God's Whereabouts/Motives/Fate

[Trategos_Sol]

Before I ask this question:

1. This may be a more Demon/Vampire/Wraith centric question
2. I am fully aware of the published options that are available in the ToJ Book and other end times material (generally speaking)

Nevertheless, I'm curious to know your favorite explanations about God's ultimate fate in the WoD, plans, motives for doing what they did, etc. Has this issue ever factored heavily in your stories, and if so how? Were your explanations well received by players or, as a player, did you like what your storyteller did?

[Mr. Sluagh]

I tried to explain my Grand Unifying Theory of God, Lucifer, the Wyrm, Cain, Lilith, the Tenth Sphere, the Croatan, the Book of Nod, the Black Hand, the Umbra, the Apocalypse, and that one Easter egg in VtM: Bloodlines, but I couldn't make it much more concise than a fanfic I wrote a while back, so I'll just link that:

The Cabby

[TheVarulfen]

In my current game, God (as in any abrahamitic god) is the Patriarchy Incarna of the Weaver. However, it is connected to the creation of Angels/Elohim and has a lot of power due to the number of christian, muslim and jewish followers. I don't like to have a definitive "god" in my games and prefer the triad, as broken and disconnected entities, that can easily interpreted as the magical triad of dynamism, stasis and entropy itself (even though one might just be the incarnation or result of the other).

I think, this approach works really well for crossover campains, as it easily combines most aspects and implements Weaver as a secret antagonist, wheras the Wyrm is more of the typical bad guy-corrupting everything type.

[Amalasuintha]

In the overall crossover setting me and two others are in, The Creator/God is essentially the one that made all of Creation with the Triat, the God-Machine(imported from DtD), the realms and so on. All for various reasons. With various events being provoked and manipulated into happening so that certain concepts would be cemented into the workings of cosmos all for the sake of ensuring the creation and existence of various things that came after. With angels being the ones that built everything across the near-infinite layers that existed in the beginning. With everyone else simply remembering wrong, misunderstood things or having gotten something wrong for one reason or another.

For example one thing people in-setting got wrong is believing that Helios from werewolf is the real embodiment of the sun when he's not. Rather he's a celestine made specifically to take up the duty of being the sun while the true embodiment was thrown into the Void/True Abyss when the Fallen were defeated. Another example is that The Creator/God isn't the only deity in the multiverse either. Its just the one that made our universe.

Fun part for the players being that The Creator/God knows one of the worst outcomes happened, but can't intervene to fix any of it, like the broken and malfunctioning Triat, because of something she did in the past to further The Great Plan. So if they ever wanna play a story or put their current characters through a path to deal with it, they can.

[Crowley]

Days of Fire.
Lucifer basically says "She is Gone." (some theorize that "she" left to create Exalted..or that she gave up on trying to control humanity..or that's all part of her plan)

Personally. i like to think that "Her" plan was to cleanse the world from the supernatural but using humans to see if they are worth it. if they are worth the "inherit the earth" speech.

Or that she was expecting angels to rebel, since she knows her laws were flawed

[Illithid]

If Yahweh didn't leave (and then come back for Gehena *tm) then the best real idea in a wholly ingrained aspect is that being susceptible to faith, the One being indivisible, was divided. As people started splitting how they believed and what they believed into different shards or aspects. Faith became stronger and stronger that God stopped interfering directly, so God had to stop interfering.
There would be a number of different "God"s that overlap in the umbra (I love the Helios aspect @Amalasuintha) and mages would have had an easy time tapping it/them for power or destroying it as they whim (or isolating it/them into realms that can not be contacted.

[Amalasuintha]

If Yahweh didn't leave (and then come back for Gehena *tm) then the best real idea in a wholly ingrained aspect is that being susceptible to faith, the One being indivisible, was divided. As people started splitting how they believed and what they believed into different shards or aspects. Faith became stronger and stronger that God stopped interfering directly, so God had to stop interfering.
There would be a number of different "God"s that overlap in the umbra (I love the Helios aspect @Amalasuintha) and mages would have had an easy time tapping it/them for power or destroying it as they whim (or isolating it/them into realms that can not be contacted.

I thought it'd be fun to encourage players who decided to play Demons/Fallen to have made or been architects of various pieces of reality. So a PC character with eminence 5 became the real embodiment of the sun(which is pretty amusing since the other two players went for vampires instead) and the serpent in the garden(except Lilith was the one that got the apple and not Eve). So I figured since we're crossing over all of cWoD to some extent and with Helios being real, he must've been made to replace it to avoid disaster since this particular Creation was the one where all the stuff had to be invented wholesale.

Besides toying around with established ideas and seeing players figure which thing is as canon says and which aren't is pretty fun.

[Illithid]

I thought it'd be fun to encourage players who decided to play Demons/Fallen to have made or been architects of various pieces of reality. So a PC character with eminence 5 became the real embodiment of the sun(which is pretty amusing since the other two players went for vampires instead) and the serpent in the garden(except Lilith was the one that got the apple and not Eve). So I figured since we're crossing over all of cWoD to some extent and with Helios being real, he must've been made to replace it to avoid disaster since this particular Creation was the one where all the stuff had to be invented wholesale.
Besides toying around with established ideas and seeing players figure which thing is as canon says and which aren't is pretty.

Why Lillith being tricked into eating the apple and getting the knowledge? Most versions of Lillith have her being the wife of the Devil. I think with Eve's submission, she would have listened to the serpent and to God's edict in the first place; Lillith as an equal to Adam would not have been as submissive to God's authority and questioned why the fruit was forbidden anyway, probably having eaten it (and the fruit of the Tree of Life) before needing to be tricked.

I think this links into the end times fair-is-foul with her being master of the gardens. (Also might be that the serpent played the trick on Even at the request of Lillith)

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Days of Fire.
Lucifer basically says "She is Gone." (some theorize that "she" left to create Exalted..or that she gave up on trying to control humanity..or that's all part of her plan)

Personally. i like to think that "Her" plan was to cleanse the world from the supernatural but using humans to see if they are worth it. if they are worth the "inherit the earth" speech.

Or that she was expecting angels to rebel, since she knows her laws were flawed

But Exalted has no intersection with a supreme being. This goes back to the first edition Fair Folk book, in which Advaita Iraivan - God - was an aspect of the Shinma Nirguna. Nirguna defines existence by not existing itself. Given the cute set theory expression of setting, this, of course, means that there is no God in Exalted, and any that tried to present themselves as a supreme being or, presumably ,were a supreme being somewhere else would be in for a very rude awakening when they interacted with the set of assumptions that holds for the setting of Exalted.

(Graceful Wicked Masks changed this, but it is eminently ignorable, since it had to have an entire book's worth of errata to make it work.)

[Amalasuintha]

Why Lillith being tricked into eating the apple and getting the knowledge? Most versions of Lillith have her being the wife of the Devil. I think with Eve's submission, she would have listened to the serpent and to God's edict in the first place; Lillith as an equal to Adam would not have been as submissive to God's authority and questioned why the fruit was forbidden anyway, probably having eaten it (and the fruit of the Tree of Life) before needing to be tricked.

I think this links into the end times fair-is-foul with her being master of the gardens. (Also might be that the serpent played the trick on Even at the request of Lillith)

Lilith was never tricked in the chronicle me and two others are going through. A lone fallen angel(the demon PC in the chronicle) saw her observing Adam and Eve when the other Fallen where revealing themselves to the two and gave her that apple as a gift, which Lilith chose to accept of her own free will.

Which reminds me of the bahari. They are partially right and partially wrong. So far Lilith has been played as finding their self-mutilation a tad... creepy.

[Dezeroth]

Game wise I would go with God moved on to create other worlds

[Nyrufa]

I tend to reject the idea of a singular, all powerful creator and take a more polytheistic approach to the setting. Yahweh is A god, but he's not THE god. Not only are there countless religions far older than the one that worships him, but they also have their own creation stories and divine hierarchy. In fact, I just picked up C20, and it turns out that the Changelings of the far east are considered to be low ranking deities by the culture surrounding them. They even draw power from ceremonial worship, meaning that there's something going on there that isn't covered by Abrahamic doctrine.

Oh, no wait... demon worship!

And that's just talking about the other supernatural races. I still haven't pointed out the fact that mages can warp the very fabric of reality itself, which is about the closest you can get to being omnipotent without being declared a god.


One possible example for how / why Yahweh became as big as he did is burrowed from the Thunderstruck webcomic. Basically, Yahweh is a power hungry dick waffle that decided he wanted to be the only god around, so he killed / imprisoned all of his peers and boasted to everybody about how great he was, until they started to believe him.


In my Gehenna / end of the world scenario, the ancient Powers That Be are sick of his shit. The current state of the world can be described as FUBAR, and they're here to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. Why else would Gaia declare that the Rokea are intended to survive the apocalypse, if she wasn't planning to rebuild later?

[Koronus]

In my theory he is either the first and mightiest Mage or some creation entitie that is busy fighting the forces of Outer Darkness that want the world become the chaotic nothing again like it used to be.

[Gryffon15]

It's a vast question but my loosest answer because I myself go back to forth on the specifics is something along these lines...

The G-d of Abrahamic lore is a common (perhaps even predominant in the west) cipher for understanding Everything or The One, the cosmic force that represents Everything (time, space, matter, life, souls, etc.) as opposed to Nothing. It is sometimes enterfaced with more directly through ciphers such as The Holy Spirit, Jehovah, and so forth.

Most people are going about their business with ignorance of The Divine Plan and their roles within it, but akin to The Wheel of Ages, The Plan is in motion and what it is heading towards is difficult to say.

What can be said is that I generally treat full angelic/divine manifestations on Earth as ultimately impossible in the modern day because frankly if The Archangel Gabriel manifested in Time Square, their very presence may simply shatter the very firmament of The Fallen World and send all of Creation back into the alchemical blender between Everything and Nothing.

[Reasor]

The Creator divided Its consciousness into principles of creation, stasis, and entropy in order to gaze at Itself and thereby better understand Itself.

All of Creation comes from the interplay between these three forces, and when the Triat are reunited, the universe will have served its purpose. All will be One again.