Divine Domains

High Gods of Many Names and Faces

Faith is powerful, but so is doubt. There should be little room for doubt in a world where Gods and magic are real not only real, but many gods have active, confirmed presence in the universe, but still it finds a way-- especially for the real-world reader. Gods being real feels simpler when it comes to more specific deities like the goddess of memory, but the world is vast and its people varied, so what are you supposed to believe when there are about a dozen or so different Sun Gods worshipped by different groups of people across various regions? There is only one actual sun, so how can all fifteen sun gods be real? When so many different people tell extremely conflicting myths about the creation of the world by various different gods, and we know gods, in general, are real, how are we supposed to know who is right? Which gods are real, and which aren't? Well, it's sort of a chicken-or-the-egg kind of situation.

What's a God to the sheer laws of physics?

For the gods to make any sort of contact with the mortal realm is no small thing, even for the highest of divine entities-- in fact, even more so for the higher divine entities. The universe as a whole, which includes all material, metaphysical, spiritual, and divine realms, is a complex web of existence (For a more detailed explanation check the article on Universal Stratum here). The capital-G Gods, also called the High Divinities or empyreal entities, reside in the Ninth Realm-- it's called that not because it's actually specifically the ninth one in any kind of numerical order, but because there are considered to be nine High Divinities. The Ninth Realm and the mortal realm are the furthest from each other, and the mortal realm is also the smallest one, while the Ninth Realm is the largest.

The true forms of the High Divinities are so ultra-gigantically enormous, comparable in size and mass to supergiant stars, that it is literally physically difficult for them to access the smaller realms. They reach out with parts of themselves, having to condense and split into more parts as they pass through the smaller realms, branching further out, eventually managing to just barely make a whisper of contact with the mortal world-- of course, to mortals, that whisper feels more like a deafening roar. All these reaching tendrils of divinity, if imaged, would resemble an exhaustive map of the entire human nervous system, each of the nerve endings being the forms of the gods as mortals know and worship them. So if you follow the thread from any one god as recognized by mortals far back enough, you will eventually find that all of them connect back to one of these nine High Divinities.

The Nine High Divinities

Rather than think of the High Divinities as gods-as-individuals themselves, with their own names and appearances, it is simpler to consider them as representations of their domain, instead. The nine empyreal domains are: Light, Dark, Chaos, Law, Life, Death, Secrets, Power, and Creation. These domains are the source of all the rest of existence, from whence come all other spirits, entities, metaphysical realms, energy, and magic.

These domains often intersect, and many gods trace to two or more domains. Certain dieties of the sun or moon might originate from the domains of Light, or Power, or both. Nature dieties typically come from Life, Creation, or Law. Veniathan, a goddess of time and memory, comes from Life and Law. Her sister, the goddess of fate, came from Life and Secrets.

Other classifications of gods and deities

Different gods fall into different categories depending on how powerful, or in a sense 'undiluted' they are. The highest of order of god are called Empyreal Gods. Next are Luminus Gods-- very major but not the most powerful, then Eminent Gods-- still considered major but not as powerful as Luminus, then Diadema Gods, which are considered minor gods, but still Whole Gods.

There are other divine entities, deities, that are somewhere between spirits and gods. Different levels of deities don't have fancy classification names, rather mostly just referred to as either major or minor deities.