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Dec. 31st, 1983 09:07 pmAN UNNAMED ECATS STYLE GAME, IDEFK
because my imagination is way too active.
So I had this vague idea for a game a while back, and it got developed a lot by talking with Ivory and Horn while we were hanging out in Seattle. I'm honestly not sure if I have the knowledge I need of this medium to actually...run this. Or the time and energy. But I figured I'd write a batch of stuff down and share it to see what people thought, I guess. Basically if people think it sounds really exciting, I might put it on the back-burner to think about more once I deal with getting my RL in order, and see if I have the energy then. (Also I'd want a co-mod but w/e, details.)
This is a panfandom amnesia game primarily built around developing characters in interesting ways, through relatively short (maybe) and dynamic arcs. Every PC starts dead. (Much like Thusia, you can make up a death if you don't have a canon one. It's also possible, I think, to play a character coming into game having temp-died, maybe even had a near-death experience.) At some point after their death, they were contacted by some strange God who offered to take them on a journey to return to life/become stronger/rebuild themselves as a better person/whatever. So a character's progress through the game is an afterlife journey/divinely guided initiation, as they face various tasks, deal with various things, and gain their memories back.
Every PC starts as an insubstantial Ghost, remembering only their death and the conversation with the God who brought them here. Here, they find, is a strange network of giant colorful spheres suspended high above roiling darkness, linked by gravity-defying bridges with doors in strange places. The Spheres are the places of Gods, normally inaccessible; each PC starts play in the Sphere of the God who brought them. The doors lead to living areas, and each PC will soon learn that they have a three-person team that they live with, and a Book--more on that later. They can touch their Books properly, but nothing else, at least not until they earn a day's worth of being substantial by completing or winning one of the various Tasks that the Gods run. While insubstantial, they neither hunger nor thirst. Over time, they gradually, naturally recover their memories--but there are other things they must win on their own.
While in this world of Spheres and recovering themselves, each PC can choose to take one of three Paths towards and continuing on from their good-end. (There is, I'm sure, some sort of drop mechanism as well, possibly a well of souls that people fall into if they lose their Path, but this is a game pretty attuned towards giving people good ends and sending them towards them, I think.) I may rename the paths later, I'm maybe not satisfied with them, but they are:
The Path of Return - Somebody who takes this path is returned to their home world, alive and well, fully revived and substantial, probably with a boon of some sort. Quests can be done to strengthen this boon. A character who takes the Path of Return may revisit the game in their dreams, either at any time or during specific events, but is out of regular play.
The Path of Travel - The character is again fully revived and substantial, and will gain the ability to walk between worlds, visiting their home world, this one, and any other at will. Again, they are out of regular play but can definitely pop back in whenever. They probably also have a boon.
The Path of Divinity - The character has ascended to godhood, and remains in this world permanently as a God associated with one of the Spheres, basically transitioning from PC to NPC and remaining in play. They don't need a boon, they're a fucking God.
How does a character complete their path? By winning Tasks, which are sort of like Aather games. More on them below! But to complete one's Path, one must win a Task that counts for that Path in each Sphere. So, for example, if you are intended to take the Path of Travel, you must, over time, win at least one Task of Travel in each Sphere. (There is probably also an additional thing or two to complete the Path of Divinity, I'm working that out.) Once you've won all ten, you probably have a few days to wrap up your business before heading out, but this world is not a place for living people unless they are Gods. I might consider working out a stay-here-as-a-living-human option if there is interest, but given that all of the good-end options have the potential for nearly unlimited visitation play, I'm not sure it's necessary?
Early on, especially depending upon initial interest levels, there will be a series of unlocks/expansions to the world that allow the addition of new characters, gods, and spheres. There *is* a cap to the number of spheres; people trying to finish a path aren't on an infinite treadmill. After that initial period, people can start good-ending, and the world won't expand much further except for smaller amenities and other Interesting Things. (Nor will the character count unless there's *overwhelming* interest.) I suspect the game will eventually reach a sort of equilibrium where it could either go for a while or be wrapped up with a series of potential events.
There may or may not be things outside the network of spheres and bridges that may or may not do things. :3
BOOKS AND MEMORIES
So I mentioned above that everybody has a Book. The Book is the record of themselves, and to a certain extent also a device for forcing them to confront or share things they might not otherwise.
Primarily it's the memory delivery device. Every time somebody gets a memory, it appears in their book, in eloquently written detail. If the owner of that memory reads it, they get a full visceral mental playback; if anybody else does, they just get the written version.
And yes, I am playing with the idea of divorcing memory regain from games. Winning Tasks is your path to good-end; regaining your memories is just another way of developing your character in interesting ways. I think memories simply reappear on a regular basis, enabled by the God who initially brought you to this world. You can probably quest to slow them down, speed them up, put them on hold entirely, or get a specific sort of memory, depending upon your character's wishes--though if you want to OOC override their wishes, their God is free to deny such a request for their own good. Playing characters with very short registries is certainly possible! Characters with long registries are free to lump trivial stuff a lot or ask their God, either IC or OOC, to speed up their delivery. Reaching good-end before you have all your memories back necessitates some sort of quest to get the rest in one or several lumps.
Gods, in turn, are encouraged to do things like "read this sig-neg" as quests. :3 A lot of this is a mechanism for developing PC-God CR, because the character and their God are basically cooperating in the exploration of that character's past and memories, and it's totally valid for the God to IC do things like "no, seriously, you need to face this" or "I'm just gonna lock away those memories of you being a villain so you can learn to be nice for a bit." (Or maybe "here have only your trauma ever because I want to mold you into a horrible person '-'" depending up the relationship and the nature of the God.) It's not possible, though, for a God to hold back any memories for more than three IC days after a character wins good-end.
Anyway, Books! Beyond simple memory delivery, they can also sometimes...do interesting things. This is all basically by OOC fiat: it is possible for a Book to share the written form of your memory to somebody else's Book, indexed in a different section from their own memories. It is possible for a Book to transcribe some of your subconscious thoughts that you do not want to deal with, again indexed in a different section. And maybe even, in turn, share those with somebody else. :3 Basically a Book is also your mechanism, as a player, for making life more interesting for your character in terms of information sharing and confronting matters that they might need to confront.
Skills, by the way: you can quest with a God to regain a skill once you've remembered having it. There is possibly some sort of powercap in place? But it's relatively weak. Heights of magical badassery can be reached; this world is explicitly about self-development and empowerment, after all. Mostly the Gods will not let you damage the structures of the world or themselves. Damage to fellow PCs is allowed, but various gods will be pretty generous with healing and revivals.
TEAMS
One of the initial ideas I had for this game is...what if teams were notably smaller? PCs are grouped into three-person teams, each sharing a common area with a partner team. So a three-person core group, a six-person extended group.
Because of the nature of a Path being one's progression through the afterlife, a character does not automatically win a Task if their teammate does. However, if any member of a three-person team wins, they can choose to share their memory of the Task with a teammate to allow them to also claim that win. (Thus allowing some wiggle room for players who can't make Tasks very often. It's probably also possible to take out an individual quest with a God to complete a personal Task for a particular Sphere, but that should be restricted to emergencies.)
The three team members share a bedroom and a shelf for their Books. (And probably also a place with food for when they're substantial. Insubstantial people don't need to sleep btw.) It is not possible to lock one's Book against a teammate choosing to read it. People who aren't those three can't enter the bedroom period, ever.
One's team placement also has another effect: each team bedroom is set off of a bridge connecting two Spheres. The Gods of those two Spheres will be favorably inclined towards the connected teams. It's possible to go outside your affiliated Spheres for quests and so forth, but the quests might be harder and an unaffiliated God has the right to tell you to go fuck yourself, depending upon their personality, while an affiliated one cannot refuse a reasonable request. Affiliation has no effect on Task difficulty, though, since that would just be stupidly complicated. :P
TASKS
So most of the major in-game events, aside from regaining memories, are Tasks, which is more-or-less the equivalent of an Aather game, but broader and more flexible. Some might seem like Persona events, not games, or group quests. Depending upon what the Task-runner wants, people can play individually, with whoever of their three-person team or six-person partnered team turns up, in mixed-team groups, whatever.
It's possible to have a Task be an automatic win! Though it's encouraged that it be more difficult than it otherwise be for what the characters are getting out of it. It might be simple and rewarding, though, to have an incredibly traumatic death game count as a win for everybody who played, especially if people turn out to have trouble collecting all ten waypoints on their Path.
Gods co-running Tasks is certainly possible!
Take-home Tasks are also possible, yes.
So Tasks come in varying degrees of difficulty and trauma, which affect what Path they count for. Some Paths are easier than others. Simply winning your resurrection and going home, maybe with a small boon, is pretty easy. Gaining the power to travel worlds is harder, earning your place in the Spheres as a God is harder still. So there are four types of Tasks.
Tasks of Inconsequence - It's certainly possible to run a Task that doesn't count for a waypoint on one's chosen Path. Basically these would be smaller derpier Tasks where the reward is simply a day of being substantial, perhaps mass handing out of skills, gifts, that sort of thing. If you want to run a silly dress-up game, a light-hearted social game, arts and crafts with no particular profound meaning, that sort of thing...this is what to do. And I would encourage these to happen from time to time, just for fun. :D
Tasks of Return - This is where relatively lighthearted Tasks that still have some substance, depth, or involvement go. More involved or revealing social games like Truth or Dare, Never Have I Ever, things of that ilk. Harmless exploradoras. Games and puzzles. Arts and crafts about your feelingsss. There will never be physical harm done in one of these games (maybe minor scrapes in an exploradora that get healed right away), and characters shouldn't be able to get too emotionally worked up unless they're serious drama whores.
Tasks of Travel - More challenging than Tasks of Return, but not all trauma all the time. Physical transformations and swaps, metamorphoses of all sorts. Honesty games. Dangerous exploradoras. Combat. If heart games exist in this world, normal ones would go here. Physical injury is possible, death is not except in highly unusual circumstances; potential for emotional trauma.
Tasks of Divinity - These are the trauma tasks. Something counts for Divinity only if it carries a major risk of severe and painful physical harm, death, or hardcore emotional discombobulation. Because becoming a god is *fun.* :) Death games, corruption style heart games if heart games exist, trauma trauma trauma. I would aim for these to be 1/4 to 1/5 of Tasks, which may seem a little dense, but as strictly speaking you don't *need* to play in them unless you wish to stay in the Spheres and become a God (or unless you just want to fuck with your character), I think that's okay. Tasks of Divinity are also the only tasks that result in unlocks.
It is up to the God running the Task whether to notify characters in advance of what sort of Task it is, or to allow them to leave the Sphere. It's totally valid for a God to say "hey guys, this is a Task of Divinity, take off if you don't want to deal with it" and only be running a Task for a few serious self-challengers or people active seeking that Path. And it's also valid for a God to give no warnings whatsoever, lock the Sphere, and trap everyone who signed up (with OOC warning, of course!) in a hellish Task. '-' Though in terms of IC trauma balance, that probably shouldn't happen *too* often.
And finally, note that any more difficult Task also counts for lesser ones if that is your Path. So winning a Task of Travel could also count as a Task of Return for that Sphere, if you just want to go home. Tasks of Inconsequence are probably their own beast, though, they're more like group quests than anything else.
GODS
Do what they say on the tin, more or less. Each God is associated with a Sphere, which will be chosen by the mods when processing an NPC app, much like choosing PC teams. Balancing exact numbers isn't as important, but I'd aim for no Sphere with overwhelmingly few or many. 2-3 per Sphere would be nice. This game probably has a fairly high God-to-PC ratio, but individual Gods do not have to be hugely active, and that's basically to build in a lot of variety and redundancy. Every Sphere needs a God who will run trauma Tasks, for example! I might also consider giving some Gods affinities with multiple Spheres, depending upon the numbers and balance.
The Spheres are basically over-arching and very abstract affiliations that link the Gods within them. It's highly encouraged for the Gods within a Sphere to interpret its nature in radically different ways! For example, a Sphere that's all about love, beauty, harmony, and the connection to the divine, might have a completely derpy romantic and a very serious angelic messenger who runs trauma Tasks about self-transcendence, IDK.
Obviously I have some Gods of my own that I would want to run, but players apping them is encouraged. \o/ Gods can be mythological or fairy-tale figures taken pretty straight or warped in various ways, from constructed myths, complete OCs, even fandom characters. Odysseus, Kali, Mr. Wednesday, Delirium of the Endless, Nyarlathotep, Kyuubey, chaos from Xenosaga--all legit God apps. Though if the fandom character is not on a god-like level of power and/or knowledge, you had better do some justifying about why you're apping them as a God and not a Ghost.
One of the things about running a God, btw, is doing a pre-intro thread: since every Ghost starts remembering being called into game by a God, they have the option to thread that out with whatever God seems appropriate. So playing a God means being on call for players going "hey, I'm bringing in character X, I think you'd be an awesome God to have brought them here." And then continuing that relationship as you administer their memories, though it's probably possible to hand that off to another God should circumstances require it.
I AM CRAZY?
yes
because my imagination is way too active.
So I had this vague idea for a game a while back, and it got developed a lot by talking with Ivory and Horn while we were hanging out in Seattle. I'm honestly not sure if I have the knowledge I need of this medium to actually...run this. Or the time and energy. But I figured I'd write a batch of stuff down and share it to see what people thought, I guess. Basically if people think it sounds really exciting, I might put it on the back-burner to think about more once I deal with getting my RL in order, and see if I have the energy then. (Also I'd want a co-mod but w/e, details.)
This is a panfandom amnesia game primarily built around developing characters in interesting ways, through relatively short (maybe) and dynamic arcs. Every PC starts dead. (Much like Thusia, you can make up a death if you don't have a canon one. It's also possible, I think, to play a character coming into game having temp-died, maybe even had a near-death experience.) At some point after their death, they were contacted by some strange God who offered to take them on a journey to return to life/become stronger/rebuild themselves as a better person/whatever. So a character's progress through the game is an afterlife journey/divinely guided initiation, as they face various tasks, deal with various things, and gain their memories back.
Every PC starts as an insubstantial Ghost, remembering only their death and the conversation with the God who brought them here. Here, they find, is a strange network of giant colorful spheres suspended high above roiling darkness, linked by gravity-defying bridges with doors in strange places. The Spheres are the places of Gods, normally inaccessible; each PC starts play in the Sphere of the God who brought them. The doors lead to living areas, and each PC will soon learn that they have a three-person team that they live with, and a Book--more on that later. They can touch their Books properly, but nothing else, at least not until they earn a day's worth of being substantial by completing or winning one of the various Tasks that the Gods run. While insubstantial, they neither hunger nor thirst. Over time, they gradually, naturally recover their memories--but there are other things they must win on their own.
While in this world of Spheres and recovering themselves, each PC can choose to take one of three Paths towards and continuing on from their good-end. (There is, I'm sure, some sort of drop mechanism as well, possibly a well of souls that people fall into if they lose their Path, but this is a game pretty attuned towards giving people good ends and sending them towards them, I think.) I may rename the paths later, I'm maybe not satisfied with them, but they are:
The Path of Return - Somebody who takes this path is returned to their home world, alive and well, fully revived and substantial, probably with a boon of some sort. Quests can be done to strengthen this boon. A character who takes the Path of Return may revisit the game in their dreams, either at any time or during specific events, but is out of regular play.
The Path of Travel - The character is again fully revived and substantial, and will gain the ability to walk between worlds, visiting their home world, this one, and any other at will. Again, they are out of regular play but can definitely pop back in whenever. They probably also have a boon.
The Path of Divinity - The character has ascended to godhood, and remains in this world permanently as a God associated with one of the Spheres, basically transitioning from PC to NPC and remaining in play. They don't need a boon, they're a fucking God.
How does a character complete their path? By winning Tasks, which are sort of like Aather games. More on them below! But to complete one's Path, one must win a Task that counts for that Path in each Sphere. So, for example, if you are intended to take the Path of Travel, you must, over time, win at least one Task of Travel in each Sphere. (There is probably also an additional thing or two to complete the Path of Divinity, I'm working that out.) Once you've won all ten, you probably have a few days to wrap up your business before heading out, but this world is not a place for living people unless they are Gods. I might consider working out a stay-here-as-a-living-human option if there is interest, but given that all of the good-end options have the potential for nearly unlimited visitation play, I'm not sure it's necessary?
Early on, especially depending upon initial interest levels, there will be a series of unlocks/expansions to the world that allow the addition of new characters, gods, and spheres. There *is* a cap to the number of spheres; people trying to finish a path aren't on an infinite treadmill. After that initial period, people can start good-ending, and the world won't expand much further except for smaller amenities and other Interesting Things. (Nor will the character count unless there's *overwhelming* interest.) I suspect the game will eventually reach a sort of equilibrium where it could either go for a while or be wrapped up with a series of potential events.
There may or may not be things outside the network of spheres and bridges that may or may not do things. :3
BOOKS AND MEMORIES
So I mentioned above that everybody has a Book. The Book is the record of themselves, and to a certain extent also a device for forcing them to confront or share things they might not otherwise.
Primarily it's the memory delivery device. Every time somebody gets a memory, it appears in their book, in eloquently written detail. If the owner of that memory reads it, they get a full visceral mental playback; if anybody else does, they just get the written version.
And yes, I am playing with the idea of divorcing memory regain from games. Winning Tasks is your path to good-end; regaining your memories is just another way of developing your character in interesting ways. I think memories simply reappear on a regular basis, enabled by the God who initially brought you to this world. You can probably quest to slow them down, speed them up, put them on hold entirely, or get a specific sort of memory, depending upon your character's wishes--though if you want to OOC override their wishes, their God is free to deny such a request for their own good. Playing characters with very short registries is certainly possible! Characters with long registries are free to lump trivial stuff a lot or ask their God, either IC or OOC, to speed up their delivery. Reaching good-end before you have all your memories back necessitates some sort of quest to get the rest in one or several lumps.
Gods, in turn, are encouraged to do things like "read this sig-neg" as quests. :3 A lot of this is a mechanism for developing PC-God CR, because the character and their God are basically cooperating in the exploration of that character's past and memories, and it's totally valid for the God to IC do things like "no, seriously, you need to face this" or "I'm just gonna lock away those memories of you being a villain so you can learn to be nice for a bit." (Or maybe "here have only your trauma ever because I want to mold you into a horrible person '-'" depending up the relationship and the nature of the God.) It's not possible, though, for a God to hold back any memories for more than three IC days after a character wins good-end.
Anyway, Books! Beyond simple memory delivery, they can also sometimes...do interesting things. This is all basically by OOC fiat: it is possible for a Book to share the written form of your memory to somebody else's Book, indexed in a different section from their own memories. It is possible for a Book to transcribe some of your subconscious thoughts that you do not want to deal with, again indexed in a different section. And maybe even, in turn, share those with somebody else. :3 Basically a Book is also your mechanism, as a player, for making life more interesting for your character in terms of information sharing and confronting matters that they might need to confront.
Skills, by the way: you can quest with a God to regain a skill once you've remembered having it. There is possibly some sort of powercap in place? But it's relatively weak. Heights of magical badassery can be reached; this world is explicitly about self-development and empowerment, after all. Mostly the Gods will not let you damage the structures of the world or themselves. Damage to fellow PCs is allowed, but various gods will be pretty generous with healing and revivals.
TEAMS
One of the initial ideas I had for this game is...what if teams were notably smaller? PCs are grouped into three-person teams, each sharing a common area with a partner team. So a three-person core group, a six-person extended group.
Because of the nature of a Path being one's progression through the afterlife, a character does not automatically win a Task if their teammate does. However, if any member of a three-person team wins, they can choose to share their memory of the Task with a teammate to allow them to also claim that win. (Thus allowing some wiggle room for players who can't make Tasks very often. It's probably also possible to take out an individual quest with a God to complete a personal Task for a particular Sphere, but that should be restricted to emergencies.)
The three team members share a bedroom and a shelf for their Books. (And probably also a place with food for when they're substantial. Insubstantial people don't need to sleep btw.) It is not possible to lock one's Book against a teammate choosing to read it. People who aren't those three can't enter the bedroom period, ever.
One's team placement also has another effect: each team bedroom is set off of a bridge connecting two Spheres. The Gods of those two Spheres will be favorably inclined towards the connected teams. It's possible to go outside your affiliated Spheres for quests and so forth, but the quests might be harder and an unaffiliated God has the right to tell you to go fuck yourself, depending upon their personality, while an affiliated one cannot refuse a reasonable request. Affiliation has no effect on Task difficulty, though, since that would just be stupidly complicated. :P
TASKS
So most of the major in-game events, aside from regaining memories, are Tasks, which is more-or-less the equivalent of an Aather game, but broader and more flexible. Some might seem like Persona events, not games, or group quests. Depending upon what the Task-runner wants, people can play individually, with whoever of their three-person team or six-person partnered team turns up, in mixed-team groups, whatever.
It's possible to have a Task be an automatic win! Though it's encouraged that it be more difficult than it otherwise be for what the characters are getting out of it. It might be simple and rewarding, though, to have an incredibly traumatic death game count as a win for everybody who played, especially if people turn out to have trouble collecting all ten waypoints on their Path.
Gods co-running Tasks is certainly possible!
Take-home Tasks are also possible, yes.
So Tasks come in varying degrees of difficulty and trauma, which affect what Path they count for. Some Paths are easier than others. Simply winning your resurrection and going home, maybe with a small boon, is pretty easy. Gaining the power to travel worlds is harder, earning your place in the Spheres as a God is harder still. So there are four types of Tasks.
Tasks of Inconsequence - It's certainly possible to run a Task that doesn't count for a waypoint on one's chosen Path. Basically these would be smaller derpier Tasks where the reward is simply a day of being substantial, perhaps mass handing out of skills, gifts, that sort of thing. If you want to run a silly dress-up game, a light-hearted social game, arts and crafts with no particular profound meaning, that sort of thing...this is what to do. And I would encourage these to happen from time to time, just for fun. :D
Tasks of Return - This is where relatively lighthearted Tasks that still have some substance, depth, or involvement go. More involved or revealing social games like Truth or Dare, Never Have I Ever, things of that ilk. Harmless exploradoras. Games and puzzles. Arts and crafts about your feelingsss. There will never be physical harm done in one of these games (maybe minor scrapes in an exploradora that get healed right away), and characters shouldn't be able to get too emotionally worked up unless they're serious drama whores.
Tasks of Travel - More challenging than Tasks of Return, but not all trauma all the time. Physical transformations and swaps, metamorphoses of all sorts. Honesty games. Dangerous exploradoras. Combat. If heart games exist in this world, normal ones would go here. Physical injury is possible, death is not except in highly unusual circumstances; potential for emotional trauma.
Tasks of Divinity - These are the trauma tasks. Something counts for Divinity only if it carries a major risk of severe and painful physical harm, death, or hardcore emotional discombobulation. Because becoming a god is *fun.* :) Death games, corruption style heart games if heart games exist, trauma trauma trauma. I would aim for these to be 1/4 to 1/5 of Tasks, which may seem a little dense, but as strictly speaking you don't *need* to play in them unless you wish to stay in the Spheres and become a God (or unless you just want to fuck with your character), I think that's okay. Tasks of Divinity are also the only tasks that result in unlocks.
It is up to the God running the Task whether to notify characters in advance of what sort of Task it is, or to allow them to leave the Sphere. It's totally valid for a God to say "hey guys, this is a Task of Divinity, take off if you don't want to deal with it" and only be running a Task for a few serious self-challengers or people active seeking that Path. And it's also valid for a God to give no warnings whatsoever, lock the Sphere, and trap everyone who signed up (with OOC warning, of course!) in a hellish Task. '-' Though in terms of IC trauma balance, that probably shouldn't happen *too* often.
And finally, note that any more difficult Task also counts for lesser ones if that is your Path. So winning a Task of Travel could also count as a Task of Return for that Sphere, if you just want to go home. Tasks of Inconsequence are probably their own beast, though, they're more like group quests than anything else.
GODS
Do what they say on the tin, more or less. Each God is associated with a Sphere, which will be chosen by the mods when processing an NPC app, much like choosing PC teams. Balancing exact numbers isn't as important, but I'd aim for no Sphere with overwhelmingly few or many. 2-3 per Sphere would be nice. This game probably has a fairly high God-to-PC ratio, but individual Gods do not have to be hugely active, and that's basically to build in a lot of variety and redundancy. Every Sphere needs a God who will run trauma Tasks, for example! I might also consider giving some Gods affinities with multiple Spheres, depending upon the numbers and balance.
The Spheres are basically over-arching and very abstract affiliations that link the Gods within them. It's highly encouraged for the Gods within a Sphere to interpret its nature in radically different ways! For example, a Sphere that's all about love, beauty, harmony, and the connection to the divine, might have a completely derpy romantic and a very serious angelic messenger who runs trauma Tasks about self-transcendence, IDK.
Obviously I have some Gods of my own that I would want to run, but players apping them is encouraged. \o/ Gods can be mythological or fairy-tale figures taken pretty straight or warped in various ways, from constructed myths, complete OCs, even fandom characters. Odysseus, Kali, Mr. Wednesday, Delirium of the Endless, Nyarlathotep, Kyuubey, chaos from Xenosaga--all legit God apps. Though if the fandom character is not on a god-like level of power and/or knowledge, you had better do some justifying about why you're apping them as a God and not a Ghost.
One of the things about running a God, btw, is doing a pre-intro thread: since every Ghost starts remembering being called into game by a God, they have the option to thread that out with whatever God seems appropriate. So playing a God means being on call for players going "hey, I'm bringing in character X, I think you'd be an awesome God to have brought them here." And then continuing that relationship as you administer their memories, though it's probably possible to hand that off to another God should circumstances require it.
I AM CRAZY?
yes