Gods and the Loom of Fate redundant?

[DireSloth]

This has been bothering me for some time. As I understand it, and I haven't read much beyond the core book, the purpose of the Gods are to ensure Creation runs smoothly and correctly, while the Loom of Fate is to preserve casualty within Creation and make things follow their fate. Isn't that effectively the same thing? I know inefficiency and redundancy are themes in Heaven, but what I've read never suggest that the Loom and the gods can be at odds. Have I missed something? Also, I'm reading Roll of Glorious Divinity I now, which seems to suggest that the only real purpose of the gods, at least the terrestrial gods, is to observe their domains and report up the chain of command. If that's true, then why do the terrestrial gods have so much power, or even sentience? Can someone show me insight into the inner workings of heaven?


(I also have trouble telling what the differences are between terrestrial gods and elementals, but that at least makes more sense, as they are thematically intertwined.)

 

[Plague of Hats]

The Loom of Fate is like a giant database full of plans and projections about what is happening and what is supposed to happen. It may even have some direct influence over what happens. Primarily, though, it is a giant computer that helps Heaven keep on top of "how the world should be (often as determined by Heaven)." Gods are there to primarily to observe because the world's processes actually can run themselves most of the time; they report back to Heaven, to make sure the world is working right. When something screws up, though, they're also there to fix it.


The better part of the gods' labor is behind them, because the Primordials were the ones who made things screw up more often than not. They created the gods so that they could run roughshod and not have to fix things, and they gave them free will and sentience because:


1) It makes the gods more adaptable, which is important when they have such a complex job.


2) It makes them slaves instead of just tools, because the Primordials are huge dicks.


That's the ideal, anyway. The gods certainly can be at odds with the plans of Heaven and the patterns of the Loom. The Loom is telling them to do their jobs, and the gods are full of laziness and iniquity. But, the lower you are in the hierarchy, the more of your job you actually have to do, because you're what keeps the world where it is, and the guys higher up the ladder can more easily replace or even destroy you for slacking off, which allows those higher-ups to be even lazier. Plus, the Bureau of Destiny is one of the least corrupt divisions of Heaven, because of the driven efforts of the Sidereals, the fact that the Maidens are directly in charge (even if they don't tend to do as much as they used to), and because it's kind of important to keep the world actually running so that you can be lazy in it.


So, yeah, you can and should have stories about how a god is giving Heaven the bird because he really likes how the valley full of people looks better as a lake, but the bigger the transgression and the more important the thing being fucked up, the more likely it is that powerful gods or some Sidereals will show up and kung fu everything back the way it should be. Which means that transgressions actually tend to be small and long-lived, or big, showy and probably fixed within the space of a few decades.

(I also have trouble telling what the differences are between terrestrial gods and elementals, but that at least makes more sense, as they are thematically intertwined.)

Well, elementals are made of a given element and tend to be an expression of its imbalance in the world. They can be hired by Heaven, if they're smart enough and useful enough, but their origin is as troublesome spirits who shouldn't really exist. They don't tend the elements of the world like the great elementals did from which they come. Terrestrial gods are created and live to be overseers, just like any god, watching their domain in the world and reporting back to Heaven and making sure all the plans go right.


An elemental of fire might exist because of an abundance of fire geomancy in a place. He acts as a warning of that abundance, but only in the same way that a bursting steam pipe warns you that maybe the pipe is broken. The steam might even be good for your skin, and put out a nearby fire, or distract Hans Gruber so he doesn't kill John Mclaine, but more often than not it's just another Essence user who's probably going to cause trouble. He can join the Bureaucracy and get a job, which is probably pretty cushy compared to other jobs he might get, but as an immortal being with no metaphysical imperative to do the right thing, it's pretty safe to bet that you get a job to make your life easier, and "doing work" tends to be low on the list of priorities when you're trying to make your life easier. So the elemental is largely in the same place as a god, in the regard, except he's a second-class citizen and he could just as well get jobs with some other organization that (probably) won't destroy him if he screws up really big. But, damn, if you can get a job in Heaven, it pays so good, and there are these parties…


A god of fires, on the other hand, is born out of the need of the world to make sure that fires do what fires are supposed to do. If they don't, he reports back to Heaven about the problem and tries to fix it, and maybe his report is noticeable enough in the right amount of time that a fix-it squad shows up from Heaven. Often enough, the god uses his control over fire to try to extort a little extra prayer out of the unfortunate masses that use fire, or to bump into some other fire god's territory so that he gets even more prayer and underlings to do his job for him. He's the janitor who should've fixed that steam pipe, above, but he's too busy becoming Head Janitor because that pays better and allows him to slack off more.

 

[DireSloth]

It may even have some direct influence over what happens.

Ah, see this is what was confusing me. I haven't read the Sidereals book yet or anything about the workings of Heaven, so when I read all the talk of things being inside or outside fate I got it into my head that the Loom controls everything within Fate directly. Thinking of it as a giant planning computer helps a lot. Though, when the Siddies manipulate Fate, does that work because the bureaucracy of Heaven makes it work, or is it an inherent power of the Loom itself?


Incidentally, does the concept of the Loom of Fate remind anyone of the delusions of James Tilly Matthews? It'd be hilarious if that was intentional.

 

[Plague of Hats]

The Loom of Fate and what it means to the setting is really not well explained anywhere. You tend to have to rely on inference from designated themes and author commentary.

Though, when the Siddies manipulate Fate, does that work because the bureaucracy of Heaven makes it work, or is it an inherent power of the Loom itself?

Yes to both, and more. Sidereal manipulation of Fate extends to participation in planning committees, direct contact with the pattern spiders that weave the Loom, and their own personal Charms. This latter is something that Heaven doesn't really have any control over, as it's an inborn property of the Sidereal Exaltation.

 

[Inverse]

I thought that the Loom made causality (time) work. The gods make sure things work as they should, but if weird stuff happens that's inside fate it still follows the rules of time and stuff. Like, you could have all bananas suddenly turn pink because the god of bananas decided to change it's color and violate all sorts of heavenly laws against arbitrarily changing colors, but bananas will have been their normal color until the banana god changed their color. The only way to make all bananas forever and always since bananas first had a color pink is to mess with the loom, and that would mess things up and cause bad things to happen to time. So, heaven keeps things their proper color and stuff, but the Loom keeps time working. It's just what I think though.

 

[Plague of Hats]

Sort of.


The Loom has some sort of ill-defined influence on how causality in Creation works. The gods' effect on causality is better explained, because they rule directly over their domains with magical powers and stats and everything. But causality is a loose concept, here, in a world where you can redefine the consequences of a given action. The Loom of Fate is used to track and enforce the specific brand of causality mandated by Heaven, as opposed to whatever crazy shit Fair Folk or Solar Exalted want to happen.


The inexorable arrow of time, the illusion that one moment marches into the next and each event is followed by another, related event, is not up to the Loom (not directly). One of the first and greatest wounds the Primordials dealt to the universe in building Creation was to sear linear time into its basic foundation. It is inescapable, no matter where you go; one second is followed by the next. You can turn seconds into hours, or hours into seconds, but it's always one step forward over and over again. There is no going backward. This temporal circumstance might be due to Creation itself, Creation's situation in the conjunction of shinma that allow it to exist as it does, or something even more permanent that is branded into the shinma directly.


When the Loom of Fate and destiny-based powers, such as Avoidance Kata, deal with things that look like manipulation of the past, they're not really. What's happening is simply a different kind of causality, which can include rewriting the present's perception of the past. A Sidereal that escapes danger with Avoidance Kata really was there a moment ago, even though all evidence points to him having left before then. This can look pretty much exactly like time travel or past-manipulation for most purposes, but it's actually an important facet of the setting that it is not.

 

[Indon]

The way I see it is that essence use, by making the impossible possible, gradually unmakes reality by damaging causality. Without constant maintenance, the fabric of reality slowly loosens, Wyld-tainting the area, then eventually unmakes entirely as without causality, nothing means anything anymore.


Fate is a hodgepodge of reality-maintenance measures meant to make sure things have meaning, if not physically, then narratatively. The Primordials thought in terms of story and narrative, and this is one of the fundamental principles of the reality they created, and probably the best one to hold things together since most essence use breaks physical laws while often conforming to narrative ones.


At the lowest levels of the protocol, the Pattern Spiders maintain physical laws with little care for narration. The high-level design, the Loom, brings the whole design into a narrative whole.


Reality could function without the Loom or Fate, but each blatant use of Essence would prove an existential danger to Creation.

 

[Thorn Darkblade]

The way I understood it is the Loom has all the laws and programs already in it, and the gods are there simply to execute it. Think the code machine in Lost. Someone's gotta press the button.


For example, take a river surrounded by floodplains. The Loom says 'This is a river. It flows this way. It occasionally floods."


The god of said river makes sure it floods when it's supposed to, instead of randomly, killing hundreds of poor peasants working in the nearby rice paddies when a freak flood that shouldn't happen just happened. The flood follows all the rules of what a flood is (It's made of water, it comes from the river overflowing, no molten fire or such), but, somehow, happened when it shouldn't have.