Reply With QuoteDamn this looks fun, can I reserve Zeus? My idea is some kind of politician.
Based on Neil Gaiman's bestselling novel and upcoming HBO series, American Gods.
The Premise:
When one leaves their mother country behind to seek their fortunes across the Atlantic, to America, they bring more than their culture, their language and their values and other such vestiges of their origin. They bring to America their gods. Such has been the case since the discovery of the New World. Such has been the case with all manner of gods and mythic beings. The likes of the Aesir, the Olympians or even the Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy, they all rely on the belief of their worshippers. Without faith, without belief, without worship, they wax and wane until they are a distant memory of a bygone age.
Such is the state of affairs in the modern day, in America. The gods who crossed the ocean with their respective immigrating cultures have been almost been all but forgotten by the very descendants of their own people. Heroes of old, gods of stature and monsters and creatures who shaped the imaginations and minds of mortals... now little more than shadows of their former glory. From riches to rags, the old deities and mythic entities get by however they can. They survive on the barest scrapes of belief and cultural knowledge. They get by however they can. Odin has been reduced to a con artist, going by the name "Mr. Wednesday." The old Slavic goddesses of the dawn make a living off fortune telling in the streets. Thoth and Anubis run a funeral home in a little town in Illinois.
Everyone has fallen on hard times.
It gets worse.
The new gods - gods of the credit card, mass media, the internet, and uniquely American esoteric concepts - have taken center stage, and they find the old ones an infestation that must be eradicated, an ancient pest with no relevance in the real world. They've taken to hunting down every single old one. There's a storm coming, and it doesn't pay to be an old one.
This is not a land for old gods.
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The Plot:
The characters will be part of a band of old deities, heroes and other mythic creatures on the run from the new gods. They're making a cross-country trek to make it to the Pacific, where it's said they can find refuge. The characters can be any mythological entity so long as they meet the following two bits of criteria.
- They must be part of a cultural and/or group that had immigrated to America at any point in the past.
- Due to a substantial loss of faith, they're nowhere near as powerful as they used to be, but you can still retain some talents. Pick a talent and ability your entity is known for, and stick with it. For example, if your character is - say - Hercules, then obviously you'll have high strength as your main talent. However, given the lack of active belief, it'll be toned down a bit. At best, you'll have to strain to even flip over a pick up truck.
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Character Sheet Template:
True Name:
Modern Alias:
Culture/Mythology of Origin:
Occupation: (what your character is doing to get by in modern times)
Gender:
Height:
Weight:
Weapon of Choice: (optional, but if your character is historically well known for having a weapon, go ahead)
Appearance: (either describe textually or take any picture or drawing and point to that, I'll accept it)
History: (cover your character's history as a down-on-his/her-luck deity/hero/monster/creature/entity in the last century, since coming to America with his/her people)
Personality:
Powers:
Talents:
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Alright then, how's that? Any questions? Also, you can be a bit creative. Some of the characters in the book were leprechauns, elves, demons, djinn and so forth. So get crazy. Hell, you can have a unicorn (in human form) character.
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Reservation List:
Zeus - chulance
Ares - Act Raiser
Fafnir - VioletUke93
Last edited by Sanjuro; 12-24-2012 at 04:50 PM.
Damn this looks fun, can I reserve Zeus? My idea is some kind of politician.
(DAMN she's a sexy gurl)
Hey, yeah, I could see that. He could play the leader of the group.
Shit, I better make a reserve list for players.
Just curious if maybe I could be the god of guns, a youngish but kind of oldish god that feels sorry for the older gods and tries to be their Oscar Schindler? If not, what about, oh say, Ares?
True Name: Ares
Modern Alias: Daniel Megara
Culture/Mythology of Religion: Greek
Occupation: He's a martial arts instructor.
Gender: Male
Height: 5'10
Weight: 170 pounds
Weapon of Choice: These days, he goes with a combat knife and a trusty 45c.
Appearance: He has black hair and black eyes and a smooth, clean shaven face.
History: Ares came to America with a few worshipers and managed to find a few more. Kind of tough luck, but the people who know him admire him. He's been a martial arts instructor and has fought and won many tournaments. He's also been a marksman for a little while, and a cage fighter.
Personality: Ares is no longer arrogant. Being deprived of worshipers for so long has given him a survivor's mentality. He is more calm and level headed, and is more like Athena than the old Ares. That said, he's still a master of war.
Powers: He's unusually strong, and is capable of fighting with super-human skill in combat with whatever weapon, whether it be an actual weapon or his body, that is allowable in the role play.
Talents: Tactical and strategic genius. He also knows how to make guns and the old weapons of his time. In addition, he is a superb unnarmed martial artist.
Alright now I gotta think of his powers, probably electricity manipulation, persuasion, or some sort of mixture of the two. What's the power level you're going for in this RP for the gods?
YES my son is in this bitch, was sup ares.
(DAMN she's a sexy gurl)
Hi dad.
What about native american gods? People like Raven and Coyote are probably pushed to the brink as well.
Tempted to bring in some Aesir with Thor or Heimdall....or Baldur....
Or I could just go Hephaestus so we can all hate each other.
Or go all Xipe Totec...dem Aztecs be brutal.
The weakened gods in the book were capable of shapeshifting, longevity, prophecy, weather manipulation...Originally Posted by chulance
But not on the scale as, say, DC superheroes. At their prime, hell yeah, but now? Mr. Wednesday, aka freaking Odin, has been limited to the ability of psychic persuasion and seeing through the eyes of his two ravens. Bast can invade dreams and shapeshift. So on, so forth.
Now, consider this. The Greek Gods are the most well known in the Wester World, they're the most popular mythology. They have a strong prevalence in the Western World in popular culture. Hundreds of novels, movies and TV shows have been based on these lads. It helps that most of the Greek Gods, heroes and other figures tend to serve nowadays as literary and even psychological archetypes. Hercules is the masculine ideal, Zeus is one of the reasons why the image of the white bearded godly authority figure is so popular, and so on so forth.
Where am I going with this? Basically, they can get a power boost from that. It's still a form of belief. It's not religious, but it's a reverence to what they represent as cultural symbols.
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Oh, they definitely are. Luckily, neither Raven nor Coyote are characters in the book, so they're up for grabs.
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Baldur's a character in the book, sorry. Off limits.
Oh it's a book.
When the hell did that happen....
Oh well.
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