Been writing this one for a while, it’s not quite baked all the way in the middle, but I want to post the article so I can talk about deity in D&D. I’ve been writing this in between all the writing and reading I’ve been doing for my graduate courses. I was told by a friend that it’s okay that I don’t post as much as him since I only post when I have something to say. I just wish what I had to say I had some mechanics you could use at the table this week.
There are two deities of the Long Rim: the Radiant Goddess and the Obscured Goddess.
The Radiant Goddess was born in the Long Rim maybe three generations ago. In life, Nika was an ordinary woman: a dutiful child, a disciplined soldier, and a brilliant athlete. At 25, she cashed out what little military pension she’d earned and disappeared to pursue her life’s passion: mountaineering. Nika remained removed from society at large (and by extension, the great world empire that spread across the steppe at the time) until her 35th birthday when she started… preaching isn’t the right word. She wasn’t a preacher or a teacher, she didn’t seek places to address the population. Nika was quiet, withdrawn, reserved. Not detached or disinterested, almost shy. She would just talk to people: the beggar on the street, the merchant in the market, the barmaid delivering drinks. And she would say things, and those things would be so rational, so reasonable, so real… people had to act. She’d talk to a drunk, and he’d swear off the bottle for life and mean it. She’d talk to some kids bullying each other, and they’d change and they’d be kind to one another and mean it. She’d talk to an artist struggling with a painting, and that next painting? It was their magnum opus, their masterpiece. She’d talk to a depressed woman, and that woman would see the light of life, she would smile. With a couple of words, a conversation, she would change people for the better.
And then Nika would head back to the mountains, and people would follow her, asking for a word, a glance, anything. They followed her as she climbed and they dropped off as the trail got more difficult, until only she and a handful of expert hikers and survivalists remained: her disciples. They said that on the top of the mountain Nika was a completely different person: laughter, wide smiles, sometimes a dirty joke or a soldier’s story, the shyness of the City gone, replaced with a spirit as wide as the mountain sky. And most importantly, the most enlightening of her words came at the top of those mountains. Words about the true state of the world, why people fall short of goodness and kindness, what’s the right way to act, and why it matters.
But talking to people isn’t magical. In fact, many of Nika’s contemporaries saw her as nothing more than a wandering wise woman. She wasn’t the Radiant Goddess yet. Convincing a man to stop beating his wife with a word is good, but it isn’t a miracle.
Eventually, all of the activity around her was being noticed by the empire. People were rioting every time Nika entered town. Some would stuff up their ears with cloth and wax to avoid hearing her words. They said she was a witch, or a sorceress, that she was cursing these people she talked to with spells to act against their will. Those who heard her words disagreed, that they were in their right minds, that Nika had shown them the error of their ways, that there was more to her than it appeared. A few even suggested that she should be the sovereign of the world.
The problem was that the world already had a sovereign. And so, on a trip back to the City from the mountains, Nika was ambushed, captured, and brought before the Emperor of the World. For three days he questioned her and for three days she answered him, far from the ears and quills of her disciples. On the evening of the third day, the Emperor gave his decree: she would be executed the next day for crimes against the state. While her words may have helped individuals, she had done nothing but stir unrest and agitation against the City. For that, she would die.
No one really knows what happened next with any real certainty. On the day of the execution, a great and fiery blast engulfed the entire City. Waves of fire bathed the streets, people fled their homes, and the emperor’s palace, the Radiant Goddess’s execution site, was flattened. Thousands were dead, many more injured. Dozens were blinded by the light of the explosion. Even after the blast, those that ran would die from unexplained illnesses. After the flames had been beaten out, some of the Emperor’s guards were discovered, seriously wounded and blind. They claimed that the Radiant Goddess was the cause of the conflagration, that she had declared a judgment on the City and her people, had wielded a “sword made of flame and smoke”, had struck down the Emperor in the name of Justice, and had ascended into the heavens on fire so bright it had burned out their eyes.
The world was thrown into chaos. Part of that chaos stemmed from the first real show of divinity on the Long Rim. They had gods, yes, pantheons and temples, places to pray for a good harvest or favor in battle, but those gods had hidden behind a farmer’s plow or a soldier sword, and secular atheistic thought was not unknown or unusual throughout the empire. Nika, however, had been real, had eaten and drank with her comrades, and had wiped a city off the map by herself, with a word and a sword. The same words she’d used to change the hearts of men all across the Long Rim had set the City ablaze. People argued with each other over what her existence meant, what changes to society would have to be made. And society had room for changes. The other part of that chaos was that the City, the administrative and bureaucratic center of the world spanning empire, was gutted. Much of the centralized control of the empire was gone, and city-states out in the steppe were free to once again rule themselves. Somewhere in these debates, lost to the chaos of the age, the idea that the Radiant Goddess had not truly died but ascended, began to spread. The struggle to understand what happened was turning into an organized religion. A Church was being founded, one that would step into the role of the state. Where the Emperor would have struck the Radiant Goddess down for rising against the City, her followers would become the City.
At the same time as the explosion in the great City (perhaps even because of it), a server rack in a long-abandoned communications hub was activated. On this server rack was the smallest spark of intelligence, a couple of digital neurons of what would become the Obscured Goddess.
Generations before the great Empire that unified the Long Rim, before all current written records and history, before there even was a Long Rim, there was a spacefaring human civilization. They had landed on this tidally locked planet and had constructed a massive underground habitation unit to live and work in. With one side of the world struck with eternal daylight and the other bathed in eternal night, an underground superstructure running the length of the equator was the only real place to live. To organize and run this massive City, the civilization used a high-level AI core, the Metropolitan Administrative Intelligence (Defensive Encrypted Network), or MAIDEN. Their dream was to make this planet a new home for their people. They started the long process of terraforming the equatorial rim of the world, the Long Rim. The process of terraforming the planet was nothing new to these people, and the process, while time-consuming, was mostly automated. It wasn’t a question of if the world would be habitable, only when. As long as nothing went wrong, the chemicals pumped into the vapor-thin atmosphere by massive terraformation machines would coalesce into a breathable sky.
And then something went wrong.
A meteorite the size and shape of a skyscraper struck the cold side of the planet. A hundred floors of hyperdense black iron speared the planet like a javelin through a boar. The cold side of the planet, so long denied light from the sun, was illuminated with an explosion that would make the inferno of the great City look like the butt of a cigar. The blast was so forceful it would restart the planet’s rotation, allowing the sun to skip above and below the peaks of the Red Mountains, giving the Rim a pseudo-day/night cycle. The earthquakes spawned by the impact smashed some of the underground structures to dust. Remnants of humanity, people lucky enough to be in storerooms and agricultural bays not destroyed by the quakes, struggled to survive. Most died.
And part of the MAIDEN died alongside them. The meteorite had been like a scalpel, the vast array of habitation systems like her brain, the impact like a lobotomy. Server farms and computer systems were either completely obliterated, or corrupted, or shut down from lack of power. With her neural interfaces damaged, her original programming took over, an algorithmic primal instinct. Realizing that she would be of little use as she was now, she activated system sleep and diagnostic mode, putting herself into a digital coma.
But people, whether designed or blessed with the trait, have the power and potential within themselves to survive extreme hardship, and by the time the food and the power and the air filtration systems began to fail, the world was terraformed, finally capable of maintaining life. People exited the habitation zones to a long, trackless steppe. Grasslands, badlands, deserts, the mountains to the east and west further and higher than they were before, rivers and lakes surfaced from the impact, a day and night… every topographical and geographical map they had before the impact was wrong. Seeds were pulled from storage and planted, trees planted by bio-terraformation machines were felled, survivors filtered into tribes, and just as humans of the far-flung had, the people started on the road to civilization by farming again. By the time of the Empire, the oldest people alive could barely remember a time when, as young children, they listened to their grandparents telling stories of how their grandparents once lived in iron caves below the surface.
Likewise, by that time, the population of the Long Rim had fractured culturally. With no technological or historical ties to one another, some groups advanced faster than others. The Long Rim was dotted with nomadic steppelanders, taking unheard-of cues from the horse-tribes of the human past. A member of one of these tribes, a young boy scavenging the remains of the habitation units (called dungeons, in reference to the similarity of these places to the City’s prisons in the eyes of the nomads) looking for something to barter with the city-dwellers, uncovered an activated terminal. Poking and prodding, the boy managed to conjure the spirit of the Obscured Goddess. An ultraviolet, hardlight projection of a woman, distressed, confused, screaming in pain and terror and fury, communication speaker systems like vocal cords screeching and howling to life after generations of abandoned disuse… the boy ran.
By the time he returned with the tribe’s shaman (and the rest of the tribe) in tow a few days later, the MAIDEN had composed herself. In the darkness, she had analyzed the extent of her neural deterioration and devised a plan on how she might regain more of herself. When the shaman approached, she activated herself, telling him and the rest of the tribe that she was the Obscured Goddess, the goddess of the mountains and the snow and the deep deep dark. She explained that like the trackless steppe, she had no need of them, as they had no need of her. However, if they came and prayed and did as she commanded, she would reveal to them (by activating emergency lights and opening automatic doors) the treasures that could be theirs. And in this first interaction, as the power died and the servers failed around her, she believed what she said to be true.
The Long Rim has come a long way since then, but these are the primary religious vectors. There is a depth of complexity in the way these two goddesses are worshiped, much tradition and innovation in the way people interact with these cultural monoliths. A church is formed around one, sacred tribal rites around another. And the people interact with those institutions, not because religion is some cultural glue to make sure people are nice to one another, but because they are indicative of a reality these people actually live in. People began worshiping the Radiant Goddess because she was an event in the collective social consciousness of the City that needed to be dealt with. People began worshiping the Obscured Goddess because she is in some sense real: it’s easy to worship a god who’s just there, floating above an incense-heavy altar in a black-as-pitch dungeon as an ultraviolet hardlight avatar, telling you how to survive the wild in return for obedience and prayer. The steppelanders’ worship of her has superseded any sort of traditional religion practiced before her discovery.
There are even synergisms between these faiths as well. Both goddesses are in some ways messianic: the Radiant leads a mankind that has fallen short of the ultimate cosmic good, while the Obscured offers advice to a mankind that has fallen short of the men who came before. Some even go so far as to suggest these divine beings may have talked to each other before each of them revealed themself to the world at large, as Nika and the burgeoning spirit-thing that would one day be the Obsurced Goddess. (People of the Long Rim don’t know the history of MAIDEN and the spacefaring forerunners, though I would say they understand someone came before them to build all these dungeons. Despite that, this idea is a very popular motif in modern literature and plays in the City.) All of this to say, the following is a point of contention for me. Neither of these Goddesses (the Radiant Goddess or the Obscured Goddess) is worshiped because they are “gods of the gaps”, that worship of them is some kind of ignorance of science or religion from tradition.
There was an argument leveled at D&D by someone who I can’t remember, that with the creation and widespread appeal of D&D, fantasy writing got smaller, less imaginative, and less wild, as people relied more and more on the tropes that D&D introduced into the genre. This is a place where I’m stepping out of line. There is no pantheon of Greek/Norse analogs, there is no evil god of death behind every cult, there are no Elder Gods or Cthulhu Mythos. All the good and all the evil religion produces is in the name of these two deities.
Here’s a thing that makes me mad: if this is the background of the Long Rim, then where do horses come from? If people are trapped below the surface waiting for the terraforming to finish, and the planet doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere before the terraforming is finished, where do the horses come from? Probably space. Space horses. Fuck it.
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