Cosmology

The world, in a broader sense, that my game takes place in is called Mishtar. To explain Mishtar it's actually best to begin with the D&D alignment grid. While it's convenient to put characters into boxes, in reality the alignment exists on two axis, good-evil and order-chaos, each with an infinitely dividable sliding scale of options.

[ alignment square]

It's also not actually a perfect square. While the distance between order and chaos is significant, all creatures of Mishtar are ultimately creations of order and so even the most chaotic cannot attain true chaos. More on this in a minute. The distance between good and evil, however, is vast and those creatures with sentience are capable of extreme acts of both good and evil. Extremely good or evil characters can have high amounts of lawfulness and chaoticness, but those traits can distract from goodness and evilness so the most good and evil creatures will have a balance between law and chaos. That leaves us with this elongated hexagonal alignment graph:

[alignment hexagon]

This alignment graph covers just about all sentient creatures in Mishtar, mortal, immortal, and divine. It does not however, cover the full range of possible alignments. For that we need this triangle:

[alignment triangle]

As you can see, at the top and bottom are pure good and pure evil, which are by definition lawful since they are both ultimate sources of Law. At the right side of the graph we have pure chaos, which is inherently incompatible with the created substance of Mishtar. The only creatures that could approach that alignment (beyond the usual chaotic good/evil/chaotic) are the truly mad.

So that's alignments. That graph is also a good image of a slice of the cosmos. The only issue is that chaos is shown as a single point, when really it's infinite and surrounds Mishtar. Imagine the good-evil side of the triangle as a central axis which chaos forms a full circle around. Chaos then extends from that circle on a flat plane (devoid of good end evil) infinitely.

[diagram]

That infinite plane of chaos existed before Mishtar, filled with structureless beings (this is the home of the elder gods). But one being was different, distinct even among the unpatterned chaotic forms. That being is called Good. Good created the world tree, Mishtar, out of chaos.

Good created beings to inhabit the tree, the celestials. The celestials were tasked with helping to grow the world tree, by taking chaos and forming it into structured reality.

One celestial, after seeing chaos, preferred it to reality. He complained that all the good things in Mishtar created the potential for pain, a lack of good things, and failure, non-promotion of good. He became known as Evil, and railed against creation, and against Good, saying it would be better if reality was never created. Evil and his followers, fiends, rebelled and claimed for themselves the highest branches of Mishtar. But since the world tree grew from it's roots, the fiends were unable to introduce new elements into the world, they were only able to twist the creations of Good and the celestials.

In addition to Good's creations, the celestials, Good also has descendants, the powers. Good's twin son and daughter are Light and Darkness, and their descendants include Fate, Death, Wisdom, Time, Law, and Nature (sometimes called Life), among others.

After creating the building blocks of the world, in the Outer Planes and Elemental Planes, the powers and celestials (along with the tampering fiends) set about the task of creating Rojopotis, the prime material plane, at the center of Mishtar.

After the elements, plants, and animals were created, the celestials created first mortal souls were created: the giants. The giants, like their creators, were capable of creativity, of furthering creation. The fiends, to counter this, took the souls of giants, twisted them, and created creatures with immense power to destroy: dragons. A constant war waged between the two.

The balance of power was tipped when the powers took some giants, and gave them limited divine power over the material world, creating the first gods. Examples include Shimesh, chosen by Light, who carries his torch across the sky each day; Khoref, chosen by Death, who travels the world bringing cold and withering; and Aviv, chosen by Nature, who follows behind Khoref restoring warmth and green. Since that time, divinity has on rare occasion been granted to other mortals, even a few dragons, and gods have begotten new gods (though not all children of gods inherit divinity).

Gods were then responsible for many of the species that followed, beginning with dwarves, elves, and men, whose creation began the Age of Heroes, when gods walked upon Rojopotis.

Four distinct houses emerged among the gods, as gods began to depart Rojopotis and make their homes in the four elemental planes. These houses competed and squabbled with each other, with mortal pawns carrying out most conflicts. Tensions escalated and eventually spilled into all-out war between the houses of Air and Fire, with all five mortal races split between the two sides. Ultimately the house of Air was victorious.

The gods of Air created a lesser material plane called the Underdark as a prison for the mortals that had opposed them (these would evolve to become Trolls, Shadow-dragons, Dwuagar, Drow, and Tieflings). The Fey gods, though primarily aligned with the house of water, helped Air in the war and so were rewarded with another lesser material plane: the Feywild, counterbalance to the Underdark.

Because Water and Earth had stayed neutral, they were each given dominion over 1/4 or Rojopotis, the land and sea, while Air was given 1/2, the sky, which would stretch above all the land and sea. Fire was banished from Rojopotis completely.

The inner planes were reoriented, with the plane of Air being closest to the root of Mishtar, where Good resides, and the plane of Fire moved nearest to the lower planes. The gods of Air made certain that that mortals associated air, the sky, and by extension them with good, while associating fire with evil.

Some time after the war, Shimesh was defeated by fiends as he passed through the lower planes one night and his torch was extinguished. Unable to reignite it due to the ban on fire, Rojopotis was plunged into darkness, lit only by the silver light of the Seelie Court and the dim sparkling of more distant planes. This was the Age of Darkness, during which time orcs and goblinoids were created.

[ Fire reintroduced ??? ]

While gods still make an appearance in Rojopotis from time to time, most have retreated to more distant realms, some to fortresses in the elemental planes and other minor material planes, many to their own small planes on the edge of the Astral Sea, and some beyond to the outer planes. Souls devoted to a god may go to that god's realm when they die. Some, who have won a god's particular favor, are given some of that god's power to use in Rojopotis. These souls are called saints.

While reality, Rojopotis, is more stable than in the past, gods, saints, powers, celestials, and fiends still interfere with and change the nature of the world. Chaos seeps in the edges of the world, manifesting in bizarre aberrations, and altering reality. New races occasionally enter Rojopotis from other planes like gnomes, evolve like halflings, or are created by magic like the dragonknights of Larnaca.

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While some of the above is captured in legends and myths, for the most part it is unknown to the mortal denizens of Rojopotis. See religion.