Hello and welcome to part one of a seven part series giving all you out there reading, watching, or consuming this in whatever alien manner is native to your world a sense of how some things work in the world of Nisteria.

Many of the things covered here are common knowledge or otherwise hard to bring up in idle conversation. These things range from ‘The Nature of Souls’ to ‘Cataclysms’ and ‘The Divine Hierarchy’.

Today we start with ‘The Divine Hierarchy’. This is frankly not well understood by most residents of Nisteria, but we feel this information is advantageous to the fans of the world, so here we are.

First and foremost, to be Divine is different from the Angelic races, and separate from the Holy element. In fact, Divine is it’s own element that all members of the Hierarchy have access to, regardless of their nature.

At the top of everything stands the Creator of all. This is the being that created Nisteria, that set it’s rules and it’s future. This being is rarely seen by the rest of the Hierarchy, we’re talking one confirmed sighting in the last million years rarely. He, She, It, They, whatever they are, they are above everyone. The only hard rules of our reality were set by them, even most of the rules for the Divine Hierarchy itself was set by it’s membership, and not the Creator.

Directly beneath the Creator are the first true members of the Hierarchy. The first three, the first born of the Creator and the impartial judges of the Hierarchy for almost everything. Those three are Nisteria, Time aka Ithys, and Life aka Beasis.

These three make up the backbone of the world, enforce it’s hard rules where they have to. As their original names imply, they have very specific realms they are in charge of. Nisteria is literally the planet of Nisteria itself, the heart of our world. He lives in it’s core, all his divine power going to maintaining and expanding the world. Thankfully the vast magic needed is partially supplies by the people and beasts inhabiting it. More on Nisteria (The planet) in part 2 ‘The World of Nisteria’, but some basic information is presented here.

The planet is massive. As in many of our readers and viewers would liken it’s size closer to Jupiter than the planet Earth many of you reside on. The world is divided into one hundred and forty sections whose surface area matches that of Earth, so in fact Nisteria is slightly larger than Jupiter. Much of Nisteria, the gods, energy goes to maintaining the flow of magic, weather, and other factors to ensure a quality of life on the surface roughly on par with that of Earth.

These divisions are important, as each section has it’s own gods and goddesses. There are currently on record, not counting dead, retired, missing, or otherwise indisposed, 85 different moon gods or goddesses just in the section of Nisteria that you the readers have currently been exposed to. Each of them are members of different pantheons, worshiped in different areas by different cultures, with only a few pantheons having duplicates. Namely the ‘Light’ pantheon which has the Twin Goddesses, Rettia and Detia, who represent different parts of the moon among their followers.

Each pantheon has it’s own rules for membership, and constantly war with one another. Some through their followers, others only in the Divine court, and others still physically come to blows in pocket dimensions created to prevent mass death from divine infighting.

Put simply, your place in the divine hierarchy is based on three factors. Power, Followers, and Influence. Power is simple, it is the level of the god or goddess in question. Minimum the weakest truly Divine being is level 400. For perspective, Nisteria, Ithys, and Beasis all sit at level 1200, and few other deities are above 1000. Most are between 600 and 800. No one knows the level of the Creator, but given that the original three fear the Creator's wrath, the general consensus is that they are at least 2000, if not more.

Followers is self explanatory, but has a few…exceptions. Followers restore energy to Divine beings, and the more one has, the faster they recover from or can get involved with different schemes. Mortal races all give about the same amount of energy (Nisterians (Humans and their kin), Beatfolk, Draconic, Fae, Angel, and Demon represent the six mortal race groups, more on this in Part 3 ‘The Nature of Souls’) while monster races (Ogres, Dragons, Lamia, Titans) give about the same if they are mortal adjacent (Ogres) or quite a lot more energy if they are to strong to be among the mortal races anymore (Dragons, Lamia, Titans).

And finally, Influence. This is a measure of what Domininos the gods hold sway over, and the portfolios or specialties therein. For instance Rettia is the Goddess of the Moon (Dark Side), Chaos (Change), and Insanity (Mania). While she has influence over all things to do with the Moon, Chaos, and Insanity, if she is for instance spreading Mania instead of Dementia, her power will be able to be invested far far more efficiently.

When all these factors are taken into account, you get someone's ranking in the Divine Hierarchy. Mostly this is like the difference between wealth classes in the world below, and is more about the quality of their residence and where they can go than anything else. It is a system not created by the original Three or the Creator, but rather created as the number of deities expands with the ever expanding world below.

Finally we will discuss the Divine Factions and in brief, talk about Cataclysms (More info in Part 5 ‘Cataclysms’). Largely speaking most of the Divine fall into three factions, or are independent (Independent is in fact the majority). These factions have names in the divine language, but for simplicity we will translate it to what your mortal minds can gleam.

Those factions are the ‘Sandboxers’, the ‘Roleplayers’, and the ‘Warhawks’. Put simply, when a faction is dominant in one of the 140 current regions of Nisteria, they set the rules for that section. These rules include resource scarcity, general geography, initial technology, monster spawning, the strength of magic, and a dozen other minor rules. If 2/3s of current deities active in a region vote to begin a Cataclysm, once the region is clear of sustainable intelligent life, they can rewrite the rules, and alter the geography. Cataclysms have their own rules enforced by the Three, but the major one to be aware of now is that they must be survivable by the intelligent mortals below.

The mortals usually don’t, but there must be a way for them to end the Cataclysm or simply weather it depending on the nature at the time. Violation of this rule can have the faction that broke it, or those responsible as determined by the Divine Court, imprisoned for anywhere between a thousand and a billion years (Both ranges have happened.).

When the ‘Sandboxers’ have set the rules, most everything is set to equal distribution, and moderate levels. They usually start technology at roughly a stone or bronze age, and simply want to see how the mortals of this go around evolve and build the world around them. ‘Roleplayers’ limit resources a bit more, but expand magic and general set technology and starting populations closer to Medieval or Kamakura periods of Earth history. The biggest difference is that they set the world up so they may walk among the mortals, living mortal lives and playing hero and villain among them.

Finally you have the ‘Warhawks’. They have the most variation, but key to their preference is large clashes between armies and nations. They want to see the struggles of entire groups, their rise and fall, and where it takes the world. Resources aren’t distributed easily, monster spawn rates drive regional conflicts by destroying or restricting some resources among one group while leaving it easy for another to access.

In the current story, following Kahari and his friends, the ‘Roleplayers’ have dominance, but they also hold an alliance with the ‘Sandboxers’ creating a rare hybrid cycle. The last Cataclysm was approximately 200,000 years previously, and most of the region was set to a stone age. Some mortal races have gone extinct, and must wait for the next cycle, or for Regions to cross-interact to have representation in Region 001.

Violation of the Divine Rules as created by it’s membership can have punishments ranging from power reversal, imprisonment, and in rare cases, execution. So far the only time any Deities have been executed by the Divine Court itself has been violators of the First Rule. There is no alteration of the past, period. Not even Time, Ithys, is allowed to do so. Three times has someone attempted, and failed, to violate this rule for their own game. All three times the High Judges, the original Three, ordered their execution. These are also among the only known times the Creator themself has gotten involved in the politics of the Divine Hierarchy. Demonstrating their power by immolating high ranking gods with little to no trouble.

While there have been other executions, these were done to losers of Divine Conflicts where such a punishment was known by all parties ahead of time. The Divine Hierarchy, is frankly, a convoluted bureaucratic mess and most of the Gods and Goddesses of the Nisterian world operate without getting the courts involved. The Divine Realm is one of endless delights, for those with the power to seize it. For those Gods and Goddesses with few or no followers, while they do not starve and exposure can not kill them, their lives are far from comfortable.

There is a persistent rumor that the Creator will one day return to end this destitution and reset the scales. The Three deny this, stating that the Creator believes in free will, and that the destitution of the lower deities were because of the choices of those higher up. That said, lower deities often find themselves having more chances to gain new followers than more established deities. More chance prayers, more random encounters, more people born with a natural connection to them. This the Three says is the creator giving them the chance to go on, if they only seize it. Given the lack of statement from the Creator, no one knows the truth. All they know is that the Creator spends most of their time living among the mortals, usually multiple mortal lives at once. Unaware of their power until it is needed.

The truth? The truth is the Creator despises the Hierarchy as it is now, but refuses to take the choice away from those inside of it, because they know if they indulge in their limitless power, one day they will become a tyrant like the one that made the world the Creator left behind. The Creator made the world to allow anyone to become anything, and that is where they leave it, they may not like where it ended up, but they respect the work the others put into it.