Creating a Fantasy Kitchen Sink world

edited 21st Aug '16 10:48:15 AM by DrZadkiel

If you wan to create a modern day fantasy kitchen sink where all the gods are real, I cannot recommend highly enough The Dresden Files as background research.

Some things you will need to consider. Each and every single religion has multiple theories. Some taken seriously by one or another branch of the religion in question and a whole whack more occasionally entertained by agnostics, religious theorists and fiction writers. You will need to pick the one that is actually true.

The usual solution for the monotheist deity is Have You Seen My God?. And then just have the angels and all the other gods essentially be super powered immortal not-quite humans.

Lets play some Shin Megami Tensei games, right now.

And for the Abrahamic God, well, you can go for the Cao Dai doctrine, who say who YHVH isn`t omnipotent and he had to give his power in order to create the world. Or go for the SMT way, who say who YHVH just was one god who was so badass who put himself over others (if this is true, why the Chaos faction, followers of a Social Darwinism doctrine based in freedom are complaining?)

Use just things as Parallel Universes for things as the planes of existance,

edited 18th May '16 9:23:07 AM by KazuyaProta

All of the above recommendation forgets to mention that you don't actually have to cram them into one "main" setting because various myths have the stories of parallel universes (like the Yggdrasil from Norse mythology) so you can based on that theory.

I'd say the Abrahamic God should probably be more powerful than the rest of the pack. Zeus has to mate to have kids, Set doesn't know what Horus does during their "who's the king of Egypt" contest, Balder is killed. Abrahamic God, by contrast, is explicitely described as omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.

As for incorporation of him into the rest: personally, I rather like the idea I've seen somewhere ("Interactions between gods" thread, maybe?), which stated that there are mutliple deities, but Abrahamic God is the creator of the universe and a being so powerful, he operates at pretty much another level from other gods. When your touch can remake Earth from planet to several moons, you probably stay out of squabbles between your minor colleagues. Many of pantheons you've mentioned could accomodate God as the inciting force behind the events of their creation mythos.

Other option could be that all gods are in some way manifestations of Abrahamic god, with the prime "intelligence" behind them all usually staying in the back. Something like a Hive Mind of gods, one that rarely acts unified, but when it does, it overrides the "temporal" personalities of its pieces and wields powers of all of them combined.

edited 29th May '16 1:07:25 PM by Kakai

bump

I would immediately drop a book that had that premise the moment it presented it.

edited 14th Jul '16 10:26:34 PM by Matues

Why? Because it presents one major religion as being 'better' than other religions?

It's just-

I live in the American south.

So I see a lot of people who live in this cultural bubble that causes them to be totally unaware of other faiths even being real things; when they do these other faiths are typically faced with explainations about how they fit in.

Typically, "all other deities are demons", though rarely something like, "all gods are just servants or facets of one God, who just happens to be ours and not anyone else's".

So it carries tones of extreme condescension that they are only able to relate to other faiths by subjugating them to their own.

So I wouldn't want to read a book that does the same thing.

One thing to consider are what are the myth stories that have happened since their 'time' in the limelight, so to speak?

A LOT of pantheons have much inter dramatics and contentions at play. Deity X does something because they felt slighted by Deity Y. Deity Z doesn't exist because they were cast from 'insert place that deities exist' or they were given reign over something else because of some evolution in their deity politics or the world evolving or something.

Basically, the potential for new things to have happened since then is invaluable for A) setting up Chekhov's Guns, other continuity plans, and world building, B) getting creative with your characters, and C) making the world A LOT easier to keep track of because you know exactly where Gods are and if someone might be dead by now or something.

There's honestly nothing I find more frustrating about 'Fantasy Kitchen Sink' Settings (and especially ones that deal with Mythology Gods) is when it feels like EVERYTHING has been in some bloody stasis for the last two thousand years where there were no new myths or stories about them to be told. No new Gods. No new demi-gods. No dead Gods or otherwise vacant positions in the Pantheon (unless the Hero is meant to fill the slot) and no new mythological creatures because Athena or the Morrigan or someone had to smite a mortal or two.