(What is the past? Can you touch it? What is a post? Was it almost a week ago? (Far longer now))
I dreamed of a woman with rose petals growing from her head. They laid on her face like a veil, showing only a white chin and a red mouth. There were paintings of her everywhere. We were in her kingdom.
She was old, older than any human had any right to be, and she was evil. So was I. Neither of us in the “depends on your point of view” way.
Her reign was in decline. Mine was on the rise, building on her ruins.
The memory of a dream changes in the telling. Try penning in a breeze by blowing on it.
Does this mean a damn thing, or only that I saw the picture below before falling asleep:
Not fit for polished pews are those knees that have bled crawling in the dark on rough stone.
Not fit for gentle hymns are those ears that have heard the whispers of the dead and the damned.
Not fit for sweet communion are those lips that have supped on the the effluvia of sorcerery.
But the human soul must have its idols, so where the gods above grant no succor the gods below happily and hungrily fill their void.
Get To The Point
Been a while since I touched this, but now the pieces have fallen into place... oh yes...A little bit of this:
http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/06/fixing-religion-augury-blasphemy-and.html
And a little bit of this:
https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2021/08/local-gods-and-spiritual-technology-of.html
The version of the GLOG I run is Skerples' Many Rats on a Stick. It has rules for using scrolls, but not for making scrolls. This is a system for filling that niche.
So: there are gods everywhere, and everywhere and everything has a god. Obviously there is only One True God, and the rest are fallen angels, ascended masters, living reality-glitches, cannibal ghosts, antediluvian abstract machines, and so on. This is fine, it means they're more venal. They are divided into the Gods Above, who are all hoity-toity and must be plied with red heifers and barrels of rosewater to grant kings victories, and the Gods Below, who are the divine equivalent of those abyssal fish that can go weeks without eating and swallow things bigger than them when they finally do.
Gods can grant scroll-like tokens, called miracles, if you give them sacrifices at one of their shrines. Each shrine has a rating that limits the number of MD that can be contained in across all miracles it's granted, based on how fancy it is. You don't get to choose what spell the miracle contains, only make the request (e.g. "healing pls") and hope there's something close enough within the god's domain. Using the miracle against the god's interest will turn it into a curse.
At baseline, miracles cost 20 sp in sacrifices (or gp, or whatever the standard currency is in your campaign) per MD for Gods Below, and 200 sp per MD for Gods Above. The cost can increase if the god doesn't like you, if you've worked with their rivals, if you haven't used your other miracles from them quickly enough or in suitably impressive ways, or if the sacrifices aren't in line with their preferences. Sacrifices stolen from another god are always accepted at full value (zero-sum status contests!) but will make that other god pissed off at you, and they'll probably send their priesthoods and servitors after you.
The shrines of the Gods Above tend to be fancy and relatively easy to access, but chances are their MD are already claimed. The shrines of the Gods Below are either deep in dungeons, or you have to make them yourself. Shrine components are a form of treasure. For each of the following your shrine to a God Below contains, it gains 1 MD it can grant to miracles:
-A record of the god's name, titles, and important myths
-A relic related to the god
-A priest initiated into its cult and constantly tending to the shrine (requirements for initiates tend to be esoteric, "one blinded by fire without making a sound", "a warrior maimed by their own child wielding their favoured weapon", etc.), each additional MD granted in this manner requires 10x the priests
-A suitably big idol carved from an appropriate material
-One of its monstrous spawn contained in a labyrinth within the shrine, and fed regularly
-The shrine is big, obvious, and impressive
-And so on and so on
With enough knowledge, resources, and hubris you could even try making your own custom god, like how Serapis was said to have been created by Ptolemy I.
Every level you've got limits the max MD of spells you can get from the shrine of a surface god (e.g. level 3, max MD is 1). If you've survived that deep into the outer darkness then it has made you strong, made you strange, and thereby laid its claim on you.
Example God Below:
Berraror-Sarraraz
Lady of the Ozonic Boudoir, the Decapitator of Mountains, She Who Raises the Curtain to Clouded Vistas
Preferred sacrifices/materials: mirrors, the bones of outlaws, pink granite, things that have been struck by lightning, fine textiles
Grants Miracles: that inspire, that blind, that have to do with heads, that scry or create illusions of entire landscapes, that deal with the boundary of life and death
Relics: the Bladeless Axe, which rests still in an infected wound in the third neck of the Hyrda of Herioloz; the Heron of A Hundred Sagas, a mechanical bird which can recite her popular legendry, and is sought by many other gods for the same reason
Priests: widows who must sleep only once every three days in beds stuffed with the grave-dirt their spouse was buried in
How about a remake of Forrest Gump in the 21st century, and the plot's like that he ran too fast to be caught in the explosion at the Boston Marathon Bombing, just doing it in the absolute worst taste. Instead of dying of AIDS Jenny overdoses on fentanyl. I hate this but I can't stop laughing about it. Anyways, here's the next picture:
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