Godslayers

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

In the ancient, brutal days, the Eifni Organization reached heaven through violence and tore the gods from their thrones.

Now their methods are more precise. Etheric technology allows them to measure love, create beauty, and reincarnate the souls of the dead into new bodies. By embedding specially-trained operatives—godslayers—into a culture, they can create the exact conditions to kill a god and save the souls it would otherwise devour.

Lilith was a run-of-the-mill college atheist until a divine being took a bite out of her soul. Rescued by the Eifni Organization, she signed on as a godslayer. Now, after years of training, she's deploying on her first real mission to a planet called Theria. Objective: perform reconnaissance on the local pantheon and clear out as many of the gods as they can before the strike team arrives.

There's just one problem: the Therians seem to know they're coming.

Godslayersis a story about intrigue, meaning, and militarized sociology. Updates Sundays.

Book 1 is available on Amazon/KU and Audible:

-Amazon

-Audible

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2022
Author: Trollmore

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.6/ 5.0
Followers: 1,999
Views: 154,126

What readers say about Godslayers

“Overall: The story is well-paced, well-written, and well-structured. The mixture of plot-driven necessities and character-driven twists and developments makes for a gripping read. Grammar: Impeccable. Syntax, spelling, and grammar are all basically perfect.…”
Aaron Sofaer (aka Pastafarian)Royal Road5.0 / 5
“This is the only social sci-fi I know of and it is downright brain candy. Highly recommend. Aliens arrive at a planet (one a former earthling) to kill it's gods that consume the souls of the people, to save and liberate them. Social fencing ensues, found fa…”
Bug PetrichorRoyal Road5.0 / 5

Reviews

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Community Reviews(10)

Aaron Sofaer (aka Pastafarian)Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Overall: The story is well-paced, well-written, and well-structured. The mixture of plot-driven necessities and character-driven twists and developments makes for a gripping read.
Grammar: Impeccable. Syntax, spelling, and grammar are all basically perfect.
Style: Love it. The descriptions of locations and scenery are beefy enough to provide the sense of place that the story needs, but the real focus is on the characters and the people and the society, and there it delivers in absolute spades. Everything is believably from the POV of the point-of-view character, and everything bleeds style. Also, as someone who loves jargon, I gotta say I love Godslayers's use of both real and fake jargon.
Character: If you liked A Practical Guide to Evil's banter, you're going to like this banter. I did, so I do! Characters are appropriately quippy or not, appropriately smug or snarky or patient or severe as the character and the scene demands. The characters are also strongly different, and in ways which make sense given their cultures of origin.
Story: This story crashes through the planetary barrier from etheric space and is immediately going somewhere, and I'm here for it.
Godslayers is one of the best stories I've had the pleasure to beta-read, and I am deeply excited that it's now getting posted on Royal Road. Buckle in, there might be some etheric turbulence.
Bug PetrichorRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This is the only social sci-fi I know of and it is downright brain candy. Highly recommend. Aliens arrive at a planet (one a former earthling) to kill it's gods that consume the souls of the people, to save and liberate them.
Social fencing ensues, found family mixed with professional team dynamics, and the tech is on another level of imaginative. Communications, resurrections, creating emotion in themselves and others. This features largely in how the main characters' use social combat related ways of coping with disenfranchised feelings and grief that the team has to navigate over the course of their mission.
If you like the more recent works of Thundamoo, you may love this. Complex morally grey situations, with 'the ends will justify the means because we'll make them' type spirit. Highly dynamic characters, that can body swap. Gender ambiguity and change is the norm over the story as well.
I am padding for word count, but it really is my favorite story on here and you should really give it a shot. The effort and eye for gripping story shines through and even with some scheduling difficulties, every chapter is worth the wait. This might be the first thing I will ever support on Patreon!
Some typos, but that's it for complaints. :)
Chris Ford WritesRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Initial thoughts. This story doesn't babysit the reader, thrusting them into a world unlike any I've ever encountered. Captivated from the get-go, I binged everything... twice. The cast is dynamic, each character adding their own flavor of personality to every interaction. The entire story exists within a realm of gray, challenging ideologies in entertaining and creative fashion. All in all, this blew me away.
Now, for the breakdown.
Style: Oozes from the pages naturally. Trollmore writes in a way I'm envious of, really bringing every narrative aspect alive in a brilliant display of skill. The core concepts of this story tickle an intellectual scratch I wasn't even aware I had, and so seamlessly at that. Everything flows smoothly. Phenomenally done.
Story: In its simplest form, this story is about a crew of space travelers with awesome tech. In actuality, this story is driven by conceptual principals with an emphasis on the main cast using mathematics to combat larger-than-life concepts-given-flesh with the goal of creating a world where all have freedom of will and are detached from the manipulative and parasitic entities they once worshipped. Deicide is the name of the game, and the amount of tools the cast has at their disposal mean little without the casts' intelligent planning and preparation. I love everything about this. I could gush far more, but I've more to discuss.
Grammar: Liberties were taken here and there to maintain flow, and I respect that. Trollmore has a great understanding of the language and his craft, and it shows.
Character: This. I can't even begin to describe how well-crafted each character is. A lot of thought has gone into ensuring the consistency of personality and the dynamic of the core cast. Lilith is our primary point of view character, but I love everyone equally. All of them have traits that make me want to call them my favorite. I've been thinking about that a lot as I read, and I can't definitively say I have a favorite, because t
ChtaeRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Sometimes you stumble on science fiction so brilliant, it expands your whole concept of what SF can do.
Godslayers was one of those stories, for me - a ‘what if’ so interesting and novel, it sent my imagination in whole new directions I’d never considered before.
The central idea is “etheric tech”, that directly measures, and manipulates, meaning, identity and other entities we usually consider abstractions. And the military organization producing this tech, Efni, uses it for a multiversal war against the gods, which are a sort of soul-devouring parasites - or so Efni claims.
This central concept isn’t just thrown around and used to handwave magitech. Everything in the plot and setting deeply engages with it and plays with it.
(mildly spoilery examples)
You can turn ‘invisible’ by using a soul prosthetic to manipulate your concept of self. You can reincarnate by transmigrating the soul, but it turns out some memories and mannerisms are stared into the body and they don’t transfer. Weaponized rituals are the weapon of choice to kill a god.
I love the way the story fully engages with the strangeness - and the contradictions - of having hard-science, quantifiable answers to philosophical questions. All the more since MC fully believes the Efni organization’s more outlandish claims - that they can prove their bloody, occasionally genocidal campaign is morally right, that they can measure such a thing as the moral arc of the universe - but there are abundant hints that they shouldn’t be taken at face value.
The workings of etheric tech feel consistent and well thought, so that every time Efni produces some outrageous new toy, it feels like it makes sense in context. There’s the right amount of handwaving about the details, so it feels like the author has a clear idea of the possibilities and limitations of etheric tech, but the reader discovers it bit by bit and doesn’t get swamped by lore.
I gushed a lot about the worldbuilding because it was so brilliant, but the whole
Courtyard AliceRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
What made me check this story out in part was someones description of it as 'hard social science sci-fi' and, having read through what is available, I really must agree.
Also fighting gods with sci-fi just slaps as a premise, you can't go wrong with that
Really , though, great characters with both the sci-fi and fantasy cultures well depicted and the plot is going to strange and fun places
Daja_KisuboRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Exciting, fun and filled with interesting characters that actually feel like other people with personalities. Ordinarily, I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi, however, I can highly recommend this story. Early days, but so far, so good!
Style: Fun and to the point, with lots of good banter. However, I’m also really enjoying some of the setting descriptions. Sci-Fi but with an interesting dose of religion and sociology built into it. The worldbuilding so far is really, really, good in its mix of sci-fi and religion, plus there are plenty of hints of great things to come as more chapters are released.
Grammar: Flawless. Or at least I haven’t noticed any flaws yet.
Characters: The MC Lilith is a great unreliable narrator who has her own personal opinions, desires, habits and beliefs - all of which give you a sense of her as a unique person. Lilith’s shipmates also all have their own personality/voice and given what’s going down story-wise I’m certain we have some very interesting new characters coming soon.
Story: Kinda like XCOM and PGTE combined. I won’t say too much more because of spoilers, however, it's good shit so far.
Very good so far and well worth a read!
FayhemRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Story: The story is very intriguing. The plot takes twists and turns to keep our characters on their toes, but without feeling forced. The worldbuilding underpinning everything is absolutely fascinating as well. There have been a number of stories about killing gods at this point, but I don't think I've ever seen one about sci-fantasy commando teams breaking into a new reality and murdering gods with weaponized anthropology before. So points for showing me something new right off the bat.
Style and grammar: These are both top-notch. The writing flows easily; it's both clear enough to be legible and vivid enough to be engaging. Spelling and grammar are both nearly impeccable. On at least one occasion the author has used the style of the narration to communicate important information about the protagonist, but in a way that's understated enough to serve the narrative rather than pulling focus. That's a needle that a lot of stories that try something like that fail to thread, so pulling it off successfully definitely earned some points from me.
Character: As for the characters, well. Even with as much as I'm vibing with the rest of it, the characters might be my actual favorite part. The main character has powerful gremlin energy and following her point of view is fun as fuck, but even with as (relatively) short a time as this story has been running it's still very clear there's more depth to her personality as well; she's not just a one-note walking meme at all. The same is also true for the supporting cast; they all have clear and well-defined personalities, that are interesting in their own right and also interesting to see bouncing off each other.
Overall: This is one of my favorite new stories on RoyalRoad, and I heartily recommend it. Seriously, unless you're just overtly allergic to the premise itself, give it a shot - you'll be mad at yourself if you don't.
GayOnTillMorningRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
An incredibly smart and well-written take on gods and religion I've genuinely never run into before, this story is absolutely worth your time. Sometimes the writing gets a tied in knots and it takes me a minute to figure out what's going on, but that doesn't get in the way of the super much enjoyment i've been having with this.
GorewoodRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Soft sci-fi with hard social sciences; not since reading Ursula le Guin have I realised how much I needed this.
Let's start with style; the prose here is effective and seemingly effortless, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Style - I'd say it has buckets, but that implies it's applied without artistry, which is definitely false.
The overarching plot of a team of four killing the gods of the planet they've landed on - is bold and different, and obviously we're in the early stages but I'm expecting it to pay off well.
The closer-in threads of the initial village, the plan to get one of them into the "Olympics", and Lilith's infiltration of high society are all well executed, with satisfying pay-offs.
Grammar, not sure what to say - it's good? The writer has a clear facility with language, well, great, we kinda covered that with style. Moving on.
Characters: at the heart of the story we have four, but they're all centred around Lilith, at least in my view. Team rookie, Earth girl with some trauma she's still got to deal with and an attitude - there's a lot to like about Lilith, especially her screw-ups, of which there are several. Sometimes she amazes her teammates, other times she dismays them, join the rollercoaster to see them happening in real time!
Character relationships are dynamic, nuanced and effectively drawn, even bit parts don't feel like cardboard cutouts.
I can't recommend this story highly enough; I think as long as it maintains this level of quality it will be the best story on the site when it's finished.
1212BRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Godslayer focusses on a small team of sci-fi operatived on a mission to... Well stay gods. Plural. And they've been very successful so far.
Their initial assault goes awry as they speed straight into an ambush and now they have to stay covert and hatch small but effective plan on how to rip the gods asunder and cause their concepts to implode.
This story is absolutely fascinating. It's the most intriguing sci-fi story I've read in a long time. I would however not recommend it to anyone who hates sci-fi mumbo-jumbo and military fiction.
Style and grammar:
As I said, this story is densely packed with sci-fi mumbo jumbo, which can make some paragraphs tedious to read.
Gods, emotions, concepts — They're all concrete things that can be measured and expressed in mathematical equasions in this world and the story will prattle on about them.
Some of these paragraphs you can sort of get a grasp of what they're doing, others not so much.
I know that it's a central part of the story that everything is quantifiable, but at points it's been a bit too excessive for my taste.
In terms of grammar — Couldn't find any fault at all.
Story and characters:
The concept behind the story is fascinating, how it's been continued until now mostly plays second fiddle to intelligence gathering and thus worldbuilding for now.
You need to know your targets before you can shoot at them, after all.
The characters feel like they have substantial depth, though we haven't gone in depth yet and none of them have been pushed to their breaking points. They're a team of hardened professionals and this isn't their first god-killing rodeo.
A true standout is our main character, who originates from earth and thus holds different values than her crewmates.
As a comment aptly put it, she's also "packing more feral gremlin energy into every interaction than most people will produce in their entire lives" and it's a joy to read.