A Game of Gods: A Multiversal Challenge was the first chapter in the Chronicles of the Gods series. In addition to introducing many of the basic concepts- such as Nomads and challenges- it also provided a framework for future games and remains the most popular and well-known installment.
Can be found here.
A Game Of Gods contains examples of:
- Aliens Speaking English: Both complete aliens, like Dis Baba, and humans like Blink and Galen Marek speak English, in both OOC and IC senses. Which means there are Translator Microbes at play.
- Anti-Climax: The ending to Endless Blue. The heroes bring Ecco to the Big Blue, and that's it.
- Anticlimax Boss:
- Darth Vader, of all people, wound up as this in the Boarding Action challenge.
- Subverted, by the great white shark at the beginning of the Endless Blue challenge; while the champions manage to dispatch the poor creature in very short order, a nebulous force intercedes to revive the shark, giving it a major upgrade in the process.
- Big Bad Ensemble: In order of appearance, Lambda, Digamma, and Omega. All three wish to stop the games and commit genocide on their race, but only Lambda wants to save the Challengers.
- Blinded by the Light: Mason throws a flashbang when the Common Room went dark. Some of the people inside got blinded temporarily.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Mal-Keshar insists that guns are 'thundersticks' and rifles are 'dragonsticks'.
- Call-Back: During the Halo: Reach Challenge, Lambda asks Phi to come to him, and when he does, Lambda hurts him. A couple of challenges later, Lambda does it again, but Phi doesn't fall for it. It helps that Lambda is grief stricken with Echidna's death and everyone knows he's gonna snap at them for it.
- Casual Danger Dialogue: Kimimaro explaining the mechanics behind his powers to Dr. Langley while slaughtering Morlocks.
- Cerebus Syndrome: At first, it was all just fun and random, but then, as the challenges got Darker and Edgier, so did the tone of the entire RPG.
- Curb-Stomp Cushion: The end result of a Ravage vs. Rey "match" is evident, but Rey manages to land a couple of hits before he's taken down.
- Darker and Edgier: The Halo: Reach challenge. Not a few minutes in, and already both Covenant and UNSC troops are brutally killing each other. Also crosses over with Mood Whiplash, as it takes place right after the Magical Girl challenge, which itself had darkness that predates Puella Magi Madoka Magica by a few months.
- Death Is Cheap: Dying in the challenges simply boots A Champion back to the Common Room, leaving them no worse for the wear; at the very worst, it is a mild inconvenience. Some players occasionally take advantage of this fact to get out of challenges they don't like by having their characters die easily or commit suicide. Outside of the challenges, however, death is very much permanent.
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Difficulty Spike: The Halo Reach challenge. The Mooks are much tougher than the team's previous opponents, death is a constant threat, allied NPCs keep dying in droves, and the objective isn't made explicitly clear to the Champions.
- Elephant in the Living Room: The characters are often dropped into situations where they really should stand out, but don't. Justified in that the characters are there to complete a challenge, which would be impossible to complete if everyone noticed them and flipped out from the start, and people eventually do start to notice that there's something a bit off about these strangers once they start drawing attention to themselves (such as when they blow up all of southwest Verona).
- In the Blood Feud challenge, the characters are dropped into Romeo and Juliet, and none of the world's inhabitants are bothered by their presence.
- Zigzagged in the Halo Reach challenge. The challengers are pretty much treated as normal... until they do stuff that is not normal. Luckily Subaru makes a Saving Throw and convinces the troops that all the Challengers are special forces. Until they see that Subaru is a cyborg. And than Mal-Keshar slithers out of the shadows. The troops freak out.
- Enemy Mine: Characters from all over the alignment scale forced to work together... when they manage to stop fighting each other.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Saren does not take kindly to anyone mocking Subaru's ability to fight. Just ask Jack Noir.
- Fauxshadowing: The End of Evangelion being a Nomad challenge when a representative of Lambda named the Inevitable smashes computer equipment used related to Tokyo-3 work, including broadcast of the said movie. Earlier, Spriggan used PHANTOM to see if he can recreate 3D maps of other places. His first choice: Tokyo-3 based from End of Evangelion as a test. Narumi swears to defeat the JSSDF if the Nomads send them there after he learned of what they did to Tokyo-3. Nothing of this happens.
- Fisher Kingdom: Halloweentown and the Silverrealm turn the characters into more appropriately-dressed versions of themselves.
- Gender Bender: The Magical Girl challenge turns every (male) character into teenage girls.
- Genre Shift: The Magical Girl challenge changed from a comedy bordering on Fanservice Hentai to a Darker and Edgier genre with a villain that constructed itself out of dead bodies.
- Giant Flyer: The over-sized shadow dragonfly which serves as a boss in the Paved With Good Intentions challenge; the thing is stated to be roughly as large as a bus, although considering the force responsible for it becoming so large, this may be justified.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Spriggan speaks Portugese due to his early Timorese upbringing with FALINTIL.
- Humongous Mecha: Ravage has a habit of conjuring up his fellow Decepticons whenever the Champions get into a fight between challenges. He has brought in Devastator, Frenzy, Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker, and the towering Scorponok. And now, Megatron!
- Hypocritical Humor: Kirby calls out Narumi for shooting at him (see Let's You and Him Fight) and Narumi points out that he does not blend in with his monsters, despite using the same device as the monsters he fights.
- It's All My Fault: Spriggan during the crossover challenge, after a civilian was killed in front of him while conducting basic first aid. He swears vengeance on whoever was trying to kill him and the team. He wasn't exact to enact his revenge.
- Left-Fielder: During the Crossover Challenge of Season 1, the Nomad homeworld receives a party crasher in the form of Unicron, of all beings.
- Let's Get Dangerous!: Rey cowers, cries, and freaks out constantly from the instant he shows up in the challenges...until getting snapped out of it by the first monster attack in the Magical Girl challenge. Double points for Rey for kicking an Elite in the gonads, even though it doesn't do much.
- Let's You and Him Fight:
- Narumi in the "Blood Feud" challenge picked a fight with both Saren and Ravage on two separate occasions, mistaking them for Dopants.
- In the Endless Blue challenge, Narumi attacked Kirby, mistaking him to be one of the hammerhead sharks.
- It would have happened again in Halloween Town, but Gordon stopped him from picking some fights.
- Mood Whiplash: Happens often. Especially this one. To clarify, Mason makes a heroic speech... Then promptly strips down to his underwear.
- My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: Phi asks Rey if he wants to tap Gordan.
- No One Gets Left Behind:
- Spriggan does this to Luxanna when she's knocked out cold during the SCP challenge.
- Quoted per verbatim by Mason during the Half-Life challenge, while giving cover to everyone who wasn't in the reactor building. Saren violently pulled him in.
- Out, Damned Spot!: The Doctor starts seeing blood on his hands during the crossover challenge.
- Pass the Popcorn: Chi shows up with a bucket of Popcorn at one point, while some of the other Nomads are arguing. No-one is sure why or where he got it.
- Rage Against the Heavens: Sub-Zero calls out the Nomads for making Asuka and thinking they can get away with it.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Due to problems with one of the participants, Kisame was killed off in the final battle.
- Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: The wedding in the Magical Girl challenge early on was Played for Drama. When the wedding actually took place, it was Played for Laughs with a clever priest and everyone, including the bride, pointing out how Sick and Wrong it is, both in and out of character.
- Running Gag: Saren keeps getting dragged away (involuntarily) from the group.
- Sailor Earth: The Nomads seem to fall under this trope: just pick a Greek Letter, a color, and bam, you have a Nomad.
- Screw Yourself: The dating challenge pits the Doctor with... The Doctor.
- Shout-Out: As expected...
- Ravage's line before he fires a Wave-Motion Gun at Saren.
- Gordon gives one to one of his interpretations.
- Kirby's costume is his Darker and Edgier persona from There Will Be Brawl.
- Everyone in Halloween is playing a game of "what's in the box?" and Narumi hopes it's not a human head.
- The Nomads are one giant shout-out to Faiz. Greek Letter Motif? Check. Tron Lines? Check. It helps that the Nomads representing Phi and Psi is Red and Teal (closest to Cyan) respectively. Note, however, that any similarity was completely unintentional, save for Phi, who is played by Psyga 315 who happened to be a Kamen Rider fan. They are also compared to the Earthbound Immortals and the Fal'cie.
- Quite a lot of Warcraft ones by Mal-Keshar.
- Roach's reaction to the Angler Fish monster in the Magical Girl challenge:
- The Dullahan summons Charon, the boatman of the Styx. This being a Magical Girl universe, he gets Komachi Onozuka.
- One of the letters to Robot Santa asks him if he's insane, gone senile, illiterate, or just a vindictive, twisted elf, bent on destroying little kids' dreams.
- Another letter to Robot Santa was from Bowser. You can expect what it contains.
- Gordon passes through a microwave corridor in the Half Life challenge.
- After the Common Room gets changed, Sub-Zero asks if this is the Cowrealm.
- Gordon mentions Silent Hill after the team lands on the Persona 4 challenge.
- A few Aut Omnia Aut Nihil ones, such as a company called GAUECo, and two guards in a prison called Regg and Will, during the semi-final challenge.
- Natsu does a Domon reference from G Gundam.
- Phi makes up for the lack of Mami by using a BFG, which itself is a reference to Kamen Rider Faiz's Super Mode, and shouting "TIRO FINALE!"
- Phi's last words echo Tomoya's last words.
- At one point, Sub-Zero asks whoever created Asuka the superweapon "Are you out of your stupid rotted skull, you dumb Nomad?!"
- The Doctor's Anti-A God Am I speech towards Digamma echo Near's similar speech towards Light.
- Summon Bigger Fish: Apparently, a Nomad wanted to kill the other Nomads, so he brought in UNICRON.
- Super Multi-Purpose Room: The Common Room is pretty much a larger version of The Room Of Requirement. Anything the Champions need, bam, they have it.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Oh yes. A combination of cultural differences, ideologies, and moral extremes make working together less likely than simply turning on one another.
- Theme Naming: The Narumis in the Magical Girl challenge are named after the Japanese words for the seasons, Natsuki (the mother), Tsuharu (Narumi), Taki (the father), and Fuyuko (the daughter).
- Wham Episode: Although the War For Cybertron challenge was the first challenge to include the Nomads, The Magical Girl challenge was the one that really sunk in the wham. How? How about multiple Nomads.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- Roxas, Mewtwo, and Cirno inexplicably vanished early in, and Mecha-Sonic disappeared a little later on, and the Reach challenge seems to have had Roach, Kirby, and Deidara suffer the same fate. It was eventually answered later that they're drained of their life-force to power a multiverse-destroying warhead.
- Samus Aran appeared briefly in the Magical Girl challenge, and that's all.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- Kirby and Narumi call out Optimus for killing Saren by comparing him to Megatron, and when the group has to split up, they join Jorge's team simply because of that. However, Optimus isn't stung by this and remains faithful towards his justifications.
- Rey rips into Jorge for throwing Tron out of the back of a plane when they disagree on what to do next on Reach. Even though Tron was being a jerk, it was uncalled for.
- Later, Harry and Jorge return the favor to Rey when he accepts an infusion of black magic from Mal-Keshar.
- Just about half the team whenever Mason whips out the explosives, most of the time for good reason.
- Wife Husbandry: Narumi finds herself in one with a guy named Taki. What's more weird is that she proposed instead of the other way around.
- World of Ham: The Blood Feud challenge. Saren and Ravage are definitely the hammiest.Saren: Useless prattle. Thou hearest report of a great beast who wouldst devour thine kin and end the line of Capulet for the grudge, and what doest thou? Prolong the ordeal and order the service of questionable men in arms, kick away the option of the diplomat! What a Soveraigne be thou, what fine orders thou givst!
Ravage: I shall tell thee but once; end this feud 'twixt thee and Capulet, Montague, or on the head of thine son, Romeo it shalt be! Thou shalt not have time enough to mourn his passing 'ere my wroth and vengeance be upon thee, and Verona shall run red with the blood of Capulet and Montague entire in resitution for the violence and bloodshed thou hast wrought! - You All Meet in a Cell: All of the characters are taken from their home universes and start out trapped in a hotel, which is located in what looks like Tokyo.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Hurray! Omega is defeated and the Champions have won! Wait, what's that? They forgot about freeing Echidna? Ah well, back to the planet for one final battle.
