The Sands of Time - In the Beginning
 

So I've decided to start this game a little early. It will operate in a similar vain to Arhras Happy fun adventure time in that the players decide what actions to take.


The Sands of Time - In the beginning

In the beginning you were without form, less than an idea, less than a whisper on the wind. Darkness surrounds you, in every direction a great void.
You can neither feel nor perceive anything from the great void and for what feels like an eternity you are alone.

A faint sussurus of something intangible sparks across your consciousness.
A dull thumping sound reverberates around you its tempo rapidly increasing.
Suddenly colours and lights explode into existence below you.
You feel invigorated and feel something else that you have never felt before flow through your essence.
A sudden cry for help rings through your mind.
The thumping sound continues to increase in tempo, suddenly you feel an emotion you have never felt before. Panic, and yet it is not your own. A wave of vertigo passes through you.

Your perspective shifts suddenly and you see a man running through a great gathering of trees he is clearly distressed and behind him a pack of wolves are persuing. He stumbles and the wolves circle him. Time shifts and slows as energy flows into your being, a great tide of power rises from within and without.


Status

You are filled with POWER
You have no alignment
You have one worshiper
You have no affinity towards any miracles

Your worshiper is in grave danger.

EMPOWER follower to fight off the wolves with his bearbare hands.

Fill the man's germs with power so that they live on without him and evolve into creatures that can worship you somewhere safe.

EDIT: Better yet, use the power to grant the wolves enough intelligence so that they will worship you.

Allow the wolves to slay him but then use your power to resurrect him once they leave, and impart to him a message of your greatness, and that he shall be your prophet.

All those sound like things we aren't quite powerful enough for yet.

>>Make the wolfs go to sleep

I'm caught between choosing between one of these 2, as we definately want this man to come to understand and respect our power so that later we can make him our Herald of Divine Will, but allowing him to first die might set a bad precedent for future relations.
I therefore offer 2 alternatives;

1) Grant this man Holy Laser Eye Beams, with which he might defend himself and become our Chosen One, or

2) Demonstrate our Supreme Greatness by unleashing Lightning Blasts upon his canine oppressors, so that he might come to understand Our Greatness.

But that's the point. We don't want everyone bothering us with their useless bullshit, so we teach them early to rely on themselves and avoid trouble rather than asking us for help all the time.

But we also show them that if their faith is unwavering through their hardest times, we will be there to lift them back up when they fall.

Plus: Prophets gotsta be resurrected. It's a thing.

Eventually we can get rid of that second part, and go all Crom.

OK, here is what is going to happen.

He is going to pick up a branch to defend himself with and we are going to set the tip of it on fire. Holy fire brand, yeah!

Helping those who help themselves is an instructive first lesson.

Accept the wolf's human sacrifice and grant it your divine favor.

Fun fact: I'm pretty sure wolves are also scavengers.
 

Cause the wind to change direction, revealing a huge, juicy rotting elk carcass a safe distance away from your worshiper, which the wolves would naturally greatly prefer to some itty-bitty human.

> Annex Poland
Yeah, no, Arhra's seems pretty ideal. Simple, yet divine. Maybe have a ray of flame strike the tip of the man's club? And have our mighty voice ring from the sky, proclaiming that we bestow upon him our divine flame, so that he might conquer the darkness?

Best way i could come up with to link every ones posts together
 

No.


The wolves move in slow motion preparing to pounce on your follower.

You struggle to control the titanic energies coursing through your being, a great blast of fire and energy erupts from you.

The blast of fire slams into the forest floor near your follower and explodes outwards burning and destroying everything in its path, the flames spiral around and into your follower before slowly dissipating.

Ash and smoke fills the air and the surrounding forest is blackened and burned a gust of wind blows the smoke clear and a large fire continues to crackle in the centre of the newly formed clearing .

The wolves lie burnt and broken on the forest floor.

Your followers clothes are charred and his skin has a red hue to it. He rises from the floor, he is clearly shocked and in awe. He circles the clearing for a moment before falling prostrate before the fire.


Status
You feel only a small amount of power flowing through you
You have no alignment.
You have one worshiper.
You have a slight affinity towards both fire and enhancement.


You have created eternal flame

You can feel energy flowing into you from your follower giving you strength

Command the follower to write the Tome of Flames, and to set forth and spread this wisdom.

EDIT: Or as a means of expanding our affinity, attempt to channel power to slowly regrow the forest before the follower's eyes.

Speak from the flames, commanding the follower to gather others to settle near the Holy Pyre.

We should definately try to communicate with him at this point and therefore establish a proper identity. Then we can start giving out directives to gather more followers.

We could also do with a name.

i'm open to suggestions

Those poor, poor wolves ='(

Nudge the follower to bring the Eternal Flame home as a help to get others to convert to you as well. Worship is required for increased magic, probably.

Command your follower to forge the eternal flame into a Flame Brand, which shall serve as your holy symbol and aid in converting more followers.

First, I think we should introduce ourselves, and lay out the basic relationship between us--the whole god/prophet thing. (And he is, if only by default.) We can then strike a kind of deal: His worship, and the worship of however many others he can convert, gets him...I dunno, something nice and poetic like "warmth in the cold, and a beacon of hope in the night which is dark and full of terrors".

I'm a little torn. On the one hand, I think it'd be cool to be one of those gods who are all about encouraging peace and reason and such; on the other, if we're playing a god and not using our powers to terrify and manipulate, aren't we kind of missing out?

Well seeing as our first act was the murderise a bunch of animals just for being hungry, I'd say we're probably already on the path that inevitably leads to the destruction of the enemies of our followers. So we should add that to the list of benefits we offer him.

The problem with that is long-term follow through. It's easy early on when it's some wolves and maybe enemy villagers, but eventually you have to start expending massive amounts of power to deal with opposing armies and whatever else is out. If you have a large enough worship base it's feasible, sure, but the second we start to falter you cause people to doubt, which means it's that much harder to smite the next set of guys, which causes more doubt, and so on, and then we're a footnote, assuming the overwhelming horde happens to have some pen and paper.

Therefore, I second that we tell him to tell his friends to settle near the eternal flame. We consolidate our worship base, demonstrate that if they stick near us we'll keep them safe from the dark and cold, and eventually we can work out a way to allow them to use the flames to make their own (holy) tools* to spread our power/word.

*See, if you give them a tool, the onus is on them to use it right. If they fail, you just say that they weren't worthy but if everyone believes harder they'll get the hang of it and make it work on the next go around.

I say we start gathering more worshippers. Let us speak to our prophet-to-be, and tell him to gather more before the Flame. This is where they shall build, protected by the Light of the Flame.

Our prophet, marked by the Flame, but not destroyed by it, is to be The First Firebrand.

I say we do nothing for now, as we are still unsure of how our powers work and our own place in the universe. Plus, leaving a little mystery could help, and he'll probably convert others and form a church around our flame without our directives.

Plus: Are we really sure we want to be a fire god? Maybe we want to diversify a little when we learn how stuff works better. No sense locking ourselves into all this fire stuff.

We've gained a bit of affinity, but there's no need to lock ourselves in. We can always branch out. However, our first Miracle should be a good thing to focus on at the beginning. Get them to worship it and use it. We don't need to do everything with Fire.

Heck, we could leverage the Enhancement affinity we also picked up, and become a god of the Forge, maybe.

Besides, it's a tried-and-true thing. Lots of gods use magical fire as a jumping-off point, whether they're Fire gods or not. [citation needed]

Tell our prophet this
 

KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.

I mostly just want to turn into Crom, and have people worship the fuck out of us without ever having to do anything.

you direct a small amount of power from you into the clearing, seeds deep in the soil begin to very slowly sprout and small shoots raise from soil.

You feel almost powerless


You notice that a small amount of energy is flowing from you into the eternal flame.

You struggle for a moment trying to conceive of a way to communicate with your follower.

Using the last remaining energy within you, you direct a surge of power into the flame, it roars and crackles allowing you to speak through the fire.

"KNEEL BEFORE ZOD"

Your follower raises himself from the floor in wonderment and not a little trepidation and instead kneels before the flame.


You feel less energy flowing into you from your follower how ever you have a greater understanding of his emotional state.

He currently feels, Shock, Awe, Gratitude and Confusion.




"GATHER YOUR KIN, FOR THESE FLAMES SHALL PROTECT YOU IN THE DARK OF NIGHT"


You begin to feel fatigued there is little energy remaining inside you. The world begins to blacken once more and your senses begin to shutdown.

Status

You are completely powerless
You can still feel a gentle tug on your essence it HURTS

You have one follower
He is filled with Purpose

You have a slight affinity towards Fire, Enhancement and Growth


*Next update will be on sunday

Your character isn't very self aware at the moment so if you feel there is information you are missing or want to know status wise make sure to include that in your post.

I guess we're pretty much out of things to do now that we're powerless then. If there is even the slightest bit of energy left inside us I suggest we conserve it until our followers returns with others.

It also seems we started drawing less energy from him the moment we made demands, so we should probably be more careful about that in the future, it probably means he's now more afraid of us and fear might be the opposite to what we need to feed on. Hopefully we can negate this with wonder and more followers.

Also it seems we're named Zod now. I'm not overly impressed with that designation but oh well.

Boo. Only the insecure gods need names.
Is this supposed to be our follower's influence, or something else? Like, just the act of being can ache if we don't have enough power?
A way to determine how much power we can expend would be nice, just so we can avoid going non-existent through a mistaken over reach. Also a way to see if there's an easier way to get affinities beyond just making it rain with power and seeing what sticks.

I think it's the eternal fire. I believe it was mentioned that the fire is draining us slightly.

Well, all we need is for our worshippers to come here and start, well, worshipping. A town full of followers should be able to counterbalance that.

Oh, duh, that makes the most sense. Maybe a list of what and how much power we're expending at any given time would be good for accounting.

Since it appears to have flown over a few heads...

I can't speak for Hawk, but for me it's the fact that we even have a name, regardless of whether its a nerd reference or not.

I mean, lets take a random sampling of three religions that have survived for a while with a lot of influence and see how they address their deity:

Judaism: G-d
Christianity: God
Islam: Allah*

*Allah means "God"

Saying we have a name implies, at the very least, that we have to differentiate ourselves from all the other potential deities out there, whereas going either nameless or just descriptive instantly elevates us above all the others. Even if there are no other deities, it's a lot like trying to give yourself a nickname, which, just, not cool no matter how you slice it.

Oh no, I meant I said it as a joke.

Gods can have more than one name, and tons of different titles 'n' stuff. :crossarms: Anyhoodles, let's lie low until he brings some new worshipers. The whole "new shoots coming from the ground which is basically still smoking" is a nice touch, and should win a few more people over.

Well the big thing we can sell them is that there is power in things they can't see. Since it seems like the forest is regrowing at a rate where the change will be noticeable if they stop paying attention for a moment. Also having plants actively grow faster around fire adds further to our awesomeness in their eyes.

I just think Zod's a stupid name. I've never been able to take that guy seriously as a villain.

I figured as much when you first said it, but now it seems to be official :(((.
Well, sure, but those should come from our followers after recognizing our greatness and such, not us doing the equivalent of walking into school and insisting everyone calls us "Danger Zone."

The One Above All?

Or alternatively, Legion, for we are many.

Confession time, I didn't actually know what Arhra was referencing when I first read his post. I did a google search and saw it in tv tropes. I wrote up that post whilst at work on a text pad and didn't copy/paste what I had typed up properly as i was attempting to play along and had typed a joke about the deities alignment moving towards villainy.


That said, I understand most of you dislike the idea of being known as Zod so if people would prefer it I will either retconn the name out of existence or come up with another more palatable solution. Any way back to the game and sorry for the late update.


You aren't sure how much time has passed but with every moment you feel weaker and more drained. The gentle tug on your essence begins to feel excruciating.

Slowly you notice more energy starting to flow into you the pain begins to dissipate

and you can feel the energy swirl around gently healing you. Your senses begin to awaken slowly


You realise you were close to death

You have a greater understanding of your being.

You are made up of three core parts

Essence, Energy and Experience

Essence is your life force and your ability to perceive the world around you, you may expend it to make up for a lack of energy.

Energy is the power you receive from your followers it is used to power your miracles and is used in any action you perform

Experience is your skill at influencing the world and your followers it influences your ability to control your power effectively.



Where once the clearing you had made was empty now exists a small village it is clear that a good deal of time has passed.
The Eternal Flames burn as brightly as ever. The clearing has been enlarged and many huts circle the fire.

The man you saved from the wolves is currently kneeling before the fire praying. You can just barely catch small snatches of his thoughts as he prays.

"Great one..... Your help......Give me a sign...I will strive..."

A small distance to the north of the village the forest clears and you can see rolling grasslands.

The forest extends in every other direction further than your senses can perceive, there is a river a hundred meters to the south it is flowing gently.





Status and stats!

You feel a small stream of energy flowing into you.
You currently have a small amount of energy flowing inside you it is growing

You have 1 devout Follower and 11 other followers.
Your followers have conflicting views of what you represent.

Essence
Life force: 15/80
Senses: 3/3

Energy
Energy contained: 5/60
Energy flowing in: 15
Energy flowing out: 3

Experience
You have a small affinity with Fire, Enhancement and Growth

For future reference how would you like to deal with energy loss and essence usage, for instance I presume people would prefer to be able to keep their senses and instead lose essence at a faster rate?

We should let them know what we represent. A will to establish a theocratic state that executes the infidels.

> Try to find out what our followers think we represent

Well he wants a sign, presumably he wants to ask us something, so we should probably do something to show we're listening. Something midly impressive that's not going to drain too much energy. Perhaps open a dialogue? Does speaking through the Eternal Flame cost us power?

Maybe a noncommital sign, to get his attention. Maybe make the Eternal Flame flare up a bit more for a brief moment. Nothing permanent, just something he'll notice.

Seconding this for now.

Also wondering how energy it would take to change the properties of the eternal flame. The rest of the people in that village seem pretty non-commital and another miracle'd be good. Especially if it's a self-repeating one.

Say, making the flame cleanse impurities and heal wounds instead of consuming flesh.

Though we'll probably have to wait a bit to do this.

Thing is, we don't want to get too trigger-happy with full-blown miracles. The more we do miracles, the more our followers will expect us to throw miracles at every problem they have, and overextending ourself is going to kill us.

That's the point of changing the very structure of the flames, though. We shouldn't have to do much/anything else as it will be a constant reminder of our power. Plus, a healing flame that can cure diseases and mend wounds?

When stories of that get out we'll get pilgrims from all over.

Thought, could we use a high priest of sorts? Give the guy a staff with a knob of eternal fire, tell him to spread our word?

One git of eternal fire is already a constant drain on us. We should limit ourselves to one persistent effect for the time being, I think.

I like this idea. To keep it within the wheelhouse we have now (fire, enhancement, growth) we could start with crops and work our way up when the power display convinces more people. Like, send our main guy a flash of inspiration to burn some seeds/whatever, then spread the ashes on their farmland, then insta-farm. Might be a little less power intensive than eternal panacea.
Hmm, this is probably a future-god concern, but we should at least plot out a rough outline of how the hierarchy of our faith followers is gonna be, at least as a way to avoid civil wars and anti-popes.

Not a bad idea for whatever comes soon after this, but first we ought to get his attention so we can figure out exactly what it is he's begging for here. Maybe he needs a good harvest, maybe his wife has cancer, maybe he's got boner issues, I dunno. (Come to think of it, though, all of those are pretty well within our wheelhouse.)

Also, we don't need to act as an "eternal panacea"--just one or two miraculous cures every so often should be enough to keep 'em loyal, if that's the kind of thing we're gonna decide to do. (It works for the Christian one, after all :smug: .)

Yeah but I think Eternal Panacea might be better in the long run, 'cause it'd just be a change to the flame and then let it keep on going independent of our actual will other than the constant drain it's already causing (maybe a little more).

And later on we could add conditions like, it only heals the faithful, or the innocent, and burns others. Make it central to society, especially with the innocent one. Not only using it to heal the sick but as a part of their society's criminal justice system.

Maybe give it an AoE effect that makes everything healthier in whatever distance of the flame.

As for church organization, I suggest not having one, and just striking down anyone who claims to speak in our name unless we've actually told them anything. That way we don't have to worry about dealing with the 'official' church adding things they shouldn't to our faith.

Basically I'm advocating a slew of passive constant effects rather than anything we have to actively cause, as that way we can just sit back and collect prayer juice and do whatever we want with it, rather than being beholden to specific prayers that everyone makes constantly (wah wah my child is dying of plague, just throw them in the fire and leave us out of it).

Information post!
 

Past action energy costs.

Instinctively granting yourself the ability to See and hear: 200 energy

Initial blast of fire that killed the wolves burned a clearing and created Eternal fire and enhanced your follower so he wouldn't be consumed by the flames. : 1000 energy

Making small shoots of plants and encouraging fast growth: 60 energy

Speaking through the flames: 40 energy


The more subtle the action the less it costs. It is possible to expend large amounts of energy initially when creating persistent effects to lower maintenance costs.

Affinity also effects costs of actions as a general rule the greater your affinity the cheaper an action becomes when linked to that affinity, when attempting to utilize a miracle with which you have no affinity towards unexpected side effects can and will occur.

Changing the fire so that it heals would require more energy than you can currently hold within you.

Your time spent channeling your own essence to power the eternal fire has left you less capable of containing energy however your control over fire is correspondingly greater.

You have a small affinity towards Fire and a slight affinity towards Enhancement and Growth

Personally, I saw we bank on this and basically turn the flame into a franchise. Get a homebase set up, then send out people who basically carry a portion of the flame to a location, explain what it does to new villages, and then install it for them to use. Maybe personalize each flame to a location's particulars. Again, probably a longer-term problem.

So, seeing as we only have 5 energy now we have to be super duper subtle to communicate, huh? Also, is speech the other "Sense" we have, in addition to Seeing and Hearing?

Your other sense is the ability to 'hear/feel' your followers emotions and thoughts during either prayer or times of intense emotions you start with this ability.

Your Affinity with fire has increased since last using it to speak with your follower and it is now cheaper to do so.

using the fire to speak to your followers would require you to utilize life force. It converts at a rate of 1 life force to 10 energy

Before we start putting cast from HP on the table, do we have any idea how to regain life force? Is it like overflow energy, or do we have to do something different?

You can run the process in reverse and when your energy store is full it converts at 1 energy to 1 lifeforce.

Edit: You can only burn off life force to power your miracles when your store of energy is empty.

My idea was basically give the flame a bunch of powers, and add some 'only works for believers' aspects so people don't forget it's US doing this shit, and then let it do, nearly, all our work. We'd probably still have to pop down and be like "Yo, yeah, remember us? Pray and shit" now and then to keep people from taking it for granted, but yeah.

Though, I don't know about putting flames in other places. Might lead to more taking it for granted stuffs. Flame feels like it should be a 'main church only' type of deal. Maybe we could create different elemental pillars in other places if we diversify some. Like an eternal windstorm somewhere, or a mystical healing stone, etc. to keep the mystique, but that'd require us to diversify our portfolio pretty heavily.

Not entirely against it though.

My original thought was that if there were other elemental gods out there, our guys could go over and convince the foreign populace to accept us. Then we'd be all "Hey guys, we're cool, just throw some flame on that magic lake, no need to change things up too much."

But anyways, concerning the present situation, should we just say something like "Feed our flame and we will help you grow" or something? Just spend the life points now to convince the rest of the followers and then get down to business when they're more committed.

I kinda liked the destruction/creation feel we had going. We burn and we regrow, we destroy and we sustain, sort of a life/death cycle. Which is a bit grander than just being an elemental god.

But doesn't that imply a lot of power output from our side? Looking at the typical energy costs (even if the affinities start to drive them down a little) we're probably going to do better in the long run adopting a passive enhancement strategy that puts the action onus on our followers and their steadfast faith, rather than raining down destruction from above and hoping we can get enough new cowering followers from the remains to charge the reserves for the next bloodletting.

Silly people, start by making him think you're listening.

Have a spark jump out of the eternal fire and settle on him without burning him.

Less is more!

Once he spills his guts about what the problem is, you can leverage that into a bigger sign.

Well, what we end up standing for in teh eyes of our followers has no bearing on how much energy we'll be using up. We could be an energy-efficient god of life and death, or a super-high-energy elemental god.

I'm just saying that, on the whole, I'd prefer to go the life and death route over being just another elemental god.

A gentle wind blows through the clearing and the forest, the sounds of leaves rustling fills the air. A sharp gust of wind blows through the clearing

You utilize a tiny amount of energy and a small ember shoots out from the fire and hits your follower squarely in the forehead.

Your follower gasps but soon calms when it fails to hurt him.

The ember continues to burn for a brief a moment before disappearing.

As if a veil were being parted you can suddenly hear your followers prayers more clearly.

"Mighty one, my child is sick and I know not what to do please help him, He has been ailing for many weeks now. I will do anything you ask of me. Please I beg of you help Pyrros"

His voice is ladened with desperation and grief.

Your perspective shifts onces more and you are now inside one of the huts. The walls are made from wood and mud and there is little decoration.

The floor is covered in animal skins and a young child is wrapped in them he is unconscious, his skin is a heavily flushed red hue and he is sweating profusely.

Outside of the hut, your follower continues to pray.


Status

You feel a stream of energy flowing into you
You have a moderate amount of energy flowing inside of you it is growing


Essence
Unchanged

Energy
Input:15
Output:4
Total:16

Experience
Unchanged

Make use of that growth affinity and attempt to give the child strength (as in a stronger body w/ immune system), so that he may recover on his own. Also make him see a vision of a flame when he is out, so he doesn't forget who did this for him.

Burn the child. Kid isn't sick anymore, problem solved.

How did I know somebody would say something like that?

But yeah, this should be fairly easy, we can already enhance people so we can just make the kid like his dad, instantly curing him of disease, assuming that it doesn't take a massive amount of energy to do so (I forget how much it cost us to do that with our acolyte dude now).

Of course, we also want to make it blatantly apparant to everyone else that we've done this, so we can get the rest of these people believing more firmly in us. I foresee several options here;

1a) Enhance the child, curing him instantly. Response; Hey presto, a miracle has been performed!

1b) Same as above, but more flashy. Make the kid engulfed in flame whilst he's being cured or something. More costly on energy, but will remove any doubt as to a miracle taking place if there's any naysayers in the village.

2) Cure the child without using enhance (not sure if healing is classed as a seperate discipline). Probably less costly and easier, diversifies our skillset. About as flashy as 1a though.

3) Turn the eternal flame into a healing flame, tell the acolyte to place his child in it, child is cured. Makes a nice test of his faith, removes ALL doubt from the village, since everyone will likely see it, villagers forever get mystical healing flame. Probably very costly energy wise, but most likely the biggest payoff.

Or we make the kid our avatar.

Just because he got sick?

I say we tell the dad to take whatever form of medicine they have, hold it directly in the fire (without getting burned, while everyone watches, natch) then enhance the medicine and let him give it to the kid. Maybe make the kid have a vision or somesuch while the medicine works on him. I don't know how much of the 1000 energy was spent giving immunity to the guy, but we don't have anywhere near that even if we dig into our essence to duplicate it, and we don't seem to have a lot of health/energy to throw around outside of our discounted affinities.

He does have the name for it...

I like this one. Maybe go with 'near the fire' instead of in it, seeming as apparently we can't even hold enough energy to alter the flames so they don't burn things/whatever yet and we don't want to burn the medicine away on accident.

Ohohoho, silly people.

Why should we heal this child?

I am leaning towards identify antidote, give vision of location of antidote myself.

I'd go for this if its energy-cheaper than my proposal, but I'd add that the vision has some obvious supernatural sign (fiery aura, tongue of flame, general light show) so that there's no doubt in the other villagers's minds that We had some influence. We don't want everybody thinking that our guy staged the whole thing when he runs off to get the antidote on a hunch.

Yeah, help the people help themselves, but give them a bit of a sign so they know who helped beyond a doubt. F'rinstance, maybe another of those undying, unburning embers shows him the way to a patch of the stuff that'll help his kid get better (possibly paired with a vision of said substance).