Sci-Fi World With Heavy Emphasis on Gods?

Well, excuse me dear reader, it’s Sci-Fi/Fantasy!

Honestly, it’s not that weird or out of the norm, but it does stray from the typical Sci-Fi depiction. Yes, religion is HUGE within the worldbuilding I have created. The Pantheon is likewise very big, as well as decently complicated. It’s a lot to go over, but it is important to the game world!

Now, if you haven’t detected my stalling for words (girl how do I even manage this typing!), I’m trying to figure out a good starting point to share the religion. I think probably the most prevelant thing is that each set of Hearthkin (group of species that resided on the same planet and sometimes systems in the pre-FTL stage) all worshipped the same Gods and Goddesses but depectided them differently and with different names. For instance, one of the Goddesses, Avernus (I SWEAR I DIDN’T STEAL IT FROM DND), has the name Vrth’zoros in Lepherian scripture. Within their tongue, that is how they refer to her. They also depict her as a dragon and an evil force, while her common depiction is a Sea Serpent that promotes growth and expansion. Generally, a culture’s view of a God and Goddess depends on how they view their correlated realm within their own culture - as well as anything the God or Goddess actually did within the Reality Plane.

This begs the question of how the common names and depictions of these Gods and Goddesses came to be. It’s actually an interesting story - they aren’t common galactically! The names and depictions of the Gods and Goddesses revolve around the ideals of the nation that the game primarily takes place in - as well as where the player is from. This place is the Yami Collective.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t efforts to commonalize Gods and Goddesses’ depictions. In fact, you can think of this effort like actual competing religions. The Lurain (Don’t worry about these name drops!) depict Astarious, the Goddess of Magic, as an infaliable good while their neighbor, Pyra, depict her as a selfish insolent fool. Obviously, this causes massive friction, and this friction can tend to start wars. While religions don’t tend to argue about the existence of who and what, they always argue about their why and hows.

This gets more complicated when you pull in dead Gods - but let’s not worry about that right now!

Well, Who Are These Gods?

As mentioned before, each of these names and ideals are in the context of the Yami Collective. This is honestly very helpful, since their view on religion heavily focuses on the idea of balance. This means that they paint Gods and Goddesses more grey than other cultures, so they don’t have dedicated good and bad Gods. This is particularly prevelant for the Weavers, who I’ll talk about in a moment.

Regardless of your hearthkin, Gods and Goddesses are always seperated into a three-tiered hierarchy. Intiutively, the highest tier are the strongest while the lowest are the weakest.

The Temporal Creators

As the name suggests, the Temporal Creators are the trio that created the world. In Yaminian culture, these three are named the Lightweaver, the Nightweaver, and the Dawnweaver. The Yaminians tend to ignore these three in worship, as they believe they would essentially be worshipping to Gods that would only be insulted by them, if they’re even noticed. In otherwords, they’re far too above their realm to care about mere Yaminians.

The Temporal Creators themselves each oversee one of the planes. The Lightweaver oversees the Reality Plane (the plane you and me would live on - unless you are a God or something ig), the Nightweaver would oversee the Celestial Plane, and the Dawnweaver oversees the Astral Plane.

A fun fact that is going to be heavily depicted throughout the game is that the Huashan believe that the Dawnweaver does not exist and is actually just the joint effort and pairing of the Lightweaver (Kaga) and the Nightweaver (Kage).

The Weavers

The next teir are the Weavers. While the Temporals created the universe, the weavers literally weave the forces that make up the universe. There are 7 total alive Weavers (yes, Weavers can die!) that make up the Celestial Council at the start of the game.

Lylah, for instance, is the Goddess of Time. She is quite literally responsible for governing time within the universe for each and every plane. She is commonly depicted as a Phoenix, and is known to not be able to die like one. In fact, because of this, she is the oldest and one of the only three long-standing Weavers.

The other Gods and Goddesses include: Astarious, the Goddess of Astral/Magic; Avernus, the Goddess of Growth and Expansion (or Chaos); Grayvist, the God of Gravity and Order; Matre, the Goddess of the Atom; Nivus, the God of Space; and, finally, Evanus, the God of Death and the End. These Gods and Goddesses do have relationships as well - for instance Avernus and Grayvist are wed and represent the balance of the universe.

The Aspects

Finally, the last tier of the Gods and Goddesses are the Aspects. These are basically all of your basic Gods - like the God of Fire or something. Not to diss on all of them though - for instance my favorite Aspect is Thranix, the God of Eternity! Although, you may notice that Eternity is technically a subset of Lylah’s realm, which is really what defines the main difference between the Weavers and Aspects. The Weavers have realms that do not fall under any other God while Aspects will almost certainly fall under a subsection of the Weavers.

Aspects are also divided further by their general alignment. It is helpful to note that this is not a tag that people and worshippers themselves use, but tags the actual Gods and Goddesses use on each other. This means that most people will never hear these terms.

To explain these alignment tags, the Ishari are generally good aligned Gods, ones who want to aid and help mortals. They don’t necessarily have to do this all the time, Ishari Gods can aid in the extinction of a species. It’s just that their overall goal is for the betterment of mortals.

The Maar are Gods that have no interest in mortals. They are basically neutral and focus on matters in the Celestial Plane.

The Raum are what we would consider evil Gods and specifically seek the downfall of mortals. They act like demons in the Reality plane, commonly attempting to stew hatred and wars just for the fun of it.

Wait - What Happens When a God Dies?

I’ve mentioned that this is possible a few times now and has, in fact, happened before with the Weavers! Well, it depends on the position of the God or Goddess. Obviously, the Temporals can’t die (or can they? :3), so their role is out of the question. When a Weaver dies, Gods have the opportunity to ascend. This effectively means taking over that Weaver’s previous realm while forgoing your old one. This tends to happen on a Celestial Council vote, but can happen by influence or force if the politics of the Celestial Plane permit it at the time.

For aspects, Celestials or Mortals tend to take the reign. This requires nothing more than attunement to the realm, which does mean that fights tend to break out. It is easier for Celestials to become Aspects, but mortals, in certain circumstances, have been known to ascend to take an Aspect’s place.

Atheist - Do They Exist?

I always read people talking about how the existence of Atheism makes no sense in Fantasy worlds were the Gods and Goddesses literally interact with the world. This, quite honestly, confuses me.

I mean, people think the Earth is flat! And even then, it is known that someone will rather believe that their eyes are decieving them than that they were wrong about a longstanding belief. Look at the flat Earth community again!

So, yes, there are people who just do not believe in the Gods. They’re obviously a lot rarer and few and far in between, but they definitely do exist.