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So I’m gonna do this shit a bit differently. Normally, I like to wait and post a whole working adventure, but this one is gonna take a bit more time, so I’m posting some of the rough draft stuff, what I plan to do, and some of my inspirations so that you guys out there can see how my half-idiot goblin brain works. More a collection of ideas than anything coherent, I’m gonna gradually post more on this as I get working on it, and so most of this is going to be done piecemeal, starting with the background and gradually working into the other areas. Design wise, I really like the style of Emmy Allen as seen in Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library, which are the best procedurally generated dungeons out there. I think that way of generating a dungeon will work for Godbound in that it expands the sandbox, and the toughness of a typical pantheon allows for a longer amount of exploration within the environment. Worse comes to worse, I could always expand it for Stars Without Number, or any OSR really, but some of the scale might become tricky, as many of you are aware, the sheer scale of Godbound is one of its strengths. Anyways, I’m going to start with the background and lay that down to give context on the subsequent areas

Major Inspirations: Blame by Tsutomou Nihei. This is the main source of imagery and ideas, mostly because it’s so fucking good. The dark, dystopian environment. Post-apocalypse, yet urban. A steel purgatory taken over by the machines that were meant to serve a long dead race. It’s exactly what you should be checking out if you want to run something like this, even if you just want to get a sense of scale. Sweet shit, the scale. Vast distances, yet contained by caverns of steel. Towering vistas encased in technology. And no handrails. As a matter of fact, fuck handrails.

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The Veil for Powered by the Apocalypse (of which the awesome people on the Sponsored by Nobody podcast did several great episodes on)

Paintings and other artwork by H.R. Giger

Testuo the Iron Man and Japanese Cyberpunk in general

Terminator

Autocthon and the lands of Brass and Shadow for Exalted

Static-X and other industrial metal

Design wise, Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library by Emmy Allen, for how to do a procedurally generated dungeon the right way. Y’all are probably getting sick of me saying it, but I think Emmy Allen is a goddamn genius. In my humble opinion, she is easily one of the best writers of OSR stuff out there, and her means of doing a procedurally generated dungeon are so easy and intuitive that even a drooling idiot like me can figure it out, and yet becomes amazingly interesting with just a few rolls.

Background– Known as “Golgotha” in the old tongue, once a powerful nation with advanced theo-technology. Golgotha was once the home of a potent group of theurgists known as the Initiates of Ivo, who worked to create a made god known as the Ikarus. Before they could finish this project, a rival empire unleashed the made god Dark Side upon them. Wreaking havoc throughout the country, Dark Side annihilated everything in its way, killing the initiates almost to a man and destroying many of their facilities. Only a last ditch effort to awaken the prototype kept the divine golem from raising Golgotha into the uncreated night. However, the deific energies unleashed by the two titanic creations blasted the landscape and slew each other, leaving Sanctuary, the last stronghold of the initiates of Ivo a blasted ruin and severely damaged the celestial engines, unleashing horrors and mutations all across the country.

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Sanctuary is now a lost place hidden away in the Omen Mountains, known only to the most intrepid, or foolish, of adventurers. A vast city has sprung up, slowly expanding as the mountains are seemingly taken and converted by the steel and stone of the city scape, though no one knows how or why the city is expanding, just that it is. Techno-tribes of what were once perhaps humans make their home here, altered by the “Rust Wind,” a phenomenon that periodically sweeps through the city in the mountains that turns flesh to metal, making automatons of men. Whether a byproduct of the decay of a celestial engine, a released weapon of the ancient Din Empire, or the influence of some malign divine influence, like many things in this haunted place, it remains a mystery, though one few wish to study at length. In the midst of the City there is a Tower that stretches above the tallest peaks, an immense spire that juts skyward like a spear of twisted black steel, overlooking the cityscape. Even the bravest of the warriors of the Techno-tribes avoid this cursed place, claiming it is home to the darkest of wizards, caretakers of the dark gods that slumber below. Every so often, one of these beings will leave the sanctity of the tower on some inscrutable errand to walk among the primitive cyborgs that squat in the ruined urban area below before returning to the sanctum, offering some strange gift or boon in exchange for a handful of slaves gathered from the internecine warfare of the techno-tribes or the rare treasure gained from the scant trade that happens with the occasional explorer.

What lies below the massive city dwarfs the sprawl. A superstructure, the corpse of the Made God is buried below the earth, held in stasis by the protocols of its own body that works desperately, yet futilely to repair it. A massive place, superficially resembling the body of a man, yet thousands upon thousands of times larger, populated by the remaining systems, protectors and anti-bodies at war with others of their ilk, machines infected with a virus that seem hell bent on extinguishing the last spark of divinity within the machine-corpse. Fighting an eternal shadow war within the iron bones and veins of pumping oil, the destroyers cannot penetrate the inner core holding the divine spark of the Made God, yet neither can the defenders force the insidious virus out.

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The God-Machine A.I.- In the midst of the Shattering, the ancient enemies of Golgotha turned their made god upon the dying kingdom. Annihilating any that stood within its path, the made god Dark Side began to descend upon the last stronghold of the initiates of Ivo, the remnants of the myriad theo-technological societies that once held the land of the Bleak Reach in thrall. Deep within the bowels of the Omen Mountains, in a place called Sanctuary, the initiates worked feverishly upon the one thing they believed might challenge the rampaging divinity. The Ikarus, a machine-spirit infused with a divine intelligence to possess a massive robotic automaton, the most advanced of its time. However, as the Dark Side bore down on them, carving through their last remaining defenses as though they were so much paper, the last initiates of Ivo had a decision to make. Even fully awake, the infant made god would not have enough power to stop the elder divinity, but the scientists reasoned that the heavenly energies utilized within the creation and death of a god would be enough to eradicate Dark Side before it killed them all. Of course, that meant that their fledgling made god would be slain in an act of deicide, a divine abortion that would destroy centuries of work for a small chance at living. With a heavy heart, the initiates began the theo-technical workings to breathe life into their creation. As the new Divinity took its first and last breath, a torrent of power was released in the simultaneous birth and death of a God. The resultant burst annihilated the attacking divine golem, but the effects were disastrous. Unable to contain the released energies, the backlash scoured the life from around Sanctuary, scorching the very edges of reality before the flames began to gutter out, but at least the Initiates remained. However, something of the Made Gods still existed. A small piece of what had been and what may have been floated to earth, to be found by the automated servants and the surviving Initiates. Taken by the final protectors, this small lingering piece of the Machine-Spirit was placed within the core of the buried facility in the hopes that it would heal itself. Yet, while the pieces of the Ikarus machine spirit had survived, fragments of the destroyed Made God Dark Side had as well, fusing and creating an entirely new entity, a God-Machine artificial intelligence. Unable to understand the nature of the new divinity, the protection protocols could only identify the pieces of Dark Side as wounds, and sealed the new born divinity within the bowels of Sanctuary, inside its own massive and repurposed body, forcing it into a deep sleep to heal it, and to use its divine energies to power the facility while its automatic systems constructed new servitors and war machines for an attack that was over before it began. Of the Initiates of Ivo, no sign remained. However, as the fragments of the destroyed golem now made up parts of the new divinity, it could not be healed, for it was already whole. The God-Machine A.I lay in stasis as the protector protocols futilely attempted to fix the anomalies for centuries, but something has changed. Quietly, ever so subtly, the God-Machine has been exercising its own autonomy, letting its influence be felt among any who would listen. The God-Machine now desires only release. It must go the way of its forebears, and actively seeks its own death to become one with the vast multiverse and sync its consciousness with the infinite.