How do gods work in Hero’s Song? What races can you play? John Smedley’s just posted a new and lengthy explanation on both to Reddit. In his upcoming OARPG, the gods are “the core of the game,” he says.

You choose which ones you want to be bound to your world (5 total) from 15 different Gods at the start (if you Ascend your character becomes a God and can then be used). You get the choice to pick the 5 Gods, one of which has to be assigned to be the God of Shadows. These choices dramatically impact how the world is formed physically. The Gods have attributes that determine how they impact world creation specifically. For example, if you choose Nae, the Goddess of the Seas – and you decide to up her impact in the world (through UI choices during world creation) you’re going to get a world with a lot more water and islands. If you choose to have Cor, The Mad Smith, God of the Roads and patron of the Dwarves you’re going to get a lot more mountains. The same is true of Silea, the Goddess of the Wild. She happens to be the patron of the 3 different Elvish factions in the game (The High Elves, the Elathi and the Ashen Elves who had their home destroyed by the Dwarves when the Dwarves built the Great Forges. The Gods each have their own attributes which determine how they impact the world, but the real effect is felt with the combination. The Gods were the children of the Lonely God who created all, and their impact cannot be understated.

Even the NPCs and monsters of the server are influenced by the selected gods. “For example, if you decide that Silea has more influence than Cor, you could end up with Elves having destroyed the Dwarven civilization in it’s infancy,” he says, and that means “you’ll see the ruins of a once great Dwarven empire (all the civilizations of the game have different states they can be set to by the history generator). It also means that you won’t be able to even select Dwarves as an option when choosing your character.”

As to the races, they run the spectrum from stock humans like the Avar to ocean dwellers and a whole series of elves that will remind gamers of D&D and EverQuest.

Pixelmage’s website is offline at the moment and loading through a DDoS-protection Cloudflare splash page. Smed didn’t answer our tweet speculating as to whether or not the usual suspects were attacking the site. And I don’t think anyone will blame him.

The game has pulled in almost $80,000 of its $800,000 Kickstarter goal so far. You can get caught up on the game with this week’s Massively OP interviews with John Smedley and Patrick Rothfuss.