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[Iduno]

I think this is the blog of one of the current Earthdawn developers, sort of working on ideas or as a place to store stuff that doesn't quite fit with the game. It's a description of one of the Horrors (something like demons from the spirit realm that return when magic is powerful enough in the world to feed on any suffering they can cause). This one leans more into the horror elements of the game than the adventuring bits, and is entertainingly wtf.

https://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.com/2020/10/earthdawn-4e-anatomy-of-horror-13.html

Great stuff there! I'm currently running a kyton-heavy scenario, and something like this is great material for a bit of flavour to the scenes I'm developing.

Yeah, D&D 3rd (and again in 4th) did grab some ideas from Earthdawn, so I can see Earthdawn material matching nicely. I think a lot of the reason I'd like to play Earthdawn is to see all of the ideas and possibilities it has. Putting the requirement on themselves that everything has to fit together means a lot of things are more developed.

[Grim Portent]

So for a dark setting I'm working on I want to break up the mono-culture races that D&D tends to have, starting with the dwarves because I have to start somewhere. So I want to split them into culture groups, not all related to each other, with some being oppressed by the others, all with their own language and so on. I don't plan to be super specific, since I plan for dwarven politics to mostly only play into things in as much as they affect refugees and diplomats in a human centric part of the world, but I want to have a good feel for the basics and who hates who.

I'm aiming for 15 races/cultures, spread among about 9 kindgoms, with some dwarven races being minorities in some kingdoms, majorities in others, actively subject to genocide in others, or completely absent from some.

For simplicity I plan to split them into 4 groups, and I am going to provisionally just give them english names, but I'm probably going to find a few related languages I can butcher to give them better names in future. My current thoughts on them are as follows.

The four ethnic families of the dwarves are the great dwarves, the dwarves of the black lands, the lesser dwarves (not their preferred name) and the green dwarves.

The Great Dwarves consist of four races. For now let's just call them G1, G2, G3 and G4, because names are hard. The Great Dwarves speak a related group of languages and can communicate with each other in a faltering fashion. They are as a group taller than the other dwarven ethnicities and worship variations on the god Gann who they believe made the world and made the Great Dwarves to be his chosen servants. G1 and G3 include other lesser deities in their pantheons, G2 are purely monotheistic and G4 believe in a handful of cultural saints who serve as intermediaries between them and Gann. G1, G2 and G3 are the dominant races in five of the dwarven kingdoms, with G4 being a minority largely found in the other Great Dwarven lands. Great Dwarves in the lands of other dwarven races are subject to severe bigotry, generally being seen as spies or saboteurs working for their rather imperialistic homelands.

The Dwarves of the Black Lands consist of six races, B1-B6. Like the great dwarves the black dwarves have related languages and can communicate to a limited extent without translation, though B3 cannot communicate with B1 or B5. They are long limbed and slender for dwarves, with strong cultural trends towards modesty and the careful use of resources. This stems from their now fertile lands being the product of a series of volcanic eruptions that nearly drove them to extinction and brought them to worship the gods of boundaries, of bounty and of protection when they where offered the magic they needed to survive the harsh conditions that afflicted their lands for several years. B6 is a conglomerate culture of displaced members of B1-B5, that split off during the early days of the volcanic eruptions and the resulting turmoil, and maintain the old religion worshipping the goddess Arctus. Dwarves of culture B6 mostly fled into the kingdoms of the Great Dwarves as refugees, where they live their lives as an oppressed minority, but their faith is forbidden in the lands of their ethnic kin, where they face severe puishment if they refuse to convert to the new gods. B1-B5 are the dominant group in 3 of the dwarven kingdoms, but in kingdoms ruled by other dwarves they are subject to extreme prejudice and occasionaly genocide, which they are quite happy to return in kind.

The Lesser Dwarves consist of four races, L1-L4. Their languages are related to one another, but L1 and L4 differ enough that they cannot communicate. Lesser dwarves are shorter on average than other dwarves, and are considered inferiors by almost all other dwarves. The Lesser Dwarves are found in all the dwarven kingdoms, living in ethnic enclaves or mobile caravans. They are more close knit than the other dwarven races, viewing even their most distant cultural kin as friends in defiance of a hostile world. L2 are the dominant race in a single kingdom, and drove the others LDwarves, including many L2 dwarves, out of their lands as a result of a schism rooted in conflicting interpretations of their gnostic faith. Lesser dwarves are the most commonly found in non-dwarven lands, fleeing oppression and genocide that follows them everywhere in the homelands. Among refugees populations L2 dwarves are generally disliked by other LDwarves, who resent them for their relationship to the dwarves that drove them from their homelands.

The Green Dwarves are a singular race, with a language unrelated to any other dwarven tongue. They live in nomadic groups outside the traditional dwarven lands, and tell tales of being driven from there an extremely long time ago. They have a cultural tradition of cooperating with humans, and over time have adopted a form of pantheism, worshipping every god whose faith their community has encountered in it's travels and still remembers to include in prayers. Green dwarves do not distinguish between the dwarven races from the homelands, which the refugee and expatriate communities of other dwarves they encounter find incredibly insulting.

Dwarves do not generally bother to distinguish between the ethnic variations from groups other than their own. That is to say, an LDwarf doesn't distinguish between a B1 and a B3, though the B1 and B3 hold themselves to be distinct from one another in important ways. Put another way, dwarves are racist. But everyone is probably going to be in the setting I envisage.

[scriver]

I like that, Portent! I think there a lot if interesting stuff to be gained from breaking up races into cultures like that. Just gotta think about not overdoing it, for example how many of FR's dozens of human cultures and culture groups can anyone recall existing?

[heydude6]

When I glimpsed your list, I thought you were having a dwarf only campaign (which you definitely have enough content for btw). I like it, I really do, but I don't think this is practical for a D&D campaign, at least if you plan on giving the other races the same treatment.

You've got 15 different dwarven subcultures here, each of which is going to need to be fleshed out or else the hole will be obvious to those playing the game and detract from the experience. Assuming you stick with the basic trio of humans, elves, and dwarves (the latter which you already started), you're going to have to come up with 45 different cultures in total which is a lot of work.

I believe you can accomplish this, the real problem is incorporating it into a game. That's a lot of information to hold in one's head, and running a session is already a mentally intense activity. You're either going to give yourself a headache trying to figure out how to bring up these different cultural groups in a given play session or your not going to bring some of them up at all. If the latter happens, then what was the point of creating them in the first place?

I do like your idea in principle though. Real cultures and ethnicities are incredibly diverse and it would be great to see some of that represented in fiction. I just see your task more as a fun mental exercise rather than something that can practically be used in a game. Don't worry, I've done this too. It's fun in its own way.

[Grim Portent]

My plan, such as it is, is to set the game I want to run in a single recently conquered province of a human empire. So the majority of NPCs would be the local human ethnicity, plus members of the empire's dominant ethnic group, other imperial ethnicities, small dwarven enclaves of various oppressed groups, maybe the odd dwarf of status from the homelands whose distinctly not part of the dwarven refugee communities, and then the elves as a nomadic monoculture due to some apocalyptic stuff that destroyed their homelands and left them forever damned.

The main human group I have in mind is called the Val, sort of a eastern europe/steppe cultures mashup. About a third of their lands were conquered by the Aurogentum Empire and the Val as a people are split into a few mindsets on the matter. 'Free' Val either view their occupied cousins as people needing their help to be freed, or as weaklings and/or traitors who allowed the empire to take their lands, 'Imperial' Val are divided on the empire, some like it, some hate it, some don't really care, some actively resist it even four decades after being conquered. The Val have their own religion, based around a unitary duality that encompasses all things, which conflicts with the main religion of the empire who revere a monotheistic goddess called Astarte and her saints, some Imperial Val have converted, some stick to their own ways, some have adopted a hybrid faith that's considered weird at best by the others.

Other than the Val I'll probably only really flesh out the main imperial human race, and the race of humans who are native to the province(s) bordering the Val, on the grounds that humans from the far away parts of the empire are unlikely to have headed or been sent there in a short time and the older imperial human ethnic groups will have started to blend together.

Only a few dwarves will get actually fleshed out, those who have communities of refugees that have reasons, good or bad, to dislike one another. Dwarf groups that aren't prevalent among refugees will be left bare bones. So mostly the LDwarves because they'll be easy to base conflicts around with the emnity they have towards other dwarven groups and towards their L2 brethren.




Broad thrust of the actual game idea would have the players be Witch Hunters, with broad discretionary powers in dealing with heretics, unsanctioned magic users, fleshsculpters, wielders of the dark arts, cults, demons, monsters, dissidents and political malfactors. My plan is to run multiple shortish adventures, some for 1 PC, some for 2-3, and some for all 4 people in the group (not counting myself), with a mix of mystery, political intrigues, horror, and a bit of hack and slash.

[Iduno]

Yes! This is the stuff I like.

Range 60 feet, and the z-axis isn't forbidden. Excellent.

Also, it's a level 3 spell, so it's affected (in 3.x) by a minor rod of metamagic, like extend (1.5x all numbers, including distance and number of animals summoned).

In addition, summoning a bunch of cows seems like a good way to bribe a dragon.


Edit: I'd still like to find a teleport spell that is either ranged, or touch (which becomes ranged with the reach spell metamagic). 20d6 from falling is always fun. And sometimes they end up outside, which makes it difficult/time consuming for them to be angry at you for it. I assume this is why wizards live in towers.

[Kagus]

Yes! This is the stuff I like.

Range 60 feet, and the z-axis isn't forbidden. Excellent.

Also, it's a level 3 spell, so it's affected (in 3.x) by a minor rod of metamagic, like extend (1.5x all numbers, including distance and number of animals summoned).

"Wizard, you're up. The gang of bandits is moving closer, surrounding the party on all sides. What do you do?"

"I cast Bird."

[Loud Whispers]

I've got a question. Assuming no concerns for standardised/balanced speed, how many metres per second would a hill giant move when walking/running sprinting? What about their even larger storm giant cousins? I've been trying to wrap my noggin around this conundrum for some time

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The largest land animal capable of fast movement is probably elephants, which even hill giants exceed at 15 ft to the elephant average of 10.5 ft. So if you're really, truly, going to put the square-cube law in DnD, giants probably have to move slower as they get larger. I suppose they could still charge much like an elephant can charge, at some risk to their own lives.

[Loud Whispers]

That works for hill giants. For storm ones I decided to just wing it using the speed of a T-Rex. Slow boys who like plodding along at 3m/s and can book it a max 10m/s if they really feel like it. This compares to humans usual 3m/s and max of around 12m/s. Being chased by a storm giant might be fucking terrifying but you ought to be able to run faster and run longer than them, which seems aesthetically pleasing as a concept

[Grim Portent]

Depends on the way their anatomy actually functions. If they're just humans but bigger because magic then they'd probably run pretty damn fast, at least compared to us, if their legs, bones and so forth are similar to those of other large animals then they'd probably be at most the same speed as humans or even significantly slower when at max speed.

The bigger an animal is the more impact force each step puts into it's legs, so bipeds past a certain size start having problems, especially if they walk and run like humans where sometimes a single foot takes all the impact force of the body running and jumping. So a giant massing the same as a large theropod dinosaur would presumably have to run slower than them or break it's ankles when it tried to sprint, and the speed estimates I've seen for large theropods aren't actually that great for such large animals, and it would have terrible balance because it's center of gravity would be really high up and shift whenever it leaned even slightly in any direction.

If a giant wanted to eat it would probably have to sit or squat and reach out with it's hands rather than lean, and would likely have to sleep in a squat, sitting or standing position. Without a tail to act as a counterbalance for their upper body leaning down to do anything would make them tip forwards, which would also make it hard to stand up in general come to think of it.

Hill giants are, imo, the best designed d&d giant from a realism standpoint, with short legs and long gorilla like arms, some of them are depicted with proportions that would let them knucklewalk, which reduces a lot of the problems of being a giant biped. They also have disproportionately large hands and feet, and are very fatty, which would help spread their weight over a larger ground surface and cushion their joints from impact force. Their huge sagging stomachs shift their center of gravity closer to their hips than the muscle chested larger giants whose center is going to be higher up. They're also lethargic and spend lots of time eating or laying about digesting and napping, and can eat basically anything organic, which is not a bad set of things for a large organism.

Fire giants are a bit stubby limbed, essentially being giants with dwarf proportions, so they'd struggle with a lot of tasks that force them to lean to reach things and risk tipping over. The other races are all human proportioned or really gangly in the case of stone giants, so they'd all struggle with the fact they aren't anatomically designed to be huge. Stone giants would probably be in constant minor discomfort from their joints having barely any fat cushion, based on their usually scrawny and wiry depictions, like dairy cattle compared to beef cattle.

[Grim Portent]

So for the same setting as the dwarves I posted about above I have the following in mind for other major races.

Elves - nomadic wanderers, the hubris of their magi in ages past destroyed their homelands and cursed the elves with a spiritual stigmata that they bear to this day. Other races view them with fear and superstition and generally don't allow them into their towns and cities, and drive them away if they look to be settling down long term. When elves reach the age range of 650-750 they are supposed to commit ritual suicide according to their customs to prevent the curse that festers in all their souls from reaching maturity. Most elves face this death with acceptance, having had centuries to come to terms with it, but there are always some who seek to delay their death until it is too late, or flee from the prospect in it's entirety.

Humans - like everyone else, humans are kind of bastards. Superstitious, ambitious, clannish, and all the other properties of real life humanity.

Halflings - Much like humans, but able to reproduce faster and subject to a lot of prejudice, which they return vigorously. Slightly matriarchal and very clannish, with halfling women who bear enough children being able to form a large village in their lifetime and the resulting family remaining very close knit and living under the matriarch's thumb. Hospitable to people they don't know other than some bigoted rudeness, but with strong inclinations to more severe passive or overt aggression towards people from groups they have bad history with. If someone from a human village stiffed a halfling on a payment once, that halfling's community will hate the entire human village for a long time. Theorised by some magi to have been created.

Orcs and Goblins - created by a half-forgotten sorcerer-king of the dwarves, now revered in various different ways by the orcs and goblins. Orcs were created to serve as shock troops in dwarven wars, being faster and stronger than dwarves and naturally aggressive, while goblins were created to be domestic servants, their speed, dexterity and unobtrusiveness making them well suited to roles as gofers, maids, butlers and so forth. The use of these servile races fell out of fashion in the dwarven kingdoms, leading to the majority being banished and left to fend for themselves or murdered for the sake of convenience, but there are also established communities of orcs and goblins who had been granted freedom for dutiful service during the peak of their use, and some kingdoms still make use of small numbers of them. The general outlook of orcs and goblins towards other races varies by their communities' historical origins, with those who are descended from those who were pensioned off generally being quite amiable towards dwarves, while those who were exiled or escaped genocide take a rather dimmer view of their former owners. Relations between O&Gs and humans and halflings tend to be frosty, but are usually not outright hostile. The magically created nature of orcs and goblins makes them inherently heretical in the eyes of most human and halfling faiths, the priests of which encourage their congregations to avoid interacting with them.

Trolls - A very old race, fashioned by an ancient practitioner of magic from human stock to serve as living siege weapons. Trolls are essentially like D&D ogres and hill giants, huge deformed humans, rather than regenerating green monsters with long noses. Trolls are born much larger than humans, and mature rapidly. They have no known maximum height, growing steadily until the point they die. Their bodies are afflicted with what is essentially a form of exaggerated gigantism, their bones and tissues growing and distorting starting at a young age. This process is painful, trolls are subject to headaches, migraines, joint pain, muscle fatigue and various other ailments. Understandably this makes them generally pretty angry creatures, with a short temper and a tendency to lash out at their surroundings. Trolls are as intelligent as any normal human, but their living situation makes it difficult for them to learn or engage in healthy social interaction. While the original trolls were essentially just big grumpy humans, their children found themselves trapped in a downward spiral of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their parents, which became progressively worse as each new generation was less functional than the last, to the point that many modern trolls are little more than apes, unfamiliar with language or the use of tools. With help from others trolls can be functioning members of a society, albeit prone to substance abuse to relieve their pain, but on their own they struggle to cope with their intergenerational traumas and physical suffering. Most cultures view trolls as little more than animals, with even those that have 'domestic' trolls viewing them as subhumans.

[Jimmy]

Nice write-up! The elf section gives a fair bit of grey room for some interesting story hooks, especially what happens when one doesn't commit ritual sudoku(sic). Are we looking at Tolkien elves, tall and fair, or Grimm fairytale elves, small and sprightly?

Also, trolls are great. I like their flavour, which reminds me of the old trolls that would live under bridges extorting billy-goats.

Speaking of fairytales, are you going to include gnomes and the fey? I've always loved the concept of the fey as an antagonistic element to the world, and some of my favourite fictions such as The Dresden Files or A Practical Guide to Evil feature the fey as a major player in the story. I've long wished I could run a campaign that features them prominently, but I'll freely admit my own intelligence simply isn't wired to properly come up with the twisty schemes fey are famous for. I tend to do much better with writing plots involving straightforward threats.

[Grim Portent]

The idea behind the elves is that when their curse matures they turn into horrible distorted monsters, or a natural disaster. Ranges from small things like a manticore or a house fire, up to dragons and major earthquakes. For the most part the actual role of their curse will be along the lines of 'human authorities suspect an elf has run away from it's people because it can't bring itself to die, and the community failed to force the situation. Go track the fleeing elf and deal with things,' though I do envision a race of humans who lost their homeland to an elf refusing to die and making the whole peninsula sink into the ocean. Physically they're similar to humans, except with pointy ears, eyes that go fully black as they age and a patch of raised red flesh that resembles a tentacled mass that slowly moves about their body over the decades. If they dress up heavily they can pass for human, which helps avoid people throwing rocks at them.

I like the idea of races that are worse than humans, but it isn't their fault, which is the premise behind the trolls. They're victims as a species, but no one is really able to help them because most people don't even know where to start so they get pushed away and continue to spiral downwards.

Gnomes are probably not going to be a thing, though something similar to them and fey in general might be a thing. I have an idea for a loose collection of deities called the Witch Gods, whose whole thing is being the gods of magic in a setting where magic is feared and distrusted. All magic knowledge can ultimately be traced back to one of them teaching someone the basics and that person then taking things from there, and some of them have really weird followers. Several are served by witch covens, warlock cabals, post-human hags, and some have creatures that serve only them. Fey will likely be reskinned and used as the eldritch servants of these gods, some transformed from humans, some transformed from animals, some from the same unnatural places as the Witch Gods themselves. So far I only really have one group of Witch God servants really fleshed out.

Spoiler: The Witch Folk, children of Prennos (click to show/hide)

The Witch Folk, as they are named by the fearful people of the empire, are a race of creatures that resemble humans, but with extended digitigrade legs, tough leathery skin and mismatched animal teeth crammed into a misshapen human mouth.

The Witch Folk do not speak save for bestial howls, grunts and brays, wear no clothing other than masks made of bark, branches and animal remains and live in the hollows of rotten trees, in caves or in animal burrows. Witch Folk have been confirmed to eat their food raw, and engage in cannibalistic rituals, eating the flesh of one another and of humans. They wield few tools other than sharpened rocks, sticks and bones.

They do not breed as other races do, instead they create more of their kind through stealing human babies. Smuggling kidnapped infants into the deep forests, the Witch Folk bring their victims to large sacklike structures made of animal skins strung between trees. These structures, called Witch Wombs by those who have made a business of culling the vile creatures, are stuffed with vast quantities of rancid offal and rotten animal flesh. Under the light of a full moon the Witch Folk place their stolen infants into the womb, which they then stitch shut. As dawn breaks the womb splits like an overripe fruit, spilling the newly transformed witch child upon the forest floor.

Despite the many disadvantages the Witch Folk have in outright combat they increase in number year after year, with great surges of their kind murdering entire villages in their beds and defiling the shrines and temples of the gods of man.

Behind the scenes, the Witch Folk are the descendants of a coven of witches who served Prennos, the god of the dark wood. The men and women who served Prennos used to be like any other group of humans, living in small settled communities practicing various rites in honour of their deity in exchange for various little boons. Eventually one of the races that would later become part of the Aurogentum Empire began to move into the region and engage in violent competition with the Prennosian cultists. The cultists lost, being forced to convert to their conquerers faith at swordpoint, with some fleeing into the woods to escape. Over several decades the population gradually came to accept the new status quo, which angered those who had dwelt in the woods and kept to their old ways, and the god Prennos.

Prennos' loyal followers gathered in the presence of their god in the deepest parts of the woods and engaged in a ritual to preserve themselves forever and enable them to reclaim what is theirs. The remaining cultists were transformed into the First Womb, a pulsating mass of living flesh growing like a tumour among the ancient trees of the forest, from which came the first Witch Folk. All Witch Folk contain a fragment of the collected minds of those last cultists, and if slain are reborn as adults from the First Womb upon the next full moon. As long as the foul seed that gave them life exists no Witch Folk can truly perish, so their numbers grow year after year.

The Witch Folk draw on the kidnapper elements of some fey, and a bit on races like the Beastmen from Warhammer. I'm also thinking of making bugbears a type of fairy like creature based on the folk song Long Lankin, which in some versions has the titular Lankin as basically a boogyman, but in other versions he was meant to be a leper who murdered a child to try and cure his disease with the babies' blood. I figure I'll mix the two ideas and make Bugbears a type of deformed spirit that pursue various macabre folk cures to try and heal themselves.

[Grim Portent]

Got more of my setting notes I want to bounce off people. This time focusing on gods and spirits.

To start with there's Yahg the Primordial and the demons.

Spoiler: Yahg and the demons (click to show/hide)

Yahg is essentially the unity that existed before anything else, is male and female, dead and alive, so on and so forth. Mostly forgotten by mortals, or never learned of by mortals, which is probably a more accurate statement. Yahg was murdered at the dawn of creation by the beings who came to be the creator gods, such as Astarte, Gann and Caer-Dunn. Where these gods came from is unknown, their own faiths teach that they have always been and formed the world from various things that existed in the void of pre-creation.

In truth the gods flayed Yahg to the metaphysical bones, and shaped all that is from the scraps of being they had torn from it's body. All animals, plants, people, even the very ground and sky were fashioned from Yahg's flesh and blood and live only because they bear a portion of Yahg's perpetual life. The gods doted on their new creations for untold ages in the time before time, leaving the flayed remains of Yahg and the scraps of unused flesh to drift in the void.

But the pieces of Yahg lived, and they yearned, and they envied and they shaped themselves into echoes of the creations of the gods. Stumbling on newborn legs, mewling with infant voices, these beings whose creation was unasked for approached the gods and tried to bask in their radiance. The gods looked upon these beings with disgust and contempt, for they were twisted parodies of their creations in their eyes. So the gods cast them back into the void, where these beings, the demons found the corpse of Yahg that they had overlooked, and came to understand creation.

The demons, sorrowful at the gods rejection, turned to their kin for comfort. 'If we cannot be with the gods, we shall be with the other beings born of Yahg's flesh,' they cried. And so they walked among the creations of the gods, and they taught them of Yahg and their common heritage and creation began to question the will of the gods.

In fury and rage the gods cast the demons to the void once more, sealing them in the beyond with the light of all the stars in the sky. Still burning with anger the gods turned to their creations, who had embraced the demons as kin, and cursed them with mortality so that they would wither and die and forget what they had learned of their origins.


Now Yahg is little more than a memory, thought of as an obscure god of demons by even the most learned occultists. But the gods have grown silent, though the priests may deny it, and the demons return as the stars fade, whispering of the truth and of their intentions for all of creation.

Spoiler: More details on demons (click to show/hide)

The demons are divided into three rough categories, Yahghannic Demons who seek to return everything to being part of Yahg and thus be whole again, Erosian Demons who seek to enter the mortal world and be together with mortalkind for all of time and thus be whole but still separate, and the Angels, demons who never stopped loving the gods no matter how much the gods cast them aside.

Yahghannic Demons are simple creatures, seeking the mutual destruction of all things so that Yahg can once again be unitary and whole. They approach mortals with nihilistic teachings, endorse actions that will provoke conflict and undermine the churches of the creator gods who flayed Yahg.

Erosian Demons love mortals. Not healthy, beautiful love, more creepy stalker love. The kind of love which ends with someone wearing another person's skin. To the demons, who are truly immortal, this is not an unhealthy thing. When a demon says it wants to crawl inside you, to be one with you it means this genuinely, and if there is a way to be together forever without killing you it would even prefer to do things that way, but they are desperate, impassioned and impatient. Erosian Demons don't understand the curse of mortality which mortals are afflicted with, and so their actions are truly horrifying. They will tear the unborn from the womb so they can hold it now, fight over mortals until they accidently tear them apart, literally try to crawl down someone's throat and wear them like a skinsuit so they can see through the mortal's eyes. To them this is harmless, but to mortals it is obviously horrifying.

Angels are obsessed with the gods. They understand that the gods did not, indeed could not love them as they were. They see themselves as foul mockeries of the god's creations. And they want to change that. They think if they change the gods will finally love them as they love the mortals. To this end the angels flay their skin, break and reset their bones, pull fangs from their bleeding mouths, sever their wings, bind their immortal flesh with fabric, leather and metal and force themselves into a form they think the gods will like. Most angels have no visible flesh, their teeth and nails are fashioned from metal, ceramic or polished stone and inserted into the sockets where they pulled out their talons, their mutilated bodies concealed under wonderous armour and robes. Often heated metal was pressed into the bare flesh left after scaled or leathery hide was ripped from their limbs, permanently forcing them into their new forms.

Spoiler: The Creator Gods (click to show/hide)

Even the demons don't know where the gods came from, not that many people ask them. The creator gods are a loose group of deities who are all attributed with the creation of the world. Most of their creeds claim that only one god is the real creator, and that even the other gods are their creations or are demons masquerading as deities. The specifics of their faiths vary, more so now than ever as no true prophets have been born for nearly a thousand years, leaving the faiths to diverge from their origins and grow corrupt and obsessed with temporal power and political bickering. The most important to my ideas are Astarte, Gann and Caer-Dunn

Astarte, the Immaculate Lady of the Heavens, is the god of the Aurogentum Empire. While her worship is not unique to the empire it is the state religion, with many other faiths being forbidden, depending more on the practicality of banning them than any moral concerns. Astarte is venerated primarily through the worship of her saints, who may be as numerous as the stars in the sky. A truly accurate census of the saints revered in the empire is nearly impossible, as almost every town attributes their founding to a saint, various locations are associated with saints, nobles, merchants, guilds knightly orders, mercenaries, temples of a thousand deviant forms all claim a saint as part of their heritage. The most consistent rule of the Astartian faith is that most magic is forbidden, an edict often flouted by all manner of authorities, including the clergy, with various justifications. She is considered to be responsible for keeping the demons sealed in the void with starlight.

Gann the Potter, supposedly fashioned all that is from river clay according to the tales of the Great Dwarven races. Gann is generally worshipped as a deity of racial superiority, most iterations of his faith depicting the other races as being made to be servants or tests of some kind for the Great Dwarves. Commonly his faith preaches a measure of isolationism, declaring that other than slaves the Great Dwarves should have minimal contact with other peoples. Every now and then a truly extremist faction will gather political support in the dwarven homelands and attempt to purge the populace of percieved impurities, such as non-majority dwarves for instance. Diplomats from the Great Dwarven nations often encourage their trade partners and political allies to oppress or cast out populations of refugees from the other dwarven races.

Caer-Dunn, the dualistic god of the Val. Caer and Dunn are depicted as two entities who are inextricably linked and interchangeable. Together they represent the beginning and the end, birth and death, the wellspring of a river and the mouth where it flows to the sea. Cycles and sequences. In Valland Caer-Dunn is a largely decentralised religion, with the head of the faith technically being an individual called the King in the River, though they are rarely seen and considered somewhat mystical by their own followers. After the Aurogentum Empire occupied Southern Valland the status of the current King in the River is unknown. The Vallic interpretation of Caer-Dunn is revered in a number of ways, most involving the use of circular designs or the repurposing of old things. Newborn babies are often named after people who recently died in their community, trees are planted atop burial mounds and cairns, and pregnant or young animals or animals with young are not to be killed. The faith of Caer-Dunn is forbidden in Occupied Valland, though enforcement of this policy is spotty.

Spoiler: The Witch Gods (click to show/hide)

Enigmatic entities that arrived after creation, and taught all magic to mortals. They dwell in remote locations, deep forests, mountain peaks, large lakes, stretches of the ocean. Unlike the other deific beings the Witch Gods have actual physical bodies, though few have seen them. Those who have stood in their presence describe them as an overwhelming weight upon the mind, an irresistable desire to show obesiance to the god surging into the minds of mortals. All magical spells invoke the name of at least one Witch God, depending on the nature of the magic., though one does not need to worship one to learn the magic it first taught if another mortal is willing to pass the knowledge on.

The Witch Gods are mostly considered malevolent, their cults often practice human sacrifice as part of arcane rituals to earn the favour of their gods. Even so some of the cults and covens have found their way into accepted positions of various societies, practicing the unsavory parts of their creed in private while selling their services as sorcerers to the society they dwell amongst. Many kings will turn a blind eye to the loss of a few vagrants every full moon in exchange for someone who an call fire from the sky assisting their armies.

Mortals are not the only beings found in service to the Witch Gods, various eldritch beings heed the call of the gods. Undead, spirits of the woods and nightmares, shapeshifters and other abominations all find a home amidst the gatherings of mortal cultists.