Godcrafter's Guild

"My attempts at creating useful gods have been unsatisfactory thus far, and I have come to the conclusion that my methodology is at fault. When I initiated the experimental team, I envisioned that it would be a simple matter of large-scale mindweaving to induce the population to believe whatever I required, and allowing that to cascade through The Egregoric Force and generate the gods I had designed. While the theory was sound, the application has been problematic. Directly altering the beliefs of the population has resulted in flat, forgettable, and shortlived Numina, very different from the wild variety. After spending an inordinate amount of time adjusting the mental states I was inducing in the thinking populace, I have given up on mindweaving as a suitable tool. It seems that gods cannot simply be built like houses - they must be cultivated, like gardens. Very well. I shall become a gardener of gods." - from the lab journals of Illustrata, two years before the publication of the Godcrafter Manifesto

The Godcrafter's Guild was an organization founded by the Clarati sorcerer Illustrata, with the intention of identifying and deploying techniques to spawn new gods via the Egregoric Force. After centuries of trying and failing to use large scale mental manipulation, Illustrata finally founded the guild as an attempt at a new approach, focused around using carefully crafted and disseminated stories to guide the forces of collective belief. Over a four hundred year period, the Godcrafter's Guild developed several techniques that could yield success, although the final result was never as predicatable as Illustrata wanted. While the Guild itself scattered after Illustrata was killed in a duel with Fulmen, several of its techniques were preserved and have been used to create new gods.

The Godcrafter Manifesto

When Illustrata finally decided he needed a new approach, he threw himself into researching the ways in which naturally occuring gods and spirits formed, a topic he had only glossed over in his previous work. This led him to the conclusion that a single entity, no matter how powerful, could not successfully create a new god. Numina were the outgrowth of culture and community, and their nature was formed in the stories told about them. Most importantly, those stories had to be shared around the community, and allowed to change and grow with the retelling.

Upon examining this process in detail, Illustrata realized that in order to get the specifically designed gods he wanted to create, the stories would need to be carefully curated, monitored, and tended. This was not a job for a single person - and in fact, having only a single perspective driving it was one of the reasons his previous attempts had failed. Only a group of storytellers could hope to manage the undertaking. Reluctantly, Illustrata took steps to found such a group.

He wrote "The Godcrafter's Manifesto", a document which laid out the mission of the guild to create new gods for the benefit of their creators. This seemed to Illustrata to be the perfect lure for the kind of storyteller he wanted to recruit, and he had copies delivered throughout the region and then waited for people to come to him. It didn't work.

Finally, Illustrata took to kidnapping bards via magic and forcing them to read the document. The startled and terrified people gave some critiques, but none were willing to tell him why his attempts had failed until one older storyteller convinced the sorcerer to actually go into a tavern and listen to him work. After that, Illustrata conscripted the old woman to handle recruiting for him, and the Guild was truly begun. The name of this storyteller has been lost to time (reportedly by her own wish to not be included in the Guild histories).

The Godcrafted

Finally, Illustrata was able to begin his project of god crafting in earnest. He drafted design after design for the guild storytellers to tell tales of, and recorded the results. Most of the early attempts failed outright, or produced gods that were totally unlike the designs Illustrata created. But over time, both the sorcerer and the bards got better. The stories grew more interesting and capable of inspiring a particular sort of belief in the characters, while Illustrata learned the limits of what he could hope for. Eventually, the ranks of the Godcrafted began to grow, and Illustrate began to design a whole pantheon of truly useful gods (at least, they would be useful to him).

Death and Dissolution

Before Illustrata's grand pantheon of the Godcrafted could take hold, a great catastrophe struck the Clarati Empire, causing the entire island of Sange and the captial city of Luxe to vanish entirely. In the aftermath, the surviving Clarati on Ynys seemed to go insane, abandoning all their projects in a quest to annihilate each other. This behavior has never been understood by those who were not Clarati, but it spelled the end of their rule over Ynys, and of the Godcrafter's Guild. Illustrata was one of the earliest casualties in the Clarati's internal struggles, killed in a duel against the sorcerer Fulmen.

The Guild had never been popular in Lifworðig, but had been protected by Illustrata's power. With the sorcerer gone, the guildmembers felt threatened and exposed. The gods they had crafted began to drift away from their proscribed development almost immediately, responding to the changes wrought by the new Age of Warlocks, and some of them were also growing hostile to the guild. In an emergency meeting shortly after Illustrata was confirmed dead, the members dissolved the Guild and resolved to scatter, taking up the lives of wandering bards and storytellers.

Most of the techniques they developed were lost in the years after the guild broke apart. Some have been preserved, and a few organizations have actively collected what remains. The most complete record known to exist is in the hands of the Lorekeepers of Foxbridge, who used the techniques to create their Librarian (after a somewhat embarrassing attempt that resulted in Billy the Goat). More recently, both the Cult of the Clarati and the Tirta Baya have been attempting to recreate the skills of the Godcrafters, for very different reasons. You can read more about those groups here.

Illustrata

Dissolution Date

2997

Founders

• Illustrata

Location

Lifworðig

It Began With a Bridge

One of the events which led to the formation of the Godcrafter's Guild was the spontaneous creation of the god known as the Aurelian Bridge. Illustrata had used magic to create and maintain the bridge as a convenience, a feat which the Clarati considered insignificant, but greatly impressed the citizens of Lifworðig. While the sorcerer was trying to force the creation of new gods via magical suggestions, stories were growing up around the magnificent and mystical bridge he had constructed. When the Aurelian Bridge began to manifest as a god of commerce, trade, and bargains, Illustrata was extremely irritated that this accidental creation put all of his intentional efforts to shame. Still, he was able to learn from the incident, and the Guild always considered the Aurelian Bridge to be the first among the Godcrafted. You can read more about the bridge here.

Speeding Things Up

Normally, it takes years or decades to create a new Numina. Illustrata didn't want to spend that much time on it, especially during the period where they were still testing basic techniques. In order to expedite the creation of new gods, he consulted with Celestina and Niten on how to modify the local Folk Magic to create an increased rate of Numina manifestation around Lifworðig. Using what the other two Clarati had learned in their experiments, Illustrata was able to create a metaphysical environment where Numina came into being much more rapidly - sometimes with very little provocation at all.

This change has not faded in the years since the Guild disbanded. Lifworðig today is known as the 'City of a Thousand Gods', and inhabitants think this might be underestimating things. Numina tend to appear for brief moments, and then vanish as whatever confluence of thought that inspired them falls apart. Some of these Numina have taken drastic measures to remain in existenc, and the Numina Salvation Society was formed to help these small gods, and to prevent them from having to seek other methods of remaining in people's thoughts and prayers.