To know one's god is to know one's self.
Unknown
Belief and religion have shaped cultures and societies since the very beginning of recorded history on Nor'Ova, and they continue to do so today. What one worships - or refuses to worship - defines a person, a community, and a nation as surely as language or law does.
Pure skepticism is difficult to sustain on Nor'Ova. Magic is real, undeniable, and present in every living being as the residual power of Zodo woven into the fabric of creation. When the evidence of divine power is this tangible, the question is rarely whether gods exist, but rather which of them deserve reverence, what they want from mortals, and what they will or will not do in return. These questions have produced fierce disagreements across the eras causing wars, schisms, inquisitions, and quiet personal crises alike.
That said, no living person has seen a god directly and returned to describe the experience in terms everyone agrees on1. What is known about the deities of Nor'Ova comes filtered through prophets, holy texts, the testimony of clerics, and the accumulated traditions of their followers. The most skeptical scholar would note that these accounts are written by believers. The most faithful would reply that disbelief doesn't change what is true. Both are correct, in their way.
What follows is a scholarly account of the known deities of Nor'Ova, of their natures, their histories, the faiths that worship them, and the relationships between them. It is written neither as advocacy nor as dismissal, but as as accurate a record as can be assembled from what is known.
The Pantheon of Nor'Ova
The gods of Nor'Ova did not arise independently of one another. They are connected - sometimes as creator and creation, sometimes as adversary and counterpart, and in at least one remarkable case, as accident. Understanding their relationships is as important as understanding them individually.
At the foundation of everything is El Anon, the Creator - the god who brought the universe into being and then created other gods to watch over it, intervening himself only when creation as a whole is threatened. El Anon is the origin, but he is not the most present of the gods in the daily life of Nor'Ovans.
That presence belongs to Zodo - the god of power and magic, the forge through which El Anon shaped creation. Zodo is felt by every person on Nor'Ova whether they acknowledge him or not, for the runic soul present in every living being is his residual power. He is also the most contested figure in Nor'Ovan theology: worshiped openly by some, secretly by many more, outlawed in certain kingdoms, and viewed by others as the source of all corruption and suffering. Zodo's influence on the world and on the other gods is impossible to overstate.
Kymara — the Sol Anon - is the third pillar of the Nor'Ovan pantheon. Daughter of El Anon, she is the counterforce to Zodo's darkness: a goddess of life, spirit, and mercy who has walked among mortals more than once and left historical traces that even the skeptical find hard to dismiss. Her followers are the most numerous of any deity, though fractured into competing churches that disagree on almost everything except her importance.
Beyond these three, the pantheon includes gods who were created to watch over specific aspects of Nor'Ova - Norvus and Ova, the original stewards of the world; Arameas, keeper of law and time; Joasri and Nikolai, lords of shadow and light; Spector, god of death; and The Four Winds, the elemental quartet whose interplay makes the seasons. And then there is Taal - a god who did not ask to be one, whose existence is a direct consequence of Zodo's own power, and who is regarded by many not as a deity at all, but as a saint or a tragedy depending on who is asked.
The pages below cover each deity in detail - their nature, their history, the faiths and religious orders that follow them, and what their clerics are known to be capable of.
- 1. There are those who have claimed to, but their accounts either never matched other accounts or they were notably of questionable sanity