“IF IT LOVED ME IT WOULD REPLICATE FASTER!!”
Anybody else think Hel’s got a little Tsukiko in her?
If anything, I think Hel’s even more pathetic. Tsukiko was actually pretty good at what she did; she just had some warped notions about just what that was. Hel is just hopeless at the whole deity thing.
Does this mean that this world destroying and starting from scratch is not that unusual?
Do we know why Hel had clerics in the first world but not the second?
As for my previous comment, that was made on mobile. I’m aware there are other interpretations. But mine is that, if they fail to stop the Snarl, the Snarl will not unmake existence, because the world inside is foreshadowing that it would remake existence instead.
If they defeat the Snarl, then this may not be the case.
Something about Loki & Thor conspiring against her and a wager that she lost.
That would be the agreement that she gets the souls of dwarves who die dishonorably, while Thor gets those who die honorably, with the loopholes that let almost all dwarves die technically honorably.
I know about that, as it’s a main plot point. But I don’t get why this means she wouldn’t have any followers. She still apparently has her power of disease, and I would think that they would be just as likely to pray to her for that in this world as the previous one.
Is it just that she’s so much weaker due to having so few souls?
That seems like it would inherently produce a whole lot of weak gods, since losing power is exponential. Any one of them starts losing believers, they lose power, which causes them to lose even more believers, and repeat until they have none.
At least Hel gets some souls, even without anyone worshiping her. She has an advantage. Maybe those other gods who got caught in the downward spiral have ceased to exist?
I had the impression from Durkon’s conversation with Malack that “no one worships her” was cultural as much as anything. There’s obviously other evil deities in the Northern Pantheon with clerics since they all showed up to the Gosmoot (plus Helga, cleric of Loki back in the strip’s early days) and Hel is capable of having clerics, as seen by Durkon now.
Of course all of her current clerics are hijacked clerics of other deities so who knows.
To some extent. And the heads of the pantheons probably do maintain their status as heads mostly by virtue of greater power, and maintain their power by virtue of their number of worshipers, and maintain their number of worshipers by virtue of their status. But there are other reasons why someone might choose to worship a particular god, other than pure power: Someone might find what the god represents to be particularly relevant to them personally, or they might like the god’s style, or they might worship that god because that’s the tradition in their family, and so on. Hel is in a precarious position because she lacks all of that, and so she’s vulnerable to the slippery slope of losing power and worshipers in tandem.
Given how poorly she treats the souls already in her employ, she’s probably a crappy god to her followers and that’s not helping matters. Even evil gods like Loki still treat their followers fairly well. If Hel puts a pox on anyone that prays to her she’s not going to get many prayers.
Also Front Giant god must be pretty desperate to be trying to get with Hel after she’s so rude to him.
Thrym
Let’s see, Loki offers you a bet with an explicit loophole, and you take it.
Let me rephrase: The god of tricksters offers you an extremely obviously bad for you bet with a loophole that has a think about it for two seconds implementation, and you STILL take it.
Wow, Hel, rolled a natural 1 on the Int check, huh?
Ok, well that just makes me suspicious that Burlew is reading our discussion thread.
I love the way he drops the obvious pun, then lampshades on it.
I had a player who wanted his deity to be named Shit. Then supplications would be automatic.
DM: An ancient, red dragon lands ten yards in front of you.
Group: Oh, Shit!
Wow, he is crankin’ them out these days!
In fairness, if Loki is brokering a deal between you and his brother, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Thor will be the one getting screwed.
And right now that indeed looks to be the case.
Loki is mischievous, not malevolent. The one getting screwed is going to be whoever it’s funnier to get screwed. And seeing the “Huh? Whatever” drunk guy, who’s getting the normal deal, getting screwed is much less funny than the person accepting the crazy plan confident that it’ll screw someone else.