Elements & Spirits

cosmologyelementsspiritsgods

A magician will usually know most of what’s contained in this section.

The Universe is composed primarily of elements & spirits. There is also metal & the gemstones.

Elements

There are 8 elements, of which 4 are cardinal or oppositional — a distinction that mostly only matters to alchemists, many of whom use alternative models of the elements.

A body of elemental matter is the source of Hit Dice (HD) in creatures.

Elemental Hierarchy

Elementals have a saturated & mostly fixed hierarchy that rarely changes. A river is composed of droplets forming creeks forming branches forming a river. Each river is part of a much larger watershed. In theory, you could call upon the waters of an entire land at once. In practice, they would never answer you in unison.

The earth, air, acid, lightning, & a firestorm are similar.

Spirits

A spirit is the soul possessing matter — most commonly Wood or Flesh, but occasionally the other elements as well. Spirits are immortal.

Nothing is truly immaterial. Even a ghost exists as a projection (an illusion) of a spirit from a corpse (& is anchored to that corpse). Even a human soul when extracted, though invisible to the normal man, resembles a small glimmering star (or a Will o’ Wisp, p. @) through magician’s eyes.

There is no such thing as a disincarnate god. Gods cannot appear anywhere they want or teleport around. Every god is a creature with a body. If they are worshiped, it is because they have built a cult as a religious Faction around themselves.

Elemental Spirits

A stable expression of an element can be home to spirits, which are generally called elementals. These are not common & most elemental matter is devoid of a spirit.

Divine Hierarchies

Gods are fractious creatures. Since they can’t be everywhere at once, most of them tolerate local cults so long as that cult is nominally a part of an aligned pantheon. In practice, most local cults owe allegiance to & are Subfactions of the local lord or are wholly independent. On the other hand, many gods are also temporal rulers.

The boundary between a local lord & a local demigod is exceptionally thin.

Divine Benefits Cancel Out

Just like how we don’t explicitly model elemental hierarchies, we don’t explicitly model the myriad pantheons of spirits & gods that exist across all human societies on the basis that it cancels out en masse. Everyone maintains a basic relationship to the gods that matter most to them — rice, water, war, threshold, ancestral spirits, so there’s no need to give a +1 to anyone for explicitly stating that they’re doing that.

We only model the effects of gods in the following cases:

• Exceptional Devotion: A person or group of people is exceptionally devoted to a single entity. Creates both benefits & vulnerabilities.
• Exceptional Neglect: You have really angered a specific god.
• Competitive Advantages: A person or group’s access to a specific god or set of gods grants unique competitive advantages that others don’t have.

Settlement Gods

Worship is zero-sum. It costs resources & most people only have so much to give. A god is constrained by their physical nature. Since a god is an actual creature with creature-like powers, they are often not worshiped outside of their center of activity.

Every five or ten settlements or so, there is usually a local demigod of some minor local power. Most are humans that have acquired a lot of features & power over time.

Making More Spirits

Making spirits requires you murder powerful creatures & imprison their souls.

Why not just send ghosts to fight for you?

It’s super expensive to send disembodied spirits to do anything. Almost impossible, actually; nothing can be truly immaterial & a spirit by itself is mostly helpless. A ghost is just a tortured spirit stuck in a damaged Totem (normally, their own corpse). You can embed a soul in a skeleton, but why? It’d usually be easier & less expensive to just send a regular living soldier.