[Cosmosdex] The Universal Encyclopedia
[Cosmosdex]
Rng
Noise Noise / The Amphigory
Rng
No art currently, maybe you can help
Type: Indifference
Domains: Chaos, Absence of meaning, Luck, Colors, Fate
Associations: Nihilism, Flashing colors, Lack of motion, Visual noise, The Abstract, Randomness, Octopi, Good-luck charms
Summary: Rng is a deity said to create everything truly random, only for the natural laws of the universe and its inhabitants to force patterns upon its work.
Traits
This character is a natural born gambler. They will gladly gamble away some of their resources on any game of luck.
This character is prone to losing chunks of time and has no memories of anything that happened during certain periods of their life. At the start of every day, a d20 will roll to see if they will be able to recall any events that occurred that day. Sanity will affect the roll.
This character is prone to.... something.
Any newly obtained item this character finds has a chance to appear at first to be high quality, however, on closer inspection it will always be a shoddy knockoff.
Any newly obtained item this character finds has a chance to appear at first to be worthless, however, on closer inspection it will be an item of greater value.
Is a
May the odds be ever in
Trends are out, chaos is in.
Worship
Worshipers pity Rng, whose creations' infinite possibility are whittled away at by natural laws and the imposition of sense and pattern. They may either praise and protect the works of Rng to prevent their being comprehended, or actively seek to destroy constructed meaning. Anti-worshipers may impose sense upon random noise, seeing patterns and shapes within it, or dedicate their lives to understanding the true pattern behind seemingly-chaotic things.
Common Worshippers: The lucky, Those who are spiteful of intellectuals, Nihilists, Lovers of abstract art
Common Anti-Worshippers: Most Toreka, Those plagued by misfortune, Discoverers of knowledge, Polyglots
Original Creator: Schazer
Presence
Believers who ascribe Rng with a physical form describe a vortex-like creature of an infinite radial symmetry ruined by the randomised twisting of its many limbs. A ring of beaks at its center clicks out a signal without pattern.
Others may dismiss the above description as a falsehood, the justifications of one formed in order attempting to ascribe a form to an entity that needs no form. Most anti-worshipers consider Rng's true form a moot point, but may generally describe it as "probably a huge disorganised mess."
Disposition
Rng is widely acknowledged by its followers as an entity from beyond this reality, with a consciousness and sense of self utterly removed from what any mortal in this existence could comprehend or recognize as the mind of a fellow living thing. This vast gulf of understanding is credited to our being the product of an inherently ordered universe, one where the inevitable arc of existence tends toward comprehension and understanding. Rng's motives and why it bothers to interact with this universe are, thus, inherently unknowable.
Despite its alien mindset, however, people naturally try to make sense of its actions, to attribute some manner of mind behind the one who places its works in our universe. Such philosophers concur Rng is not hostile to the general concept of a comprehending universe, nor does it bear ill will, or, for that matter, seem to purposefully direct any kind of will, to the little aggregations of matter who do the comprehending.
Proponents of a universe trending toward understanding itself may frame Rng as an antagonistic, yet ultimately beneficial force. Anti-worshipers view Rng's incomprehensible creations as a challenge to overcome, by fully understanding the yet-undiscovered rules which govern seemingly-random behavior. Others who view the universe and our motions within it as purely deterministic may view and praise Rng as a disruptor of what should have been inevitable.
Acts
Worship of Rng is primarily centered in toreka-controlled space, and Rng is credited with giving the toreka a means of expression through their changing colors. Without this, claim the toreka, their communication may have evolved to serve a grimmer purpose than play, and irrevocably changed the way they see and interact with the world.
Once the toreka named the entity responsible for the visual noise they built patterns out of, Rng would be credited with all manner of strange and beautiful things across the universe. Most would see such initially-inexplicable things as a challenge sent by Rng to "solve", to determine the forces - name and link the inputs - to correspond to the outputs.
Prevailing thought among anti-worshipers is that Rng is not offended by this dismantling of its "gifts", much like a parent would hand their tinkerer child an old device to take apart and learn the workings of. To the toreka, after all, everything's a game, and Rng is their sworn rival who they deride and honor to equal measure.
Cults
Rng's Children: All those who pity the destruction of Rng's creations by the inevitable march of progress and order align themselves with the Children of Rng. There are several sub-cults who disagree on the specifics of Rng's true form or how best to venerate them, but there are several common threads among the sub-cults.
Rng's Children generally find themselves to be luckier than others, attribute this to Rng's favor, and will seek to further attract Rng's attention through whatever means deemed righteous by their cult.
The Clowns: The Clowns are the easiest sub-cult to spot on the torekan homeworld, and also the most harmless. In an environment like Foyer where everything's a game and there are few serious consequences for living your life randomly, they are most frequently seen in areas hosting games of luck, chanting nonsense and generally having a grand old time.
High-Rollers: High-Rollers are less concerned with the veneration of patternless phenomena and simply praise Rng for twisting the world around them to their favor. High-Rollers are most easily seen in fields of work where good luck is beneficial, such as gambling, and will often carry with them a "lucky charm" from a crucial moment of their lives when Rng first visited upon them.
De-Constructivists consider all that is unknowable to be Rng manifesting into the universe, and consider attempts to understand or make sense of such phenomena as acts of violence against their god.
Members of this cult are the most volatile and unpredictable. Some sects work within societal structures, preying on society's most vulnerable by painting Rng as an adversary tearing apart the Limbo gods' cruel reality. Others are anarchic, terrorist cells often led by a less anarchic leader who seeks to destroy knowledge. Archives and repositories of knowledge are common physical targets for these cults, as well as institutions or individual researchers aiming to to demystify a particular natural phenomenon.
Anti-Cults
Torekan Traditions: Almost all toreka will attribute their ancestral color-changing ability to Rng, but the most popular view is that the toreka bested or tamed Rng's senselessness with their intellect. In contrast to most anti-cults, the torekan tradition tends toward a demeaning fondness of Rng, like a flawed parent whose shadow they have grown out from.
The torekan tradition is not an organized cult of anti-worship, though looking down on those who would venerate Rng's domains (including relying overmuch on luck in games) is common.
Quasarheads: Quasarheads dedicate their lives to gazing into Rng's creations, such as the shape of snowflakes or the pulses from their eponymous quasars. They do this not to determine the physical laws which govern such phenomena, but to try and decode a message from Rng itself. As they seek meaning but ultimately see Rng as a sympathetic entity, this eccentric group straddles the line between cult and anti-cult.
Rng's Estranged: Rng's Estranged arose in response to terrorist attacks by Rng's Children, who sought to destroy repositories of knowledge and return what was known and made comprehensible to Rng's dark domain. They work to raise awareness and counter propaganda spread by Rng's Children in areas where the cult is known to be active, as well as step in to protect museums, archives, or other places at risk of being targeted by Rng's Children. In extreme cases, they may pre-emptively convert folk to their cause by blaming the individual's bad luck on Rng's machinations.
The Estranged have no strong animosity toward Rng or its creations, saving most of it for the worshippers who would destroy or confound in the name of their god.
Creations
Rng is spoken of as the "wellspring of true randomness", a force from beyond whose influence extends into this universe and manifests as all phenomena without clear pattern. Creatures which change color or pattern for arbitrary reasons, including the toreka, are retroactively considered Rng's creations if there was some duration when the exact mechanics and causes of their changing colors were unknown.
Creations of Rng are not considered "solved" until the system producing the lack-of-pattern can be described in such exacting detail that any particular instance can be generated by design. "Unsolved" creations of Rng include turbulence, lava lamps, auroras, pulsars, cloud formation and the way you always push the charger into the port the wrong way round the first time.
"Mostly solved" gifts of Rng include why some rocks have fossils, snowflakes, what migration's all about, earthquakes, cauliflowers, and what the heck bees are doing.
Artificial objects that can generate true randomness, such as dice, properly shuffled decks and Ananke units are a hotly debated topic among Rng-worshipers as to whether they can be credited to Rng, though the among of sense, law and meaning behind the behavior of intelligence species is enough of a philosophical minefield without throwing a god's presence into the mix.
Demi Gods
No known demigods.
Special
None.
Unliturges Of Evlvkulpuqjtz 26-29 (transcribed)
(This is Unliturges Of Evlvkulpuqjtz 26-29, transcribed for ease of reading.)
Rng gives and gives
and
gives we
of this staid and stifled universe with
every new frontier, new systems without
sense, structures
of matter and thought which mock and warp the very term
'structure'. Rng
gave us a dance
of color
across our crests, a dance
without tempo or displacement, all the worlds 'pon we, the stage, and we
bless sense, we
we shunned infinity.
Who could care
or
comprehend
such a gift, when we could use our skins to press
voluminous emotion
'twixt the pages
of a grand tome, and wear the flattened result on our face?
Trivia
• It is commonly assumed that torekan anti-worshippers of Rng blame the god for any personal misfortune which befalls them, but this is a false assumption. Rng is understood by the majority of toreka to have very little understanding of what would constitute "good" or "bad" luck for an individual.
• The Clowns' registered base of operations is the 2D6 Hotel on Foyer, though they also congregate on islands with heavily luck-based games. Whenever the dice-based room allocation of the 2D6 conspires to gather a critical mass of Clowns in one room, a signal goes out for all of the Clowns, along with any onlookers, to take part in one of Foyer's biggest social events of the *indeterminate time duration*.
• On the explanation of anomalies, "a limbo god did it" may or may not be a valid answer to whether it's an inexplicable creation of Rng, depending on what kind of believer you're talking to.
Image Gallery
No art currently, maybe you can help.
