God

> *This article is about the concept of gods in Worth the Candle. For the gods in This Used To Be About Dungeons, see Gods (TUTBAD).*
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A **god** or **deity** is a being with divine and/or supernatural powers. They are often personifications of a concept or force of nature, and can be tied into a world's creation myth. According to Juniper Smith, there is no evidence that any gods exist on Earth. Aerb, however, has five gods. These gods are considerably less puissant than some of the more powerful examples found in Earth's mythologies. Amaryllis, when commenting on their moral character, claims that it is lacking - a claim supported by the arc of Aerb's basic history. The book *Fingers of the Celestial Hand* discusses Aerb's gods as forces within the world.

*“[...]If you’re omnipotent, how fucking shitty do you have to be at planning for any of your plans to involve killing millions of children every year?”*

—**Juniper** on theodicy, Chapter 81: "Musings on the Elder God"

## Gods of Earth

### In Religion

#### God

In the specific part of Earth where Juniper grew up, people are raised to believe that there's a singular god who created the world and wrote the laws of physics. This "God" is supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Juniper gets mad at him sometimes.

#### Athena

The Greek goddess **Athena'**s name is the root of the word "Athenaeum".

### In RPGs

#### Cthulhu

**Cthulhu** is a "Lovecraftian" elder being, one that presumably plays a prominent role in *Call of Cthulhu* - a game system used by Juniper Smith for his *Tentacles of the Third Reich* campaign.

#### "God of the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread"

A minor god played by Tiff in Juniper's *Small Gods* campaign.

#### "God of Stories Without Endings"

A minor god played by Arthur Blum in Juniper's *Small Gods* campaign.

#### Sonkrag

A god created at the same time as Invreizen. God of the sun, honor, justice, order, and law."Sonkrag" means "solar power" in Afrikaans.

#### Kennis

A god created at the same time as Invreizen. God of civilization, innovation, books, and metal. "Kennis" means "knowledge" in Afrikaans.

## Gods of Aerb

### The Five Gods

Aerb has five gods, all pulled from a campaign where Juniper lazily made their names using the first option on Google Translate - Afrikaans. Four of the five deal with aspects of the natural world. Two other gods from that campaign failed to make the cut (see Fictional Gods below). This was a real campaign Alexander Wales ran.

The four main gods' only concern is that their aspect of nature continues to follow it's rules. Very rarely, if sufficiently angered by someone managing to pervert the laws of nature, they may interve to "answer heresy with heresy" and cause a natural disaster in defiance of the natural workings of the world.

Their clerics are granted only relatively weak abilitites, to mildly bend the rules around corner cases of their domain, as well as to sense and understand things falling under their domain. At the highest level, they are aware of everything that falls under their god's domain within a wide radius around them, a much more potent power than their ability to fudge the rules of their domain. Part of the clerics' role is to help guide people on what is or isn't likely to anger the gods with their enhanced understanding of their domain.

The gods all claim to have "arrived" on Aerb around 30,000 BE and witnessed it's creation, although they refuse to say from where, and their descriptions of Aerb's creation all differ.

#### Invreizen

**Invreizen** is Aerb's god of Sea and Ice, plus the domains of Wind, Water, Rain, Clouds, Air, Birds and Fish. Invreizen lives in Frustbury, in a bowl filled with lake water at the top of the Yshuis, an ornamental temple and his primary place of worship. Invreizen is capable of changing his body instantly, much as Juniper Smith does when putting skill points into PHY. He can transform into any creature from his domain, or a being made up of parts of any creature in his domain.

He describes the creation of Aerb as it being "thawed out". He is aware of the fact two gods were not included in Aerb by the DM.

"Invriezen"[*sic*] means "freezing" in Afrikaans.

#### Aarde

**Aarde** is a god. The blood magic spell "Aarde's Touch" is named after them. In a possible future, the Fifth Empire called in a favour from Aarde to confirm that there was not a single living thing left in Fel Seed's domain. Describes the creation of Aerb as a "mudslide". "Aarde" means "earth" in Afrikaans.

#### Skaduwee

**Skaduwee** is a god. "By the grace of Skaduwee" was sometimes used as an oath. Dolmada, a cleric of Skaduwee, was one of Uther's Knights. Described the creation of Aerb as a "lightening". "Skaduwee" means "shadow" in Afrikaans.

#### Karakter

**Karakter** is a god, specifically some kind of godess of nature. Her name was accidentally mistranslated by Juniper (and, in reality, by the author), so it literally means "character" - a person's "nature". She describes the creation of Aerb as a "fracture".

#### Truuk

**Truuk** is a god. He is a trickster figure, rather than representing a facet of nature like the other four. Unlike the other gods, Truuk does not live in a city, and does not have a stable base of clerics. People avoid saying his name They have never told the same story twice regarding the creation of Aerb. "Truuk" means "trick" in Afrikaans.

### The Other Side

The Other Side of Aerb had two gods instead of Aerb's five. It seems likely that they were Sonkrag and Kennis (above), which may explain why civilization on the Other Side was so much more stable.

### Other Beings Referred To As Gods

The Six-Eyed Doe was referred to as a minor god by both Invreizen and Fel Seed. Presumably the same applies to other Druidic Loci.

The DM and his Pantheon were sometimes described as the over-god(s) or true god(s) of Aerb; their role was ultimately taken by The Authority.

### Fictional gods

#### Bethel

Aerb's legends told of a home, the first god, that sheltered the first humans for the eldritch storms that crossed the world in its distant past.

#### "God of Might"

Juniper Smith once mentioned a "God of Might" in a made-up story about Moxit and Kerland.

#### "God of Scurrily"

In the Council of Arches' *Dungeons & Dragons* games, the race of scurrilies was cursed by their god for rebelling against him. Like the rest of Alphalon's gods, the "God of Scurrily" lived high on Oros Olympos.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 “Well, on Earth there’s no evidence that any gods exist, and I’m one of the people who thinks that they don’t. And as part of that, I don’t think that anything happens to people when they die, they just … cease to exist.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 “There are five gods,” said Amaryllis.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
3. ↑ “He learned the basic principles of blood magic in the space of a few minutes this morning and got us over the wall this afternoon by applying those principles in novel ways. I don’t know whether this will extend to other skills to such an extent, but if he keeps up this rate of progress then he’ll be able to rival the gods within a month.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 15: "Whys and Wherefores"
4. ↑ “The gods are decidedly lacking in virtue,” said Amaryllis, crossing her arms.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 81: "Musings on the Elder God"
5. ↑ “It’s not clear whether it’s dying or not,” said Amaryllis. “The
overall trend is downward. Optimists feel that the final graph will be
sigmoid, with a long period of stability before the First Empire, a
period of instability, and then a second long period of stability.”

We moved on to other things after that, but it left me thinking  *holy shit is this world grimdark.*
 There was no heaven, only nine thousand hells, and Aerb itself was
becoming a shadow of itself. It was obvious to me that this was a
reflection of my own mind; since Arthur had died, I hadn’t really been a
 believer in bright and happy futures, and even before then I had always
 made my worlds a little dim so that the heroes could shine all the
brighter. That was the thought that gave me hope. If I had designed this
 world, then maybe I was a hero in it, one of the people whose purpose
was to blaze with light and banish the darkness. - Ch 19: Montage!
6. ↑ This was described to me as being five dossiers on the gods, and I checked through it to make sure that it contained relatively little in the way of biography. It was more about the five gods as forces within the world, which I was much more interested in.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 28: "The Impish Inn"
7. ↑ “Okay, fine, I’m going to give a very, very brief summary in the interests of bridging the cultural divide. On Earth -- well, no, in the specific part of Earth that I grew up on, we’re raised to believe that there’s only one singular god, who made everything in the whole world, wrote all the laws of physics, set up all the rules the world works by, is omnipotent, meaning that he’s all powerful, he’s omniscient, which means that he’s all-seeing, and finally, the kicker, he’s omnibenevolent, which means that he’s all-good, as good as good can be.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 81: "Musings on the Elder God"
8. ↑ It was how I had felt after Arthur died, this furious anger at a world that was so indifferent to us, a burning desire to find God and punch him in his fat fucking face for letting a thing like this happen.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
9. ↑ It was true when I said it, but right after a memory sparked and I recalled the term; it was a fancy term for a place of literacy and learning, taken from the name of the Greek god Athena.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
10. ↑  I was tensed up; my personal conception of gods was that they were basically Lovecraftian in nature, elder beings of incredible power and inscrutable goals, and yes, that interpretation of gods extended to most major world religions. That view had been reflected in the worlds I’d created for D&D. If I was in a world where a Cthulhu knock-off was real ...
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
11. ↑ Of course, Rule 2 was that I couldn’t depend on good game design, and there were some genres or schools of thought where it would be acceptable, like in Call of Cthulhu where deadly wasting sickness was par for the course.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 All the players were really, really weak gods of very minor things, like Tiff was the God of the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread, and Arthur was the God of Stories Without Endings.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 105: "Notes"
13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 When I’d created Invreizen, he’d been one of seven gods, an attempt to create an extremely broad pantheon. Aerb only had five gods, and I had no idea what had happened to the other two. Sonkrag had been a pretty classical sun god, possibly cut because of his secondary focus on mortal affairs like honor, justice, order, and law. Kennis had been the god of civilization, innovation, books, and metal, and my guess was that he likewise just didn’t make the cut. That left four gods with domains that were more focused on the natural world, and the last of the bunch, Truuk, who was a trickster god, not sprung from the same mold as the others, and the kind of god that people tended not to talk about unless it couldn’t be helped.

(The names of the gods were all Afrikaans. I want to be clear that I wasn’t at the level of being lazy by naming gods using Google Translate: I was at the level of naming gods using Google Translate, and picking Afrikaans because it was alphabetically first.) - Chapter 222: Clerical Errors
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 My favorite "joke" in all of Worth the Candle is one that wasn't seen for a long, long time, and which I hadn't actually intended: the gods of Aerb are pulled from a campaign where I had lazily run words through Google Translate into Afrikaans, but one of them sticks out, which is Karakter. This translates to "character", so what is she the god of? This has puzzled people for a long time, including me (though I knew what she was the god of), but the answer is that through ignorance and laziness, another translation of "character" is "nature". So a lazy translation to avoid thinking up a name gave a god a wrong and confusing name, which is so good and in-character. (h/t to bacontime for figuring that out) - Worth the Candle Q&Q
15. ↑ The gods of Aerb went far in the direction of aloofness, but it was a special kind of aloofness that played into their ineffability. Put simply, four of the five gods of Aerb didn’t really give a shit about people, and while they all had their domains, and granted limited powers within those domains to people who were recognizably clerics (and called such by the people of Aerb), their interests in those domains hewed very closely to the status quo.

Invreizen was the god of Ice and Sea, or more precisely, the god of Ice, Sea, Wind, Water, Rain, Clouds, Air, Birds, and Fish. What Invreizen wanted, so far as anyone could tell, was for the ice to be the ice, and the sea to be the sea, and so on through all his domains. Sailors rarely prayed to Invreizen, because why would they? It was the nature of the sea to sink ships, and thus, part of Invreizen’s agenda as well. Invreizen was the god of good weather and bad weather, and so far as he was concerned, weather was based on the fundamentals of high and low pressure systems, moisture and dryness, winds and evaporation and all that stuff. To change the weather would mean to make the weather go against the fundamentals that drove the weather, and thus make the weather unlike itself. Invreizen wouldn’t stand for that.

Where the gods acted, they acted against what they saw as fundamental attacks on the basic nature of their domains. [...] The last time Invreizen had acted was one hundred and twenty-six years prior. Someone had invented something that they called ‘dry water’, and the following month, the edge of the sea had lifted up and then slammed down on his coastal city, killing roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people. Among the gods, and those who followed them, this was known as ‘answering heresy with heresy’, a god’s way of saying, “Oh, you think that water should not behave how it does? Then let’s see how you feel about a gross violation of the behavior of water.” This almost always meant death on a large scale, not because the gods weren’t capable of fine control of their domains, but because ‘fuck everyone in your general vicinity’ was just the way they operated. [...] For the most part, gods didn’t take drastic action, because for the most part, things obeyed their fundamental natures simply by definition, and virtually all magic that altered that fundamental nature was included within the domain. - Chapter 222: Clerical Errors
16. ↑ Where the clerics acted, it was in the liminal spaces of definitions, or what they called the dialectics, those places where two aspects of a domain were somehow in tension with one another. A cleric of Invreizen couldn’t cast a spell like create water, a D&D mainstay, but what they could do instead was to heighten certain aspects of water. This was, to be plain, incredibly weak, but each god had enough domains to their name that being a cleric of a god got you access to a wide variety of weak powers. Clerics were still typically at the bottom of the barrel, at least as far as magical might went, but there were a few exceptional rule benders among them, and even a weak cleric could still earn a living, especially with the support of their church, namely because of their deep understanding of the domains, which came with extra senses that couldn’t easily be replicated. - 222: Clerical Errors
17. ↑ An extremely high level cleric has A) high detail clairvoyance/clairaudience of the local area, at least when it comes to the domain, meaning a cleric of Invriezen would know where every drop of water in a city was, every fish, every bird, etc. B) clerics work best at the limits of the domain, e.g. the question of whether the domain of water includes mud. And if it is water, then it should behave like water, which would allow it to behave less like mud (for example, flowing faster, evaporating, etc.). This is much less useful than the information though, and much harder to use, and you don't want to commit blasphemy. - Worth the Candle Q&A
18. ↑ Part of the function clerics served was to use their understanding of the various domains of their god in order to advise on and police ‘godly matters’, which were mostly those areas where something impermissible might happen. - 222: Clerical Errors
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 It’s commonly accepted that the world began in 30,000 BE, though there are a handful of historical records that claim much different dates, some more authoritative than others. Among entities that claim to have been present at (roughly) the start of prehistory: The gods all claim to have “arrived” around 30,000 BE, though they refuse to say where they had been before that time. Invreizen describes Aerb as being “thawed out”, Karakter describes it as a “fracture”, Skaduwee says “a lightening”, Aarde refers to it as a “mudslide”, and Truuk has never told the same story twice. These variable descriptions are difficult to reconcile with each other, though it’s possible that they arrived in different places on Aerb, or perhaps came at different times. - A Brief Description of Aerb: Chapter 1: History
20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 “Where did you see the trick before?” I asked.
“Invreizen,” she said. When she saw my blank look she added, “God of Sea and Ice.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
21. ↑ Invreizen was the god of Ice and Sea, or more precisely, the god of Ice, Sea, Wind, Water, Rain, Clouds, Air, Birds, and Fish.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 222: "Clerical Errors"
22. ↑ The biggest of those buildings was the Yshuis, the primary residence and place of worship for Invreizen.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 222: "Clerical Errors"
23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 The gods all claim to have “arrived” around 30,000 BE, though they refuse to say where they had been before that time. Invreizen describes Aerb as being “thawed out”, Karakter describes it as a “fracture”, Skaduwee says “a lightening”, Aarde refers to it as a “mudslide”, and Truuk has never told the same story twice.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 1: "History"
24. ↑ Q: Would Invreizen have had a reaction to Juniper telling him about the two gods missing from Aerb? Speaking of which, is there a diegetic reason that those two are missing?

A: He'd have known that this was the case, and responded calmly, as though this were information that was common knowledge to everyone. The reason the two of those are missing is because their domains are closely tied to people, rather than the natural world, and their existence would have been more problematic. - Worth the Candle Q&A
25. ↑ “Who is Aarde?” I asked.
“A god,” Amaryllis replied.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
26. ↑ ***Spell discovered: Aarde’s Touch!***
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
27. ↑ When the losses began to grow, when too many warders were dying trying to remove the wards throughout Thousand Brides, the Fifth Empire called in their ultimate weapon of last resort. They tore a hole through space and time, destroying Thousand Brides utterly and killing thousands of their own. Someone, somehow, convinced Aarde to get off his butt and confirm that there was no living thing left in the entire zone. I don’t know who got the god to owe them a favor, but that was what they spent it on. - Chapter 130: The Abject Despair of an Uncaring World
28. ↑ “I thought that maybe … if you had known him, I would have been able to explain it better. A Dungeon Master is like a god, I guess. Like, um, Skaduwee?”
“I know my gods, thank you,” replied Tiff.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 89: "The Face of a Place"
29. ↑ Xorbus’ eyes widened at that. “By the grace of Skaduwee, where are you from ?” She hurried past me, through the archway. “You should know that’s not really how it is in the Library.” - Chapter 129: Schemata
30. ↑ Q: What was the deal with the rest of Uther’s Knights?

A: [...] **Dolmada:** Cleric of Skaduwee - Worth the Candle Q&A
31. ↑ The fifth god was special though, not a part of the normal worship of god botherers, not with any stable base of clerics, not with a city built around him, and not even what you’d call the same type of being as the other four, save that they claimed him as one of their own. It was considered best practice not to say his name.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 222: "Clerical Errors"
32. ↑ “As the legend goes, she sheltered the first of the humans from the eldritch storms that once crossed Aerb. She was the first home for humans, and the first god, before the five we know. The story is almost certainly apocryphal.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 100: "Immanentizing the Eschaton"
33. ↑ “[...]The arrow doesn’t kill Kerland, not even close, but it does graze him, and in that moment Kerland feels a real fear, because now they know that underneath a small kingdom’s worth of magic items and a body that would make the God of Might green with envy, Kerland is still just a man.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
34. ↑ “So the world that we’ll be playing in is called Alphalon, and the four of you will be starting in the town of Gramp’s Hollow. The tax collector is coming in five days time, but the taxes for the village have been stolen out from under the mayor’s nose by a band of scurrilies, small, furry, treacherous creatures cursed by their god with profound greed. The scurrilies have taken their prize to the run-down Crumplebottom Manor a mile outside of town, and the mayor is desperate to have it back before the taxman comes.”
—*The Council of Arches* side story
35. ↑ At our D&D games she played Case, a defector from the evil scurrilies, whose overarching goal was to lift the curse that the God of Scurrily put on her race.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 56: "Vacation Vocations"
36. ↑ “Fenn, their god cursed them because they rebelled against him.”
—*The Council of Arches* side story
37. ↑ “They’re mostly absent though, high on Oros Olympos at the center of the world.[...]”
—*The Council of Arches* side story