The world of Coven 1934 is dystheistic, one where there are great spiritual and metaphysical forces, but none can be considered wholly good. It draws inspiration from the works of Clive Barker and Stephen King, where benevolence is hard to find in the supernatural world. The purity and fixation of the great supernatural forces make them terrible and dangerous, no matter the side.
The world of Coven 1934 is anthropocentric, one where humanity and the human soul hold unique power and importance. The souls of humans are the pieces of the board for the great powers, more than anything else.
Every mortal faith, belief, magical traditional, and mythology has perceived but glimpses of this true cosmology. Their glimpses have been warped by their own interpretations, biases, and hopes, never giving the full picture. Some have learned to tap into some of the powers for their own ends – or have been used by the powers for their own ends.
Creation
In the beginning in the world of spirit, there was the void, and the void beget Chaos. Chaos reigned. Nothing had a soul. Nothing had form. The world of spirit was forever changing.
Then came the seed of Darkness. The Darkness grew. The Darkness had form, but not a soul. It grew and pushed back the edges of chaos. It was the deepness, the abyss. Infinite but with edges in the chaos.
Then there was a whisper. The whisper became the Light. The Light shone and threatened to consume the Darkness. The Darkness screamed and thrashed, and in the violence of its pain, the world began. It threw up forms to capture the light and to cast shadows and colors. The captured Light became souls, and the souls were granted forms in the world.
The Light cut through the Darkness in deep places, and pierced the boundary between the Darkness and Chaos. Where the Light touched, the Wilds grew, boundless and forever warping, impossible shapes that mimicked the world but could not exist within it. The Wilds were jealous of the forms within the world.
So it has been, and so it has been for far too long. All these three forces – wilds, shadow, and light – fragment and fracture. They age and wrinkle. Like all things, they fall apart and cannot hold.
Cosmology
There are three primary occult forces at work in the Coven 1934 universe. None of them are particularly nice.
- The Light – The Light wishes to regain all parts of itself and become One. It strives for unity, and wants everything with a soul to give up its forms to unite with it once again. All should be the Light. The Light’s themes include dominance, consumption of the self, and the desire to be part of something bigger than oneself. Its servants include cultists, angels, purifying gods, priests, lawmen, and unifiers of all sorts.
- The Darkness – The Darkness threw up all forms which captured the Light and turned it into souls, in order to survive. The Darkness hungers for that which the Light has wrought while abhorring the Light itself. It dances in the shadows created by forms and taunts the light’s idea of unity. The Darkness’ themes include hunger, self-destruction, willfulness, and primacy of the self. Its servants include demons, ghosts, freethinkers, rebels, and things which feed on the souls of others.
- The Wilds – The Wilds exist beyond the realms of shadow and light. They grew where the Light touched the chaos. They are everything that can be and should not be. They are chaos incarnate, but cannot have souls themselves. The Wilds’ children covet that which they cannot have. The Wilds’ themes include malleability, parasitism, hate and jealousy. Its servants include the Fae, vengeful and angry spirits, vicious tricksters, energy vampires, conmen, doppelgangers, and shifters.
These powers roll and blister against each other. But each one has begun to decay and fragment as well as they’ve created prisms to enforce their will upon the world. Gods and angels are children that the Light made from cracked fragments of itself, half mad. Fae and whisper-lords dance around the Wild and escape from it into the void of the darkness and through that, reality. The Darkness sheds children carelessly, half-filled forms of darkness that hunger for souls to feel satiated.
This process has only accelerated since the grand sacrifice of the First World War, the conflagration which further splintered the light and consumed the darkness; and let loose the gashes in the world that let the Wilds flow in more freely.