What If Mortals Created the Gods?

Khassid began about twenty years ago with a quote commonly attributed to Voltaire: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

By that point, I had been interested in Dungeons & Dragons for years. I owned what felt like a metric ton of books and had read through settings such as Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk. I did not play much because no one I knew was really interested, but I kept buying the books, reading the lore, and thinking about the worlds.

Each setting had its own personality. Ravenloft was gothic horror. Dark Sun was brutal and apocalyptic. Dragonlance was built around war, faith, and sweeping legends. They were different, but underneath those differences, certain things usually stayed the same.

Elves were graceful, flighty, and arrogant. Dwarves were dour, stubborn, and taciturn. Halflings were warm and friendly, but often lazy or more interested in comfort than adventure. The details changed, but the basic ideas behind the peoples and the worlds remained familiar.

That familiarity is part of what makes D&D what it is, but I started wondering what would happen if I changed something deeper.

The Voltaire quote led me to the question that started everything:

What if mortals created the gods?

Once I had that question, another one immediately followed. If mortals created the gods, then who created the mortals?

That was where Aeru came from.

I knew Will had to be important. The idea of Will as a force appears throughout fantasy and philosophy. In Xena: Warrior Princess, Lao Ma says, “The entire world is driven by a will; blind and ruthless.” The Green Lanterns use Will to shape energy and make their thoughts real.

I began thinking about Will not simply as determination, but as something that could exist on its own. What if Will were the first thing to become aware?

Aeru began as Will strong enough to ask, “Who am I?” and then answer, “I am Aeru.”

That was the birth of one of the Elder Four.

Aeru existed, but there was still no world. I had also always wanted twin gods, not simply two divine siblings who happened to be related, but twins who were inseparable from the act of creation itself.

From Aeru came Antaz and Sujaz.

Antaz embodied air and water. Sujaz embodied earth and fire. Together, they held the elements needed to create a world. Aeru gave those elements purpose, and the twins gave that purpose form.

From them, Khassid was born.

With the world in place, Aeru could create mortal life. Those mortals would experience love, fear, hope, grief, war, ambition, death, justice, disease, magic, and everything else that shapes a civilization.

Through those experiences, mortals would create the gods.

The gods of Khassid were not placed into the setting simply because every fantasy world needs gods of war, death, magic, nature, and the sea. They grew from the things mortals experienced and needed to understand. Mortals gave names and identities to the forces affecting their lives, and their belief gave those forces divine form.

That was the basic idea. The gods came from mortals, but mortals came from something older.

From there, the world kept growing.

The next task was figuring out the mortals themselves.

I began with the familiar peoples of D&D: elves, dwarves, humans, and halflings. I wanted players to recognize what they were, but I did not want them to feel like the same versions found in every other setting.

They needed to belong to Khassid.

The first step was changing their names and then asking what those names meant for their cultures.

Elves became the Syl’Aeris.

Halflings became the Felden.

Humans remained humans.

Then I reached the dwarves and wondered whether they needed to be native to Khassid at all. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if they had come from somewhere else?

That was the beginning of the Barazûn.

Of course, deciding that the Barazûn were not native created more questions. Where did they come from? Why did they leave? How did they reach Khassid? How did their arrival affect the peoples already living there, and how did living in Khassid change them?

That became my general approach to the setting. I would ask a question, find an answer, and then realize that the answer created three or four new questions.

The Syl’Aeris, Felden, Barazûn, and humans still needed to be recognizable as fantasy peoples, but their cultures, histories, beliefs, and relationships had to come from Khassid rather than from assumptions carried over from other settings.

There were no gnomes.

I was never much of a fan of them, so I left them out.

That has since changed, but hold your horses. Some things are better when they are allowed to arrive in their own time.

Back then, none of this was part of a publishing plan. There was no website, no sourcebook, no product line, and no real thought that anyone besides me might ever see it.

There were only ideas and files.

Some of those files were stored on floppy disks. Later, they were moved to CDs as technology changed. Khassid followed me from one format to another, stored in notes and documents that I kept adding to over the years.

Then, at some point, I lost everything.

The disks were gone. The CDs were gone. The files were gone.

What remained were the ideas.

I had lived with Khassid for so long that much of it was still in my memory. I could not restore every sentence or recover every detail exactly as it had been, but the foundation was still there. I remembered the questions, the names, the gods, the peoples, and the ideas that had made the world different.

So I began reconstructing it.

Some parts returned as I originally remembered them. Some changed. Some were replaced by better ideas. Khassid was not restored as a perfect copy of what I had lost, but it survived.

For years, that was how the world existed. It was something I carried with me, thought about, added to, and occasionally rebuilt. It was not yet a public setting. There was no audience waiting for it, and I was not certain there ever would be.

By the time the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Document 5.2.1 became available, I was in my fifties.

For the first time, I had a clear foundation I could legally use to turn Khassid into something other people could explore and play. By then, I also had decades of ideas, revisions, failures, lost files, and reconstructed history behind it.

I began to wonder whether Khassid had not been delayed at all.

Maybe it had been waiting.

It had been waiting for the right tools. It had been waiting for me to gain the experience needed to understand what I was trying to build. It had been waiting for a time when I could turn a collection of remembered ideas into sourcebooks, websites, timelines, archives, kingdoms, monsters, and entire pantheons.

When I first asked what would happen if mortals created the gods, I did not know how large the answer would become. I was not trying to create something that would take twenty years to finish.

I was simply following the questions.

What if mortals created the gods?

Where did those mortals come from?

What existed before them?

What happens when belief gives a divine force a name?

What happens when those gods begin influencing the mortals whose beliefs created them?

Each answer led to another question, and each question uncovered another piece of the world.

That is how Khassid grew.

It did not begin with a map, a kingdom, or a campaign. It began with an old quote, a shelf full of D&D books, and a question about gods and the mortals who needed them.

Twenty years later, Khassid is no longer sitting on a floppy disk, hidden on a CD, or living only in my memory.

Maybe it was waiting for now to be seen.