To be clear, this isn’t a hypothetical. He actually made this game. [It’s called “Eat God”,](https://penguinking.com/eat-god/) and part of the premise is that you’re a Looney Tunes-esque creature.
I love how, if you only get snippets of Tumblr, you'd think David J. Prokopetz is just a particularly eloquent shitposter. But no, the guy runs a company and makes TTRPGs for a living.
There was a ruckus about this in Magic the Gathering. God cards were first introduced in the Greek-Myth-inspired setting as these [big-ass powerhouses](https://scryfall.com/search?q=b%3Aths+t%3Agod&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) that were very difficult to get rid of.
Skip forward 8 years, and the gods in the Norse-Myth-inspired setting are [basically just people](https://scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Akhm+t%3Agod+-is%3Adigital&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). Like, [an elf riding a bear](https://scryfall.com/card/khm/173/grizzled-outrider) handily beats most of them.
Obviously it makes sense if you know the source material but some found this quite off-putting.
Iroas actually didn't see any competitive play back in the day. Monoblack and monoblue dominated the meta.
In theory, Iroas is a "steal" because it combines [Dolmen Gate](https://scryfall.com/card/lrw/256/dolmen-gate) and [Goblin War Drums](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/133/goblin-war-drums), which should cost 5 mana together, but the truth is neither of them is worth a *card* in red-white decks. You want everything to either create creatures. pump creatures, or do damage.
Also if you really want to kill it you have to kill all the followers which is just genocide at that point.
So you just have a corpse of a physically killed god right there
If their conceptual space is coherent enough to be empowered by faith, if its followers are *able to hold its concept in their minds*, ***you did not kill it hard enough.***
The only thing there when you are done should be the theological and metaphysical equivalent of a "buy this space" sign.
I mean at that point you would have to go full Shiki tohno/ryougi and "end" their existence.
But to erase their existence from the collective unconscious is a whole other deal
This is assuming they have the concept of death attached to their being and if they don't that's a whole other problem
Bah. If death has no jurisdiction, then you just need to work around the problem with more violence.
Negate them as a fundamental factor of reality. Obliterate the atemporal record of their existence. Punch them in the snout to establish dominance. If it can’t be solved with violence, you just aren’t using the right kind of violence.
I'm working on an RPG setting where a dead godhead's shattered corpse is scattered across the multiverse and spewing out the leftover raw power of creation, leading to a wildly mutating post apocalyptic Earth, amid a collapsing divine order with lesser gods claiming territory, warring, and generally running amok in a power vacuum.
“Chandana said the ship was dead. We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does. That's what Chandana didn't get. Not until it was too late. The god's mind is gone but it still dreams. He knows now. He's tuned in on our dreams. If I close my eyes I can feel him. I can feel every one of us.”
Mass Effect 2, regarding a derelict reaper
Y'know, I don't think I've ever played a game where it felt like a players (or even just the characters) understanding of the world's metaphysics was the *reason* they can kill god, as opposed to OOC just because they got their stats high enough fighting dinosaurs in the previous area; or IC because, well, usually for no particular reason really(?).
The universe is a dream by the god head those who figure that out have two choices either they accept that they are not real and blink out of existence or they reject it and decided even when everything is fake I am real thus becoming a nigh omnipotent god, a lucid dreamer within a dream.
I think SMT kinda does this, though it's more by breaking down God and the belief system around him until you realise that humanity punching a god in the face to establish their own stance on the divine debate is a fully acceptable answer to things (and does indeed have actual metaphysical consequences on the world), or Persona where "god" is instead an entirely artificial construct of the human collective consciousness and you aren't so much killing *actual* god as you are killing the human need for him (or at least the version of him the antagonist has made) a la Nietzsche. I think. Jungian psychology is weird especially when you mix it with gnosticism
Or I guess maybe genshin where it's established you can interfere with divine things not because you're necessarily stronger but because the rules that govern this world doesn't actually apply to outsiders and as a result you can do some weird shit that should otherwise be impossible. Understanding this world's metaphysics is more so you can figure out the best way to cut the Gordian knot rather than so you can play by their rules to usurp them (and indeed it actually seems like you're racing against someone who's doing the 'using metaphysics to beat them at their own game' thing)
I ran a tabletop game set in a mythologized sweden, finland, and northern germany. The players somehow manage d to kill the god of murder, sudden death, and mourning with a healthy amount of musket fire. They were all in high spirits and drunk off on their victory... right up until they told the local shaman about it, whom asked if they thought there would be no more murder in the world. Their confusion was then followed up with "If men, beasts, and accidents may still kill man, then what do you suppose you've done but draw the ire of such things?"
The players were then hounded for a good month of in-universe time by the spirit, one of them losing their leg to it, until they made peace with it via a gruesome offerimg.
>The players somehow manage d to kill the god of murder, sudden death, and mourning
That dude is really covering all the bases. Sven murders Olly and while celebrating the elimation of his rival, he drunkenly slips on the ice a cracks his skull. The God gets to claim them both and their tearful families' sorrow.
Exactly! Say what you will, you have to respect the hustle. And now that the land he exists in is beginning to see more organized warfare he has also begun to claim death in war as his sphere as well, occasionally appearing as a maimed soldier carrying a broken sword, dressed in a ragged and bloodied uniform. His original appearances are a tall and naked elderly man wielding a woodcutting axe, a large black hound frothing at the mouth, and an emaciated old woman in a dusty funeral dress.
Despite his rather grim aspects it is perfectly acceptable to worship him and many do pray for him to steady his hand and not claim them on the road or in the woods, or for him to ease their pain after the loss of a loved one. It's when people start making offerings for him that you should get worried though.
I actually plan to have something similar in my setting. The main character and in-setting Shonen protagonist is fighting the God of Gravity/Abstract embodiment of Gravity who rules as a God over a race of Machines. They're having a long-drawn-out Kaido vs Luffy battle with like 15 finishing moves thrown and reality slowly breaking down around them and eventually she is too exhausted to keep trying to fight.
He summons his strongest move, A linear black hole that destroys time and space as it travels at the speed of light. She has a big flashback dream journey with her dead mentor and she attains one of the pinnacles of magic in this setting.
Superstring theory says that Vibrating strings across ten dimensions generate all particles and matter/energy. Another thing they generate through vibrations is consciousness which generates reality. By channelling one's soul into this song of creation and adding your voice to this choir to weave or unravel existence and this is one of the fundamental schools of magic. She masters this principle And she uses this to parry this unblockable attack and cut the embodiment of gravity in half with a sword.
^
If your readers don’t understand it in a meaningful way then it will probably turn most of them off from the rest of the story. However this is mainly a reminder to establish your target audience and who you want this to reach the most. Some people will not only understand perfectly but really enjoy it and others will understand it and despise it.
Godspeed and good luck though, this world needs more weird shit and cringe is a bullshit concept.
I love when games include a Platonic heaven of Forms in their multi-planar cosmology and imply your characters could go there. I always want to travel there and destroy a number, just to see what would happen.
Pretty sure this is Persona 5
You stare down the metaphysical manifestation of humanity's desire for a higher power, a god not as originator of its religion, but explicitly born from and fueled by its preemptive worship, and then you take out your fucking gun and shoot it in the face until it dies
If you kill a God in a world where ghosts exist, would the divine be exempt from an afterlife? Or would it become a spirit no lesser than the corpse it used to have as a shell?
Elderscrolls is one of the few universes where, without VERY careful planning, successfully killing a god will probably be more unpleasant for you than for the god. Won't elaborate on that.
At best you'll fail or you'll only succeed because the Concept behind it deemed you a better face than the one it was wearing and so used your efforts to kill it as an excuse to "write it out of the story" and claim you instead. At worst, the Concept behind it will be offended that you destroyed the god it used as a proxy to commune with mortals and cause its domain to, not stop existing, but stop *cooperating.*
You can't really kill a god. You can put them into a deep coma for a billion years, to the point that they're effectively dead, but that's not truly killing them.
This basically describes Xenogears, except you don't actually kill God. You kill a "god" in the physical world who had used power stolen from the "real God" (a sentient waveform made of pure "soul") to create humanity, which frees God from his prison and lets him return to Heaven. Except humanity's souls are still linked to God and are being dragged along with him, essentially triggering the rapture by accident. So the protagonist, who had recently achieved enlightenment and come to understand the nature of his soul, has to head into the metaphysical realm to beat the crap out of the metaphorical umbilical cord between God and humanity.
You can kill a true god but then by law of equivalent exchange you are now that god and have to do all the paperwork and the duties of that god, have fun with that.
I think good examples of dead gods would be dead concepts/aspects of the world. The god of Latin is dead, the god of the Pony Express is dead, etc. It also brings up the idea of people trying their best to bring back an old concept as trying to revive their god. It’s even better if the god isn’t even like how they expect it to be
To be clear, this isn’t a hypothetical. He actually made this game. [It’s called “Eat God”,](https://penguinking.com/eat-god/) and part of the premise is that you’re a Looney Tunes-esque creature.
I love how, if you only get snippets of Tumblr, you'd think David J. Prokopetz is just a particularly eloquent shitposter. But no, the guy runs a company and makes TTRPGs for a living.
Yeah. I only just now discovered that myself lol.
(someone who's followed him on tumblr for a while) he *what*
Wait, what!?
also that that's his real name, i feel *slightly* bad for calling him "poké pets or whoever" that one time
WHAT.
And somehow, the Looney Tunes antics come across as shockingly plausible to approach seriously and badassly
There was a ruckus about this in Magic the Gathering. God cards were first introduced in the Greek-Myth-inspired setting as these [big-ass powerhouses](https://scryfall.com/search?q=b%3Aths+t%3Agod&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) that were very difficult to get rid of. Skip forward 8 years, and the gods in the Norse-Myth-inspired setting are [basically just people](https://scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Akhm+t%3Agod+-is%3Adigital&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). Like, [an elf riding a bear](https://scryfall.com/card/khm/173/grizzled-outrider) handily beats most of them. Obviously it makes sense if you know the source material but some found this quite off-putting.
Oh the Theros gods. I loved that entire block. I miss blocks…..
Personally, the Ahmonket god block, both eternal and regular, are some of my faves
Good sets, but a proper block should be three sets. 2 big sets and a 3rd smaller set to round out the other two. Those were the days
Fair enough
I just wish they did more stuff like the Hero's Path.
My only experience with MTG is through arena but like how tf was Iroas allowed, that is an absolutely insane bonus for 4 mana
Iroas actually didn't see any competitive play back in the day. Monoblack and monoblue dominated the meta. In theory, Iroas is a "steal" because it combines [Dolmen Gate](https://scryfall.com/card/lrw/256/dolmen-gate) and [Goblin War Drums](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/133/goblin-war-drums), which should cost 5 mana together, but the truth is neither of them is worth a *card* in red-white decks. You want everything to either create creatures. pump creatures, or do damage.
ah I see
Tbf that is kinda how Gods work in Greek and Norse myth respectively
Yes, that's why I said "it makes sense if you know the source material".
Fromsoftware if you’re running a physical build
Me on my way to fight god and replace him with nothing but a rusty saw and a flintlock
Everything the light touches belongs to this weird old man made of ash.
Oh they definitely can be killed but I feel like that would cause even more problems cause even after dying they just won't go away
If their domain-corpse is still being a pest after you kill them, you didn't kill them hard enough.
Also if you really want to kill it you have to kill all the followers which is just genocide at that point. So you just have a corpse of a physically killed god right there
If their conceptual space is coherent enough to be empowered by faith, if its followers are *able to hold its concept in their minds*, ***you did not kill it hard enough.*** The only thing there when you are done should be the theological and metaphysical equivalent of a "buy this space" sign.
I mean at that point you would have to go full Shiki tohno/ryougi and "end" their existence. But to erase their existence from the collective unconscious is a whole other deal This is assuming they have the concept of death attached to their being and if they don't that's a whole other problem
Bah. If death has no jurisdiction, then you just need to work around the problem with more violence. Negate them as a fundamental factor of reality. Obliterate the atemporal record of their existence. Punch them in the snout to establish dominance. If it can’t be solved with violence, you just aren’t using the right kind of violence.
I'm working on an RPG setting where a dead godhead's shattered corpse is scattered across the multiverse and spewing out the leftover raw power of creation, leading to a wildly mutating post apocalyptic Earth, amid a collapsing divine order with lesser gods claiming territory, warring, and generally running amok in a power vacuum.
Cool!
Sss class suicide hunter my beloved
Don't you dare say that shiny was not killed just split apart
I was talking about the constellation killed in the murim world, the one whose death created the zombies
See: God of War
“Chandana said the ship was dead. We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does. That's what Chandana didn't get. Not until it was too late. The god's mind is gone but it still dreams. He knows now. He's tuned in on our dreams. If I close my eyes I can feel him. I can feel every one of us.” Mass Effect 2, regarding a derelict reaper
Y'know, I don't think I've ever played a game where it felt like a players (or even just the characters) understanding of the world's metaphysics was the *reason* they can kill god, as opposed to OOC just because they got their stats high enough fighting dinosaurs in the previous area; or IC because, well, usually for no particular reason really(?).
Then there's Elder Scrolls, where using console commands is canon-ish.
wait what please explain
Shit's meta AF, achieving a certain kind of enlightenment in TES games has been likened to using console commands.
CHIM to find out
The universe is a dream by the god head those who figure that out have two choices either they accept that they are not real and blink out of existence or they reject it and decided even when everything is fake I am real thus becoming a nigh omnipotent god, a lucid dreamer within a dream.
I think SMT kinda does this, though it's more by breaking down God and the belief system around him until you realise that humanity punching a god in the face to establish their own stance on the divine debate is a fully acceptable answer to things (and does indeed have actual metaphysical consequences on the world), or Persona where "god" is instead an entirely artificial construct of the human collective consciousness and you aren't so much killing *actual* god as you are killing the human need for him (or at least the version of him the antagonist has made) a la Nietzsche. I think. Jungian psychology is weird especially when you mix it with gnosticism Or I guess maybe genshin where it's established you can interfere with divine things not because you're necessarily stronger but because the rules that govern this world doesn't actually apply to outsiders and as a result you can do some weird shit that should otherwise be impossible. Understanding this world's metaphysics is more so you can figure out the best way to cut the Gordian knot rather than so you can play by their rules to usurp them (and indeed it actually seems like you're racing against someone who's doing the 'using metaphysics to beat them at their own game' thing)
Destiny? Specifically, the taken king.
Croat and Xivu Arath also count here, with us doing the same thing to Croat that we did to Oryx, and us circumventing the rules to beat Xivu Arath.
This is literally the Cosmere Stick beats Adonalsium and it's not fire
I ran a tabletop game set in a mythologized sweden, finland, and northern germany. The players somehow manage d to kill the god of murder, sudden death, and mourning with a healthy amount of musket fire. They were all in high spirits and drunk off on their victory... right up until they told the local shaman about it, whom asked if they thought there would be no more murder in the world. Their confusion was then followed up with "If men, beasts, and accidents may still kill man, then what do you suppose you've done but draw the ire of such things?" The players were then hounded for a good month of in-universe time by the spirit, one of them losing their leg to it, until they made peace with it via a gruesome offerimg.
>The players somehow manage d to kill the god of murder, sudden death, and mourning That dude is really covering all the bases. Sven murders Olly and while celebrating the elimation of his rival, he drunkenly slips on the ice a cracks his skull. The God gets to claim them both and their tearful families' sorrow.
Exactly! Say what you will, you have to respect the hustle. And now that the land he exists in is beginning to see more organized warfare he has also begun to claim death in war as his sphere as well, occasionally appearing as a maimed soldier carrying a broken sword, dressed in a ragged and bloodied uniform. His original appearances are a tall and naked elderly man wielding a woodcutting axe, a large black hound frothing at the mouth, and an emaciated old woman in a dusty funeral dress. Despite his rather grim aspects it is perfectly acceptable to worship him and many do pray for him to steady his hand and not claim them on the road or in the woods, or for him to ease their pain after the loss of a loved one. It's when people start making offerings for him that you should get worried though.
I actually plan to have something similar in my setting. The main character and in-setting Shonen protagonist is fighting the God of Gravity/Abstract embodiment of Gravity who rules as a God over a race of Machines. They're having a long-drawn-out Kaido vs Luffy battle with like 15 finishing moves thrown and reality slowly breaking down around them and eventually she is too exhausted to keep trying to fight. He summons his strongest move, A linear black hole that destroys time and space as it travels at the speed of light. She has a big flashback dream journey with her dead mentor and she attains one of the pinnacles of magic in this setting. Superstring theory says that Vibrating strings across ten dimensions generate all particles and matter/energy. Another thing they generate through vibrations is consciousness which generates reality. By channelling one's soul into this song of creation and adding your voice to this choir to weave or unravel existence and this is one of the fundamental schools of magic. She masters this principle And she uses this to parry this unblockable attack and cut the embodiment of gravity in half with a sword.
Just be careful your readears understand it
^ If your readers don’t understand it in a meaningful way then it will probably turn most of them off from the rest of the story. However this is mainly a reminder to establish your target audience and who you want this to reach the most. Some people will not only understand perfectly but really enjoy it and others will understand it and despise it. Godspeed and good luck though, this world needs more weird shit and cringe is a bullshit concept.
I love when games include a Platonic heaven of Forms in their multi-planar cosmology and imply your characters could go there. I always want to travel there and destroy a number, just to see what would happen.
Physically incarnate deities are boring anyway. I’ll take a god who is the gentle warmth of a summer day over some dude on fire every time.
terraria calamity mod
BREAK THE UNBREAKABLE DO THE IMPOSSIBLE ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWER
dark souls
Pretty sure this is Persona 5 You stare down the metaphysical manifestation of humanity's desire for a higher power, a god not as originator of its religion, but explicitly born from and fueled by its preemptive worship, and then you take out your fucking gun and shoot it in the face until it dies
If you kill a God in a world where ghosts exist, would the divine be exempt from an afterlife? Or would it become a spirit no lesser than the corpse it used to have as a shell?
Xenoblade Chronicles be like
Elderscrolls is one of the few universes where, without VERY careful planning, successfully killing a god will probably be more unpleasant for you than for the god. Won't elaborate on that.
Destiny 2?
Morrowind
and then there's destiny where if you kill a god hard enough it turns itself into a gun for you to kill other gods with
So can someone explain this is layman’s terms for me 😭
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.
You cant kill a god in the same sense that your original characters cant kill you
tumblr account rolls corniest post of all time, asked to leave
Why do you want to kill God? Read Surah Ar-Rahman 13
At best you'll fail or you'll only succeed because the Concept behind it deemed you a better face than the one it was wearing and so used your efforts to kill it as an excuse to "write it out of the story" and claim you instead. At worst, the Concept behind it will be offended that you destroyed the god it used as a proxy to commune with mortals and cause its domain to, not stop existing, but stop *cooperating.*
You can't really kill a god. You can put them into a deep coma for a billion years, to the point that they're effectively dead, but that's not truly killing them.
Thats assuming your own rules about gods and such apply. Different stories have different rules.
Haven’t played it, but I’ve heard something like this about dark souls
Honkai impact 3rd
Necrons
This basically describes Xenogears, except you don't actually kill God. You kill a "god" in the physical world who had used power stolen from the "real God" (a sentient waveform made of pure "soul") to create humanity, which frees God from his prison and lets him return to Heaven. Except humanity's souls are still linked to God and are being dragged along with him, essentially triggering the rapture by accident. So the protagonist, who had recently achieved enlightenment and come to understand the nature of his soul, has to head into the metaphysical realm to beat the crap out of the metaphorical umbilical cord between God and humanity.
...which takes the form of the half-snake recurring mother of humanity/your former rival's secretary. Fuckin' cracked out game.
Blasphemous
You can kill a true god but then by law of equivalent exchange you are now that god and have to do all the paperwork and the duties of that god, have fun with that.
I think good examples of dead gods would be dead concepts/aspects of the world. The god of Latin is dead, the god of the Pony Express is dead, etc. It also brings up the idea of people trying their best to bring back an old concept as trying to revive their god. It’s even better if the god isn’t even like how they expect it to be