The premise of the game is simple: You are a bunch of world-creating gods/god-like beings who must design a world by committee and/or subterfuge. The execution is somewhat less simple. 


Character sheets should probably follow this template:
[code]Name:
Sphere:
Primary form/associated symbol:
Description/Background:[/code]


You may optionally PM secret (or not-so-secret) goals of grand scale, e.g. an entropy player wishing to bring about a very early heat death. Eliminating your sphere's opposite is not secret enough to require a PM.

[hider=Guidelines]Name: Try not to make it stuff like xXUberTitan625Xx.
Sphere: For inspiration, you can check the [url] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Sphere[/url] or the [url]http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/spellLists.htm[/url]. One restriction is that there should probably not be significant overlap between players (e.g. five undifferentiated life gods (‼) or earth, rock, and sand gods). Opposites, however, are [b]encouraged[/b].
Primary form/associated symbol: While you are not required to have human cultural justifications, some things make no sense. Being a god of ice who takes the form of a sphere of white-hot lava is not a good choice.
Description/Background: Any fluff-text you might want. You probably will not have had much history yet, on account of the world not being created yet[/hider]

[hider=Mechanics]Voting: Most actions in the game will be decided through voting. Certain small actions, particularly self-applied ones, will not require votes. You can vote to change game rules, the world and its contents, and assorted other rules like the ever-present non-intervention clause. Significant opposition to proposals and bad luck will likely blunt or subvert the resulting effects.

Essence: This represents both your health and your creative ability. You consume two units of it when you yourself perform a significant action and one unit of it when you perform a not-so-significant action. Additional costs may apply for particularly significant projects, and costs become cheaper when you have at least three deities working on the same action. If it goes down to 1, you should probably find some way to raise it or preserve yourself (e.g. possessing an artifact/site). If it reaches 0 and you have made no preparations, you die. Essence can be transferred between multiple deities by agreement or by force of the council. You all start out with 20/20 Essence.

Gaining Essence: You can gain Essence through Worship, ambient Essence income (very low, cannot prevent death), transfer from other gods, and your sphere's influence on the world. Some of you are aware of powerful beings beyond this world who can supply you with Essence in exchange for doing their bidding...

Losing Essence: You can lose Essence by consuming it, transferring it to other gods, and losing your sphere's influence on the world.

Worship: This represents how much genuine respect (whether reverence or fear) sapients have for you, and it contributes to your Essence daily income. Unlike Essence, it represents the rate of worship per turn and cannot be transferred, but deities can affect each other's Worship by affecting their followers. Worship from the extremely long-lived or immortal or extremely powerful is considered to be of lower value, as is Worship from the extremely short-lived or insufficiently sapient. Human-like sapients would probably supply around 1 WU*. Direct mind control nullifies Worship output.[/hider]

[hider=Inactivity, stasis, dormancy, and character death]
If you will be unavailable for at least 2-3 days, you have the option of announcing it and being marked as in stasis. This will freeze your income and prevent others from killing you off. Unannounced leave will result in being marked as inactive, which has a high chance of character death from opportunistic players. 

If your Essence store goes down to 1, you will be marked as dormant. This is effectively the same as inactivity, but draining is more likely to cause a notification and the dormancy only lasts until the Essence store goes above 1. 

If your character dies, you are free to rejoin as a new character with a sufficiently new/different sphere. I reserve judgment for too-close cases. You may optionally be revived with an investment of at least 15 Essence (which grants you 5 on revival). Additional Essence is added to the revivee at an exchange ratio of 1:3 (+6 Essence invested -> +2 Essence on revival) rounded down.
[/hider]

[hider=Main Council rules]These are all subject to addition, removal, and change by you. 

An active player is defined as a player who has posted within the thread within the last two (2) UTC days.

A bill must be supported by at least 50% of active players to pass if unopposed.

A bill must achieve 60% support in order to pass if opposed.

Players may flame the host if he has been inactive for at least two (2) UTC days.

Council-produced creations are not to be tampered with without council approval. Failure to comply will result in the automated initiation of a trial.[/hider]

[hider=Realism]Physics: The level of physics realism in this game will depend on you (pl.) and you actions. There is no easily definable minimum, but the maximum amount of realism is probably "Physics without substantial linear algebra."

Causality: If you can mess with it well enough (i.e. without implausible contradictions), it goes in. PMing me when setting up time loops would be nice.

Realist grittiness in general: As with physics, it depends on you (pl.). Hopefully, no one will complain if the setting becomes fantastic enough to have magic and something like an energy-free fast desalination technique appears.[/hider]

[hider=Acknowledgements]The mechanics and this OP were stolen from Kilojoule Proton over on the Bay 12 Forums [url] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144651.msg5724880#msg5724880[/url], mostly because they are really well put together and help answer most player`s questions.[/hider]

Post and criticize!