<Snipped quote by Rune_Alchemist>
This would also work! They could've been poisoned either by any number of possible enemies who would want to either harm House Kaides itself, or your character in particular---It's not unusual for the in-fighting among the Patriarch's children to get underhanded, and it's also not unusual for all three of the Great Clans to constantly screw with one another.
Also, you asked me about the setting's religion on Discord! Thus we have another hider for MORE WORLDBUILDING! ;D
To those who might be intimidated by some of these info drops, don't worry. Anything that's a NEED to know I will make sure to be plain about when it comes to the character sheet and all that.Humans believe the nature of god, whom they call ILA, (always written in all caps out of respect) to be omnipotent, omniscient, male in personage, and possessed of "infinite capacity" for "Peace and War." What this boils down to is that they believe ILA performs both acts of absolute peace (self-sacrifice, pacifism, etc), and acts of absolute war (genocide, natural cataclysm, etc) without contradicting his own nature (whereas a human who claimed to be pacifist, then committed a murder, would clearly be a hypocrite). It should be noted that the "capacity for Peace" is different from the Christian beliefs in "mercy and forgiveness." To "forgive" someone, you have to overcome a wrong that they did to you. ILA's "infinite capacity" for Peace is interpreted to mean that no mortal creature is CAPABLE of "doing wrong" to him. Some believe this is simply because he "takes no offense" from mortals, others believe that it's because the other side, War, makes him metaphysically invulnerable the way an idealized fortress would be physically invulnerable.
Humans do have a concept of "sin," because ILA's infinite capacity still demands infallibility (if you can never be a hypocrite, you must be right all the time), and the official scriptures/history of the church tell of instances where he gave mankind direct orders. Thus, going against these orders is "sin." The idea isn't that you seek repentance for sin because you've angered or offended ILA, but because if you're not in lock-step with ILA, by extension YOU cannot be "right" because your evil actions, selfish beliefs, etc will almost invariably always make a human being a "hypocrite" in some fashion. And if your soul is not in right standing with ILA when you die, then you go to hell because you have become his enemy, and an enemy is destroyed by the infinite capacity for War.
It is believed that ILA's "thoughts and will" produce Angels in the way that humans codified their thoughts into language and expression---the acts of writing letters, painting pictures, etc, multiplied by divine providence, is the same as the creation of Angels. Thus, they are beings that perform a singular function and then cease to exist once ILA's expression has been carried to its destination. Unlike humans they are not fully "willed" creatures, and attempts to communicate with them by human religious figures are limited because the angel will eventually go into a Chatbot Death-loop of "I cannot do/understand that," or similar AI behaviors.
Humans believe that ILA created them in his image, and originally gave them dominion over all of Creation. Every animal, fish, and bird had to come submit to human authority. But the animals were created by ILA with different natures so that Mankind could show their own capacities for Peace and War; it was intended that they handle each animal differently to showcase proper use of authority. And the "Primordial Demon" was created to test Mankind's ability to, basically, crack down and issue punishments because it would never submit. Mankind failed because they allowed the demon's arguments against their authority to sway them into "only" banishing it from the land, instead of killing it. As a result, it multiplied and convinced other animals to rebel. These rebels against human authority were the first Monsters, and because Humans weren't aligned with ILA's will they couldn't appeal for his direct help. This first battle between Humanity and Monsters "broke" the world, and from there the descension of society pretty much follows most monotheistic archetypes--society is corrupt, we're our own worst enemy, we were originally closer to heaven and have degenerated, etc etc.Elves ALSO believe in ILA, roughly, but they call him Jya'Sabath and believe speaking/writing the actual name is disrespectful. They interpret god as non-gendered, referring to Jya'Sabath only by name or by "god" in all contexts, and interpret the infinite capacities not as peace and war, but as "Chaos and Order." They see this nature not as a spectrum of extremes but as a sinuous infinity. Even if an ordered system becomes completely chaotic, the elements of that system will eventually entropy to a point at which they can no longer undergo change---at which point a new "order" has been reached. If a chaotic system is forcibly brought under order, the elements of that system will eventually become so ordered that a single random factor can spark a chain reaction, creating "chaos." This belief kind of influences how passive they can sometimes be as a society---if you don't like something, just wait a little while and the situation will change. Of course, that's not true for every situation in life and even the Elves acknowledge that.
Elves also believe that ILA specifically chose their race over Humanity to inherit "authority over creation," during the long-lost-to-history conflict that caused the original elves to split off from mankind. It's kind of a "Abraham's sons Isaac and Ishmael," situation, as elves were originally just humans with some different traits due to the "degeneration" brought about by the Primordial Demon's rebellion. When the populations split, Elves breeding among their own differentiated them further, and so on until the present day.
As a side note, Elves believe longer ears are a sign of sophistication, purity, etc and many of their priestly class have "higher" (literally) ears, thus bringing about the belief that their features changed from those of normal humans due to supposedly being able to better "hear god's voice from heaven."Dwarves believe in a creator deity, but the closest thing to a name it has in their language translates to human languages as "Archaic-Anvil-Strike-Hot-Steel." Some of the modern era have taken to just calling it "the Maker," and this is often how it's translated by non-dwarven scribes. They believe this deity created everything in the world, and then simply left it to its own devices, though there are some sects who believe it will return to "pull the world from the furnace and quench it into its final form." They put certain Monsters, geologic structures, and other things into categories of "Great Creations," because they believe the original creator imbued them with some kind of meaningful purpose; Dwarves themselves, Humans, and Elves are considered "Less-Great Creations" because while being higher functioning, they determine their own life-motivations.
They see their deity as a higher being divorced from mortal thinking, as different from them as they are from ants, and thus unconcerned with matters like morality. They sometimes make offerings to try and appease it in times where creation seems to be "going wrong," (unusual weather, disasters, etc), but they do not typically pray to it. Instead, the Dwarves get their concepts of good and evil from a sort of craftsman-slash-monk known as Gabhiram. The legend goes that he dug deep into the center of the earth until he could "go no further," then sat contemplating "where to go next." He supposedly brought back enormous stone tablets he'd made in the depths of the earth, detailing an entire school of philosophy that would be further developed by Dwarven society over the centuries. It has elements of stoicism, Nietzche's original ubermensch (not nazis), and a hint of Ayurvedic meditations, mindfullness, etc. Dwarves are also big on "It's not that I don't value your life over my stuff; it's that you value my stuff over your life" mentality when it comes to ideas about weapons, justice, etc.
There are a small handful of sects (even the dwarves disagree on the exact number, but it's no more than 7 and no less than 3 depending on how you separate them) who have their own tablets they claim to be accurate copies of Gabhiram's teachings. All dwarves agree, however, that the originals were destroyed in "the Calamity" that destroyed their original homeland. It is a matter of great sorrow in their culture, and one of the things you DO NOT talk about, along with the Calamity itself.
Whew, alright thats a bit of information and some quite neat concepts to digest and think over.
Alright, I don't think I have any more questions for now. Might come up with some more during actual character creation when I put words to paper, but I have a some ideas for fleshing out this concept more.
