Oookay, I think I'm all caught up on Nod's opinions on others, though it's easy to do when your character's opinion of everyone else basically boils down to either 1) would make a good fight, or 2) too much talking, not enough fighting.
I've established a past history with both Wu-Dan and Kalikmalo. If you feel your demigod has crossed paths with Nod before, is likely to cross paths with him again in the IC, and would like to establish some sort of pre-existing relationship, let me know.
Well, it varies from Child to Child, depending on how humanoid they are and what they've got under the hood. Males can impregnate mortal women, although the results are messy, the mother always dying in childbirth and the child not surviving its first week. Female Children can't at all. Transferring power is a complicated and unfortunately fatal process for mortals in most cases.
That's my thought right now, anyway. I'm conflicted on the issue, so I might be swayed otherwise.
With so many new, titanic characters, I am wondering if it's worth it to go the opposite route: a demigod who is an infectious strain of sentient and hyperintelligent virus. It might make interacting with other characters a bit difficult, though.
Updated Nod's opinions for the new characters. Will continue to do so as they come in. It's pretty fun, like little bits of flavor text, a preview for the game proper.
Okay, so clearly for the greater good we must slaughter all the humans right? Just line em up and feed to some sort of giant burning pit or something. Then we can have the demigods be all powerful again and protect us from each other... Wait a minute...
Also, working on a second character, it should be done by tonight in the next few minutes here.
In the earliest days, even among the tribes of men who did not know his name, few Children of Aton were invoked more than the Great Beast, Nod. When mankind, newborn and helpless, faced the immensity of the unknown, his was their courage. When mankind, soft and without weapons, were set upon by the predators of the land and air and sea, his was their strength. And when mankind, arrayed in vast armies, fell upon each other with the glory of war burning in their wild and chaotic hearts, his was their joy. If he is not the father of conflict than he is its most prolific author, finding no greater purpose or pleasure than the lustful heat of battle.
In all his aspects Nod appears as a gigantic white-furred humanoid lion, densely muscled, standing three meters tall and weighing more than four-hundred kilograms. His right eye is a brilliant, piercing blue, while his left is naught but a mass of scar tissue.
Despite his savage mien and nature, Nod is no berserker driven by a mindless, consuming rage. In truth, his spirit is more akin to a limitless ocean than a torrential rain. He is freedom and purity personified, beholden to no discipline, no creed, and no master but his own desire. To his bright eye there exist no shades of grey. He is self-assured. He is complete. He brooks no agenda, no secrets. He possesses nothing inside him that could be called doubt.
Given this mindset, Nod disdains magic and detests all manner of machinations. He views trickery and politics as the tools of vermin, fit only for cowards too weak to wage war, while those who face fate with courage will always find his favor. His mercy, on the other hand, is reserved for no one.
Nod is a warrior true and clear, a cyclone bound in flesh. Despite his sheer mass he moves as though he were weightless, every muscle a wellspring of energy and vitality. He is among the strongest and most imposing of Aton's Children, a juggernaut whose claws can punch through steel plate as easily as if it were a butterfly's wing, whose hide can withstand and recover from untold punishment. Though his own natural lethality and fighting prowess is already virtually unmatched, Nod also wields Magog, a massive double-headed axe that would require a team of draft horses to move, a single swing of which could cleave giants in half.
Owing more to his clarity of vision and razor sharp intuition than any supernatural gift, the gaze of Nod's right eye can unravel nigh any ruse, uncover nigh any deception. While the illusions and weavings of his more magically inclined brethren can be complicated enough to beguile him for a time, no sorcery, no falsehood or disguise can forever withstand his keen scrutiny.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Original tribe:
The Golgoth were among the earliest tribes of men, the first to settle in the dense jungles of present-day Xochimilia. They were also the first to know Nod, to turn to him for guidance. Under the aegis of the Great Beast the Golgoth flourished into the most renowned warriors in the South, fighters cloaked in the trappings and totems of wild animals, a sweeping horde whispered about in the same hushed and fearful tones as the Death Monks of the far northern mountains. The Golgoth were a people dedicated to the virtue of combat: every man, woman, and child a soldier for whom death at the hands of a worthy foe was the greatest possible fate.
This state of total war left them no architects or builders, no farmers or scholars. Instead, the Golgoth were regularly paid a tribute by the other tribes of the southlands, bribes of crops and livestock, slaves and raw materials, that their people may be spared and their cities left unrazed. But despite the viciousness of the Golgoth, they were not unduly cruel. They did not torture nor rape, and left unmolested the villages and settlements that had no warriors to defend them. They were not thugs or murderers or bandits - much like their patron the Golgoth lived solely to kill and die on the battlefield. In this manner they were as simple and uncomplicated as the Great Beast himself, a truly free people.
In the years following their warlord's captivity in the Pit, the Golgoth found themselves unable to last long against all their enemies. Grossly outnumbered and besieged by their rivals from all sides, but unwilling to compromise their ways of war, most of the Golgoth died as they had lived. Of the survivors, many lost their will to fight without the Unfettered's joy to stoke their spirits, and were assimilated by the Etruscans. The rest retreated back into the impenetrable canopy of the southern jungles, where their descendants still dwell today in disparate clans, patiently awaiting the return of the Relentless Storm to once more cover the world.
From the start, the Unfettered refused to take sides, knowing that to ally with any against another would only compromise his own pristine ethos to serve as no one's will but his own. This does not mean he was neutral: he gleefully brought his warriors to bear against any army that marched on him. For Nod, the War of Dawn was an endless source of battle and joy. However, he was still branded a Demon and in the end it took a unified effort from several of the strongest Angels - among them O-Dan, who was the Spirit of the Mountain and the only one among the Children whom Nod regarded as his equal - to defeat the Great Beast and cast him into the Pit.
Our people have one purpose. One reason. A single bride for whom we all dance.
War.
We are not given to tradition. We have no temples but the battlefield, no halls in which to commemorate our history. Our history are the wounds we gouge into this earth. We have no time or inclination for secrets or ceremony, save a very few. One of which is a tale we tell when a child makes their first kill and becomes a true blooded warrior of the Golgoth.
Have you your knife? Your helm? Have you the head of your foe?
Then I will tell you once, and only once, of how Nod the Unfettered, Father of Beasts, lost his eye.
Before the Great Beast delivered our people from the dark, he wandered the earth, a force of nature, as irresistible as a hurricane. Young as he was, he had but one desire: to test his strength and prowess to its limits. In this way, he traveled endlessly, seeking out and besting the most worthy of adversaries. He cut down any who stood against him, and in his naivete, despaired of ever finding one who could defeat him, even amongst the most skilled and doughty of his divine kin. This despair would last until the day he crossed into the desolate mountains of far Qayu, where he heard tales of a peerless fighter, a Child of Aton named O-dan, who is Wu the Grandmaster.
He sought out the venerated Grandmaster and initiated his challenge. Wu Dan, being an entity of discipline and contemplation, desired no needless battle and respectfully declined. Outraged at this rejection, the Great Beast, who in those days was feral and ill-tempered, descended upon and massacred hundreds of the northerners who claimed Wu Dan as their patron. At this affront to his personage and duty, the Spirit of the Mountain saw no recourse but to duel the Relentless Storm.
It is not known how long their battle atop the tallest mountain in the North lasted. Only that their blows shook the firmament. Only that the thunder and the lightning were born of their shouts. Only that their blood fell like rain.
Only that it finally ended when a lucky but precise blow from Wu Dan's prayer beads struck Nod's eye from his head, and Nod was cast off the mountaintop.
To this day, it is said that despite his vitality, the Great Beast Nod refuses to allow his eye to grow back. He keeps the scar as a reminder of his first defeat, a testament to the singularity of his vision, and only when O-Dan's corpse lies mauled and broken at his feet will Nod permit his eye to regenerate.
There. That is the story. You will not hear it again, and you will tell it only once, should you live long enough, when your time comes to initiate another child into the ranks of the Golgoth warbound.
Take your knife. Take your helm. Cast your foe's head into the fire. Your armor and spear await you. Glory awaits you.
Nod awaits you.
Fight by his side. Die by his side. Live forever at his side.
As a physically frail Child of Aton whose sphere of dominion is cunning and intrigue, the Godmother is everything Nod detests. Before the Pit, Nod would never have deigned himself to sully his claws with her coward's blood. But after spending over a millennia in that festering hole, there is nothing Nod would not sacrifice to feel her ribs crack between his teeth and wear her weathered hide for a hat.
A trickster. A prankster. A fickle and treacherous purveyor of japes and jest, of mockery and merriment. And he probably tastes awful, too.
Nod holds O-dan in the highest regard. Though their philosophies and temperaments are in diametric opposition, never has a single opponent given Nod such cause for joy in battle. He hungers for another encounter, one in which he might return the favor of removing the Grandmaster's eye from his head, as well as his head from his neck.
A scholar and a sorcerer. There would otherwise be nothing in Therelon to hold Nod's attention, but as the architect of the infernal prison that caged him for so long, Nod would have words with the pretty bird.
The death fetishist who is three-in-one, there is only one aspect of Tarthus which interests Nod. He would gladly welcome an opportunity to test his axe Magog against the black armor of the Warrior, and send him along the way to Mistress Death if he loves her so much.
A lion's legs, a lion's tail, but nothing of a lion's heart. Nod bears Chinasa no consideration one way or the other, but if the Pastel Lord employs any of his chromatic foolishness against Nod then the Great Beast will gladly tear off his tail and choke him with it.
An illusionist and manipulator. Not unlike Eyra. More plotters. More schemers. Perhaps the Kindly Man's bones will break just as prettily as the Godmother's will.
A minor if potent aspect of Aton. What she lacks in raw power she makes up for in courage and spirit. Nod has no want to do her harm, so long as she does not give him reason to. A shame. Were she stronger, she would likely prove a deserving foe.
Though Nod has idly wondered more than once if testing the cyclops' large size and brutish strength would provide some measure of a challenge, he ultimately has nothing but esteem for the smith's artistry, and recognizes that Kozz's purpose and place is by his forge, not the battlefield. It was Kozz, after all, who crafted Magog, Nod's legendary double-headed axe.
A shapeshifter who played both sides in the war, as malleable in their shape as in their conviction. For someone as stoic in vision and form as Nod, there can be nothing but contempt for the changeling.
Nod can appreciate the chaos Zhystkrexas sows in his wake, for war often follows, but the beguiler and bargainer can only offer Nod nothing, for Nod is already his idealized self. The Demon of Desire can make the world dance to his tune, true, but what Nod wants to know is, can he fight?
Dragons. Nod is largely unimpressed by dragons. For all their strength they never seem to know what to do with it. But their King is another matter entirely. A worthwhile diversion, for there are few things as satisfying as breaking a dragon's pride before breaking its back.
Nod has never directly faced this mother of monsters, but during his travels he has encountered quite a few of her abominations. He has always enjoyed these meetings, for Nefas' children of the deep more often than not taste like calamari, and are quite excellent when either consumed raw or roasted and paired with a spicy dipping sauce.
Over a millennia ago Nod had the pleasure and honor of battling the Titan during the early stages of the War of Dawn. It was a battle that threatened to answer the question of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Though neither of them had as yet claimed a side in the war, the two giants' fight raged for weeks without stopping, the upper hand going back and forth between them, and it only ended in a stalemate when both were set upon by several demons who sought to take advantage of their discord. Their fight left unresolved, Nod hopes to one day resume their contest, and see if he has in fact finally found the one who is superior to him. He suspects that their next encounter will only end when one is feeding on the other.
Your sheets are all accepted! Go nuts with the character tab. If other people submitted their sheets too and I missed them, just point it out to me. I'm very tired and clinically braindead right now.
A reminder: Your powers are inversely proportionate to the amount of humans alive, so you guys won't be able to do all the fancy stuff you did in the old days, at least at first.
Woot!
And yeah, I figured my dude would be severely weakened, but hey, a ten-foot tall lion is still a ten-foot tall lion.
In the earliest days, even among the tribes of men who did not know his name, few Children of Aton were invoked more than the Great Beast, Nod. When mankind, newborn and helpless, faced the immensity of the unknown, his was their courage. When mankind, soft and without weapons, were set upon by the predators of the land and air and sea, his was their strength. And when mankind, arrayed in vast armies, fell upon each other with the glory of war burning in their wild and chaotic hearts, his was their joy. If he is not the father of conflict than he is its most prolific author, finding no greater purpose or pleasure than the lustful heat of battle.
In all his aspects Nod appears as a gigantic white-furred humanoid lion, densely muscled, standing three meters tall and weighing more than four-hundred kilograms. His right eye is a brilliant, piercing blue, while his left is naught but a mass of scar tissue.
Despite his savage mien and nature, Nod is no berserker driven by a mindless, consuming rage. In truth, his spirit is more akin to a limitless ocean than a torrential rain. He is freedom and purity personified, beholden to no discipline, no creed, and no master but his own desire. To his bright eye there exist no shades of grey. He is self-assured. He is complete. He brooks no agenda, no secrets. He possesses nothing inside him that could be called doubt.
Given this mindset, Nod disdains magic and detests all manner of machinations. He views trickery and politics as the tools of vermin, fit only for cowards too weak to wage war, while those who face fate with courage will always find his favor. His mercy, on the other hand, is reserved for no one.
Nod is a warrior true and clear, a cyclone bound in flesh. Despite his sheer mass he moves as though he were weightless, every muscle a wellspring of energy and vitality. He is among the strongest and most imposing of Aton's Children, a juggernaut whose claws can punch through steel plate as easily as if it were a butterfly's wing, whose hide can withstand and recover from untold punishment. Though his own natural lethality and fighting prowess is already virtually unmatched, Nod also wields Magog, a massive double-headed axe that would require a team of draft horses to move, a single swing of which could cleave giants in half.
Owing more to his clarity of vision and razor sharp intuition than any supernatural gift, the gaze of Nod's right eye can unravel nigh any ruse, uncover nigh any deception. While the illusions and weavings of his more magically inclined brethren can be complicated enough to beguile him for a time, no sorcery, no falsehood or disguise can forever withstand his keen scrutiny.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Original tribe:
The Golgoth were among the earliest tribes of men, the first to settle in the dense jungles of present-day Xochimilia. They were also the first to know Nod, to turn to him for guidance. Under the aegis of the Great Beast the Golgoth flourished into the most renowned warriors in the South, fighters cloaked in the trappings and totems of wild animals, a sweeping horde whispered about in the same hushed and fearful tones as the Death Monks of the far northern mountains. The Golgoth were a people dedicated to the virtue of combat: every man, woman, and child a soldier for whom death at the hands of a worthy foe was the greatest possible fate.
This state of total war left them no architects or builders, no farmers or scholars. Instead, the Golgoth were regularly paid a tribute by the other tribes of the southlands, bribes of crops and livestock, slaves and raw materials, that their people may be spared and their cities left unrazed. But despite the viciousness of the Golgoth, they were not unduly cruel. They did not torture nor rape, and left unmolested the villages and settlements that had no warriors to defend them. They were not thugs or murderers or bandits - much like their patron the Golgoth lived solely to kill and die on the battlefield. In this manner they were as simple and uncomplicated as the Great Beast himself, a truly free people.
In the years following their warlord's captivity in the Pit, the Golgoth found themselves unable to last long against all their enemies. Grossly outnumbered and besieged by their rivals from all sides, but unwilling to compromise their ways of war, most of the Golgoth died as they had lived. Of the survivors, many lost their will to fight without the Unfettered's joy to stoke their spirits, and were assimilated by the Etruscans. The rest retreated back into the impenetrable canopy of the southern jungles, where their descendants still dwell today in disparate clans, patiently awaiting the return of the Relentless Storm to once more cover the world.
From the start, the Unfettered refused to take sides, knowing that to ally with any against another would only compromise his own pristine ethos to serve no one and make war where he finds it. Though there were many Children who similarly stood on their own but eventually found themselves forced to join the ranks of either the Angels or Demons, Nod was powerful enough and feared enough among both armies to remain independent throughout the entirety of the war, gleefully taking on and crushing whatever adversary sought to challenge him. In the end it took a unified effort from several of the strongest Angels - among them O-Dan, who was the Spirit of the Mountain and the only one among the Children whom Nod regarded as his equal - to defeat the Great Beast and cast him into the Pit.
Our people have one purpose. One reason. A single bride for whom we all dance.
War.
We are not given to tradition. We have no temples but the battlefield, no halls in which to commemorate our history. Our history are the wounds we gouge into this earth. We have no time or inclination for secrets or ceremony, save a very few. One of which is a tale we tell when a child makes their first kill and becomes a true blooded warrior of the Golgoth.
Have you your knife? Your helm? Have you the head of your foe?
Then I will tell you once, and only once, of how Nod the Unfettered, Father of Beasts, lost his eye.
Before the Great Beast delivered our people from the dark, he wandered the earth, a force of nature, as irresistible as a hurricane. Young as he was, he had but one desire: to test his strength and prowess to its limits. In this way, he traveled endlessly, seeking out and besting the most worthy of adversaries. He cut down any who stood against him, and in his naivete, despaired of ever finding one who could defeat him, even amongst the most skilled and doughty of his divine kin. This despair would last until the day he crossed into the desolate mountains of far Qayu, where he heard tales of a peerless fighter, a Child of Aton named O-dan, who is Wu the Grandmaster.
He sought out the venerated Grandmaster and initiated his challenge. Wu Dan, being an entity of discipline and contemplation, desired no needless battle and respectfully declined. Outraged at this rejection, the Great Beast, who in those days was feral and ill-tempered, descended upon and massacred hundreds of the northerners who claimed Wu Dan as their patron. At this affront to his personage and duty, the Spirit of the Mountain saw no recourse but to duel the Relentless Storm.
It is not known how long their battle atop the tallest mountain in the North lasted. Only that their blows shook the firmament. Only that the thunder and the lightning were born of their shouts. Only that their blood fell like rain.
Only that it finally ended when a lucky but precise blow from Wu Dan's prayer beads struck Nod's eye from his head, and Nod was cast off the mountaintop.
To this day, it is said that despite his vitality, the Great Beast Nod refuses to allow his eye to grow back. He keeps the scar as a reminder of his first defeat, a testament to the singularity of his vision, and only when O-Dan's corpse lies mauled and broken at his feet will Nod permit his eye to regenerate.
There. That is the story. You will not hear it again, and you will tell it only once, should you live long enough, when your time comes to initiate another child into the ranks of the Golgoth warbound.
Take your knife. Take your helm. Cast your foe's head into the fire. Your armor and spear await you. Glory awaits you.
Nod awaits you.
Fight by his side. Die by his side. Live forever at his side.
As a physically frail Child of Aton whose sphere of dominion is cunning and intrigue, the Godmother is everything Nod detests. Before the Pit, Nod would never have deigned himself to sully his claws with her coward's blood. But after spending over a millennia in that festering hole, there is nothing Nod would not sacrifice to feel her ribs crack between his teeth and wear her weathered hide for a hat.
A trickster. A prankster. A fickle and treacherous purveyor of japes and jest, of mockery and merriment. And he probably tastes awful, too. Nod's piercing eye can see past the surface bluster into the deeper waters beneath, but he doubts that Kinion would ever seek to incur Nod's anger. He is a fool, after all, not an idiot.
Nod holds O-dan in the highest regard. Though their philosophies and temperaments are in diametric opposition, never has a single opponent given Nod such cause for joy in battle. He hungers for another encounter, one in which he might return the favor of removing the Grandmaster's eye from his head, as well as his head from his neck.
A scholar and a sorcerer. There would otherwise be nothing in Therelon to hold Nod's attention, but as the architect of the infernal prison that caged him for so long, Nod would have words with the pretty bird.
The death fetishist who is three-in-one, there is only one aspect of Tarthus which interests Nod. He would gladly welcome an opportunity to test his axe Magog against the black armor of the Warrior, and send him along the way to Mistress Death if he loves her so much.
A lion's legs, a lion's tail, but nothing of a lion's heart. Nod bears Chinasa no consideration one way or the other, but if the Pastel Lord employs any of his chromatic foolishness against Nod then the Great Beast will gladly tear off his tail and choke him with it.
An illusionist and manipulator. Not unlike Eyra. More plotters. More schemers. Perhaps the Kindly Man's bones will break just as prettily as the Godmother's will.
A minor if potent aspect of Aton. What she lacks in raw power she makes up for in courage and spirit. Nod has no want to do her harm, so long as she does not give him reason to. A shame. Were she stronger, she would likely prove a deserving foe.
Though Nod has idly wondered more than once if testing the cyclops' large size and brutish strength would provide some measure of a challenge, he ultimately has nothing but esteem for the smith's artistry, and recognizes that Kozz's purpose and place is by his forge, not the battlefield. It was Kozz, after all, who crafted Magog, Nod's legendary double-headed axe.
A shapeshifter who played both sides in the war, as malleable in their shape as in their conviction. For someone as stoic in vision and form as Nod, there can be nothing but contempt for the changeling.
Nod can appreciate the chaos Zhystkrexas sows in his wake, for war often follows, but the beguiler and bargainer can only offer Nod nothing, for Nod is already his idealized self. The Demon of Desire can make the world dance to his tune, true, but what Nod wants to know is, can he fight?
The Beast cares only for combat, not what comes after. As such, despite the untold number of souls he has sent to the Reaper, he spares no great thought for Thanatos, though he views his actions during the war - intervening on behalf of mortals, walking willingly into the Pit - as signs of weakness. He has heard, however, that Thanatos is mighty in battle. And that he has a pretty sword. Perhaps, if ever they meet, Nod will use that sword to pick Death's remains out from between his teeth.
