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Wed Feb 10 2010 21:39:12 By Sean Pan
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The Lore of Gods and Idols: Who are you?
Perhaps the first and most important part of the Gods and Idols universe is that not only does it take place in a future universe of humanity, it is also a humanity where the rules are different. Gods and angels are hardly mystical and mysterious, but daily agents of the worlds.

The universe has been conquered before, by great gods and their endless flocks of followers.

Their ruins now scatter over the planets, vast temples containing lost technology and the haunted echoes of their names, shattered and destroyed by a devastation so complete that the very planets bear the scars of their fall. What had once been verdant worlds have now been reduced to planets covered by barren sand dune or curved black by lava flows. Under their lifeless surfaces are mired the skeletons of billions of humans and their descendants.

You are one of the new gods, having arisen from one of the innumerable worlds and bolstered by the power of your followers. Few know what triggers exactly this transformation - legends speak of a time when great humans remained only mortal, leading through their wisdom or strength, but as equally plagued by the perils of age and injury as other of their followers. This is no longer the case.

The moment you drew followers to yourself, you sensed the aura. It was faint at first, but demanding in its own way, a drive that accentuated whatever natural abilities you had before. You became more intelligent, beautiful, or mightier the more your legend grew, and the more followers you drew to yourself. Simultaneously, you have felt a call to preach whatever standards that you once espoused unto anyone who would heed, becoming a prophet of your cause.

It began with perhaps a handful, a dozen of dedicated disciples. Then hundreds came to listen to you, to serve you, and to advance your cause. Simple desires of flesh or whim began to cease to matter as much while you pursue your agenda; unless your original goals were unusually carnal, whereupon your name has become a byword for degeneracy now. But it took a special event for you to have truly realized what you had become. Perhaps an assassin's bullet ended your mortal coil, and you returned a day later, faintly aware of the fact that you had awoken fully formed while another copy of your body lay still elsewhere. Perhaps you performed a miracle, not accidentally as had happened many times before, but intentionally with an extention of your will that you had never realized you had. Or perhaps one day, you simply tired of your flesh and ascended, becoming a creature of pure spirit and finding another body as easy to possess as wearing clothes was to you.

Soon afterward, your world was cast into chaos, a chaos that only you could uplift. You have led your followers to greatness, converted the unbelievers to your cause, and crushed all who opposed you. Quite likely, there were others similar to you, or that your world was already ruled by a demigod-lord. No matter.

Soon, all that remained of the unfaithful who defied you are scattered outcasts, holdouts in the most remote regions of the planet and barely worth the afterthought of your divine mind. You have become a god, a child of the cosmos.

Your story is different, unique to yourself, but you have reached the same conclusions as virtually every god, though distant as they might have been. That your evolution, common has it may be, was not natural but the result of an ancient war between the forefathers of humanity and it is somehow tied to the vast numbers of humans and near-humans scattered in the galaxy. And furthermore, while you have asserted your power over your planet, you realize that the planets bear the remains of ownership by far more powerful gods than you are.

And yet they are all gone, save for the ashes that blow listlessly over their temples. What has happend to them? And if they were destroyed...what power could have so utterly vanquished the gods themselves?


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