Quote:As noted below, Gryphon's said that in the UF universe the Norse pantheon is It, and anything else is just the local culture "skinning" them, so to speak.
I understand it as "the Norse pantheon is 'correct' insofar as it assigns the correct names to the deities, but those are merely facets of who/what they really are." We see this when Eris/Peorth is talking about who she is in Twilight...
Quote:A more metaphysical tack, to be sure. One of the things that has bugged me a little about UF is that the gods therein aren't ineffable enough. I like my divine beings to be just a bit on the "you can't really comprehend us without blowing your brain gaskets" side. But I like the personable, "human" deities of A!MG and other stories.
It seems like Bob is taking a similar, et more vague tack here...
I needed to include the (admittedly vague) in-game cosmology of Warriors' World at the very least because it's part of Hexe's background, and that includes an in-game meeting with her divine parents; these worthies (and their setting) did not adhere to any one theme or "flavor" for more than a few seconds as the gestalt group impression of/reaction to them varied and changed. I'm also more than a little influenced by the celestial settings from Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp's "The Bet". (One day, Toltiir will make an appearance in a Step. I don't know where yet, but I'm sure of it. Maybe Doug will wander by the Well of Mimir and drop a pebble...) Also, for various purposes, I need to allow for supporting things like Ed Becerra's "Legion's Quest" and its built-in system(s).
Anyway, the basics of the DW cosmology, at least as far as divine beings are concerned, is thus: There are gods and there are demons. Each one is a vastly powerful, ineffable multidimensional creature capable of what, to humans, looks like either timesharing their attention in almost infinitesimally small slices, or incredibly complicated cases of Multiple Personality Disorder. For reasons of their own, they have an interest in the lives of mortals. (Maybe they're just playing their version of the Sims. Who knows?) In order to deal directly with mortals, they have to tone themselves down -- either by manifesting only a pinhead of themselves in a 4-D spacetime, or by crafting one or more "native bodies" of varying power and putting a portion of their consciousness in it/them. When two or more of them share an interest in a particular timeline, they often work out rules for "playing" there -- who's in charge, what the teams are and so on. In their native spacetime, there is already a polarization of sides -- Good/Evil, rights and dignity of lesser creatures (us) vs. screwing with the timelines for personal amusement, among other issues -- and this usually carries over into the roles they play within timelines. And there are a lot of them -- there are more faces for the gods than there are gods.
Well, that's a vest-pocket summary. It's not complete, it glosses over details, and it's subject to radical change depending on what story ideas grab me, but it gets the idea across. Hexe is unique among the gods in that she isn't just operating a human body with a fraction of her consciousness, she's poured all of herself into it -- into a fetus, in fact, and grew up pretty much as a mortal. She chose to do that in Warriors' World mainly because the natural laws there let her do so without spontaneously combusting herself and most of the planet she was on.
Quote:That's a really good question. I've addressed it sorta in fragments I've written by suggesting that there's something special and different about Keiichi, but what it is, I don't know yet. I just know that in almost every universe where there's a Keiichi, an aspect of one of the Three loves him.
I mean, Belldandy really loves Keiichi with all her heart. Does that apply to her other aspects as well? And if not, and Keichi really understood what Belldandy was in these terms, what would it mean for their relationship?
Quote:You know, I really love the word "ineffable". I can wave it at anything I don't want to explain.
I really have no idea how this'll work in the NGE step...
Ineffable!
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.