Easily one of my favorite tabletop stories of all time. I only wish I knew if this was a system or some kind of homebrew thing created by the DM.
Back when this was submitted on the alien site, a few of the suggestions were:
- Exalted
- FATAL
- "Musta been free form or something"
Exalted was the most popular suggestion, though not by a wide margin.
No fucking way this was FATAL.
This has all the marks of free form to me, with a bit of rules as a framework, but if not, it could have been Exalted.
Transcription copied verbatim from the amazing work done by @[email protected] in [email protected].
Image Transcription: Greentext known as Desirebro's Tale, 1/9
[Transcriber's Note: I got requested to transcribe this yesterday by /u/Thatstealthy_spy over in /r/TranscribersOfReddit's sister sub, /r/DescriptionPlease. (If you ever see an image anywhere on reddit that you want transcribed by us, post it there!) While this has been posted here before, it's never been transcribed by us. I thought you guys here would enjoy the fruits of my labors. Happy reading!]
Our campaign started with only a bit of flourish. Our Game Master announced himself as the greatest God in a grand pantheon, who dwelt in a time and space that no other god could reach, judging the deeds of all lesser beings. By his hand the universe turned, and by his word all things trembled.
This was actually rather subdued compared to his usual drama.
We would each take the role of demigods, half-gods, barely-gods, or however you wanted to say that we were not true gods. Our greatest power would be our immortality, which allowed us to walk within the realm of the Greater Gods, and also kept us from being truly killed by anything less than the terrible means it took to kill a god.
Our bodies, no stronger than that of ordinary men, could still be destroyed in the mortal realm, but we would simply reform within the Halls of the Immortals.
Our other power depended on which god we would serve. After much discussion, we managed to settle on our characters.
The first one to decide was the demigod Qorg, a servant of the God of War. His choice of power was simply great strength.
Next was Handelhan, a servant of the God of Knowledge. His choice was the ability to read minds, and our Game Master made certain he understood that his power (and all of our powers) could not be used upon divine beings, but only mortals.
After some thinking, Pleth came into being, as a servant of the God of Nature. He could breathe motion into trees, allowing them to move according to either his will or their own.
Finally, I decided to serve the God of Desire, as the barely-god Cym. My ability would be to convince mortals that they can satisfy one of their desires with something else. If they were hungry, for instance, I could tell them that a glass of water would satiate their hunger.
With our characters set, our GM explained that though we served the Gods, we also sought after their positions and power, and it was up to us to decide how to walk this twisted path of subservience and subterfuge.
We four demigods easily saw the benefits of working together, and as Qorg began to carve a stronghold at the top of a mountain with his bare hands, we discussed what method we would take to obtain true godhood. A century passed before Qorg was satisfied with our Citadel, but it took another two before our plan was ready to be set into motion.
Handelhan spent his three centuries gathering lore about the gods, learning what he could about their natures. Ten of the largest chambers within our Citadel became the Library of God Lore, filled with mortal scholars who thought that looking into the nature of divinity would reveal the truth of the world. Those scholars worked quite hard in their contemplations, but I daresay that though they revealed a great number of interesting truths about the Gods, none of them died satisfied.
Pleth was the wandering sort, and didn't actually like the mountain too much. He helped us in many ways, by providing our citadel with living furniture and shelves, and even managed to produce a tree that grew blank books rather than nuts or fruit. But beyond that, he was aloof and distant, only appearing once every decade or so to check on his trees. I think part of him was conflicted, in that he wondered if him becoming the God of Nature was truly what was best for Nature, and there were many times that I wish my power could work upon him.
Qorg spent his time after finishing our stronghold sleeping. He'd occasionally wake up, go down the mountain, fight in whatever war was available, die, and then get resurrected and go back to sleep.
I spent most of my time figuring out the limitations of my ability. The foremost restriction was that I could only shift desires towards reasonable mistakes. I couldn't make someone who is tired desire running instead of sleeping, but I could make someone who really wanted bananas instead think they wanted plantains. I couldn't increase someone's desire, couldn't decrease their desires, and I think, though I'm not sure, but I think every time I used my power, the affected person became a little less happy.
With three centuries of planning behind us, it was time to make our move, to establish ourselves as the new gods of War, Knowledge, Nature, and Desire.
Our first step was an overall decrease in worship. We had to reduce the power of the Gods we served, in order to limit how much they could interfere with our plans. By reducing the amount of followers of these four Gods, we could then proceed to form new sects of worshippers that worshipped particular aspects of the Gods, with those aspects being us.
Reducing Nature worship was easy. With Qorg at the head, we spent 50 years leading armies to destroy tribal cultures. Pleth, in order to not raise any suspicion in the God he served, was absent from this campaign. That was also good for another reason, as we slaughtered many people of various levels of innocence who genuinely loved nature.
It was during our last campaign that we encountered another demigod, one that tried to oppose us. Our army was beset by all manner of animals, and we would have been routed if Qorg had not simply marched singlehandedly into the enemy camp and crushed the enemy demigod by throwing a bison at him. To our good fortune, the demigod survived, albeit with his body in shambles, and after submitting him to some sedatives Handelhan dragged him back to the Library of God Lore.
With most tribal societies a fraction of the size they once were, the worship of Nature had decreased rapidly. Pleth had been commanded by his God to do what he could for the remaining worshippers, and in only a decade there were small shrines dedicated to Pleth himself, though it was through an image of a tree with a large eye at the center of its trunk.
We tried for Desire next. Yet, it wasn't quite so easy. There were few people that outwardly worshipped Desire, as my God was not exactly one of the major players in the grand pantheon. The only shrines dedicated to Desire were small and often hidden, and all were rather sensual in design (which tended to actually detract from genuine worship).
We tried to tackle the issue of decreasing the worship of Desire by funding ascetic orders, but after three decades without a drop of change, we abandoned that idea. Perhaps our plan failed because the worship of Desire was small already, but I think it was more of a case where these ascetic orders just didn’t have a large enough influence, and perhaps that providing them with additional funds we actually managed to reduce their ability to resist desire.
Those three decades were not wasted, however. Pleth had gathered a decent size following, especially after Qorg in a new mantle helped defend their tribes from the remnants of our old army. With a substantial amount of worshippers, Pleth obtained a new power, the ability to speed up the growth of trees from years to mere hours. In combination with the ability to animate them, Pleth could create a small army wherever he wanted one, but he had some misgivings about doing so. He didn’t think it was wise to militarize the forces of nature, and we agreed to not press our luck with forces we weren’t in complete control of.
Handelhan had also been rather busy. With the animal-controlling demi-god’s body under constant sedation and a number of scholars working around the clock experimenting on it, he had made major breakthroughs in being able to transfer divine essence from one person to another. Though nothing truly useful just yet, but Handelhan promised us results by the end of the century.
We put Desire on the backburner, and decided it would be a good time to focus on reducing the God of Knowledge’s power. Handelhan went about this in a fairly straightforward manner, by going to each of the great schools and examining all of the teachers’ minds, seeking out the most intelligent people. With my aid, we managed to convince them that they didn’t actually want to teach anyone, but instead to continue their research elsewhere. We established an academy of all the brightest minds, and with both Handelhan and I working tirelessly, slowly pushed them towards researching things that would help our goals.
The teachers who refused to join us, even after I tried to persuade them and Handelhan tried to use his knowledge of their innermost secrets to blackmail them, were simply removed. After forty years, the decrease in education and general knowledge was rather tangible, and Handelhan was summoned to a grand meeting of the God of Knowledge and all of the demigods that served him.
Handelhan was spared any blame thanks to him having helped found one of the last bastions of knowledge, even though our academy was more of an intellectual prison than anything else. Without enough information for him to act, the God of Wisdom ended the meeting without deciding upon anything. The meeting did however prove rather useful to us, as Handelhan uncovered an opponent in the form of a demigod named Maleon.
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Image Transcription: Desirebro's Tale, 2/9
Maleon was correct in thinking Handelhan was actually working against the God of Wisdom, but Handelhan was surprisingly adept at playing the fool. By the end of the meeting, Maleon’s accusations had accomplished nothing but incite Handehan to mark him down as the second demigod to be added to his collection.
The capture of Maleon went almost too smoothly. Though Maleon has immune to our powers due to his divinity, he had chosen to live a life amongst mortals, and had even chosen a mortal wife. Handelhan managed to approach her and read through her memories, discovering each of Maleon’s weaknesses. Handelhan also asked for me to try and direct her affections away from Maleon and towards himself, but I told him that I failed, as I would rather that he think I was weak rather than uncooperative.
In the end, a demigod whose only power was to read books at an accelerated rate proved to be a rather easy capture. With the aid of the knowledge taken from his wife, Qorg managed to sneak into Maleon’s keep and subdue him without much trouble. Once Maleon was sedated and brought back to our Citadel, Handelhan began to experiment.
While Handelhan was busy in our ever-deepening dungeons, and Pleth was gathering followers beneath the banner of the One-eyed tree, Qorg and I rode out to sow some general chaos. Qorg needed to spread the fires of war in order to appease the God he served, while I had to figure out how to do something constructive with my time. In the end, I just ended up convincing generals who wanted peace that the only way they could obtain it was by preemptively attacking all potential threats around them. Somehow, this satirical irony didn’t particularly excite me in any way.
While traveling with Qorg, I found out that he didn’t particularly trust Handelhan. If Handelhan did manage to figure out a way to transfer divinity, Qorg feared that Handelhan might one day try and take away our powers. I found this to be a rather amusing idea, but I told Qorg not to worry, since if Handelhan tried to betray us, at the very least we could warn the Greater Gods to ruin whatever plan he had. This did not seem to comfort Qorg, but cutting his way through an enemy army did seem to calm his nerves somewhat.
At the end of the century, Handelhan made good on his promise, and showed us the dried up form of Maleon. The youthful appearance of a demigod had been taken from him, and ultimately he never awoke from the sleep Handelhan had placed him under, dying some years later while under the care of his wife. But, none of us spared a thought for our enemy, since Handelhan continued his demonstration by rapidly reading a novel in the span of a minute. Both Qorg and I were rather impressed, and we immediately decided that capturing other demigods would be our current task for the next few centuries.
When Pleth returned from his wanderings, we convinced him to absorb the divine essence of the animal-controlling demigod we had captured so long ago. With those powers added to his own, Pleth was truly a formidable force, and the cult dedicated to him flourished under his protection. Upon hearing that our first priority was capturing other demigods, Pleth agreed with Qorg that we should try and capture a servant of the God of War.
Qorg already had a target in mind. He was a rival demigod named Brask whom Qorg had met many times on the battlefield, with each of their encounters ending with one of their temporary deaths. Qorg suggested him because he’d be easy to locate, since Qorg knew what areas he typically gravitated towards, and also because Qorg had a good chance of defeating him alone, and a very good chance of defeating him with Pleth’s aid.
We found Brask leading a rather sizable but rough-looking army, and I spent a year following their band. It would have been a tough year, but my power made it rather easy for me to live amongst the soldiers, since I could direct any ire towards me towards any of the other camp followers. My presence alone seemed to sap a great amount of the morale from the army, with everyone in a constant sour mood because I kept misdirecting their anger towards each other. By the end of the year, the army had been reduced to a third of its original size thanks to casualties and deserters, and Qorg couldn’t wait any longer.
The army that Qorg had assembled within the year was quite impressive, somewhere near twice the size of Brask’s. Brask, not being a fool, fled from Qorg’s army and holed up his main force inside a castle. After Qorg had finished slaughtering the out-lying forces, he was stuck staring at a fully-stocked and fully-garrisoned castle.
I had changed roles by then, from a camp follower to a castle attendant, and while I spent my days doing menial chores I didn’t bother to do anything overly clever. Brask was very unlike Qorg, extremely intelligent to the point where if I acted too boldly within the confines of the castle, he might be able to trace any chaos I caused back to me. So, I had to be content with simply using my power to sow misery everywhere, primarily by convincing people that the best way to ease their fears was to eat and pretend like everything was fine.
Brask, who’s divine gift was complete mastery over any weapon he held, spent a large portion of his time instructing his elite soldiers. Watching Brask, and imagining Qorg with his skills, made me wonder if we’d be able to conquer the entire world after we captured him.
The rest of Brask’s time was spent defending against Qorg, who was simply an utter asshole. Being on the inside of the siege, I realized that Qorg was the worst kind of opponent you could ask for. Every few days, he would sit himself into a catapult, launch himself over the walls, slaughter as many soldiers as he could before either he got tired or Brask himself entered the fray, and then Qorg would just run back and dive into the moat, just to return to his camp and give his fresh wounds a chance to mend.
By the fifth time Qorg had done this, I realized that he was really just playing around, trying to extend this last battle against his rival as long as possible. I often wondered why Pleth didn’t simply overrun the castle with animals and trees, but not so much as I wondered what Handelhan was doing during all this.
With his food stores having been depleted far quicker than he had anticipated, Brask was faced with a hard decision at the end of the third month. Assembling his last remaining soldiers, Brask decided to make an attempt to break the line surround the castle, even if it meant leaving the other castle inhabitants, myself included, to fend for ourselves. Though the men would likely all be killed and the women raped and worse, it was hard for ourselves to hate the man as Brask delivered a rather moving speech explaining his reasons, and how hard it had been to reach his decision.
As Brask and his soldiers rode off, I helped the remaining men gather the women together and for everyone to cram themselves into the innermost keep. There was an incredible amount of weeping, from the men and women alike, and I could practically feel how strong their desire to live was. I knew that the best I could do for them was to get to Qorg as soon as possible and stop his army from sacking the castle, but that all depended on whether Qorg survived his encounter with Brask.
Qorg had allowed his men to spread the line too thin, and Brask easily broke it. He and his men would have likely managed to escape if Pleth did not command their horses to return. It was somewhat pitiful, with Brask’s men screaming at their own mounts, which refused to listen to them no matter how hard they kicked at their sides. With the horses gouged and bloodied by the time they rode right back into the center of Qorg’s army, the soldiers upon them urged their commander to surrender. Brask, in a sign of complete surrender, threw down his lance and sword, all that separated him from a normal man.
Qorg was in a good mood, and offered Brask the right to duel for the lives of his men. Brask agreed to a duel at sunrise, which allowed me enough time to sneak into Qorg’s camp. We had quite a feast that night, celebrating our victory and our reunion. Pleth refused to celebrate, since he claimed we hadn’t won quite just yet, but Qorg feasted and drank until morning.
The duel didn’t start with any real ceremony. A ring of men surrounded Brask and Qorg, and they simply rushed at each other. Qorg showed no sign of weariness from having spent the night partying, and attacked Brask with a large club fashioned out of iron. Despite Qorg’s ferocity, Brask could keep up with the incredible speed of the club, dodging each blow and landing several of his own with his sword.
When Qorg finally landed a hit, a gruesome blow that crushed Brask’s left pauldron, shattered his shoulder, crippled his arm, and drove him an inch into the hard ground, it was too late. Brask endured the attack, and then stabbed Qorg several times, felling him.
It was an unwanted outcome, but not unexpected. As Qorg lay dying, shouting obscenities, we watched as Brask and his men climbed onto their horses and rode off, with none of Qorg’s men bothering to give chase.
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Image Transcription: Desirebro's Tale, 3/9
Pleth waited until Brask was riding close to a ravine before he had the man’s horse buck him off, a somewhat cruel end for a man who had endured so much. The rest of Brask’s riders tried to stop their horses, but they continued right past their leader. While some men did jump off their horses, they did not manage to reach Brask before the mountain lions did, and the beasts dragged him all the way back to Pleth.
The crippled man was all but dead, and we tried far harder to save his life then we had to save Qorg’s. Thankfully, Handelhan showed up, and managed to get Brask into a state of a sustainable coma. He also explained how much he had learned thanks to his speed-reading ability, and how he had become able to combine his two abilities, reading people’s minds all the way to their deepest aspects in only a few seconds. Having spent a good amount of time scanning the minds of the brightest people within his academy, by his reckoning, he had become the smartest person in the world.
While Handelhan took Brask’s battered body back to our citadel, Pleth and I tried to restore some sense of order to Qord’s army. Without Qord’s leadership, the army was reduced to just an enormous gang of bandits, and to my dismay they not only sacked the castle but began to terrorize the countryside.
Pleth ended up eventually managing to corral them with his powers, and even managed to make a good majority of them convert to the worship of the One-eyed tree, but that did little to alleviate the bitter feelings within me. I had spent far too long among the mortals, I knew, and it was difficult to forget the faces of the men and women weeping as they huddled in the bottom of the keep, their fates utterly outside of their control.
When Qorg, resurrected and angry, returned, he only stayed for a few days in the citadel before he rode off to fight in some war. It was several months before he returned, and Handelhan was forced to deliver him some unfortunate news.
Brask had died a few days before Qorg’s return. Though Handelhan had done everything he could to save his life, in the end he had been forced to extract Brask’s divinity in order to prevent him from being resurrected. Not wanting to waste what we had worked so hard to obtain, Handelhan himself had taken Brask’s divinity.
This story was plausible enough, but the shift in power had become rather dramatic. Qorg had been counting on Brask’s skill to bolster his own might, but now he was forced to contend with Handelhan possibly having the upper-hand in a straight fight. Qorg did not voice any of his anger, but I doubt Handelhan would have needed to read his mind to know what he was thinking.
His only solace came in the form of Pleth, who we could count on being stronger than Handelhan and keeping him in check. But, with Pleth quite busy managing his cult and generally wandering, Qorg felt far too vulnerable within our stronghold. Without wasting any time, he began planning our next capture, a woman he had heard about in rumors known as the Queen of the Archers, who was most definitely a demigod if the tales surrounding her were true.
Part 2
I followed after Qorg, and we journeyed far south. Here, the gods we served had different names than the one’s we were accustomed to, but the God of War was still the God of War. We chased after rumors of the Queen of Archers, and I learned the useful trick of shifting a person’s desire to not be killed by Qorg into the desire to tell him everything they knew. It was still many months before we found her, dwelling among a large band of warrior-priests.
Ceret was indeed a demigod, and she had the dreadful ability to never miss with her bow. After observing her devastate a group of bandits while standing on a distant mountain, Qorg decided it would be best to try and befriend the woman. I was somewhat surprised, since Qorg was the last person I had ever thought would try to avoid a battle, but as we melded into the group of warrior-priests, I realized these people were just the kind that Qorg liked best.
After meeting with Ceret, I found her to be rather amiable, and Qorg was practically smitten with her. She was bold and beautiful (like most divine beings were), and could fire four arrows from her bow and strike the heart of a man coming from each of the four directions. Utterly devoted to the God of War, I often wondered what she would think if she knew Qorg was trying to unseat him.
We spent several years simply following along with her band, with Qorg suppressing his strength to mortal levels (but still leagues stronger than me). It was an odd time, because I don’t think we actually had any sort of plan, and Qorg was simply doing whatever he wanted. A part of me thought that he was still nursing the wound of losing to his rival in their final encounter, and I was more than willing to give him some time to settle into himself.
We encountered some trouble in the form of a demigod who served the God of Nature, who had mastery over fire and flames. His priests and the followers of Ceret clashed, resulting in a disastrous battle. Ceret’s arrows turned to ash as they neared him, and Qorg was stubbornly trying to hide his divinity. In the end, I rode forth, my pride far exceeding my ability, and was charred to a crisp.
Awakening in the Halls of the Immortals, I realized it had been many centuries since I had returned there. I felt compelled to wander the pristine halls, and only once I had reached the Gardens of Desire that I realized why the urge to wander had overcome me.
The God of Desire did not want to approach me, he wanted me to approach him. Though he was a comparatively weak deity when placed among the greater gods, the difference between us was greater than that between a king and a rat that dwelt within the sewers. My God wanted to know how I had promoted desire throughout the land, and I could only answer that I had prevented people from reaching true satisfaction.
I was offered a few bits of advice, mostly that denying people satisfaction for too long would simply kill their desire, but also that providing satisfaction would prevent their desires from growing too strong. Too strong desires, he warned, led to people’s ruin far more than anything else. I thanked my god, then was left to wonder just how much the God of Desire knew about my own desires.
When I returned to the mortal world, I decided it was best to leave Qorg to himself and to spend some time with Handelhan. Mostly, it was because I really couldn’t just return from the dead without blowing Qorg’s whole attempt at poorly pretending to be a mortal, but also because Handelhan had been spending much too much time by himself.
He asked me to help twist the desires of several people within his library and academy, and also allowed me to observe some of his experiments. Some of these were performed on himself, as he was trying to find a way to remove only a portion of a person’s divinity rather than all of it, partially so that he could potentially transfer Brask’s weapon skills to Qorg.
A more pressing goal for him was his attempts at increasing the longevity of mortals. While working amongst the researchers, I found out that Handelhan had actually managed to get himself a mortal wife a decade ago. When I asked Handelhan about this, he said that I should understand how powerful desires can be, and he had fallen in love with a researcher after reading her mind and becoming hopelessly enamored with it.
The fact that she was quite beautiful might have also played a part.
Though she was still rather young, it would be only a few decades before her lifespan was over, and Handelhan would not permit something like that to happen.
With no captured demigods left, Handelhan was quite willing to give a portion of his divinity to his wife, but the hurdles he was facing were quite high. He had to not only successfully split his divinity, but to successfully transfer it to a mortal, something we weren’t even certain was possible. In theory, there was a chance it would work, but there were so many complications that could occur that I was very reluctant to try before we were certain of what we were doing.
But, Handelhan was working on quite a strict clock, with his wife not becoming any younger. After assisting him in his experiments, he asked me to help either Pleth or Qorg capture a demigod as soon as possible, in order to try and transfer their power to his wife. As I left to join up with Pleth, he mentioned casually that he’d prefer it if the demigod was a servant of Desire.
Pleth and the cult of the One-eyed Tree were constructing a rather grand temple when I met up with him. After telling him about Handelhan’s wife, which Pleth referred to as Handelhan’s folly, I tried my best to persuade him to help Handelhan in his endeavor. Though Pleth argued that a mortal’s death was as natural as their life, and that granting one divinity would go against nature, I bullied him by saying that we all owed Handelhan for his many years of hard work.
After adorning ourselves in the garments of pilgrims, we left the construction of the temple in the hands of a young but brilliant architect, who promised to finish it within thirty years. With swarms of bloodthirsty birds and beasts surrounding the temple as its guardians, we journeyed off to meet with Qorg.
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