Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Another OSR Product I'd Like To See

"Weird Gods of Sword and Sorcery" or something along those lines, a big thick monster manual size listing of weird, swords & sorcery deities. It's the same idea of Judges Guild's excellent Unknown Gods, but taken to ridiculous extremes. Mostly a bunch of petty, niche godlings, the kinds that Conan or Elric would stumble across.

Although that's wasn't my original intent, a monster manual of the sort of bush league jerk-demigods that or Conan or Elric would end knocking over, isn't the worst resource for picaresque high-level play...

Anyways, so you have this books and there's a ton of gods in it. There's a god of swords, a god of axes, a god of siege warfare, a god of sharks, a god of earthquakes, a god of forest fires, a god of dancing girls, a god of slime monsters, a god of sea monsters, a god of mules, a god of arson, and so forth and so forth. And none of them have any big, campaign altering elements. And they're all nicely somewhere suitably between archetypal and weird.

When a new player asks if they can have a Cleric of the god of poison, or the god of apes, or the god of flowers, or some other random or way-out god, this book could have a fair chance of providing. Plus, for a DM being able to browse the index and think that "...maybe I want cultists of the god of Wrestling in my campaign..."

Another element could be associated minor artifacts for appropriate deities, with appropriate associated complications; another resource for emulating Elric-esque High Level Sword & Sorcery, "Our adventuring buddy is possessed by this ancient, holy headsmans' axe, and so far has proven to be nigh unstoppable; we can either kill him or kill the god of Decapitation..."

14 comments:

  1. Very nice. A couple of holy rituals wouldn't go amiss either.

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  2. Interestingly enough, this is similar to an idea I had for a semi-regular feature on my blog, but I never got round to starting it. Maybe I need to change that ...

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  3. I'd dig that. Back in the day one of my favorite books to read was Deities and Demigods. I loved to trip out on all the cool descriptions, illustrations and crazy powers.

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  4. Great shades of Fahfrd and tge Grey Mouser's Avenue of the Gods: Issac of the Jug!

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  5. Would they have hit points? I like my swords & sorcery gods murderable. None of that pansy "oh it was just an avatar, he's still alive over on THIS plane" foolishness either.

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  6. Unknown Gods is such a neat book, very inspirational. I'd love to see something in that spirit.

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  7. I like throwing some weird little gods into my Nod stuff, mostly inspired by the JG product you mentioned. Makes for a more interesting world.

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  8. I flashed on Terry Pratchett's novel, "Small Gods" where the basic premise is that a God waxes and wanes in power and awesomeness in relation to the number of followers and believers he/she has.

    So, you could have, say, a Mouse God who, by accident or through the work of some loyal PCs, is gifted with a relic that attracts believers and then, suddenly he evolves into Ares, God of War (and Mice).

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  9. I was hoping for a post on the Halloween Encounter Critical session, but this is awesome instead.

    This is an excellent idea. I use the shit out of Unknown Gods.

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  10. What Sean said.

    Two Amazons, a Dwarf, a Lizard Man, a Klengon, and a Wooky walk into a tower of a stargazer…

    (Insert EC session synopsis. End with TPK)

    So what do you call this adventuring party? The Aristocrats!

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  11. Sean & B. Portly: Part I is up now.

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