I'm working on my own RPG, which I hope to be starting campaigns of here within the next couple months. But before I do that, there's a LOT to explain here. I intend this post to be two things. First, a primer for those who might be interested, and second, a reference post for any questions I ask at a later date. I can't say which is more important, really.
The first thing that separates this game from others is the lore, which is not at all your generic fantasy lore, and is VERY complex. I'll be putting lore under hider tags throughout, to explain why certain things in-game work the way they do. Some of it would make NO sense without this lore. Let's cover three topics at once in the lore that are hugely important before moving on.
WARNING: This is all very serious, and it starts getting really dark in the middle when I cover Earth's history. And when our real history collides with the fantasy of the setting, it ends horribly. Like, the world burns in nuclear fire and humanity is scattered across the stars as punishment for events that actually happened in the last hundred years. Plenty of the things mentioned are real, and are addressed in a way you may not agree with. Much of it is kept intentionally vague, but if you have a passing knowledge of history, you'll know what I'm talking about. You have been warned.
I'm going to have to end this here, and start on gameplay mechanics and more specific lore related to them in a couple days.
The first thing that separates this game from others is the lore, which is not at all your generic fantasy lore, and is VERY complex. I'll be putting lore under hider tags throughout, to explain why certain things in-game work the way they do. Some of it would make NO sense without this lore. Let's cover three topics at once in the lore that are hugely important before moving on.
WARNING: This is all very serious, and it starts getting really dark in the middle when I cover Earth's history. And when our real history collides with the fantasy of the setting, it ends horribly. Like, the world burns in nuclear fire and humanity is scattered across the stars as punishment for events that actually happened in the last hundred years. Plenty of the things mentioned are real, and are addressed in a way you may not agree with. Much of it is kept intentionally vague, but if you have a passing knowledge of history, you'll know what I'm talking about. You have been warned.
This is a VERY important thing to understand about this universe. It'll also take a LONG time to explain. This is both more important and more complicated than the other two things to follow it combined. In this universe, life arises naturally but brings with it an energy called Vitae. There do exist living things that don't produce vitae, which we have different names for, but most living things produce some form of vitae. Those that don't at all are called "un-living", and then there's mortae, produced by the dead and undead, which has to be covered separately.
Vitae is a very flexible energy, capable of being harnessed in many ways. Subconsciously, before you've left the womb, your body has decided how you are going to use your vitae based on what it thinks you're going to need, as throughout life you can adapt your vitae to meet new requirements and ambitions. (This is the basis for the class system in the game.) Vitae is created by an as of yet not understood process called "Vitalism", from a second force called "vital power". Vital power, unlike Vitae, is only produced when new life is born, and cannot be replaced when lost except by taking it from others. Some creatures, even some people, inherently have more vital power, but they have the disadvantage of taking more vital power to develop.
Magic is powered by vitae, and vital power is responsible for the "class" half of in-game progression. It is unrelated to the "experience" half of in-game progression. As you gain more vitality, your class features steadily become more powerful and you gain new ones. Vitae can protect its creator, be used to produce or absorb other energies and can even be used to heal. *All* class features are based off of vitae, even things like a rogue's sneak attacks are based in vitae. So you *will* need more vital power to progress. Killing an opponent grants you 10% of their basic vital power (effectively 100*grade), progressing you towards your next class level. Your opponent can also grant you some small amount of altered vital power when they are defeated, usually more than the amount you'd get from killing them, to bribe you into letting them live. This vital power works like normal vital power and lasts until they die, so if you kill them afterwards (even from wounds you already dealt them before they surrendered) you lose that vital power. Vital power can also be used as a form of currency, where it follows the same rule.
Mortae is an altered Vitae produced by decomposing bodies, as their decomposition alters the process through which Vitae is produced, and is fundamentally different from Vitae. Mortae interacts oddly when confronted with Vitae, as the mortae bonds with and traps the vitae. This means being around decomposing bodies weakens you. Somehow, in a baffling way, some creatures produce mortae instead of vitae. These are called the "undead", and they all possess the ability to use their mortae to weaken the living, and re-absorb their mortae and the vitae bonded to it in order to use it to heal themselves. Vampires, liches and wraiths are all examples of undead. They can all survive solely off of the vitae of the living, absorbed through the living's blood. They also possess something called "mortal power", their equivalent of vital power, which they grow by absorbing the vital or mortal power of others.
If you're undead in-game, you can still progress as normal using others' vital power to create more mortal power for yourself. Undead can also add to the mortal power of other undead, but their mortal power actually *takes away* the vital power of the living. That means that if you're alive and defeat an undead opponent in battle, you will get weaker, not stronger. They can't give altered mortal power like living creatures give altered vital power, in fact they have no control over their own mortal power.
Finally, divine beings possess divitae, a unique form of vitae. Divitae can trap and absorb vitae the way mortae can, and also does the same to mortae. Divitae also has the power to do unique things vitae and mortae can't and is more powerful than either vitae or mortae. However, divine power can't grow like vital power, so it has to be temporarily added to by absorbing vital power, destroying that vital power in the process. This means that without other creatures giving them a constant flow of vital power, divine beings get steadily weaker as the vital power they've absorbed is steadily used up. Eventually, the divine being will hit their bare minimum level of divine power. To avoid this, they generally form religions, and force the followers of that religion to part with their precious vital power. They also generally don't tell their followers why they have to give up their vital power, either.
Vitae is a very flexible energy, capable of being harnessed in many ways. Subconsciously, before you've left the womb, your body has decided how you are going to use your vitae based on what it thinks you're going to need, as throughout life you can adapt your vitae to meet new requirements and ambitions. (This is the basis for the class system in the game.) Vitae is created by an as of yet not understood process called "Vitalism", from a second force called "vital power". Vital power, unlike Vitae, is only produced when new life is born, and cannot be replaced when lost except by taking it from others. Some creatures, even some people, inherently have more vital power, but they have the disadvantage of taking more vital power to develop.
Magic is powered by vitae, and vital power is responsible for the "class" half of in-game progression. It is unrelated to the "experience" half of in-game progression. As you gain more vitality, your class features steadily become more powerful and you gain new ones. Vitae can protect its creator, be used to produce or absorb other energies and can even be used to heal. *All* class features are based off of vitae, even things like a rogue's sneak attacks are based in vitae. So you *will* need more vital power to progress. Killing an opponent grants you 10% of their basic vital power (effectively 100*grade), progressing you towards your next class level. Your opponent can also grant you some small amount of altered vital power when they are defeated, usually more than the amount you'd get from killing them, to bribe you into letting them live. This vital power works like normal vital power and lasts until they die, so if you kill them afterwards (even from wounds you already dealt them before they surrendered) you lose that vital power. Vital power can also be used as a form of currency, where it follows the same rule.
Mortae is an altered Vitae produced by decomposing bodies, as their decomposition alters the process through which Vitae is produced, and is fundamentally different from Vitae. Mortae interacts oddly when confronted with Vitae, as the mortae bonds with and traps the vitae. This means being around decomposing bodies weakens you. Somehow, in a baffling way, some creatures produce mortae instead of vitae. These are called the "undead", and they all possess the ability to use their mortae to weaken the living, and re-absorb their mortae and the vitae bonded to it in order to use it to heal themselves. Vampires, liches and wraiths are all examples of undead. They can all survive solely off of the vitae of the living, absorbed through the living's blood. They also possess something called "mortal power", their equivalent of vital power, which they grow by absorbing the vital or mortal power of others.
If you're undead in-game, you can still progress as normal using others' vital power to create more mortal power for yourself. Undead can also add to the mortal power of other undead, but their mortal power actually *takes away* the vital power of the living. That means that if you're alive and defeat an undead opponent in battle, you will get weaker, not stronger. They can't give altered mortal power like living creatures give altered vital power, in fact they have no control over their own mortal power.
Finally, divine beings possess divitae, a unique form of vitae. Divitae can trap and absorb vitae the way mortae can, and also does the same to mortae. Divitae also has the power to do unique things vitae and mortae can't and is more powerful than either vitae or mortae. However, divine power can't grow like vital power, so it has to be temporarily added to by absorbing vital power, destroying that vital power in the process. This means that without other creatures giving them a constant flow of vital power, divine beings get steadily weaker as the vital power they've absorbed is steadily used up. Eventually, the divine being will hit their bare minimum level of divine power. To avoid this, they generally form religions, and force the followers of that religion to part with their precious vital power. They also generally don't tell their followers why they have to give up their vital power, either.
When creatures die, their lost vital power doesn't vanish, it lingers in its own way, and changes form into something different, the precursor of divine power. But vital power is odd, and eventually when enough of it, imprinted with the will and thoughts of the dead and effected by vitae being used by the living, will take on a life of its own. This is called the God Realm. This is a very literal name. It's made of the history, the living and dead, so it is the realm. Given an unbelievable amount of time, this realm will form a physical avatar, and in doing so gain consciousness through that avatar. That avatar gains influence over the divitae of the realm, and therefore becomes God. It creates the rest of the divines using divine power, and rules over the realm through them.
This entire RPG takes place within an unusual God Realm, one formed from the conquest of eighteen God Realms by a nineteenth God Realm. The conquered realms did not have avatars yet, so avatars were made for them by their conquerer. While these new avatars have partial autonomy, they are under their conqueror's leadership and give him part of their power. This conqueror god is named Wandel, and has chosen the form of a flamboyantly dressed child. He has more control over his form than most avatars, and while he frequently changes species and sometimes appears as a female, he is always a child. (He can be referred to with both masculine and feminine pronouns, but he appears as a male more often so I use masculine pronouns.) As for why he's a child, this as how he perceives himself relative to his main enemy, the Elder God.
One of Wandel's main failures is our world, Earth. He found it with no avatar, and he partitioned it. He wanted each partition to generate avatars for his other worlds, and then he'd have them each send a representative when it was over to rule over their partition. They wouldn't be able to directly influence these areas until the end of the ten-thousand year project, but he didn't think that mattered. These partitioned areas were south-central Europe, north-eastern Africa, North-Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, India, East Asia, North America, Central America and Autralia. He locked down all the rest of the world as best he could to prevent other avatars he couldn't control from forming or the Elder God from getting in, but he missed a spot where several of his partitions were too close for him to close the gap. That spot was the middle east, and became the Elder God's opening.
Each of these realms created a pantheon of deities that became avatars for his other realms, which became the realms of death, and the dead of those areas were used to populate the realms with humans that worshipped these gods to give them power. He couldn't directly control these realms, either, since if he interfered he'd lose the connections he created, but this didn't end well. Sometimes an area produced multiple pantheons, and those pantheons fought. They couldn't kill eachother permanently, but they could (and did) take away eachother's power. Some of the partitions didn't create gods, per se, instead worshipping other things which inherited the divitae in unusual and unique ways.
But the problem came from the blind spot. See the below section on what the Elder God is. Just under three thousand years ago, the Elder God entered the blind spot. By then, it had been fighting other realms Wandel had appropriated for nearly ten thousand years. But between the other rebellions and Wandel's building power it had made little progress. It couldn't enter directly itself, as Wandel prevented it from doing so, but it could still influence the people and appear to them. The Elder God coerced the people into that area into creating a religion of its own. It turned those people against their neighbours, and had them massacre the neighbouring tribes.
When Wandel responded by having the area invaded hundreds of years later and trying to keep the area under control, the Elder God created a new faith that not only drove out the invaders, it took them over. Within a thousand years, it has created a third faith, and even though Wandel cut him off entirely at the expense of losing his own influence, the damage was too extensive. Now everything goes to hell for both parties as the three faiths begin to massacre eachother, though it's mostly the two new ones massacring the original one. Nobody wants them killing eachother. Wandel doesn't want them killing *anybody* and the Elder God just wants them killing Wandel's people. Flash forward another thousand years, and Wandel's project has ended in failure. Even many of the cultures Wandel created have been suborned by the violence and barbarism of the Elder God's religions, and turned into horrid, fascist regimes. Some before Wandel could even disconnect them, infecting the other realms.
Wandel never meant to create religions. He wanted to harness the human imagination to productive ends, to draft ideas for ways to fight the elder god. But instead, our imagination was harnessed by the Elder God to destroy all the good in us. He's not willing to accept that. He can't intervene directly yet, but he tries to use stronger influence and promotes secularism to destroy all of the world's religions. He's doing fine for a while, but it all comes crashing down. Not because his influence didn't work, not because of the Elder God's influence, but because of human nature and unfortunate circumstance.
On the 28th of June, 1914, gunshots ring out in Serajevo. Two months later, a million men are dead.
Across the next hundred years, Wandel stares at the great train wreck our world has become, petrified. In his despair, he fails to defend his other realms. He finally wakes up when one of his twenty realms falls while he's staring at Earth in horror. He begins defending his nineteen remaining realms, as he should, and looks away from us entirely for forty years. He comes back on the 28th of June 2014, invading our world in force.
Wandel is not nice about this. His war is quick, brutal and efficient. There's no demands and no explanation until he's already won. Wandel does horrible, unforgivable things coldly, with no hesitation. He uses our own weapons against us. Nuclear fire burns the world, ash covers the sky, and the world plunges into darkness. Earth's fallen are scattered across eighteen realms, where they are resurrected. The surviving leaders on Earth are supplanted by Wandel's guardians, who sweep the skies of ash as they bring to the people of Earth the message that they have been judged unfit to rule themselves. The guardians will be Earth's ruling government for a hundred years, allowing enough autonomy to the nations that they practice government under the guardians' watchful eyes.
It's still the 2020s in the RPG. So Earth is post-apocalyptic. Bring a Geiger counter, potassium iodide tablets and vodka. But I won't actually run a campaign on Earth for a LONG time, so that's not your concern at the moment. Until then, this is only important in that it lets you know where humans come from, why they're looked down upon in the other realms, and gives some background on the plots I have planned for the campaigns to come.
This entire RPG takes place within an unusual God Realm, one formed from the conquest of eighteen God Realms by a nineteenth God Realm. The conquered realms did not have avatars yet, so avatars were made for them by their conquerer. While these new avatars have partial autonomy, they are under their conqueror's leadership and give him part of their power. This conqueror god is named Wandel, and has chosen the form of a flamboyantly dressed child. He has more control over his form than most avatars, and while he frequently changes species and sometimes appears as a female, he is always a child. (He can be referred to with both masculine and feminine pronouns, but he appears as a male more often so I use masculine pronouns.) As for why he's a child, this as how he perceives himself relative to his main enemy, the Elder God.
One of Wandel's main failures is our world, Earth. He found it with no avatar, and he partitioned it. He wanted each partition to generate avatars for his other worlds, and then he'd have them each send a representative when it was over to rule over their partition. They wouldn't be able to directly influence these areas until the end of the ten-thousand year project, but he didn't think that mattered. These partitioned areas were south-central Europe, north-eastern Africa, North-Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, India, East Asia, North America, Central America and Autralia. He locked down all the rest of the world as best he could to prevent other avatars he couldn't control from forming or the Elder God from getting in, but he missed a spot where several of his partitions were too close for him to close the gap. That spot was the middle east, and became the Elder God's opening.
Each of these realms created a pantheon of deities that became avatars for his other realms, which became the realms of death, and the dead of those areas were used to populate the realms with humans that worshipped these gods to give them power. He couldn't directly control these realms, either, since if he interfered he'd lose the connections he created, but this didn't end well. Sometimes an area produced multiple pantheons, and those pantheons fought. They couldn't kill eachother permanently, but they could (and did) take away eachother's power. Some of the partitions didn't create gods, per se, instead worshipping other things which inherited the divitae in unusual and unique ways.
But the problem came from the blind spot. See the below section on what the Elder God is. Just under three thousand years ago, the Elder God entered the blind spot. By then, it had been fighting other realms Wandel had appropriated for nearly ten thousand years. But between the other rebellions and Wandel's building power it had made little progress. It couldn't enter directly itself, as Wandel prevented it from doing so, but it could still influence the people and appear to them. The Elder God coerced the people into that area into creating a religion of its own. It turned those people against their neighbours, and had them massacre the neighbouring tribes.
When Wandel responded by having the area invaded hundreds of years later and trying to keep the area under control, the Elder God created a new faith that not only drove out the invaders, it took them over. Within a thousand years, it has created a third faith, and even though Wandel cut him off entirely at the expense of losing his own influence, the damage was too extensive. Now everything goes to hell for both parties as the three faiths begin to massacre eachother, though it's mostly the two new ones massacring the original one. Nobody wants them killing eachother. Wandel doesn't want them killing *anybody* and the Elder God just wants them killing Wandel's people. Flash forward another thousand years, and Wandel's project has ended in failure. Even many of the cultures Wandel created have been suborned by the violence and barbarism of the Elder God's religions, and turned into horrid, fascist regimes. Some before Wandel could even disconnect them, infecting the other realms.
Wandel never meant to create religions. He wanted to harness the human imagination to productive ends, to draft ideas for ways to fight the elder god. But instead, our imagination was harnessed by the Elder God to destroy all the good in us. He's not willing to accept that. He can't intervene directly yet, but he tries to use stronger influence and promotes secularism to destroy all of the world's religions. He's doing fine for a while, but it all comes crashing down. Not because his influence didn't work, not because of the Elder God's influence, but because of human nature and unfortunate circumstance.
On the 28th of June, 1914, gunshots ring out in Serajevo. Two months later, a million men are dead.
Across the next hundred years, Wandel stares at the great train wreck our world has become, petrified. In his despair, he fails to defend his other realms. He finally wakes up when one of his twenty realms falls while he's staring at Earth in horror. He begins defending his nineteen remaining realms, as he should, and looks away from us entirely for forty years. He comes back on the 28th of June 2014, invading our world in force.
Wandel is not nice about this. His war is quick, brutal and efficient. There's no demands and no explanation until he's already won. Wandel does horrible, unforgivable things coldly, with no hesitation. He uses our own weapons against us. Nuclear fire burns the world, ash covers the sky, and the world plunges into darkness. Earth's fallen are scattered across eighteen realms, where they are resurrected. The surviving leaders on Earth are supplanted by Wandel's guardians, who sweep the skies of ash as they bring to the people of Earth the message that they have been judged unfit to rule themselves. The guardians will be Earth's ruling government for a hundred years, allowing enough autonomy to the nations that they practice government under the guardians' watchful eyes.
It's still the 2020s in the RPG. So Earth is post-apocalyptic. Bring a Geiger counter, potassium iodide tablets and vodka. But I won't actually run a campaign on Earth for a LONG time, so that's not your concern at the moment. Until then, this is only important in that it lets you know where humans come from, why they're looked down upon in the other realms, and gives some background on the plots I have planned for the campaigns to come.
The Elder God is not a god realm. It's something very different, much larger, more powerful and more dangerous. The Elder God is ancient, nobody really knows how ancient but it seems to have existed forever. This galaxy-spanning hive mind controls an unfathomable number of bodies in different sizes with different levels of power. Each of the ten tiers of bodies manufactures the tier just smaller than it. No tier can manufacture the highest tier, the creators, when those are lost they're lost forever.
Most God realms agree, the Elder God is a detriment to their existence. This wasn't always the case, the Elder God was benevolent at first. It was taking over realms just so they wouldn't be a threat to it and didn't care what else they did as long as it knew they weren't a danger. It didn't even take over if it didn't have to. But when one of the civilizations it was controlling discovered the galaxy was on a collision course with Andromeda, the Elder God realised there might be other entities like itself out there, and it might meet one. And it knew that it may end up at war. It remembered its early origins, back when it wasn't all powerful, and knew what the fear of death felt like. Now, once again filled with the fear of death and with nearly unlimited power to exercise that fear with, it became cruel.
It now wants to control every living thing in the galaxy, not just so they won't be a threat to it, but so they'll be forced to defend it. Even God realms don't last billions of years, so none of them care about the "threat" of Andromeda. And the Elder God is forcing them to submit to it, and give them its power, and follow its rule as it sees fit. It wants huge populations and war-like people, and is willing to abuse and manipulate its people to make them more savage if it'll make them better in the war it fears is to come.
Soon, a God realm rebelled against it. That God realm was the Elder God's closest friend, and that realm's avatar considered the Elder God its parent. When the abuse started, it went along with it for a while, becoming more and more broken and confused as its "parent" tortured it. Eventually, one day it realised why it was doing that, and that revelation changed its view of its "parent" figure forever. It had believed it was being punished for doing something wrong, it had blamed itself. When it realised it was being tortured to make it a better weapon, it didn't take it laying down. And when it rebelled, the Elder God put the rebellion down. But in all the fighting, the Elder God lost one of its creators. It punished that God realm by killing all of his people, leaving only the avatar and a ruined, post-apocalyptic landscape and countless wild animals creeping into the ruins where people once dwelled. And it told that God realm that if it ever made people again, it would come back and this time he'd only leave microbes.
That avatar was Wandel. And he's angry. He lost his entire civilization, everything it built and nurtured for a thousand millenia was gone in just over one. When other God realms began rebelling he abandoned his realm, and he took over God realms whose gods hadn't formed yet, covertly, with what power remained in nature in his realm. He managed to connect to the other realms in a way the Elder God couldn't perceive, and until very recently even the Elder God didn't realise he was doing it. Now, with nineteen realms, Wandel can't fight off the elder god by himself, but his power isn't meaningless anymore and he's able to do real damage. He has killed another creator, and two more have died from other rebellions that sprang up due to the Elder God diverting resources to fight Wandel.
Wandel wants the Elder God dead for what it did to him and his people. As long as the Elder God can't devote a large percentage of its resources it can't wipe Wandel out, and if it did devote those resources it would have to pull enough pressure off of other realms to allow dozens more rebellions. It's a huge, perpetual war of attrition where both sides are trying to reduce the other's ability to renew their resources and increase their own ability to renew theirs. Wandel doesn't want to count his chickens before they hatch, especially when the Elder God presently has vastly superior resources and is much better at renewing them than he is, but he knows he has better ability to improve and the Elder God's resource renewal is much easier to weaken. He believes that, in the long run, he will eventually destroy the Elder God entirely. And he's going to wipe out all of its upper production tiers, and tell it that if it ever gets his attention again he'll leave it just the very weakest. Maybe then, it'll understand what it did to him.
Most God realms agree, the Elder God is a detriment to their existence. This wasn't always the case, the Elder God was benevolent at first. It was taking over realms just so they wouldn't be a threat to it and didn't care what else they did as long as it knew they weren't a danger. It didn't even take over if it didn't have to. But when one of the civilizations it was controlling discovered the galaxy was on a collision course with Andromeda, the Elder God realised there might be other entities like itself out there, and it might meet one. And it knew that it may end up at war. It remembered its early origins, back when it wasn't all powerful, and knew what the fear of death felt like. Now, once again filled with the fear of death and with nearly unlimited power to exercise that fear with, it became cruel.
It now wants to control every living thing in the galaxy, not just so they won't be a threat to it, but so they'll be forced to defend it. Even God realms don't last billions of years, so none of them care about the "threat" of Andromeda. And the Elder God is forcing them to submit to it, and give them its power, and follow its rule as it sees fit. It wants huge populations and war-like people, and is willing to abuse and manipulate its people to make them more savage if it'll make them better in the war it fears is to come.
Soon, a God realm rebelled against it. That God realm was the Elder God's closest friend, and that realm's avatar considered the Elder God its parent. When the abuse started, it went along with it for a while, becoming more and more broken and confused as its "parent" tortured it. Eventually, one day it realised why it was doing that, and that revelation changed its view of its "parent" figure forever. It had believed it was being punished for doing something wrong, it had blamed itself. When it realised it was being tortured to make it a better weapon, it didn't take it laying down. And when it rebelled, the Elder God put the rebellion down. But in all the fighting, the Elder God lost one of its creators. It punished that God realm by killing all of his people, leaving only the avatar and a ruined, post-apocalyptic landscape and countless wild animals creeping into the ruins where people once dwelled. And it told that God realm that if it ever made people again, it would come back and this time he'd only leave microbes.
That avatar was Wandel. And he's angry. He lost his entire civilization, everything it built and nurtured for a thousand millenia was gone in just over one. When other God realms began rebelling he abandoned his realm, and he took over God realms whose gods hadn't formed yet, covertly, with what power remained in nature in his realm. He managed to connect to the other realms in a way the Elder God couldn't perceive, and until very recently even the Elder God didn't realise he was doing it. Now, with nineteen realms, Wandel can't fight off the elder god by himself, but his power isn't meaningless anymore and he's able to do real damage. He has killed another creator, and two more have died from other rebellions that sprang up due to the Elder God diverting resources to fight Wandel.
Wandel wants the Elder God dead for what it did to him and his people. As long as the Elder God can't devote a large percentage of its resources it can't wipe Wandel out, and if it did devote those resources it would have to pull enough pressure off of other realms to allow dozens more rebellions. It's a huge, perpetual war of attrition where both sides are trying to reduce the other's ability to renew their resources and increase their own ability to renew theirs. Wandel doesn't want to count his chickens before they hatch, especially when the Elder God presently has vastly superior resources and is much better at renewing them than he is, but he knows he has better ability to improve and the Elder God's resource renewal is much easier to weaken. He believes that, in the long run, he will eventually destroy the Elder God entirely. And he's going to wipe out all of its upper production tiers, and tell it that if it ever gets his attention again he'll leave it just the very weakest. Maybe then, it'll understand what it did to him.
I'm going to have to end this here, and start on gameplay mechanics and more specific lore related to them in a couple days.