Powerful Beings
What gods/aliens/other powerful entities exist in your setting?
How much influence do they have?
Now, don't get me wrong, the different races of the world have their various pantheons of gods, but those aren't true gods. Some are powerful entities that happen to align with what the races want. Others are demonic entities that come from an unknown plane of existence, seemingly manifest to embody the deity that the races describe in their religions. Basically, they're demi-gods at best. They do affect the world and they are thought of as gods, but they aren't gods. and are definitely not the God. So who is the main God?
Tartok is a mythical being known only to us, the readers, and the writer. He, She, or They, are a powerful being that spends or spent a lot of its time running a server for a game that they enjoyed several years back. It lies running and forgotten somewhere in "Tartok's" home realm. The real world. That's right. Big twist! The God isn't a god, but simply a guy playing a video game! Simulation Theory confirmed! And I quite literally mean that. Apandi is one planet within a simulation that spans an entire universe.
The game that Tartok played was called "The Craft Of The Gods" and is a game where the player acts like a God and goes from planet to planet changing and tweaking the worlds in as few steps as possible, to make a sentient race on the planet thrive and take over their local area of the galaxy. It's like Black & White or Spores meets Golf! The fewest strokes win. The game is often played between a few friends who divide up some of the races between themselves and then attempt to see who can get their races of sentient digital beings to spread the furthest throughout the galaxy. The server that Apandi lives upon was the last server that Tartok played "The Craft Of The Gods" on with his friends. Much like Minecraft in our own world, there are many different servers of the game idly running on PCs and Server racks in data centers paid for, yet forgotten. Destined to be shut down forever, maybe someday soon.
I had a friend in my youth that had a hefty portion of Young Adult novel series, The Animorphs. And one of the only parts of the stories that stuck with me throughout all these years has been the God-like being in the books known as Ellimist. Akin to a deity, Ellimist used to play a game similar to the one Tartok played. But this was before Ellimist became a God, back when he was one of many bird-like people who lived on a floating crystal continent kept afloat by the flapping of their collective wings. The game that he played was an escape from the reality of his existence of flapping forever or falling and dying.
Toomin could be best described as a "gamer"; he frequently played a life simulation game called Alien Civilizations, very popular among his people, which gave each player an alien species and tasked them with slightly modifying their environmental or evolutionary aspects, so as to cause change over time. The aim of the game was to keep the species alive for as long as possible; if the species became extinct, the player lost. Toomin's game name was Ellimist. He chose the name because he "thought it sounded breezy," not knowing how important the name would become.
I wanted to include my own take on this type of God in my world, even though they remain unseen and unnamed by the actual people of this digital world. To the people of Apandi, it is a truly real world. They think, they feel, they bleed, they die, they adapt and evolve. As a setting for a story, the world is as real as JRR's Middle Earth or D&D's Faerun, so this twist/tweak on the God trope is superficial flavor, at best. It's something just for me and maybe those curious enough to dive deep into if I was to take this onto a table-top.
Tartok has never interacted with this world in any way that survived into written or oral history. At one point he came to this world and made the tectonic plates start moving, which is what made the world of Apandi grow and flourish in ways that weren't possible before his intervention. He made a few other tweaks on other planets in different parts of the galaxy (but not within the solar system) to kickstart their growth towards sentient life, and when satisfied with his work he proceeded on towards a different galaxy within his control to start work on that one. Afer several weeks of this Tartok and his friends stopped logging in every day, but someone was always there to justify Tartok keeping the server online. Eventually it was the memories of the good times that kept the server on for Tartok, the people of Apandi, and countless other sentient races created in the super-simulator, The Craft Of The Gods.
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