World Concept: Gods Amongst Us

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I have a developing idea of another concept, though it does not contain nearly as much detail as the Nightlands one.

The basic idea is of a society that has, at some point in it's past, a divine war that resulted in all the gods being thrown out of the divine planes, and relegated to living as mortals, reincarnating over and over again.

The first and biggest effect of this is that any demi-god child and their descendants for several generations have a measure of divine ability - more commonly known as magic. Their magic also tends to follow what their divine ancestor is patron of - a water god will spawn water mages, a fire god will spawn fire mages, etc.
There are exceptions, but they are very rare. Magic pre-existed the divine war, but it was rare for humans to be able to channel it, with most magic-using being more people using magical objects or priests and clerics receiving divine aid.
However there has always been a goddess of magic, and her descendants can defy common patterns of reducing magical ability, with a mage being born four or more generations after the goddess but having demi-god strength. Descendants of the goddess of magic also have no perceptible alignment in their magic, potentially being able to cast anything and everything.

The second issue is that some of the gods can cause trouble when they become aware of their divine nature. This more than the issue of parenting mages has given rise to an order of Watchers who have taken up the task of keeping track of the gods when they incarnate, and if they start to cause trouble for normal people, kill them.

Some gods incarnate in certain family lines - usually the more reliable and predictable ones. Some have a tendency to incarnate in certain areas - a forest god gets born near a forest, a sea god is born in a coastal or island village, even a god of Justice tends to be born in a city because that is where law courts and universities that teach law are located. These gods are slightly more difficult to track, but often can be found before they reach puberty.

But the ones the Watchers are most concerned with are the ones with less definite patterns - random parentage, random location of birth.

Some Watchers have become so prejudiced about the gods they would prefer to kill them on sight and will find any excuse to get rid of them.

Meanwhile there are some gods who want to live unassuming lives, playing at being mortal, and then there are some who are vicious, violent, or scheming plotters who inevitably want to grab power and rule as tyrants. The former get misunderstood by prejudiced Watchers, when something drives them to defend themselves - like loggers trying to log the forest that is home to a forest deity and the deity trying to stop them - while often Watchers cite the latter as reason why all of the gods are dangerous, all of the time.

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So yeah, I was idly thinking about this and managed to wrangle my two nebulous Main Characters around into something of a plot.

The main characters are two Watcher-trained but independent-working adventurers who meet by random. One is a mage woman, the other is ranger man. The general idea for a plot that came to me is that they agree to temporarily work on a relatively minor job together and end up going on to work together on several jobs. At first they are doing busy-work - fetching packages, carrying messages, obtaining supplies that are only available in another town. They get sent on a mission to locate one of the more problematic gods so that the Watchers can capture him and keep him under protective custody. They meet a Watcher-backed archeological team studying a ruined temple that dates back to before the divine war, and take documentation of their finds back to the major Watcher base.

However while stopping at the Watcher base they accidentally stumble upon a plot that eventually is revealed to be a plan to "deal with" the gods, once and for all. The people who are in on this plan seem to be the highest-ranked members of the Watchers.

The investigation of the ruined temple is part of an ongoing project to find a way to kill a god. The problem god they brought in is the one it will be tested on.

The Mage Woman Protag is believed, because of her anomalous level of magic, to be a descendant of the Goddess of Magic and the Watchers have kept her as an ally so that when they have everything ready, they can use her in a blood magic ritual to track the Goddess of Magic. The reason for this is that they have come to believe that if they kill Goddess of Magic, her death will also kill the rest of the gods as well, since magic is basically just another name for divine power, and because she is the goddess of it, she is basically the goddess who governs the existence of the gods.

This leaves both of the protags in shock and causes a couple of important secrets to be revealed, the Ranger Man Protag is the God of the Hunt and the Mage Woman is the Goddess of Magic.

They have to find a way to not only prevent the senior Watchers from getting far enough in their plot to get to the tracking magic stage, but also call together a gathering of the gods to deal with the Watchers. And all this with severely curtailed powers that living as mortals causes.


Of course all of this grew out of a mental image of the Hunter and the Mage getting into a romance.