Weekly Update - 209 - 3/11/24

Skye can't believe her heterochromatic eyes!

There's also still time to vote in the poll! I'm working on a couple of other things this week, so the next character art will probably end up landing some time next week! Riley is currently winning by a significant margin! Also, feel free to comment with suggestions for anything you'd like to see her doing!

Who Should I Draw Next? | Patreon

Comic this week? Yes!

Drawing: Pages 190-194, Random Special Thing 1, Celebratory Page 200 Special Thing 2.

Playing: A tiny bit of AoW4 but more and more I'm just drawing into the long evenings instead of playing games which frees up more time for those above-mentioned special things.

Ramble:

Last week I promised more lore. So have some more lore! It might sound like this is the beginning and end of the story of gods in the world, but there's actually quite a bit more history to go before we get to the present day situation. This is largely just the most widely accepted version of the legend that explains where gods came from and what happened to them, and perhaps even why public opinion started to sour on them. I know that not everyone enjoys the unreliable narrator approach to worldbuilding, but honestly I feel like it's often a much more realistic interpretation of a world's history, especially in a world that lacks the infrastructure for a more organized collection of historical evidence and cataloguing of past events. Kuserra doesn't have historians, it has storytellers, myth-weavers, and depending who you ask, the story might be embellished one way or another. Still, while the details may still be fuzzy, especially the further back you look, there are events that most people can agree almost certainly did happen. I try to focus my lore on those events in particular, since they are the events most likely to shape the present-day culture and beliefs.

And again, I'm always open to feedback, your thoughts or suggestions on any of this. I may be the author but that doesn't make me an incontestable authority.

Next week maybe I'll explain why gods became so universally reviled, where the Hunters came from, and how we got to the current ~status quo.

The Rise and Fall of the Gods

History starts to get a little more interesting, and maybe a tiny bit more reliable, much more recently than whatever the “Catastrophe” was. It’s pretty well understood that some people started being born with a weird mystical power that came to be called “Vim.” The name being adopted from a more general term that once meant “life energy.” While at first it was merely a curiosity, some gods started being born that could perform true miracles, using this power to create delicious feasts for the famished, heal entire communities of everything they were afflicted by, or purify an entire lake of poisoned water. People began to worship those who were born with these powers, so the legends say, and that’s how they came to be called “gods.” These gods were a breath of fresh air in this forsaken world, and there was just nothing else that fit the moniker.

It's thought that somewhere around here there was an age of enlightenment. If you can call it that. While the gods were still young, some people were focused on solving the mysteries of the Ancestors, discovering their old technology and messing around with it to see if they could figure out what it could do. This is roughly when Chitters were likely invented, and when people discovered watts might make for a useful currency. This, however, eventually became secondary as the gods rose in number and influence, and more people turned away from the practical and the physical and put their faith in the mythical.

If there’s any truth to the stories, it didn’t take a generation for people to figure out our “gods” were no different than regular assholes. They just happened to be regular assholes that also had the power to kill hundreds of dissenters in an instant on a whim. Laws were written and rewritten again and again until anyone who wasn’t born a god was no better than the mud beneath a god’s foot. For the majority, this meant things went from being barely tolerable to being far worse than they had ever been before. People just felt helpless to do anything about it. The gods were all-powerful, omniscient, immortal, eternal beings, (which they loved to remind everyone of every day,) and people believed it… right up until one of these so-called “gods” died.

Try as they might to suppress the rumors, once whispers began to circulate that our “gods” weren’t really gods at all, a small group of assassins formed, and they began to hunt them down, one by one. Obviously the “gods” weren’t actually omniscient, all-powerful, or immortal at all, so they succumbed to the same things anyone did, like poisoned food, convenient “accidents,” and the ever popular knife-in-the-neck-while-sleeping. The trick to killing gods was actually quite simple. No normal person could beat a god in a straight fight, but the gods were vulnerable to being caught off guard. These assassins would eventually prove to everyone, in increasingly public and spectacular fashion, that our “gods” weren’t immortal, and certainly weren’t worth being afraid of. Legends began to spread about the “God Slayers,” a new form of salvation showing everyone the cracks in the iron grip of the gods. As more and better Ancestor tech was dug up out of the wreckage, more of it found its way to the Slayers, and killing gods got even easier. The Slayers eventually killed every member of the ruling “pantheon,” then all of their supporting Landlords, many of whom were gods themselves, and finally they became the silent sentinels, making sure no god could rear its ugly head in public again without getting it shot off.