Telling Stories: Pray The Day Away

My PC's not-too-long-ago reached Legend 9 and underwent Apotheosis, becoming Gods in their own right. Since then, one of the bigger challenges I face as the Storyteller is keeping a balance between appropriately epic challenges that can seem to realistically stress even Gods and allowing the players to really feel like Gods. There should be this huge sense of accomplishment that your character has reached Godhood and is now not just some hero or super-mortal with awesome powers. They're actually a Figure of Legend with an entire religion (or religions) built around them. There are thousands of people who, every day, pray to these characters for guidance, help or pray to avoid their notice and displeasure.

You can't just let new Gods steamroller over everything, they've still got Legend 10, 11 and 12 to advance to, after all. They're not at the top of the foodchain by a long shot, and even Legend 12 Gods still have to face other Legend 12 Gods, Titan Avatars and Greater Titans. So, you do have to keep challenging your new Gods with ever-increasing levels of world-smashing calamity, Machiavellian scheming and politics, etc. There just needs to be times when they can say to themselves "Holy crap, I'm a God now! People are totally praying to me and expecting things! And I can do them!"

My solution to this was something called Prayer Sheets. They're open documents (we use GoogleDocs for just about everything) where anyone can post prayers to the God in question. The player sets up a brief list of 'typical' prayers that they expect to receive based on their God-role and various Fate Expectations, which serve as a guideline. I might add some extra prayer categories based on what I think, as the ST, they might have forgotten or not even considered.

Then, prayers! Generally, prayers are short little snippets and tagged with very basic information about who and where they're coming from. Here are some examples of prayers that our characters have received so far:

Yurak Otorongo, please protect our village from the poachers, and the lumberjacks who seek to drive us away through violence and death. - the voice of an old man in the Amazon rainforest.

Alan decided to respond to this prayer with horrific violence, as he often does, and murdered the shit out of the loggers and poachers. Some he sacrificed with Itztli, others he just ate or tore to shreds.

Lady of Secrets, help me push this corporate deal through and secure my promotion. - a middle aged woman in New York City 

Amira granted her help to the nice woman, but the Lady of Secrets never does anything for free. In exchange for a few Knacks being used to bolster the woman's chances, Amira will be using this cultist to further her own goals at some point.

She’s so far outta my league.. God, I’d do anything to get her to notice me... -- a lonely young man wearing cardboard antlers, sitting on a street corner in Texas. 

In a rare display of subtle behavior, Eoin used his Illusion to hide himself from sight and whispered advice into the young man's ear with his Sound Boons, securing the object of his affection with charm and flattery.

Essentially, in response to a prayer (which has no defined time attached to it), the Gods can choose to manifest, or act from afar. They can do anything within their power (their actual powers such as Spells, Boons, Knacks, Relics, etc) to answer the prayer. Answering prayers gives the players a real confirmation that, yes, they've reached a new level and it also helps connect them more firmly with their cults. They gain a new source of stories about themselves as they drop into the World to provide bona fide miracles to their worshippers.

How they answer the prayers that come their way also are a great opportunity for Fate to get involved. They can even form new Expectations or buck old ones by answering prayers in unexpected or innovative ways. In the case of characters like Garreth and Amira, who haven't done a lot with the reverence that mortals have for them, it can be incredibly useful for figuring out how they're perceived by the mortal World and allows them to shape their Legend in more general, subtle ways than the kind of crazy things they're doing up in the War.