Five Earths, All in a Row

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

* Power Levels of the Gods, and what they are
'Gods' are spirits or other beings that are of such power that human minds (including mine) cannot categorize or quantify how powerful they are relative to each other. At best, scholars can vaguely compare different degrees of power within the same pantheon, but not between pantheons (e.g. Zeus is more powerful than Hermes, but no mortal can say who is of greater power between Thor and Herakles). In short, spirits (including the servitors and avatars that some gods might manifest to interact with the mortal world) may get character sheets, but the gods themselves will not. Also, pantheons prefer not to go against each other directly, for reasons that humans generally don't get told, save in vague terms about 'unimaginable consequences that no-one sane wants.' (If it were possible to quantify the powers of gods, or if War In Heaven were allowed, that would put the threads at risk of having endless unresolvable arguments about why X faith hasn't completely destroyed Y faith, and other 'my dadgod can beat your dadgod' nonsense. I don't want that, so we're not having it. Full stop.)

In general, any gods that will appear in this setting started out as spirits, became connected with some story or set of stories, and through various methods (fame of the stories is only one of many, but it's one of the more easily-comprehended methods), grew in power to the point that they trancended mortal comprehension of their true selves. Some of these beings were the ghosts of famous or infamous mortals whose tales outlived them, others began as thoughtforms shaped by specific myths, and still others shaped themselves to resemble new stories, perhaps merging with or absorbing other spirits that had been born of those tales. Some of the myths did happen on one or more of these Earths, though most of the ones that did certainly didn't happen exactly as they did in any specific myth (because oral traditions tend to vary quite widely), others really didn't. It can be quite difficult to determone which is which.

I should point out that gods (or at least their physical avatars) are "buildable" in GURPS. Angels and Demons can be surprisingly cheap, Tiamat (the Babylonian one) is 1,200 and a Lovecraft inspired Ancient One is just north of 1,300 points.

Give you consider that lesser versions of beings so powerful that they would be considered "gods" are running around: Sailor Moon (her crystal or Sailor Saturn reshaped the entire solar system), the various Lantern Corps (Parallax Hal nuked the DC multiverse and tried to remake it), the Incubator (helped create a demon that turned the galaxy if not the universe in a Labyrinth), and the Wiseman/Time Trapper thing (As Wiseman is was a servant of Chaos who the big bad behind every foe the Scouts face. As the Time Trapper it created a duplicate of the main universe and then pruned the crap out of it wiping out Darkseid, Highfather, the Green Lantern Corps, and all supernatural forces) there has to be an upper limit to what the spirits can pull from what amounts to 'semiotic ghosts' ala The Gernsback Continuum.

Mechanics-wise it is very close to the "Everything" answer to the question "What Deities Get From Their Followers?" in GURPS Religion. It how the gods of Terry Pratchett's Diskworld operate (this is why there is a god of hangovers or a Death for rats and how the events in Hogfather went down the way they did)

It is when you get to actual religions that things get messy. Does Thor have a mixture of his Marvel and Norse elements or are there at least two Thors running around? And what of something as complex as Christianity which has a different version of God that varies with the denomination?

Normally I would say that players should be mature enough to handle this without turning it into a 'my deity can beat up your deity' but given this is the Internet that idea is effectively DOA. :-(