Emperor, I need a creation myth for a d&d game. can you make one up? I don't have any set deities yet.
It all started on accident.
In those days before the world was crafted, the powerful creatures who would become our deities lived in a land beyond thought and memory, The land was both boundless and malleable, an open realm waiting for their creation to be laid down upon it. Each morning, they would set their will to work, taking up a piece of their home to forge into a world as they saw it to be perfect. Day in and day out, they would make a tree bearing fruit more delicious than you can imagine, or an ocean wave cresting higher than the highest peak, or a rumble of thunder that would deafen you with its majesty.
And every evening, they would meet to try and find a place in the world for their creation. This was where they struggled- for while one deity might think that the single, most perfect hawk’s feather they shaped was vital to the glory of the world they wanted to build, to every other deity? It was merely a feather, and was nowhere near as important as the gentle sweep of perfect river bank or the magnificent mountain peak or whatever bit of perfection they had crafted that day.
It was on one of those evenings, as the deities argued, that the world was born.
It began as the Lady of the Skies placed down a raging blizzard before the others, every snowflake within it a work of art, the gusts of wind sending them twirling in a perfect ballet of frozen wonder. It had been the work of a long afternoon in her workshop, a storm that would dance for a decade, and she was quite pleased with it.
The Lord of the Harvest, though, dismissed it with a wave of his divine hand. Years of snow? It would be the death of all the plants carefully growing under his care, and he had spent all day perfecting the way a field of grain might ripple under a gentle breeze. The storm would have to be abandoned as impractical.
The Keeper of the Lakes and Rivers agreed. Letting a storm rage for so long? It would be foolishness- it would ice over each of their creations, wasting every bit of time perfecting the pebbled river bottoms and the depths of the lochs, keeping them hidden away. Though, it was pointed out, the Lord of the Harvest had wasted time, too- the rippling waves of the fields were a mere echo of how the calm surface of the water would dance with the winds, and a poor copy at that. It was nearly insulting.
Every deity objected to one part or another of their companion’s creation. A perfect sun placed high in the sky, unmoving, would have given no succor to the beasts who hunted in nighttime shadows. A perfect, intricate set of caves would have weakened the glorious mountain range meant to be stretched across the horizon. Each deity felt their work was perfect, but at least one other would object, sweeping it aside.
This had been taking place for some time, and each disagreement came with greater passion, as those who had seen their work shunned had little pity or forgiveness to see someone else’s work be treated with less scrutiny than theirs. As the night stretched on, many works of art were shoved away, joining the works abandoned the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that, and so on.
Finally, the tension broke. Each deity felt pained that their work had been rejected so soundly, so repeatedly, that the chamber fell into an open squabble, each deity airing their grievances loudly, shouting over their companions, letting out their frustrations.
It was as they fought, that the Page noticed what was happening. The Page was not as powerful as the other deities. He did not craft things that would have made a perfect world in his eyes. He had his own projects, and was merely there to observe the deities in their creations.
As the deities fought, he saw the piles of rejected works react. Slowly, one by one, they melted together. The blizzard came alive with the anger of the Lady of the Skies, while the sun rose high in the sky, chasing away the shadows of night only to be chased from view by the darkness of the evening. Small beasts ate away at the fields of grains, only to be hunted down by birds swooping in from the sky above. As each deity argued for their own supremacy, the pieces of the world they crafted came alive with that same passion.
Carefully, the Page lifted up the world. From his pocket, he pulled out a small handful of figures- creatures carved not unlike the deities the Page had observed, but smaller, each one tied to a particular realm he crafted for it. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the creators, and imbued a fraction of their power into the figures he had made. These figures became our gods- and that world, imperfectly meshed together from the squabbles of creatures we never knew, became our world.
