Antarctic Termite

Hold my head, under the water / Take a breath, for the Father / Learn to love, lessons repeating / The chronicles are so misleading

ZOTASH'E
-Sling
-Flute
-Skull of Ventus
-meeting Sable
--The Cure
-Terrestrial Citadel
-Gneissposting?

LAMBDA
-Dwarf / Elemental fights?

DABBLES
-Dabbles the Dove, Prophet of All-Beauty
--High Administrator of Alefpria, Chief Advisor to Lifprasil, and Pilot of the Fathership
-Exit stage left, spacewards
--BLESSED ARE THE MEEK

JVAN
-Xos-tied
-Collected Memories

FLESH CENTAUR SCULPTOR
-Fight Help
-Hear the whispers
-Seek power
-Burn It Down

AMUL'SHARAR
-A certain business with the deer
-Where the World Begins and Ends
--roleplayerguild.com/posts/4604565

TIRA
-Finish with Vowzra
-Fly south
-Meet the Mother

PHI
-Phiposting

THE MERCENARY
-Who cares

TAUGA
-Two more Marquisate posts I barely even remember
-I told you they'll grow in

GODSPEED: A game about deities, stories, creation, and the hybrid lovechild of Advanced and Free

@Lord Zee The character sheet is in the rules thread, if you'd like to start work on them. We're not really waiting on anything but me to stop being a sad sack of exhaustion.

@Lauder WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT NOTHING ELSE FOR A WEEK

GODSPEED: A game about deities, stories, creation, and the hybrid lovechild of Advanced and Free

I'm not 100% sure what to say, but color me interested! As long as you guys don't find Apples edible that is.

@Apples

Well, last game we managed to eat spiders, explore the divine origins of lactose intolerance, and distil liquor from human skin, so I think we can safely say anything goes in the culinary world.

We also had some nice stories about bread.

One question, what kind of writing are you expecting here?

@Scarescrow

Depends on what you mean.

There will be a soft cap on post length. It will probably hover around two or three thousand characters. This is why the game will be going in Free, as well as because Divinus is in Casual for some reason, so we may as well spread out.

Posts can go shorter, but rapid dialogue and combat interaction should probably be collabed. There's not limit on collab length (within reason).

Otherwise, don't rush things. Pay attention to how the other players are writing and try to match their effort in your own style. Make sure your posts make sense, are paragraphed nicely and grammatically tidy, colour coded if you want it and have a Might use summary at the bottom. Posting will be mostly (but not necessarily) third person- we tend to play with perspective a lot in Divinus.

For examples on what kind of writing we currently see in Divinus, feel free to stop by the thread.

Interested, thinking of some kind of god based on challenge and change.

@Pyromaniacwolf

Maybe a god of Change and Chaos (for the latter is the purest expression of the former) although someone else expressed interest in change and we've got one whose the patron of rebellion, so it might be easier to hop ship towards a god of knowledge and forbidden secrets and stuff like that. Either way, perhaps maybe something of a cunning or conniving god who isn't as interested in overtly expanding his own power as he is in simply throwing something out there and seeing whether anything - shall we say interesting - happens as a result.

@darkwolf687

These are always popular! Feel free to try out any of these archetypes.

In fact, feel free to try anything at all that comes to mind. In Divinus we currently have a god of Order (Physics), Beauty (Mathematics), two very different eldritch abominations, a mechanical engineer who uses his Might to build robots and devices, a worm-god of Flesh, a dead god of Life, a porcelain god of Perfection and Calligraphy, and more.

You really can go buck-wild with this.

the Might is just a means to that end.

@darkwolf687

That's all Might is, really- using numbers to count power.

GODSPEED: A game about deities, stories, creation, and the hybrid lovechild of Advanced and Free

I lack the speed to write as much as the majority do for Divinus

@pokemad1

Are you sure speed is the word you're looking for? Divinus is quite slow, but if all goes to plan, Godspeed will be pretty fast-paced. The post length in Divinus is sort of just a product of the way stories pan out.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

y'all'dn't've

GODSPEED: A game about deities, stories, creation, and the hybrid lovechild of Advanced and Free

In the Beginning...

A solemn wind disturbed a dune of stellar ash, sweeping dead stars, like dust, across the galactic sea. The thing that looked like a man gazed on, wishing it all away.

"Why?" said the thing that looked like a girl. "Why did we let it happen this way?"

"Because we were afraid," said the thing that looked like a man. "Because we wanted them to live, and never gave them room to breathe."

"Then let them have it," said the thing that looked like a girl, clenching her quivering hands into fists. "Let them have it all. Let them make this world their own; let no limits be upon them. Let them laugh and cry and hate. Let them go out there and be happy," said the thing that looked like a girl, laying her hands on the thing that impaled the man. "Set them free."

"You know not what you do."

"I don't care," said she.

The thing that looked like a girl wrenched the javelin from his chest and raised a great cry. Then she hurled it into the darkness, where it tore a wound so bright that quenched stars lit in its gaze, and she braced as the winds of dawn blazed against her, burning her, igniting the dune and the body and all the stars therein, blowing it apart and carrying its dust into a new galaxy.

She stretched her hands against the force of the wind, and felt a mass growing where the gale met her palms; and when the mass grew too great to hold back, she stretched out her other hand, and a smaller mass grew there; and when the gale overcame her they slipped from her palms and she tumbled back, laughing, as the two orbs spun one around the other.

As they fell into the cool distance, she grabbed the greater mass in her hands and twisted it; she felt it warm, and fizz. She clutched its warmth to her chest, and kissed it, and the moisture of her lips enveloped it.

And the thing that looked like a girl fell onto its surface, where the sun warmed her still, and she laughed, and her joy rose on the horizon in a hot, clean blue that covered the sky. She struck her palm at the ocean, and a plume of cyan entered it. Again and again she struck, dancing along the shore, until the sea was filled with life and oxygen.

Then she fell to her knees, exhausted.

"Take it!" said the thing that looked like a girl, laughing as the tears streaked down her face. "Come and take it all."

---

This is the prose intro for a new game, collaborated on with great love and devotion, by the cast of a wildly successful roleplay that began in early 2015 and is still going: Divinus!

Divinus is an extremely free-form deity roleplay that has been run three times over the past five years or so, with positive results each time. While the gameplay itself has a backbone of rules, which we've updated to make sleeker and more fun, the way the story and the world of the gods pans out each time is always wildly unexpected.

Although the current game is an advanced roleplay in the Casual subforum, we're aiming to make this one something truly casual and light and fast-paced, with posts of just a few paragraphs each. It'll go in the Free section, but don't expect the quality of the writing to flag- much of the Divinus cast is in Godspeed, and we'll keep an eye out for players from anywhere.

Here's the overview, which can also be found in the current revision of the thread starter, which has all the updated rules.

Overview

Divinus is a game about Gods. Taking a blank planet as our starting point, we write characters that come into being as the sovereign lords of the universe, and follow them as they compete, collaborate, fight, and fumble their way through Creation.

Though gods may start small, in time they will raise mountains, gouge rivers, sow jungles and freeze oceans, and having done so they can create every manner of flora, fauna, spirit and mortal folk to populate them. Their colliding visions for the world may drive them to invent mighty weapons and field vast armies, conjure horrific monsters and sanction glorious heroes in order to defend their dreams from the passion of the other gods.

Each god embodies a certain Domain of existence, such as Life or Chaos, and wields it in a unique way. Their power is measured in Might, which they must spend wisely on the aspects of creation that are most vital to them. As they grow and expand into new powers and Domains, they may build holy sanctuaries in which their mortal disciples may glorify their name, raising them to even higher levels of terror and splendour.

Though the game of gods has many rules, all of them are here for your benefit, to make sure everyone plays fairly and in a collaborative manner. We've put a lot of effort into the system, so I hope it brings as much pleasure to you as it has to us.

We have five players from the 'casual' iteration of the game who've already pledged to join in. Here are their character sheets!

@WrongEndoftheRainbow with Lasis, Patron of Rebellion

@Kho with Seidhara, the Bear Mother

@LokiLeo789 with Trickster Iwa, the Scarab God

@Double Capybara with Kap Gam, Ephemeral Queen

@Frettzo with Aella, Goddess of Kindness

And I'll be playing with Yu, the Demon Slayer, probably.

So yeah. Anyone interested?

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

@Dawnscroll To recap, we're making a casual version of Divinus to go in the Free section, hopefully with much lighter and easier posts. It has a thoroughly updated set of rules and most of us have made characters for it, so we'll see how long it lasts.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Alright, everyone, I think I'm done with the OP for Divinus Lite. Here's a changelist for how it differs from Kho's last update of the WIP.

-added an overview.
-changed or added some more examples.
--by which I mean I kinda rewrote all of them
-shuffled things.
--Holy Sites, for example, are now in the Turns section.
--Domains and Portfolio are now in the Level section.
-Rewrote the Mater Lei section several times to make sure it's as clear and non-prosey as possible.
-Put the fair warning rule under 'conflict'.
-Gave avatars their own little section.
-Added a 'goals' bit to the character sheet.
-Bold for emphasis.
-Added a note on sanctuaries (Holy Sites). They may bless or protect the disciples within them in various ways.
-Changed 'worshippers' in sanctuaries to 'disciples', which can now be anything.
-Added a note that gods can in fact be overwhelmed by mortal armies if those armies have enough Might behind them.
--not gonna lie, I'm excited about this, let's have us some evenly matched god vs. army battles
-Acknowledged BBeast!

Maybe other things I'm not noticing now, too. The thread itself is here.

I'll be making an interest check thread soon enough, and, provided there's no other issues, the actual game thread.

Let's try that again, shall we?

roleplayerguild.com/topics/91565-mid-…

---

Mater Lei

Concierge of the Gods

'What then of your horns, o Mater? What are they?'

'The perfect excuse to blast doors I don't feel like opening.'

Dᴏᴍᴀɪɴ & Pᴏʀᴛꜰᴏʟɪᴏ

██████ (██████ | ██████ | ██████)

While Lei's Domain is a mystery, much is known of her portfolios. The most obvious involves automata, beings of clockwork and coiled springs, which she creates effortlessly and in great number. Another is strongly linked to books of fiction, of which she has a nearly limitless supply, and the contents of which she can realise as simulacra, forming not-quite illusory flora and fauna from words on a page. The third involves powerful transmutative magic, especially of her own body and environment.

Aʟɪɢɴᴍᴇɴᴛ

Chaotic Neutral

Pᴇʀsᴏɴᴀʟɪᴛʏ

Lei likes to be fancy. Not act fancy, just be fancy. Fond of dramatic entrances, an aura of untouchable smugness pervades most of what she does, which is usually exactly what you don't want her to do. Life's a game, when you're the Mater, and it's easy to get the impression that she wears her masks purely to hide the fact that she's teetering on the edge of laughing at you.

With all the petty spite of someone who enjoys tripping up passerby with her cane, Mater Lei placidly denies or subverts every request placed on the position she's been entrusted with, and happily cheats, tricks and lies her way through godly transactions. Fortunately, she's not malicious, and will bow out and call quits before she involves herself with serious trouble. Lei also tends to be polite, even helpful, especially in things of little (or extraordinary) consequence.

For all her easygoing strut, Lei isn't entirely secure in herself. She hides her anger well, but not perfectly, and fears both her task and her pantheon. She tells herself that she is safe, and can usually believe it, but there's only so much she can do. She fears, also, that someone may eventually see her face.

She also attends a lot of balls.

Gᴏᴀʟs

It is Mater Lei's belief, informed or otherwise, that the gods must be both the sole and the sovereign rulers of the universe. There can be no great power outside them, nor may any great power surpass them. For this reason, Lei guards the Vault from which the gods emerged and to which they may return, such that none of her nieces and nephews in the pantheon may wield power other than their own.

Lei isn't particularly stringent about this, though. The Door tends to stay perfectly well closed of its own accord, and she's known to let the pantheon loan or make use of other oddities in the Vault in order to perform feats that may otherwise have been beyond them, such as creating planets, travelling time, or altering the fundamental properties of the universe. The costs of operating such oddities are high, but so long as Lei doesn't have to pay it herself, she doesn't particularly care either. Her primary goal, after all, is simply to have a grand old time.

Aᴘᴘᴇᴀʀᴀɴᴄᴇ

Lei seldom changes form, but regularly her costume. From formal to semi-formal to casual*, Lei always has some outfit up her sleeve for the occasion, usually in the gold-grey-red colour scheme she's addicted to. She wears human flesh often, usually stealing the body of whichever pretty mortal girl she last ran into who happened to be wearing her colours*, sometimes returning it later and often keeping it (and the girl) for herself as an attendant. When the need arises to be small, she takes the form of a serpent.

All of Lei's faces are masks, made or stolen one way or another. In this way, though she may be highly expressive when she wants to be, her insecurities remain securely bound up inside her.

Lei's avatars are two, and rather different: Malkut, the radiant automaton, is a powerful being born of her more diligent side, not so prone to travel; and Alto, the harpy, is a lazy wanderer. These twin sons almost never appear in the same place, and generally keep to themselves.

Lei's dresses are innumerable, and rumour has it her wardrobe is a major demiplane.

Mᴜsɪᴄᴀʟ Tʜᴇᴍᴇ

*Models photographed are Choi Sora and Ikebana Katsu, respectively.

---

Let's try that again, shall we?

The Door through which the first gods enter the universe comes in many forms. Each god that enters the universe does so in a unique way- Some rise from pools, others hatch from eggs; some dream their way into reality, others simply take shape in the void; some are reincarnated, and yet others are stillborn.

While the Door itself exists outside conventional space, the gods who pass through it always emerge from the same place: a lonely beach on a planet named Galbar, where, it is said, the universe began.

Below (or perhaps containing) the entrance to the universe lies a Vault of many oddities. These delicate relics are mechanisms by which gods may alter things beyond the limits of divine power. There are means to stop time, forge planets, and rewrite the basic laws of reality; there are tools with which gods are made mortal and mortals into gods. All of them are cruelly guarded by a being called Mater Lei.

Mater Lei acts as doormaster and concierge to the universe. Of her two avatars, Alto, a being of pure Light, is said to hold the key, and Malkut, a being of pure Force, is said to hold the lock. Without her consent nothing can enter the universe from beyond, and no-one can leave until their allotted Time. It is said that she acts in the interests of Fate, though what these might be is inscrutable, even to her.

Punctual yet notoriously unreliable, Lei considers it her duty not only to defend the Door but also to act as a guide to those who step through it. Lei hears every question posed to her, even the frivolous ones, and usually answers (and sometimes lies). Any god may approach her dwelling-place in order to ask favour, such as to retrieve something from beyond the universe, or allow them to leave it, or to grant them power from the Vault, or relieve them of its burden. Naturally, she is obliged to deny them.

But Mater Lei is both a liar and a cheat, and her devotion to duty extends only so far. She is well known to let the pantheon loan or make use of oddities in the Vault in order to perform feats that may otherwise have been beyond them. The cost of operating them may be exorbitant or bizarre or both, but so long as she herself isn't paying it, Lei doesn't have much reason to care.

Either way, it is far safer to rely on one's own power- Lei is neither sadistic nor power-hungry nor tyrannical, but she has never, ever been trustworthy.

While Lei has stood at her post since the birth of the universe and intends to stay there to its end, she is otherwise much like any other god. Her ability to defend the Door and Vault are limited. If the temptation to challenge her wardenship arises, take it seriously, but not lightly- Although far from infinite, Mater Lei commands tremendous power, and responsibility for her things will fall on the shoulders of any pantheon with the hubris to depose her.