Creation Myth: The Jewel

Azaryin

Senior Magitechnician
Original poster
FOLKLORE MEMBER
Invitation Status
Posting Speed
  1. Multiple posts per day
  2. 1-3 posts per day
  3. One post per day
Writing Levels
  1. Intermediate
  2. Adept
  3. Advanced
  4. Prestige
  5. Adaptable
Preferred Character Gender
  1. No Preferences
Genres
Fantasy, Fantasy, Fantasy. Swords and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, Dwarf Fortress. Medieval Fantasy, basically. I also love futuristic sci-fi stuff here and there.
Creation Myth: The Jewel
A Godly Worldbuilding Game

The Jewel 2.png

Artwork courtesy of Bubblegum Obstagoon (???)​

The Jewel is a mythical deal made between a handful of deities and a group of entropic interlopers. The deific powers may get to create their own deific realms and people, but the entropic beings make their dark demands in return. No realm will go without strife and suffering, and no god or people will go untested. Thus is the price paid to play for The Jewel.

A handful of deities sit around the game table, ready to set up a portion of the playing field to fit their designs. The entropic Masters fill in the cracks and spaces left by ignorance and neglect as the deities build their little piece of the board. The deities all ponder their machinations, future and present, to reach their victory conditions. They eye each other across the board, unsure who could be friend or foe. How can the game be played?

As they think, a set of rules is laid out by the Masters, dictating the phases of play and the eventual end game. Right now, we'll worry about the first.






1st - Creation

Welcome to Creation Myth: The Jewel! This is a Godly Worldbuilding roleplaying game where you will play as a deity that creates a land, a people, and reaches for a victory condition. Not to necessarily "win the game", but to satisfy your purpose as a deity in this realm. Holding onto your little piece of The Jewel will still be very important as End Game approaches. My role as gamemaster is to throw adversity at everyone one of you, and to do it consistently so there's rarely a dull moment in your world. Your role is to play your deity to the best of your ability, keep your chosen people alive and believing in you, and eventually complete the End Game scenario.

You do indeed get to create your chosen people and their land for the most part. We will collaborate together on the construction of the map, which will be made up of 9 sections and borderlands between each of them. You will pick a section from the main map and create your land there, while I create savage lands wherever a deity has not chosen. These lands will be left unseen until discovered by your people. You will be given an allowance of "Boons" to bestow upon the land.





Boons and Banes

Boons describe creatures, machinations, and structures that have been placed before or shortly after the chosen people are created. They are not under control of the people or the deity, but they are generally beneficial in some way if the chosen people learn to control it, use it, or exploit it in some way. Leylines, ancient constructs, old haughty guardians, or strange and powerful creatures. Cards played right, they could aid in your deific machinations.

Banes describe disadvantages put upon a domain that can manifest immediately as inhibitions, solid walls to development, terrible geography, natural savagery, inclement weather, or even magical anomalies. They may also manifest later in things such as curses (vampiric, lycanthrophic, demonic), or buried ancient evils that ravage the land. For each boon chosen, the Masters choose a bane to test you.

For the people, their boons may give them resilient bodies to deal with their environment, an innate command of an aspect of the realm (animals, plants, magic, an element, etc.), greater knowledge of the world around them, an innate sense of community to keep them together, and many other things. You will choose what boons are appropriate for your people during creation.

As for the Masters, they may see fit to bestow banes upon them as well if they find you overspending your allowance. They may end up resembling nothing close to your deific image, be cursed with a lack of resilience for their harsh world, be unfit for certain geographies, or even just be a generally rowdy people. How this manifests is up to them, and they won't always be cursed in such a way, but it will always be made to test you.




2nd - Introduction

Once all is said and done for creation, you will introduce yourself to your chosen people and provide them with your instruction, scripture, tenets, and whatever else you wish to bestow upon them in your short time in this world. The people you meet will be your first followers, and it is up to you to make sure they continue to believe in you. How you set up your civilization, your church, your religion, or anything to secure your influence in this world is up to you. This introductory phase will take place over a space of years, between five and ten, and be the exact same for every deity. During this phase you may not explore outside of your land, and you may not meet with the other deities. The purpose is to secure influence with your people, after all. Create a prophet, make up rituals, decide on symbols-- whatever works for you, but be sure your people have adequate connections to you.

As part of your introduction, you may choose to eliminate one of your Banes near the end of your introductory phase as a show of your deific power and influence. Should you choose to opt out of this, your people will be none the wiser, but you will have the respect of the Masters. What this means for you will be shown in time, but do not leave a bane behind lightly. This will make it harder for you. Getting brownie points with the Masters is not worth it if you don't think you and your people can take it.





3rd - The Game

Now begins the meat of the game. You have a godly portfolio, a chosen people, a land, and most of all you have a goal. Your goal is your major motivation for playing upon The Jewel, and could be many things. It could be entirely aside of the other deities, or conflict with them directly, all dependent on what it is and how you and your people go about it. The machinations of the Masters will fight against you the whole way, and they will never go easy. If they can take you out of the game with their next move, they will, and they will use their chaotic archagents to do so. Demons, devils, shadow beasts, aberrations, and monsters of all kind may litter the world. Magic storms, exploding volcanoes, rending chasms, and even dissenters from your own people will try to undo your machinations. You have followers, but what you really need is Influence.

Influence is what allows you to send a messenger to inform your people. Influence lets you create heroes and avatars from your people. Influence gives you power to create tools to use against the Masters and keep them from cutting the legs out from under you. How you gain Influence is dependent on your goal, but you will always gain it on your forward path to victory.




Goals

Every deity has a major goal. It's the reason why you're playing the game. Instead of go on a long spiel about what goals are, I'll list some examples.


War God
You vie for control of your part of The Jewel by conquering it, and then conquering anything around it, and anything left unclaimed, and possibly anything claimed by anyone that isn't your or your people.
Perhaps you wish to annihilate every interloper faction from The Jewel, just to flex nuts and say you and your people and monster slaying badasses. Perhaps you wish to wipe every tree-humping, nature-loving, shroom-chewing momma's boy off the face of the map. Maybe you just have an innate love of waging war and wish to share it with everyone around you, whether or not they like it. Yours is not to question why-- yours is but to do or die.


Love God
You vie for control of your part of The Jewel by bringing it under your wing, arm, tentacle, or other strange and indescribable limb through love and camaraderie. Your people will love you, their world, and each other. Maybe even the other gods and their people. Maybe even the interloper factions. Who knows what their power could do?
Perhaps you wish to assimilate all other peoples to yours, thanks to incredibly malleable genetics and maybe a little magic. Perhaps you wish to bring the entirety of The Jewel under the banner of one god, or one pantheon, by making nice with the other deities and their people and working for a better tomorrow. Maybe diplomacy is just your favorite thing in the world. Maybe you don't absolutely detest war, and your people are the only ones you care about-- everything else can die in a fire. Perhaps, your love is Passion, and you and your people are passionate about some certain thing which defines them. Whatever it is, you definitely do love it.

Elemental God
You wish to cover your land, and possibly the entirety of The Jewel in your element. Drown the world as a water god, set it on fire as a fire god, bury it under miles of shale as an earth god, or liberate it from its core as an air god. Or, maybe you just really like your element and you have a goal that isn't directly associated with that. Maybe you don't want to bring ruination to The Jewel for everyone else just because it suits you and your people. Or maybe, just maybe, fuck 'em anyway.

Dr. God, MD
The world is sick and dying, and you already know it. The Jewel is your patient, and you will do whatever it takes to heal it. How you go about 'Healing' it depends on how you manifest your power, and how your people follow that motivation, but you will heal it. Maybe you wish to burn away all the corruption riddling The Jewel. Maybe you want to surgically remove it all and jettison it into the aether. Maybe you want to heal the landscape and bring longevity to all mortals. Whatever you do, remember your intervention may cause more harm than good if you aren't clever.

Undeath God
All flesh is grass. All is grist for the mill. The goal of all life is DeAtH. You are a patient god. A conniving, plotting god that wishes to consume The Jewel in a thick blanket of fog and necromancy. Your people may start as mortal, but their eventual goal is immortality through cheating the system, just as you intended. Everything will join the ranks of the undead. Fuck nature, fuck life, and fuck the original design of mortals-- you're here to screw with the status quo and make a race of little bastard cheaters while you're at it. You may be okay with what everyone else is doing, and they might not be okay with your existence or principles, but you're here to make sure skeletons walk and zombies shamble.
What's that? This sure sounds an awful lot like what an interloper faction might be? That's because it is, and you can guarantee that if they are there, The Jewel ain't big enough for the both of you.

Trickster God
You are either a gormless asshole that does what he wants, or a chaotic mastermind that sees far too many steps ahead for anyone to catch. Regardless, your major goal is to mess with every other deity playing on The Jewel. How you go about that is your business. You don't so much have a goal as you have a checklist of stupid pranks you wish to pull off. Replace ancient artifact of the War God with a toy replica that does nothing? Check. Steal everything out from under an interloper faction and leave them penniless, upset, confused, and none the wiser? Check. Inspire your prophet to meet with the Love God's people, animate the statue of the Love God, then make sweet Love to the Love God statue? Ballsy. Whatever you do, you will not gain influence unless you and your people are screwing with someone.



These are just a few examples of what you might choose, and you might mash some things up to make your deific portfolio in the end.




4th - End Game

End Game is the final phase, as expected, and it is the make-or-break point for every deity and every people. This will be the most difficult phase of the game, by far, and may be made more difficult by how much you shit around during the 3rd phase. How long it takes to get here is dependent on how fast things are moving in the 3rd phase, but you can guarantee it will at least be hundreds of years.

End Game will introduce the greatest challenges the inhabitants of The Jewel have ever faced. True agents of the Masters, cataclysmic weather, giant monsters, literal armies of demons pouring in through planar gates everywhere on The Jewel. Whatever it is will be hinted at during the 3rd phase, but not enough that you may easily guess the nature of the encroaching forces of destruction.

You will have to use all of your advantages, spend all of that Influence, call in all your favors, and pull out all of the stops in order to survive the End Game scenario. But, if you do survive, you can count yourself among the winners. The Jewel will soon join the Greater Cosmology with you as the new proven gods of your little piece of it. Your denouement is up to you at that point. All of you.

The Players


Of course, we need to create the players that will play this game. This means filling out a character sheet/application.

Which I'll get to. I promise. I just need to make sure this is posted before something stupid happens like... my computer shuts off.


Player

How often can you post? (Once a week, multiple times a week, once daily? More than that?)
How long do you think you will commit to this RP?
Would you like to use a Discord for OOC?

Deity

Name: You deific moniker. How you call yourself is one thing. What epithets the people give you are up to them, but you can definitely influence them.
Domains: What are your areas of concern? Choose a few aspects-- three or four-- to define what your god is and does.
Manifestation: How does your god appear in mythology? How does your first manifestation appear? How do their avatars manifest?
Demeanor: How does your deity communicate and present themselves to others? Are they curt or polite? Vague or descriptive? Does it depend on the company?
Major Goal: What is your overarching goal for playing on The Jewel? What do you want your people to accomplish?

I'll make an example god just so we're all on the same page.



Name: Nox, The Machine That Looms
Domains: Metal, Constructs, Night.
Manifestation: Nox appears as the upper torso of a massive humanoid machine with jagged edges, hanging in dark clouds that is visible only when lightning strikes. You never see him directly-- only the absence of light which he creates by his presence. His avatar manifests as a machine that casts no shadow as almost no light can reach them. The blackened and cold silhouettes can be seen no matter the light level, almost as if they are darker than the darkness itself.
Demeanor: Nox speaks in hollow whispers that always seem to be behind and right in front of the listener. He speaks calmly and deliberately, enunciating each word clearly. Despite how threatening his appearance may be to the unaccustomed, he at least sounds approachable. In the right company, Nox is quite the talker. He enjoys passing time talking about anything within his domain, but he also likes to explore domains and fields outside of his own. The right company, by the way, is anyone who doesn't think he's trying to Grey Goo the entirety of The Jewel. He probably isn't.
Major Goal: Nox is a Machine God, and his major goal is to get his people to produce machines that will serve his and their purposes. Guardian constructs and servant machines, something that will eventually drain the light from their homeland and drown it in darkness, and eventually... a machine body which Nox may manifest in to physically represent himself upon The Jewel once again. That's right. Nox's goal is to have a second coming, and his people must build him the body. Perhaps he may even get his people to ascend into becoming a machine people.



Now, I bet you'll want some example aspects to make a portfolio with. Well, don't worry. The mythology of Creation Myth is designed to be hyperflexible, so you could pick a handful of one word aspects and make a deity out of them. Some examples I can give to spur ideas would be...

The Classical Elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water)
Emotion (Sorrow, Rage, Hope, Love)
Geography (Rivers, Oceans, Mountains, Hills, Plains, Forests)
Bounty (Farming, Hunting, Mining, Fishing)
Commerce (Wealth, Merchants, Travel)
Communication (Singing, Messengers, Mail, Stories, Books)
Visceral (Blood, Bone, War, Conquest, Death)
Nature (Plants, Animals [Possibly of a specific type])
The Soma (Strength, Endurance, Intelligence, Willpower)
The Cycle (Light, Darkness, Day, Night, Life, Death, Decay, Growth)
Trickery (Theft, Lies, Secrets, Japes)
Weather (Storms, Rain, Snow, Lightning, Sun, Skies, Clouds)

There's a lot more I could give. But, I can't think of it all off the top of my head. These were just supposed to be a general rubric for the hyperflexible mythology we're working with.
 
Last edited:
The Game Board
Scope of Reality.png

The Jewel is the name of the realm, and maybe it's cosmological representation, but not it's true physical form. The map wraps around at any edge, meaning that all deities' lands are bordered by each other and three unknown spaces. The borderlands that separate them are a mashup of the biome portfolios of what lies in between, and they are usually hostile, but clearly valuable to explore and conquer. You can decide together on what the mash up of your lands will be as you create them, but know that the Masters will by manipulating what you do not focus on. If you want safer borders, you may notice the savagery in your land is a little closer to home than is comfortable. By decision of the deities, however, the world map might not wrap around, and the world may just be a square floating in the aether.



The Corners

The Corners are every section that is left untaken by a playing deity, and they make up the four corners of the Game Board. Of course. Though they do wrap around to each other, the only aspects that affect their geology are the neighboring sections claimed by deities. Even then, the Masters will seed their own chosen biome portfolio into each corner of the map on top of what the deities choose. The end result is usually a recognizable but obviously changed landscape. There are would-be foes and could-be friends within these lands, but moreover it's more land to claim. More land is more resources. More resources is greater expansion. Expansion means followers. Followers means Influence.




The Core

The Core describes the section in the very middle of the map, bordered and affected by every deity's land. It usually turns out to be a chaotic mishmash of lands made alien by the designs of the Masters, and filled to the brim with adversity. These lands will not open immediately, and nothing from it will harass anyone unless if it's provoked. Or attracted. Or dragged out.

End Game will always involve The Core, as the final test will arise from within the very center of that map section. As said, only clues are given as to the nature of the End Game, but determined (and foolish) scholars may discover something deep within the bowels of the core if they study long enough. Well, study long enough and aren't slaughtered by what lies within.
 
Last edited:
In the meantime, feel free to post your character sheets/applications! Remember, this is hyperflexible. If you want to discuss ideas, I'll... I'll make an OOC chat for that since it seems like we're actually somehow moving forward. In fact, I'm opening this to Discord for OOC. This thread is also open for OOC, of course. Remember to link the post with your character sheet to me so I can plop it on the front here and on the eventual IC thread once we have a main cast all set up.

Message me if you'd like to get set up in the Discord! I'll send you the link privately. Probably best not to leave it lying out in the open, after all.

Really, this is uncanny. This is the first time I've done anything like this in a while, but it's just kinda pouring out. I'm excited!