Why are "gods" who have had to hide themselves in a parallel processing network hidden in Earth's massive network of planetary bacteria using human avatars to fight for control in a universe plagued by near invincible monsters? I've had a loose storyline in mind that has several elements:

• God-like beings marooned in our universe
• Hordes of unthinking, ghostly, city-sized creatures that are called by emotion and drain sentience
• Avatars that survive across lifetimes by being reborn in new bodies
• "Doing what you're told because you were created" vs. shaping your own destiny
• Rebellion / dissent among the "gods"

Can you imagine any story threads that would connect all of these elements? I've been trying to work out something where the gods did something to create the horde, and had to hide from their mistakes. My first thought was that the gods wanted to escape the end of our universe so badly they'd do anything it took to survive, even if they became monsters. But this theme suggests that the right answer to a final end is acceptance, which is a bit more gloomy than I like. I'm now thinking an option that might be fitting with the gameplay is one where the gods are more like Olympians, bickering over how to fight off the horde, using humans. Should humans be made into soulless machines that do the job, or should they be controlled some other way? The main story could involve a god who rebels and gives you powers to upset the gods' plans. But I'm not at all sure about this. Any alternate ideas that might weave these elements together?

I'm taking a line actually from Lufia here, but I'd have to say that an interesting idea might be:

The "Gods" are trying to escape *their* own demise. Their demise has been foretold, and will be caused by a *being* from Earth. I know, extremely vague but come on what prophecy isn't. The "Gods" are on the brink of a war between each other and so tension between the "Gods" is rising as can be shown through each of their avatars.

Now, this is part of the story the character doesn't overly know. One of the "Gods" who became tired of the bickering decided that instead of just creating his avatar he'd become his avatar.

You can fill in the rest as you wish =P.

--Ter'Lenth

an ancient race finally achieves immortality. A group of their most brilliant minds figured out how to transform souls[sentience] into energy making them immortal and god-like. The main limitiation is they have less power in the material side. They can travel interstallar distances and communicate with each other or access/control mechanical stuff but they don't have a corporeal body.

They figure to share the knowledge to other members of their race so they make nanomachines that takes the souls from living organisms and convert it to energy. They fail, the nanomachines strip the individual of his soul but it does not release the energy. It merely stores the patern within itself and uses it to grow (horde). The result is an every growing cloud of mental/electrical energy composed of brain patterns of mutiple individuals, which is chaotic. anybody even going close to the cloud would probably go insane.

The gods realize this but they are have limited power needed to stop this threat, they can not go directly against it for fear of being sucked within the clouds.

Enter earth. Humans have progressed far in terms of technology. They have a similar system for semi-immortality. They have a global net that you can plug into and download yourself into a new body whenever you like (avatar).

The "gods" discover this world and notice that they are actually compatible with the network. It seems they can use the human technology to get new bodies. Some are too afraid to go back into the physical world and remain as gods. Others stay for fear of contamination of the "human" body which seems so alien.

The body transfer procedure is not clear cut. They can use human bodies but the result is not always good. a body can only last for days, weeks at best. They decide to do genetic engineering to make a body capable of hosting their souls. They highjack the system of a cloning factory to produce their bodies. some gods get physical bodies and escape. the rest of the modified humans are discovered. The genetic manipulation is not understood by humans. The clones are savants and geniuses have brain patterns unlike normal humans. Not being fully human, they can't use the avatar method of body transferal. The world govt decides to use these clones as living computers, tools.

The now-human gods research a way to fight the horde. They need the help of humans, of course. The remaining gods in the network, fight over the prospect of giving the humans too much knowledge about the way to immortality as they might make the same mistakes as the gods (dissent among the gods). Some gods also envy the human-gods since immortality isn't as fun as they thought it would be.

Now you have human-gods fighting the horde, network gods trying to stop the human-gods, savants being controlled by the humans, humans slowly finding out about immortality. Dunno where the main character is [grin]

hope this helps.

some more thoughts:

I am thinking about salvation and redemption of the gods. They made a mistake which they are trying to correct. However, their arrogance blinds them to the truth that they can not do it alone. They must trust and cooperate with the humans, not just use them as tools or weapons. The humans also use the clones as tools, not recognizing that the clones are sentient beings themselves. Being half human and half god, these clones could be they key between the two races, if they can break free of the human control over them.

Time to be rather cynical--why do you need a rationale for what the Gods do? They're Gods. They don't have to answer to you mere humans.