Ask Lemmy

The Culture is objectively the safer answer. Living in Star Trek feels like it carries a fairly significant daily risk of being assimilated / used in a Romulan plot / sucked into some weird negative space wedgie / having a console explode in your face for no good reason.

Meanwhile, if you're in the Culture, you've pretty well got it made.

Fine, what's a TV show based in '80s America? The Americans! Just a nice, stress-free American family life in the suburbs.

honestly, you can! its a skill and if you work at it and practice, your mind can really open up.

Mine?

Well, there's the back story that thousands of years ago, "something" broke magic here on earth, and doing so broke magic everywhere. That last part matters because there are other worlds, settled by humans that have changed greatly over millennia.

So earth went along without magic for a very long time. It became a myth of its own, a thing that only existed in stories, until believing in is would make you seem crazy. During that time, the gods slept. Without magic to bind the faith of the living to the forces of the universe, the archetypes that the gods represented became only forces, undirected and impersonal, but also more observable as forces.

But magic was broken, not gone. Over time, the fundamental force of magic was building back up. Indeed, there were people that had the ability to perceive such things, though working magic took incredible effort, prolonged rituals, and often great sacrifice.

Towards the end of the 1800s, there were some of those people that could perceive magic and related energies became aware that magic as a force was building. (In the real world, here, that's when a lot of people became interested in the occult and magic. Stuff like the golden dawn, etc).

But it took a long time for it to "snap" back into place with the other fundamental forces.

The moment it happened was Woodstock. Between the energies of magic coming back, the altered states of the concert goers, and the presence of what are called awakeners, magic, humanity and the world reunited and triggered the return of the first god.

Only it was a goddess, Gaea, mother nature.

This obviously had a world changing effect. When mother nature appears in a gathering that size, then sends her voice across the world, the old paradigms were shifted.

This led to other gods awakening too. All the gods woke up so long as there was at least one person alive that worshipped them, or an awakener was aware of the god having existed in the past or in fiction. Some of the gods that woke up had no worshippers, but because someone with the ability to make the connection between forces and faith thought they should exist or come back, they did.

However, the monotheists were decidedly unhappy. See, not only were their religions in question, but their gods hadn't awaked in quite the same way as the other gods. The deep connections between the Abrahamic faiths, and the sheer numbers of worshippers made a mess of God/Allah/Jehovah(Yahweh)/Christ. They all came back, but they came back very messy. They had awakeners and worshippers viewing them as different gods, as the same god, and with hugely varying ideas of what those gods were.

This, through a process of anger and hatred led to the first part of the gods wars. One branch of an Abrahamic religion attacked another with not only conventional weaponry, but with magic. The allies of the nation that got attacked rallied, and the world was thrown into chaos.

Now, the story of that is long as hell, and there's not enough room to cover it. Not suffice it to say that gods fought, and some gods died. As gods died, the power they held accumulated in the victors. This led to a single god of a given thing, like Gaea being goddess of nature, Kwannon being goddess of mercy and healing Jesus being god of peace, Ares god of war, etc.

This left a planet with a pantheon made up of pieces of every religion, massive damage to the landscape, huge loss of population, and a surprising number of gods that were essentially fiction like Cthulhu.

That's the premise. I've been building it and using it for various things since 1991. My home brew ttrpg, a good amount of stories told to friends, and in a few books and shorter fiction now.

Fwiw, I'm almost 50, and I'm still creating stuff. You're never too old to imagine :)

Congratulations :')