Neolympus: Tidbits of Lore, part 1

I’ve been jotting down pieces of lore as they get fleshed out, which is honestly my favorite way to world build.

• Many sentient species were created wholecloth to fight in the Titanomachy, and elder species are still getting used to the sheer number of new beings.
• The arrival of the Nullspace drive (also called Prometheus’s Gift, or Promethean drive) opened up free trade and travel between destinations near and far. Previously, the gods and their Chosen controlled who could enter Nullspace.
• Favor can be won or lost with deities and their representatives, with consequences therein.
• Nullspace has “rivers” that allow for faster travel, but some rivers you don’t want to travel in. Lethe steals your memories and databanks, potentially leaving you with no navigational data. Styx is one of the few known routes to get to Haides’ realm of Erebos, but they don’t like visitors.
• Haides has very much said “fuck the lot of you for all of the dead I have to deal with now” and has been fairly quiet.
• To gain access to certain spells and rituals, you must earn enough favor with a particular god to access their mysteries. There are three paths to magic: inherited, divine, or learned.
• ANY sort of ability that involves fortune telling, precognition, seeing the future, fate, or altering fate in any way are extremely limited. Mere mortals should not have access to such foresight. Oracles and sibyls and similar folk are either killed or imprisoned for the gods’ own purposes.
• The Fates exist, and they also do not want visitors.
• Summoning or gating creatures isn’t a thing in Neolympus—because there are no planes to summon them from. Angels, demons, devils, and the like also don’t exist.
• After the Prometheus’s Folly (the gift of the Nullspace engine to humans), the various gods split themselves up into factions with the usual quarreling and bickering you’d expect from Grecian deities. There are those that support Prometheus’s decision, those that didn’t, those that don’t care, and those that are so out of touch that their opinion doesn’t matter.
• The Olympians are VERY much in power right now, and make sure people know it. That doesn’t mean that their antecedents, the Titans, aren’t still around, though, and some retained their territory in a compromise with the Olympians.
  And of course, those that created the Titanes are also still around. (Those are the ones that are out of touch and truly have no fucks to give, or have bigger designs that demand their attention.)
  Olympians don’t need engines to enter Nullspace—they can do so at will. (Hence why they were so put out about Prometheus.)
  How dare, etc.
• Vesk are associated with Ares, ysoki with Apollon, androids with Hephaestus, humans with Promethus, lashunta with Aphrodite, shirren with Demeter, and kasatha with Athene.
• Aphrodite currently looks like Lizzo.
• Olympians (and by extension, their antecedents) don’t really have a gender, so they can appear as they want as often as they want.
• Witchwyrds are favored by Hekate, as are any species that has an arcane bent.
• While a species might have stronger ties with their creator god, individuals might not feel particularly beholden to them. Deific favor is ever-fickle.
• Dionysus is not picky about their followers. They are fond of uplifting individual animals, though. Demeter usually isn’t happy about that, but can’t really stop them.
• One of the reasons that Haides is disassociating is that they were forced to use the souls of the dead in experiments against the Titanes, and felt that they had betrayed their duty towards the dead. Borai would be one of those experiments.
• Nobody’s hands (tentacles, claws, whatever) were clean in the Titanomachy, and many of the gods Feel a Way about that.
• Poseidon has control over “real space”, but the older ocean and river deities have power over Nullspace. Appropriate offerings are always appreciated.
• Hera has control of the news networks (Argos).
• Hermes has control of shipping and mail (“private”), while Hera has control of “public” communications.
• Hestia usually has a free kitchen in spaceports for hungry travelers.
• Hephaestus also has a lot of guilt for the machines that they created, in particular the androids. Too many view androids as relics of a war that they would rather forget.
• Aphrodite has a Medousan Guard.
• The Asphodel Fields in this setting is a space around Haides’ realm that drains energy. It was never invaded during the Titanomachy and their were never souls lost from Erebos. You have to have specific jump points to bypass it.
• There is a distinction between the Children of Gaia (which includes most mortal races, the Titanes, and Olympians) and the Children of Nyx. There is a distinct hierarchy among the gods, and one of the hallmarks of the primordial deities is the ability to create life.
• Tartaros is a region of black holes–an anti-stellar nursery. Tartaros is the prison of the Titans, guarded by the Hekatonkheires.
  “And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of gloomy earth and misty Tartaros and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven, loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. It is a great gulf, and if once a man were within the gates, he would not reach the floor until a whole year had reached its end, but cruel blast upon blast would carry him this way and that. And this marvel is awful even to the deathless gods.”
  There’s Tartaros the place, and there’s Tartaros the god. One can be bargained with. The other, not so much.
• Kharon can travel through Nullspace, which is how they collect the souls of the dead that await travel into Haides’ realm.
• Thanatos collects those that die by non-violent means, and takes them to Kharon. The Keres (daimones of violent death) like to…toy with their charges before turning them over. The Keres and Thanatos preside over death, but they get into arguments about the semantics of what constitutes violent/non-violent death. (Meanwhile, the poor mortal just lingers between life and death.)
• According to vesk lore, they arose from the teeth of Drakon Ismenios.
• Most gods have a preferred form, but most can also shapechange as their desire. The older deities, like Gaia or Khaos, don’t need a physical form, but can assume one if they want to.
• In their arenas of influence—Haides over the dead, for example—a god’s power is absolute. Problems arise when there is overlap between their scopes of influence.
• The Bacchae are Dionysos’s party guys/gals/non-binary pals—the ideal party organizers.
• If there’s a frat boy god, Komos is it.
• At the end of the Titanomachy, many of the Titanes that were not part of the fighting between Kronos and Zeus were locked up with their guilty brethren. It’s going to cause problems.
  Later.
• Oath-breaking or contract-breaking is a serious crime in Neolympus. The Furies, a mercenary company that often accepts criminals seeking repentance, is hired to seek out the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
• There are many deities associated with water. The Okeanides, born of Okeanos and Tethys, number in the thousands, the eldest of which is Styx. The Nereides are associated with the sea and saltwater.
  In the context of this setting, the Okeanides are in Nullspace, while Nereides are realspace.
  And as rivers always find a way to the sea, the Potamoi (a subset of the Okeanides and river deities) cross over into both Nullspace and realspace.
• Pandora was an android.
• Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus to not accept any gifts from Olympus. Epimetheus did not listen.
• Prometheus has 99 problems and Zeus is pretty much all of them.
• Olympians don’t go for the cannibalism route—it’s uncivilized, and criminal. The Titanes and Gigantes, though…

Need more lore? Check out this introductory post, and if you’d like to play in a Neolympus game, see this other post!