Three Pantheons Workshop: Divine Marks (Part 1)

So this is going to be part of a new thing I do. As I work on revamping the original Three Pantheons setting for my own use, I think it will be important to examine some of the initial concepts used in the setting and analyze them. See what they were doing narratively, the problem they were intended to solve, how well that worked, and then build them back up to my new vision.

So today we’re going to be talking about “god marks”. The gods of the pantheons need to have followers, in a form of Gods Need Prayers Badly. In setting, every conscious entity has a soul (essentially). A soul creates a certain amount of ‘magic energy’ consciously, which dissipates under normal circumstances.

However, by ‘marking’ an individual, the god can direct this ‘excess’ energy to funnel up to them (only while the individual is in the divine realms). This energy can be used to perform various paranormal feats. The individual capacity of any mortal is extremely low; to put this in analogies, a single mortal is like a AA battery. Can’t do much with only one. But if you get a few hundred…or thousand…or even more together, now the total capacity is a bit more robust.

So now that we’ve established the incentive for gods to mark people, how do they get people? Depends on the god, but broadly, there are two categories: “Voluntary” marks, where someone gives some form of consent to get the mark, and “Involuntary” marks, also known as “Forcemarks”, where it becomes essentially a form of divine press-ganging.

Voluntary marks need a carrot, or nobody would ever do it. As such, marks cannot be overridden under normal circumstances; if you get a voluntary mark, the chance of getting forcemarked go to near-zero. This makes sense for the gods because nobody likes their stuff getting stolen, so of course the gods would make marks difficult to override. They can be removed by the god, or even traded between them, but this isn’t common. At the scale they’re at, mortal souls are largely fungible for the ‘magic power’ purpose.

As for mortals, why would they agree to essentially sign away part of their soul? Well, Forcemarking provides the stick. Some gods don’t particularly care HOW they get marks, as long as they get them. So they will have agents of theirs try to lure unmarked people into their domains and then mark the victims. Often, this involves a forced transformation into a new race of mythic creature. But hey, if you don’t like it, maybe the god will change you back to human if you prove yourself useful enough…

So that’s the basics. Marks provide gods with power, and can’t be overridden. But this leads to a few problems that developed in the original play. One was that once the setting was relatively established, it became essentially a no-brainer for anyone in the realms regularly to get a mark, which actually isn’t bad, but since marks don’t affect people who aren’t in realm, also made it somewhat no-risk for people who weren’t planning on coming back. One attempt to fix it was to force a language skill overwrite during marking (So you’d speak, say, Hellenic Greek instead of English after), but this is hard to use in text RP as communication is key. So I might need a new form of small cost for anyone who gets a mark. Just so that it’s not such a ‘yeah, do this right away’ thing.

Another problem was that a forcemark victim who got transformed get a sort of health and age reset, because the god wouldn’t be interested in marking people with maladies that would make them ‘risky investments’. But a natural consequence of that is that people who are terminally ill, or of advanced age, might actually go out and try get caught, to try and get their health fixed in a way medicine can’t achieve. To be clear, I’m not actually against the gods giving this kind of stuff out as a reward, but these so-called “Briarmarks” (gonna try and find a new name for these!) always felt wrong to me. Like maybe the first few might work but eventually that feels like something that wouldn’t be looked favorably on. But gods largely outsource the capture to various followers, and the marking is done by their clergy in temples so there’s a level of disconnect.

A few other concerns arose, but this ended up way longer than I intended so I’ll finish later. But I’m posting anyways because I got in a mind-loop editing this trying to get it ‘complete’.

-Arrow