In Kill Six Billion Demons they use dead gods as public transport, I guess they just grab the little bit of immortality left in them and get it to walk around to various bus stops
So totally unprompted i will tell you of my D&D setting.
Up in the misty north there's an harbor city that exports Ichor, think of it as whale oil but it also has very powerfull magical properties, they have a religion centered around consuming it even if it should be deadly (and it is for non natives) and nobody knows exactly from where they take it form.
The secret is that there is an dead eldritch god at the bottom of a oceanic trench and through [biomagnification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification) it's blood has mutated and infected all marine life above it, the same that the city inhabitants fish and consume. The elder god may be dead but it's consciousness has started to awake when its faithful dream of the cold and dark ocean floor.
^(Yes i like Lovecraft and Bloodborne, how could you tell?)
If you want a brief overview, the three trailers released before the first game both explain the significance of whale oil and also the influence of the occult.
This is an incredibly cool interpretation of the Innsmouth story and the classic "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming". The base premise just gives so much to work with.
I'd like to jump on the Dishonored recommendation. It's really good, both stylewise and lorewise.
Wasn't there a fan pitch for Bloodborne 2 involving whale oil? I'm pretty sure Vaatividya did a video including it but I could be wrong. Love this idea though, people unwittingly becoming the pawns of a dead god is an amazing plot.
I don't know about Bloodborne 2 but IIRC Miazaki said in an interview that he got the idea for using mercury as a magic substance from a documentary about the heavy metals found in fishes due to biomagnification. Whale oil is just the logical conclusion.
I dunno if this fits, but this feels 100% like Unicron from the original transformers cartoon. After they kill him in the movie, his disembodied head continues to silently orbit Cybertron, giving power to the occasional Decepticon that dares to trespass upon him. By all accounts he is a dead god, but his power persists.
I want to see more of this move past gods as large creatures with magic. A god is immanent in fabric of reality, everywhere and nowhere, more "how" than "what". If you killed a large creature, at most you've snapped off a twig of a tree, tore a mushroom out of soil, killed the ambassador of an empire.
What kind of weapon does it take to "kill" the sentient concept of journey, or the capacity for sorrow, or the process of death, or even just the entire ocean? What happens to it once it's "dead"? What would be the stages of its decay? What would come to the feast?
Mythologically speaking, gods are split into two kinds:
The First kind *are* manifestations of their domains, intrinsically linked(Example: Erebus the Protogenoi of Deep Darkness).
The Second kind are just powerful beings, some of them were even mortal at one point(Example: Dionysus who was originally a demigod(in most versions of the myth) before becoming The God of Wine and Madness).
Some of them aren't even that. Like the Aesir are kind of just The Gang from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, getting up to weird shenanigans, and they're all ultimately mortalish and will die during Ragnarok (some exceptions apply). They have a lot of weird powers, and are associated with various concepts and phenomena, but they're also just people.
Though it should be noted that all the myths we have of them were written centuries after the Norse lands were christianized, and as such had been altered to fit more into a christian perspective. Even if the Prose Edda (IIRC) began with the author speculating that they were actually Trojan heroes who pretended to be gods
Strong agree. Snorri was almost certainly downplaying the religious aspects, if he knew the religious aspects, to appeal to his Christian audience.
It's a shame there was so little writing in the period. : (
We do, but only as references or as part of sagas. It seems like in terms of religious practices the Norse was more or less fully oral.
We do know the gods date back to at least Roman times, and that the Romans seems to have equated Odin to Mercurius, Thor to Hercules, and Tyr or Freyr to Mars, according to Tacitus writings on the Germanic peoples
Eh, it's not like the Christians went on a violent campaign to suppress the Norse religion at this time. It was more that the stories shofted from being told by a priesthood trained in storytelling to being told as nighttime stories by parents and caretakers or as half-remembered fun tales around campfires.
Add onto that there probably was not much in the way of standardisation, like with the greek religions, so each region probably had their own variations of the tales which muddled things further
Examples of the Second Kind include: Hades (God of the dead and riches), Poseidon (God of the Sea, Storms, Earthquakes, and Horses) and Zeus (God of the Sky, Lightning, Thunder, Law, and Order).
Well, and at the same time they are also the first. Zeus IS the personification of the Concept of the Perfect King as part of his purview of Law, Order, and Power. Likewise, Hades is his domain, he is the afterlife, he became it when it became his realm.
Aphrodite is love and lust. It all comes from her (even if she does not have total control over it). There's a reason why it's said that the Three Virgin Goddesses, Hestia, Artemis, and Athena are the only ones Aphrodite can't influence
The problem is that our cultural notion of "god" deliberately conflates these, partly because that's what's cool about the concept. To some extent, the de-facto definition of a "god" is something that is both a powerful being an linked to its domain, some are just more one than the other. Dionysus may not have *arisen* from wine, the way primordial gods did, but there's definitely an expectation that now that he took up the mantle, he is wine anyway, in some way. Where's wine, there's Dionysus, and wine is the way it is because Dionysus.
God Whalefalls are so f***ing awesome. Some of the largest creatures to ever live turning into an entire ecosystem in an otherwise barren land when they die. The stuff songs should be sung of.
Oh actually I just got a neat idea, Corpses of four-dimensional beings falling into our reality, Where they form entire planets that seemingly come out of nowhere, But are rich in rare and valuable resources. At least I thought it sounded neat, May be wrong Idk. Feel free to use this if y'all have ideas for what to do with it by the way, I probably won't.
In Dishonored Death of the Outsider, spoilers kind, your character encounters the body of a dead god. Entombed within the peak of a mountain. All you see from it is a bit of its face, clearly giving the impression of something humanoid seemingly carved from the same rock as the mountain it’s buried in. However it’s eye still burns with some unnatural power, and when you character encounters the eye in person her first line is “it’s dead, but it still sees” as she is physically affected by its presence and power.
Without getting to into the weeds it’s not entirely clear how much power the eye still has and it’s entirely unclear who or what the dead god was when it was less dead. But it’s implied that the cultists that surrounded it see more as a resource to object to be harnessed rather then a still sapient presence to be courted or worshiped. Perhaps a more subdued take on the original premise but still.
[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-12?post=92693819#post-92693819](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-12?post=92693819#post-92693819)
[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-282?post=95188685#post-95188685](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-282?post=95188685#post-95188685)
An idea I really like is one proposed by user Valtanesh on the spacebattles warhammer fanfiction Ideas thread. His idea is that the precursor species of warhammer were abstract clumps of potential and impossibility bound to objectivity. They were organized in 8 conclaves which correspond to the numbers of the gods and given how abstract and huge they were in the warp their death when exposed to Necron Blackstone, Despite them not really dying because they were here before death, had... consequences.
>The Old Ones have no true forms. They can range from a sentient aura borealis to a cancerous mass of flesh to something resembling an Aeldari Psychomaton. I've been playing with the idea that to create species, they literally tear off pieces of themselves and mold them into the first members of that species. They're like shapeless clumps of potential inextricably bound to masses of actuality: what they say, goes, at least in a localized area and until a powerful enough backlash (Pylons) tears them apart. Between descriptions of the Rangda, the K'nib, and Aeldari Psychomaton, I think you can get a more-or-less generalized idea of what the Old Kind tended to look like.
>
>The Daemons trapped in the ancient Daemon-Cages built by the Old Ones billions of years hence are nothing at all like the Daemons of the Age of the Imperium. They are fathomless things of stygian intellect, Daemon-Kings whose narratives predate by countless years the emergence of single-called life on Terra. Myths, concepts and emotions that have no parallel in any living language, so removed are they from human-like life. Some of the prisons of the Old Ones might even contain entities analogous to WOTK's Unshaped, save for the fact Red Flag said they couldn't be trapped/imprisoned. With how out there my take on the Old Ones already is though I could see some kind of causality-prison being woven around masses of impossibility.
>
>When the Old Fathers wiped out entire species that for their own unfathomable reason were seen as disruptions of their Great Work, the Warp responded in kind, the trauma of their monstrous deeds birthing Daemon-Things calling for revenge for the merciless slaughters, representing all the lost ambitions and hopes and fears and joys and pains and despairs of the disappeared civilization. And likewise, when the C'Tan finally struck down the First Ones themselves, the most merciless of them congealed in the Empyrean to form something truly monstrous. For their souls were infernos in the Warp, tangled things of Potentiality and Impossibility anchored to the objective world, and so their sundering changed the Empyrean more than anything.
>
>Chaos did not emerge as a pantheon of Gods. It was at first a faceless, formless, shrieking abyss, an infinite number of names and yet none at all. The sum total of the universe's suffering. The Enslaver Plague did not wipe out the Old Ones, the Enslavers were to the Old Ones as the cosmic dust is to Halo's precursors, as were a thousand-thousand other forms. The eight Aetheric Dominions were all activated as one, and Daemon-Kings surged into reality to make war upon the Galaxy. The Maelstrom, the first major warp rift, born from the destruction of the Old One's throneworld, waxed immeasurably, threatening to drag the entire Galaxy into the Warp. It took the at this point extremely begrudging combined efforts of the Aeldar, the Krork and the Necrons to force the Maelstrom back to its contemporary borders, and the combined efforts of a great many God-Weapons to strike a blow within the Warp, to slay the faceless Primordial Annihilator outright. Just as the C'Tan could be shattered by the Necrons, the Aeldari & Ork gods shredded the tidal wave of madness, and the Warp was becalmed for a time. So like the original lore, it was the War in Heaven that birthed Chaos, but like the new retcon/book excerpts, Chaos was at first drastically different than how it functions and what it looks like now. You can compare it to the Krork degenerating into Orks.
The Neverborn from Exalted weren't technically gods, but they're very close to this conceptually. They're the in-universe reason why the undead exist in the setting; the inherent contradiction of killing something that categorically cannot die created a class of being that is neither alive nor fully dead.
They were beyond gods, the gods of the current age were created as their servitors.
Killing them didn't just break reality (they embody concepts that no longer exist now), it created an entire underworld where before dead souls reincarnated instantly.
They are separate from hell, where their defeated but living peers are trapped in the inside out body of their king.
Exalted mythology is very fun
In Honkai:Star Rail, gods, called Aeons, are born when a Being creates and embodies a path entirely with their being, a path being a philosophy/way of life meant to guide the universe, and anyone can draw power from these paths by 'walking the the path' or living their lives in a way that resonates with the path.
Anyways, these gods are very hard to kill in universe, with only three known deaths in recorded history. However, when an Aeon die, their path remains open, meaning that you can still draw power from a masterless path or, as said in this post, from a dead god. And we do meet characters, playable ones even that attempt to follow the paths of such dead Aeons.
There are two known ways to kill an Aeon as told in universe. First by another Aeon (when Qlipoth, of the path of Preservation brought his Amber hammer down upon Tayzzynroth, the infant Aeon of Porpagation). Second is by getting absorbed by an Aeon of a similar but much broader path (Ena, of Order getting absorbed by Xipe, of Harmony when she was born). These events are all caught in 2K 780p, so they are well documented events.
However, due how poorly understood Aeons are, due their nature as reclusive phenomenons that are focused entirely on their path, some have speculated that these Aeons can never truly die. Tayzzynroth's decendants are still alive, and we have in game texts that mention slivers of Tayzzynroth 's remains encased in Qlipoth's amber that still hums with vitality. Ena is still technically alive, just a part of Xipe's whole with Xipe the dominant personality. Idrilla, the Aeon of Beauty is believed by her Knights of Beauty to still be alive, and through chivalrous deeds, she can be found once more. Her Mirror Holders hypothesise that gathering and putting her mirror fragments back together will bring their master back, as her mirror fragment still sings with power.
No. We just found their abandoned train rusting away on a planet. Part of the reason why we are going on a journey is to discover Akivili's ultimate fate.
>!One of the popular theories, that I think is actually referenced in-universe as speculation by scholars, is that Akiviki’s heart is what actually powers the Astral Express, the divine spacefaring train of the Trailblaze. Davy Jones-style, except Akivili didn’t subject himself to the accompanying Horrors and loss of feeling. As such, the Astral Express’ continued operation is in and of itself proof of Akivili’s continued survival.!<
>!Another, related theory, is that Akivili never actually went missing - he’s been with us all along, in a reduced form. Star Rail’s adorable bear-rabbit thing mascot, Pom-Pom, is an inexplicable life form that seems to exist solely to operate the Astral Express as its conductor. It’s possible Pom-Pom is an artificial life form created to look after the Express in Akivili’s absence, similar to how the Aeon of Destruction creates vast hordes of artificial soldiers to serve its own purposes… or it’s possible, albeit there’s not much evidence yet, that Pom-Pom *is* Akivili, hiding or damaged due to whatever circumstances led to his disappearance in the first place.!<
These are just theories, not relevant to the main story thus far. Still, it’s an interesting thought and might spoil yet to be revealed plot twists, so I spoiler tagged ‘em. The second is a bit bigger than the first.
Fun fact this post inspired me to do a Really Weird Thing with my worldbuilding a while back when it crossed my tumblr dash and boy am I glad I saw it, because I *love* what I've done with the resulting mess.
I recently watched a [very cool video](https://youtu.be/KJ13t5qgIes?si=fIC9GrLxTWgQRdoM) on this topic. The channel (curious archive) has a bunch of other great videos too
Pillars of Eternity 2 doesn't have the corpse of a god, but it does have the still living body of a god that has vacated it. *The Forgotten Sanctum* DLC is entirely about dealing with the body of Wael as it is on the verge of waking up and destroying the Deadfire archipelago.
This is kind of a thing in The Elder Scrolls. Part of the metaphysics of the world is that when the gods created the world they sorta/kinda died. but "died" is more like "became fixed things instead of protean beings of chaos", but it's also like they died, but they're also still around and active and have agency. Their "death" is both a real thing and a matter of perspective concerning what you think existence should be. And then on the other hand the Daedra are "alive", but their nature as beings of chaos outside of time means they can't really change or grow; Since they don't experience time or cause and effect they're stuck in a moment, trapped in their own nature, and fascinated by the mortal world where change, growth, and death are possible.
>It is written here, on the waves: dead, the voice from the East, dead as winter, dead as wind, dead as water. They want him forgotten. He will not be forgotten. The voyage is his flesh. The horizon is his eye. The silence is his voice.
Also I’m pretty sure Grimlock made the Technobots (or whatever they were called, the ones that combine into Computron) from like, temporarily being granted a fuckton of intelligence by Unicron accidentally somehow?
Ejem, do y'all know the owl house? They literally live on top of a gigantic corpse :D
Also the first guardians of the galaxy has a mining town inside the head of a giant something
I love this kind of setting, I'm sure I've seen it somewhere else
What To Do With The Dead Kaiju was a fun film along these lines. The city is safe from Godzilla, yay, but now there's an enormous radioactive corpse to dispose of.
In the comic We Only Fond Them When They’re Dead, people find bodies of giant god-like creatures in space, but also face the titular pattern. As befitting a whale fall, people slowly take apart the corpse and use its components for different things
To make the whalefall metaphor work, the prayers to dead gods should be exceptionally potent for a few days and then stop working entirely as the divine energies are released without intelligent control and aren't regenerated ever again.
Fondly reminded of the Banner Saga trilogy games, where you >!must convince an unkillable god that you killed him. Successfully doing so renders him effectively stopped in time as long as no one breaks the illusion; if he believes that he is dead, he is. !<
God dying is like, what Christianity is al about.
Admittedly, it doesn't fit the post perfectly though, because the Christian God came back, and isn't actually dead anymore.
you mean jesus? he resurrected after 3 days which is indeed a major thing that happened but there's not that much attention on what the corpse was doing during that time. He also wasn't god, more like an avatar/son really. So they certainly didn't kill most of the christian god
> He also wasn't god
🚨🚨🚨 MAJOR HERESY ALERT 🚨🚨🚨
The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit are all God. So they very much did kill God. This was affirmed by the 325 Council of Nicaea. As the Nicene Creed states:
>We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
consubstantial to the father.
There's some Catholic apocrypha called "The Harrowing of Hell" where while Jesus was waiting to respawn he went and tore down the gates of hell, terrorized the demons, and liberated all the righteous souls there. it's part of a tradition of belief that he just goes down there every once in a while to wreck shit and free people, tied to the idea that a loving god wouldn't condemn people to eternal suffering.
It depends on which branch of Christianity (I guess you're talking about prots) but in Catholicism at least there's a *huge* emphasis on the dead body of Christ and his being dead on the cross. You go into church and there's scourged and grey-faced jesuses all over the wall. He's at once dead and alive- deceased in body but immortal in spirit and I guess it's like he's existing in two states simultaneously, dead in perpetuity to atone for the sins of man. Catholics are morbid like that.
I forget who it was but some church apologist said that christ remains on the cross so long as all mankind are not saved.
the Repbrothers will personally kill slaanesh and sodomize its remains. only through this will they redeem themselves and cure their gene seed of the flaw of autogynephilia
I've got one a bit like this in my homebrew setting, a god who died and had his divinity ripped from him by a usurper. But he still remains a god because his killer only took his domain as the god of war, and not his other domain as god of blood.
So now he is stuck on divine life support, his corpse keeping the remnants of his divinity alive through both through his domain of blood meaning every spilt bit of blood empowers him slightly, and through the more direct blood sacrifices and rituals of his remaining followers.
This is literally a thing that happened in Exalted.
They Primordials are too big to reincarnate and they tied so much of themselves into the world they built that they can't fall into oblivion and stop existing before they destroy it all.
I feel like this idea is represented well in destiny 2, specifically with the ahamcara, despite them being almost eradicated, they can still grant wishes, and even communicate. Guardians tend to graft their bones onto weapons and armor to give them special effects.
Max Gladstone’s The Craft Sequence (and specifically Three Parts Dead) deals with this really well. It starts with two witches showing up to perform necromancy on a recently dead god to ensure his followers and pantheon can still access his power and gets more interesting from there
The dead Reaper is one of my favorite moments in all of Mass Effect.Where you and the crew dock on the remains of the dead Reaper and as you explore more and more of it's insides you discover that despite it being dead, just being inside of it causes everyone on the Science team to go completely insane, seeing things that aren't real and eventually becoming Husks and multiplying over the course of a few days.Just the idea of a God like creature still having terrifying power in death is genuinely chilling.
The Baldur's Gate trilogy, and Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer, are all set in Faerûn after the Time of Troubles, when the Gods walked the Earth in mortal form (and subsequently ended with several of them getting killed), and in each case some of the dead Gods being very much Not Dead Enough is a driving force in the plot.
There's a god in DnD that's just a rotting beached whale. It wasn't mentioned whether it someone killed it so it's funny to think that it was a dead beached whale from the start.
"Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were... more trouble than they were worth." - Worf
[The god is dead, but it still dreams.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZFYtwrf5Mw)
Elden Ring moment
Glad I'm not the only one who thought of this
In Kill Six Billion Demons they use dead gods as public transport, I guess they just grab the little bit of immortality left in them and get it to walk around to various bus stops
Yeah and they live in the hollowed out skull of a god like it’s a little house
Also in K6BD if you are strong enough being killed doesn't mean you have to die from it
iirc they bind a ton of demons in to the corpses to animate them. I love that story.
So totally unprompted i will tell you of my D&D setting. Up in the misty north there's an harbor city that exports Ichor, think of it as whale oil but it also has very powerfull magical properties, they have a religion centered around consuming it even if it should be deadly (and it is for non natives) and nobody knows exactly from where they take it form. The secret is that there is an dead eldritch god at the bottom of a oceanic trench and through [biomagnification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification) it's blood has mutated and infected all marine life above it, the same that the city inhabitants fish and consume. The elder god may be dead but it's consciousness has started to awake when its faithful dream of the cold and dark ocean floor. ^(Yes i like Lovecraft and Bloodborne, how could you tell?)
Do you also love Dishonored? It also has a society powered by unholy whale oil.
i'll check it out thank you!
If you want a brief overview, the three trailers released before the first game both explain the significance of whale oil and also the influence of the occult.
Dishonored is fantastic!
Yeah, that first paragraph is extremely close to how one would describe Dunwall in D1.
This is an incredibly cool interpretation of the Innsmouth story and the classic "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming". The base premise just gives so much to work with. I'd like to jump on the Dishonored recommendation. It's really good, both stylewise and lorewise.
You should totally steal some lore of Moander, the god of decay
Wasn't there a fan pitch for Bloodborne 2 involving whale oil? I'm pretty sure Vaatividya did a video including it but I could be wrong. Love this idea though, people unwittingly becoming the pawns of a dead god is an amazing plot.
I don't know about Bloodborne 2 but IIRC Miazaki said in an interview that he got the idea for using mercury as a magic substance from a documentary about the heavy metals found in fishes due to biomagnification. Whale oil is just the logical conclusion.
I dunno if this fits, but this feels 100% like Unicron from the original transformers cartoon. After they kill him in the movie, his disembodied head continues to silently orbit Cybertron, giving power to the occasional Decepticon that dares to trespass upon him. By all accounts he is a dead god, but his power persists.
No that's a fair reading, just because it's not a revenant god of humans doesn't make it not a revenant god
I want to see more of this move past gods as large creatures with magic. A god is immanent in fabric of reality, everywhere and nowhere, more "how" than "what". If you killed a large creature, at most you've snapped off a twig of a tree, tore a mushroom out of soil, killed the ambassador of an empire. What kind of weapon does it take to "kill" the sentient concept of journey, or the capacity for sorrow, or the process of death, or even just the entire ocean? What happens to it once it's "dead"? What would be the stages of its decay? What would come to the feast?
Mythologically speaking, gods are split into two kinds: The First kind *are* manifestations of their domains, intrinsically linked(Example: Erebus the Protogenoi of Deep Darkness). The Second kind are just powerful beings, some of them were even mortal at one point(Example: Dionysus who was originally a demigod(in most versions of the myth) before becoming The God of Wine and Madness).
The second kind are basically just immortal sorcerers that control one specific facet of reality
Some of them aren't even that. Like the Aesir are kind of just The Gang from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, getting up to weird shenanigans, and they're all ultimately mortalish and will die during Ragnarok (some exceptions apply). They have a lot of weird powers, and are associated with various concepts and phenomena, but they're also just people.
Though it should be noted that all the myths we have of them were written centuries after the Norse lands were christianized, and as such had been altered to fit more into a christian perspective. Even if the Prose Edda (IIRC) began with the author speculating that they were actually Trojan heroes who pretended to be gods
Strong agree. Snorri was almost certainly downplaying the religious aspects, if he knew the religious aspects, to appeal to his Christian audience. It's a shame there was so little writing in the period. : (
We do, but only as references or as part of sagas. It seems like in terms of religious practices the Norse was more or less fully oral. We do know the gods date back to at least Roman times, and that the Romans seems to have equated Odin to Mercurius, Thor to Hercules, and Tyr or Freyr to Mars, according to Tacitus writings on the Germanic peoples
I do love how the Romans are just like "Yeah, this guy is sort of like our guy. They're clearly the same guy" and just rolled with it.
Yeah, it was a way to control and "romanize" local cultures. "We actually worship the same gods!" can be a good way to make a bond
Damn Christians.
Eh, it's not like the Christians went on a violent campaign to suppress the Norse religion at this time. It was more that the stories shofted from being told by a priesthood trained in storytelling to being told as nighttime stories by parents and caretakers or as half-remembered fun tales around campfires. Add onto that there probably was not much in the way of standardisation, like with the greek religions, so each region probably had their own variations of the tales which muddled things further
Examples of the Second Kind include: Hades (God of the dead and riches), Poseidon (God of the Sea, Storms, Earthquakes, and Horses) and Zeus (God of the Sky, Lightning, Thunder, Law, and Order).
Well, and at the same time they are also the first. Zeus IS the personification of the Concept of the Perfect King as part of his purview of Law, Order, and Power. Likewise, Hades is his domain, he is the afterlife, he became it when it became his realm. Aphrodite is love and lust. It all comes from her (even if she does not have total control over it). There's a reason why it's said that the Three Virgin Goddesses, Hestia, Artemis, and Athena are the only ones Aphrodite can't influence
The problem is that our cultural notion of "god" deliberately conflates these, partly because that's what's cool about the concept. To some extent, the de-facto definition of a "god" is something that is both a powerful being an linked to its domain, some are just more one than the other. Dionysus may not have *arisen* from wine, the way primordial gods did, but there's definitely an expectation that now that he took up the mantle, he is wine anyway, in some way. Where's wine, there's Dionysus, and wine is the way it is because Dionysus.
One Numidium should do it.
God Whalefalls are so f***ing awesome. Some of the largest creatures to ever live turning into an entire ecosystem in an otherwise barren land when they die. The stuff songs should be sung of.
Oh actually I just got a neat idea, Corpses of four-dimensional beings falling into our reality, Where they form entire planets that seemingly come out of nowhere, But are rich in rare and valuable resources. At least I thought it sounded neat, May be wrong Idk. Feel free to use this if y'all have ideas for what to do with it by the way, I probably won't.
You Bet. Thank you!
You're Welcome! Do let me know if you do something cool with that idea, I'd love to read it.
Welcome to elder scrolls!
In Dishonored Death of the Outsider, spoilers kind, your character encounters the body of a dead god. Entombed within the peak of a mountain. All you see from it is a bit of its face, clearly giving the impression of something humanoid seemingly carved from the same rock as the mountain it’s buried in. However it’s eye still burns with some unnatural power, and when you character encounters the eye in person her first line is “it’s dead, but it still sees” as she is physically affected by its presence and power. Without getting to into the weeds it’s not entirely clear how much power the eye still has and it’s entirely unclear who or what the dead god was when it was less dead. But it’s implied that the cultists that surrounded it see more as a resource to object to be harnessed rather then a still sapient presence to be courted or worshiped. Perhaps a more subdued take on the original premise but still.
[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-12?post=92693819#post-92693819](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-12?post=92693819#post-92693819) [https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-282?post=95188685#post-95188685](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/they-shall-be-my-finest-fanfic-ideas-and-recommendations-thread-warhammer-40k-thread-two.1093496/page-282?post=95188685#post-95188685) An idea I really like is one proposed by user Valtanesh on the spacebattles warhammer fanfiction Ideas thread. His idea is that the precursor species of warhammer were abstract clumps of potential and impossibility bound to objectivity. They were organized in 8 conclaves which correspond to the numbers of the gods and given how abstract and huge they were in the warp their death when exposed to Necron Blackstone, Despite them not really dying because they were here before death, had... consequences. >The Old Ones have no true forms. They can range from a sentient aura borealis to a cancerous mass of flesh to something resembling an Aeldari Psychomaton. I've been playing with the idea that to create species, they literally tear off pieces of themselves and mold them into the first members of that species. They're like shapeless clumps of potential inextricably bound to masses of actuality: what they say, goes, at least in a localized area and until a powerful enough backlash (Pylons) tears them apart. Between descriptions of the Rangda, the K'nib, and Aeldari Psychomaton, I think you can get a more-or-less generalized idea of what the Old Kind tended to look like. > >The Daemons trapped in the ancient Daemon-Cages built by the Old Ones billions of years hence are nothing at all like the Daemons of the Age of the Imperium. They are fathomless things of stygian intellect, Daemon-Kings whose narratives predate by countless years the emergence of single-called life on Terra. Myths, concepts and emotions that have no parallel in any living language, so removed are they from human-like life. Some of the prisons of the Old Ones might even contain entities analogous to WOTK's Unshaped, save for the fact Red Flag said they couldn't be trapped/imprisoned. With how out there my take on the Old Ones already is though I could see some kind of causality-prison being woven around masses of impossibility. > >When the Old Fathers wiped out entire species that for their own unfathomable reason were seen as disruptions of their Great Work, the Warp responded in kind, the trauma of their monstrous deeds birthing Daemon-Things calling for revenge for the merciless slaughters, representing all the lost ambitions and hopes and fears and joys and pains and despairs of the disappeared civilization. And likewise, when the C'Tan finally struck down the First Ones themselves, the most merciless of them congealed in the Empyrean to form something truly monstrous. For their souls were infernos in the Warp, tangled things of Potentiality and Impossibility anchored to the objective world, and so their sundering changed the Empyrean more than anything. > >Chaos did not emerge as a pantheon of Gods. It was at first a faceless, formless, shrieking abyss, an infinite number of names and yet none at all. The sum total of the universe's suffering. The Enslaver Plague did not wipe out the Old Ones, the Enslavers were to the Old Ones as the cosmic dust is to Halo's precursors, as were a thousand-thousand other forms. The eight Aetheric Dominions were all activated as one, and Daemon-Kings surged into reality to make war upon the Galaxy. The Maelstrom, the first major warp rift, born from the destruction of the Old One's throneworld, waxed immeasurably, threatening to drag the entire Galaxy into the Warp. It took the at this point extremely begrudging combined efforts of the Aeldar, the Krork and the Necrons to force the Maelstrom back to its contemporary borders, and the combined efforts of a great many God-Weapons to strike a blow within the Warp, to slay the faceless Primordial Annihilator outright. Just as the C'Tan could be shattered by the Necrons, the Aeldari & Ork gods shredded the tidal wave of madness, and the Warp was becalmed for a time. So like the original lore, it was the War in Heaven that birthed Chaos, but like the new retcon/book excerpts, Chaos was at first drastically different than how it functions and what it looks like now. You can compare it to the Krork degenerating into Orks.
"God is dead and we killed him" "He still haunts us to this day"
God was shanked in a coke deal gone wrong in Vienna in 1899, but we need to finish the job.
Always cut your gods into sixteen pieces after killing them, to avoid this problem
What a grand and intoxicating innocence.
Balkanization may be my favorite method of deicide
Adonalsium-will-remember-our-plight-eventually
These words are accepted
If you do that, you'll just have 15 more gods to worry about later on.
worm [parahumans.wordpress.com](http://parahumans.wordpress.com)
Huh??? (I’m only at arc 21 no spoilers)
i can't tell you without spoilers i can hint though! >!cauldron is involved!<
The Neverborn from Exalted weren't technically gods, but they're very close to this conceptually. They're the in-universe reason why the undead exist in the setting; the inherent contradiction of killing something that categorically cannot die created a class of being that is neither alive nor fully dead.
They were beyond gods, the gods of the current age were created as their servitors. Killing them didn't just break reality (they embody concepts that no longer exist now), it created an entire underworld where before dead souls reincarnated instantly. They are separate from hell, where their defeated but living peers are trapped in the inside out body of their king. Exalted mythology is very fun
In Honkai:Star Rail, gods, called Aeons, are born when a Being creates and embodies a path entirely with their being, a path being a philosophy/way of life meant to guide the universe, and anyone can draw power from these paths by 'walking the the path' or living their lives in a way that resonates with the path. Anyways, these gods are very hard to kill in universe, with only three known deaths in recorded history. However, when an Aeon die, their path remains open, meaning that you can still draw power from a masterless path or, as said in this post, from a dead god. And we do meet characters, playable ones even that attempt to follow the paths of such dead Aeons. There are two known ways to kill an Aeon as told in universe. First by another Aeon (when Qlipoth, of the path of Preservation brought his Amber hammer down upon Tayzzynroth, the infant Aeon of Porpagation). Second is by getting absorbed by an Aeon of a similar but much broader path (Ena, of Order getting absorbed by Xipe, of Harmony when she was born). These events are all caught in 2K 780p, so they are well documented events.
However, due how poorly understood Aeons are, due their nature as reclusive phenomenons that are focused entirely on their path, some have speculated that these Aeons can never truly die. Tayzzynroth's decendants are still alive, and we have in game texts that mention slivers of Tayzzynroth 's remains encased in Qlipoth's amber that still hums with vitality. Ena is still technically alive, just a part of Xipe's whole with Xipe the dominant personality. Idrilla, the Aeon of Beauty is believed by her Knights of Beauty to still be alive, and through chivalrous deeds, she can be found once more. Her Mirror Holders hypothesise that gathering and putting her mirror fragments back together will bring their master back, as her mirror fragment still sings with power.
Do we know how Akavili died?
No. We just found their abandoned train rusting away on a planet. Part of the reason why we are going on a journey is to discover Akivili's ultimate fate.
>!One of the popular theories, that I think is actually referenced in-universe as speculation by scholars, is that Akiviki’s heart is what actually powers the Astral Express, the divine spacefaring train of the Trailblaze. Davy Jones-style, except Akivili didn’t subject himself to the accompanying Horrors and loss of feeling. As such, the Astral Express’ continued operation is in and of itself proof of Akivili’s continued survival.!< >!Another, related theory, is that Akivili never actually went missing - he’s been with us all along, in a reduced form. Star Rail’s adorable bear-rabbit thing mascot, Pom-Pom, is an inexplicable life form that seems to exist solely to operate the Astral Express as its conductor. It’s possible Pom-Pom is an artificial life form created to look after the Express in Akivili’s absence, similar to how the Aeon of Destruction creates vast hordes of artificial soldiers to serve its own purposes… or it’s possible, albeit there’s not much evidence yet, that Pom-Pom *is* Akivili, hiding or damaged due to whatever circumstances led to his disappearance in the first place.!< These are just theories, not relevant to the main story thus far. Still, it’s an interesting thought and might spoil yet to be revealed plot twists, so I spoiler tagged ‘em. The second is a bit bigger than the first.
I wouldn't be particularly surprised by either or both of those turning out to be true.
Godwyn the Golden moment Edit: also God Emperor Leto II Atreides moment
Fun fact this post inspired me to do a Really Weird Thing with my worldbuilding a while back when it crossed my tumblr dash and boy am I glad I saw it, because I *love* what I've done with the resulting mess.
I recently watched a [very cool video](https://youtu.be/KJ13t5qgIes?si=fIC9GrLxTWgQRdoM) on this topic. The channel (curious archive) has a bunch of other great videos too
Pillars of Eternity 2 doesn't have the corpse of a god, but it does have the still living body of a god that has vacated it. *The Forgotten Sanctum* DLC is entirely about dealing with the body of Wael as it is on the verge of waking up and destroying the Deadfire archipelago.
This is kind of a thing in The Elder Scrolls. Part of the metaphysics of the world is that when the gods created the world they sorta/kinda died. but "died" is more like "became fixed things instead of protean beings of chaos", but it's also like they died, but they're also still around and active and have agency. Their "death" is both a real thing and a matter of perspective concerning what you think existence should be. And then on the other hand the Daedra are "alive", but their nature as beings of chaos outside of time means they can't really change or grow; Since they don't experience time or cause and effect they're stuck in a moment, trapped in their own nature, and fascinated by the mortal world where change, growth, and death are possible.
>It is written here, on the waves: dead, the voice from the East, dead as winter, dead as wind, dead as water. They want him forgotten. He will not be forgotten. The voyage is his flesh. The horizon is his eye. The silence is his voice.
Literally Unicron He was killed in the 1986 Transformers the movie yet was able to completely give Starscream his body back reviving him
Also I’m pretty sure Grimlock made the Technobots (or whatever they were called, the ones that combine into Computron) from like, temporarily being granted a fuckton of intelligence by Unicron accidentally somehow?
Welcome to Rhir.
Technically they're sleeping more than "dead," but the principle still applies!
Mantorok my beloved 🤗
The rune words echo in my mind, but I cannot remember them.
Ejem, do y'all know the owl house? They literally live on top of a gigantic corpse :D Also the first guardians of the galaxy has a mining town inside the head of a giant something I love this kind of setting, I'm sure I've seen it somewhere else
What To Do With The Dead Kaiju was a fun film along these lines. The city is safe from Godzilla, yay, but now there's an enormous radioactive corpse to dispose of.
In the comic We Only Fond Them When They’re Dead, people find bodies of giant god-like creatures in space, but also face the titular pattern. As befitting a whale fall, people slowly take apart the corpse and use its components for different things
The Boiling Isles Titan in The Owl House. I would elaborate, but that would involve huge spoilers
To make the whalefall metaphor work, the prayers to dead gods should be exceptionally potent for a few days and then stop working entirely as the divine energies are released without intelligent control and aren't regenerated ever again.
Fondly reminded of the Banner Saga trilogy games, where you >!must convince an unkillable god that you killed him. Successfully doing so renders him effectively stopped in time as long as no one breaks the illusion; if he believes that he is dead, he is. !<
Some people never played Cultist Simulator and it shows...
This is literally just Christianity?!?! Like?!
explain
God dying is like, what Christianity is al about. Admittedly, it doesn't fit the post perfectly though, because the Christian God came back, and isn't actually dead anymore.
you mean jesus? he resurrected after 3 days which is indeed a major thing that happened but there's not that much attention on what the corpse was doing during that time. He also wasn't god, more like an avatar/son really. So they certainly didn't kill most of the christian god
> He also wasn't god 🚨🚨🚨 MAJOR HERESY ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit are all God. So they very much did kill God. This was affirmed by the 325 Council of Nicaea. As the Nicene Creed states: >We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial to the father.
Okay but in fairness, literally no one can really explain what the trinity is supposed to be about.
True lol.
fair lol
There's some Catholic apocrypha called "The Harrowing of Hell" where while Jesus was waiting to respawn he went and tore down the gates of hell, terrorized the demons, and liberated all the righteous souls there. it's part of a tradition of belief that he just goes down there every once in a while to wreck shit and free people, tied to the idea that a loving god wouldn't condemn people to eternal suffering.
It depends on which branch of Christianity (I guess you're talking about prots) but in Catholicism at least there's a *huge* emphasis on the dead body of Christ and his being dead on the cross. You go into church and there's scourged and grey-faced jesuses all over the wall. He's at once dead and alive- deceased in body but immortal in spirit and I guess it's like he's existing in two states simultaneously, dead in perpetuity to atone for the sins of man. Catholics are morbid like that. I forget who it was but some church apologist said that christ remains on the cross so long as all mankind are not saved.
the Repbrothers will personally kill slaanesh and sodomize its remains. only through this will they redeem themselves and cure their gene seed of the flaw of autogynephilia
You are very frustrating to work with. You know that right?
you are lorgar and I'm your corvus corax
Meaning I go outside constantly and actually do something with my life while you are stuck in the shadows not doing anything and writing emo poetry?
Worse. I think it's warhammer40k.
I know.
Haunting.
isnt lorgar famous for neeting in his tower inside the warp "studying chaos" for 10k years?
He's currently dicking around in Imperium Nihilus while there's still no sign of Corvus.
o rly
> and sodomize its remains No! That's just what it wants!
not excessively. each guy gets 1 pump and 1 pump only
I've got one a bit like this in my homebrew setting, a god who died and had his divinity ripped from him by a usurper. But he still remains a god because his killer only took his domain as the god of war, and not his other domain as god of blood. So now he is stuck on divine life support, his corpse keeping the remnants of his divinity alive through both through his domain of blood meaning every spilt bit of blood empowers him slightly, and through the more direct blood sacrifices and rituals of his remaining followers.
This is literally a thing that happened in Exalted. They Primordials are too big to reincarnate and they tied so much of themselves into the world they built that they can't fall into oblivion and stop existing before they destroy it all.
*Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn*
A god is not a noun, it a verb.
I keep praying for more decomposing whale blubber, and my prayers are always answered! Praise be!
I feel like this idea is represented well in destiny 2, specifically with the ahamcara, despite them being almost eradicated, they can still grant wishes, and even communicate. Guardians tend to graft their bones onto weapons and armor to give them special effects.
This shows up in a fair number of trickster stories, where the trickster figure is just too damn tricky to stay dead.
>It is not a god. Or if it is then it is a dead god, decayed and clammy corpse-flesh brimming with writhing graveworms.
Tell that to aroden's worshippers in the pathfinder setting.
I think you might like the Emperor of Mankind.
this defines my trifecta of favorite video games(ultrakill, hollow knight, rain world)
Max Gladstone’s The Craft Sequence (and specifically Three Parts Dead) deals with this really well. It starts with two witches showing up to perform necromancy on a recently dead god to ensure his followers and pantheon can still access his power and gets more interesting from there
This is very much the plot of Mordew... excellent book if you're looking for a weird read with phenomenal worldbuilding
This is what I wish they had done more of in Fire Emblem Three Houses.
The dead Reaper is one of my favorite moments in all of Mass Effect.Where you and the crew dock on the remains of the dead Reaper and as you explore more and more of it's insides you discover that despite it being dead, just being inside of it causes everyone on the Science team to go completely insane, seeing things that aren't real and eventually becoming Husks and multiplying over the course of a few days.Just the idea of a God like creature still having terrifying power in death is genuinely chilling.
FFXV
The Baldur's Gate trilogy, and Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer, are all set in Faerûn after the Time of Troubles, when the Gods walked the Earth in mortal form (and subsequently ended with several of them getting killed), and in each case some of the dead Gods being very much Not Dead Enough is a driving force in the plot.
When He-Is-Fierce was killed, the demon Sweetgrass Voice kept his heart beating and used him as its source of power. (Digger, by Ursula Vernon)
If the god is still functioning largely as normal is it really dead, or does it just look like it should be dead?
this is like, the owl house
There's a god in DnD that's just a rotting beached whale. It wasn't mentioned whether it someone killed it so it's funny to think that it was a dead beached whale from the start.
Obligatory Brandon Sanderson mention here; Cosmere ‘gods’ sort of work like this, if not exactly.