Which itself is an expanded version of the Manse's pantheon generator here: http://themansegaming.blogspot.com/2019/04/pantheon-generator.html
That the world shall one day end and be born again is common knowledge across it. After all, it is the way of things from autumn leaves to mortal generations.
Less common are stories of many worlds, many endings, many beginnings anew, each following the last.
Rarer still is the insight that there are not just many worlds in sequence, but in parallel as well, each with its own deaths and rebirths.
Imagine a world that ended like a dandelion in a breeze, pulled apart and drifting on the void in a thousand thousand pieces. One of these pieces came to this world in its current incarnation, landing more gently than a falling feather. This piece is called Jornu, and so is the city atop it. The city is built from its gods. Little else could have survived the journey
The greatest six of the gods of Jornu (in size and potency), and ancestors of the rest, are the Quartermasters. Each is a divine monument which defines its section of the city. They are as follows:
A smoking ziggurat at the center of Jornu, her stepped sides flowing with her incandescent effluence. Munsara's domain is a pounding heart of industry. Under the shadow of her fumes nightlife thrives. Her people are artisans and prostitutes, labourers and gamblers, the deafened, the blinded, and the maimed.
Before she was remade in Jornu, Munsara was a god of clanging blades and hardened hearts. Idleness poorly suits her. Her frustrated energy bleeds into her populace. Members of the iron-fisted Tempered Temperance movement kick down the doors of speakeasies and do battle with drunken boxers. Guildsmen fight over contracts in the streets. The energy is frantic, indulgent. Philosophies, politics, religion: all melt together here into endlessly merging and colliding sects.
Munsara is respected by the other gods. She is mother to many of them. She is feared as well. They sense her restlessness, and each would turn it to their own ends. Integrationists, isolationists, conquerors, escapists, these are tendencies in their agendas, but not true blocs. The gods of Jornu are family, and squabble like family even when their interests might align. An outsider could tip the balance.
The palace of Jornu's royal family is built on her top steps - this statement is mostly correct. Each of Jornu's royal families has a palace somewhere on her top steps. The palaces are so crowded they've kludged together into essentially a single palace. Each family has a credible claim of descent from Munsara herself, but no one can prove their claim is closer than anyone else's. Locked in an impasse of competing divine rights, the families have withdrawn from government of the city, and become incredibly passive-aggressive towards each other. Theirs is a self-contained world of genealogical warfare.
In their absence the city has defaulted to a sort of gangland anarchy. Each god holds territory in their vicinity, and their will is enforced by mortal lieutenants: the high priests of their cult. This has worked out mostly alright, or at least better than the royals did.
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| Macro-Cosanti, Paolo Soleri |
The gleaming dome of his back dominates the western skyline of Jornu. His splayed limbs are carved with apartments, balcony-gardens, storefronts. In his chest are gymnasiums and bathhouses and racetracks. Throughout him is the salty-sweet smell of incense and sweat.
Virvaril is an arcology, a city-within-a-city. You could live your entire life inside him and not want for anything. By this fact he should be a paradise, yet isn't, because once some weed has taken root within his body it becomes nigh-impossible to uproot. Rebels, criminals, and heretics can disappear within the liminal tangle of his hallways and sustain themselves on hydroponics and vermin indefinitely.
He is also a tragedy, a constant reminder of the cost of Jornu's journey. In hollowing Virvaril out, in tapping his vitality, he was rendered comatose. His remaining priesthood is a few bitter remnants encysted in his guts. The glory and comfort of Virvaril's internal amenities are slowly, yet perpetually, deteriorating for want of his active attention.
Some adventurers believe that within Virvaril's body must lie his brain, and that a sufficient jolt will rouse him back to wakefulness. A handful of these adventurers have returned raving and mold-ridden at the heads of exile-hordes, forced back only by fractious alliances of Jornu's priest-gangs. It is an issue which even polities of the new world have taken interest in, for if Virvaril finally fails then a massive exodus of Jornuans into the outside world for want of food and habitation is assured.
Hala was and is a seer. He foresaw the end of the gods’ world, and what his family would need to do to survive it. None trust him. It was the authority of his wife Munsara that convinced them.
He had originally intended to become the engine of Jornu, its motive power, yet all the wheedling and prophecy Hala could muster couldn't convince the others to grant him such an esteemed position. Instead he was shattered, shrieking, into a million reflective pieces, and reassembled into the city's optics - made to see through space as he already could through time.
As a structure, Hala is five enormous silver dishes pointed skyward, and the complex connecting them with hallways and bounced light. Beneath each dish is the monastery of an order of prosecutors, forbidden from speaking with each other except by the most controlled and monitored channels. These monkish prosecutors are charged with interrogating the five lobe-dish minds of Hala, ensuring there is no unity or alibi between them to further the seer-god's schemes and trickery. By their cross-examination of his splintered psyche they are able to derive cryptic, yet defused, portents to guide Jornu by. There is perpetual low-intensity gang warfare along the branches of Hala's complex from rival cults attempting to steal or disrupt these portents before they can be delivered. There are some who say the entire endeavour is a farce, that Hala's telemetry is meant for the interplanetary void rather than an atmosphere, and that his prophecy can no longer be trusted - these voices are swiftly silenced.
Due to Munsara's smoke a large part of the city is twilit at best. As her husband, Hala takes it upon himself to amend this. A web of mirrors pried from his halls reflects the brilliance of her blazing flanks to all darkened corners of Jornu. Even so, blackouts can occur when a parade, pursuit, or prank pulls the macro-mirrors out of alignment with civilian lumino-networks.
Stolys is the most likely of all the Quartermasters for a foreigner to encounter, perhaps the most likely of any god in Jornu. She is a gregarious being, quick to befriend, eager to learn (quicker to discard once she has what she wants). It's what she was made for.
An eclectic building, Stolys is part university, part embassy, and part zoo, under constant renovation and reinvention.
Of all the gods of Jornu, she is the only one with demigods, for her priests are integrated into her divine construction, either as fleshy, conscious mortar or with music-box-like machines chirping from a privileged position in their skulls.
Her role in the pantheon is to learn, assimilate, and manipulate the new world that Jornu has found itself upon. In the old world she was a goddess of something like a rainbow, a divine messenger who circled the world a dozen times over before the day was done, yet now her horizons are restricted, her ability to travel and observe for herself shackled to her own foundations.
This is agonizing for her - Stolys is starved for knowledge. Her Jornuan agents are limited in the movements, and ignorant of the outside world besides. She needs agents, agents of the new world, and when employing them is on the knife's edge of paying through the nose for information, and capturing them for vivisection.
Elegant Lomizelc, trimmed and manicured and stuccoed and painted in all the ways that are pleasing to the eye. Land here is coveted, where the sunshine might be enjoyed outside Munsara's caul.
Most of Lomizelc is claimed by the fortified micro-fiefs of old world aristocratic families. Their holdings are the last place in the entire universe where Jornu's fruits are grown in the same manner as they were so very long ago. The families have calcified in the new order of the city, without the uniting yoke of the royals. Roles are played out in feuds and scandals that have repeated so much over the generations that they've become formal traditions. Honours are granted to exceptional knights-florist on the scale of patches of dirt. The gods themselves are mistrusted for the forms they've taken. Alcoves are carved into idols to worship.
Edging in on the nobility's manor-farms are the towers of Jornu's noveau riche, built with merchant-wealth. They have no love for tradition and much for the money brought in by trade between Jornu and its new world. Their feuds are stunning in their speed and innovation. Lomizelc abhors brute violence, but their eyes are low, so the merchants fight 'cloud wars' between their towers, and against the taller nobles' homes. These wars are fought at lethal heights with war-kites, siphon-blasted toxic gases, pole-shimmying mercenaries, trained birds, and pissed-off swarms of bees (or rather their Jornu-equivalent).
There are domes speckling the immaculate gardens where the careless flaneurs do not care to tread. These 'speculatoria', monuments to all Jornu's imagination and ignorance both, are Lomizelc's true passion.
The gap between worlds is one that light and divinity struggle to cross. Little wonder then that even as they set off Jornu's people were woefully uncertain about their destination (indeed, even whether there was a destination to arrive at). There was much guesswork. Natural philosophers worked night and day beside novelists. A thousand contingencies were drawn up in the space of possibility. Would solid things be drawn downwards, and gaseous things up? Would the air sustain or poison? How many of their angels could dance upon the head of a pin? Each speculatoria is a closed ecosystem adapted to one of these contingencies.
Many contain curiosities, trivialities, answers to problems like "what if the plants there are green instead of purple?". Some contain horrors, answers to worlds of unceasing hostiliy: exponential cancer-castles that decant their own armies, suffering-maximizing terror weapons that root in your brainstem, signivores that eat reality and shit simulacra, and more. These horrors have been sealed (and not even Lomizelc alone could release them now) for fear of what they might do to Jornu as much as for the goodwill of the city's host - this is what is hoped. Truth is there's so many possible threats that not all of them could be sealed, or even recognized for what they could become. All it could take is one urban explorer stumbling through the wrong door to unleash havoc in the gardens.
Jealous Abuo, who curls around the city's southern rim, is the god of rags, despair, and those with nothing else. It is by mass the largest of all the gods of Jornu, but it is spread wide and deep and thin into clutching pipes and coiling drains. All things lost and all people with nowhere else to go in Jornu drain down to Abuo, who is loathe to let them go.
It has two cults, one within itself and one on the outside.
The cult within is a lay priesthood, informal, eager missionaries. They pray to forget, give what little of themselves is left in return for relief. They know much of what others would rather have forgotten. The highest ritual they have is to dance to the moaning music of their god.
The cult outside go about in stainless white. Theirs is an elite circle, open only to the scions of oldest privilege. To them Abuo is a necessary cosmic purifier, swallowing the filth and the cast-offs of existence.
Of all the gods of Jornu, Abuo longs for their home the most. Its dreams of that home spill out from its mouths as miscreated spawn. They're pitiable things, dangerous, a bit nostalgic. Skewered and seared they're popular as street food.
The First Children of the Gods of Jornu
Around the Quartermasters are arrayed their many children, subordinate architectural marvels that guide the ebb and flow of life and death in Jornu. Among their number are:
Jornu is shaped like an apple core, eaten around the middle: fat on top and bottom, gnawed skinny between. There are several ways to get up or down, some better than others. There are the twisting tunnels inside (but those aren't a place for decent citizens, as monsters from Jornu's old world lurk within), the rickety zipline-gondolas (great for bulk shipping, not for the faint of heart), and then there is Kybalt. A flexing trunk of a bridge, long enough to extend right to the ground at a comfortable incline. He is armoured in segments of the seven metals of Jornu (not iron or gold or lead, but alien stuff). His armour is the cradle-gift of his mother Munsara.
Kybalt sees himself as the city's gate and guardian both. He allows none to tread upon him that are not gracious guests or exemplary inhabitants. In the one and only siege of Jornu, Kybalt inflicted more deaths on its enemies than even the star-sicknesses.
He loathes his half-sister Skurma. It would take a threat to the city itself for him to consider treating with any agent of hers.
The gentle daughter of Abuo and Lomizelc. Like her father she accepts everyone into her graces.
A broad road, bulging along its middle, that winds through the whole of Jornu. Ukasil is the child of all six of the Quartermasters (don't worry about how that works, the gods don't follow the bio-logic of gametes). They are a responsive god, responding to foot traffic as though it were prayers, snaking and shifting the layout of the city through its interstices to maximize the efficiency of its throughput. This is a gameable system, and priest-gangs will often press passers-by to commit a quota of marching through their territory as a practical show of dominance that will serve to centralize and nexusize their holdings.
A cabaret club, and a crusader against tedium and conformity. She would not let the god-reconstruction touch her immaculately beautiful features, and so she is a gigantic decapitated head occupying a city block as surely as any apartment or office. Her golden tresses are woven by her devotees into the curtains and chandeliers of her interior. Her haunting, echoing voice provides the music for every dance.
Yaheya is a proud god, and for good reason. She is the tallest building in Jornu (which has won her no friends in her parents' generation) and she is why there are any people left in the city. Recognition of this fact is what keeps her as tall as she is.
She's built in sections, stacked cylinders, each rotating slower than the ones below it. This is a trick of perception. They're really all turning at the same speed, just in different frames of reference. The higher sections are not slower in speed, but in time.
Traveling the yawning gap between worlds takes a while even for gods (whose years are measured in the cycles of stone to dust to magma and back again). They could not feed all they wished to save for that long. Nor did they wish to see their people drift from the ways of their home. Thus Yaheya was made, the last god born on their dying world.
She worked exquisitely (with one grating exception - the inhabitants of her lowest section... diverged, and escaped into Jornu's godless tunnels). In her highest sections some mortal sages are still preserved (along with countless cultural treasures). They are consulted in direst need, as doing so robs future millennia of the potential to do the same.
Yaheya is conservative as only an immortal can be, and viciously xenophobic. She is a patron of the arts (Jornu's arts! And a stickler for adherence to the art forms!). She serves her purpose without question, out of deep love.
No on in Jornu likes to talk about Zizabuz. Worship of the god is forbidden. She is an abomination.
Zizabuz is unlike the rest of Jornu's gods. She exists in scrawls, defacements, scribbled invectives. She is a parasite on others' faces. Zizabuz is divine graffiti. She is scraped from facades and plastered over every day, and reborn in paint and grime and blood every night.
Her priests, when they are not executed on the spot, are accused of nihilism - of valuing nothing but destruction. They protest - their only sin is tradition, for Zizabuz is the conscience of the gods, sprung forth from their collective unconscious the moment Jornu touched the earth once again. Her message is simple, her message is kind.
“Come home,” she says, “come home and die with us”.
This is really good. I've always liked the idea of "alien gods", and this is like if Galactus were a whole pantheon, with a heavy dose of planescape exoticism. I love how evocative this is, right from the start with the dandelion simile. They each feel like gods, just familiar enough, while still importantly alien. This feels like a whole world unto itself and one can easily imagine this turning into a whole adventure.
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