PDA

View Full Version : Cosmology



Drache64
2019-03-22, 04:39 PM
Have you ever decided on a cosmological origin for your universe? Who created everything, what made the gods etc.

I'd love to hear a few if you're willing to share.

Yora
2019-03-22, 04:50 PM
I made the deliberate decision that there was a completely impersonal big bang and nobody in the world has any clue where it comes from. The cultural beliefs are that there was a dawn of time and there will be an end of time, but nothing is known about them, and between those nothing ever changes. There are no gods having plans for anything.

Man_Over_Game
2019-03-22, 05:06 PM
I made the deliberate decision that there was a completely impersonal big bang and nobody in the world has any clue where it comes from. The cultural beliefs are that there was a dawn of time and there will be an end of time, but nothing is known about them, and between those nothing ever changes. There are no gods having plans for anything.

Erm, I think he's talking about your fantasy world, not your real one.

I generally have it so that all humanoid species all come from the same Human original. One example is of a magical Eclipse transported all that fell under its shadow (about half of the population) to disappear to a parallel world, full of magic. The magic was so strong that it mutated the humans into new species to adapt them to their new lifestyles, which also caused them to isolate themselves from the other species.

Humans who lived in caves became Dwarves, and so dug deeper into the earth. Humans who lived in the woods became Elves, and so became better at moving quickly and living in the wilds.

Several millennia passes, and another Eclipse has come, transporting half of the magical population back to their original world of humans. This repeats until you have a diverse collection of goblins, gnomes, dragonborn, and whatever else you can imagine.

JoeJ
2019-03-22, 05:14 PM
Ermater was the first being to come into existence. All by herself she floated in the Mórigherd (Encircling Sea). After a while, Ermater noticed that she had become pregnant. “A strange thing this is, that I should become pregnant when I am all alone,” she thought. “Unless I managed it by myself, it can only have been the Mórigherd who impregnated me.”

For nine days Ermater was pregnant, and then she gave birth. The first to be born were Mormary (Night) and her brother Durogos (Darkness). Then Stermos (Sky) was born. And after that Nátrikis, Mother of Dragons, and her two sisters. And after that the nine Vatweisi, eldest of the Ankana (giants, primordial deities). The Tremeri (Fates) she gave birth to as well, and the Sun, and the Moon, and all the stars. The great beasts of the sea were born next, and then the four winds: Ugros (North), Werstergo (East), Kitowen (South), and Epros (West). Last of all, Ermater gave birth to Smughras, father of beasts.

Then Stermos, the great sky, spread himself out to cover the Mórigherd and his mother and all the children that had been born to her. He covered Ermater as well, and she became pregnant a second time and conceived the Teukona (elder gods). Again Ermater was pregnant for nine days, but on the ninth day Ermater was not able to give birth because there was no room, so tightly did Stermos hover above her.

Kretos was the strongest of the Teukona. When he saw what was happening, and that there was no room for he or his siblings to be born he thought, “shame on me if I don’t do something about this.” He plucked a hair from his beard and formed it into a knife, sharpening it with his teeth. Then he cut an opening in Ermater’s side so that all the Teukona could get out of their mother’s womb. This is how the Teukona were born; through the opening that Kretos made.

Then Kretos said to his father, “It’s not good for you to spread yourself out so close to the ground. There’s no room for anybody else!” So he grabbed hold of Stermos and lifted him all the way up to where the sky is today. After that he cut Ermater apart and formed her body into the world. The mountains he formed from her bones, and the lakes and rivers from her blood. The top of Ermater’s skull Kretos carved into the vault of the heavens. When Kretos had finished, the world had become as it is today, with the earth below and the sky far above, and around it all the Mórigherd.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-22, 05:28 PM
This might be better for the World-building subforum, but...

Here's the basic story, as told by a researcher who spent his entire life (and sanity) researching this. For the record, he's basically correct, if not complete.


All scholars know the story of the origin of our sphere and its planar adjuncts. What lies beyond? Again, the answer is known to all, even children. The Dark Beyond, home of creatures alien to our reality, whose very presence warps and twists existence. But then, what of the One? It who created our sphere? It must have come from the Dark Beyond. How did It start? What else is there?

The Gods refuse to speak of this topic. Experiments in reaching to the Beyond to ask its denizens questions ended badly. Who else might know? In desperation, consumed by this question, I turned to Leviathan. With my mightiest spells I transformed myself into Leviathan and listened to my own song. While most of the knowledge faded once I was returned to mortal shape, I will write what I remember.

Leviathan's Song
I remember the singing. We sang to ourself, for we are one but we are many. The deeps are not silent--they are filled with the slow, stately song of memory and of being. It echoes and is re-sung, layers of melody overlapping with itself, forming new song. This is the oldest song we sang:

Mother Dark lay dreaming;
Dreaming the endless dream.
Does She still dream?
In time without time?

Into the dream came a thought:
I am; I am ALONE.
What is it to be?
What is loneliness?

If there is self,
There is other.
And so other came to be.
Children of the dreaming Dark.

Creators and Destroyers,
Darkness and Light.
Each making and unmaking with a thought.

ONE created nine, a world to shape:

Air to move,
Fire to burn,
Earth to stand still,
And Water to remember.

Life to create,
Death to bring peace,
Good to look outward,
Evil to take care of self.

Watching for the coming of the Nameless, bearing change.

The last four stanzas obviously reference the creation of our world, Quartus. I believe that the rest refer to the Dark Beyond. That space between universes must be a realm where thought shapes reality--somehow, that eternal silence of oneness was broken. If the One came forth, so must have others, each creating and destroying as they saw fit. Is this then what the stars are? pinpricks through the Barrier at the Edge of the crystal sphere, showing other creations?


A full look at the planar cosmology is here, on my setting site. (https://www.admiralbenbo.org/index.php/the-council-lands/11-metaphysics/87-astronomy-and-cosmology)

Clistenes
2019-03-22, 06:26 PM
There are several competing cosmologies... What the Druids believe isn't the same as what the Wizards believe which isn't the same to what the Clerics believe... And even among them there are different philosophies, schools of thought and sects...

Also, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Orcs, Goblins, Dragons, Giants...etc., all have different cosmologies.

If you dig deep enough you get clues, though... not all gods have the same origin, and the Multiverse seem to have gone through several cycles of destruction and rebirth. The Outer Planes seem to be literally made of soulstuff, most of it from previous cycles. The Aboleths and other beings claim to remember a time before gods were worshipped (which doesn't mean they didn't exist...),...etc.

Drache64
2019-03-22, 06:37 PM
So many great stories and ideas!

Keep them coming!

Have you guys ever contemplated the DM in your cosmology?

Currently I am playing with the idea of two characters hidden from my players. They are called simply Hero and Villain. Hero is the side of my mind that wants to see Heroic actions and great deeds. Villain is the side of my mind that constantly acts against the heroes.

In my last campaign the gods were just elder beings, one was an Aboleth, one was a Balor Lord, one was a Titan, Etc. The evil gods had been manipulated to go to war with the good gods by one seemingly weaker god who just wanted to manipulate the others. This god was secretly the character I call Villain who's only aim was to oppose Hero.

Jay R
2019-03-22, 07:35 PM
Here's the one from my latest 2E world.

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.

Clistenes
2019-03-22, 07:51 PM
Here's the one from my latest 2E world.

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.


What's the relationship between Angels/Celestials and Gods? Or are Celestials absent in your game?

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-23, 04:06 AM
There is a creation myth - but dig deep enough, there's a creation myth beneath that one. Dig deeper still, and there's a creation myth before that one. This seemingly goes on forever, and forever, and forever ... but should some player go on digging long enough, they will eventually discover vague clues that the world was dug up by some adventurer searching for the truth.

Millstone85
2019-03-23, 06:12 AM
The Far Realm is all wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, spacey-wacey stuff, found at both edges of linear time.

The Ethereal is the flow of linear time. Yet it has both backward currents and fast forward ones.

The Elemental Chaos is the Big Bang at the beginning of time. It later separates into the Inner Planes.

The Feywild is the vibrant dawn of life. As it loses in vitality, it becomes the Prime and then the Shadowfell.

The Astral is the fully evaporated universe. There, ascended beings maintain a number of mindscapes, the Outer Planes.

gkathellar
2019-03-23, 07:37 AM
I fit most of my fantasy ideas into a broader cosmology in which solar spirits of radioactive vitalism are locked in a seemingly endless struggle with beings of chaos that hate the imposition a static universe represents on the void beyond it. The victory of disorder is inevitable but impossibly distant, tens or hundreds of billions of years hence. Capital-G God is absentee and has been since creation, and the closest thing to agents of the divine basically just hide in the background keeping sequential time working.

All of this only very rarely has any impact on any individual world, which have their own creation myths and gods, and very little contact with or awareness of the War In Heaven. The existence and scale of that conflict mostly helps to keep things in perspective, and gives me a concrete reason to avoid getting too gonzo in any given case. If I know in advance, "this is how the universe ends," it helps me avoid the temptation to get overdramatic with my save-the-world plots. The upper boundary for any given story is, "not big enough to get involved with the War In Heaven," unless the story is specifically meant to do that.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-23, 08:08 AM
I fit most of my fantasy ideas into a broader cosmology in which solar spirits of radioactive vitalism are locked in a seemingly endless struggle with beings of chaos that hate the imposition a static universe represents on the void beyond it. The victory of disorder is inevitable but impossibly distant, tens or hundreds of billions of years hence. Capital-G God is absentee and has been since creation, and the closest thing to agents of the divine basically just hide in the background keeping sequential time working.

All of this only very rarely has any impact on any individual world, which have their own creation myths and gods, and very little contact with or awareness of the War In Heaven. The existence and scale of that conflict mostly helps to keep things in perspective, and gives me a concrete reason to avoid getting too gonzo in any given case. If I know in advance, "this is how the universe ends," it helps me avoid the temptation to get overdramatic with my save-the-world plots. The upper boundary for any given story is, "not big enough to get involved with the War In Heaven," unless the story is specifically meant to do that.

I too fit my (local) cosmology into a broader one. Each universe (or even multiverse) is embedded in the Dreaming Dark, which created the Dreamers (who created the individual universes) by dreaming of Self, and thus creating Other. I figure that all universes of all fiction are embedded into this background. So the D&D multiverse? It's an overblown creation of a few of the Dreamers working together. The infinite worlds of various superhero settings? Embedded as well. Each one has its own rules, and most aren't aware of the Outside at all.

There are factions in the Outside that are aware of the Dreams, however. Some beneficent, mostly uncaring, and a few (one in particular) malevolent. The Awakener rolls through the dark in Borg-like fashion, infiltrating Dreams and trying to absorb them into itself. It wishes to absorb all the Dreams and the Dreamers, eventually to awaken the Dark itself into one being. It usually takes the form of infections, intelligent memetic information--thought-viruses--in each Dream. Other Dreamers, often those without stable Dreams of their own, try to fight it. The angels in my particular setting are tasked with patrolling the edges of the Crystal Sphere enclosing the Dream and destroying any traces of Awakener that make it through the Sphere.

All of these are nice Great Old Ones for warlock patrons, among other things. And gives me license to have "strange events" happen where the landscape/minds of people warp and twist. It must be Awakener influence.

Jay R
2019-03-23, 09:18 AM
What's the relationship between Angels/Celestials and Gods? Or are Celestials absent in your game?

First of all, the game is AD&D 2e, and the idea of celestials was fully developed for 3e.

Secondly, I haven't invented any angels yet. If I do, they will be consistent with whichever pantheon they are connected to, and I won't care that they are inconsistent with the others. The whole point of this was to allow (for instance) a priestess of Athena and a fighter who worships Thor, without introducing any cross-pantheonic difficulties.

The PC who is priestess of Athena can assume the Greek pantheon, without having to work out how Zeus, god of the Sky and Thunder interacts with Thor, Lei Gong, Haikili, the Thunderbird, etc.

The world is invaded occasionally from other planes, which causes an "Age of Heroes". When there are no cross-plane invaders, it's very peaceful, and there are very few high-level people, because it's much harder to get experience points. One such age is just starting. The PCs, fourth level when we last played, have only bumped into two people who are higher level than they are, and have earned a reputation as great heroes. I won't introduce angels unless I have a story that calls for them.

[I have never used the word "cross-pantheonic" before in my life.]

Drache64
2019-03-23, 10:08 AM
I like to base my cosmology after all the various groups I've DM'd for even if the new group doesn't know the old players. I find it just makes for a more creative world.

Every time I DM a new group, I'm coming up on my 4th group (friends of mine, students of mine, then a new group of students of mine, moved and now looking at a new group of adults), I keep my world but tell myself (not the players) that the world has progressed thousands of years.

The first group became heroes of lore, the second group got to level 20 but failed the final mission and became the lost gods for the third group who awoke the old gods and discovered the multiverse, these players went on to become prominent members within the multiverse but through their journeys they defeated the ultimate evil, which was the other half of the ultimate good which caused the multiverse to collapse.

The new world takes place in the dream of the Avatar of the ultimate good and ultimate evil. All the past characters that used to be PCs are remembered as heroes who everyone knows but never met.

Frozen_Feet
2019-03-23, 02:48 PM
I used to make my worlds cosmology first, but then I realized ancient cosmic past is not the playable part of the game and stopped. :smalltongue:

The (largely implied and rarely explored) shared cosmology in settings I currently use is that they exist as planets in an universe much like, or even the same as, our own. Clarke's third law is taken to its logical conclusion and is a hard fact of life: trying to distinquish between aliens and supernatural beings is mostly humans drawing lines in the sand. Humans make myths of things they see, but not all myths are true, nevermind accurate. Meteor impacts and other natural catastrophes have been explained as acts of gods.

This said, locally, there are Otherworlds, creations of human spirit and imagination, which overlap and superimpose on the natural world. Normally accessible only in dreams, sometimes physical things cross over the boundary. Beyond that, there exists the realm of abstracts and ideas - things that are true yet cannot be fully realized in the causal world, unreachable except for glimpses caught by the imagination of living beings. And even further is the true supernatural - that which can explain all that happens in the lower realms, yet cannot itself be explained by the knowledge existing in those worlds. (Just like you can use physics to describe all rules of Conway's Life, but you cannot use rules of Conway's Life to describe all rules of physics.)

As such, there is no unified explanation for existence of "gods", because "god" is just a vague category humans came up with for beings which inspire awe. Some gods are aliens from another planet. Some are natural phenomena which nonetheless appear unexplainable and powerfull to living beings (the Sun being the chief example across ages). Some are ghosts born from human fears. Some are manifestations of abstract truths, echoes of something real that can't be fully realized in the causal world, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

Panspermia is a recurring concept - life spreads from planet to planet via natural catastrophes and intentional action alike. Mimicry is another: unearthly life may imitate earthly life to facilitate contact, and earthly life may imitate its own fiction, making the imaginary real if given the power to.

This said, let me give you a brief glimpse of other ideas I've had across the years:

There exists a balance between good and evil, creation and destruction, and that balance point is zero. The world spawned from nothing and will one day return to nothing. For each act of pleasure, someone will suffer, for each act of creation something must be destroyed, and vice versa.

The Sovereign Will saw this and decided to game the system. To get something out of nothing, matter, it imagined the opposite, anti-matter. For spirit, anti-spirit. So on and so forth. All of existence is a grand example of double accounting.

It then split the world into three layers: Heaven, material world and Hell. Those who gain pleasure from torment of others in the material realm are cast into Hell, and their suffering and destruction is used to fuel the rewards of virtuous people who suffered in the material realm. After time, their spirits are reborn, thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle.

Of course, consequentalist thought is doomed to futility in such a world, because the total sum always comes to zero in the long run. You can make existence bigger or smaller, but you can't truly make it better. There must always, at the very least, be a scapegoat, an anti-god or anti-creator to serve as the Devil upon whom endless misery is heaped upon so the rest of the world can go on. And every good thing strengthens it untill it will inevitably break free and destroy all to balance out the equation.

Those in the know must accept a deontological or existentialist mindset.

Once upon a time, there existed a world or a state where all beliefs could be true and equal.

But then, in a singular will a belief was born that all beliefs could not be true or equal. So to avoid the obvious paradox, the existence collapsed upon itself and reordered itself in the image of that will. All that was before was lost and the causal world of reason and logic was born as a series of self-imposed limitations by the omnipotent will. By limiting itself, the will exhausted itself and became but a mechanism upon which rest of the world rests. Under that mechanical rule, the life was born, and under the will of living beings everyday life is ordered to their image.

Kitten Champion
2019-03-23, 11:12 PM
I used to make my worlds cosmology first, but then I realized ancient cosmic past is not the playable part of the game and stopped. :smalltongue:

I had similar thought, I guess.

One of the things I dislike that shows up in quite a bit of fantasy is that there's in-universe knowledge on things like god(s), the afterlife, and the genesis of the cosmos in an accurate and objectively real sense. It takes away a lot of the ambiguity of real life that leads to interesting internal and external conflict of your characters and their various societies, it makes religion just another layer of politics with gods and their domains in place of monarchs with their states & associated ideologies, and the knowledge of what happens after your death being as widely known and as factual as the water cycle really should have more implications than generally depicted.

Still, my initial thought was that I did need a "how this actually works" for the cosmology and deeper metaphysical questions of the universe even though everyone in it would be unaware of my answers and made their own belief systems anyways. Then it occurred to me that it wasn't going to come up as it wasn't really relevant to anyone and none of my players were going to roll up a cosmologist or time travel back billions of years to change that.

Mechalich
2019-03-23, 11:32 PM
I used to make my worlds cosmology first, but then I realized ancient cosmic past is not the playable part of the game and stopped. :smalltongue:

Depends on the game.

In D&D the ancient cosmic past slams full-bore into the present and player characters can, and often do, visit with beings of cosmic consequence or encounter their machinations, and this is not exactly uncommon. Even in fantasy settings where the ancient cosmic events are largely unknown and/or unknowable they may have a startling impact on present day events as in ASOIAF.

In terms of world-building, it's important to know if events at the 'cosmologic scale' are going to influence the setting directly in any way, which in any setting with a 'cleric' class they pretty much have to. If this is true, then the person designing the setting really does need to know what the cosmology looks like and how it was structured, even if it never actually comes up directly in gameplay. A good example here is actually LotR. In the actual novels the cosmology is largely unknown and hidden from the audience, with many things referenced only very obliquely if at all, but Tolkien knew how all of it worked already and had most of it written down elsewhere in notes which was essential for the overall coherency of the narrative.

Yora
2019-03-24, 04:25 AM
One of the things I dislike that shows up in quite a bit of fantasy is that there's in-universe knowledge on things like god(s), the afterlife, and the genesis of the cosmos in an accurate and objectively real sense. It takes away a lot of the ambiguity of real life that leads to interesting internal and external conflict of your characters and their various societies, it makes religion just another layer of politics with gods and their domains in place of monarchs with their states & associated ideologies, and the knowledge of what happens after your death being as widely known and as factual as the water cycle really should have more implications than generally depicted.

The problem is that there is usually only one story and everyone agrees with it.

Having everyone be completely certain about these things isn't that bad if there are a couple of conflicting accounts. Though in human history, there have always been people who had doubts about some of the details.
Most religiously motivated conflicts are taking place within religious groups, not between them.

falcon1
2019-03-24, 11:38 AM
While no one except the Titans and gods really know what happened (and except for the Far Realm-aligned ones they aren't talking), there was never any act of creation of the universe and its planes. Instead, there was once a tapestry where individual realities were threads, mixed together in an impossible ocean where the very laws of physics changed with every moment, and not even things like time and distance remained constant. Through this eternal madness swam an endless number of incredibly mighty beings - the Titans. Some, led by Sublimity-Through-Patience, teased a single thread from this tapestry, and separated it from the rest to begin the existence of the world.

There's a lot more cosmological stuff involving how it go to its current state though.

Phhase
2019-03-25, 01:46 AM
For those with more time, here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?564083-Bottom-Up-Pantheon-amp-Setting-Game) lies an excellent wold-building starter I participated in, concerning the deities and nature of the cosmos.

Frozen_Feet
2019-03-25, 11:49 AM
@Mechalich: being very familiar with how Tolkien did it and having tried to do it the way Tolkien did it several times, I'll have to say: it's neither necessary nor necessarily the best way to build settings for games.

D&D's cosmology is actually waaaayyyy more expansive, and precisely because of that, it's less cohesive. Seriously. D&D appropriates elements from anything and everything, but only a tiny slice of it is necessary for a playable game. Only some metasettings really try to squeeze everything out of the craziness (Spelljammer, Planescape) .

Yora
2019-03-25, 02:13 PM
I was recently thinking about a planescape campaign using only the "odd" outer planes: Beastlands, Ysgard, Pandemonium, Carceri, Gehenna, Archeron, Arcadia, Bytopia, and the Outlands.
I think that would feel quite different from the regular Great Wheel that seems to be dominated by the "even" planes, particularly the Abyss and Baator.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-25, 02:32 PM
Depends on the game.

In D&D the ancient cosmic past slams full-bore into the present and player characters can, and often do, visit with beings of cosmic consequence or encounter their machinations, and this is not exactly uncommon. Even in fantasy settings where the ancient cosmic events are largely unknown and/or unknowable they may have a startling impact on present day events as in ASOIAF.

In terms of world-building, it's important to know if events at the 'cosmologic scale' are going to influence the setting directly in any way, which in any setting with a 'cleric' class they pretty much have to. If this is true, then the person designing the setting really does need to know what the cosmology looks like and how it was structured, even if it never actually comes up directly in gameplay. A good example here is actually LotR. In the actual novels the cosmology is largely unknown and hidden from the audience, with many things referenced only very obliquely if at all, but Tolkien knew how all of it worked already and had most of it written down elsewhere in notes which was essential for the overall coherency of the narrative.

I tend to start at the present, with the world I want, and at the very beginning, and work in both directions at once, until I get the deep history, recent history, and present that I want.

When it comes to worldbuilding in general, I'm very much in favor of the "iceberg" principle -- it's the stuff the audience does see that holds up what they do see.

Or as an internal skeleton... just because the audience doesn't see the bones doesn't mean they can't tell when the bones are missing.