Alicornutopia

More worldbuilding from me! I've already PM'd with Kappa about this some.

The world in question is an alternate earth, with standard mundane earthy history until a couple hundred years ago when a magically-contagious plane-hopping ingot settled there. The ingot's magic spread, and is now common knowledge; people with the ingot's kind of magic are referred to as deities, and people who habitually make use of that magic without having it themselves are called channelers.

As the name suggests, channelers channel magic from deities, but the mechanism itself isn't that elegant: Channeling from a deity temporarily gives the channeler several of that deity's traits, which can be anything from 'is afraid of moths' or 'has blue eyes' through 'can cast a particular spell' to 'is a deity' and vary with each instance of channeling. Channelers who have a better understanding of a particular deity's personality are more able to control which traits they get from that deity when they channel them, to get 'larger', more complicated traits, and to make the channel last as long as they want it to and end when they want it to; this is a matter of degree, though, and no channeler has perfect control over those things. (By default, a channel lasts 10-15 minutes, with no cooldown afterward; a professional channeler can usually hold a channel for about an hour.) Channeling a particular deity, especially getting personality traits from one, does make the channeler more familiar with the deity's personality, and is the main way of becoming familiar enough with a deity to channel useful traits from them on demand; the process of getting to know a deity well enough to reliably channel useful traits like magic takes about a month of intensive effort or three to four months of intermittent effort (for example while also holding down a job), though this also varies with the channeler's skill in getting to know people and 'fit' with a particular deity's personality. (Jokers are extreme outliers and can get to know most deities well enough for basic magic channeling with a week of persistent effort.)

The traits that are channeled in a particular instance of channeling are random, with certain restrictions: Each trait has a size, and larger traits are harder to channel; getting to know a deity increases the size of the channeler's channel to that deity and allows for larger traits to be channeled, but they still have to make an effort with each channel to avoid wasting that space on traits other than the ones that they want. The 'is a deity' trait (like all ingot magic traits) is especially large; someone who wants to become a deity themselves (which involves channeling the deity trait and then using that trait's magic to become one permanently) generally has to limit themselves to channeling almost exclusively from one deity for twenty to forty years to have a reasonable chance of getting it. Most channelers don't aspire to be deities themselves, and instead split their attention between three to five deities, which gives them a good balance of being able to channel a wide variety of traits without sacrificing reliability. People who are not channelers often do some channeling, too, but generally only know one or two deities, and only know them well enough that channeling is more likely to be useful than inconvenient, not well enough to be reliable.

Learning about a deity to be able to channel from them in the first place is not especially hard: Channeling from a particular deity requires that the channeler know enough about them to specify who they're looking for, but there's plenty of publicly-available information about various deities to fill that need. It's also possible to channel from a deity without specifying a particular one by opening a channel to a deity with some specified trait, but this is fairly dangerous, since the channeler has no way of knowing what traits they'll get that way. (Opening a channel for a deity with a particular trait does guarantee that the deity you connect with will have that trait, but you'll still get a random selection of appropriately-sized traits from that deity with no guarantee you'll get the one you asked about.) A channeler who finds a deity using the specify-a-trait method will be able to find that deity again whenever they want, but they won't gain any special knowledge of the deity's traits besides the ones they get through the channel.

From the deities' perspective - being channeled is, by default, invisible; they don't notice it happening unless they specifically set things up so that they can. Setting that up isn't hard, though: What the 'is a deity' trait does in practice (beyond allowing other people to channel from the new deity) is make it so that the person can add or remove near-arbitrary traits to or from themselves, and 'magically able to notice when someone is channeling me' is well within the realm of traits that they can add. Some traits only come in packages - the 'is a deity' trait is a singular thing and can't be split into 'can be channeled from' and 'can add/remove arbitrary traits', for example - but most magical traits can be added individually. Deities also have an innate sense of the size of various traits, including ones that they're planning on giving themselves, and they can package traits together if they care about only allowing sufficiently-devoted channelers access to certain traits, though this is inconvenient for the deity in question - for example, a deity might package 'can cast this killing spell' with 'likes cheesecake', with the resulting trait being 'can cast this killing spell, but only while enjoying a slice of cheesecake', which would be harder to channel, harder to figure out once channeled, and harder to use effectively if it's channeled unintentionally. (A deity who did that would also have a 'can summon tasty cheesecake' trait, of course.) Beyond saying what they can do, though, it's hard to make general statements about deities; they're not a very homogenous group.

I'm not actually sure ingotry can work like this, but I'm sure there's some kind of personal magic that can. Maybe a Gift or something, who knows.

Ingots are the ones that mints are derived from, right? That parallel is what made me think 'ingot' in the first place, though I guess this is complex enough that ingotry might not quite cover it. Anyway, I'm not especially attached to that particular aspect of the backstory, it just seemed like an easy way to go 'this type of magic, starting fairly recently, with no other local magic available'. (If it helps, the dimension-hopping is not a native part of that particular power; it's a trait that the first deity added to themselves.)

It's speculated that there was an ingot mint at some point, but I think that mints are the only thing-like-mints-this-way that can come out of ingots. There could easily be a different world with a thing-like-ingots that produced one of these instead, though.

Sure, that works.

Further thoughts on deity mechanics:

• Having the 'is a deity' trait means that random strangers can channel from you, fullstop. A deity who doesn't like this has a few options, but none of them are completely foolproof:
  • The deity can set themselves up to know who is channeling them and respond directly to that in some way.
  • The deity can keep the publicly-available deity lists from including information about them.
  • The deity can make it harder for channelers to get useful traits from them by giving themselves lots of useless small and medium-sized traits.
  • The deity can add certain traits to themselves only when those particular traits are wanted, and remove them afterward - I'm actually not sure about this one, though, I don't want it to be a common strategy and as is it's a very good one. Possibly how this should work is that channelers can get any trait a deity has ever had, with the chance of getting that trait decreasing as the deity goes longer without it.
  • The deity can add or remove personality traits from themselves; their channelers' ability to channel them will be based on familiarity with their new personality rather than their old one, or possibly on either personality with the old personality's effectiveness fading with time the same way that removed traits fade from being available to be channeled.
  • In extreme cases, a deity might choose to remove the 'is a deity' trait from themselves, which will stop anyone from being able to channel them and remove their ability to add or remove traits from themselves, but not remove any traits they added while they were a deity. In this case, the ex-deity might be able to get the 'is a deity' trait from their original patron a second time, but it's not guaranteed (especially if they've edited themselves in a way that reduces their compatibility with the patron) and is likely to take at least a year or two to be plausible at all if they've let their familiarity with their patron get rusty.
• If a deity knows ahead of time that a particular channeler wants a particular trait from them, they can help that channeler get that trait.
  • This requires that the channeler be able to get the trait the usual way - the deity can't make the trait smaller or the channel bigger.
  • The deity does have to know ahead of time that the channel in question is going to happen, and when, and from who; they have to be focusing on bringing the trait into alignment with the channel at the moment that it starts.
  • A channeler's skill at keeping the channel clear for large traits does still matter in this situation; it's still possible for the channel to get clogged with lesser traits before catching the wanted one even if it would be guaranteed to get the wanted one rather than anything else of similar size.
  • This can also be used to stop a particular channel from getting a particular trait if the deity knows about it beforehand, but can't be used on unexpected channels at all.
  • This is a skill that deities learn, not something they know how to do automatically; it's not very hard, but it takes practice and is not an especially obvious thing to try doing in the first place if you don't already know about it.

Plotty things!

Important note: I haven't done any research at all on what the state of the world was in 1800ish when the first deity showed up; I'm assuming that there was some society that had ideas compatible with what I want, but if not, some things might need to be adjusted.

So. 200 years ago, the first deity showed up, settled in, made some friends and/or found some followers, and founded channeling as a thing. Those first channelers were hand-selected by the deity [dang, this person needs a name at least] to be people he [?] would get along with, so they didn't notice this at first, but as the second generation of deities started gaining devoted channelers, they discovered an odd pattern: while having similar personalities was definitely the defining factor in how good someone would be at channeling from a particular deity, certain traits - even some that didn't seem to be personality traits at all - were more important than it seemed that they should be, no matter which deity the person with those traits was trying to learn to channel from.

One of the second-generation deities was particularly curious about this, and decided to try to figure it out, and gave herself [?] a trait that would let her see others' traits, leading to the discovery of what in other worlds are called neurotypes. The deities' trait-sight and the context of how neurodivergence was discovered have given the people of this Earth a very different understanding of it than in most places - the most obvious difference is that since neurodivergence was first discovered in typically-functioning adults rather than struggling children, there's very little stigma about it - almost everyone expects that the average child who's struggling with an unusual neurological quirk will eventually find a way of handling it and be fine. The other big difference is that, where on most earths things like autism are seen as being single, coherent entities, trait-sight reveals them to actually be collections of traits that are associated, but not connected together in any unusual way - and that also occur in people who would usually be considered neurotypical, just not as often or in the same combinations.

This understanding has had some fairly far-reaching societal effects, mostly in the realms of psychiatry and neuroscience, but the interesting part here is how the channeling community reacted to it, which was primarily by [...okay, now I'm doing some research - 1800s USA had a utopian society movement going on! On the one hand, perfect, on the other hand, meh, America, boring. But I can live with boring for the sake of correctness, American setting it is...] a group called the Society for Various Deities, which was founded by the previously-mentioned second generation deity and her followers to make sure that subsequent generations of deities contain as wide a variety of neurotypes as possible. They do this by putting together groups of twelve to fifteen people, each of which contains two or three people who are more neurologically unusual than an existing deity but close enough that they're very likely to ascend anyway, and ten to twelve other people who are similar enough to those people that when one of them ascends, knowing that person well means they'll probably be able to ascend to, even though they couldn't ascend from the original deity on account of being too dissimilar. The people in each group are given a place to live and a reasonably generous stipend, and are expected to spend their time practicing their channeling and getting to know each other as well as they can, especially by working together on whatever sorts of projects suit their collective interests. Our protagonists are one such group.

Our antagonists, on the other hand, are under the purview of a later-generation deity who found Darwin's work and the early eugenicist movement to be particularly compelling. This definitely needs more research to pin any details down, though - plus I'm going to need to think about how having deities running around and any sufficiently-devoted person being able to teleport with six months' work will have affected the legal and penal systems.