Gods, Magic, and Contracts

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rectify Conflicting Magic Systems

In the context of Arborous, magic is defined as any action, effect, or expression of power that bends, warps, or violates the natural laws of the universe (such as - but not limited to - physics, biology, and some formal systems like probability). Put in layman's terms, magic is “any thing that happens through unnatural means, or any object that exhibits unnatural properties.”

In general, this breaks down into a few major groupings:

Magical workings that only a god could pull off. This includes things like magical flora/fauna or, on a more “mundane” level, the magical strands of arcane energy that keep the islands we inhabit floating above an endless void of nothingness.

Yes, people have tried to work cosmic magic. No, it does not turn out well for them. That isn't to say none have succeeded, only that the costs inevitably far outweigh the benefits. There are some workings of magic mortals were simply never meant to grasp, and it's likely to stay that way.

This is what the majority of people think of when they contemplate magic - it's the sort of magic one can actually use and wield. However, workable magic is a fickle thing - the word is more a categorical description than it is a specific “thing” one can point to. However, there is one thing to keep in mind: all workable magic is a contract between god and mortal. That isn't to say that magic necessitates a personal relationship with any particular deity, but magic cannot exist in a place where no gods deem it so.

There is…one exception to the previously stated rule. Alchemy itself is not “magic” per se, in the sense that the mixing of ingredients is not very different to cooking or baking or brewing. However, there is a certain “common understanding” among the Ordered Gods that, regardless of location, magical properties of flora and fauna are to be upheld, even if used outside their territory of origin. There are some RARE exceptions to this rule to be found in the Crowns, but these are rare indeed, and almost always short-lived; the Ordered Gods do not take kindly to their works being snubbed in this way.

In the context of Arborous, gods are immortal, sentient, magical beings whose existence relies upon the symbiotic, contractual relationship between themselves, their territories, and their followers.

Let's break that down in a bit more detail, shall we?

Gods can be killed, but not in the sort of way that humans can. While some choose to take on physical forms from time to time, a god itself is not bound by that form - if the form is killed (assuming it even CAN be killed) the god still remains. The only way to kill a god is to sever all its relationships to the real world, something we'll discuss later.

Not all gods are particularly talkative - some outright refuse to communicate at all - but they are sentient, capable of thinking, planning, and making decisions, and susceptible to all the influences that come with such sentience, albeit to varying degrees depending on the deity.

The gods are not simply capable of magic - they are the source of all magic itself. Mortals alone are not capable of bending the fabric of reality to suit their whims; only the gods are so strong. This also means that whatever magic a deity chooses to empower, that magic's existence rises and falls with the existence of the god which created that magic.

Gods are sentient, but they are not wholly invested with free will. Magic is, in a sense, a binding set of rules, one that a deity imposes upon themselves in the form of a contract to ensure their own self-sustenance. The terms of these “contracts” are not always clear, and they can vary wildly from one another, but the contract is, in a sense, the self-identity of the deity; their personality, their ideals, their very self is wrapped within this contract. More details are discussed below.

What exactly does ascension to godhood look like? Well, to become a deity, first you have to be dead. Sorry, but shedding the mortal coil is the first cost of ascension. Once you die, your soul is now free to pursue one of three outcomes:

Those who served a deity often choose to become a vassal for them after death. Not all gods take vassals, but others accept vassalage from any who wish it after death. Vassalage is an imprecise term - some deities have specific tasks for their vassals to do, while other deities simply offer a place of eternal, quiet solace. This also offers spirits the opportunity to occasionally visit the mortal plane in some fashion, depending upon the agreements made with the deity that controls that territory.

Alternatively, there's nothing stopping a particularly ambitious spirit from ascending to godhood, other than the difficulties involved. To ascend means to be in constant competition with other deities - good, evil, and indifferent - in an eternal, cosmic power struggle. It also means that a newly-ascended spirit-turned-deity is easy prey for malicious gods to try and kill, manipulate, or drive mad.

In addition, there's the necessity of forming symbiotic contracts in order to ascend - this is not a well-understood process, given that deities don't generally converse about this with mortals. It's unclear if the lack of communication on this subject is because deities are somehow universally forbidden to speak of the details, or because the details are so cosmically incomprehensible that there aren't proper words to even describe the concepts involved. Suffice it to say, there appear to be solid, dangerous reasons why you don't see many new deities popping up in the world, and it's probably best left at that.

This is, in theory, the end state of all deities. Gods without any anchoring to reality through contracts simply…cease to exist after a time. It's unknown where these souls go, but presumably they have to go somewhere. One of the great mysteries of the universe, I suppose. In any case, whatever this force is, contracts are the counter-force; they serve to anchor a deity to reality. The only way for gods to avoid consumption is to anchor themselves to reality more strongly than the force that tries to annihilate them.

As mentioned, gods become gods through the creation of contracts. Some gods tie these contracts to their territories, others to an entire race, and still others to select mortals whom the deity deems worthy, or to mortals who worship said deity. Some gods choose to sacrifice power amongst the pantheon for stability, and tie their contract to multiple sources. This makes them weaker, but also harder to kill. Other deities crave the power of godhood, and thus tie themselves strongly to one source, leaving them empowered but vulnerable.

Some deities choose to directly select specific mortals for contractual agreements. The most common example of this is a pact warlock, an individual who operates as an agent of their patron deity's will in the mortal realm. Usually, these sorts of contracts provide a sense of limited immortality for the contract-holder, as well as immense magical power that the individual may wield through various means. In return, the mortal provides an “anchor” for that deity, and are often required to perform certain obligatory actions as directed, lest they violate their contract.

Deities that create individual contracts usually have much more direct control over their vassals, and the vassals themselves often wield much more magical power, as they have a direct connection to their patron deity. However, this creates weakness in both vassal and patron: killing all a patron's vassals effectively kills that deity, and vassals only wield their full power when within a territory that the patron controls. When outside the patron's direct territory, the individual becomes significantly weaker the further they stray from home. Usually this is expressed through loss of immortality, diminished magical effect, or physical illness.

• Control - vassals must obey or lose their powers.
• Simple - Providing magic to one mortal is cheap, leaving plenty of power available for dealing with inter-deity conflicts.

• Vulnerable - Having a handful of powerful mortals means the contract-holders can still die, which would kill the deity.
• Small Scope - Vassals are only powerful within the territory the patron controls.

• Powerful - Being one of a select few vassals means your patron is more inclined to lend you more power
• Simple - Having magic given to you, rather than having to work for it through other means, is about as easy as magic can get.

• Rare - It's not often that a god just picks someone to bestow great powers upon.
• Small Scope - Vassals are only powerful within the territory the patron controls.
• Loss of Free Will - A direct contract like this almost always comes with some strings attached.

Some deities will bestow contracts upon an entire clade, clan, bloodline, or group affiliation. The most common example of this is a clan patron, often an ancestral spirit who bestows certain minor boons in exchange for simple expressions of faith or belief. These contracts, while weaker than direct selection, are still stronger and more specific than religious or systemic contracts due to the nature of shared belief among a community.

Deities that create lineage contracts are heavily reliant upon communal belief, often requiring acts of worship in some form to sustain their power. In return, the patron deity is obligated to uphold certain “lineage qualities” as established by whomever initially forms the contract (usually the first ruler of a people, the first head of a lineage, the founding clanmaster of a clan, etc) and is upheld and occasionally amended by the head of the lineage (ruler of a people, head of a lineage, clanmaster of a clan, etc).

The benefit of a lineage contract to a deity is that it spreads out the contract among many people - it's much more difficult to wipe out an entire group than it is to kill a few warlocks. The downside is that beliefs can shift or sway - should a people stop believing in a god, that god loses power and may die entirely.

• Strength in Numbers - Lots of believers means lots of ties to reality.
• Low-Maintenance - Hereditary beliefs tend to propagate without much work on the deity's behalf.

• Amorphous - Beliefs can wax and wane, shift and merge with other beliefs.
• Less Direct Control - Granting boons to large numbers of people provides some degree of indirect leadership of the group, but to a much lesser degree than individual contracts.
• War-weak - Killing the “head” of a lineage contract is sufficient to drastically weaken the deity behind the contract. Annihilating the entire lineage itself, such as through war, will most likely kill the deity.

• Straightforward - Being born into, marrying into, or voluntarily joining into a group that has magic isn't common, but it isn't nearly as rare as individual contracts, while also being less directly dangerous.

• Narrowly-Scoped - Typically, lineage contracts provide an extremely narrow set of magical capabilities.

Some deities, rather than specifically bonding with a specific group, will instead create open-ended contracts with any who choose to adhere to specific tenets (or “ideations”, hence the name). These tenets/ideations are not specific actions - though many groups of people form certain rites or rituals as a learning aid - but rather are specific concepts, ideals, morals, or philosophies that must be embraced. Those who more fully embrace or embody these tenets tend to receive greater magical benefit, though whether this is due to the deity awarding greater power or simply because rigorous training tends to yield mastery is unclear.

• Widespread - Ideals tend to spread far and wide, leading to large groups of people anchoring a god to reality.
• Infectious - Ideals often mix with other, similar ideals, leading to further propagation, even outside of a deity's territory.
• Weakly-linked - Due to the interpretive nature of tenets, deities have some leeway in determining if and how to permit magic usage through such a contract.

• Amorphous - Concept-heavy contracts tend to become muddled, sometimes mixing with other ideas to form new ones. This can lead to some unintended consequences where one deity's contract becomes intermixed with another deity's contract, forcing gods into new partnerships or arrangements and potentially diminishing each other's distinct power.
• Costly - Open-ended contracts like this tend to be costly; the greater the number of mortals that adhere to the ideals, the greater the amount of power must be distributed through the contract. This can leave a deity more open to attack or manipulation.
• Ideas Are NOT Bulletproof - Moral values can and do shift over time. If culture shifts drastically enough, the ideas that underpin an ideatic contract may cause people to stop following the contract. This doesn't often occur quickly, but frequently occurs over the span of generations, leading to a deity's slow drift into obscurity and eventually, death.

• Accessible - Anyone can choose to learn and adhere to ideatic contracts, making this form of magic fairly accessible.
• Interpretive - It is unusual but not unheard of for individuals to “argue” their way into or out of problems with their patron, based on differing interpretations of certain ideas. This lends a certain sense of flexibility to the magic itself.
• Pluralistic - Depending on how willing a mortal is to bind themselves to multiple sets of restrictions on their behavior, it is possible to gain access to multiple types of magic through the use of ideatic contracts.

• Code of Conduct - Similar to individual contracts, ideatic contracts do limit what sort of actions a person can take and still retain access to their patron's magic. A healing god does not take kindly to murder, even justified murder, and inversely gods of violence or death aren't fans of healers.
• Interpretive - Being open to argument cuts both ways - deities have been known to punish mortals who try to bend the rules. This is true in any contract, certainly, but seems to occur more often in ideatic contracts, perhaps because the way gods view the world differs from the way mortals see it.

Finally, a select few deities choose to create the most open-ended - and simultaneously, the most complex - contracts. These contracts involve open access to any mortal willing to learn and, to the extent possible, understand the intricacies of whatever contract the deity chooses to create. These contracts can be, and most often are, enormously complex and convoluted affairs, even by the standards of deities, which pushes them into the realm of near-incomprehensibility to any one mortal.

Many systemic contracts become the foundation for entire schools of study by the magically-inclined, and for good reason: those who can learn to understand and abide by the rules of such a contract can perform surprisingly strong magic without binding themselves to a fixed set of ideals, a group identity, or a will-binding agreement. Hubris has been the downfall of many a mortal, however, who dares to believe they fully understand the extent of a systemic contract; while a systemic contract cannot be nullified once created, it can most certainly be amended, meaning that new side-effects can constantly arise should the deity who formed it be capricious, or just particularly bored.

• Ironclad - Systemic contracts are, as far as is known, the final authority in anchoring a patron to reality. That is not to say that it's foolproof - there is more than one recorded instance of mortals (or groups of mortals) destroying a deity by overwhelming or nullifying their systems - but barring active sabotage, gods that form magic systems are here to stay.

• Exhausting - Have you ever been focused on several bits of work at once and then had someone try to talk to you? Multiply that out by the size of the mortal population, and that's what a systemic contract is like to a deity. Managing the system leaves the deity heavily occupied, often preventing them from meddling in other things, either in the mortal realm or the spiritual realm.
• Potentially Exploitable - As mentioned, it's not impossible for someone to, eventually, find a loophole in the way a deity makes their magic system work. The repercussions of this can range from the system becoming unstable, having new side-effects, or even the destruction of that system entirely.

• Accessible - Barring some sort of “contractual entry” clause, any mortal willing to undergo the rigors of understanding a complex systemic contract can use it.
• Flexible - Many systemic contracts are only limited by one's knowledge of how it works, access to any requisite materials, and a mortal's creative thinking.

• Complex - Systemic contracts vary wildly in their complexity, but almost all of the powerful ones require extensive learning and training. It's not unheard of for mages to not only learn new languages for the sake of casting magic, but in some cases to invent entirely new languages from scratch for the sake of expressing complex ideas succinctly.
• Hold Those Thoughts - One of the few consistent features of systemic contracts is that the person manipulating the magic must be capable of accurately holding/representing the sum total of the magical working in their mind. This limits the scope of a magical work to what one can mentally comprehend and process in their head at one time - excessively complex castings require either multiple layers of casting, or multiple people casting works that interact with one another.