Laws of primordial creation, and what they beget.
It may be a dense read, so here is what would make a great wyrm by Nolan Lu.
The primordial laws of the universe are:
Law of primordial creation: From nothing stems something.
Law of primordial recreation: From something stems more of something.
Law of conservation: What is created cannot be destroyed, only transformed.
From this stems the secondary primordial laws:
Law of proportion: The proportion of relatively stable “dead” creation will continuously increase relative to the amount of “meaningfully” complex “live” creation.
Law of absolute quantity: The total amount of every single individual component will continuously increase.
Law of destruction: What exists cannot remain in its current state forever. Derived from the law of proportion. This is because the circumstances in which it exists change.
Law of life/law of cancer: Every source of information that is able to modify itself and to react to external stimuli will modify itself to become more proficient at creating more of itself and at continuing to exist in its current form. Eventually, this leads to being alive.
Tertiary laws:
Law of sentience: Technically, the law of cancer is written as a lie, until it reaches the law of sentience, cancer does not modify itself. It only tends to become modified towards a certain state. In effect, since every law came into existence simultaneously as a natural consequence of the three primary laws, this does not matter.
Law of death: From the law of cancer, things will seek to make themselves more suitable to create more of themselves in accordance with the current situation. This runs counter to continuing to exist in its current form. This counteraction is essential to sentience and life, if you remove it, it stops being life. In essence, eternal life as the same being is impossible.
Quaternary laws:
Law of repetition across scales: The results of laws will manifest themselves across every scale which has both the resolution (amount of agents) and the absolute amount of complexity to manifest the pattern. Technically, this is another primary law, since it is not derived from anything. However, every application is derived from something else.
Law of madness: What is derived from sentience will, over a long enough timescale, seem insane and amoral to any past sentient being from which the new sentience was derived.
Law of scale collapse and scale competition: Derived from the law of cancer. In essence, beings/memetic agents at different levels must suppress the cancer within elements of lower scale, and resist being suppressed by agents from a higher scale.
This applies to life, in the molecule-gene-single cell-multicellular organism-family-species- lineage-life sequence.
And to information, in the information-thought pattern-individual-polity-state-empire sequence.
For example, even a cancerous cell will suppress prions, and an organism which is selfish (and therefore cancerous) will still try not to have cancer. The same extends with the law enforcement of expansionist governments. Similarity members within a species will try to spread their specific genes and memes, but species that are able to suppress this and develop sexual selection behaviors and interpersonal relations will tend to proliferate.
What is considered “cancer” is subjective to the layer, with layers considering the action of those below as cancer, and the action of those above as tyranny.
Authors notes: Technically there are a lot more layers than this, since the law of absolute quantity is what determines the law of destruction and life. Though the more you look at it, the more you realize that most of the laws beneath the primary laws are derived both from lateral laws in the same layer, and of lower laws.
Also, why this is important won't be important until you learn a certain amount about a setting. In order to care about an origin, a result must first be seen. This is because as beings within time, we care about what is derived from the timeless laws.
As such, I will talk about this in relation to magic, this is kinda a companion piece to the divination post, but it is also a companion piece to every single post.
I will also discuss below the results that affect different gods and mortals within this setting.
The carrion gods: There are others, but the maggots are the ruler of this world.
The maggots: Stem from a cancerous offshoot separated from an unknown divinity. They are minor gods who utilize the law of conservation and recreation to create more minor gods from breaking down the raw materials of existence: Information, matter and space. They are immensely stupid as juveniles, and after reproducing a certain amount of times, they attempt to ascend. Those ascended gain wisdom to go alongside their monstrous power. And in this process lose some of it.
Due to the law of life/cancer, certain of the minor gods go back to find their children and kindred still in their base form and attempt to corral them towards a successful ascension.
The wyrms: Wyrms can be created from a variety of failed apotheoses, but the majority of these failed apotheoses come from the maggots, due to their stupidity and inherently cancerous nature. Wyrms result in a slight increase in intelligence in both mortals and maggots, but the process of apotheosis causes the maggots to lose the majority of their power. This power largely ends up as part of the background divinity within the expanse, and later on, the biosphere. Wyrms consider cancer as an axiom, and will have multiple other heavily mutated, seemingly insane axioms. However, they are not irrational, It's just that their goals are heavily abnormal, like a paperclip maximizer. Remember that due to them having cancer as a common unifying axiom, it may be more important that those axioms be spread, then that they actually be followed. For example, a wyrm would rather more people be honorable regarding not interfering with natural humoral imbalance, then that the humors actually stay imbalanced, whatever that means. The goal is somewhat less important than the existence of the goal.
If you want to run them, randomize a few axioms using a random word generator, and try to interpret them. They will try to maximize this at any cost. If you can convince them it is in the best interest of their values, they will always strike a deal with you. Also I don't have a stat block at the moment, so run them as a beholder, an aboleth and a hydra acting as one creature with 3 actions, a summed and shared hp pool, and taking the highest score in each stat.
The true gods:
The lord of the burning horizon: Resultant from the law of madness, his moral perspective is abhorrent to members of his past alliance. And anything created during that era, including his own past creations. Due to different speeds of degradation due to the law of madness, this causes many of the original lineages and members to be still aligned, while this faster element falls outside the “moral Overton window”. Eventually, unless change can be synchronized amongst members to become part of a larger scale, the same fate will happen to every single member. His title, lord of the burning horizon, refers to his baffling proficiency with the manipulation of the laws of both the spaces between domains, and the domains of other true gods. This makes him exceptionally hard to imprison. He is responsible for the erosion of the fabric between worlds, and introduced into the fabric of black holes as a consequence of singularities. The lord of the burning horizon will offer great power to anyone who will strike a deal with him. If you do so, you will gain a “pinhole” which he can both see through and feed power to you. If at any point, a critical mass of pinholes exist within a world, he will descend. The nameless: The dead god which created the lineage from which the star children, humanity and the vermin all stem from. He, like all other gods, had two choices, either become abhorrent to his children through changing, or become eternal and unchanging and his children changing to then find him abhorrent. He chose the latter, turning himself and his divinity into an eternal machine, which endlessly creates universes with laws suited to the form his children took during his last moment. So that their descendants would still evolve under the same conditions that originally created them, and so may still recognize and understand him. This was comforting to him before his death. Arguably, this is one of the nicer versions of divine suicide.
The star soother: Nobody within the nine rivers knows anything about the star soother, save for that he is the third member of the alliance between Yahweh, the mother of serpents, the nameless and himself. It has been confirmed that he and the lord of the burning horizon are the oldest of all the true gods that we still know of.
The pronoun he is not confirmed, unlike the other two gods. While it is strange that more of the gods are traditionally masculine, one should consider why the traits associated with divinity would be claimed by masculinity if they had a stronger role in shaping culture for the last few millennia. In addition, lord is equally invalid as the term he, neither captures their true essence.
His other name is Memory.
The mother of serpents: To divide oneself and to attempt recombination is a form of resurrection suicide. You destroy your current form, but create a new one. The variations of this strategy are all attempts to make the reincarnation better/more virtuous than the previous form.
The mother of serpents has divided themself into one thousand thousand thousand minor gods, each holding a small aspect of their divine essence, authority and memory. Most have decided to take the divine form of the serpent (the other divines forms being the sphere/singularity and the Word). The wyrm and maggot are degenerate forms of the serpent.
The separation of the self allows one to hybridize mentally with other beings, so if a god separates themselves into a society, and later combines, this can stave off mental drift. Effectively, this is suicide by mental/existential meiosis. Multiple gods can participate and unify into one this way.
Yahweh*: The separation of the son from the holy trinity and recombination to transform oneself into something wiser and kinder is in some way an imitation and test of the division which the mother of serpents underwent. Yahweh is the second youngest of the true gods, after the nameless, and so they too struggle with many things, despite nominal omniscience.
Outer gods:
The four gods below have limited interaction with the nine rivers, and so are more enigmatic.
The laughing god: Also known as the lord of pain, they are associated with acceptance of horrible truth, and of the avoidance of self-delusion. They are patron god to the mad.
The formless: Also known as the ocean of blood, suspected to be slowly creating a universal connection between all life. Responsible for blood magic/resonance. Despite this, it has not created any identified lineages itself. From this, it is theorized that its other name is Reflection.
The sublimation: The great unifier, patron god of artists. They are considered an opposing
force to life and cancer, as perfection requires the removal of impurities and of internal dichotomy/strife.
The truth breaker, greatest of all conquerors: He is far, far away, and yet, every oracle, every spirit, every demon, are in agreement: No matter where you are, no matter how long it takes, one day he will come.
Oblivion: Defies classification and recording.
There are many other outer gods, introducing some from other mythos or making your own is encouraged.
*Yaweh is capitalized, as all the others are titles, not names. The showing of the name is an immense show of trust. This is not the true name of god, the words of god are all divinity that has taken the form of information. Most gods do not name themselves, so to have a name derived not from action and authority, but from being, is special. Also I have run this by a few people, but if any christians, muslims or jews want to help me portray him more accurately, I am always happy to help.
**Notably, it is debated by the shadows whether their lineage emerged naturally or if they were created from a dead god or past form of a god. Humanity is known to have emerged from a single strand of genetic information separated from a lineage created by the nameless.
Minor gods: Prime principals create true gods, with divinity/magic itself being the physical manifestation of the law of primordial creation. True gods can then create from themselves minor gods and angels. All three can create new forms of energy, alter life which they have created, and alter the fundamental forces of the universe. Angels eventually lose their capacity for creation, and are severed from their connection to their god, becoming demons as a result. Demons feel a strong hunger towards divinity, which explains their presence in the nine rivers.
Most minor gods result from the law of scale collapse (and in the case of the serpents, the law of spontaneous synchronicity) breaking the true gods into lesser elements.
Materially, there is nothing different between high demons/liches and lesser gods. Both are differentiated from simple demons in that they possess a fragment of material and conceptual divinity, and so can generate their own magic through primordial re-creation, as well as tune reality using a resonance key. The main distinction is instead conceptual and existential, minor gods remain connected to their progenitor, and so are never completely individual. They also are constructed neatly and with purpose by their god, instead of being assembled from disparate elements through consumption and growth.
Magic and divinity: Divinity is another form of existence which predates matter, space and information. Magic the substance is the intermediary form which divinity occupies when converting into other forms of existence.
Since divinity is not inherently possessed by mages, you will need to find your own. The role of the mage is to act as the maggot does, to take decayed reality once descended from divinity, and to either consume it to turn it back into divinity, or to act upon and reforge it into a new image. This energy is hard to harvest, even for demons, it is, however, much easier to release. The most efficient spells selectively assist the tendencies that existence already holds in order to power the effect.
The other role is the direct consumption of divine flesh. This flesh can be found from three sources.
1: At the bottom of the earth, deep within the atrament, lies the corrupted body of a malformed god. Long ago it was slain by the maggots, and now the wyrms feast upon its flesh, slowly recovering their divinity. The mage may decide to venture there, and they will find that the air is so thick with magic as to be corrosive. Of course, if one seeks to bring more than a paltry amount with them, they must take a piece or the source with them. This is dangerous, as the wyrms are jealous and are many, and the beasts that lie in such places have strange powers which defy the conventions of magic. Once the thief has claimed their pound of flesh, they must flee under pursuit, and have the tainted flesh purified and crafted into an organ, which will grant them increased power. Taking more is possible, but the wyrms always know where pieces of divinity lie, and the more you take, the brighter the light you shine for them.
2: Slay a leviathan, or have a sponsor pay for an organ crafted from its marrow, or a staff from its teeth. You cannot afford it alone, that much is sure.
Leviathans are self-contained ecosystems encrusted around a nucleus of divine flesh. Those who remain unhunted are the toughest and most elusive, and so new finds are great events and auctions are held on the butcher ships which carry back the mile long corpses. These are attended by many nobles and academies* hoping to secure a future for their most promising scions.
3: Capture a high demon or angel, you can forget about this method.
*The state which owns the ship, of course, gets first pick.
Note: In accordance with physics, matter/energy and space/time are the same “type” of existence.
Note: Measurements in thaums are actually almost always in kilothaums, a single thaum is so small as to be useless. Think of it like calorie vs kcalorie. This is important because it means a milithaum is one million times smaller than what would traditionally be thought of as a thaum. A single true thaum is the amount of energy it takes to negate the gravitational energy of a single kton of matter for a second, (note this is not contingent on the strength of the local gravitational field).
It can also be used to instantly boil 1 L of water from 0C. However, the latter is a lot more efficient in practice. If using pure gravitational manipulation in a combat situation, ~99.9% of energy will be lost as light. This is both why mages and spells glow, and what spells are for.
Spells increase efficiency and speed of learning by pre-emptively containing the information to guide the magic into the right form. Depending on the situation, efficiency will still vary greatly. This is why, in practice, a mage casting a 1 thaum spell will get 1–12 minutes of levitation for levitating a 100kg mass. Spells automatically minimize their expenditure if it would be inefficient, which is why they return when their output is low.
This should never matter during a game, it's just a bit of background.
Note: The repetition of the name Tsenkutli across scales is part of a general trend of the empire to attempt to create microcosms of itself across every scale.
Note: Magic: At the time of writing, this is the only part which has enough material to appreciate. Over time this should change. This is the nature of trying to partition out information over time regarding a holistic setting.
