Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice

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This month, Mike and Roger talk about apotheosis.

We mentioned:

Ever and Anon, the PDF APA successor to Alarums and Excursions, the new Superman film, Percy Jackson, SCION, theodicy (not theurgy), Harpo holding up the wall, Chesteron's Fence, Gloranthan history, Wrath of the Immortals, Sufficiently Advanced, Sorcerously Advanced, Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books, T Kingfisher, Unknown Armies, In Nomine, A Man of his Word, Kate Daniels, The One Above All, Good Omens, and The Grognard Files on Dungeon Crawl Classics.

We have a tip jar (please tell us how you'd like to be acknowledged on the show).

Please use the discussion forum at discussion.tekeli.li rather than commenting below.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

Transcript thanks to Shimmin Beg,

Michael Cule: Hello. This is Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, with me, Michael Cule

Roger BW: and me, Roger Bell_West

Michael Cule: There's a break in the weather in High Wycombe and we are grateful for it just at this moment in time. It rained on Roger's barbeque

Roger BW: I have a tent. I have a gazebo.

Michael Cule: and I had water dribbling down the back of my neck at one point. And this time, we're going to be talking about matters high, high above our lowely status, about secrets of the cosmos, and gods -- who are these people? and can we knock them over?

Roger BW: I would like to say thank you to Glenn Lewis, who has sent us some money. This does encourage us to keep doing this show.

Michael Cule: And I would like to mention that after mentioning the demise of my former APAzine, I'm now writing for the free replacement which you can get online. We'll put a link in. It's called Ever and Anon, which is A&E backwards. The old one was called Alarums and Excursions. everandanon.org will find the homepage where the first two issues are available to everybody, for free. You might even want to join in yourself at some time.

Michael Cule: Onwards!

Roger BW: MUSIC SEGUE

Roger BW: Valued listener Shimmin Beg writes: "Prompted by a few episodes back of IRTD, I can't remember if you've discussed apotheosis as a topic before? Mike's run a campaign about it, and we've all had the players whose goal is to become the immortal god-wizard or actual canonical god, it goes back to Forgotten Realms etc. But what can be done with it as a premise? What does the possibility say about a setting, and about a game? How does it work in play? Etc."

Michael Cule: Alright. Let me first describe what I was setting up and why I felt it wasn't entirely satisfactory at the end. I was setting up the idea of a universe where you know there was a god and it has gone away, most of the divine has been shattered and destroyed, and thigns are going wrong with the universe. I set it up so that the player characters were innocents who had grown up in a mountaintop refuge who go out into the world and find out what's really going on. And because I wanted them to be powerful above the level of mortals from the start, I had them be children of the last surviving angels, of "messengers" they were called in literal translation, of the old god. A group of angels had been given a command to go out and form pairs and multiply, and they died as their children were growing up, without passing on the information about their ancestry so that the player characters could have a surprise. And they went out, and they found the world in a terrible state, and they found implications that the barriers between worlds were crumbling and becoming more weak, and things were crawling out from other worlds and from the places between the worlds, and some repair work was desperately needed to be done. And it also became clear that the god had been assassinated by a mortal conspiracy of sorcerers who were still around and still trying to get back up to heaven to finish the job -- perhaps take it for themselves. Looking back on it, I shouldn't have been surprised when they said yes, we'll sit down over there and start giving out dictates and start putting things back together. I shouldn't have been surprised because I was really forcing the situation into saying "somebody has to be responsible", but I was surprised, and I think I've worked out why. It's because I've had a dread of and a tendency to avoid responsibility my entire life. Alright, I am being humourous, but not totally humorous. I have avoided positions of high responsibility, like, let us say, parenthood, and going into politics and saving thw world. I've always avoided that, but my players just said "right". I was especially surprised because at least one of the players has proclaimed his atheism several times during my games, when my games drift off into the theological and supernatural, but here he picked it up and said "yeah, we gotta do this thing". And I was wondering if I had unfairly set it up. Is this the only thing you can do with gods, and gods being missing? Or is there something else? Is it possible that you could have a game like this where there were multiple possible good solutions? I'd really like to think that there were, but I'm not sure.

Roger BW: Well, I'm reminded of a friend of mine who was quite a high-ranking army officer before they retired, who said, essentially: "Yes, it's a horrible job. I hate having to do it. But somebody is going to do that job whether I agree to or not, and most of the other people who do it will do it worse than I will, and people would suffer as a result."

Michael Cule: Despite my egotism, I've never been able to give myself my own blessing for being responsible for the lives of other people.

Roger BW: You don't have to be good; you just need to be better than your co-workers.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and maybe your co-workers are what drives you away from the job.

Roger BW: But it seems to me that if you are talking about gods, you are not talking about, say, superheroes..

Michael Cule: That is something I wanted to bring up. I've just been to see the new Superman, which has my seal of approval. I'm sure they're very happy. Maybe they'll send us some merch.

Roger BW: Who knows, maybe one day they'll make a film about characters who weren't invented in the Second World War!

Michael Cule: Well, Superman is pre-Second World War. The Fantastic Four are coming up shortly, and they were in the 60s, maaaan.

Roger BW: We're going to keep making Fantastic Four films until you guys start going to see one.

Roger BW: Maybe this one will be better.

Michael Cule: I've always said that the thing about the Fantastic Four is that is isn't a superhero crime-fighting thing, it's a family of explorers of the unknown. They were Stan Lee's response to the DC comic Challengers of the Unknown, and he decided "Let's take the Challengers of the Unknown and give them superpowers."

Roger BW: Heh.

Michael Cule: And it's always been a soap opera, and they are playing up the soap opera aspects, as far as I can see from the trailers, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Roger BW: Fair enough.

Michael Cule: But alright, let's call Superman a wizard, shall we? Compare him to a wizard. He has much more power than anyone else around him, but he is not infinitely powerful.

Roger BW: He's playing on the same scale, he's just much further along it.

Michael Cule: Yeah.

Roger BW: Contrast, for example, if we're in Superhero Land, Dr. Manhattan, who is essentially a god. Because there is nothing you can do that will affect him. He can undo it, he can change it, whatever.

Michael Cule: Well, I understand in the comic books -- I've not read the latest sub-Alan Moore...

Roger BW: I've no idea about anything beyond the original appearance.

Michael Cule: Well of course, they face him up to Superman, and Superman wins by moral suasion. Which is realistically the only thing you can bring up against something -- he's an averagely godlike power, he's not even a weakly godlike power, he's average godlike, he can reshape worlds. And the good thing about Dr. Manhattan is that he turns out to be, in their version of it at least -- I'm not sure Alan Moore would agree -- he turns out to be capable of accepting that other people can tell him things and can point out when he's going wrong. There is evidence that the god of the Bible at one stage did this, but his followers these days tend to assume that they know what he said and they don't need to check with him.

Roger BW: Well you get it in the Old Testament a bit, don't you. One of the prophets goes and argues with God and says "No, this is not just." The razing of Sodom and Gomorrah would be one example that comes to mind.

Michael Cule: Managed to delay it, anyway.

Roger BW: The point is, it is an acceptable thing to do, to go to God and say "This thing you're planning to do, this ain't right." You don't just get squished for raising the idea. But I think also ineffability is important.

Michael Cule: Go on.

Roger BW: Step one, I think, if you're talking gods, you're not on the same scale any more.

Michael Cule: That's the assumption. I've always resisted it, but that is the assumption.

Roger BW: Possibly it's my Christian upbringing showing, but I think that may apply to morals to. I mean, one of the standard answers to the problem of innocent suffering -- i.e. if God is all-powerful and all-benevolent, why is there still suffering in the world -- is that God's morals are not quite the same as human morals, and God considers this necessary for reasons that we cannot understand because we are mere mortals.

Michael Cule: Yeah, I've heard it, and it boils down to "It's okay if you're god." Which leads to...

Roger BW: Do as I say, not as I do.

Michael Cule: Well, it leads to "It's okay if you're a Republican." And I don't want to encourage that sort of thinking in mortals.

Roger BW: But I do think, if you are talking about gods.. well, alright, there have been games that talked about gods, I'll talk about more of them in detail later, but I've seen at least one that came through the Bundle of Holding a while back, which basically, I think in some sort of absolute term you might be called junior demigods or something of that sort. You are the byblows of the immortals, and the immortals have gone away for some reason, so you are basically living in something like the real world, to the extent that you have to interact with it and have a job and pay rent and things like that. But at the same time, you are dealing with supernatural greeblies that nobody else can do anything about.

Michael Cule: There have been several of these. These are the Percy Jackson strand of roleplaying.

Roger BW: Yeah, I haven't read them but I've heard people speak highly of them.

Michael Cule: White Wolf did one in which you are supposed to be climbing up the ladder trying to have more divine power so that you can walk amongst the immortals at a later stage, which is good marketing for White Wolf, but...

Roger BW: The problem to my mind is that is could also be "You are a wizard, and you have got magical powers for Reasons, and now you have to live in the real world and have a job and pay rent and deal with supernatural greeblies that nobody else can deal with." It doesn't need the divine in order to work. At least, not at the low level.

Michael Cule: I think it is... they're both similar in this, that your power derives from inside of you, and not from outside of you.

Roger BW: You can't recruit somebody else and teach them your ways and expect them to gain your powers.

Michael Cule: On the divine, yes, that's true. Though, you can go out and search for and recruit the other youngsters who have discovered the daddy on the birth certificate is not entirely accurate. But I mean, both of them, you don't need to sacrifice to a god, or a political organisation, or anything, in order to have your power -- it is inside of you, it's personal. Whether it's teachable or not is different.

Roger BW: And that does diverge a bit from your classic White Wolf, oh, Vampire, where there is always a bigger vampire than you and they can just shut you down if they want to.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and their werewolves, where there's always the pack, and even if you rebel against it, the pack is still inside you. I think that's true. Where was I? Divine... there are responses to the problem of theurgy that say "we must accept God", and there are responses to that which are "You what?" I'm afraid I'm more in the latter. I think in most circumstances, in worlds where there are gods, you aren't going to be reaching up to them. You're going to be having some relationship to them, even if it's rejection of them-"

Roger BW: Or the occasional muttered "Crom!" when somebody hits you.

Michael Cule: "Crom, if you will not give me this, I will not sacrifice to you. I'm not going to sacrifice to you anyway, but I just thought I'd tell you."

Roger BW: Everybody I kill is a sacrifice to the god of battles!

Michael Cule: Ah, no libation for you, mate! But they're there, you have a relationship to them, and that's it. But at this level of gaming, we're talking about a) the killing of gods, and b) the taking of the gods' power for yourself.

Roger BW: I would like to spread that out a bit more, and say this is about a mortal becoming a god. Because there are different ways that can happen. Are you replacing one of the existing gods? Are there only so many god slots and you're taking one of them by pushing somebody else out? Are you becoming an entirely new god who works within that community, as it might be, somebody ascends to join the Olympian pantheon. Are you throwing them all out, and setting up a whole new system? These all have different flavours. But I think the common factor is, it is possible for at least some mortals to become gods. How widely known is that?

Michael Cule: Yes, I think it's something the gods.

Roger BW: And how widely possible is that? Is it something you have to be born with, or is it something anybody can aspire to if they are just X enough?

Michael Cule: I think that whatever the situation is, the gods keep it very closely to their chest. A person could do an awful amount of damage even attempting to disrupt the major powers that are holding things together. The first question is, "it is ever possible to have enough information to know whether it's safe to kill a god?" Can somebody who is not a god understand, when you kill the god -- it's like Harpo, holding up that wall. "What are you doing there, holding up that wall?" "Yes, yes, yes" and you kill him and the entire universe collapses.

Roger BW: Chesterton's Fence on a cosmic scale.

Michael Cule: Yes, I was thinking of Chesterton's Fence. That you can't tell. But assuming that there are people who are obsessive enough and overconfident enough to do this, I've not had the sense of "Let's kill god." I know there are people who would regard, if it existed, as an abomination. I'm not sure. Trouble is, I'm not a revolutionary by nature. I don't want to stand on any barricades, and I certainly don't want to clear up the mess afterwards. These people are revolutionaries against gods, and that's what the Seven Poisons, which were the villains of my GURPS Wandering Angels campaign -- that's not what I called them, I called them the Exiles, because they were exiled from both their mortal home, where they grew up like Clark Kent, and their divine home, and that's what it was about.

Roger BW: But one can picture, for example, an alternative arrangement. Something like your classic D&D world, once they started admitting the existence of gods for different cultures and so on, you know, not entirely unrealistically. If you have something like that, then you can, not I think unreasonably say, well, the old gods who nobody really worships any more gradually fade away, and then the new gods perhaps replace them, and one of the ways a new god can replace them is to be a mortal who is legendary enough to ascend in some way, and then they get talked about, and gradually their cult builds up.

Michael Cule: Glorantha is of course an early example of this, and a really good example. It has baked into it a level of conservatism because, when one of the young gods near the beginning overthrew one of the old gods, it was the storm god killing the sun and it didn't turn out well, and the storm god had to go back and fix it. And it is possible to clamber up the and become part of the legend of the world, and make your way one of the ways that is sustaining reality. And there have been bad examples as well. There are evil people who've become gods, and there are gods who have arguably overreached and destroyed part of the world with their actions, several times. It's a very conservative "don't interfere with things you don't understand" morality on Glorantha, and on the other hand, the people who save it are also people who go out and fiddle with the basic structure, which is, overall, given that it's a corporate and a multi-authored thing, is quite an achievement really. If I were on Glorantha, I don't know that I would want to tread that path, because it's depicted as a trap. You become a god, and you become bound to the way of your godhood, and you can never be anything new.

Roger BW: And of course, Glorantha also gives us the horrible example of the Godlearners. Really all I know about them is the name, and that they're a horrible example, and you don't want to do that. Personally, I regard applied theology as a very fruitful field of study. We have a small research god in the university basement, you know. But it doesn't seem to be a thing.

Michael Cule: Which you bombard with particles of faith and antifaith just to see what happens.

Roger BW: I want to have a small diversion here, which is what I might call the steady state vs. big bang theories of roleplaying campaign.

Michael Cule: Gosh, that sounds fruitful. Go ahead.

Roger BW: Basically, the steady state can go on forever doing basically the same thing. I think most of the campaigns I played when I was younger were of this sort. Particularly, they tended to be called "X's game" rather than anything else. And the campaign would go on with essentially the same characters, replacing dead ones, until the GM got bored or went to university. There was no conclusion. There could be big fights against big villains -- you could call them chapter breaks, perhaps -- but there was no sense of "okay, at this point, the game is over, the story is over." Versus the Big Bang, or more to the point the Big Crunch, where this campaign is about X, and when X is over, the campaign is over. The World War 2 game I ran ended basically with the end of the war. We still have in mind the idea of a single adventure for some years later, but fundamentally it is about that period, not the world in other periods. The 2300AD Bayern campaign that you're playing at the moment basically ends when the mission ends, and so on. And I think that a campaign about ascending to godhood can fit in either of these, but it's tricky. Obviously if you're going to have an end point, it is when one or more people ascend. And the vast majority -- okay, I need to talk about D&D here.

Michael Cule: I think you're going to be compelled to at some point.

Roger BW: Because what was originally the D&D Basic spin-off got into five volumes, basic, expert, I think companion, masters, immortals. And the immortals level of that, which was hastily dumped for the next version, and then Aaron Alston wrote Wrath of the Immortals, was basically about becoming and then living as a god.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and the problem here is the same as becoming a High Programmer in Paranoia.

Roger BW: Well, no, but it does mean that this is now a completely different sort of campaign.

Michael Cule: Yeah. Which nobody has had any experience with.

Roger BW: I mean, I will trust Aaron Alston when he said he'd made it work.

Michael Cule: Okay, I believe it can work, but I believe it's a damned difficult thing to do.

Roger BW: But I was having a look through Wrath of the Immortals before we talked about this, and his approach there is you are pretty much now self-motivating. You decide "I want to get one over on this rival god", or you decide "I want to gain power in this particular way", and you set off this plot and go about trying to achieve it. Rather than "somebody else does something and then you have to react."

Michael Cule: Yeah.

Roger BW: Basically they're causing their own shenanigans, and there is some stuff there about, yes, this will spill over into the mortal world, you know, you do in Zeus so that he loses some power and his priests are suddenly weaker, but that's not suggesting really that it's the same campaign. I could see something where you have a different group of players being affected by these divine shenanigans, but... that's really the only example I can think of as, you are playing gods on a continuing basis, and it's clearly not the same sort of thing.

Michael Cule: No. The problem is, the core problem of anything like this, is that you have to have a clear idea of what a god is, and what you need to understand to be a god. I believe philosophers have found this difficult over the years.

Roger BW: I suspect the more well-defined it is, the less divine it feels.

Michael Cule: Oh, good point. Well, the same thing happens with any sort of magical-based game.

Roger BW: I certainly know people who feel this way about magic.

Michael Cule: The more "You can't do that, because..." it feels, the more it feels like science and the less it feels like magic.

Roger BW: Thulsa Doom cares not for your conservation of energy!

Michael Cule: Well, I was thinking at this moment of the two systems Sufficiently Advanced and Sorcerously Advanced, which I have actually read and find interesting, but I have no idea whatsoever about how to run it, because it's diceless -- that's one reason -- and everything is a big handwavy. It's like the levels of magic in Mage: the Ascension. You have your characters defined by the degree of their mastery of various areas of magical stroke technological achievement, and if you have Travel, then they don't worry -- they describe how things look fro the point of view of the user, but they don't go into any detail of how it's achieved. There would be trainspotters, but there would be no railway enthusiasts in such a universe. People who actually care about couplings and gauge and steam pressure, as opposed to people who say "look at the pretty train, I must get its number."

Roger BW: I know this more from the aviation side, you know, I regard myself as an aviation enthusiast, I have some idea of how the various sorts of engine work, the design compromises you make when you build a plane that does this rather than that.

Michael Cule: And as one of your other podcasts demonstrates, you understand the business history and the relationships between the designers and their patrons, all that stuff.

Roger BW: But I know other people who regard themselves as aviation enthusiasts who basically like things that go whoosh and zoom. I mean so do I but...

Michael Cule: Yes, quite. I think you can only go so far with saying "Your intent makes the magc" and have a satisfying... the details matter. I know that lots of people who write film scripts think the details don't matter, but in a roleplaying game as in a movie, it's got to look right to look real, and the people who are going to say "hang on a second" are not your bad audience, they're your good audience. My players on a Wednesday night, if you're listening, you could give me a little less criticism about my sense of realism, alright?

Roger BW: But also, they're the ones who are getting involved in the world enough to say "hang on, this doesn't feel right", even in this completely alien world. You know, up to this point, this particular thing has been consistent, and now suddenly it's not any more.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and that probably springs from the GM or the author or the director or the scriptwriter -- the person putting the script forward -- having not described the earlier stages clearly enough.

Roger BW: Or at the very least, somebody in the world should notice and say "hey, that's odd!"

Michael Cule: And to take back my earlier bit of peevishness, I will say that when my players are reasonable and provide evidence that I'm being inconsistent with what I said before, or inconsistent with what the book say about the universe, then I will listen and I will say "Ah, good point, let's take it back a stage." There are moments when they're annoying and there are moment when they're not.

Roger BW: I think this needs a certain amount of double-mindedness, you know, on the one hand, certainly as GM and to some extent as an involved player, one has to be able to say "these are the actual rules, this is what is actually happening" from which I will generate the view of the world that the PCs see. But also as GM, and certainly as player, you've got to say "well, we don't understand all of it, it's magic". And for some players at least, it's difficult to hold both of those at once. You know, like Asimov talking about explaining how a rainbow works should not leave you less able to feel that the rainbow is beautiful, but for some people it does.

Michael Cule: Yes, understanding it should enhance your pleasure because it adds pleasure on more levels. I wanted to mention at this moment in time, on the becoming gods front, I wanted to mention the Commonweal books again. There's an example of somebody who's doing a heck -- he's withdrawn his books from availability on Google Drive, I hope some day somebody gives him enough money to actually publish the things properly. But they are difficult not only because of his eccentric choice of vocabulary, but also because he simultaneously does and does not explain what's going on, and he handwaves things, and yet it works, fundamentally. I think I could use that as a guide to doing something like Sorcerously Advanced. Because what it's all about is the moral question and the political questions of what it's like to be a sorcerer in a society which is egalitarian and wants to keep the sorcerers on a leash, and the sorcerers having to choose constantly not to go over the limits but to take the good things that having a society gives them. And I'm not quite sure what he's saying about becoming a god, because it happens to some of the characters that they are honoured as gods and gain power thereby, and yet they are still citizens of the Commonweal, and that is really weird, if you don't mind my saying so. I admire it greatly, but it's really weird.

Roger BW: Yeah. Certainly it's a good example of what I think of as fantasy with cogs. As in, there is clearly an underlying system of rules that governs how this works, even if we as reader don't see all of it. Or at least there is the impression of such a system, which in linear fiction is all you need. There probably is, given that the author-

Michael Cule: He has good verisimilitude, if you can look up enough of the words to understand, or get them from context. Stepping back a moment to the killing of gods, you pointed me back to T Kingfisher's Paladin sequence, and that is an interesting thing about -- and I rather wish I had used more of this in my creation -- that's about what happens to those devoted to a god when their god is killed. For reasons and by means that have yet to be revealed, and I do wish she would get on with it and do some revealing.

Roger BW: Yes, I haven't read all that was published so far but certainly the details haven't come out. I think it's fair to say, without spoilers for those who haven't read them (and I do recommend them, I like them a lot) there are many gods in this world.

Michael Cule: Yes, some of them are called saints and the distinction is a difficult one. It's one that I used in my campaign. Go on.

Roger BW: Most of them have some role that they call a paladin, though they do quite different things. The paladins of the Forge God do a lot of making things, extremely well, and they can fight, but they generally don't, for example. But essentially there is a little bit of the god permanently dwelling in each of these people. And all of a sudden, snap, it's gone. One of the things that is mentioned is, "When I was a paladin, the battle rage would come on me and I would know it was okay, because the god would make sure that I only killed bad people. Now that I think back on it, I'm not so sure that the god was always right."

Michael Cule: Yes, and that's a terrible thing to have to do. And that's one of the best things in it, and I think if I'd shown my angels' children more of the people who immediately suffered from the death of the god, and had given the one god who sits above more of a connection with his people, then maybe t would have been both a discouragement to take the gods' place, and an encouragement. To say, "Yes, I can do this. I will help you now." I used the idea of saints as beings that could protect a small area -- there were saints of villages and of cities who, because the god was gone, in the night-time mists would cover the land and things would creep through. And the saints of the cities and the towns and particular professions would protect what was theirs to protect, but they were holding a last bastion and knew that the night was going to overcome them. Which I thought was a nice bit of foreshadowing on my part, but maybe a little crude.

Roger BW: One thing I do like that I think Christianity misses out on slightly by having one big god for everything, is the idea of deities of specific areas. I mean yes, you have saints, a bit. But I mean the idea that not only do you pray for the god of the specific thing you're about to do, but also, the god of the specific thing you're about to do is not all-powerful, and they may disagree with the god of the people on the other side. "I am praying to the god of seducers, but the goddess of faithful marriages is opposing him", that kind of thing.

Michael Cule: You might be able to weave something together in which there are the bigger gods who are holding everything together -- who are holding up the wall, keeping the nasties out, and making sure that things fall down instead of up, and water freezes at zero degrees instead of boils.

Roger BW: The God of Gravity is on holiday. I'm standing in. I'm the God of Velcro.

Michael Cule: Everybody wear very thick boots. Ah, no, Velcro boots, during the God's holiday.

Roger BW: We're sorry about the sheep.

Michael Cule: The sheep are sorry about the sheep.

Michael Cule: You could have the cosmic-level gods, and you could have the "bigger than human, but still concerned with human things" gods. That as a division can be made to work, I think.

Roger BW: Obviously, as a modern moral relativist, I tend to think of gods as associated with specific cultures. Even if you can say "our god is basically the same as their god", our worship is not going to be the same as their worship, unless it is enforced from the top down, which most systems don't do.

Michael Cule: Yes, as the Catholic priest said to the Anglican, "you must go on worshipping God in your way, and I will go on worshipping him in His."

Michael Cule: Or it may have been the other way around.

Roger BW: But I think there are several things that feed into an actual game, the first of which is, who knows that it is possible to ascend to godhood, and for whom is it possible to ascend to godhood?

Michael Cule: Yeah, how do you go around finding out that sort of thing? I think you go about finding that sort of thing in the ancient records and legends. I think you look at the bit of history where things were not quite as tidied up, and the records have drifted through. Perhaps you make the acquaintance of a god who is going down and out, like Om, and doesn't mind spreading a bit of divine wisdom in order to bother the people who are staying behind.

Roger BW: "You know that inn? Nobody ever gets sick from their beer!"

Michael Cule: "You know that inn? Well, if you can get yourself born in the stable attached to it, you're in!"

Roger BW: So if this were a consideration in game, that would be an enjoyable first step. I mean you would set it up as a standard setting, potentially, and just gradually make it realised, as people continue their - all right, I like historical research, but let it fall out of that. You know, this does seem to have happened before. "The guy who is now the god of knowledge, well, hang on, in this thing from 3000 years ago he was an actual sage who had actual students. What changed?" And so on.

Michael Cule: I think you could do that even in a modern conspiratorial setting. That the illuminated ones, whoever they may be, are actively trying to become gods and are actively ensuring that you never find out how to do it.

Roger BW: I've lost the name of it. What is that modern slightly weird horror game where magic is based on obsession? Unknown Armies. Certainly, one of the things in that, becoming the personification of Particular Thing, is something that only one person can be at a time, and you can gradually edge someone out of it.

Michael Cule: Yes, an aspect of human culture, of being a human, because the humans are all that's ultimately real in that universe. And once the pantheon is full, at 333 members, then something big happens and the clock is reset, and maybe a new aeon of the universe occurs. It's difficult, I think, to find players for that, because humans regard obsession as being not healthy.

Roger BW: Well, I think the game does too. The further you go down that path, the more broken you are as a human being, and the game makes it quite explicit.

Michael Cule: And do you, a broken human being, want to play somebody even more broken than you?

Roger BW: Even if they can to THWAKOOM! occasionally.

Michael Cule: Even if they can use magic to get them money, or use money to get them magic. The plutomancers have to be very careful how much they spend, it causes problems.

Roger BW: So step one is "Can you, who can, can anybody?". Step two might well be "how?" and that is definitely going to tie into the specific world's theology. Do you have to defeat one of the existing gods? Do you have to get one of them to sponsor you, which is basically what Wrath of the Immortals did. You would find the god of, let us say, all war, and essentially apply to become the god of a tiny aspect of war under him, as far as I can tell from a quick reading.

Michael Cule: The demons and angels in In Nomine also try to get themselves a Word, under one of the bigger Words like "destiny" or "fate" or "lust", and you become a demon prince, the demon of, let us say, tentacle porn, and then you've got a position. I don't know that tentacle porn is something that's going to have a promotion path, but it definitely gives you a set of power and patronage that you can dispense to lesser demons, which is very neat.

Michael Cule: I will mention a very nasty way of doing it, which is kill and eat them. There's also David Duncan's "A Man of His Word", in which the words of magic are scattered across that cosmos in single syllables, and if you know one or more of them you start accumulating power. At the end of it, the hero is offered godhood but turns it down by spreading the knowledge of the word to many thousands of people, and diluting it down the point at which it's harmless.

Roger BW: I'm just reminded of the Ilona Andrews/Kate Daniels series in which -- spoilers for the series, at least the later books of it -- the heroine turns out indeed to be the daughter of something pretty darned close to a god, and one of the things that she can do and very few other people can do is use the words of power. Which have to be accumulated individually, because nobody talks about them, but only somebody with that level of resilience can do them at all, because if a normal mortal tries it, they would just be burned out by the magic flow. But they are very powerful if you can use them.

Michael Cule: In my Dawn of Magic campaign, I gave out the thirty-six words of the decans to a group of people including the player characters, and it was perfectly safe for another person to say the world. It just wasn't very safe for the person who held the word inside him to say the word, because at that point, the word connects directly to your life-force, and if you're lucky, you'll still be alive at the end of it, and if you're really lucky, you'll be able to reliably form the force of the word into something you wanted.

Roger BW: There is a standard exchange rate in GURPS for hit points to mana points.

Michael Cule: One for one. One for one. And the good thing is, you don't die when you get to zero hit points. You may not even die when you get to negative your total hit points.

Roger BW: You have to start making health rolls though, yeah.

Michael Cule: Do not die. Do not die! Poom!

Michael Cule: There is stealing, there is killing, there is defining a new sort of divine word and staking it out somehow and convincing people. I'd say that starting out as the founder of a school of magic and consolidating it into a workable theory of how magic works, and then riding the reverence of the people you share that with, I think that would be a possible thing to do if you knew what you were doing right from the start. But where are you going to get that sort of knowledge?

Roger BW: I think it would be fair to say for both of us that we are enthusiasts for mechanical systems of magic. As in, you can work out "this is stuff that magic can do, this is stuff that it sort of can do but it has a huge cost, this is stuff that it absolutely can't." And a system of divinity and divine powers, I feel, benefits from something similar, rather than simply "well, I'm big and tough, I can do this!".

Michael Cule: Yeah, I think you need to be... even a transcendent and immanent and omnipotent and omni-everything god needs to have a defined limit, even if it's only in his moral code. You need to have things that are not-god to be god.

Roger BW: If you're dealing with gods in the game, you need a solution that works in the game for the problem of innocent suffering, various other things of that sort. You don't need to tell people what it is, but you need to know what it is, because they're doing to explore it. My players certainly would.

Michael Cule: I don't suppose they get -- unless they do what Jack Kirkby did, and introduce themselves as the god of the setting, and explain things to the Fantastic Four when they come around. "Hello, I am the One Above All." I have enough egotism to do that, but in the campaign I ran, I only got to play God's secretary, who was holding things together frantically from the next office. "Do you think you could go and sit down now and start issuing some commandments?"

Roger BW: "I'm sorry, God is not available right now. He's watching cricket, with ALL of his attention."

Michael Cule: Well, it was roller-derby in Dogma, or something like that, wasn't it? When God goes on holiday you just have to hope that the help is competent.

Michael Cule: I think on the whole, my sympathetic portrait of a god is that he's a gamemaster. He's weaving the stories together and trying to do as well as he can, but the characters keep arguing with him and the players even more, and so he's doing his best, alright? He's doing his best. Give him a chance. This is another message for my Wednesday night group.

Roger BW: But I would also say, consider for example the Greek gods. I grew up with a lot of Greek mythology. Those are not -- I mean they're operating on a different level, yes, but their goals and motivations are basically the same as human motivations. You know, I want to sleep with this beautiful woman I've just seen, I want to keep the household safe, that sort of thing.

Michael Cule: And this is a strand in roleplaying games, the power fantasy strand, which I think may fight with the theme of being responsible in the use of power and doing things... I don't know. Maybe those games we've been looking at where you're a demigod and you have a chance to crawl upwards, tugging your forelock and saving your divine parent Father's Day presents, to greater power, maybe if you were a little shit it might be an interesting thing to play, for some people. I'm not sure it's interesting for me, but I think it might be for some people.

Roger BW: It's not one that appeals to me, basically because, as I said at the beginning, I believe that if you're invoking divine power it should feel different. Not just the same but bigger. A classical Greek would disagree with me. At least some of the classical Chinese would disagree with me. You have the whole celestial bureaucracy mirroring the Imperial bureaucracy.

Michael Cule: And vice versa. As above, so below.

Roger BW: But to me the Chinese Imperial bureaucracy is a sufficiently exotic setting already, I don't need to say "Oh, and it's divine as well."

Michael Cule: Yes, that's true. Hmm. Good gods use power responsibly and to do what is necessary. Other gods have fun. I suspect you could do a comedy god setting, in which maybe you're the Office of Divine Assistance. You are semi-powerful beings and you get these commands down from on high down from, you know, the Chief Executive Officer, whoever it may be, and you're out there to solve things with a wacky sort of feel to it. That might even be fun, if we don't want to be serious.

Roger BW: Or Good Omens and its many imitators, whatever you may think of the authors, the idea that, you know, the troubles of the mortal world are not troubles for you unless they are divinely inspired themselves, but you still have to interact with the mortal world and try to get stuff done.

Michael Cule: Yes.

Roger BW: And quite possibly you have to herd mortals into not doing the extremley stupid thing that they were planning to do.

Michael Cule: Perhaps you are under instructions not to let them know you're divine. I think that would be required. No miracles that are going to be noticed; it would work like magic did in Mage: the Ascension. If you got too ovviously no-excuse magical in that then the universe smacked you around the head. I could see political and diplomatic resaons why you don't want to do this stuff openly, and like I suppose the angel and demon in Good Omens, you would be operating in a distant office far away from Headquarters, and sometimes you slip-slide around the edges.

Michael Cule: I had a mental note to mention our friends at the Grognard Files who are lookijng at the Dungeon Crawl Classics, and praising the cleric's role in that, because the cleric's powers have a limit on them which goes down. You use up a reserve whenever you fail to invoke your powers, and I wanted to say to them, if you're listening fellows, but I think rather than saying it's an index of how angry your god is with you, it would work better if it was an index of your faith in god going down because he's just failed you. And at the end of each mission you have to go and pray a lot, and center yourself, and understand the real reasons why god failed to deliver that lightning bolt when you asked for it. I think that would work better than "god is angry with you".

Michael Cule: God should be angry with you sometimes, but.

Roger BW: Or you could look at a Christian model. I've heard sin described as, not a checklist of "thou shalt nots", but rather turning away from, being out of tune with what God wants, which you shouldn't need a checklist for, you should be able to work it out from first principles.

Michael Cule: And yet you get provided with a checklist

Roger BW: Well, yes, religions.

Michael Cule: So harmony with god is divine, and religion is human. That's a reasonable concept.

Roger BW: I mean, that's probably not a germane point for this specific episode, but it does seem to me really quite obvious that in a setting where you can pray to a particular god and you will be given miracles, that the role of faith is at least diminished.

Michael Cule: No, I'm going to disagree. Actually, faith may be diminished but hope might increase.

Roger BW: But you know your god exists, that's the thing.

Michael Cule: Faith as I'm using it means trusting that the universe is right, that things in general are beneficent towards mankind in general. And hope is the belief that that applies to you.

Roger BW: (laughter)

Michael Cule: And maybe that what happens when the god fails you is that you lose hope in your own ability to be worthy, and that's what corrodes at you.

Roger BW: Or contrariwise, you don't lose faith that the god exists, but you lose faith that the god will help you right now.

Michael Cule: You can decide to curse god and die. The second always succeeds the first. Mind you, it'll succeed even if you don't curse god, but never mind. Conan can get away with cursing Crom, but...

Roger BW: Crom is a low-intervention god.

Michael Cule: It says so on the package. It will not do you any good whatsoever.

Roger BW: But it sounds good.

Michael Cule: We haven't touched upon what religions do when gods die or change, and I think that's a big enough topic for maybe another time. In my own campaign I went with the classic that the core of the imperial faith in the One True God hang together, because that's where the cardinals are and they don't want to admit that everything's changed. "We're being tested" is their motto, but I think there are more interesting options. "Your god is dead, but I have a new one over here -- don't look at the tentacles." And there is also "we need no gods! Gods are dead! Hurrah!"

Roger BW: Where are we going to get the healing, and make sure the fields grow fruitfully this year?

Michael Cule: We don't need -- you need manure, not god! No, not for the healing, for the fields!

Roger BW: And also, D&D, at least the AD&D that I played with, had a gradation that low-level spells were gained from low-level divine servitors, and only the very high-level ones needed to come directly from the god. Which started to have interesting effects when you needed to travel to other planes, where maybe those servitors weren't available, or maybe your god didn't have influence there because it was some other god's dominion, that kind of thing.

Michael Cule: Because I tend to throw the kitchen sink and everything in, I did have things leaking in from other planes. At one point the player characters found themselves in a version of the Christian Hell and started letting people out, which may or may not have been a good idea.

Roger BW: Very traditional.

Michael Cule: Prison break.

Roger BW: Harrowing of Hell, dash it all!

Michael Cule: Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to have a license for that sort of thing.

Michael Cule: Do you have anything else you wish to draw to my attention?

Roger BW: Well, clearly this is something we can talk more about in the future, but I think that's the key of it. To me, divine should mean special.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and working out "special in what way" is the work of an entire campaign, maybe several seasons of a campaign.

Roger BW: Actual ascending to godhood seems to me, it is, at the very least, the end of this phase of the campaign, and the way I tend to run things, I would be very tempted to say "Okay, somebody else run something for a bit, and we will start the new campaign with the newly-ascended gods later" rather than as a continuation of the direct narrative.

Michael Cule: I think I might well be tempted to find myself on the mortal plane in that world, some time later. I don't think they even managed to kill all of the people who had killed the previous gods, and there were rumblings from the chthonian entities who got excluded from the upper world, and there was possiblility of further developments written into it. I'm not sure I ever will, but it's there.

Michael Cule: Well, thank you Roger, for that.

Roger BW: And thank you, Shim.

Michael Cule: And thank you Shim for the very good question, which we may or may not have answered.

Michael Cule: If you have any divine wisdom you are willing to share with we lonely and impertinent mortals

Roger BW: Don't look at the light!

Michael Cule: Look at the light! Look at the light! All right, blink, you can blink now. Then you can contact us via...

Roger BW: Leave a message on the website, or email podcast@tekeli.li

Michael Cule: And we'll be back again in another month, we sincerely and devoutly intend.