Hey there, Jean here.
Quick question. What dies first, legacy or mortality? If, during the course of human events, every member of your nation has, like slowly over the course of generations, been replaced soul by soul, does the flag you wave still mean anything?
What weight is carried in a grudge older then hero carrying its burden. And, when that score is settled, does it belong to the generation who wrote the grudge, or the ones who crossed it out?
Welcome to Darkvale, a stunning metropolis with no crime and full bellies. Because, there can be no criminals if there isn't a citizenry. The Aspis prosper, their minds empty of any thoughts, but the infinite coils of Rexan's fell plans, rendering the entire nation an aggressive example of a planned economy. Every member is equal in that every member is a facet of Rexan's will. You can argue with them, you can shake their hand, but the Aspis, aren't really there. There is only a concept of a Aspis, rendered in meat like a lesser man renders stone into a statue.
And yet some people have taken it upon themselves to ruin a perfectly good communist dictatorship, all because, if they didn't, the family dog would pee on the carpet.
Backstory: Rexan is the god of poison, deceit, and and snakes. The Autocrat of Assassinations, Master of the Hidden Death. He first showed up 30 years ago in the ascension wars, only to lose, because uh, no one really cared about him. Flash forward a few years and the Coiled Conscious had wriggled their way into Darkvale, using the powers of Dissension to twist the populace into aspects of his own conscious. Through cruelty and cleverness he had hampered, harassed, and griefed the Realms, taking their wholesome, family values oriented invasions, and making them significantly more inconvenient. Every attempt to thwart him has failed in one way or another, culminating in the Shadow Wars, where Rexan backed the foul Jonas Cooke, seeing the psychotic shade lord as another useful puppet to dangle on his string.
Except, that puppet didn't last. His power was taken from him, along with his life, by Shadow, in what is known to layman, as the Greatest Mugging in inter dimensional history.
Rexan, backed into a corner, did what any brave soul did. He got drunk on 3 cases of Crimson Viper Vodka, got in a drunken facebook rant about the Rogue build being discontinued, and quit the game, encasing the entire nation in a narrative firewall.
That was until Vawn, the world's greatest hero, decided to do something truly worth the Summerlands. With nothing more than a pen, and a wish from Santa Claus, he found a quest worthy of entering the hall of heroes. With sword in hand he rushed into the halls of Asmodeus, and freed the God of Balance from the traitorous hand of his own Avatar. A effort that cost Vawn his life.
This quest was met with complete ingratitude by the heavily neutered Wolflord, and the populace who now had to deal with the antics of the Anticless God. Garm, serving his role as the Moral Accountant of the Divine, had crunched the numbers and what he found a deficit, not in the balance of good and evil, but in divinity itself.
To put it plainly, there were too many gods, and not enough people to give a shit about them. The multitude of wargods is as endless as species of beetles and yet the heroes, the faithful can only say "Um, I killed like, 3 gods last summer, why should I care about YOU Darkon Deathbringer?" This has created a Sellers Market on Sacrilege, with the going price of miracles having never been cheaper, with Divine Intervention having plummeted from a seventh circle spell to a sixth. With power cheaper than piety, the faithless threatened to outnumber the faithful, and heaven will fall from the sky, crashing, with the cold gravitational pull of reality.
Or... something. Look Garm is not a man of words, he is a man of action. And his actions were simple. Knowing the conflict driven nature of the realms he came up with an ultimatum. Start a holy war against one of the greater gods, the big faith guzzlers, pitting faithful against faithful, or Garm will, methodically, war with every god himself, killing every follower. Either the world was going to cut these empty platitudes, fighting for their divine, or they will not, and let all of them, even Garm himself, sink into oblivion. Either way, Garm's duty would be done.
Because, Garm put himself in the list, allowing the Realms to try to put the death knights back in their graves. However, the Realms didn't pick Garm, there were other enemies with older grudges.
Specifically Rexan, the eternal second string sociopath, and, as previously mentioned, the Realms can only fight what has inconvenienced them. Garm, made the inconvenience and finally Rexan could be put to task.
But how DO you kill a god?
Gameplay: Turns out killing a god is very simple. All you have to do is throw a ball in the hole. The only thing is you have to build the ball with the blessings of three different gods to create a Godwounder, and you have to carve the hole out of Rexan's flesh through blessed instruments. And all you have to do in order to do that is hold Rexan in place by casting Seven Holy Auroran orbs, each infused with the Mantra of the great saint Psy Gangam. And all it takes to do that is to ensure that Rexan's Champion is dead to ensure that Rexan would be weak enough to imprison in the first place.
Now things get VERY simple. Because the only thing you need to do is kill the Champion is to use a specially forged dagger after killing all three of Rexan's Avatars. And to kill Rexan's Avatars you simply have to win the chances to slay them in the most hallowed of God slaying traditions, the Green and Gold Tournament.
And of course you have to build a fully functional war camp with the power of teleportation. It's so easy a child could do it. And I know this because, several children DID do it.
But to do that, you better know how to finger paint.
You see the Just God does not believe in a free lunch. He believes in a specific kind of lunch. The kind that is eaten atop a girder in black and white footage.
You see there is a glue stick on the table, and unless that glue stick is empty by the time he gets back, there are going to be words.
The Just God wants a tiny house, and by himself, if you want those regional spells, you are going to build that tiny house, or heavens have mercy on you. For the Slithering thought will not.
But how can you build a tiny house? With popsticks? No you fool, you use them with effort gems.
Effort gems are the manifestation of hardwork, using the only method that old people can conceive of it as, in shiny, economically stable transferrable currency, unaffected by the Blackwood Bacondollar.
Do you honestly think that simply because you hand stitched a flag that it means anything? Without the appropriate amount of capital harvested by picking it up off the ground?
The fields of liberty must be watered with the bloods of patriots. Not your patriots of course, but the patriots of the rich, plentiful, effort filled torsos of the Rexan Apsis.
Coincidentally all arranged in a convenient natural hallway in the middle of the field, leading up to a single anvil integral to the formation of the only tool that can kill the Disciple.
Who is the Disciple, why only the champion of Rexan, you can tell because he has a funny hat.
I like that hat, it has a little snake on it. And the sheer, unfathomable drip exuding from that little snake works as a protective wreath, shielding his chad body from the feeble blows of the Incel armored red knight, easily piercing his feeble heavy plate armor as the Red knight's blades helplessly bounced off the Disciples single tshirt and blue tabard.
Listen it's called fashion, maybe the heroes should have spend some of those seer spells, on sourcing some gucci chainmail, and maybe, they'd have had a better time of it.
Instead, the group fled, their dagger securely in their grasp, and their pockets jingling with the stolen labor of the Aspis peasantry.
And thats what we in the Realms call, a typical Friday night.