For a while I liked the idea of creating my own world and my own pantheon. It allowed me to be more creative in what I want and understand the motivations of the deities and the clergy in order to create a more vivid experience. It also allowed me to create the type of Pantheon that I prefer. In general, there are several things I like about my religion:
1) A Pantheon that covers different portfolios, a very standard thing about most published pantheons.
2) The idea in my pantheon is that a deity of a portfolio is the deity of that portfolio for all races and that the different races worship the same deity but their put their own twist on the deity. For instance Humans and Goblins may both worship the deity of war, but the Humans will picture the deity as a Human and the Goblins will picture the deity as a Goblin.
For now, the Creation Story.
Webyrd awoke simultaneously as the world was created from nothing. It is a part of her and will always be a part of her. She cannot die if the world remains. [Some say Webyrd created the world with her own life force and that she existed before anything else did. She tired of living within the void of nothingness, so she decided to create the world and with it, life. Others say the world was first and that in order to populate the world, it created Webyrd in order for someone to have control over how the world was to be shaped with the beings upon it].
Webyrd was the first Deity. She created life among the mortals and she created the sustenance they required upon the world. She guided the world, modified it to suit her needs. The world was good and everyone seemed to be happy.
Mrutvu, however, ended that for the people when he took his first life. He is the Deity of Death and he was created one second after Webyrd. With life, there is always death and there cannot be one without the other. [Some say he appeared when the first person died, that that person’s death brought into existence a Deity who could figure out what to do with the dead after their life had ended. Others say that as soon as mortals had been created, he was created as well. Death only appeared in their minds when Mrutvu acted and caused them to feel hunger and their bodies to slowly perish]. The truth is that Webyrd knew of Mrutvu and believed that he would be unable to stand against her, but that was not what happened. Instead, she was forced to work with him, to be the Yin to his Yang. They had to keep the balance of life and death and if one cheated the other, the entire world was going to suffer.
Webyrd comforted the people and they, while not completely happy, appreciated her words and slowly began to understand the need for death.
Webyrd spent much time with Mrutvu in order to maintain the balance between life and death. It is in this time that she began to fall in love with him and vice versa. Her attention slowly drifted from the mortals to the Deity of Death. Then, she found out she was with child. Her attention almost fully disappeared from the mortal world as she paid attention to her family.
This is when trouble started. In this neglect, the people became angry. Her most faithful followers attempted to assure these people that Webyrd’s distance was only temporary, but not all believed them. Fights began to occur, fights which soon escalated into war. Without anyone looking, Wyrre, the Deity of War, was created. [It is said he was born when the first person balled his hand into a fist and first struck someone. Others disagree, saying that a fist-fight isn’t important enough to mean anything to Wyrre. Some also say that he was created when the first person killed someone, but as this is likely to be considered a murderous act, this had also been denied by many. The most common thought is that he first appeared during the takeover of one of Webyrd’s temples, feeding of the energies of the fight and the anger. This would also explain why he feels so much hate of Webyrd because anger towards her and her followers was part of the fuel that led to his very existence].
Wyrre excelled at his job and began to spread war within the world. In fact, he did this so well that he began to set his eyes upon Webyrd herself. Webyrd found this out and learned that his favorite method of killing was to cut a person in half from head to groin. Knowing this would kill her unborn child, she reached inside herself, drew forth the child, and hid the girl inside of a great oak where her baby would continue to grow and be safe. [There are a few strange stories regarding this tree and why it was so special and how it could hide the unborn babe from a Deity and how it could giver the babe nourishment. Some say the tree itself was special, one of a very rare breed that is unique in the present. Others say it was the first true created by Webyrd which became the first Treant and that it’s constant moving allowed them to remain hidden from Wyrre.]
Wyrre did not come for her yet, however. He had other plans in his head. There was a group of people who had hidden themselves off from the war and were drawing like flies people who were tired of the war. Wyrre certainly did not approve and he desired little more than to destroy these people. He sent his soldiers to destroy this city and there was a great battle. [This city is thought to have been destroyed, but many scholars debate on which of the current cities it actually was, though only a few cities are old enough to debated for. It is one of these that scholars believe that Civitatem was created to protect originally]. Just as his victory became certain, Webyrd herself appeared before him. She created Civitatem to watch over the people and to protect them. Wyrre himself was not present during this battle and perhaps the history of the world would have been different had he been.
Defeated in the battle, Wyrre knew he had not yet lost the war. He readied himself for what he was sure was going to be the last battle of the war. When this battle came, it was one to shake the very foundations of the world itself and threatened to destroy it. He searched for Webyrd in the midst of all the fighting and when he finally found her, their battles did not last long and he killed her, chopping her in half from head to groin. She split apart, but she rejoined her parts. The Deity of Life could not be killed so easily. She trapped him in a great tree, the Tree of Life, and it is here that he remains until this day.
Webyrd looked out among the warring world and was saddened. The war was torn apart and in some places, the followers of Wyrre were continuing to fight without realizing that their leader had been defeated. She assigned Civitatem the job of fixing up the mess. However, while he was able to help stop the fighting and repair the cities, there was little he could do about the numerous burned crops, the torn down forests, the ravaged wilds.
It was then that her own daughter, strengthened by the great oak she had been placed in before her birth, came before he mother, offering to help. Her daughter was a Deity in her own right and due to her connection to nature was able to work with Civitatem to fix the problems of the world, between the two covering both civilization and nature together.
The two spent a great deal of time together and because of this, they grew to care about the other and became lovers. They had a child they named Crescere. This child took on more attributes of her mother than her father and became the Deity of the Elementals. She had power over Air, Earth, Fire, and Water.
The daughter began to help her parents reshape the world, but through the machinations of Wyrre, her reign ended shortly. Through great magic, she was ripped apart. While it seemed likely that she would perish, Webyrd stepped in to keep her daughter happy. However, all she was able to do was to keep alive all four separate parts of Crescere, creating minor Deities, one for each element. Wyrre was not done, unfortunately for her, and in their weakened state, he managed to catch them all separately, killing them one by one almost simultaneously in order to not warn the others. All Civitatem could do was take the pieces of his daughter, wrap them up on a body created from the most beautiful women in the world, and create Crescere anew. The elemental powers faded away, but she was left with a new, stranger power, and she became the Deity of Creation. [Most believe that Civitatem and Salvatica had a child whom they named Crescere, but she was killed early on in her life. Some say Wyrre did so, others say it was done by the Chaos Lords. None of these people made any connection between the four elemental powers that helped Salvatica and her daughter. Civitatem was upset by her death and created a new version of her. Others say that they were unable to have children – there are arguments about which parent was the one unable to have children – and that he created Crescere in order to for them to have the child that both desperately wanted].
In the meantime, Webyrd gave birth to two more children, twins, whom she named Arthris and Sithra. While she attempted to instill within them the values she believed a Deity should have, they let the power get to their heads and they had fun playing with the lives of the different mortals on Lecrutia. Mrutvu went to confront her after a large number of mortals had been killed due to their playing. They argued on what way they should punish their children. They didn’t know it, but their angered was fueled by Wyrre who was always causing trouble in both the mortal and immortal worlds. They were unable to control themselves and their fight threatened to annihilate the entire mortal population as Life and Death fought. Webyrd tore the love from her body and threw it away.
Without the love, she punished her twins by putting them into the same body, explaining that they would only be able to become separate once again when they had learned from their mistake and why it had been a mistake.
Crescere happened upon the thrown away love. She kept it hidden away, believing that it would be needed again. However, the emotion made her curious and she experimented with it. It was through these experiments that she ended up creating Lubhyati, the Deity of Love. [Some believe she did it on purpose, though others believe it to be an accident].
While she was distracted by working on the love and creating Lubhyati, Wyrre took a piece of her power and placed it in the body of a loyal servant of his. He took some power from the Chaos Lords as well, a dangerous task, but one his servants were able to accomplish. He combined the two and twisted them, curious to see what he would create. What he did create was Ravina, the Deity of Destruction. Due to her twisted mind and what she remembers of Crescere, she hates the Deity of Creation, though this is due to jealousy than anything else. [People tend to say that she hates Crescere because they are opposites and that they will always work to destroy the other, though neither of them are capable of doing so].
Wyrre came to her with a proposition and in her attempt to gain another ally to use against Crescere, she agreed to his plan. She managed to steal minor parts of both Mrutvu and Webyrd while they were continuing to spend their time apart. She combined their powers and, tricking Crescere into using her powers, created Samstorfen, the Deity of Undeath, the Deity of that which is neither truly alive not truly dead.
What Wyrre did not foresee was Ravina’s obsession with destroying Crescere and what lengths she would go to in the attempt. She tapped into the Chaos and stole as much power as she could. Her mistake was in thinking that she could control the amount of power she had stolen into Lecrutia. The Chaos grew, creating powers of Chaos.
The world warred once again. Wyrre was very happy at the idea until he realized that he gained no strength from this war. Everywhere Chaos went, only Chaos gained in power. It stole his power. To everyone’s surprise, he had his soldiers fight the Chaos to their fullest ability. Unfortunately, by this time, the Chaos had gained too much power and the Deities could not completely stop it. In an act of desperation, the Deities joined forces and use a great amount of power to lock the Chaos away. They put a lock on the Chaos Realm, one able to be broken in very minor ways and one which the Chaos may be able to eventually break, but hopefully not for a very long time.
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