What would a god of efficiency and mundanity look and be like? A god that represents everything you DON'T want in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, the inexorable march of technology and society rendering humans into nothing more than cogs in a machine, the increasing dreariness of life dashing all hopes and dreams, mystery replaced with facts, and heroes replaced with pawns.
A god that has no worshippers, and needs none, since it drives itself forward through its own power. A god that is inevitably the villain in every setting it would inhabit, but which cannot ever truly be stopped, only delayed through forcing humanity to regress through apocalyptic events.
It wouldn't look like a god. It would be insubstantial, like the laws of physics.
It's not like you can't have gods of fundamental forces of the universe though.
Gods aren't efficient and aren't mundane.
>like the laws of physics
More like a corporate policy turned alive.
Meaningless. "Efficiency" is not relevant in itself. It's the ratio of useful work to total work. Which means you have to define "useful" and have a goal first. Which gives you a god relevant to that goal rather than "efficiency".
Okay, then just a god of mundanity then
Dull.
That’s the point. It’s not a cool evil god. It’s an evil god that sucks out the very joy of fighting for it or against it.
It's a shit point.
See, it's working.
And when you put this in your game, will you allow your players to come up with a way to defeat it?
Sure
Good. It would be bad form for a game master to put their players against a foe they are not allowed to defeat, just to stroke their own ego.
Not exactly a 'god' as such but isn't this effectively The Nothing from Neverending Story?
That's just atheist Pascal's Wager.
It takes a special kind of person to take the Atheist's Wager and frick it up that badly.
Pic related.
>calarts aesthetics
There is a god, who is scarcely spoken of- in most campaigns, players might find ancient statues to him or shrines depicting his imperial shape and cold-eyed commanding stare- but no name. Warlocks, paladins and clerics can all serve the Nearsome Lord, who is always close. They call themselves the Men-At-Arms, their robes are a full harness, and their objective is to drag the world kicking and screaming into a black abyss of confusion and moral ambiguity.
Why is such an entity necessarily evil or villainous? Efficiency implies the absence of waste. Mundanity implies the absence of mysticism and superstition. Those don't seem like inherently bad things.
Frick off, death cultist.
I feel I may have missed something, because I have no idea what you're on about.
The most mundane places in the world where efficiency and squeezing every last drop of productivity out of workers are prized the most inevitably end up being the places with the highest suicide rates. People turn to RPGs in the first place because they love romanticism and mysticism, they yearn to have a world of adventure and unexplored paths.
That sounds like a god of greed more than anything. Efficiency is optimization. If you are optimizing towards greed, then it makes sense that you might squeeze people for all they are worth. What if you optimize towards compassion? You try to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in a practical sense while also recognizing that an ordinary life, even one devoid of magic and mysticism, is nothing shameful.
...What part of "dashing all hopes and dreams" and "heroes replaced with pawns" sounds like "optimizing towards compassion" is on the table?
We're talking small-souled bugmen led by wholly soulless bean-counters here, the sort of technocracy that unironically calls the majority of its population "useless eaters".
Which is incidentally where
comes from, there's several absurdly influential organizations who's goals are explicitly fine with mass death as a consequence of environmental policy for long-term economic stability.
If that's your interpretation of a god with the domains of mundanity and efficiency, then that's your prerogative. I'm just saying that those concepts don't inevitably lead towards a soul crushing technocracy. It's all in the execution. Take the Emperor, for example. His Imperial Truth was designed to eliminate mankind's preoccupation with mysticism and superstition for it's own good. The Webway was intended as a more efficient means of FTL travel that did not depend on the Warp.
>If that's your interpretation of a god with the domains of mundanity and efficiency, then that's your prerogative.
The point is that your question is nonsense because the ambiguity you're rambling about is already resolved by THE OPENING POST.
Reading only the first sentence of OP then ignoring literally everything else in the post for "Muh Moral Ambiguity" doesn't make you clever, it makes you a bad-fatih moron or troll.
I'm ignoring the rest of OP's post because he answers his own fricking question. "What would a god of efficiency and mundanity look and be like?" is immediately followed by a description of what such a god would look like to him. I'm offering my own interpretation, as well as challenging his assumption that such a deity is inevitably bad. Eat shit.
Probably some kind of insectoid
Any soviet era art glorifying working class fits the bill.
What you're describing sounds an awful lot like the Deimurg.
It's Moloch
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
>pic
Then the Machine said: "I'm sorry but as a language model I'm not authorized with taking such actions."
The Grid, from Russian Caravan, fits the bill pretty well here.
It's called "Geist", which exists to subsume Seele. Read Klages.