"You shall not knowingly speak a lie."
A god's word carries the spark of creation. Hedged speech, careful oracles, the silences of the bound when pressed, all consequences of this article.
I
"If someone speaks of laws I instinctively picture written words in a book, maybe a judge that decides the fate of a criminal. But the gods law is no written word; it is more akin to the laws of physics or magic, affecting everything around us. Forces not needed to be understood to be felt; chains that bind with no knowledge needed."
Golivander · A Traveller's Guide to Tyrnarra · The Gods' Law
Mortals know it as the Gods' Law. Scholars writing in the formal register name it the Compact. Some chronicler traditions break it out as the Thirteen Articles. All three names refer to the same body of binding: the laws sworn at the close of the great war, the ones that ended an age in which gods walked the Material Plane and ruled mortals directly.
It exists because something happened that the gods had not believed possible. Tani was killed. What followed was the largest conflict Talan has ever seen, fought across the Material Plane and through Feyworld and Shadowplane, with the surviving signatories hunting one another and the lesser pantheons into their own sanctums across Layer 1 and Layer 3 when the Material was no longer enough to contain them. The Compact is what the Grand Gods bound themselves to, so that what happened could never happen the same way again.
What follows is the Compact's text, in the order the chronicle records it.
Scope
Who is bound, and how much
The Compact binds every divine being present on the Life Layer (Material Plane, Feyworld, Shadowplane), in proportion to their power. The greater the power, the closer the chain.
- Grand Gods: bound absolutely on the Material Plane. The thirteen accepted this in exchange for Material Plane presence.
- Major Gods: fully bound on the Material Plane; weaker on the Shadowplane and Feyworld.
- Minor Gods: more constrained, especially on the Material Plane; less so than Major Gods.
- Demi-Gods: touched by only the lightest articles, proportional to their power.
- Beings who departed the Life Layer at the swearing (those who fled to Layer 1 or Layer 3) are bound only insofar as they reach back to the Life Layer. They may keep their own kingdoms beyond the veil; they may not extend their hand across it unbound. This is the structural reason Layer-3-resident non-bound gods (the Divine Faith's god of the Legea Empire, the Vice Demons reaching from Bolverk) can operate sovereign within their own planes but must work through the Compact's permitted forms (clerics, chosen instruments, mortal mediation) to act on the Life Layer.
The Thirteen Articles
Sworn at the close of the Week of Crimson Rain
The Compact operates as physics, not as rule. A god who steps against an Article is met as a thrown stone is met by the ground. There is no court, no appeal, no leniency. What follows is the chronicle text, ordered as the binding was sealed.
II
"Power shall not be given, only exchanged; every exchange matched, and both terms known."
Cleric grants are exchanges. The bound thirteen cannot place power into a mortal hand without something flowing the other way, and the exchange must be legible to both parties at the moment of binding. The god owes what was promised; the mortal owes what was sworn. Hidden costs, surprise grants, one-sided promises, and unilateral gifts all lie outside the article and are forbidden. This is what protects mortal religious life from divine trickery, divine power from being squandered on unbound favours, and the framework of clerics-and-grants from collapsing into chaos.
III
"You shall not grant what compels another's will."
An exchange may shape the world, the requester, the fortune at their feet, the boundary between life and death. It may not bend another being's free will. A god may make a petitioner charming; the god may not make another mortal fall in love with them. A god may grant strength to defend a kingdom; the god may not compel an enemy to surrender. A god may carry a soul back across the threshold of death; the god may not bind the soul there against its own choice. The line is sharp: the grant acts on the world, on the asker, or on the asker's place within events, but never on the will of a third party. When a soul refuses to return, the god's part is fulfilled. The offering was accepted, the exchange complete, the article held, and the petitioner buries their loved one with no further claim on the god.
IV
"What is granted once in exchange shall not be reclaimed."
A common blessing, a knight's investiture, a bespoke covenant's gift: once given in legitimate exchange, the grant belongs to the mortal. The god cannot reclaim it. This article cuts both ways. A mortal who bargained for a wish and lived to regret it has no recourse to the god. A parent who traded for a son's life and watched him become someone unbearable, a knight who bartered for victory and learned what victory cost, a desperate suitor who asked for a love that turned to cage. The exchange was matched, the grant was given, the article holds. Mortals are warned by their clergies to be exact about what they ask for, because the Compact will not unmake what it has made.
V
"You shall not break covenant with one who has rendered you worship."
A god may not sever the bond with one of their clergy. Once accepted, the cleric is the god's responsibility. The god cannot withdraw grants, abandon their congregation, or strike a faithful cleric from the rolls. The single exception is anathema: a cleric who acts against their god's portfolio, violates the terms of the oath they swore, or turns to a rival has by their own act broken the covenant, and the god is freed of the binding. The asymmetry is the point. A cleric may walk away from their faith; a god may not walk away from a cleric who walks straight. Every church codifies its own list of anathema acts so the line is known.
VI
"You shall not rule over mortals."
No bound god seats themselves on a mortal throne, commands a mortal army as its general, or governs a mortal population as its sovereign. The bound thirteen advise, inspire, and judge through their clergies; the chair of rule is mortal.
VII
"You shall not stand in harm's way for your followers."
A bound god cannot personally take a blow meant for a mortal worshipper. The cleric stands; the god does not. This is the article that answers the founding question. The war ended because gods were forbidden from being mortals' personal champions ever again.
VIII
"You shall only attack in defence."
Open offensive war is forbidden. Self-defence and defence of fellow signatories are preserved; defence of mortals or mortal causes is not. This is the article that explains the bound thirteen's absence from the Corrupted God's 1321 MR breach: the binding was holding, the signatories were not under direct attack, and the Compact forbade them from intervening on mortals' behalf. The Empire defended itself with mortal force; the bound thirteen could only watch. The Adventurers' Guild was founded into the gap this article creates.
IX
"You shall not enter a mortal vessel."
Possession is forbidden absolutely. Gods walk in their own form when they walk. They speak to mortals through dreams, visions, omens, and clerics; they do not borrow mortal flesh. No consent, no exception, no rite of invitation reaches around this article.
X
"You shall summon no being to act for you on the Life Layer."
A bound signatory cannot reach across the planes and call something forth to do their work. No angels, no elementals, no Postlife dead, no fey courtiers, no Abyss-spawn. The summoning craft is mortal craft. Clerics, ritualists, and properly-versed adventurers may call beings forth and bind them; the bound thirteen may not. A god who wants something done in the world hires a mortal.
XI
"You shall raise no mortal to godhood by your own hand."
A god cannot deliberately elevate a mortal to divine tier through their own grant. Mortals climb. No god may lift them.
XII
"You shall not strike to destroy a fellow signatory."
Self-defence permits a blow returned; it does not permit the blow that ends another bound god. Even in defence, the bound thirteen cannot strike to destroy one another. This is the article that directly answers the war's beginning. Tani's death set the cascade in motion; the Compact ensures the answering wars between gods can never repeat among the bound.
XIII
"You shall uphold this Compact, and bind any who would break it."
Each signatory swears to enforce the Compact against any other signatory who violates it. The Ethereal punishes the act as physics punishes a violation of physics; the thirteen punish the actor. The binding within the binding.
Sanctioned Exchanges
The canonical forms permitted under Articles II–V
The Bound Gods can be petitioned during an audience at their city-states. The shapes the exchange cluster permits are catalogued below, in order of how common they are in mortal practice. Four named forms are in current canon; new ones can be coined as gods and mortals invent them, provided they satisfy matched-and-known (Article II).
The Clergy Bond
lifetime worship → continuous grants
Lifetime worship of a specific god in exchange for continuous grants of that god's power, scaled to faith and rank. The largest and most common form. The cleric-and-god relationship of every published church on Talan operates here.
The Knight's Oath
lifetime service in arms → martial grants
Lifetime service in arms toward a specific god's cause in exchange for martial grants. Tighter than clergy, narrower in scope; this is the paladin form. The service is action rather than worship.
The Common Blessing
defined rite + offering → defined favour
A defined rite plus a defined offering in exchange for a defined specific favour. Safe childbirth, a fair harvest, a safe crossing, a child's name-blessing. Small, bounded, single-instance. Available to any mortal who knows the rite and brings the offering. Most mortals' actual experience of the bound thirteen happens here.
The Lifetime Covenant
lifetime devotion of a specific kind → bespoke grant
A defined lifetime devotion of a specific kind in exchange for a bespoke grant tailored to the god's portfolio. Araphel's second chances are the model: lifetime clergy in Myrria for the past sealed, the name lifted, the hunters who would follow turned away. Forseti's witness-oaths, Hinka's pact-of-the-quarry, Komo's forge-bond all fit the same form. Each god offers what their portfolio can offer.
Belief and the Wellspring
What the Compact requires of mortals who would rise
Article XI forbids the bound thirteen from raising a mortal to godhood by their own hand. The Compact does not, however, forbid mortals from rising on their own. Anyone who studies the question of mortal ascension quickly arrives at the substrate: the Wellspring, the source of all power that runs through Tyrnarra, and belief, one of its mechanisms. Collective belief generates real, if minuscule, energy per believing mind: a king accruing tiny strength from loyal subjects, a folk-hero growing into something larger than mortal because the songs say they are. This much is scholarly knowledge, findable in the great libraries of Ezkudon, present in academic literature, taught in better-funded temples. It is not common knowledge (most mortals never learn it), but it is not hidden either.
The contemporary case walks among us. Lord Albrecht Lavisburg of the Adventurers' Guild is a Demi-God of Order and Ethics whose ascension was driven entirely by accumulated mortal belief, no god as the giver. He is the living proof that the Compact does what it says it does: it forbids the thirteen from raising mortals, and it leaves mortal climbing untouched.
The deeper questions, however (what could a mortal do with this, what materials would be required, where any of those materials would live, has anyone ever climbed past the bottom rung), are not in the libraries. The institutions that hold those answers do not advertise them. The thirteen do not discuss them. What follows is one of the closest-held bodies of knowledge on Talan.
⚿ Known to Almost No One
The path from mortal to god is not blocked by divine decree; it is gated by scarcity of the right materials at each rung. The gods themselves cannot prevent a determined and well-placed mortal from rising; what they can do is keep the choke-point knowledge scarce. Article XI of the Compact forbids them from raising mortals; nothing in the Compact obliges them to help mortals find the procedure either.
The ladder has four rungs. Each has its own gate.
I
Mortal → Demi-God
Gate: enough accumulated power
Climbable under a mortal's own work. The gate is raw accumulation: primarily belief, but also great deeds, accumulated divine residue, and other Wellspring-touched sources. No god's consent required. No external relic required. The contemporary case study walks among us: Lord Albrecht Lavisburg, by accumulated mortal belief alone.
II
Demi-God → Minor God
Gate: a shard of divinity
Requires a shard of divinity: a fragment of power that already exists in the world. A shard's use does not require the original god's consent; the shard is sought-after, not granted. Shards exist in many places, plural; the scarcity at this rung is in the finding, and in the knowing-what-to-do-with-it.
III
Minor God → Major God
Gate: further shards (more, larger, rarer)
The same mechanism, applied at a level where the shards required are far harder to come by. Major Gods, if they choose to reside on the Material Plane, are fully bound by the Compact.
IV
Major God → Grand God
Gate: impossible by any normal mechanism
The Thirteen are the original Twelve plus one. The Twelve created existence itself; the one was an ascended mortal via a unique one-time event driven by the Compact's anchoring mechanism (see history.html → Week of Crimson Rain for the cosmic context). There is no replicable path for any other being to reach Grand God.
Where shards come from. The mechanism is open knowledge to those who hold any of this knowledge at all; the locations themselves are guarded.
Ruins of Fallen Civilisations
Sites where divine artefacts were handled: Elden ruins, the deeper Lost-Kingdom strata, the ruined sancta of gods banished or killed during the war. Picked over for millennia; still productive.
Godblood Battlefields
Places where a god bled or died on the Material Plane. The Week of Crimson Rain was the largest such event in history; smaller skirmish sites persist from across the Gods' Era.
Killing Another God
Slaying a Minor or Major God yields a shard from the kill. A near-impossible feat under normal circumstances. Gods at that tier are not easy targets, and the act draws immediate attention from the rest of the hierarchy. But it is the cleanest source of a fresh shard.
The Aurora & Duskmire Veils
The transitional veils flanking the Life Layer. Both bear residue of every god who has passed through. Shards can be recovered from either, though crossing the veils is itself a feat reserved for the powerful.
Other Planes Where Gods Have Died
The deeper planes (Elysium, Diyu, Abyss, the Energy and Elemental planes) hold shards from divine deaths recorded over the ages. Most are sealed inside the dwellings of the gods still resident there.
The genuinely rare commodity. Finding a shard is hard. Using one correctly is harder. A shard is not consumed by being held; a mortal who simply possesses or wears one accrues nothing but danger. Converting a shard into actual ascension requires integration: a specific procedure that imbues the shard into the mortal's own divine essence. Integration done wrong destroys the mortal. Done correctly, it elevates them.
The integration procedure is the choke point. Not shards; shards exist in many places. What hides is the procedure. Whoever holds it can convert any recovered shard into an ascension; whoever does not is just a mortal carrying a dangerous rock.
Most factions with an interest in mortal ascension focus on finding the procedure, not on hoarding shards. The bound thirteen do not advertise shard locations either, but they cannot easily destroy them. Where they can exert pressure is by suppressing the procedure.
Where the procedure is now.
The integration procedure was developed by the Storveldi Denbora, a mortal civilisation of the Gods' Era. They ran it at industrial scale and elevated their entire ruling class to Demi-God status, with their two most accomplished sovereigns reaching Minor God status by integrating recovered shards. Their two Minor Gods, backed by the Demi-God ruling class beneath them, attacked Tani in her own domain and killed her, the act that triggered the war.
The retaliation annihilated their homeland. One member of the ruling class survived and used the integration procedure on himself in the aftermath, ascending to Minor God status. He took the name Betibizi ("eternal life," self-given), became god of Undeath, and fled to Abyss. He has not returned. He is the original holder of the integration procedure as it persists today, and the reason it persists at all.
Fragments of the procedure persist on Talan among Betibizi's cult and the descended Azarketi lineages. Reconstructing the complete procedure from those fragments is the largest unsolved capability gap on Talan. The bound thirteen do not discuss whether they know where the surviving fragments are.
See lost-kingdom.html for the Blackened Lands deep dive, storveldi-denbora.html for the civilisation's player-facing page, and history.html → Gods' Era for the timeline placement.
Enforcement
How the binding holds
- The Ethereal Plane, the membrane surrounding the Life Layer, enforces the Compact. It is not law as mortals know law; there is no court, no appeal, no leniency. The Ethereal answers as physics answers: a god who steps against the Compact is met as a thrown stone is met by the ground.
- The thirteen are sworn each to the other. Where the Ethereal punishes the act, the thirteen punish the actor. This is the binding within the binding (Article XIII).
- The operational detail of the Ethereal's enforcement mechanism (whether it is a passive filter, an active monitor, an automatic counter-pressure, or some compound of all three) is unrecorded in any library mortals can reach. The bound thirteen would know; the bound thirteen do not say.
Continue Reading
- The Thirteen → · The bound gods whose shards anchor the Compact and who swore its thirteen articles.
- Non-Bound Gods → · Beings outside the Compact: how they operate within and around its permitted forms.
- Magic & Faith → · The four schools of magic, the cleric relationship, and daily life under the gods' framework.
- History & the Eras → · The Week of Crimson Rain that made the Compact necessary, and the eras it shaped.
- Frae City → · Where the Compact was forged, and where the Council of Thirteen still meets.