[GM Notes] 10/09: Exploring the mess of fantasy cosmology

Here’s another little update (this time specifically about tabletop) that’s more to organize my thoughts than anything else. It’s a mess.

In august and this month I’ve been spending a lot of time buried in my GM campaign notes, trying to figure stuff out for the These Twilight Years setting, especially the cosmology.

I didn’t expect to be stuck on it for so long, but since I’m trying to change the focus of my setting on People in a fantasy world where magic and ghosts and gods are all real I guess it makes sense. I’m inverting the relationship in a way since med-fan cosmology tends to start with the assumption that gods made everything, and I’m writing about gods as being from People, directly made and influenced by them. This doesn’t mean the gods are not “real”, but I think it aligns better with real belief systems where the god/people relationship goes both ways. Just because something is a belief doesn’t mean it’s not real or material, it is made real through ritual and social practice, a social reality.

There’s a tendency I don’t like where if something is seen as a “belief” (for example local spirits or a pantheon of gods), then it means all of it is purely “made-up” and not real, so in order to reconcile this fantasy settings simply make those beliefs real in a strange metaphysical way. It’s what I’d call a linear, or metaphysical kind of binary being applied that simply does not match reality, where things are either “real” or “not real”, where everything falls into neat little idealised categories. Yet we understand both the reality and how “made-up” social and political systems are, how they are both incorporeal and materially real. This tendency underplays how real beliefs and social systems are in the real world, and then you have writers awkwardly trying to make them “real” in the fantasy world through this idealistic lens.

A lot of med-fan and especially D&D adjacent stuff is all built on similar foundations, and in this case the D&D cosmological foundation is a weird reappropriated mishmash and some of it makes sense but mostly because we’re used to the internal logic. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, but hey I’m getting really annoyed at some of the weirdness specifically because I’m trying to figure things out and change them. D&D also set an annoying precedent of just taking every single term or mythological name in existence and reusing it for something entirely unrelated, blurring the meaning and history of those beliefs even more.

A lot of fantasy cosmology feels like crudely applying modern monotheistic views on older systems of belief such as polytheism or animism, in a sense keeping the “aesthetic” of something like polytheism or animism but erasing it’s actual substance. Even worse, this crude lens is also overwhelmingly from “western” writers so it tends to fall into an even more constrained fetishizing.

I’ve been watching some videos and I’m currently looking for good comprehensive sources on stuff like this, but my goal is essentially to tweak the existing cosmology into something that matches better with real things, or at least “feels” closer to something really human.

I’m exploring some interesting threads, in broad strokes starting from some of the earliest systems of belief (usually all described as “animism” but that’s probably not anthropologically serious) that I’ve looked at. I’m aware that this is also doing a reduction, which I guess is kind of inevitable in some way, but here I’m trying to imagine systems of belief for a specific region of my world, for specific groups of people. I don’t think a cosmology that works for a whole continent or world makes sense for a pre-modern setting anyway, in a non-globalized world you probably can’t have a global system of belief, at best roughly compatible ones. Some amount of reappropriation is probably unavoidable as well, since even when focusing on European stuff the older you go the more you have to cross-reference elsewhere to find patterns, as well as follow the European migrations backwards.

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There is usually “this world” of the living and “the other world” which contains all that is unseen including what we would call spirits of all kinds and dead ancestors. Those “spirits” are, from what I understand, the category that later specializes differently in different cultures but with general similarities, in no particular order and making sweeping generalizations because no one is stopping me:

• The local spirits directly representing things (or tied/“anchored” to them), places or a whole area, of rocks, trees, rivers or whole forests.

• The powerful spirits or “gods”, more primordial entities or avatars of the forces of nature, which can be very similar to local spirits. They are less tied to a place, being more about things like rain, the day/night cycle and other large events. Maybe some local spirits can also transform into these larger “gods” as time goes on and their perceived domain grows (starting from a local river spirit, to the spirit of the whole river, to a spirit of all rivers, etc..), eventually disconnecting from a specific place?

• The concept of ancestors, spirits of the dead which can give counsel and possess us, they also have wishes and burials that need to be respected, which interestingly seems to be very positive at first (in the examples I’ve seen at least), and later on shifts more and more into a fear of the dead and what they might do if we displease them. Shamanism is often related, as this role is usually one of intermediary or messenger between the two worlds, hence between the living and the dead. This seems related to later “daemons” or “genies” which represent unexplained forces affecting people’s lives, whether that be good luck or a sickness (often from being possessed by the spirit), and are a kind of intermediary between the gods and the human world.

• The guardian spirits which are similar to local spirits or daemons, that usually protect a place of a family. This seems very mixed in with other categories, and I assume any kind of spirit can slowly change into one of these if it becomes tied to a particular community or family.

• Finally the fun concept of Egregore which I’ve only really seen in weird esoteric and occult sources and very much feels like the typical nonsense out of 19th century spiritualism (I don’t think all modern spiritualism is bad per say, but a lot of it feels like misunderstood and reappropriated beliefs made into an orientalist or fetishized hobby), but the idea is useful. An egregore is basically aggregated beliefs and will, a sort of collective tulpa manifested by the group. It is usually made with a specific purpose in mind, and needs to be regularly fuelled through rituals. It’s a cool word and can be used to describe a lot of real things related to collective beliefs and group behaviour, so I want to use it.

Then a lot of these things change and mix into polytheistic, henotheistic and monotheistic systems. The Manichean idea of good vs evil, or good coming from god and evil being either the absence of god of some vaguely defined entity, seems to come with henotheism and especially monotheism. Before that, everything seems pretty grey, no spirit being entirely good or evil, the very notion of a larger “good” or “evil” doesn’t fit at all.

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So this is a big mix of things and obviously a lot of belief systems only match a few of those elements, it’s a very broad reduction, but there are a lot of things that I grabbed on and want to make into something coherent. I like the idea that a fantasy world’s cosmology changed over time according with the mortals’ systems of belief, and being able to see that cosmological history in the planes and gods themselves. I want a cosmology that is centred on people and emerges from them rather than a grand godly design, which seems to me to be a crude application of modern monotheistic views on older systems of belief.

My best bet to make something coherent, interesting and to avoid reappropriating stuff in a way that just erases good substance from the real world is to figure out a core logic to my own cosmology and go from there, only reusing/referencing real concepts and names where needed. The balance between making it my own and making it something that at least vaguely makes anthropological sense is a difficult one, especially since I’m not an anthropologist.

I have the general idea, and more importantly I know the why, I know what I want to say and the stories I want to tell with it, but now I need to figure out how to twist all the existing fantasy elements and make them fit. It’s a lot to rework: where do the elemental planes go, where do the aligned planes go, what of the fey and shadow world, what of dreams, what of undead or ghosts, what are the gods and where do they come from, what is the soul?

I’ll figure it out and talk about it here in a more coherent form, but boy are my notes a complete mess right now.

If you have any good sources on this, on the historical development of belief systems, animism and spiritualism, or anything that gives a good overview of those things, I’ll take it!

(Continued in Part 2.)