Ancient Gods And Modern Settings
0 viewsI'm currently working on a small project that tries to build a ruleset about divine inheritance and trace strength. This might not be the most unique setting to work on, but it provides some nice problems to solve. I am not claiming this is anywhere close to the truth, this is more of a small world building project for a role playing game I'm intending to run at some point.
Why have old gods stopped acting?
I introduced an energy type explaining that, Soul Attention Energy or SAE, that is generated through mortal attention on anyone and anything. Most things and beings don't interact with this energy. The ones that do are gods, angels, devils, spirits and their offspring down to about seven generations.
Given that humans have often moved away from religion, the SAE is significantly less available than it was a thousand years ago. Add in that in this setting the spread of religion is effectively a propaganda or literal war between divines and we have a lot of factions and entities recovering from wounds in those conflicts through what is effectively a tiny trickle of SAE.
Trickles of SAE make it near impossible to spend noticeable amounts to confirm a specific god is still there.
How does this change the experience of most humans in the setting?
Most humans will be effectively traceless, meaning they have no direct interaction with any of the infrastructure besides providing energy to it. They wouldn't notice if a temple is better or worse of in terms of SAE income, they might at most notice the athmosphere in said temple being slightly different.
And that is the beauty of the setting. It is not full of gods everywhere or even decendants, it is low key supernatural and that low key is almost invisible to people who are not part of the supernatural or oterwise very sensitive to it.
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