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Your characters are the only ones I think there's a risk of stepping toes on, with Knives, Kites and Lanterns, respectively.

Random object portfolios are the future, my dudes


No problems here, Knives aren't on the roadmap. Narzhak's purview is heavier equipment.


Between the elation of movement and the one he sought being but a crumb of flesh near him, it was a marvel Narzhak ground to a halt in time to avoid condemning Chopstick to the same fate as their ruinous brother, albeit one facilitated in no small part by Ashalla's significantly more visible form close by acting as a warning. The fire in his lower right eye narrowed to a monolithic ember as he sharpened his sight to discern what his quarry was doing. It then almost immediately blazed up with a roar as he saw the minuscule goddess defiantly hold up her fists at him. The giant's entire vast body began to quake, sending shudders through the soil at his feet, before he cast back his head and flooded the chamber with a new access of growling cachinnations. To think that this little wretch would stand against him! Him, the mightiest of those that heeded the Architect's summons! The mightiest warrior - warrior? Yes, that sounded right.

As this new reflection on his nature made the cackling subside, Narzhak felt an odd sense of respect for the skewer-eyed challenger stir in his cavernous entrails. For all the absurdity of her threat, she did not recoil even before one as great as him, and that was well worth something. He held up a hand to stop, more than anything else, the last cackles welling up from his throat and tried to remember why he had come hither to begin with. "Hrrah, hah, ah... Are you looking for..." Only then did he notice that Chopstick was, in fact, not looking for anything at all. Maybe a scuffle, but he found himself disinclined to stamp out a perfectly functional fighting spirit that could be saved for someone else. His question tapered to a disappointed grunt.

Nevertheless, he would not delay his duties in the world for nothing. The Iron God brought up two fingers to one of the jutting ridges in his armour and carefully snapped a scrap from its edge. With imperceptible motions, he rapidly set to work shaping it. A task of such precision would have seemed impossible for the likes of him - the fragment was like a grain of dust between the walls of palaces - yet, somehow, it seemed to him as though nothing could have been simpler. In mere moments, the formless chip of metal was moulded into a tolerable approximation of a cleaver, albeit one that strongly resembled a scimitar and was likely better suited for mutilation than any form of cookery.

Balancing his creation on the tip of a claw, Narzhak lowered it towards the ground, slowly, but not cautiously enough to prevent it from sliding down and whistling to the ground dangerously close to Chopstick's feet. "A spare one. If you ever need to cut the whole hand." He rumbled again at the memory of the fiendish tendril trailing away from the rest of the monstrous body. "Far from the sea, perhaps. Blood is that much sweeter if you spill it yourself" he added, turning his head to face Ashalla. Although he had never tasted any sort of blood himself, the fact seemed self-evident, and he would have been remiss to leave the only one of their number who had spoken reason without a word of sound advice for the ages to come.

The titan drew himself up to his full height. "Haste now, there's work to be done. Seek me in the depths if you ever have need." With this curt farewell, he trudged forward, propelling his bulk over Chopstick's head in a single step. The expectant crystals were not far away; it did not take him long to find the only one large enough to support him, and he clambered onto it without a moment's hesitation. As he was borne upwards, first slowly, then steadily faster and faster, Narzhak raised a hand in a final salute to the Architect, which promptly transitioned into imperiously signalling for the gleaming platform to move faster. For a moment, his shadow covered the sight of Galbar overhead; then, he was gone.




For long, Narzhak's booming laughter did not cease, rolling over the chaos below him like the rumbling of a storm. When the initial access of hilarity from the mere fact that he was had passed, he looked down upon all the minuscule creatures that scrambled at his feet, and what he saw was so comical that it made his throat boil with renewed mirth. Here, that scampering thing with chopstick eyes - what was a chopstick? He surmised it was what her eyes were made of - lopped off the Demon's appendage in passing before colliding with a gaggle of other beasts in a flurry of scratching and cursing. Amusing as that was, he had to admire how fast she was with that knife. Better yet was the scene of the elder one rebuking that insolent shade. What sort of question was "why"? They were there - he was there, and it was all that mattered.

What made him outright bellow out in merriment, though, was Seihdhara being battered to the ground in punishment for her sacrilege (sacrilege was the word for this, yes!). This was how one should deal with disorderly underlings! Few words and a strong hand. Where before then Narzhak had simply felt indebted to the Architect for allowing him into a world worthy of that name, he now found growing within himself genuine respect for the old god. Serving one such as him was certainly not going to be a burden. Serving, indeed. He was here for that.

These thoughts left him in such a contented state that even when that other fiery runt, evidently not having learned his fellow's lesson, shouted his own hollow defiance. Narzhak lazily shifted a foot, which ought to have been enough to raise a wave to douse a hundred ones such as Sartravius. But, unexpectedly, it was not. Puzzled, he stomped down with greater force, his laughter finally abating as the new sense of confusion took its place. Still nothing. It was only after finally standing still for an instant that he noticed a new force drawing the fluid away from where he stood, and his bemused gaze followed the current as it coalesced and spoke the first sensible words he had heard from this whole rabble.

"Create, yes. That's a fine thought" he mused, ponderously swaying his head. Now that he thought of it, he had always known that his purpose was creation. He knew something! It struck him then, drawing out another distant peal of laughter. He knew, because someone had told him what he needed to know. This truly was the best of all worlds.

Slowly, heavily, he moved one step, then another, sending tremors through the ground. Having a body was easier than he thought. Within each twinge of his flesh, he could feel a gleeful urge to take something, anything, into his hands and crush it, snap it, let his strength flow free in all its terrible immensity. With that strength, he could shatter anything, yet he could also rein it in and wield it as he best pleased, and this gave him an indescribable feeling of power. So absorbed was he in the simple act of slowly shuffling ahead with no particular goal that he failed to notice a figure of ruin and stars kneeling ahead in his path, a shimmering granule from the height of his stature. He did not see it, and for a moment neither did anyone else as an ironclad mass great enough to blot out a forest descended upon it with a dull impact.

Narzhak stopped to consider where he was going. The crystalline monoliths upon which some other divines had already ascended towards the far-off world lay to another side altogether. With a grunt accompanied by a lingering chuckling, he began to cumberously turn about, before another thought gave him pause. Was he forgetting something? He leaned his head to the side, pondering, until it occurred to him that he had not seen the chopstick-eyed little thing recover her cleaver. That, he found, was a terrible omission. To release someone so skilful and eager at swinging blades into any world without a weapon to match would have been unforgivably negligent of anyone, let alone him.

Why him in particular? He was only dimly aware of the answer. It may have been the echoes of an unspoken command radiating from the Architect, or perhaps the mere thought of a bloodied trail of severed fingers that pressed up his throat with new bouts of irrepressible hilarity. Whichever it was, it was good enough for him.

Ever rumbling amusedly to himself, the colossus set off towards where he had last seen the knife and its wielder, his shadow preceding him like a bloody tide upon the waters.


There had been a time when it did not know thought.

It had drifted - no, hovered, immobile, in the void that was not a void, unaware that there was nothing for it to experience. That the myriad others who hovered alongside it were just as immaterial and incognizant, stillborn larvae of worlds and spirits, universes and minds. They were the sightless stars of a sky without light or darkness, rotting unmourned and unremembered in their dim slumber for a time that transcended eternity.

None of them lamented this, for none knew that there were such things. And that was as it should be.

There had been a time when it did not know.

Now and again, one of them would vanish, crumbling away into a dust even more spectral than its formlessness had been. Sooner or later - what difference did it make? - another would appear to take its place. No one asked whence it came, for it was no one's business, there.

And that was as it should be.

There had been a time-

But that time was over.

Once, It had awoken, and It could sleep no more, for It knew.
It knew that It hovered in a sky that was not a sky, for a time that was not time, and It was wroth.

It knew that those who hovered alongside it came and went, and It asked whence and whither. There was no answer, and It was wroth.

The more It knew, the more It grew wroth, for there was nothing to know. And thus, for a time that transcended eternity, It knew nothing but wrath.

Until-

It knew something more. There was a voice, which in that void that was not a void was but an echo, and it called. Suddenly, It knew that It could answer, and so it did. It clawed and scrambled, slid and scampered, up from sheer abysses, down through spinning galleries, across barren expanses. None of this was truly there, but so rich did the emptiness seem after the sky that was not a sky, that ihte fancied it was adorned with all these things, and more.

The echoes of the call loomed ahead, and he hastened towards them. A throng of lesser things was in his way - how small they were! - and he thoughtlessly pushed his way through them, scattering them like handfuls of sand. He did not know for how long the summons would endure, and he was so close now that to be denied now would have been more painful than aeons of impotent anger.

At first, there was naught...



...then, he was. It began with a rippling, a twisting of the air that betrayed a presence. It did not remain bare for long. Pillars of flowing black sludge, thick and malodorous like the rot of a thousand charnel-houses, rose up from the waters, parting them in a cacophony of churning foam. They undulated like the tentacles of some indescribably colossal beast, and began to weave themselves together like cyclopean ropes, coiling into a rough form that disappeared into the shadows overhead. Sturdy legs, long arms, crooked fingers. Masses of purulent flesh sprouted over the carcass, blossoming from a thin dripping sheen to mountainous bulks in a matter of instants. No sooner had this irregular overgrowth come to a rest that its surfaces split all over the giant's form, spraying noxious blood to all sides as jagged plates of iron emerged from the wounds. They clashed and struggled with each other, interlocking along the most unlikely of lines with a loud, shrill grating.

High above, beyond sight and voice, four flames lit up to meet the Architect's all-reaching gaze.

For a moment, all seemed still about the shadowed enormity, except for the fading reverberations of the spasms in its armour. No, not that. It was not an echo, but a low, distant - so distant - rumble coming from within the bulk's indistinct heights. It grew closer, louder, like an avalanche thundering down from the summit, and burst into a tremendous, inarticulate roar. The sheer power of the sound raised up walls of water that crashed down with the strength to shatter cities, and the hall itself seemed to shake for a moment under its violence.

Swiftly, but gradually, the bellowing took shape, the steady rumble reemerging and fusing with it into a simple, unmistakable rhythm. The giant was laughing, a genuine exhilaration pervading his deafening tones even long after he had ceased and only the shadows feebly replied in kind.

And, indeed, he had good cause for joy, for Narzhak lived.
@Cyclone

I do agree that, if fraying is indeed a negligible factor most of the time, complexity would not be much of a problem, and many of my concerns about it are alleviated. However, it still seems to me (do correct me if I'm mistaken) that it would have a fairly significant negative impact on a number of the setting's features.

Take, for example, undead. Even if it only manifests after a very extended timespan soul decay would inevitably affect all of them, as there is no apparent limit to their permanence in that state. The length of that timespan is ultimately immaterial, given the roleplay revolves around immortal characters who operate over entire epochs of the world; sooner or later, we would reach its end. This could only be avoided if were truly extremely great, but, if taken too far, the whole notion would at length be rendered entirely irrelevant to all purposes. Having all undead be condemned to degrade into mindless husks would heavily impair the relevance of undeath as a divine aspect, or at least greatly limit the possible ways in which it could be explored and developed.

Another concept that has been mentioned various times is the possibility of competing afterlives. Beyond having plenty of plot potential in itself, something like this could give a whole new dimension to an eventual soul crisis arc, making it a much more personal matter for any gods who engaged in it. However, once again this would be stymied if all souls were destined to crumble regardless of what happened to them. A variety of afterlives is meaningless if all their inhabitants are featureless shells without thought or memory. Remedying this by making them impermanent would somewhat defeat the concept of an afterlife proper.

Overall, I believe the case remains that soul decay could inhibit several interesting plot opportunities while - I feel the need to restate this - contributing very little in return (its usefulness for demons is ambiguous at best if it is such a small factor, although I admit I did not entirely follow the deliberations on that, and even the ethical aspect it adds to Katharsos' work appears very minor compared to the otherwise cosmic significance of his duties). If I am inflating things out of their real proportion or if there are solutions to these issues, though, do disregard my ramblings.
On the topic of souls, I have no issues with souls being finite and any crisis plots that might entail, and I agree with it being more practical for divines to have essences distinct from regular souls. However, I have to object to the notion of soul fraying. As I have said in the Discord, I find that it makes things needlessly more complex without contributing anything interesting or useful to the setting that could not be achieved by much simpler means. Consider the following:

On soul decay, I propose this: An intact and healthy body inhibits the decay of the resident soul. Stuff like divine essence and the MP invested to make Heroes heroic further reinforces souls against decay to the extent of stopping decay entirely while they are alive. Part of making an immortal species is spending MP on their ability to keep their souls together indefinitely. Ad hoc solutions, such as those available to mortals, do not prevent this fraying, and self-made immortals will need to work to maintain their immortality (e.g. a lich needs to keep consuming souls so as to replenish the part of their soul which frays).

On the death of powerful beings, typically their death is brought about by something which weakens the being to the extent that the being is too weak to not die. At this stage, stripped of power, the being (e.g. god, hero) is likely (although not certainly) too weak to resist the Sky of Pyres.

On what counts as a body, it is whatever you have spent Might on to make as a body for your species.


In essence, this amounts to emulating a natural process (aging and bodily damage leading to death) which normally occurs on its own. In such a system, a being would be weakened by having a compromised body, which leads to a decaying soul. But a compromised body results in weakness regardless of the state of the soul within; indeed, even in a cosmology where souls were absent altogether, physical harm would bring one closer to death, regardless of any ulterior circumstances. In addition, a soul's health being dependant on the body's condition could lead to some strange quandaries: would someone who has lost a limb have their soul decay at an accelerated rate? Would someone who has suffered from a severe disease, and then recovered, nevertheless die prematurely because the period of illness resulted in pieces of their soul sloughing away faster than normal?

As concerns immortal beings, divinely blessed and not, soul decay once again adds a layer of intricacy that does not appear strictly necessary. The additional effort (MP) spent in reinforcing the souls of such entities could just as easily be explained by the difficulty of creating physical forms for them that better withstand the advance of time, something that would need to be done anyway if the creator does not wish for them to grow decrepit under the immense age they would eventually reach. Those mortals that would attain immortality by their own means would be in a similar predicament. They might be able to extend their lifespan by some means, but they would have to keep themselves from rotting away in order to enjoy it, and no amount of consuming souls would help them with that. The lich in the example would need to, for instance, drain its victims' life force to strengthen its crumbling bones; that is not to say that it shouldn't be able to strip them of their souls for some purpose, but, as mentioned, fuelling its unlife with them alone would be a futile endeavour by the system's very rules.

Furthermore, soul fraying seems to me all the more dubious since there is no definite description of how it occurs. It was said that:

I imagine a fully decayed soul would just be a bunch of crumbles, effectively a lump of soul ash with a few chunks big enough to retain some memories etc.
Cyclone in the chat yesterday


It's not very clear how this would fit into the workings of the soul as determined by the Sky of Pyres. If the decay is manifested in the soul falling apart, how would it be purified at Katharsos' hands? And, if souls crumble back into ash as they reach the end of their course, why would he need to redistribute their material by artificial means? Far from providing a justification for his work, soul decay might in fact place its usefulness into question.

One last note, not necessarily related to fraying but still linked with matters of death and the soul. I notice the OP still has this point, written before Katharsos was conceived:

3 Might: Resurrect a mortal or a hero. Reaching into the depths of death and plucking back a mortal soul is no easy task, even for a god, and will likely involve a quest to whatever Sphere the soul has gone for its afterlife. The cost for healing or building a new body for said mortal is included in this act. This cost does not cover any sundry expenses incurred during a quest to the afterlife and back.
Rules on Might spending


Since in the new system death involves one's mind and memories being destroyed and scattered, eventually going to form new living beings, the feasibility of this might need to be revised.
So what are people gunning for in terms of second portfolios?


Likely Murder, Predation or something similarly adaptable, with an aim for a cluster of Violence or Strife (more vague, but doesn't it sound that much better?).
Good gods, is this fast. Calling dibs on a war god before it gets plundered; a sheet should be coming sometime today.
I'm considering a god of strife and upheaval of various kinds. War, sure, but possibly also things like eruptions, earthquakes, disease or others in this vein. Still, the idea's pretty flexible at the moment. It could easily become something more elemental instead.
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