Entities

The in-game supermarket Emporium caters to a wide variety of god-like Entities from diverse planes of reality. Characters in Emporium have manifested only a fraction of their true power to exist within the store. They will remain in this state until the end of the game.

This page aims to illustrate the nature of Entities within the wider world of Emporium the game, as opposed to within the store. The former has less immediate relevance to the game, but may help inform how your character sees the world and how they reconcile their experience in-store with their day-to-day existence. For more information on how Entities manifest within Emporium, please see the Manifestations in-store page.

Entities in Emporium are powerful and abstract beings who are both functionally immortal, and typically extremely difficult or impossible to kill. All Entities have a soul, and are fully sapient. Entities can be found anywhere in the multiverse and vary greatly in form and function. Your character doesn't need to be the one god of their reality. Indeed, it is unusual for there to be only one Entity on a single plane of existence!

To mortals, Entities may be known as gods, monsters, spirits, or other suitably powerful and unfathomable beings. Alternatively, their existence may be unknown to mortals entirely: they may embody an abstract concept, work behind the scenes to regulate the laws of space and time within their homeplane, walk amongst mortals in disguise, or exist on a plane where there are no mortal beings.

However god-like Entities may seem to mortals unfamiliar with the workings of the cosmos, they are by no means all-powerful beings. Outside of the reality they are used to, referred to as an Entity's homeplane, their influence is usually much diminished, as can be seen in Emporium, where Entities manifest according to the laws of reality imposed by the supermarket. While travel between planes is possible, and corporations like the Orbital Conglomerate do operate across planes, true omniscience or omnipotence across planes is impossible within the setting of Emporium.

Some Entities may have powers of creation on their homeplane, but every Entity's power is limited. It is unusual for an Entity to be able to source everything they need within their own plane. A few rare commodities may be found across all worlds, such as souls, but it is common for an entity to lack some key element; specific materials, the power to shape them, the will to do so or even an idea for how to address a certain problem. Such resources may be in abundance on other planes, but only large interplanar organisations like Orbital possess the necessary infrastructure to transport them across the interplanar gulf efficiently: small scale trade between Entities simply isn't worth the divine effort. This is where Emporium comes in: whatever you lack, Emporium is one of the few places in all existence where you can find everything you might be looking for.

All you need to enter Emporium as a customer is sufficient power and/or responsibility, and the freedom to take some time away from home. For this reason, it is much more common to see divine servitors making the trip, rather than the overgods of entire planes: you'd hate to get home and find your world stopped existing without your constant micromanagement! However, such servitors must have the confidence of those on their homeplane, as once they are in the store, they will have the power to barter away vast swathes of their world. Whether you are shopping for yourself, or shopping on behalf of another Entity, the exchanges you make will matter to everyone on your homeplane … and they might be upset if you give away something important.

Once one has contacted Emporium to book their place in the queue and convinced them that their credit is good, it is time to wait. A very, very, very long time. Aeons, in fact: Emporium's products are in high demand across a more-than-infinite multiverse. Even for Entities, the wait time is almost unreasonable: so much so that they will go to tremendous lengths to protect their Manifestations once they finally get into the store. The wait is so long, many Entities will actually sign on as Employees in hopes of reducing the amount of time they have to wait for access to the store's products.

Across the multiverse, Entities are united by their incomprehensibly vast and extraordinary lifespans. This lends them a very different perspective on life and death than may be seen among mortal beings. All Entities are functionally immortal, and very difficult to kill, but not all Entities are everlasting. A Chimera tasked with guarding a gate between worlds may only be able to be killed by the individual prophesied to take them down. A Glory may fade into oblivion only when the ideal they represent no longer exists. An Implement pursuing a new purpose in life may alter their mind and body beyond the point of recognition: if you replace the head and handle of an axe, is it still the same axe? Entities in Emporium are as varied in their conception of death as they are in any other matter. We encourage players to consider what life, death, and immortality mean to their characters as they shop at Emporium.

The creation of Entities is similarly variable. Entities are commonly created spontaneously, when a large enough soul is attracted to the right circumstance, but others may have been born or created physically, or simply be as old as time. Since most Entities do not have families, they tend to form other kinds of relationships, such as a working relationship, a harmony or rivalry between ideals, or some cosmic alignment or opposition.

Entities may have the power to create life by introducing souls into sufficiently complex systems. The creation of life may be part of a character's backstory.

While Entities may mature at different rates, and the manifestation of their age may be varied, our Conduct and Themes Policy requires that all characters (PC and NPC) should have a capacity for decision-making equivalent to that of a human adult. It is forbidden to portray intentionally childlike appearances, mannerisms and speech patterns, regardless of your character's psychological age.

Emporium aims to explore themes of selfhood and identity in the context of characters' immortal existence, and the interactions - both extraordinary and mundane - that take place within it. There is no cross-universal convention for the gendering of Entities, and a wide range of modes of expression result (subject to the limitations present under the CAT policy - no gender relations that replicate real-world oppression). We encourage players to consider what, if anything, gender means to their characters.

One character might identify as masculine, employing he/him pronouns. Another might find concepts of binary gender alien, identifying zirself using zie/zir pronouns. Another still might reject gendered personhood in its entirety, seeing itself as embodying or enacting an abstract principle or process, and employing it/it pronouns. Be respectful of people's character choices, especially when using pronouns such as it/it which are sometimes points of sensitivity. Assume good faith as other players explore themes they are interested in!