The Deities of Adel

The World of Adel is inhabited not only by the mortal Adelians, the analogues to humans and human civilization, and by wild animals and strange beasts, but also by living, breathing deities known as Spirits. Though all Adelians are polytheistic, it is not entirely accurate to say there is a single Adelian religion. Adelians worship countless Spirits throughout their lives – Spirits of natural processes, Spirits of emotions or states of mind, Spirits of certain hobbies or activities, and forever on from there. All these creatures exist, and the worship of them is natural and necessary to Adelian life.

Spirits have a wide variety of forms, though most are at least somewhat human-like in nature. They have markings like the Adelians do, sometimes more pronounced – for example, while an Eel Damakran might be slender and flexible and blue-skinned, but still look human, an Eel Spirit might have the head of an actual eel, or a fin running down its back. That being said a lot of spirits also look indistinguishable from Adelians save for their dress and habits. This allows them to live among the Adelians, or to have a point of commonality should they meet. Spirits take after humanoids because their forms tend to reflect both their worshipers, and the Purview – the Spirit’s thematic and aesthetic core – they represent.

The Divine Presence

Spirits were formed out of the raw magical energy released by the world during the Cataclysm. This energy, referred to as “the worldblood” or more simply, “essence” composes a Spirit’s body. While a Spirit feels like it is made of flesh to the touch, it is actually formed out of essence, which its body is constantly consuming. A Spirit is essentially running on a battery – though it can idle and extend its life, it requires more essence to continue to exist.

Spirits receive essence from feeding on mortal food and from advancing their concept, but they primarily receive it from prayers. Every prayer or act of veneration made toward the Spirit’s purview feeds the Spirit essence. While the Spirit could subsist on food, especially if he or she is a particularly lazy or inactive spirit,  he or she will just waste away slower than normal. And while a lot of Spirits believe in carrying out an “agenda” to advance their concept, this tends to waste more energy than it makes. It is only through Adelian worship that a Spirit can truly improve itself.

Essence forms divine flesh, giving the Spirits a physical form. Spirits’ bodies function like those of mortals – they have all the necessary systems to sustain life. Though nobody respectable has ever dissected a Spirit (such an act would be thoroughly abominable) and therefore Adelian science does not know for sure whether a Spirit’s body has the same organs, it is assumed they do. There have been people who’ve been born of spirit-mortal coupling, for example; and spirits do have natural needs to take care of. So Adelians assume that Spirits must also have organ systems.

Adelians do not compare favorably to most Spirits in terms of endurance. A Spirit does not normally die of violence. There are only three ways Spirits can die of violence. The first is consumption by another Spirit. For civilized Spirits, it is unheard of to eat another Spirit, but more bestial and barbaric Spirits eat each other all the time. The second way is if a Spirit chooses to die. If the Spirit feels insurmountable pain, it may decide to simply cease existing, just to end it. The third and most frightening way is if an Adelian harms a Spirit, then declares it dead. Adelians have greater power over Spirits than either would like to admit. When an Adelian rescinds a Spirit’s existence, it will die. This is a highly dangerous and somewhat taboo practice. The one who slays the Spirit may be marked, or made to take on the karmic burden of its victim.

In any other situation, the Spirit will take a beating and may fall seemingly comatose, or become inactive – but it is not dead. Some Spirits may regenerate outright, or take a few days to recover.

There are three different overarching categories of Spirits based on physical form. Bestial Spirits are completely animal or monstrous in form. They are expressions of raw and wild concepts, tempered by nothing of civilization. As such, they have become rarer. They tend to be the most destructive and least reasonable creatures. Conceptual Spirits take vaguely after humans, but are still very monstrous to look at. These are creatures with animal heads representing a dual purview, or even vague colored humanoid shapes representing art or music. Conceptual Spirits tend to represent abstract or obscure things, or represent domesticated or folkloric creatures. Personification Spirits are the most common. These Spirits are their purview in the shape of a person. Like Adelians, they have markings – they may have permanent tattooes or body lines, or a small amount of features of an animal, or pieces of crystals for an Ore Spirit, and so on. Personification Spirits run such a wide spectrum that describing all possible markings is a fool’s errand. They can fit in with Adelian populations due to their familiar physical appearance, mode of dress and general conduct, but tend to vacillate between society and the wild.

There are no real numbers for a Spirit Population. There are certainly more animals or more people than there are Spirits, but that’s not saying much. There are many, many animals and people, after all. There may be a multitude of Spirits for certain concepts, and very few for others, and nobody can really know for sure.

Adelian Worship And Its Effects

Since the beginning of their history, Adelians engaged in the worship of powerful things they saw around themselves. From the ravages of nature, to the beauty of a song, to the tenderness or agony of their own feelings, Adelians gave prayers, and ultimately composed hymns and verses, to the various elements of their lives. These prayers were their wishes – to experience a lovely song, to stave off sadness, to pacify storms or quakes. This tradition exists to this day. Whenever an Adelian engages in an important activity he or she will often give a prayer or verse, wishing for a certain outcome.

Adelians soon found out that their prayers were being heard. Since the Tribal Period, Adelians have been aware of Spirits and know something of their role in the world. Adelians believe that Spirits cause great things to occur, but that Spirits are also fickle and alien, and sometimes incapable of understanding Adelian desires fully. There is some truth to this. However, Adelians don’t understand the true nature of a Spirit’s power, or how prayers are “answered.”

The percentage of prayers that Spirits personally answers is near to zero. Most Spirits consider themselves to have other things to do, even if in reality they tend to have nothing on their schedule but eating, sleeping, entertaining themselves, or carrying out some make-believe agenda, often at the expense of other people and spirits. What a Spirit does is buttress a concept, to empower its ability to manifest within the world. The World of Adel is a broken world, broken by its previous inhabitants and only barely capable of sustaining existence. The World can no longer make Rain or birth creatures capable of emotion and ability. What makes Adel more than a barren husk of soulless bodies is the existence of Spirits.

To illustrate this: an Adelian prays for rain. He or she believes that a Rain Spirit will bring Rain. This is false. What a Rain Spirit does is allow the concept of Rain to exist in the first place, where in Adel rain couldn’t exist without a Spirit. Because a Spirit feeds off Prayers and Rain exists because of the Spirit, Praying to a Rain Spirit increases the chance of rain. It is impossible to enumerate this procedure – it is impossible to tell whether a village Rain Festival increases the chances of rain by this or that number. But powerful acts of veneration do have some effect on the events that follow them.

Whenever a Spirit receives a prayer it boosts its vitality and the strength of its concept. Minor acts of prayer or veneration will temporarily boost the Spirit, but a major event, or sustained prayer, will empower the Spirit and its concept. If the collective heart and mind of the Adelians will it, the Spirit may even increase in rank.

Relationships With Mortals

There are so many Spirits with so many different attitudes that it becomes difficult to discuss their relationships with people. Instead, we’ll discuss a few key points of how spirits and humans differ or relate.

Time: Some Spirits have adapted to the idea of Adelian time, where a person lives 100 years at best, and then is gone forever. A lot of Spirits have no concept of time. The World of Adel is over 2000 years old, and some Spirits might have existed now for hundreds or even a thousand or even since the creation of the world. As such, Spirits might either be as active and aware of time as an Adelian, or they might be overly methodical about every action taken.

Life: Spirits, unless born of a mortal coupling, just tend to spontaneously appear. Some Adelians have claimed to have seen Spirit cocoons or eggs or even Spirits coming out of fruit, which are all possible but unconfirmed. Generally, it is thought that Spirits just come into being. As such, a Spirit that doesn’t know would be shocked to discover what mammalian birth is, or how sex works. Some Spirits do come into being knowing these things, however, and many more about life. Some Spirits appear as children and grow older, either at an Adelian rate, or in their own bizarre ways.

Personality: Many Spirits are bizarre in behavior. A lot of them like to act as though they have a plan or schedule or agenda that they must keep, often at the expense of mortals. Whatever plot the Spirit is hatching or why is a mystery to anybody – until the Spirit steals the town well or seals up a nearby river with a spell, or turns all the crops into ambulant attack-plants, or causes some other manner of insanity to occur. Others just behave like people.

Some tend to dress luxuriantly and behave as though nobility, and are often extremely broke, incapable of coming to terms with the actual value of items or the actual cost of living in any given area. Each village or city has at most one Spirit that it keeps as a Guardian or Representative Spirit, and whose life becomes a lot simpler from then on, but the rest are on their own. Wealthy people may give patronage to bratty or greedy Spirits and keep them as household pets of a sort, thinking they will bring good fortune. (They tend not to – depends on the Spirit in question.)

Some Spirits emulate villagers, and live out peaceful rural lives. Others emulate the wandering child mages of the Magical Academies, and travel the world on their own aimless pilgrimages – often becoming friends, enemies or rivals with the very children and teenagers that they emulated in the first place.

Spirits can fall in love, and people have fallen in love with Spirits. Like Adelians, Spirits have little care about sex or gender when it comes to romance. Some Spirits can shapeshift, but most are born with certain biology. They simply don’t let it get in the way of their emotions and impulses, whatever those might be.

Deep down, while a Spirit might be antagonistic to humans, it is not “evil.” It has something it wants to do, either from misguided ideals or just its own eerie and inescapable nature as a divine being, and it often happens at the expense of mortals. When defeated or shown the error of its ways, it is unlikely to continue being a problem. Truly evil Spirits are referred to as Demons, and they are quite easy to tell apart when their modus operandi are compared.

Magic: A Spirit is near limitless in what it can do within its Purview. A Spirit of Pencils could make Pencils appear anywhere. A Spirit of Rain could conjure a rainstorm with a spell. Most Spirits can also tap into both Adelian magic systems – Arcane magic and Divine Hymnody, and use effects from there. However, keep in mind that a Spirit is made of the essence it is consuming when it attacks. As such, a Spirit will almost always hold back in combat, never truly using its real powers. In the same manner, while a nice Spirit would probably love to help an Adelian village out by conjuring up a banquet, it won’t, because it would come out of its vitality and body. It simply cannot afford to flaunt its powers.

Greater Spirit Powers

The most important rank a Spirit can achieve is that of a Greater Power, though a few lesser ranks exist. There are Eight Spirits that are venerated most commonly by Adelians, known as the Greater Powers. These are the Spirits with the most Purviews, the greatest reach, and who first approached the Adelians out of all other Spirits. They are simultaneously the most mysterious, the most common and the most interacted with of all the Spirits. When a member of the clergy is invested with the voice of the spirits, he or she is given the blessing to sing Hymns in a voice imitating that of one of the Greater Powers. This gift is one of the explicit ways the Greater Spirits benefit the Adelians over other Spirits.

You can find the table with the Eight Powers in this article. There is not much more to say. Are they truly greater gods in actions and behavior, or are they the same as any other Spirit?