It'll get messy if I try to quote everything when answering, so here's a sorta blanket reply to various points Sirrocco, Catty, and Timote raised.
On Gods:-
Sirrocco asked what would happen if Deon had just killed the Old Gods, and then left it be. Would the world collapse, are the Gods intrinsic to its survival?
Well, er, yes and no. The world under the Old Gods was a stable environment, not really needing continual handwaving to support. Remove the Gods, make no changes, and it can continue indefinitely.
(Assuming Deon gave up his own 'godhood', though, there'd be zero mechanism to prevent the ascension of someone
else to godhood, under the right conditions - it's not really the sort of thing you want to leave lying around.)
Contrast this to the world as-is now, though. It's relatively stable, but still not entirely settled from the changes Deon's made. In a few hundred years, the world might be stable without Deon. If someone managed to kill Deon
now though, it's anyone's guess what would happen.
Mmm.
Anyway.
Sirrocco asked how stupid the Order Gods were, trying to fool the hired help like that.
Well. Um. Okay, see, the Gods of Order didn't actually expect Deon to destroy their opposite numbers?
They didn't expect him to
succeed.
They kinda hoped he'd kill one. Or at least severely injure one. Maybe two. That sort of thing. They expected Deon himself to die in the process.
The Godslayer thing was a con job. They just wanted a weapon against the other side. Deon wasn't the first schmuck they pulled into doing this...
...he was, though, the last.
The Gods of Order had a particularly big blind spot when it came to mortals. Overwhelming confidence in their own superiority.
As a newly-minted godling himself, Deon is understandably wary of this. His guilt, such as it is, is related to this. He's concerned about hubris, megalomania, and suchlike. How he deals with it... that's mostly for the story.
I've sort of hinted at it here and there, but to a certain degree the Gods are merely the ultimate expression of the magical system of this universe. That is, given enough steam, any mortal can
become a God... well, any extremely capable mortal, under the right circumstances. Granted, those would be exceedingly rare circumstances, but...
But you can see from my description of Deon's world-changing action... that the exercising of godhead is a matter of visualisation, emotion, and...well, the same as casting any spell within my magic system. Just on a vastly larger scale.
A spellcaster is someone forcing their will on the magical environment. A God is
part of the background magical environment - they themselves are magic, and thus their will is part of the universe.
This fact isn't widely known, however. Even magical authorities and priests believe that the Gods are on an entirely seperate level, not simply... the top rung of magic, as it were. True, that rung is a lot further from the other rungs, there's a big gap in the ladder...but it's still the same ladder. The whole worship thing might work out somewhat differently if this were common knowledge. But it isn't. So.
Incidentally, anyone can be a Godslayer under the right conditions - but those conditions are pretty much the same as the ones for one to be a God. If you can kill a God, you basically
are a God. The trick the Order Gods were trying to pull with their Godslayer, though, was to keep him from realising it.
The Old Gods have been around since before recorded history, thousands and thousands of years. In fact, recorded history
started with Senica. It was her idea...
The Gods of Chaos are somewhat older than the Gods of Order, incidentally, and tend to view the Order pantheon as johnny-come-lately's. Until recently, they saw this whole civilized culture thing as a newfangled whatchimacallit.
Again, it's all a matter of representation, yes? Chaos and Order. Nature and Civilization.
(As an aside, Deon asks Zastra who the last remaining Chaos God is... not because he's unaware of the situation, but because
he wants to see what she'll say. He already knew about Raksis.)
On Deon's Apotheosis:-
Sirrocco also asked about the pre-story period, and Deon's ascension. Briefly...
After Deon was summoned, he actually did the Godslayer quest thing for a while. He had to hunt down and kill the Chaos Gods. During this process, he met Ain, and realised the Gods of Order were lying to him.
He then he proceeded to finish off the task of killing the Chaos Gods - and then, equipped with their power, returned to the place he first entered the world in... a sort of local equiv of Mount Olympus. Not where the Gods actually
live, but the top of a symbolic mountain. The Order Gods manifested, appeared before him...
There was a confrontation. He actually got 'em to emit they were playing him... but by then, it was a very hostile exchange, in any case. So he took 'em out, with Ain's help. Senica was the first to go, taken out with his first attack. This was a pretty good tactical and strategical decision - eliminate the leader first. 'course, Deon targeted Senica mainly because he
couldn't stand the bitch, but...
Valin and some of the others - I haven't really determined who - ran, and Deon had to hunt them down. Valin was the last to be destroyed.
After destroying Valin,
then he remade the world. He did this only after all of 'em were dead. Why wait? So there was no opposition when he did it. It wasn't a heat-of-the-moment thing, he'd
planned for it.
(Mind, he was somewhat mistaken about this. Deon realised, post-change, that he hadn't killed them as dead as he thought. Some remnant of Raksis was left, for example. But he'd removed them as any sort of credible threat, at least.)
Why the entire world? No half measures. If he'd just done a single city, it wouldn't be
enough, and there'd still be factors in the outside world, be they social and political, that would endanger and disrupt his life. Better to change it
all.
(I should note at this point that Tianan is a pocket universe of sorts - heck, it's probably not even a planet, it may well be a flat world. I doubt there are elephants and turtles, however.)
Why not erase the entire universe and replace it with one identical to where he came from? Well, that'd be mass-murder. He can stomach mass-brainwashing all of Tianan's people, not wiping 'em out. Why not make a copy of Earth, and cite it in the pocket universe next to Tianan? Well, it still wouldn't be real - and that doubt alone might torpedo the construct. Also, there
are limits to what Deon can do.
It should be noted that Deon, strangely enough, doesn't really care about race. Zastra, a Tianan native, is more of a bigot than he is...far as Deon's concerned, elf, dwarf, orc, whatever, they're just different shapes of people. So he didn't feel an overwhelming need to reboot everyone into a
human shape.
Just a modern human society.
On Deon:-
Deon was a journalist before being yanked into Tianan. Some print, some radio. He was technically unemployed when he was summoned, though he'll tell you that he was
freelance. He's thus got a fairly broad base of knowledge to draw on, but very few
specific technical skills.
(I chose this because I've done some work as a broadcast journalist, so it's one of the few things I can describe if need be. I tossed round other options, but this made sense.)
In a post-changed Tianan, he does mostly the same thing. Granted, he doesn't need to work for a living. He cheats, as it were; one of the deliberate interventions he made when changing the world was ensuring a large degree of property ownership for himself, a healthy bank account, and so on.
He's also, even without god-powers, one of the most powerful magicians in the world - he could theoretically settle all his basic material needs with conjuration. Though as he points out to Zastra, it's
tiresome to magic up food.
On Tianan:-
I'm not sure what happened to the Dwarves in the reboot. Well, I mean, I saw 'em becoming industralised and a major manufacturing power, but I hadn't really thought about the ramifications for, well, them living underground. I suspect that Deon gave them a city on the surface. So there's towers and a few skyscrapers and such. But also extensive underground rail networks, shopping complexes, housing ...
...and the surface-city's probably utterly dead in the daytime, when the sun's up. Because that kinda light just ain't natural, man.
The so-called 'Chaos races' are orcs, trolls, goblins, and dark-elves. They're not evil, they're just somewhat more...well, by our sensibilities, primitive in terms of culture and social development. Lower technology level, essentially the barbarian threat to the Roman Empire. Or Imperial China, if you prefer. Their Gods have a far more hands-off approach.
A hands-
on approach would be somewhat out-of-character for Gods of Chaos, after all. Actually, technically speaking, the Chaos Gods don't identify
themselves as 'Chaos' - that's a name the
other side gave them. But Gods of The State of Nature doesn't have the same ring to it.
...
Yeah, the fact Deon's switched an agrarian society for an urbanized one means that most of those big cities are terribly underpopulated. This is a good point which I hadn't considered. Thanks, Sirrocco. Worth mentioning somewhere in the story.
As for whether he left power structures and social class more-or-less intact, when he changed the world? For the most part, yes. The fact is, unless Deon specifically willed it otherwise, most people got jobs that roughly corresponded, in
some way, to their past lives. A scribe becomes a librarian or bookseller, a farm labourer ends up working in a factory. Some people fall through the cracks, but there's a rough correspondence. So nobles used to lording it over people...end up as highly-paid executives, and so on. Mostly.
I say
for the most part, since Deon had a particular grievance against the Church of Senica - his change went through the Elven Empire like a red-hot knife... and so on, so forth. The 'gotten ugly quick' situation that Sirrocco describes, with reference to sudden unexpected revolution...yeah.
There are some legal issues arising from property ownership and so on in the changed world, though... well, everyone woke up knowing what they're supposed to own
now. But everyone also remembers what they owned
then. The disgruntled folks, however, would mostly be former nobility ... and generally speaking, they're still upper-class even in the new situation.
This isn't to say there aren't kerfluffles, however, legal or otherwise. And since Deon intentionally screwed the ruling class of the Empire, the situation may be particularly bad there.
However, I suspect the default legal ruling in most situations, most places in the world is... well, possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is,
this is the case
now. If you don't like it, that's your problem.
Everyone living in the new world has the knowledge to live in it, which means, yeah, folks know how to use credit cards, go online, and suchlike.
I note that Deon's worldshift is, in some ways, a situation-specific uplift. He's given new doctors medical knowledge, for example, on par with doctors back on earth. But that knowledge isn't the
same knowledge. Elves are basically humans with weird ears, but trolls, f'instance, and goblins, have quite different anatomies. But he accounted for that, so there now exists information on troll genetics...
One point he might have goofed on, though. Sirrocco brought it up, someone else did as well. I forget. But, yeah, he also uplifted criminals.
Some of them are probably in legitimate jobs by now, but there's probably more than a few amazing ninja D&D-style thieves who...currently possess modern electronic bypass skills, and the ability to dance past laser-sensors to the Mission Impossible theme.
As for the issue of cultural artifacts... well, yeah, he did kinda make the whole damn world resemble "urban America". He didn't totally erase existing languages and literature, though - public libraries in, say, an orc community would have old tribal lore written down in...whatever the hell it was orcs wrote in. Orcish pictograms, I'm guessing. The city Deon's chosen as a hometown used to be a colonial trading port of the old Elvish Empire - it has an 'Orctown', in the vein of 'Chinatown'. Also a 'Little Cavern' neighbourhood with a lot of Dwarves.
However, everyone
also speaks and writes English now.
Catty brought up a very interesting thing about the breakdown of the family unit. Families used to live together in multi-generation clans, but... well, smaller families are the norm nowadays, with urban living. I agree, you're totally right, that is a change. Hmm.
Actually, hell, Catty's post had a lot of brilliant things, and I'm not sure sure how to answer a lot of those questions.
I'll try, tho. Okay. I'm not so sure that people had any sort of compulsion to use the new knowledge they've gained...
Hmmm.
I suppose it boils down to how I handle the moment of the change. The 'fringe shock', as it were - a lot of the situations Catty has postulated... unpaid bills, a possible inflation spike as people don't trust the new money ... how I resolve those things depends on how, well, whacked out and rocky I want to make the transition.
Mind, I
like the idea of there being a lot of hardcases who rebel against the new lives they've been given, and refuse to adapt.
After all, Zastra and Jager are supposed to be examples of this.
Everything ELSE that Catty suggested, though... about lifelong friends suddenly getting each other's e-mail addresses, yeah. Probably. I also like the idea of cows and livestock magically turning into modern breeds with better yields. =D
(I'd already decided that fields and farms were replaced with modern
crops, you see, even in some cases, GM ones...so why shouldn't that apply to the animals, too?)
Privateers would have become part of a country's modern navy, the one that granted them the...I forget the phrase, letter of marque? Outright pirates, however, without any alliegence, would remain pirates.
The idea of some old castles becoming tourist attractions just cracks me up. So
yes.
I'm not entirely sure how the changes of faster communication, travel, and trade have affected international economics and the financial system. It may well be a background detail I do
not want to explore in the story - if I handle it, it'll only be in passing. I don't have any answer to that, though. If someone wants to offer a suggestion, it'll be welcome.
And Kokuten, I like the idea of National Socialist Goblins. e_e I will use this. The Dwarves I see as somewhat more Marxist, really...
As for 'sociopolitical tropes' he tried to bring into existence - yes. Democracy, freedom of speech, racial tolerance, freedom of religion, human rights ... you know, all
those values taken for granted by Americans and Westerners in general.
He's finding that, well, not everyone agrees with him...
On The Dream:-
Quote:
In general did the godslayer try to make the world better than it was or did he try to have it just like home?
He was trying to make Tianan
comparable to his home, but not
precisely it.
On Zastra:-
Yes, I'm being intentionally cryptic with regards to her identity, and what she is. Zastra's agenda is supposed to be a plot point, so I can't really say.
But...Zastra
isn't a goddess.
Yes, that statement can be read in several ways. Do I mean...she isn't a goddess
yet? Do I mean she isn't a goddess
anymore? Do I mean she isn't and never was a goddess, and never will be? Well, you get the idea. That's all I'm saying, though.
Though I'm sorely tempted to joke that... no, she's NOT a GODDESS...
...she's a GOD in a cunning GENDER-BENDING DISGUISE!
But that would be cruel.
Nevermind the fact I seriously considered that in an earlier iteration of this story.
It's too cruel. No, poor Zastra isn't a trap. She's definitely a mortal female.
-- Acyl