Mythic is the sort of thing that wouldn't be out of place in the Myth Cycle of your choice. Mythic things tend to be big and epic, but not all big epic things are mythic. Mythic things are often quite silly (I mean... a shower of gold, what's that all about?), over the top and elaborate.
A couple of things "Mythic" definately isn't:
As an example of this last point, let's look at Athene, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and general stroppy cow (most gods are). When Arachne beat her in a spinning contest, she turned her into a spider. Later on, when she was pissed off at Paris for not picking her in the whole Golden Apple debacle she makes her displeasure felt by giving Odysseus the whole Wooden Horse plan and generally sealing the doom of Troy. Going on previous form, she could have just turned Paris into a spider and had done with it, hell she could probably have turned everybody in the city into spiders if she'd wanted to, but she didn't, and the basic reason that she didn't is that it would have been really, really lame and not mythically appropriate at all.
(Note from Wart: If you require an IC rationale for avoiding repeatability, consider the poetic justice inherent in the above two examples. Athene turned Arachne into a spider because spiders weave things, she destroyed Troy because Paris was the city's prince. It simply wouldn't have been as satisfying to destroy Arachne's city, since that wouldn't turn her main passion in life - her weaving - into a constant reminder of what she once was, and turning Paris into a spider wouldn't have destroyed the place from which he derived his status and place in the world. When the gods want to destroy a mortal, they do so completely.)
(Note from Wart: As stated elsewhere on this page: gods don't do magic, they really don't. They do a lot of things which look like magic, but are really manifestations of their sovereignty over the world.)
Mythic: Turning somebody into a spider because they beat you in a spinning
contest.
Non-Mythic: Turning somebody into a spider because they're attacking
you with a sword.
Actively Anti-Mythic: Working out that if you can turn one
person into a spider every second you can wipe out most mortal armies in less
than an hour.
Mythic: Being able to kill a man who it has been prophecied that "no man of
woman born" can kill because you were not of woman born.
Non-Mythic: Being
able to kill a man who no man of woman born" can kill because you are not a man.
(This one bears some explaining. In general a properly mythic solution to a prophecy
should take the whole thing into account. If it just said "No Man" then being a
woman would count as Mythic.)
Actively Anti-Mythic: Trying to kill a man who
"no man of woman born" can kill by working at increasing removes "okay so what
if the sword I'm *holding* kills him. What about the poison I put in his food.
The rock I drop on his head...?"
Every intention which does not assert itself by deeds is a vain intention, and the speech which expresses it is idle speech. It is action which proves life and establishes will. Hence it is said in the sacred and symbolical books that men will be judged, not according to their thoughts and their ideas, but according to their works. We must do in order to be.The last large-scale freeform gods game run in Oxford was Inheritance, a wonderful game during the course of which Wart learnt the sacred art of freeform GMing at the knee of Lex Kennedy. In Inheritance, if you were the God of Love it was because you were the physical manifestation of love in the world, an entity which at the very core of its being reflected the very nature of Love. If you were the lucky sod with control of the Sphere of Love, you were even able to define what the fundamental nature of Love was.
- Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic - Its Doctrine and Ritual.
This game is not Inheritance, so the gods work differently. Inheritance veterans should be extra-careful to remember this because it is very easy to fall into old ways of thinking about this sort of thing. In this game, you aren't the god of Love because you are Love, you're the God of Love because you are responsible for Love. You're the person who causes love to happen, because you're the person who goes out and makes sure that it does. If you want analogies from real-world pantheons, look at Zeus, Poseidon and Hades drawing straws to see who gets the Ocean, who gets the Underworld and who gets Olympus - Hades became God of Death not because he was the essence of Death, but because he happened to take the job "God of Death".
You do not become elected to an Estate, people do not control Estates via mutual consent. You grab an empty Estate by going and doing the job required of that Estate better than any of your rival candidates, and you defend the sacred places of that Estate (such as the workroom where Love is carved out of starlight) against all-comers. It's much easier to snatch an Estate if you can get everyone else to agree to let you have it, but the consent of others is not at all necessary. In the end, Poseidon and Hades were remarkably civilised about the whole Olympus thing: in this game, they could have ignored the straw poll result and fought Zeus for the big mountain, and indeed Zeus could have cheated when the straws were drawn.
If you want to be a God of Blacksmiths, for example, there are three ways you can go about it:
In particular:
The above image is moderately amusing, but it does spoil the mythic atmosphere slightly. Therefore the GMs would like to downplay the degree to which gods get involved with 21st century technology. Similarly, gods doing magic isn't particularly mythic - gods shouldn't need it - and we'd like to minimise that as well. Here, therefore, is the in-character rationale:
By and large, the gods do not get as involved in magic and technology as human beings do. This is generally because learning the occult arts and studying science and engineering are things that human beings do *because* they are not gods - they are "cheats" to give human beings the sort of control over the world around them which comes very easily to the gods.
Magic, especially, is considered by the gods to be a rather tawdry pursuit (though woe betide the god who underestimates the trickiness and subtlety of a mortal mage!). Human beings, when they want to command spirits and demons, need to use lines and circles and spells and incense and all that gibberish. All the gods need to do is ask politely. All the gods know how magic works, because they know how more or less everything works, and there are even some gods who have made a habit of teaching the magical arts to mortals. Go about using magic yourself, however, and you'll have egg on your face - if anyone notices that you're doing it...
To a lesser extent, immortals tend not to get involved with large-scale technology. Industrialisation, setting up telephone and data networks, making large factories for the production of goods - these all tend to be human innovations. This doesn't mean that the gods couldn't have invented the Internet if they had tried. The ancient Greeks had all the knowledge necessary to invent the steam engine, but they never did because they had slaves to do all the hard manual labour, so they never had to invent machines to do such labour for them. In a similar way, the gods never needed to invent pumps because they could call pure water from the ground, never needed to invent the telephone because they could have their messages carried on the wind, and so on.
Mass production has never been necessary either. For a start, there simply isn't enough gods to make it worthwhile. Also, the gods are both very skilled in their own right, and can hire the best craftsmen mortalkind, Otherkind, spiritkind or beastkind has to offer, so when they really need a well-made item they can have it crafted to their precise specifications. The trend is very much for individually-crafted items of superior workmanship produced by individual artisans, rather than mass-produced machine-made tat.
Furthermore, the GM team will assume that the player characters represent the cream of the divine crop. There will be NPC gods, but by and large they will take their lead from the PCs in most situations. (Unless, of course, they end up becoming Court rulers because no PC is interested in the job, for example.)
The exception, of course, is if PCs willingly abdicate their authority. Go on, surrender your divine right to rule Creation and let the mortals elect the masters of reality from their own ranks instead. Surrender your divine power to the Unreal. See how quickly the world turns to shit afterwards...
So, if everything is going wrong, it's not because the GMs want it to go wrong, it's because there are player characters not pulling their weight. If the threat of the Unreal seems to be growing inexorably, chances are it's because some PC is allowing that to happen. We are giving the player characters the keys to the world, and accept that as part of that there's every chance you'll ram it into a tree before you get out of the driveway.
Similarly, you will have noticed great swathes of tabula rasa in the background: this is because we want lots of player-created background. As I've said before: you are free to make up wars, scandals, intrigues, nations, conspiracies, monsters, species, disasters, discoveries, mysteries, joyous occasions, times of sorrow, rivalries, alliances, plagues, famines, celebrations, intrigues, quests, thefts, murders, rapes, births, marriages, deaths, Threats To All That Is..... whatever you want to throw in there, do so. Let your imagination run wild. Don't be restricted to what's currently up on the website - in fact, if we get character backgrounds which just say "My name is Bob, I did this when the Creator died, I did this when the Unreal attacked, I did this in the war of the gods", we'll send it back to you and say "are you sure you don't want to add anything to the background?"
Players of New Gods: this also applies to you. The Iron Rule limited the freedom of action of the New Gods - they had to operate in secret, lest the Gods of the Iron Laws discover them - but they still became involved in swashbuckling, occult doings, secret societies, feuds, duels, running errands for the Old Gods, being initiated into Courts, winning small victories against the Iron Rule, stopping Creation collapsing when the Iron Rule fails to deal with something, and so forth.
The only restrictions are:
If you do have a question about a GMly decision - perhaps because you think we may have forgotten certain factors - please try and ask it politely. "Have you remembered that...?" always goes down better than "Hey! What about...?" Most of the time we hope the answer will be "Yes, we have remembered, there are things you are unaware of". When the answer is "Oh fuck, you're right," we will do as much as possible to correct the mistake.
In particular, there's a great temptation in freeforms to stand up and grandstand and generally do things which say "Look at me: am I not kewl?" rather than "Look at me: I have an important point to make". Try to avoid this: yes, you're a god. So is almost everyone else in the room. If you want people to think "Wow, God X is really kewl", do things which people are likely to regard as really kewl, or say something which is actually deeply profound, rather than self-aggrandising. Don't expect to be able to stand up and be taken seriously if you are talking tosh - people will notice and you'll just make yourself a big target for the tricksters out there.
...the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being is so hidebound... as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult.Democracy worked back in the Iron Rule because kings didn't really have the backing of the gods. Now the Gods are back, and the Divine Right of Kings is back in fashion.
- Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough.
There's a tendency to approach everything in society games from the perspective of 21st century wooly liberals. Please resist this. Democracy isn't the order of the day for mortalkind because theocracy and monarchies with divine backing actually *work* when the gods are awake and active. Your Court ruler isn't some wussy prime minister you've given a democratic mandate to, he or she is the god who had the skill, initiative and balls to take the position and win your fealty. Yes, mortals are lovely and sweet, but sometimes for the good of Creation you're going to have to kill most of them in 40-day-and-40-night floods.
Similarly, tradition isn't about people behaving like their grandparents because of social inertia - the traditions of the Gods are the mandates handed down from the Creator himself with the intent to keep Creation running smoothly and to stop the Gods descending into all-out War - the War of the Gods and the Iron Rule stemmed directly from a blatant breach of protocol (a bunch of folk jumping the god who found the Creator's Tools in-meeting). Flouting it is a serious risk.
"But what about the New Gods?" I hear you cry. Well, what about them? The vast majority are centuries old, and they know to their very core that they have a right to sit amongst the rulers of the world, and that they are subject to no law save that of their fellow gods. They're no more likely to believe in wooly liberalism just because they've been exposed to its by-products in the 20th Century: they see it for what it is, a by-product of the Iron Rule, and the Iron Rule was an aberration and a blasphemy and definitely not the normal way the world works.
Please, please try to approach the game from the perspective of the rightful, Creator-mandated rulers of the Universe, not enlightened 21st century centre-leftists who reckon the best way to solve the problems facing Creation is to overturn divine society, institute a democratic system, and delegate various functions to committees. The former approach will make the game that much more mythic, and thus more entertaining for everyone, the latter will drain the setting of a good deal of its flavour.
This isn't one of those games.
You can set up your character's personal storylines, but as soon as the game starts you'll lose control of how they'll turn out. Your actions will have an effect, but so will the actions of other players and GM decisions. Please try not to come into the game with your heart set on how, for example, your Lost Love problem is going to be resolved: the world don't work according to anyone's script, not even for individual gods.
Murdering another player character will be dealt with in the same way as any other contested action. Killing a god is always an Epic action - you can't just shoot them with a mundane old gun, you have to do all sorts of complicated things like craft weapons out of your own teeth and the iron which grows at the heart of mountains. Furthermore, writing "Action 1: Kill Bob the God" doesn't qualify an action as Epic: you will need to describe your plan, and it'll have to involve all the bells and whistles expected of an Epic, Mythic event.
You also have to deal with the fact that most people, when they are attacked, defend themselves. Self-defence is by and large a passive, reactive thing - we can't expect people to turnsheet "try not to get killed when I am attacked". Therefore, when you attack someone they will be able to defend themselves with a free Epic action with 2 points of overspend, modified based on whether you managed to catch the PC in question off-guard, whether they are expecting to be attacked, what plans for self-defence they have established, Natures, and so forth.
To kill an Old God, you must win the contested action by at least five points. To kill a New God, you just need to win it - they are more fragile than the Old Gods, after all.
Those are the system aspects. Simple, eh? But why are you planning on killing another PC at all?
Before you turnsheet the murder of another player character, we'd like you to stop and think. Is killing someone really the best way forward? You will be going out on a limb if you escalate things too far - is this issue so important that you'd risk another War of the Gods over it? Furthermore, the murder of a God is taken very seriously by the Gods - if you kill a God, there's one less person out there available to take an Estate and stop Creation collapsing, and so god-killing is one of the very worst crimes, after neglecting one's Duty and selling out to the Unreal. It is very hard to keep secrets from folk as powerful as the gods who are determined to find out who killed their fellow Courtier, and sooner or later you will be caught. Surely, there must be a better, more mythic, and less crass way of getting what you want.
Bottom line: if you feel you have to kill someone because there is no other way with dealing with the problem, the GM team is willing to let you try. If you want to kill someone because you're too lazy to think of a better way to neutralise them, we'd rather you didn't.
When you want to turnsheet killing another PC, please explain why your character thinks this action is absolutely necessary and why no other course of action will do. The GM team would like to be satisfied that you have thought this through.
Note that "binding them at the bottom of the ocean won't do because they might come back" isn't a very mythic excuse: Odin could have killed Loki to prevent Ragnarok, rather than tieing him under a poison-drooling serpent, but he went with the serpent plan instead and the story is all the more mythic because of it. By extension, if you write "we gather all our forces together, for we plan to find Loki and bind him in the entrails of his own son" it's far more likely to qualify as an Epic action than writing "we gather all our forces together, for we plan to find Loki and lamp 'im one."
Also, if you could turn mobile phones off during the session, this would be appreciated. If you desperately need to be contactable in case of some urgent professional or personal circumstance we'll mock you less if your phone rings mid-session, but we'll mock you more for turning up to the session when you clearly need to be somewhere else.
There is one thing every player ought to be able to do: Renaissance is going to be resurrecting the fine roleplaying device utilised by Inheritance and Age and Treachery of saying that masks (or, for those of you who do not mind funny looks in the pub afterwards, facepaint) are very fashionable amongst the folk who attend meetings. The reasons for this are fourfold: firstly, it provides instant flavour. Secondly, we intend to associate a particular style or colour of mask with each Court, so masks enable one to tell who is in which faction easily. Thirdly, it makes differentiating between NPCs much easier if the GMs wear different masks when they're playing different people. Fourthly, everyone can buy masks from shops such as Partymania on Walton Street or the other costume shop near Lincoln college, and thus obtain a suitable piece of costume.
The styles of mask worn by those attending gatherings of the gods are as follows:
Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword. Reprinted recently in the Fantasy Masterworks series. Heavily influenced by Norse myth, this tells of the struggles between Elf and Troll, and Human and Changeling, in a time when the White Christ is driving out the old gods. A sense of predestined doom haunts the proceedings, whilst the style is very much in the vein of the original myths. Easily the equal of that other major Norse-influenced fantasy blockbuster of 1954, The Fellowship of the Ring, and I'm inclined to suggest that it is better: Fellowship can never quite decide whether it's supposed to be for kids or for adults, whilst The Broken Sword is seamless and flawless.
Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods. Superb collection of mythic-fantasy short stories, including a great deal of epic divine goings-on. Often dreamlike, always beautiful, occasionally quite nasty. Lovecraft based his dreamlands stories on the material, but those look like the shabby, third-rate pastiches they are when compared to the tales in this compilation.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman. Lex Kennedy once said
"Inheritance was, at least in Alex's happy land, influenced by the bits of Sandman where Gaiman was being brilliant and grown-up rather than clever and 'adult'."The same is true for Renaissance. In particular, the story in the first collection is an illustrative example of what happens when too much of your Resource gets invested in Foci, which then get nicked...
American Gods, a tale of divinities slumming it in the modern world, could also provide enlightening reading for players of New Gods.
Michael Moorcock has written an ocean of stuff, and like all oceans his work contains both priceless pearls and used condoms. In the former category are the Corum stories, which delve into Celtic myth. The first Corum trilogy (compiled in "Corum") focuses a lot on Moorcock's Eternal Champion cosmology, and suffers for it. The second trilogy, compiled in "The Prince with the Silver Hand", pushes the Eternal Champion nonsense into the far background and racks up the mythicness dosage, and is therefore much better. Also worth checking out is "The Dancers at the End of Time", which demonstrates just how weird things can get when absolute power is in the hands of the absolutely bored.
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Silmarillion. The backplot to Lord of the Rings. It's a bit like the Bible: lots of genealogies at the beginning, but once they're out of the way things get exciting. It works on a far larger scale than LOTR, and so it does not follow the exploits of characters as closely. Instead, it follows the history of the elves from their beginnings in the far West, to their rebellion against the Gods in chasing Morgoth (Sauron's daddy) eastwards, to their eventual reconciliation with the Gods and the fall of Morgoth at the end of a war lasting generations. The dense style of the book may not to be everyone's taste, but I found that after reading it rereading The Hobbit and LOTR became that much more enjoyable, since a lot of the incidents in those books which are seemingly-random are actually related to backplot from the Silmarillion: for example, it explains why there are big spiders in Mirkwood, and what that "I am a servant of the secret fire" nonsense with the balrog was about. The exception to this is Tom fucking Bombadil, who doesn't fit the Middle Earth cosmology at all and was in fact shoehorned in from an entirely different project.
Jack Vance. Read Jack Vance. Read lots and lots of Jack Vance. Read his books. Read them read them read them. He is physically incapable of writing a bad story.
Particularly recommended is the Lyonesse books, recently reprinted in the Fantasy Masterworks series in two volumes: Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden and Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl and Madouc. Very mythic affairs, showing off Vance's ability to weave his own inventions in with established folklore so well that you can't see the seams. Based in the archipelago that King Arthur's ancestors came from, it incorporates lots of tricksterish faeries behaving much as one might expect the Children of Grace would, much fun with servitor-spirits getting the wrong end of the stick, lots of beautiful Vancian dialogue and scads of the sort of random and yet somehow significant incidents which crop up in folktales, such as encounters with fox-headed chicken-legged witches.
Roger Zelazny has often written about gods and godlike folk. The most famous example of this sort of thing is the Amber series, which follows the exploits of the family which rules the real world that all other worlds are a tarnished reflection of. Only read the first five books. In the second set of five Zelazny sets out to ruthlessly destroy all that was good about the series. I dread to think what the recently-published prequels are like...
Princess Mononoke. Is not a book, and therefore doesn't really belong in a bibliography, but let's put that aside for the time being. Members of the Court of the Deep Places will find the tale of forest spirits battling encroaching mortals strikes a chord with them. Members of other Courts will note how nasty the Deep Places can be when irritated.
Spirited Away, by the same director, is if anything even better - a small girl and her family stumble across the sauna of the Gods, operated by an insane witch and her minions.
There are scads of books out there retelling the stories of various myth cycles. But why spend money when you can read them on the net? Good resources include:
Bullfinch's Mythology, with good retellings of the Greek myths and the stories of King Arthur and Charlemagne -which, whilst not being about Gods, nonetheless lurch into mythic territory frequently.
Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts. Huge, huge archive of folktales, myths and legends, arranged by theme.
Myths and Legends provides more mythic links than you can cope with. Heck, I found the above two gems from there and I wasn't even trying.