Hey, folks! Before I have to head out for the holidays, I wanted to get up the first installment of the worldbuilding podcast. Remember, each $100 raised by the end of December will gain another one, with topics pitched by readers. I’m getting better at the recording thing. This one has a few glitches I couldn’t get rid of; hopefully they’re not too noticeable.
I am going to be without much in the way of a computer for the next 8 days, and also enjoying time with my family. I do expect to be sending out a holiday newsletter sometime before the new year, but I can’t really predict much else getting done under the circumstances. It has been a hard year for us on the family front, and I can’t see myself shutting myself away in a room to write around the holidays.
Thank you so much for all of your support and I hope you all have a good remainder of the year, and a great 2015.
<3 AE
Lot of information to take away from this, so I may have to double or triple post.
So “god” refers to both a class of beings and a power level/relationship certain beings attain.
The specific class of beings we refer to as “gods” weren’t born as strong as they are now, but instead found that power somewhere outside the world and grabbed onto it before passing it on to clerics. Which also answers some of the questions regarding bizarre Thylean many-headed gods forming their own pantheon.
I think the big thing to take away is that the world is CONSTANRTLY GROWING. Humans are blessing swords with Khersis and using Nymphs to grow fields. Which means that they free up resources and manpower in production to other areas, since those resources come from offworld. So combined with humanities own limitless and conditionless drive unique to them, you have a recipie for a species that’s going to grow exponentially. Particularly considering that without demons, Ogres and Sea Devils are conditioned to stay within their own area for the most part, and humanity has no real need to use the seas anymore due to air travel(and if they do, Malbus gives a convenient blind spot for shipping), and no real use for land described as “badlands”, featuring enemies like Ogres they’ve allready beaten in the chaos wars.
So humanity, even without it’s god activley defending them, has managed to circumvent every single block and grow around every single defense made to stop them. Little Aiden’s dad described human power as rivalling the gods they worship in certain instance, so NOBODY can stop them at this point. So Humanity, Fuck Yeah basically.
Well an act of the gods could probably stop them – if they really wanted to. But due to their various agreements it isn’t going to happen without the celestial realm going to all out war.
“the gods” in what sense?
According to a dragon, there’s no dragon in the world who could stand against the Imperium and live. Dragons can fight gods and WIN, so I doubt that it’s going to be any easier on that front. If they all went all out at once, then they might manage, but really that’s kind of it.
I mean lets face it, even if Khersis doesn’t do it himself, he has people like Brimstone Blaise, who by virtue of association is more or less strong enough by feats to tell any god to suck it on her own, and she’s far from the only Paladin out there.
In the sense of all or most of them in a concerted effort. In an all out war humanity could be destroyed – at what cost? Certainly not worth it.
Well that was quite revealing. Interesting that the god seen by humans as the best is actually the biggest dick of the bunch.
And Callahan! Ah that’s so great.
So follow up questions:
1. So Khersis killed off the one who created demons then?
2. Since their power destroys demons due to it’s inherent opposition – would their creator be just as dangerous to them now as any other god?
3. Also, what’s the difference in pronunciation between ‘K’ and ‘Kh’? They way you said them sounds like I would expect just the ‘K’ to sound (and perhaps that was the intent?) – and I just can’t figure out what the difference is supposed to sound like.
4. If gods are essentially a class of beings, are there infernal gods? Is Owains power derived from the same kind of source as the others (is it inherently antithetical to demons), or is it something else?
5. Mortals apparently can channel divine energy via a god (rather than actual from one) – is it possible for them to ever access it directly and bypass the whole religion/worship thing?
6. Would a sufficiently powerful infernal be just as inherently dangerous to a celestial as gods are to demons?
Being a human, I can’t help but like Khersis even MORE now actually.
To agree to the covenant of his pantheon is to cripple his own children. It would be like breaking your sons leg to make sure he never wins too many races. It benefits a few other gods but it screws over all of his children and dooms them to a life of mediocrity.
Without him being “the biggest dick”, humanity would just be a few cavemen clinging to a rock somewhere. It’s his actions that allowed cities and industry and culture.
It also dooms every other race. Due to humanity and their abundance of resources and healing, goblins now have potions allowing a surpass on THEIR limits. Mermaids would have no access to metal tools in the cold depths of the ocean. It turns the whole world into ignorant peasants who can do nothing but worship their creators.
Regardless of your opinion, the MUniverse is unambiguously better for the intervention.
In the real world, we Humans are currently destroying (sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally)large segments of the world’s ecosystem, as we kill off other species in numbers great enough to be the sixth Great Extinction in the Earth’s history. Khersis creating a species that has no limits on how destructive it can be towards other species is just the fantasy equivalent of what humans are really doing. But I don’t think MU’s version of Humanity would have been “just a few cavemen” if Khersis had given Humans the same sort of breeding controls that Elves and Dwarves have. My impression is that in MU, Elves and Dwarves are older races than Humanity, and created civilizations without human assistance. Humans then learned a lot from Elves and Dwarves. If Elves and Dwarves could create viable cultures without trying to expand into every possible ecological niche the way humans do, then why couldn’t a more ecological restrained version of Humanity have done the same? Particularly since such a restrained version of humanity wouldn’t have had racial enemies like Demons, Ogres and Sea Demons, who were deliberately designed to try and counter Humanity’s capacity for cancer like growth at everyone else’s expense?
Everyone Else’s expense my ass. Goblins have a direct and visible lifespan increase and Ogres have a noted quality of life improvement. Our local elves get a lush vacation on something theyadmit they could never make as a race and this is more or less why. Dwarves and Gnomes you see are just the ones wwho rode with humancolonies generations ago and grew wealthy off centuries of trade with primarily humans. Lore also indicates that old elves used a human lower class and their best artifacts were made for them.
There IS no civilization without humans. They form the economic and cultural cornerstone of half the world and most of the rest like Yokan and Durakesh are stagnant nation states with little observable influence or global power. Even in the podcast mankimd had already spread to basically be global with demons allready on their asses 24/7, while modern races like gorgons and yokai barely leave the same spots the’ve always been in as a whole.
The idea of humans as an inherently destructive force that ruins a perfect natural balance doesn’t really mesh with the observable fact that nearly every race they’ve made contact with is observably better off.
So the ends justify the means?
I don’t think anyone can claim that, at this point, it looks like most races are better off for the existence of humanity. But that is only after a long history of war and oppression.
Racism is a huge theme in this story, and regardless of the advances that humanity had made they still have done horrible things.
And while it’s unfair to blame an entire race of individuals for the actions of their ancestors and neighbors – we certainly can blame their creator who didn’t play fair. The bottom line is that Khersis is an ass hole.
The ends and means are kind of divorced here. We have no idea what Khersis thought or wanted when building mankind or why he was willing to turn on his brothers. All I know it that I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because the other gods are pricks anyway and worst case is he’s just another one. But if nothing else he’s willing to activley defend mankind, whereas others arent so active. Also, yeah, the ends were pretty fuckin sweet because people fly around shooting lasers now, and the Q&A way back when shows this wasn’t in the original plans.
It really doesn’t bother me that he refused to cripple an entire race of people as lethally as Dwarves and Goblins were for arbitrary rules. Nor does it bother me that he valued the innocent lives he’s personally responsible for more than the demon god he killed.
As for humanity, I never claimed perfection, because humans never are and perfection is obviously impossible. But if you want to sling around the word opression we can see how Semele is doing or how many elven stags saw old age. Opression is a matter divorced from this particular sociologicql issue. I’m going by directly observable modern results, which you have yet to dispute in terms of lifespan and quality.
We could discuss this issue more effectively if we had more demographic data on whether the populations of the sentient races were expanding or contracting. But we know that Humans are designed to compete with all other races in a way that Elves and Dwarves are not. How many Elven forests have humans cut down? How many Dwarven mines have they taken over? We don’t know. But most sentient species in the MU universe were seemingly designed to fit within a specific ecological niche, and have traits that limit their population growth. Humans, by contrast, were seemingly designed to expand across the world into every ecological niche, at every other species expense.
It’s possible that at least some other species have managed to limit Human expansionism at their expense. This may be the real explanation for why some species seem to be doing reasonably well, despite the fact that humans, as you say, dominate ‘half the world’.
Note also that from history classes the previous year we have learned that the Empire’s stance on non humans was pretty awful – the Elves and Dwarves were the only ones they really respected. And them only because they were good trading partners and wouldn’t be worth the cost of going to war with.
Human expansion is unchecked and deliberately at the expense of other races.
Hey, thats an issue for emperors, not gods Zeel.
All I can say is that the biggest problems most races seem to have are directly because of this. Dwarves cannot create family units and elven reproduction means most siblings never have a real relationsip.
Humans were effectivley given freedom most others were denied. Amongst themselves in natural conditions, love physically cannot exist. Dwarves can’t have romantic love, goblins no motherly love, elves no brotherly love. To play by the rules is quite literally to deny your progeny love by the definitionof love. All examples contrary are explicitly exceptions, not rules.
How humans spent that freedom wasn’t always great, but its also freedom to fail as much as it is explore and love. Unless Khersis personally rules every human nation there’s not much he can do about individual race relations, and no god cares to dothat anyway.
Nocker, the driving force behind human ecological expansionism is population growth. The more humans there are, the more pressure humans are under to expand into other races territory. And in the MU universe, Khersis is directly responsible for the fact that Human populations can expand so rapidly, because he deliberately choose to break the rules and create a species that didn’t have the sort of restraints on population growth that you describe the other sentient species in the MU universe as having. It’s not the fault of human governments that humans breed so rapidly, even though they have strong incentives to try and exploit this characteristic of humanity for their own advantage.
Glenn, I’m having trouble seeing the downside to that.
What the gods planned in this context is thus nothing short of racial segregation, and racial segregation via violence and death. Disagreeing with that is hard for me to accept.
The environment of the MUverse isn’t exactly a delecate natural ecosystem anyway, its a construct made by someone who can create life at will. Even in that context, fuck the environment, its full of shit like skull moss and ghouls.
In real life the issue is complex, but here it really isnt. You’re essentially advocating permanent segregation and a forced breeding program to defend an environment thats actively hostile to everyone and full of agressive monsters. As far as I’m concerned it could all be paved over and it would be an improvement, because then you’d have fewer mortal casualties thatdont exist in the real environment.
Dude, gods aren’t like totalitarian dictatorships. They aren’t an oppressive force taking away things from their people (most of the time). They are cretors, the very fact that any race exists is that some god created it.
Elves were created to dislike reproductive sex, this isn’t a handicap of any kind – they are perfectly happy in this state because it is the state they were created in. Their god didn’t create them and go, oh well shit there going to breed to fast, why don’t I cripple them – no, they were created with a reasonable limitation on their ability to grow that they would be happy to have.
The same is true with dwarves goblins and all the others. They get to exist at all, and they are happy to live within their biological dictates.
The problem is that humanity isn’t like them, they were created not only without checks – but to like expanding beyond any reasonable restraint. Humanity is the one that is crippled because they can never be content, nothing is ever enough.
And why is all of this so? Because Khersis couldn’t follow the rules. He easily could have made humans to only like certain climates, or to be less adventurous, or less horny, less interested in children. And they would have been perfectly happy that way! It’s not a handicap.
…people generally don’t know what they’re missing if they never had it. That doesn’t change the fact that they don’t have it.
The gods know this, because they were made outside the system somewhere else. They know how it works and are intentionally limiting their creations. Because the MUverse isn’t a closed system, things can and do get out and in.
If your mother castrated you the minute of your birth, your family wouldn’t go “well I GUESS that’s her kid, she can do whatever she wants, not like it’d miss it” they’d go “what the fuck is wrong with you, mutilating your own child”.
Additionally, they absolutley would not be “perfectly happy” this way. Staying in one area and coloring inside perscribed lines is hell to huge amounts of the human population. Hence why even Gnomes were willing to get on a ship in large numbers to found colonial Shires and Feejee has aspirations of travel independant of her purpose of killing humans. All of that largely possible through magic the gods explicitly did not want mortals wielding.
What you describe isn’t happiness. It’s tyranny. If our progenators could keep us locked where they wished and control us so absolutley, then Mackenzie would still be in her grandmothers basement.
This is something Amaranth discusses with Mackenzie once actually. About her inability to use arcane magic. She asks if it bothers Mackenzie that she can’t fly – the response: “why would I be able to fly?” It’s the same thing here.
It’s one thing to cripple a person, and another to create a race of being with certain limitations. Humans are mortal, they can’t fly, they can’t eat bones, they can’t see in the dark, they have to breathe.
Are all those things horrible tyrannical features of their existance? No! Nor is the Elvin distaste for reproduction or Dwarven distaste for the opposite sex. It is part of what they are.
You are making the mistake of looking at the limitations of other races through the eyes of humanity. Sure if you suddenly and arbitrarily applied such things to an existing race (humanity) it would be awful.
But the Dwarves and Elves and Goblins are perfectly fine with the way they are, and they are equal parts disgusted, freaked out, and over all annoyed with the things humanity does. It’s only when humans come in and try to apply their own ideals to them that there are issues. Because humans have no boundaries.
The gods created the many races with limitations and they created them to like them. Just as a snake enjoys eating raw rodents and isn’t bothered that it has no legs. And we have seen plenty of characters of races that find things that humans find distasteful to be awesome. Harpys eat rotting meat, Celia likes to swallow hole raw eggs, Mackenzie drinks blood and crunches bones like candy. Sure a human might think those things are gross, but to other races it’s perfectly natural.
Zeel, you’re forgetting something very important in your analogy.
In the MUniverse, people CAN fly, through spells, or invoking elements such as air and fire Mackenzie is already adept with. Combined with her energy reserves flight is very well something she could probably achieve before graduation. But both of those methods are ALSO BARRED TO AMARANTH. Because due to that design feature in her body she can’t work with either method.
Flying, eating bones, breathing fire, seeing in the dark. They aren’t tied into the human body but they’re possible due to human advancement and magic that was never meant to be theres. This is explicitly against the gods wishes and it explicitly terrifies the Non-Khersian gods that people can even begin to achieve this.
Without those advancements, the world would be dead a hundred times over. Without those human empires expanding and working new magics, Malbus would have broken the world half a dozen times over. The Giants would have thrice conquered the earth. Dragons would be numerous and unchecked, as a god can’t consistently defeat their greatest but a more numerous mortals can and do fight them to a standstill and kill them multiple times over.
As much as Elves and Dwarves are evidently “annoyed”, the greatest Elven artifacts are keyed to work with humans and the greatest Dwarven clans make the majority of their money on human buisness. If they’re your example of why humanity is a net negative, you made a bad choice.
You’re ignoring my point. I am not arguing that human influence is inherently negative, I am arguing that Khersis could have set limitations on them that would not have been tyrannical as you claim. The limits on other races do not ruin their lives, any more than the physical limitations of the human body ruin theirs.
If you create a race with wings, then cut them all off they might reasonably be pissed off. But if they were created with no wings then they won’t mind one bit. The fact that humanity magics their way past even that is irrelevant since the gods really didn’t realize what power the arcane would give the mortals.
Khersis didn’t sit down and think “Hey, if I break the rules I bet my creations can learn awesome magic and become a vital backbone for trade throughout the world” – no it was more like “Fuck those guys, I want my people to be the best. I want my name to be praised by the never ending, unchecked hordes of my creation.”
I’m not forgetting anything, what one can obtain through magic is irrelevant to the motives of the gods – as they did not foresee that eventuality.
As I have stated many times though, it DOES ruin lives!
Goblin mothers die near universally as the default. A dwarven poet was totally unable to raise his daughters.
Those people didn’t go “oh, well thats just how things are.”, they were devistated and jumped on the nearest work around.
As well, you’re attributing motive where none was provided, unless I missed something. I think this isn’t the simple matter you’re portraying it as. Khersis wasn’t just cheating at a divine game of scrabble, he was willing andready to kill one of his own former comrades and turn on his brothers for this. He is also willing to kill another brother for unknown reasons. Whatever his reasons, he’s willing to risk his life and do anything for his goals.
The whole ordeal is actually incredibly sketchy if you think about it. Remember that our gods werent born this way for the most part, they’re transformed refugees. Which means something drove them out and was violent enough and big enough they needed dimensional travel to escape.
Whatever the reasoning here, I don’t think it’s a closed system. Whatever motivated them to make the covenant and break it is colored by a multiversal scale event of unknown origins.
Secondly, it seems like someone ELSE has managed to rival the gods themselves, that being Demons. Demons, like humans, currently dominate their plane of existance and their internal power rivals the deities that made and cursed them. Which handily explains the references to “Archfiends” way back when in the same breath as greater dragons. The Man certainly seems to fit the description of one, and has made threats to other power players that show a certain level of power.
Which seems to make sense, given their mirror to humanity. Barring the curse Khersis put on hybrids they don’t seem to have a limit either.
So basically the gods now have TWO new groups that are rivalling them. Given that according to Steff ogre hybrids now outnumber pure ones at least on the border, humanity is also co-opting their would-be killers.
Which is particularly scary to them given that archfiends work an internal and destructive power instead of an external one like them. A good hit from them might be able to sever that celestial connection and fuck up every weapon they bless and creature they spawn down the chain, while the archfiends subordinates can carry on no matter what happens to their boss.
Lastly, the infernal plane seems like it’d be useful for OTHER things as well. I mean a sufficiently powerful mortal, or an immortal, could probably use that plane to train and get stronger. Something constantly taxing you could constantly build or condition you. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and it sure as hell made the demons stronger. The narration DID mention when Callahan went into the oblivion bar that you can only go so far on the mortal plane after all.
As an afterthought, Khersis seems to have a rather cruel sense of humor. When he banished demons he didn’t just banish them, he put a blood curse on them similar to the one he refused to put on humnanity. It seems like a kind of “…and the horse you rode in on!” gesture that really spits in the face of his rivals.
We don’t know that Demons don’t have a limit. And I can’t recall Khersis making fertile female half-demons smell soooo good. For all we know, it’s a mix of the Demonic limit and the fact humans are designated prey (hence why Mack smells good to harpies, sea devils, ogres, and nagakin). Or even just straight-up the demon limit, to stop them competing as much with other anthropophagous races.
The curse on female demonbloods seems to be confirmed based on the findings of the Epistolary charecters.