The World I: An Overview

I've been running a Godbound campaign for a few weeks now and I must say I'm enjoying it.  Sine Nomine Publishing produces a free version of the rules, though I recommend the deluxe version for its expanded material.  While the default setting is cool, I like adding my own twists as usual.  I threw in chunks of Exalted and Nobilis with some of the key defaults for Godbound, as well as some ideas of my own.  Here's the premise piece and a tiny mechanical change from the default assumptions of Godbound.

The World

First there were the titans, those primordial beings who fashioned the World from the Uncreated Night for reasons known only to them.  The titans then forged the Celestial Orrery; the great assembly of divine machinery that kept the world intact without their direct intervention.  With the foundations of the World secure, they turned their hands to create things to inhabit the World, including people.   To care for this machinery, they also fashioned the unaging spirits and gave them Heaven to inabit.  The foremost among the spirits became known as the True Gods among the people, and found they gained power from the worship that was given to them.

The titans were capricious and inscrutable masters of the World, causing havoc in the Celestial Orrery when they overindulged their whims.  Their actions strained and threatened the machinery of the World, much to the dismay of gods and mortals alike.  Unbeknownst to the titans, the worship the gods had received freed them from their servitude, so the gods plotted their rebellion.  From mortals they fashioned beings imbued with fragments of the Divine Words to serve as the bulk of their forces;  the Godbound.  With the pieces in place, the Titanomachy began in earnest.

The World burned; continents were sunk, civilizations were erased, and the Celestial Orrery threatened to break under the strain.  But in the end the gods and their armies were victorious, having defeated the titans.  That one of their number was unaccounted for was of little concern to the victorious; it would simply be crushed by the gods and their army if it reappeared.  The road to recovery was arduous, but with the guidance of the True Gods and the might of the Godbound the people rebuilt and prospered.  Over the course of ten millennia, the people of the World reached heights they had not dreamt of under the old titans.  Theurgy and its applications produced miracle after miracle.  Though the gods often came to blows, they remembered well the horrors of the Titans and kept the World running smoothly in spite of their differences.  It was a relative golden age compared to what came before.

But that changed when the Last Titan made its devastating suicide attack on Heaven, shattering the celestial engines that held the World together.  The gods died screaming dire curses at the Last Titan.  Dominion over the land fell to the lesser powers; the ones created to fight the titans and their armies.  Godbound were never intended to rule the World; the secrets of the Orrery were the province of the dead gods and titans.  What remains are broken and fallen parts of the World.

The Apotheosis Word & Godhood

Due the nature of divinity in the World, the Apotheosis Word is not something that Godbound have by default (this is a change from the normal rules for the Apotheosis Word).  Godbound must first accomplish some sort of quest to earn the Apotheosis Word.  Access to and use of the Apotheosis Word is what distinguishes True Gods from those who merely claim to be gods.

For Godbound of all kinds, Apotheosis typically involves fixing a piece of the Celestial Orrery and attuning themselves to it.