Gods, Time Travel, Dreams, I may be in over my head! - Jeremiah/Adam stay out!

[nibble128]

Ok a warning ahead of time that I am a bit mindclouded by nyquill and a cold, but here it goes...


Ferunean deities are 40+ level high entities. They have abilities that allow them to know if anyone has spoken about them in the last so odd years. They always roll natural 20's, and always roll max damage... They are as far as I can see, greatly superior to a character of equal level. I want to change the gap between mortal and God to something attainable.

Here is my plan,

What separates a God from a mortal is a magic item. These items can be passed on to another mortal when the God no longer wants to do the job. These Devine Relics grant levels in a PrC, Immortality, SR, DR, and the ability to bestow blessings.

Here is my current idea of Hierarchy:

+40 LA    -  Arch-Deity   - Can Create and Enchant / Disenchant Greater Devine Relics
                                     (LA/5 = 8 of them at once)
+20 LA    -  God          - Can Create and Enchant / Disenchant Devine Relics
                                     (LA/5 = 4 of them at once)
+10 LA    -  Demi-God     - Can Create and Enchant / Disenchant Lesser Devine Relics
                                      (LA/5 = 2 of them at once)
+5  LA    -  Avatar       - Can Bestow/Revoke Blessing upon all allies that are within 100'
+ Bonuses -  Blessed      - Grants bonus's of first level of Avatar's PrC / Class

Devine Relics, Greater    - Makes the bearer a God      (+20 LA)
Devine Relics             - Makes the bearer a Demi-God (+10 LA)
Devine Relics, Lesser     - Makes the bearer a Avatar   ( +5 LA)

Multiple (Blessed / Avatar / Demi-God / God / Arch-Deity) Items/Blessings DO NOT STACK (they gestalt instead).

The entire universe that my players are in was exiled by the God of magic to the plane that they are in. The Gods I have in this plane of existance are:

The Oracles: (3 Demi-Gods)

The Demi-God of Shadow

The God of Time

The God of Death / Rebirth

+ some more I have yet to decide upon.


The cosmology looks like this:

        (world)
        Material
         Plane
     
Plane       E      Plane
 of       A 8 W      of
Light       F      Shadow

       Underworld

In the middle of it all are the elemental planes

When you die on the Material plane you travel through the plane of light and are born in the Underworld.
When you die on the Underworld you travel through the plane of shadow and are born in the Material plane.
Time between both planes is not linear. it is linear in the underworld, however not so in the material world. Meaning that you can step from the underworld to any point in time on the material world, but when you return time will have passed equal to the ammount of time spend away from the underworld.

There are some other oddities going on in my story line:

In the topside world magic is outlawed, and the only remaining mages are so in secret.
The mages had tried to kill the God of Time, in hopes of taking his Greater Devine Relic.
The God of Time responded by destroying key cities, and working with the God of Shadow to not only kill off the mages, but to turn the world against them. The God's had been helping the mages atain greater power, in the hopes that once the mages became powerful enough they could bestow Demi-God status upon them, and use them to transport this universe back to the plane they had been banished from. The Mages reached too high too fast, and while the God of Time and of Shadow were able to destroy them, the God of Time's concious mind was slain. Now the God of Time is on autopilot, he is a temporal construct.
The Oracles can use the realm of dreams to communicate / retrieve information / target for plane hopping places/times in the material world from the underworld. This is not quite as useful as the God of Time's abilities.

My concerns are that I am dealing with some crazy stuff:
Decreasing the distance from mortal to God
Making Godhood truely player atainable
Messing with time travel
Having a topside world and an underworld
Having a dreamland

I want to have these things, and I know I am overcomplicating my universe, but I like the concepts. Even if my execution is a bit sloppy. Does anyone have any suggestions for the Devine Relic idea? If you have any plot suggestions to help smooth out the lumps.. I am all ears.

The things the players already know about are:
There are demi-gods and gods, and the players are their goffer bitches
the land of dreams is traveable
there is an underworld, and they are in it
Mages were killed off a few hundred years ago and magic has been outlawed since (except for items)
That the campaign has epic goals...

Any help?

[bkdubs123]

I don't think there are really any huge problems with the whole player attainable godhood you have set up. At least not so much if you don't plan to DM for players after they attain godhood. If you do, it may become difficult for you to imagine adventures for them in any sort of challenging way.

As far as Time Travel is concerned, and I hope I can communicate this properly, in a setting where traveling through time is possible you must accept that all Time has already happened. If you can travel to the Future, obviously the Future already exists. If it didn't there would be nothing to travel to. Also of note, if the Future already exists it can't be changed. What's important about that point is that the Present is future to the Past. Therefore, traveling into the Past can't change the Future.

A good way to think about Time Travel is this, "Time is not a river, nor a wheel. Time is an adamantine bar. Indestructible. It be perceived, experienced, or studied to be certain, but changed? Never."

Do you have The Manual of the Planes? It's a 3.5 supplement book. In it you will find information on The Realm of Dreams (commonly referred to as Dreamscape) which should prove useful to you.

Finally, just a minor nitpick: If the Mages of old killed off the God of Time's conscious brain how is it that he was able to coordinate and act out his counterattack with the God of Shadows?

[veekie]

Hmm, another way, likely more fun way, to handle time travel is that you carry your own time with you. The time traveler in essence, is safe in his own 'me' time, and his personal past is immutable.

When you go to the future, you go to what the future would have probably been, relative to the moment you left your 'present'. Changing your present makes a previously future unreachable from your current 'now', but new futures exist to be explored. As far as the character is concerned, the future he had been to will never exist. As far as the future is concerned, life goes on, but they never see that particular iteration of the time traveler again.

When you go to the past, and alter it, you make your 'origin time plane' your 'present' unreachable, in favor of an alternate 'now'. Unfortunately, you might not have any place in it.

Basically, you look at Time as a series of scenes linked together by conditional paths. The time traveler in this scenario only alters his personal time.

Or for a more active variant, tampering with time does alter matters, but more powerful entities and time travelers can resist the alterations, while being aware of them. Basically, for a while, they could be their old selves for a period of their 'personal time' before the changes 'overwrite' them.

Finally, a possible form of restraint, Time Goes On.
In this scenario, while time travel is possible, you can only move in relatively fixed intervals(e.g a year or a century). You could for example, go to 2005, or 1500, but not April the First of 2005. In this scenario, while in the past or future, your 'present' continues to happen at the same rate, and changes update your 'present' in real time. Yourself, and other time travelers may be immune to such changes, if only to reduce the headache, or be aware of the changes as they occur, even while others notice nothing.
Alternatively, place Time Holes, where linear time happens, within a particular stretch of 'past' 'present' and 'future'. This one is a lot more limited, Time Travel is only allowed during those particular times, and possibly, particular places as well. This one you have a certain level of control over what your Time Travelers get up to, as their placement is as plot demands. Within these areas, the past connects to the present with a portal, whether literal or otherwise, and is functionally just another plane, if one that alters the present realtime.

[minmax]

Your world sounds pretty cool, I like that there's a universe-wide plot as opposed to some other worlds which merely try to persist.  As for the time aspect, I liked the 'flowing' of time in Gene Wolfe's Wizard & Knight books, but yours is a little more challenging because it's nonlinear.  I guess it would make a difference how many time travellers there actually are.  If it's just the PCs, it might be manageable, but if there's a lot of time travelling, that would be pretty complicated although would allow for some interesting trade and flow of ideas.

Either way, I would side with bkdubs more on this aspect because (I would think) you want the material and underworld planes to at least have the same amount of time-- that is, they match up one-to-one in time, but not necessarily in the same order.  Although, maybe you want the underworld to have more time, like the relationship between the rational and irrational numbers (there's way more irrationals).

Another thought has occured to me, along the lines of veekie's fixed intervals I suppose.  In Jack Vance's Rhialto the Marvelous, there is some time travel by mages;  but I think the applicable part would be that the world's flow of time is divided into something like 40 "ages".  Each 'age' is separated by some singular event such that changes in one age don't affect another.  For example, if you destroy a city in the 20th age, it doesn't matter in the 21st age because that city is just ruins anyway.