Myth and History

Myth and lore tell us much that the scholars and alchemists of today can only guess at, or discuss in the abstract.

We know that the stars of the night sky are suns like our own, and have worlds around them both greater and lesser than Maeleff. We know that the gods came here from one of those worlds, and remade Maeleff as their battlefield and playground.

We know that all of the peoples of Maeleff were raised up by the gods to be their tools, both servants and soldiers against each other. We know that the gods made magic and gave it to their servants in order that they might better make war against each other.

We know that the gods died, killed in hatred by a weapon so powerful that it poisoned the world. We know that at their death, the gods spilled their poisoned blood into the world. We know that the Blood and its poison are the unmaking of everything, and that out of the arrogance of the gods, the world will someday die, either withered and foul, or so altered and rendered Blessed and strange that it will no longer seem our world.

We know that the world contains mysteries we no longer understand, artifacts of the gods and their servants from the elder days of endless war. We know that, and we have hope, that in the annals of those older and grander than ourselves, yet perhaps less wise, we may still find the wisdom to save us.

Some new flora and a blessed

Sanguine Blooms

A breed of flowers that grows only near or above physical pools of the Blood. Deep red roses that can grow either in the light or in total darkness. Their scent is hypnotic and grants visions that are sometime true, and sometimes perilous. Inhaling the scent of the blooms will cause hallucinations which may reveal truths, but is usually safe. The flowers themselves are poisonous to mortals, and the roots actually contain traces of the Blood.

Many Blooded claim that keeping or wearing a sachet made from the petals and other parts of the plant grants them powers of vision beyond the usually in incomprehensible imagery usually associated with the flowers. Certain Blessed have been known to smoke or otherwise consume the flowers. What they gain by doing so is unknown, but many will actively seek the blooms out.

Blessed:
The Hollow / The Faceless

Masters of illusion and manipulation.
Normal looking (whatever) except with no face, just an opening that appears usually to open up onto a portal into deep space - they appear filled with sky and stars.

The Hollow are empathic blessed that create illusions and hallucinations in the minds of mortals, do that they can feed on the powerful emotions. Brief contact leaves one feeling calm and dispassionate, incapable of deep emotion for a period if time. Longer exposure can damage minds, as the Hollow feeds on more and more, until they leave their victim mindless and drooling.

There are rumors of some people, usually wealthy and powerful, hiring Hollow to feed on a specific emotions, leaving them for example utterly (if temporarily) fearless.

Some have been known to become addicted to the gaze of the Hollow. These poor souls inevitably are one day found mindless and drooling.

The Hollow are not mindless at all. They are as varied in intelligence and personality as any mortal race. Their kind appear to drawn from all of the various races (save Sava of course), and some come from no race that can be readily identified.

Note that the blooded are not immune to a Hollow's illusions, nor are they safe from his feeding. Some Hollow who have not fully resigned themselves to evil have developed a taste for the Blooded, and will seek them out to feed upon.

Hollow reproduce by draining a blooded of their mind, and then pouring son of their own essence back into their victim. They may also expose the mindless (but alive) body of a victim to the blood after they have new drained, and then pour their essence into the vessel.

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He screamed in fear and rage and struck the final blow, striking the creature's head from its shoulders, and dropping it at his feet. He set the point of his blade on the ground and leaned on the hilt, panting heavily as his adrenaline drained from him.
It was then that he felt a peculiar but not unpleasant tingling warmth in his hand.

Gateways, need a name...

I'm a bit ashamed to be cribbing an idea from the Eye of the World series, daft as it is, but I will admit that some bits of it inspired this thought:

Id like to have a series of permanent portals, gateways that are set up in interconnected sets of 3 or 4 all over the world, or at least the continent, offering near instantaneous travel from one to the other. They would mostly be underground, deep in labyrinths in the Dismal, and they are old relics from before the Blood.

As they are magical, and existed before the corruption, many of the portals are infected, and traveling though then would be perilous, probably impossible, for those who are not already blooded or blessed.

Why "the nails"?

I came up with the nickname without knowing what it meant yet.

I think the reason that the Office of Causal Oversight is referred to as "the Nails" is that in their earlier, less refined days, the criminals that they sought had an unfortunate tendency to be found later nailed to things.

The Wiki of Dead Gods

I'm starting to edit this shit into a real wiki, at http://blood-of-dead-gods.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Thoughts on changing the tone from undead-horror to unknown-horror

Is Maeleff a world, in the way we think of one? A roundish planet hovering in space somewhere around a star? Do I need to be that... I don't know, mundane? Literal?

I might make it a flat world, with the "outer edges of the universe" being the far reaches of the flat plane, encircling a small island of order. But I do't want to have to figure out the physics of that.

I've said before that the gods found Maeleff as a raw natural world, file with animals but no intelligent life, and changed some of the animals into the intelligent races. Buy what else did they do to shape the world?

Ideas:

- no molten core, the gods changed the core into pure magic. That's where magic power comes from, and where mist of their blood now resides.  Thus it's not really a well of magic, it's a literal sphere of liquid power, with a denser liquid core if corruption.

- the planet below the surface was changed extensively over time, for whatever incomprehensible purposes the gods had. The entire crust and mantle is riddled with tunnels, huge caverns and cavern complexes, occasional decaying artifacts and incomprehensible machines, some of them incomprehensibly large, and all of then incomprehensible in purpose. Along with other things, this gives a reasonable excuse for the prototypical dungeon crawl.

- the gods cut Maeleff off from the rest of the universe when they were alive, but their walls fell when they did.  Stars and sun only became visible when the gods died, before that the surface had patches of light or darkness as the god willed.  Mages and academics are only now starting to really look at the universe outside their world and form theories about it.  For some years, it was believed that the sun was what killed the gods, and the stars were the gods' dead souls. Now we are unsure.

- the gods were simply another race, from another world. An old, old race, decadent and powerful, that had traveled the galaxy for uncountable eons performing experiments and changing worlds before moving on.  The creation of magic, and ultimately of the virus that killed them, were the first truly new things they had done for millions of years. One of their number had continued to explore the universe, and came to its absolute edges, where things broke down into insanity without form or natural law, and strange, directionless and shapeless power. He brought some o that strange stuff back, and the gods studied it, and from it they crafted magic. Unknown to the rest if the gods, that one explorer also brought something else back, the very thing that eventually killed them.

- magic is in everything and is a part of everything, but that was not always the case, the gods simply made it so. They were so enamored with their new creation that they bound it to life force somehow. In a sense, the sphere of power at the planet's core is thus in some sense a vast ocean of life force.

Think very carefully before making this change:

- magic is just shapeless power - like electricity that responded to will and intelligence.  The Blood of the Gods however is something else. It is, in some sense, alive. A parasitic organism, a virus, that lives for no purpose other than to spread itself.

Tonal changes - Blessed

Since I'm thinking of slightly changing the tone, from undead-centered to "outer strangeness" albeit diety-free lovecraftian in nature, consider the following Blessed changes:

- weeping - no change save that if you look into its cuts or empty sockets, you see things moving. Picture a writhing mass of tiny red worms.
- Shadekin - eyeless, otherwise unchanged
- skinwalkers- the ribcages of the skeletons, when not dressed in skin, are filled with twisted, discolored and distorted organs. Those organs can maintain the skin for months, even years if it is properly and ritually prepared
Otherwise unchanged

Kin/Shadekin

This is a picture of a dog with its head out of the window of a fast moving car. However, I like it and think it looks fairly menacing. I think this is what Kin and/or Shadekin look like. I'm even thinking about making them eyeless just to conform to the picture.
If eyeless: Kin rely on scent, hearing, and a sort of psychic awareness of their environment to "see". Psychic sense is tied in to the kin family group mind