Deities

Deity refers to any lifeform that has been sacrificed via sacrifire and now resides in the incoporealm.

## Diet

Deities feed on sacrifices and fuel their powers using belief sentiment from their faithful. In short, belief gives them power, sacrifices fulfill their needs of food, shelter, comforts, etc. Wrong sacrifices (things the deity doesn't like to eat most often) bring curses from the deity.

## Description

Deities are mostly intangible lifeforms that live in the Incorporealm, an intangible dimension overlapping Welt where entities and objects that were sacrificed arrive. The appearance, attributes and powers of a deity are dependent on the beliefs of their followers, if they have none, they retain their original form. All during their life they change in accordance to people's beliefs which influences their abilities and attributes, but not their personalities, which remains their own.

Deities owe their strange physiognomy which differs radically from their original form to their faithful, whose belief shapes their appearance. If their belief in the deity says they have three eyes, they have three eyes, if it says they can control thunder and can freeze blood, they can.

## Physiology

Like animi, deities are biologically immortal, but not truly intangible. They are estimated to have a lifespan of 1000 years provided they survive that long in the incorporealm. Deities are differentiated from animi since they aren't dead but merely changed form, and can reproduce.

A deity's intangibility is limited, they walk on the ground and are subject to gravity (though some can choose to ignore it). They can also interact with certain things that cause harm to animi; certain metals, salt, sulfur, enchanted as well as cursed or sanctified objects.

Being intangible, deities can only communicate using their powers or hand signs. However, they can communicate effectively using a divine larynx, a tool made of iron and silver allowing deities to communicate using wind.

### Powers

#### Blessing

Blessing and consecrating both refer to the act of imparting the abilities of a deity unto an object. When one of the faithful does it, it's consecrated. When a deity does it, it's blessed.

### Behavioral modifications

Deities can make small modifications in people if sufficiently powerful, such as creating lust or disgust at certain things. Examples include the aversion to crosses vampires have is the work of a deity. Aversion to beastly behaviors are also influences of deities.

## Types of deitic religions

There are three types of deitic religions; direct, indirect and unknowable deities in the Weltan system.

Direct deities live amongst others in the world, still mostly intangible, incarnating avatars of what the people believe they are. Some can

Indirect deities are deities that cannot interact with any of their faithful through the usual senses and must go through messengers to relay their will to their followers. Also called messenger gods. An example of messenger god is the practice of Udu, of which the chief deity Gutgot is unknowable. The messengers of the indirect deity are often called heralds, angels or cherubs.

Unknowable deities are like indirect deities, but do not have messengers, they communicate through extra sensory messages such as dreams, intuitions and ideas with their followers. These are most commonly referred to as gods, being unknowable even to most deities.

### Worship

Civilians aren’t immune to the benefits deities can grant them. In order to benefit from the advantages religion can bring, deities (much like demons) organize their faithful into doctrines and attempt to convince others in order for the deity to reach prominence. This plays out essentially as debates and marketing campaigns in cities, immune to other limitations.

### Rituals

Similarly to demons, deities require a series of conscious actions executed in an order so as to achieve certain results, the most common being to achieve the summoning or communication with a demonic entity, or religious rituals, which are to bring the favor of deities.

These are not ot be confused with a Dalmer ritual, which is a series of conscious actions executed in an order so as to confuse the algorithm in order to achieve certain results that are unintended or a result of complex programs clashing with one another.

### **Conversion**

Conversion is a phenomenon where an individual shifts the focus of its belief from one belief fueled entity to another object of fixation.

## Reproduction

While deities can only be created through sacrifice, they are capable of producing offspring with the rest of the biosphere. Deity gametes are resilient and adaptable, leading to certain deities being born in strange ways.

Usually, offspring of deities, like sacrificed plant offspring are tangible, and offer no significant difference from their parents (except that they are not deities and thus tangible). In rare cases the deity can pass on its ability to be fueled by belief, and as such the offspring is a true deity.

Deities can create new lifeforms due to the nature of their gametes, and are one of the most prominent sources of viable on sterile chimera in the Weltan system.

### Examples

Golden rain that birthed perseus

Phanes born from a cosmic egg

Hera conceived hephaistos alone

Zeus transformed into a swan and mated with a woman named Leda.

Dionysos born from Zeus' thigh.

Athena born from Zeus' split skull

Aphrodite born from Cronos' testicles thrown into the sea

## Items related to deities

### Idols

Effigies that the deity can inhabit and move in, allowing it to interact more fully with its environment and even communicate with its followers.

### Relics

Relics are objects used by the deity and are often consecrated via fulinginosis by the faithful.

### Artifacts

Artifacts are unique items made by the deity, mostly to reward their faithful with blessed objects.

### Altars

Workbench for all kinds of rituals concerning magic, religion, necromancy or demonology. In most religions, it is where sacrifices are made. Altars are basically a deity's all in one diner, convenience and hardware pickup spot.

## Territory

Much of the political and structure of deities influence is based on territory, shrines and temples will solidify the deities relation to the lands. Some deities organize themselves into pantheons that hold power over a region, though there is significant overlap in some areas.

This means that multiple mythologies from all over Welt coexist while at the same time having control over such things as the sea the sky and the suns. As such after divine apocalyptic events cannot affect the whole world, just the area of influence of that particular deity. Because of this the multiple creation stories can coexist at the same time and all be true. It is possible to go from one mythology to another by traveling whether it is a deity or not. Worshippers of certain deities can even bring the powers of their deities to lands unfamiliar with its worship. Common elements sometimes link these disparate deities such as common elements like primordial soups and fires. Contrary to this, the death of a sun deity in one pantheon will not affect the sun in a territory where a different sun god is worshipped.

Each mythology is essentially a pocket where the world is divided into a grid where each cell is a different mythology. But what that effectively means is that every cell of the grid or mythology has its own rules, their own sun and moon, and their own underworld and so on. Everything that happens within those cells only apply to and affect that area. Because of this, common myths such as the "edge of the world" aren't the actual edge of the world, deities holding up the sky don't hold up the whole actual sky just that mythologies "sky".

### Shrines

Small areas dedicated to the worship of a deity, deities will collect belief (or steal it from other deities) from these areas. These structures can be sacrificed in order for the deity to seek shelter inside and to interact with those inside. Generally shrines are the size of small rooms and ressemble shelters. There are general shrines for cosmopolite polytheistic multi religious areas, where all deities can come. Smaller shrines will often contain the metal suits and tools deities use to interact with the outside world.

### Temples

For more established deities, temples can become their homes if the construction materials and furnishing are consecrated or sacrificed. These elaborate structures are quite literally where deities live and can be found when not tending to their faithful.

## Known deities

### Nations Manifest

Created from the general belief of what a country represents. Based on national and stereotypical cultural influences, they coexist with more local manifestations.