Gods and How to Survive Them

In the Odyssey setting, the gods are a major force to be reckoned with and can’t be ignored or avoided. They exist, oh yes. They exist, and your character will be more fun if you acknowledge this, as one would who’d grown up in a culture permeated by their influence. If you want their opinion on something - get your priest to ask them. They’re not ineffable. Mercurial, jovial, titanic, or promethean, perhaps. Possibly at the same time. But not ineffable. Nor are they fair, or there to act like a cosmic cash’n’carry - sacrifice in, blessings out. Characters sacrifice to the gods because if they don’t, really, really bad shit repeatedly happens to them and all their loved ones. Gods, in the world of Odyssey, should be treated with reverence, fear and awe.

As a priest, you have several ways of attracting the attention of the gods, but the most effective one is sacrifice. If you sacrifice sufficiently to a god, you may be summoned to meet them for a face to face audience with the messenger god of the pantheon or, if you are very fortunate, your patron god directly. Don’t expect to meet them often. Good luck, and read your setting material. This can’t be stressed enough. If digesting and understanding big, hefty blocks of background text do not appeal to you, then the priest game may not be for you. You will need to know the ins and outs of your pantheon, and you will need to be able to predict the moods and tempers of the gods. Winging it is not advised.

Summons to the Home of the Gods will allow you to put your case directly to the deities; this will require a degree of fast talk, charisma, wits and preparation. Sometimes the gods will manifest a human form, other times not so much. Sometimes you will have an audience with the pantheon’s messenger figure; sometimes with your patron; sometimes with another god entirely, who may not be in the mood for taking messages. In any case, it is here that the rewards for your kudos can be gained; here the gods will speak to you of their will, and demand of you that you enforce and enact it. My biggest piece of advice to you the player here is twofold - don’t get cocky, and don’t get greedy. If your behaviour in their presence displeases them, the gods can - and will - slay you on the spot, or curse you so comprehensively your own mother would disown you. They owe you nothing, and demand your worship as their (literally) divine right. Anything they give, they give because they choose to, not because of some concept that you have "earned" it. What they give, they can take. Any time they like. And you, as their trusted representative, communicate their wishes to the world at large.

This is the real politician’s game; you priests will hold the balance of power between gods and men and wise ones among you will know how and where to best use it. A lot of this game is going to revolve around being able to stay on the right side of at least one, ideally a few, gods in your pantheon.

A note about the gods generally:

Whilst they may paint themselves as benevolent patrons, schoolyard bullies would be a more appropriate metaphor. Consider sacrifice to be the equivalent of lunch money; if you give it up, you go without lunch but at least you don’t get your head flushed - and if another god tries to flush you, maybe your patron will intervene. Maybe.

Of course, if you wilfully withhold your lunch money or worse yet badmouth the bully, a good flushing is the least of the things you can expect. Arachne was mutilated, her work destroyed and she was turned into a spider just for making Athena - a relatively benign goddess - mildly jealous. I’m not even gonna start on Tanit and Dagon. Badmouthing the gods of your own pantheon is called sacrilege and priests should stamp it out using whatever tools they have, because if it gets back to the god in question, everyone concerned will encounter the god’s wrath the way sentences encounter a full stop.

Yes, if you are stupid or disrespectful to a god in this game, it is possible that you will simply be struck dead by a bolt of lightning from a blue sky. Or, that all of your friends will be struck by lightning and you will be cursed to watch them burn and shrivel, depending on how much you have pissed the god off and how creative and vengeful the god tends to be. Do not try the patience of the gods, as the saying goes, because they are not subtle.

Badmouthing gods of other pantheons, on the other hand, is an enjoyable pastime for all the warband and should be vigorously encouraged.

The problem with including gods in a classical setting is the nature of player characters meeting them. Someone will, inevitably, take it into their head to swing for Ares, and then will complain that there are unkillable NPCs in the game while queueing for a new character. While the controls on the circumstances under which characters and gods can interact directly will hopefully minimise this, I do think it’s important that we are upfront from the word go about the gods.

In Odyssey, the gods are the giants in the playground, and the role of the priests is to try and steer, manipulate or predict their behaviour in a "let’s you and him fight" kind of way. if you are of a 90’s telly sci-fi persuasion, look at them as the Vorlons and the Shadows - direct confrontations with them will seldom go well for mortals. The role of everyone else is to pay their due sacrifice to the gods, obey their wishes as communicated by the priests, and offer sacrifice to their patrons - not in expectation or even hope of reward, but because they are gods, and to be revered in awe.

We will be using a variety of methods to represent the gods, but in those cases where they are phys-repped by a human being, they will (as a rule) not be represented by the same member of crew twice. This is partly to protect members of the crew from accusations of favouritism or malice; they will simply be playing to an ongoing personality brief from the Story Team. That brief may involve instructions to react with lethal force to anything which displeases them. There are no special rules protecting player characters from the wrath of the gods.

Ian A