How Our Fishing Gods Came to Be....

The Fry, Elder, and Mother Gods concept art by Ashton Musielewicz

During the initial planning phases of our game Divining Rods, the question of Fishing Gods in the game world came up. What would they look like? What would they symbolize? Which would be the main antagonist, the Dying God? We already knew we wanted three gods, and that number immediately reminded me of the triple goddess from Neopaganism: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. They stood for many things including obviously birth, maturity, and death.

We took inspiration from this for our three Fishing Gods and based them off three stages of life. One would represent youth and adolescence, one would be motherhood and maturity, and one would be age and death. We created the Fry, the Mother, and the Elder Fishing Gods. And naturally, the Elder would be the Dying God, afflicted and corrupted by the overexploitation of the waters. We originally called this god the Corrupted God, designing it to be angry and resentful at the overfishing. But “corrupted” implied that it was causing the sickness on the land, when really it was the sickness on the land that was hurting the god. So, we renamed it the Dying God, who is only as healthy as the land and waters.

Dying God design iterations by our concept artist Ashon Musielewicz

This worked out very well for one of the messages of Divining Rods about generational differences and how ancestral beliefs and traditional knowledge are incredibly valuable but quite fragile. The narrative of Divining Rods revolves around the local villagers who used to live in harmony with the waters and the fauna, only taking as much as they needed. But over time the younger, newer generations lost those values and began commercially overfishing and therefore destroying their land. Only a few elder villagers held on to those values and sustainable fishing techniques of old, so they’re the only ones who see the sickness their people have inflicted on their home and can help you fix it, like the Elder God.

-Tiffany Johnson, game design lead from the Divining Rods dev team

Brainstorming Gods and their shrine locations, "baby, adult, old." Notice the Neopaganist moon symbol.