Wow you guys have really been going at it while I was gone. Keep in mind there isn't anything wrong with pushing your ideas, just don't take it to the extreme and try and force your views on others. Just explain why you think you have a good idea and use logic, facts, etc to try and bring people over to your way of thinking. Also please for all of our sake don't start throwing around insults when people don't agree with you (that goes for everyone and if I'm ever guilty of insulting you please tell me so).
Now I'm not really going to address everything that has been mentioned, just a couple that seem more relevant to me.
I think it's been heavily implied that creatures we build from the ground up are, essentially, hollow. Soulless. Like the rest of the animals and plants out there.
Which is why I actively propose GMing our followers. We could make them plant, or bug people. Either way it'd be awesome. And hey, dedicated followers like a bunch of dryad dudes could be useful. See how the orcs work with Grumugga?
Come on, lets at least modify one kid. Not even that much, either. Just give the fetus.. I dunno.. green flame-style red hair(no abilities, just pigment)? We have to see if we can even pull this off, and if so, to what extent we can drag this before we end up with a soulless being. And hey, even if a worshipper is born without a soul, with any luck they're still intelligent, right?
Like the difference between a machine with sentimental value, and one without.
I was the first person to suggest modifying our human followers and I had (-1's) rain down on me like there was no tomorrow, which is why I brought back up the idea of just making our own followers from scratch.
I would be happy with either choice and I think we need to do one or the other if we really want to become powerful and capable of defending our followers from the huge number of enemies allied against us.
WE WENT OVER THIS!!!
we cannot make followers. they need a soul.
we cant....i repeat WE CANT.... make souls, and, therefore, followers.
Stop bringing this up. we're going to end up arguing in circles at this rate.
In response to this, I'd recommend looking at this post by Corruptor that was made about two posts ahead of yours:
To answer some questions that seem to have come up:
-Grumugga didn't create the Orc race, currently she is merely the only God of Orcs.
-Tiberius's soul stopped giving you mana because the mana in question is going towards powering his abilities. Installing a soul in a body that needs less upkeep might still give you mana, depending on the quality of the soul in question.
-Creating a new race is a difficult endeavor, and would take a substantial amount of both souls and mana as raw materials. A natural 20 would probably be needed as well, unless the God in question had very high skill levels. How exactly this could be achieved - well I'll leave that up to your creativity. Altering an existing race, on the other hand, is quite easier. Goblins originated as altered Orcs, for example.
Last but not least, update otw.
So yeah we might not be able to directly create souls but we can create a race (albeit not without much difficulty), which thus indirectly produces souls. According to Corruptor, creating a race would require us to put in an initial investment of souls and a substantial amount at that, along with and unspecified amount of mana and raw materials.
We have souls and mana although quite possible not enough and we have abundant raw materials. Once we create a race, we would gain back our investment of souls as our new race reproduces and creates more children who also have souls, paying off in the mid to long term depending on the speed at which they reproduce.
Corruptor told us that creating a race is expensive and difficult, possibly requiring us to roll a 20. He also said that modifying a race is much easier and also probably cheaper. We can see this exemplified by the fact that our neighbor chaos god modified humans to make a special race of snakemen and that some god (most likely the orc god) made goblins from orcs. If these gods could modify a race for their own purposes then we could also do it and most likely with relative ease based off our chaos and life domains which both relate to creating and changing things.
Keeping all this in mind, I think we should modify humans as I previously suggested and as a long term goal, see about creating a new race of plant people.