from Aristotle's generation on.
As you note, Greek, Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian myths don't have the main gods around at the creation of the universe, though there's the odd case of Marduk splitting Tiamat's corpse in half to make the earth and firmament when Anu (sky) and Ki (earth) already exist. Rather the Enuma Elish, Hesiod's Theogony and the theogony of Heliopolis have generations of gods arising from sexual reproduction. This leaves an opening for the first generation to be created by God.
And yes, Odin and Ymir present an odd case. It may be easiest to go with "most myths are true, but in this case Odin's lying."

Zaydos
2016-09-12, 02:10 PM
Note that there were generations between Odin and Ymir, and it's ultimately the same sort of case as between Marduk and Tiamat. There was Muspelheim and Niflheim already before Ymir. Ymir came into being, gave birth to the giants, and his cow which fed him salt-licked Odin's dad into existence. Odin's dad married one of the giantesses and Odin and his two brothers came into being. They killed Ymir and divided him into the world that we know, but there was Muspelheim, Niflheim, and Ginnungap (the formless Abyss/Chaos before all things) at least before it.

Vinyadan
2016-09-12, 02:39 PM
Actually, Tacitus identified the chief Germanic god as Mercury, not Zeus. Note that Woden's-day is called Mercredi in French, and similarly in other Romance languages.


I'm pretty sure it's the opposite :biggrin: the Germanic peoples adapted the Classical week system to their languages and their gods. Anyway, your point is right, I think Caesar also said that the Celts had Mercury as chief god, and called themselves his children. It might have something to do with Mercury dealing with the world of the dead, and Odin having his palace of dead fighters.

Anyway, the point is that there was a bunch of ways in which the ancient peoples explained the different gods. In the Mediterraneum, it was normal to say that it was the same deities with different names, see the Greek gods changing into animals to escape Typhon and thus giving birth to the Egyptian depiction of them as animals. There also were a bunch of things the various heroes had done, depending on where you were.

Creating a uniformed mythical collection in an enormous work and I think it is beyond what the OP might wish to do for a campaign. The problem is that even Greek myths aren't coherent and very often contradict each other. Idem concerning the various schools of thought in Egypt. And I am sure these aren't the only cases, and trying to build up something like this risks being a massive undertaking for some background.

Flickerdart
2016-09-12, 03:53 PM
That works if one is willing to accept retroactive causality and a non-objective universe, in which even the past changes to reflect the present.

There are a lot of other consequences that arise from that world design decision, and one would have to be willing to extrapolate and accept those consequences.

In a world of gods and magic, a subjective universe and retroactive causality is almost expected. :smallbiggrin:

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-12, 04:04 PM
In a world of gods and magic, a subjective universe and retroactive causality is almost expected. :smallbiggrin:


I don't expect either one.

The world/setting that I'm working on right now has linear time and causality, and an objective this-is-what-happened past. The power to bend reality to your will (as opposed to working within the setting-specific "mechanisms of reality") is rare, exactly, and dangerous, most of all to the person trying to do it.

Cosi
2016-09-13, 07:09 AM
The old Norse religion and the old Greek religion, just using those two examples, make a lot of mutually conflicting, contradictory claims. Zeus isn't "a guy with lightning", he's THE GOD OF LIGHTING, and KING OF THE GODS. Right there he's conflicting with Thor (thunder being close enough) and Odin.

And yet, actual people have no problem with the Percy Jackson books having both Thor and Zeus. It's almost as if most people find Odin ruling Asgard and having all the traits of Odin to be totally sufficient for him to be Odin.


Ragnarok is a very specific claim about the future of the universe that's not really compatible with most Greek religious philosophy. Etc.

That's just stupid. It's a claim about the future. If I say "Donald Trump will not be elected president in 2016" and you say "Donald Trump will be elected president in 2016", one of us is wrong. But that contradiction isn't resolvable (and therefore isn't evidence about one of our sets of claims being "truer" than the other) until Donald Trump either is or is not elected president. Similarly, unless you have explicitly unbreakable prophecies (bad for an RPG), Ragnarok is just a prediction some people made.


Maybe the existence of the supernatural is literally each mythology trying to win out over the others. Zeus is the king of the gods to Greek clerics, but Odin is the king of the gods for Norse clerics, and everyone else tries to avoid bringing up the subject in their vicinity. Depending on which pantheon gains an edge, the origin of the world is whatever they dictate.

"Maybe we could just have to gods be people with thematic superpowers, like they are in Marvel or Percy Jackson. Then you could just use a normal physics engine underneath everything and not get stupid results when people study gravity or biology or orbital mechanics."
"No, that ruins the gods! The most important part of Norse mythology is that Greek mythology doesn't exist in it!"
"Yeah, instead we should have causality work backwards and make reality dependent on current conditions! That's a way better solution."

Stop breaking physics. The ability to have a setting you can coherently interact with is 100% more important than whether Thor is the only guy with lightning powers.

Flickerdart
2016-09-13, 09:24 AM
Stop breaking physics.
Physics has us covered. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics)

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-13, 09:55 AM
And yet, actual people have no problem with the Percy Jackson books having both Thor and Zeus. It's almost as if most people find Odin ruling Asgard and having all the traits of Odin to be totally sufficient for him to be Odin.


You're referring to a halfass children's book as your source for serious worldbuilding? AND ad populum argument?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, RPGs have been presenting polytheism as a collection of dudes with superpowers for decades, and Bowdlerized public education for longer than that. It's a broken, terrible way to look at religions, that leaves out so much of the actual practice, vital chunks of the cosmology, etc.




That's just stupid. It's a claim about the future. If I say "Donald Trump will not be elected president in 2016" and you say "Donald Trump will be elected president in 2016", one of us is wrong. But that contradiction isn't resolvable (and therefore isn't evidence about one of our sets of claims being "truer" than the other) until Donald Trump either is or is not elected president. Similarly, unless you have explicitly unbreakable prophecies (bad for an RPG), Ragnarok is just a prediction some people made.


Given that response, I don't think I'm up to the task of explaining how integral Ragnarok was to the Norse-religious worldview, and how fundamentally different that was from the Greek-religious worldview. Ragnarok wasn't, to the people who believed in it as part of their religious beliefs and worldview, a claim about the future -- it was a FACT about the future. Trying to understand the Norse religion without Ragnarok is like trying to understand the great religions of South Asia while treating the cycles of the universe as a meaningless tack-on, or the ritual bloodletting of Mesoamerica without taking time to consider the underlying beliefs about the way the world functioned that drove the practice.

The thread title isn't "I want all the gods to be real in my setting" -- it's "All Myths Are True", and that's a much bigger thing than just a bunch of deific comic book rosters and stat blocks.

Cosi
2016-09-13, 10:03 AM
You're referring to a halfass children's book as your source for serious worldbuilding? AND ad populum argument?

ad hominem, I choose you!

But I should avoid the Fallacy Fallacy. Yes, I'm using an example of popular culture to prove my point. Because my point isn't that my suggestion causes both Norse myths and Greek myths to be literally true at the same time. It's that no one cares! People who want there to be a Thor don't care if Thor is the physical incarnation of thunder to the exclusion of other, similar gods. They care that he is a dude with a hammer and lightning powers. You can tell, because the reviews for Marvel's Thor (in which Thor is an alien) weren't just people frothing at the mouth about how he "wasn't really Thor".

I understand your point. It's just stupid.


Given that response, I don't think I'm up to the task of explaining how integral Ragnarok was to the Norse-religious worldview, and how fundamentally different that was from the Greek-religious worldview.

It doesn't matter how integral it is, because it is a prediction about the future. It cannot currently be "true" in any meaningful sense, because it has not yet happened. Unless you want to suggest that someone in the world of Norse mythology can make that world not Norse mythology by saying "no, I don't really buy this whole 'Ragnarok' thing, sorry". Or that the future is determined and knowable, at which point WTF are PCs doing?

Also, it can totally be integral to the Norse world-view without being true. See: the real world, where Norse myths aren't true and people were able to base their beliefs off of them.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-13, 10:26 AM
ad hominem, I choose you!


Except of course that I didn't say "your post is invalid because you're _____" -- I dismissed a children's book of bowdlerized mashup mythology as an example of serious worldbuilding.




But I should avoid the Fallacy Fallacy. Yes, I'm using an example of popular culture to prove my point. Because my point isn't that my suggestion causes both Norse myths and Greek myths to be literally true at the same time. It's that no one cares! People who want there to be a Thor don't care if Thor is the physical incarnation of thunder to the exclusion of other, similar gods. They care that he is a dude with a hammer and lightning powers. You can tell, because the reviews for Marvel's Thor (in which Thor is an alien) weren't just people frothing at the mouth about how he "wasn't really Thor".

I understand your point. It's just stupid.


Obviously the OP cares, since the title of the thread is not "I want all these dudes with deific superpowers to be real in my setting", it's "Help with All Myths Are True".

The concern here isn't your rather slanted opinion of "what popular culture wants" or "what people want" -- and for the most part audiences of the Marvel Thor either don't know better, or are savvy enough to know that Marvel's Thor and the associated "Asgardian" material aren't meant to be a straight representation of Norse religious beliefs.




It doesn't matter how integral it is, because it is a prediction about the future. It cannot currently be "true" in any meaningful sense, because it has not yet happened. Unless you want to suggest that someone in the world of Norse mythology can make that world not Norse mythology by saying "no, I don't really buy this whole 'Ragnarok' thing, sorry". Or that the future is determined and knowable, at which point WTF are PCs doing?

Also, it can totally be integral to the Norse world-view without being true. See: the real world, where Norse myths aren't true and people were able to base their beliefs off of them.


Again, the OPs thread title -- "Help with All Myths Are True". The text of the first post clearly indicates that the goal is to mesh all these conflicting creation stories, and cosmologies, and relationships, and so on.

The Norse mythos, as one example, includes Ragnarok, and Yggdrasil, and a creation "history", and so on, that directly conflict with the Greek mythos, and the Egyptian mythos, and the Mesopotamian mythos, and...

And according to the Norse religion, the future IS determined, set in stone, already woven from beginning to end -- that's what you seem to be missing. And if that "mythos" is true in the OP's setting, how does that reconcile with other mythos in which the future is not already determined?

arrowed
2016-09-13, 10:47 AM
You can tell, because the reviews for Marvel's Thor (in which Thor is an alien) weren't just people frothing at the mouth about how he "wasn't really Thor".

Well... when I watch the Thor films I always get a little twinge about the dissonance from the Norse myths, but I'm just a pedant. I realise I'm being stupid. :smallwink:
Also, I happen to quite like Rick Riordan's novels. They haven't yet given a solid Unified Mythos Theory in black and white, but they display with appreciable skill the idea of a multi-layered reality with layers playing host to the deities of different pantheons. I do not find half-ass to be a fair description of them, especially when the expanded setting of the different series is so close to what the original poster is attempting. :smallfrown:

Jay R
2016-09-13, 03:25 PM
Where exactly does Norse mythology say anything about whether or not Zeus exists?

In the discussion of the Níu Heimar, the Nine Worlds. All the worlds that exist are Alfheim, Asgard, Hel, Jotunheim, Midgard, Muspelheim, Niflheim, Svartheim, and Vanaheim, all of whose denizens are known. Only Asgard and Vanaheim are the homes of gods. The entire universe does not include Olympus.

The earth is not mother to all the titans and grandmother to the gods. Since the earth is Zeus's grandmother, he doesn't exist.


I think that the easiest way to do it is to have some boundary exist where one religion's truth becomes reality.

Unfortunately, the above statement contradicts every religion (or rather, most of them, including the Greek, Norse, Egyptian, which we've been using as examples).

Saying that it is only true somewhere is saying that it is not true, since the Greek myths, for instance, assume Zeus is the chief of the gods everywhere.


Trying to fit every religion as being 100% true is impossible, but if you're willing to be fluid with it, you can probably make a go of having something that works OK.

Of course, being fluid with it in this sense is throwing out the religious and mythological aspects, in order to preserve some relatively less important adventure stories.

In my "reconcilation" of the myths (presented in post five of this thread), I specifically deny that they can be reconciled, make statements known to be self-inconsistent, and make the inconsistencies the source of bitter wars, and state clearly that mortals trying to understand it will be struck down.

Similarly, you can preserve some aspects of many mythologies, but to do so, you have to accept that you've thrown out what their original followers would have considered the most crucial aspects.

I have no problem with that. It's not the first or the worst unrealistic aspect of D&D. But it must remain unrealistic. On that basis, go ahead.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-13, 03:58 PM
In the discussion of the Níu Heimar, the Nine Worlds. All the worlds that exist are Alfheim, Asgard, Hel, Jotunheim, Midgard, Muspelheim, Niflheim, Svartheim, and Vanaheim, all of whose denizens are known. Only Asgard and Vanaheim are the homes of gods. The entire universe does not include Olympus.

The earth is not mother to all the titans and grandmother to the gods. Since the earth is Zeus's grandmother, he doesn't exist.


Exactly.

Sometimes a statement of what does exist and what is true, is also a statement of what does not exist and what is not true, because of inherent contradictions between that statement and other possible statements.

Cosi
2016-09-13, 09:12 PM
Except of course that I didn't say "your post is invalid because you're _____" -- I dismissed a children's book of bowdlerized mashup mythology as an example of serious worldbuilding.

That's exactly an ad hominem fallacy. "That's not real world building, it's a children's story!" Maybe it's just No True Scottsman?


Obviously the OP cares, since the title of the thread is not "I want all these dudes with deific superpowers to be real in my setting", it's "Help with All Myths Are True".

Except the actual content of the post is not about your insane "you can't have Zeus and Thor" raving, it's about creating a world that contains stuff from different mythologies.


and for the most part audiences of the Marvel Thor either don't know better, or are savvy enough to know that Marvel's Thor and the associated "Asgardian" material aren't meant to be a straight representation of Norse religious beliefs.

Do you understand how unbelievably arrogant you sound right now? People's opinions don't count because they "don't know better". Percy Jackson doesn't count because it's a "children's book".


Again, the OPs thread title -- "Help with All Myths Are True". The text of the first post clearly indicates that the goal is to mesh all these conflicting creation stories, and cosmologies, and relationships, and so on.

Yes, and the resolution to that (which is an extension of what the OP is already doing) is that the world contains a guy called Thor who lives in Asgard and also a guy called Zeus who lives on Olympus and the actual reason lightning happens is electrostatic buildup in the atmosphere.


Of course, being fluid with it in this sense is throwing out the religious and mythological aspects, in order to preserve some relatively less important adventure stories.

You mean "the parts of mythology that people recognize and care about"? Because we couldn't possibly care about those.


In my "reconcilation" of the myths (presented in post five of this thread), I specifically deny that they can be reconciled, make statements known to be self-inconsistent, and make the inconsistencies the source of bitter wars, and state clearly that mortals trying to understand it will be struck down.

That's great. Can't miss an opportunity to have DM power trip NPCs that kill the PCs for no reason.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-13, 09:39 PM
Well... you can lead a horse to water...

/plonk

Jay R
2016-09-13, 10:21 PM
You mean "the parts of mythology that people recognize and care about"? Because we couldn't possibly care about those.

No, I do not mean that. That's an arrogant and insulting deliberate misinterpretation of my post. I mean the actual words I write, not the words you write, even if you put them in quotation marks.

I was never arrogant enough to base any argument on what people "couldn't possibly care about". [Note that when I put something in quotation marks, it's because it's an actual quotation.]

I mean that the religious aspect of a religion, and the mythological aspects of a mythology, are what their original followers would have considered the most crucial aspects - and that includes and requires their universality.


That's great. Can't miss an opportunity to have DM power trip NPCs that kill the PCs for no reason.

This is simply a falsehood. The post I referred to specifically had an NPC, not a PC, die by trying to do something for which no PC adventure is planned, to forestall any attempt to reconcile the unreconcilable. No power-trip NPCs have been created, no PCs have been killed, no players have complained. Every player comment on my written cosmology has been positive.

I repeat: no PCs have been killed. Your statement about me and my game is false. Just false.

GungHo
2016-09-14, 10:40 AM
That works if one is willing to accept retroactive causality and a non-objective universe, in which even the past changes to reflect the present.

There are a lot of other consequences that arise from that world design decision, and one would have to be willing to extrapolate and accept those consequences.

While it's fun to play with one of the physical quantities of reality, you're dealing with something that human beings take for granted and defines our very order of existence, so you're going to go into the world of refrigerator logic when you start letting Time's arrow go both ways. You might as well say "hey, in today's game we're going not going to do lengths." It's not simply a Buddhist navel gazing and saying time is an illusion. You're actually accepting that time is an illusion and saying I can apply spatial equations to temporal equations, entropy be damned, and not simply at the subatomic level. Wave functions don't collapse. Quanta can become disassociated and de-correlated. There is definitely some anthropic bias here, and we're going to wax theoretical really quickly, but you're not just playing dice with the universe, you're saying I can go see what happened before the Big Bang because that's now not a foundational problem.


Physics has us covered. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics)
Not when you're screwing with time.

---

That being said... the guy who actually started this thread didn't really want this. He just wants to figure out why everything has a Great Flood myth. Dagon did it. It's been called many things. Dagon. Nyarlathotep. The Walkin Dude. He's been a priest. A Marine. A member of the Viet Cong. He even had a hand in kidnapping Patty Hearst. He's fleeing across the desert, and the gunslinger follows.

Cadhríalaun
2016-09-14, 09:03 PM
You know what could be interesting?
Not sure if applicable to your campaign, but maybe you create an Otherworld, an alternate plane that overlaps with physical reality, kinda like D&D's concept of Feywild or Dragon Age's the Fade.
You have an alternate Dreamworld where all the gods are true because that place is shaped by living being's beliefs. And Gods, dryads, norns, Valkyries, Sidhe whatsoever come from this place. So, in Greece you would have an Otherworld shaped by Greek mythology, whereas in Egypt you'd have an otherworld shaped by Egyptian beliefs and so on and so forth. To further blur the lines you could make it so that you can "cross over" physically to the Otherworld unwittingly by crossing certain rivers, entering certain caves and whatnot. Maybe these passages open and close randomly and you can make this world as magical as you want to depending on how often these gates open.
I understand this would turn gods into pale reflections of human belief, but it's an interesting concept that has seen a bit of exploring in literature and comics. I think Sandman touches on that, but to be honest it's a long time since I read it, so I might be misremembering it.

Jay R
2016-09-16, 08:53 PM
As this thread has shown, there is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by trying to explain the unexplainable. Just do it, and don't explain it.

Clistenes
2016-09-18, 02:43 AM
Hi all,
I'm running a D&D campaign set in the Late Bronze Age. The PCs are interacting with Greek mythology, but I want other mythoi to be true as well. Can you help me brainstorm ways different mythologies could dovetail?

Gaia and Uranus were created from the split halves of Tiamat's corpse. (But how are Gaia and Uranus compatible with Egyptian theogony where Earth is a male named Geb and Sky a female named Nut?)
Corollary: the ur-Tiamat killed by Marduk was planet-sized and the 5-headed dragon is a reincarnation.

Hades and the Sumerian underworld are different regions of the same world. (But where do dead Egyptians go?)

Tartarus has the geography from Dante's Inferno.
Corollary: Norse Hell is specifically the frozen last circle of Hell.

Other thoughts?

Greeks and Romans believed that all foreign gods were the same as the Greco-Roman pantheon under different names, and usually tried to identify them. If you do some research, you should find which Sumerian/Babylonian/Egyptian/Celtic gods were indentified with each Greek deity.

Differences in myths were handwaved, since even among Greeks there were lots of versions about the genealogy and deeds of every god. The Greek and Romans ended sticking to Homer's and Hesiodus's versions of the mythology, but they were aware that there were wildly different local versions even within Greece.

As for differences in the afterlife, there were the Mysteries: Gods were supposed to pass down secrets to their favourite worshippers, and these secrets allowed them to go to special afterlifes after passing away.

Vinyadan
2016-09-18, 03:24 AM
Differences in myths were handwaved, since even among Greeks there were lots of versions about the genealogy and deeds of every god. The Greek and Romans ended sticking Homer's and Hesiodus's versions of the mythology, but they were aware that there were wildly different local versions even within Greece.

Given that even Homer's and Hesiodus's versions are actually different from each other... well, let's say that inner consistency in myth wasn't what they were worried about, their actual problem was to keep peace with the gods through rituals, which were pretty much the only religious thing that was immutable for them, and this is why their priests weren't a separate caste like in India or Egypt: instead, they were city magistrates that worked for the State. No priestly caste + no universally accepted sacred book (just some very well loved and wise book) = no universally enforced version of events.
There were certain religious traditions revolving around sacred books, but those were mostly of foreign (non Greek, non Roman) origin, and none of them reached us, so we don't know what was written in them.

Clistenes
2016-09-18, 04:00 AM
Given that even Homer's and Hesiodus's versions are actually different from each other... well, let's say that inner consistency in myth wasn't what they were worried about, their actual problem was to keep peace with the gods through rituals, which were pretty much the only religious thing that was immutable for them, and this is why their priests weren't a separate caste like in India or Egypt: instead, they were city magistrates that worked for the State. No priestly caste + no universally accepted sacred book (just some very well loved and wise book) = no universally enforced version of events.

Yep. So long as the PCs don't meet the gods themselves, they shouldn't care too much about the differences. And even if they were to meet a deity or a divine agent, those don't have to explain anything to mere mortals. Mortals were supposed to do as they were said and try to not piss any deity, so very few would dare to question a god about those inconsistencies.

Look, a lot of the work is already done here: Interpretation graeca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca).

Cluedrew
2016-09-18, 07:13 AM
Yeah, I have not studied this extensively but the whole idea of a single truth seems to be a modern idea. The Romans in particular didn't seem to care that there legends didn't match up. The mystery cults that appeared (or gained popularity) near the end of the Roman times sort of had the idea of hidden truths (aka mysteries) built right into them.

As science became popular, I guess people just wanted one absolute truth for everything, but way back when it does not appear to be a concern. Other that the previously mention rituals to keep the gods happy. That was a big deal in an age where people didn't believe in randomness, everything was laid out by the gods.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-18, 08:08 AM
Yeah, I have not studied this extensively but the whole idea of a single truth seems to be a modern idea. The Romans in particular didn't seem to care that there legends didn't match up. The mystery cults that appeared (or gained popularity) near the end of the Roman times sort of had the idea of hidden truths (aka mysteries) built right into them.

As science became popular, I guess people just wanted one absolute truth for everything, but way back when it does not appear to be a concern. Other that the previously mention rituals to keep the gods happy. That was a big deal in an age where people didn't believe in randomness, everything was laid out by the gods.

The Romans had a very strict requirement that people could worship whatever other stuff they wanted, so long as they also partook in the state religion. If they refused to engage in the state religion, it was taken as a sign of disloyalty, and those people were often persecuted as enemies of the state.

Vinyadan
2016-09-18, 08:23 AM
For what concerns our idea of religion as handling a single truth, I think it's the result of revealed religions rather than scientific advancement, although I can't of course give much detail here. That's where the word canon comes from.

Beleriphon
2016-09-20, 11:12 AM
Jay R is right -- that's ignoring 90% of the content of the mythology and taking a list of names and powers as the whole of the religious faith ( but hey, that's the really bad thing that most D&D and other RPG settings with gods do -- present an entire religion as a list of super-NPCs with neatly divided sets of influences and powers ).

The old Norse religion and the old Greek religion, just using those two examples, make a lot of mutually conflicting, contradictory claims. Zeus isn't "a guy with lightning", he's THE GOD OF LIGHTING, and KING OF THE GODS. Right there he's conflicting with Thor (thunder being close enough) and Odin.

Or rather Zeus the king of the Gods that the Greeks knew about. If you want all myths to be true you'll have to take a different approach to creation, in that the stories of each region are true only for that region, and the actual world being created is a more p


The Norse creation story and the Greek creation story can't both be true. The Norse and Greek afterlives can't both be universally true, at best they can be specifically true in a limited way. Ragnarok is a very specific claim about the future of the universe that's not really compatible with most Greek religious philosophy. Etc.

None of this is a big deal in a world where it's all just things people believe. As soon as it starts to become some sort of objective fact, you have mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive "facts".

Well, you still have beliefs, if you take into account that each set of facts are different for each area, and none of them tell the entire story. For example what if the titans and frost giants are in point of fact the same group? The Greeks talk about Zeus and his family, but don't remember the part where Odin and Thor helped in the titanomachy.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-20, 11:22 AM
Or rather Zeus the king of the Gods that the Greeks knew about. If you want all myths to be true you'll have to take a different approach to creation, in that the stories of each region are true only for that region, and the actual world being created is a more p



Well, you still have beliefs, if you take into account that each set of facts are different for each area, and none of them tell the entire story. For example what if the titans and frost giants are in point of fact the same group? The Greeks talk about Zeus and his family, but don't remember the part where Odin and Thor helped in the titanomachy.


The Greek myths about the origin of the Titans and the Norse myths about the origin of the giants are mutually exclusive.

One the phrase "all myths are true" was used, it took away the option of "that's just what people believe".

Beleriphon
2016-09-20, 11:45 AM
The Greek myths about the origin of the Titans and the Norse myths about the origin of the giants are mutually exclusive.

One the phrase "all myths are true" was used, it took away the option of "that's just what people believe".

They don't have to be, they just have to be incomplete versions of what actually happened. To paraphrase Dr. Henry Jones Jr: If you want truth asking a philosopher, if you want fact find an archaeologist.