One of the entertaining things about In Nomine world-building for me was playing with the way that the core game concept could handily scupper the materialist-scientific worldview. As I would sometimes point out: in that campaign universe the most insightful and accurate theorist in the 20th Century when it came to the origins of the human race was Erich von Daniken. You can get some entertaining campaign seeds that way, particularly when your players are trying to make sure that the laws of physics keep ‘working’ properly around the unaware human researchers.
Nothing
Ethereal ‘God’ of Atheism
Corporeal Forces: 1 Strength: 2 Agility: 2
Ethereal Forces: 3 Intelligence: 8 Precision: 4
Celestial Forces: 3 Will: 7 Perception: 5
Elements: Emotions (Dispassion) (primary); Information (Perspective) (secondary)
Affinities: Emotions (Dispassion) (strong); Books (Moderate); Deception (Moderate)
Skills: Dream-Shaping/3, Dodge/3, Emote/3, Fighting/3, Knowledge/3 (logic)
Songs: Charm (Ethereal/4), Motion (Celestial/3)
Dread: Revealing its existence to any mortal/3 (3pt/level)
Image: Ever have a dream where you knew that something was there, but when you looked at it, it wasn’t? But you knew that it was still hanging around, somehow? Well: there you go. It all makes perfect sense on the ethereal plane and absolutely none on the corporeal, which is just as it should be.
About the only thing that Nothing has going for it as an ethereal ‘god’ is that it’s effectively immune to Assumption combat challenges, despite the steady Essence flow. There are very few ethereals out there that want to volunteer to be under constant attack from both the Host and the Tsayadim, Outcast Servitors of Purity. The latter in particular loathe Nothing, which is why any particular one tends to have a lifespan measurable in months.
Of course, one might wonder why there’s been even a single Nothing in the first place, as a god of atheism seems counterintuitive. Well, it goes like this: in the In Nomine universe, a certain portion of humanity considers themselves to be atheists. Of that group, there is a further division between those who do not believe in God (or gods) and those who believe that there is no God (or gods): the entire ‘absence of evidence’ versus ‘evidence of absence’ thing, in other words. It’s the latter subgroup that is important, in this context. They’re the ones who are sustaining Nothing, as they are actually passing on Essence to it through their positive belief in the nonexistence of any deity.
Unfortunately, to semi-quote Terry Pratchett, Nothing lives in a universe where deities go around and throw rocks through atheists’ windows.
Nothing has no allies, or even real neutrals. The Tsayadim find the idea of a god of atheists to be a calculated insult; so does the Host, really, except that they’re slightly more polite about it. Many other ethereals consider the very existence of Nothing to be a threat to their own continued survival. Admittedly, this is not really true, as the ethereals are suffering more from a general lack of belief than from active disbelief, but since when has logic gotten in the way of a good general loathing? Besides, most ethereals live in quiet terror of fading — and Nothing’s regular mode of existence looks far too much like that condition to be anything but disquieting.
As for Hell? Well, the Habbalah at least are predisposed to loathe the ethereal on sight and the rest of the Horde have their own reasons for encouraging regular ethereals in their quite irrational hatred of the spirit. Then there’s the wrinkle of Nothing’s Dread: it literally cannot hope to openly encourage worshippers (to use the technical term), as said act of encouragement runs directly counter to its Image. The best that it can hope for is to enter individual dreamscapes and obliquely encourage existing tendencies towards an active disbelief in any deity. This only rarely works, and is fairly risky.
This should hopefully explain why there have been so many Nothings. They tend to be destroyed with a regularity that would do credit to a metronome; and when the current one is gone, a new one crops up fairly soon. Informed speculation suggests that new Nothings form from faded spirits with severe Image problems: indeed, some healing-oriented ethereals have classified Nothing as a particularly disturbing, nigh-incurable disease. Whether or not this is true is up to individual GMs, but bear in mind that trying to find a cure for an ethereal infected with Nothing can make for an interesting adventure.
As for Nothing’s personality? well, considering that it’s fueled by people who don’t believe in it (not to mention that Nothing rarely has much time for personal development), it’d be lucky to have one. As Nothing can not considered to be particularly lucky by any reasonable measuring system, it generally displays a basic sentience and not much else. The ‘not much else’ part tends to support the hypothesis that new Nothings come from faded ethereals: sometimes a flicker of what might have been the original personality matrix appears for a moment, apparently at the cost of great pain to Nothing. Most ethereals agree that seeing this happen causes them to feel two specific and distinct reactions. The first is a curious mixture of disquietude and pity.
The second is a sudden and fierce need to find a nice, heavy rock to throw.
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I’ve actually got a suggestion on this one. Of course, it would require a Nothing that survived long enough to become quite canny, with long-term plans, but…
One of the editions of AD&D – I think it was 2nd Edition, literally just before the changeover to 3rd Edition – released a soft-cover guide to Hell. In the book, there were various bits of lore, including the fall-out from the most recent attempt to overthrow Asmodeus (spoiler – it failed; bigger spoiler – Asmodeus ended up imprisoning one of his biggest supporters during said coup attempt, though no one has the slightest inkling why). Write-ups on all of the most important devils (er… baatezu) were provided.
And then there was the write-up on Asmodeus.
Every being in that book (aside from Tiamat, who I believe was mentioned, though not actually included) was explicitly NOT a deity – with one exception. That exception was Asmodeus. Asmodeus was quite literally a god of unbelief (though the fact that he was more than just a particularly powerful baatezu wasn’t known to the multi-verse at large). His goal was to get every being in the universe to stop believing in gods. And he’d use every under-handed trick that he could think of to pull it off. One example given was that he would create a religion. He’d build it up, make sure that everyone knew about the miraculous benefits (i.e. clerical spells) that could be provided by the religion’s priesthood, and otherwise build it up.
And then he’d cut off all divine support, causing his priesthood to lose all access to clerical magic.
The end result would invariably be a lot of disgruntled and bitter individuals who used to believe in a god, but no longer did so. Short-term loss, for long-term gain.
It strikes me that a Nothing could do the same sort of thing, and gain similar benefits from it.
Of course, first it would have to live long enough to actually have a chance at putting such a plan into action…
As for the guide to Hell… With the changeover to 3rd Edition, it appears to have been quickly forgotten. Additionally, iirc 3rd Edition is when they