Godstein Part 4: The Divine Council
This is the fourth post in a series about my home campaign where each of the players act as gods in addition to their player characters. Previous entries:
Part 1: Concept, God Creation, and Game Setup
Part 2: Map and World Generation
Part 3: Resources and Mana
I wanted the gods to still have major sway in the world after the campaign started, so I integrated two major systems: Mana and the Divine Council. I discussed mana in part 3; it was a way to keep the gods integrated into the world after Braunstein, but the Divine Council was the source of the most drama.
The divine actions they took during the Braunstein world generation were fun and they should continue occasionally throughout the campaign. Gods intervening and causing major world events and catastrophes would add player-made problems and objectives to the campaign.
I thought the appropriate pace for this would be one divine action per month, so I would roll a random player each month to take a divine action, but I gave them the option to vote to form a divine council. It would only take a simple majority vote to form the council and a 2/3 majority to dissolve it.
The vote didn’t pass in the first month, but it did pass in the second month, and the divine council became my favorite part of the game. Here were the rules:
Each month, there would be a vote for Divine Council Leader. Each god would vote secretly on who they think should be the divine council leader. The Divine Council leader gets to do three things:
Perform a divine action in the world. As explained in an earlier post, the divine action could be anything from terraforming, a natural disaster, something that enriches a society, etc. It’s just a major world event chosen by the god that would help mold the world into the god’s vision.
Gain mana. The exact amount of mana gained changed as I added new players to the campaign. At first, it was 1 when there were 6 players, but when I got up to 12+ I changed this to 3 mana.
Propose an amendment. This amendment would be a change to voting rules. For example, a player could propose to make voting public or to give gods more votes for each cleric dedicated to them in the world. This would be put to a simple majority yay/nay vote among the gods.
Each god gets 1 vote for divine council leader, made secretly.
Gods are allowed to bribe, make deals, and lie about their votes if desired. Since mana was freely tradable, they were allowed to trade mana to each other for votes if desired.
Sending screenshots to other players of votes or the private notes chat, in general, is against the rules. Gods are allowed to discuss and tell each other their votes, but they may not provide receipts.
Everyone has the opportunity to secretly purchase up to 1 additional vote for 3 mana. (This was dubbed the “Enhance Democracy” action
Gods could vote for themselves. In fact, if a god did not vote, the vote would be automatically applied to themselves.
In the case of a tie, there is no winner and a random world event happens instead.
At the same time every month (we use the second Wednesday at 6PM) all votes are totaled and a winner is declared. Up until that point, they were free to change their votes as many times as desired.
As stated above, gods were allowed to vote for themselves, but since a tie would result in a random world event, this meant that if everyone voted for themselves, no one would win. This actually did come up in the campaign once- two gods each got 3 votes and we ended up rolling a world event, which was later used to explain the entry of a new god into the world.
I had a random world events chart that I used in case of ties, and I also rolled from it a few times during world creation in between rounds. I only have a d10 chart, but you can easily make your own or add to this. These are all mostly just ideas, many have not been play-tested, and they are questionably balanced, so you should feel free to tweak this to suit your group:
[Note: I also used these a few times during world creation but I don’t think I included this in part 2, so I’m going to go back and add it there too.]
With this system, I witnessed situations where players were paying each other for votes, staging shadow campaigns, and even lying about their votes. It seemed to work and each month was more dramatic than the last, but there are nuances that a referee for this type of game needs to be aware of:
Because of the ability to propose voting rules, it is very possible for certain players to shut others out of the voting process by passing voting rules that will make some votes worth more than others. I consider this to be a feature. It adds drama and stakes to the monthly god elections and there are always people concerned that others will try to do this. I would allow this sort of situation to happen, though depending on how and when it happens, it may be a sign that the campaign is in its later stages.
In my game, this has not happened after 8 months of using this system. The only additional voting rule that has passed is one that prevented people from winning more than once in 3 months.
The referee may only get a partial picture of what is happening. There are backchannels that I am not privy to and deals that I don’t understand. I try to keep up with who is paying off who, but I don’t know the details of a lot of what’s happening.
This caused players to campaign each month for votes with various pitches, though some of them grasped the real game quicker than others. The real game didn’t take place in the public discord channels, but behind the scenes in DMs. Players were making deals, trading mana and votes, and promising each other favors to win. Some months gave us a bloodbath and others were extremely close. Once, so far, we witnessed a tie followed by a random world event.
The Divine Council was the catalyst of an incredible amount of drama in my campaign, and pretty much all of it was the good kind that kept people engaged in the world. There were a few hiccups that I will address in a later post, though most of the hiccups were players who tried to coast to power in-game on the back of meme magic, so the stories that came out of this are pretty good, though the effects of the memes on the world are questionable.