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ffone
2011-02-25, 08:20 PM
A thread today reminded me of something I've noticed many a time in my own experience and this and other forums: by far the most common 'trait' of homebrew settings, it seems to be, is a lack of gods: they're dead, or never existed, or the source of divine magic is more 'subjective' or vague like sorcery.

Why is this? Is it a lot of work to come up with a homebrew pantheon? Is it RL antipathy towards religion being expressed?

LOTRfan
2011-02-25, 08:25 PM
I haven't seen many homebrews, but many of the settings I've seen had a lot of interesting mythologies. Tribble's Dying Ember, for example, had several interesting deities.

In my campaign, there are just as many, if not more, gods than people.

Mikeavelli
2011-02-25, 08:31 PM
D&D Players tend to be disproportionately atheist (or at least non-religious, no need to get into the fine points between atheist\agnostic\etc here) compared to the general population in my experience. This probably carries over into the homebrewing of campaign worlds.

Sine
2011-02-25, 08:31 PM
Why is this? Is it a lot of work to come up with a homebrew pantheon? Is it RL antipathy towards religion being expressed?
Either that, or a lot of DMs enjoy ripping off Eberron.

DeltaEmil
2011-02-25, 08:33 PM
The 'source of divine magic is vague' approach should be obvious. People want their fictional gods to be mysterious and working in strange ways, to the point of not being immediately clear if there are gods at all, so as to allow possible apostate villains and heroes going around that they're doing the 'true' will of the gods, leading to (possibly very violent and bloody) conflict about all sorts of stuff.

'The gods are all dead' way is all about the primal fear that no, there is nothing in the afterlife, no guiding hand, no great protector, and that the mortals are left on their own. It's sometimes combined with the 'revelation' that one or few of the gods did actually survive... in most cases, it's the evil nasty ones who were possibly even responsible for killing the other gods... and to add to the shock factor, those evil nasty ones are more like cthulhoid monstrous beings in the image of Azatoth and other unfathomable entities.
At least that's what some of those GMs and world-builders envision. It happen enough times that it becomes quite a predictable trope in its own right.

Urpriest
2011-02-25, 08:35 PM
Some RL antipathy, or a drive to medieval authenticity. Naive homebrew worlds often tend towards low-wealth or low/unnecessarily dangerous or volatile magic. They want to feel like your average fantasy novel, and don't grok the fact that there are better games for that sort of genre. (Yes E6 is nice, but even it's not ideal).

OracleofWuffing
2011-02-25, 08:37 PM
I think raocow said it best.


You see cause right now this is the part in any RPG ever where you have to kill god. It's pretty rad. I love killing god I do it everyday. You know some people have breakfast, I kill god, with my my super giant house sized sword you know. I have like 3 mortgages in it. 2 families could live in it but instead I use it as a weapon. It's pretty rad.

But more relevantly...:smalltongue:

First, consider that deities really only have a fluff-based influence on, basically, two classes, Clerics and Paladins. Second, consider that this influence can, depending on the character build, be nebulous at best (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0052.html). Finally, consider that these two classes could just as well be Clerics or Paladins for a cause instead of a deity. With all of those combined, it is possible to conclude that deities might not even matter to playing characters, unless they get all up-in-their-grills about things. Depending on the players' individual tastes, they might not really want to research a huge fan-made religion when at best they'll talk about the big bad evil god and maybe the big bad good god. So, in a sense, it may behoove the DM not to spend his or her creative juices on something few people are going to look at.

Granted, there are exceptions.

I could also see other reasons not to, not being comfortable discussing a religion separate from or similar to oneself's own, not wanting to accidentally insult a religion one does not know of through perceived similarities, or maybe the DM just wants to avoid strict occurrences of deus ex machina. However, that above is what I think of for myself, personally.

Malfunctioned
2011-02-25, 08:43 PM
I've always had gods in my settings, though they have differed from the standard gods. There's been an evil god of undeath and the sun, a chaotic goddess of natural selection, a neutral good god of wealth and glory and so on.

I've also had Paladins that gain their power, not from gods, but from a well of immense divine energy. They attribute it to the gods and thus do things in their honour, the head of group (them being the only group of paladins in the world) basically becomes linked with the power source and can give or shut off the power of others as he pleases. Thus paladins falling when they perform evil acts.

It's only when the head becomes corrupt that the problems start.

Gnoman
2011-02-25, 08:44 PM
There's also the issue of not wanting to use published or "actual" dieties, but not wanting to spend the time ensuring that your custom complex pantheon has all the necessary domains, favored weapons, and other fluff.

Psyren
2011-02-25, 08:50 PM
The trouble with explicit divinity is that it brings up that ever-present plot hole:

"Why don't the gods fix it?"

Even OotS - a literary marvel - has this problem. Surely the gods wouldn't want the Snarl free; after all, the one time it showed up, it attacked gods first, creation second. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0274.html) Yet the gods are being very hands-off in their approach to both stopping Xykon and helping the heroes. In a world with less literal deities, this wouldn't be an issue.

Dimers
2011-02-25, 10:37 PM
The Black Company book series is godless because beings of that magnitude (it says) just shouldn't care about the pithy goings-on of mere mortals. I'd buy that. In a gameworld where gods get power from worship, of course, they care quite a bit, and in a gameworld where mortals sometimes become gods, they might retain their old loyalties despite the change in station.

While making my homebrew world, I keep asking myself "What would a tremendously powerful spirit being feel about {topic}?" That's led to my gods being quite ungodlike in some ways. It could just as easily have led to a decision that there are no tremendously powerful spirit beings, because that'd eliminate soooooo many tough questions in a sensible way. (Much like Psyren says above, except also adding the question "Why didn't the gods BREAK it?") The only reason I've worked so hard to keep gods in my setting is to attract players who want divine-servant characters.

navar100
2011-02-25, 11:23 PM
A thread today reminded me of something I've noticed many a time in my own experience and this and other forums: by far the most common 'trait' of homebrew settings, it seems to be, is a lack of gods: they're dead, or never existed, or the source of divine magic is more 'subjective' or vague like sorcery.

Why is this? Is it a lot of work to come up with a homebrew pantheon? Is it RL antipathy towards religion being expressed?

Not in my experience since 2E. Homebrews always had a pantheon. You can say this is true in your experience but not "most common" of all homebrew settings.

Knaight
2011-02-25, 11:27 PM
Specific reasons are going to vary, however I would suggest that it is common for the removal of gods to be part of a larger trend. D&D has an implicit setting where beings exist that are simply far beyond others, heroes are far beyond the common folk, and in general everything is epic and fantastic. A preference for more grounded settings removes much of that, and gods are simply a part of it. It also usually involves e6 for those that don't just abandon D&D entirely.

Furthermore, homebrew settings typically focus more on what the writers find interesting than whatever the D&D writers found interesting. As such there may not be any theological interest, or may not be any theological interest outside of cultures and the interactions between them. In the second case, the actual presence of deities places a dimension of accuracy to cultures, and can upset presentation.

In short, homebrew settings tend to go for something specific. Accurate polytheism is far from a safely assumed norm, and treating it as such will produce surprise when it isn't shown, particularly as there is a trend towards people in the setting being unsure about gods as a whole.

Kobold Esq
2011-02-25, 11:41 PM
I have never run a game with actual tangible, active gods. At BEST there are outsiders who revere the same deity and fulfill that role when necessary.


Also I think saying people are "ripping off Eberron" ignores the fact that people have been gaming for decades before WotC had the setting contest that Mr. Baker won.

Half-Orc Rage
2011-02-25, 11:50 PM
Eberron has gods, they have the gods of the Sovereign Host and the Dark Six, plus whatever the hell the Silver Flame is supposed to be.

Archpaladin Zousha
2011-02-26, 12:00 AM
Yes, but these gods are distant forces, only active through their clergy. The original D&D pantheons were active, more along the lines of the Greek and Norse gods who'd occasionally meddle directly in mortal affairs.

Callista
2011-02-26, 12:02 AM
I think people often worry that the gods will end up being mary-sueish DMPCs or plot-ruining literal deus ex machina.

As a DM, it's a fine line to walk--Say, you've got Corellon, god of the elves; and as a DM you're basically playing him and all the other gods. Your level 5 PCs are being sent to save a cityful of elves from a powerful blue dragon who has been disguised and impersonating the city's long-lost heir to the throne.

Multiple, extremely powerful gods, directly involved in the world you're running, can make the PCs feel very much like pawns in a gigantic game in which they have very little control. Most players don't like that feeling.

So you have to deal with the question of why the gods are powerful, but the world still needs PCs to play the heroes. Options include:

--The gods are limited in power, and cannot be everywhere at once; the PCs are doing what the gods can't do because they are busy doing even more important stuff. (Corellon isn't dealing with the city threatened by the dragon because he's busy preventing Gruumsh from taking over a whole nation halfway across the globe; instead, he sends a quick vision to the high priest and warns him, and the high priest hires the PCs.)

--Enough of the gods believe in free will and allowing mortals to choose their own paths that they do not interfere, and prevent other more tyrannical gods from interfering, in mortal affairs--a divine Prime Directive. (Corellon could snap his fingers and expose the dragon, but he knows that it's better to let the elves learn on their own, protect their own city, and become more powerful and virtuous through the experience. His LG deity friends agree because they know that Good not chosen freely is not Good, merely coercion; his CE deity enemies agree because they know that Evil not chosen freely is not truly evil; and they outnumber the LE and some LN deities--the only ones who would willingly force sentient mortals to obey, whether they liked it or not. The balance of power forces deities to let mortals choose their paths freely.)

--The gods are in a mutually-assured-destruction deadlock, and they fight mostly by proxy because even the Evil-aligned gods don't want to destroy the world. (Corellon knows that if he intervened directly, his enemies would start a war that would kill many more than the dragon's shenanigans are endangering; so he sends the PCs as his proxies as a way of staying under the radar of the other gods.)

--The gods have drifted away from the affairs of the Prime Material, and while they still grant spells, they think too long-term for small things like mortal kingdoms to really attract their attention. (Corellon is thinking about thousands of years in the future. Small fluctuations of power, a few cities under tyranny, etc., don't trigger his attention--he's too busy thinking on a massive timescale about the ultimate fate of the entire world.)

--The gods are real, but they aren't granting spells; their clerics actually tap into the aligned planes and channel power through simple faith, much like a sorcerer channels magic. This basically turns the gods into powerful NPCs and replaces the gods' guidance with that of the aligned planes and thus the amalgamated souls of all the sentient creatures who compose the substance of those planes. (Corellon is a powerful being, but his high priest isn't getting a vision from him when he gets the warning about the dragon--rather, the high priest is casting a divination that taps into the power of the souls of all the elves who believe in peace and not being ruled over by tyrannical blue dragons.)

--The gods are created by belief and depend on it. (Corellon is an entity created by the power of the elves and their belief, and exists precisely because they believe in him. He is as powerful as the elvish kingdoms are, and defeating the dragon depends on the faith of the elves.)

--The gods do not actually exist; clerical magic is simply a kind of sorcery that is closely associated to the aligned planes. (When Corellon's clerics get the message and defeat the dragon, the only ones involved are the clerics. They may or may not believe that Corellon himself exists, but their belief in an ideal or in the deity can be used as a conduit to channel clerical magic and perform the divination that warns them about the dragon.)

Ajadea
2011-02-26, 12:27 AM
Mostly, I ask myself 'if I had ultimate divine power-and had never known anything else, what would I be doing?'

Generally, messing with mortal affairs isn't on the priority list. Worshippers are like symbiotic parasites in this one setting I have: leeching a (comparatively) tiny amount of power from the god of their choice, in exchange for their worship and prayer. That worship? Feels nice. Kinda like a full-body shiatsu (for a formless entity) when you have a good number.

So only gods who care about their nice massage even interact with their worshippers, and they wouldn't do it that much. While a cult god would care about getting more worshippers, one of the greater gods wouldn't notice. None of the 'true' gods (that is, the ones who weren't born mortal) think in mortal timescales or limits. For example, for a concept I have, the goddess of death is everywhere and everywhen there is a death, so she only experiences three moments in her life. Her birth, one long moment when she is at the death of everything, and then she stands at the death of the multiverse. And kills it.

Daftendirekt
2011-02-26, 12:40 AM
I've always liked Norse mythology, so I think if I ever did my own setting I'd use that pantheon.

And I'm atheist :P

ffone
2011-02-26, 01:53 AM
Callista, nice rundown of reasons for hands off gods. One of my favorites is the MAD one (not our usual MAD, but cold war 'mutually assured destruction'), which the Ed Greenwood novels cite on several occasions (as Elminster and the other uber NPCs giving reasons for not doing everything).


Eberron has gods, they have the gods of the Sovereign Host and the Dark Six, plus whatever the hell the Silver Flame is supposed to be.

AFAICT the Silver Flame is the obligatory "Spanish Inquisition allegory to teach us the Dangers of being Overzealous" that's popular in fantasy settings (Golden Compass, Wheel of Time, etc.)

Ajadea
2011-02-26, 02:09 AM
AFAICT?

Also, you get some really interesting morality systems if you take 'possibly made by belief' to its logical end in a world without absolute morality.

Like the one where a 'paladin' can kill a kid without falling, as long as it's a elf/gnome/kobold.

EDIT: To clarify, those races are highly dangerous in my setting, with kobold sorcerers having access to Power Word Pain (and thereore being able to oneshot all but your strongest warriors), elves basically all being druids, duskblades, sorcerers, bards, wildshape rangers, or the rare expert (and you aren't going to fight the experts), and many gnomes being willing and able to decieve the 'paladins' long enough so that the real sorcerers can rain terror on the troops (when everyone looks like a sorcerer to you...yeah, this could be difficult)

So they think they are justified in killing them. They don't have to, very often, but when they do, it doesn't actually cause them to fall.

Callista
2011-02-26, 02:23 AM
I think that only works if clerical magic is functionally (but not necessarily mechanically) identical to a sorcerer's magic--that is, comes entirely from the person himself, not from any outside source (or else shapes unaligned power from an outside source, such as the positive energy plane for healing).

Here's my reasoning...
Your cleric is getting his magic from some source; and whether or not he gets it depends entirely on what he himself believes about himself and his actions. That is, nobody but the cleric is determining his standards of morality. It might be what the cleric believes is right or what he knows his culture prefers; but ultimately, the determination of morality has to rest with the cleric.

Obviously, he can't be getting his magic from a deity; the deity would have defined an absolute standard of morality. He also can't be getting it from an aligned plane, because aligned planes are the same for everybody who tap into them, and whether there are two planes or two hundred, they still represent specific sets of ideas.

So, the only thing left is that the cleric in this system is more like a Wisdom-based sorcerer--his magic works because he believes it does. Where's he getting his power? Maybe from his own soul; maybe he's tapping into positive or negative energy from all the creatures around him; maybe he's tapping into mental energy from the people around him. But essentially, if you have this system, then alignment and the cleric are no longer related--the cleric's loss of faith is a simple loss of confidence with few moral implications beyond the cleric's own emotional state.

If you used this system, you would probably have to turn the cleric into a class that does not follow an ideal or a deity... It's inevitable that they would eventually find out that their magic works because they believe in it; and at that point they would become a unique breed of sorcerers rather than holy men.

Ajadea
2011-02-26, 02:54 AM
Funny thing about that actually...in that setting the adepts and stuff (no clerics for fluff reasons) don't necessarily rely on their personal faith for power. You can have faith and still have your powers be stripped from you. The paladin PC is kinda on the borderline of an IC freakout due to the premise of the campaign methodically destroying most of his moral reference points (and the player is apparently enjoying every minute of it), but he still has his powers; if anything, they're actually getting a bit stronger.

There is no absolute morality. No aligned planes, not even the gods see absolute morality. What you have is morality-as-defined-by-deity. And the local god's version of 'good' does not match the D&D version. The local god that protects humans, halflings, and dwarves doesn't care about the wellbeing of elves, gnomes, and kobolds. Actually, he sees them as not only inferior species, but as risks to those who do matter to him.

And those races do admittedly have a racial penchant for accidentally murdering people. 50% of the members of those races have some sort of magical talent, and it has a tendency to reveal itself rather inconveniently. Like with explosions. While their society has ways and traditions specifically made to counteract those risks, humanity never learned them, and they remember the one time everything messed up, not the hundred times it didn't. People within the human/halfling/dwarven society don't get hurt by this racism, so few actually question it. Why would they? Most of them will never come into contact with a member of one of those races. The common person has no strong reason to believe one way or another, and the adepts who worship him...they're not helping. His paladins can kill children of those races, because he views this as necessary, though highly unpleasant.

Callista
2011-02-26, 03:01 AM
Interesting setting... certainly not the generic D&D setting, but still interesting.

Definitely requires that the DM explain that he has houseruled "Good" to mean "Whatever the deity desires" rather than the PHB definition, though. Actually, to reduce confusion, it would make a lot of sense to just use terms like "devoted" vs. "infidel" instead. The general definition of Good in D&D is pretty much agreed on, and I think I'd just end up getting frustrated trying to figure out the meaning behind the words if the DM randomly re-defined "Good" as "whatever the heck Deity X says it is" without also changing the terms to match. Much easier to just come straight out and say that this deity is running the show.

Gnome Alone
2011-02-26, 03:03 AM
AFAICT?

As far as I can tell, it stands for "as far as I can tell."

Ajadea
2011-02-26, 03:37 AM
Interesting setting... certainly not the generic D&D setting, but still interesting.

Definitely requires that the DM explain that he has houseruled "Good" to mean "Whatever the deity desires" rather than the PHB definition, though. Actually, to reduce confusion, it would make a lot of sense to just use terms like "devoted" vs. "infidel" instead. The general definition of Good in D&D is pretty much agreed on, and I think I'd just end up getting frustrated trying to figure out the meaning behind the words if the DM randomly re-defined "Good" as "whatever the heck Deity X says it is" without also changing the terms to match. Much easier to just come straight out and say that this deity is running the show.

The NPCs have a tendency to call themselves 'good' and the other side 'evil', but that's just perception. OOC, we basically ignore alignment in our chatting, and so far, it's been fairly obvious when someone needs a holy sword to the face. I already warned the players that they can stick anything they want in the Alignment section of their sheet, it doesn't have an ingame affect. The PCs are always the protagonists in the end. Whether or not they are heroes...that may vary.

Thanks, Gnome Alone.

Kami2awa
2011-02-26, 06:05 AM
There's also the issue of not wanting to use published or "actual" dieties, but not wanting to spend the time ensuring that your custom complex pantheon has all the necessary domains, favored weapons, and other fluff.

Using actual deities (that is to say, ones believed in by real-world faiths, modern or historical) sounds an interesting idea.

Another idea as to why the Gods are not interventionist: Too much direct divine intervention screws with the world itself. Deities are powerful enough that their mere presence alters reality in uncontrollable ways (for a real-world example, God tells Moses that he cannot show him his true face because the sight of it will kill a mortal man).

If deities intervened directly to deal with every issue, the world would fall apart in short order (this may be what is supposed to happen at the prophesied End of the World, but that hopefully won't be for a while).

Yora
2011-02-26, 06:17 AM
I'm currently working on a world with animistic spirits and demigods.
They are nearby and relatively easy to contact, and might even care. But their power is very limited.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 06:51 AM
I am working on a world that for a long time was without magic, the general theory is overuse, and only recently reacquired it. This blocked off the gods, but also created, like the Steel King, personification of technology and innovation, both the triumph of creation and the grinding wheels of change, and The Dark Mother (http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05/news/myths-over-miami/#)*, who haunts the tenements and slums that have sprung up around the factories. Few worship her, but many fear her, and that is food enough for a god.
*Be careful, that link may leave you in tears.

Triaxx
2011-02-26, 06:51 AM
As for OOTS, most of the gods seem to be wearing their underpants on their head, to paraphrase the esteemed Pratchett. And the Azure Pantheon seem fairly hands off anyway.

As for my own worlds, I tend to try an include no more than three to six gods. Why? Because I have a lot of trouble keeping them straight, and the DM slowing down the game because he keeps referring to his notes is annoying.

Unless of course the setting includes a religious war, in which case I've had as many as fifty. (Some were merely aspects of a larger deity given form because of sheer specific belief.)

Kris Strife
2011-02-26, 07:36 AM
Another idea as to why the Gods are not interventionist: Too much direct divine intervention screws with the world itself. Deities are powerful enough that their mere presence alters reality in uncontrollable ways (for a real-world example, God tells Moses that he cannot show him his true face because the sight of it will kill a mortal man).

If deities intervened directly to deal with every issue, the world would fall apart in short order (this may be what is supposed to happen at the prophesied End of the World, but that hopefully won't be for a while).

Like so? (http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/3ACV20/19.mp3) :smallwink:

Dervag
2011-02-26, 12:27 PM
Mostly, I ask myself 'if I had ultimate divine power-and had never known anything else, what would I be doing?'This is why it's interesting to explore the idea that deities aren't human. And by this I mean not that they're Cthulhu, which has been done unto death by people who aren't imaginative enough to think of anything for Cthulhu to do besides inevitably destroy the world, for some reason.

I mean that they don't think like a human being in the same situation would. They are, in some sense, real beings who walk around and talk to each other and do things- you can theoretically go see the gods- but they're also the personification of vast abstract forces.

So, for example, a god of fire cares about fire. That's pretty much it- very elemental mindset. Anything that promotes the cause of things being on fire, he's on board with. Yes, this makes him a bad guy, or has the potential to do so; that's the point. Now, the fire god may be a humanoid being you could theoretically interact with, and might even react to certain things as a human would, but where human nature is a complicated thing, fire-god nature is a simple thing.

One consequence of this is cosmological dualism: the god of fire would destroy the world if not balanced by the goddess of ice, and vice versa. The god of love would cause human civilization to collapse* if not counterbalanced by the goddess of war (or something else that is traditionally regarded as bad).

Another is that far more of the gods are neutral-aligned: not necessarily indifferent, but so parochial in their interests that they can't be said to care much about the bigger moral picture.

Then you've got the boundless potential for interactions that run at cross-purposes to the dualism. The gods of fire and ice are in balanced opposition (think yin-yang). The gods of love and war are in balanced opposition (ditto). What kind of interactions will you see between members of the two different pairs? Will they be hostile? Friendly? Indifferent?

*Imagine a society in which the only impulse anyone actually bothered to act on was love, to the expense of all else. It would get dysfunctional pretty fast.
____________

It is, however, important if you do this think to realize that not all, and probably not any, of the gods actively seek the destruction of the world, even if that would be the predictable consequence of them getting their way. It's just that they tend to overindulge in whatever thing they see as most important- whatever it is they're gods of.

Yora
2011-02-26, 01:29 PM
The problem with gods that are merely forces of nature and don't care at all for mortals, is that there's no reason to worship them.
There's no benefit of prayers and services, and they don't offer any mortal guidance or meaning.

The Big Dice
2011-02-26, 01:39 PM
The problem with gods that are merely forces of nature and don't care at all for mortals, is that there's no reason to worship them.
There's no benefit of prayers and services, and they don't offer any mortal guidance or meaning.

That depends on the relative technology of your society. In a stone age culture, worship is about appeasement and a successful hunt. Getting to live, and have the tribe continue is a good thing and the Sky God should be thanked for it.

As society becomes more sophisticated, abstract concepts becomes tangible ideas, which then leads to a mass spawnings of lots of new gods. A godly proliferation follows and the next thing you know, you've got the 3rd ed Forgotten Realms.

Knaight
2011-02-26, 01:45 PM
The problem with gods that are merely forces of nature and don't care at all for mortals, is that there's no reason to worship them.
There's no benefit of prayers and services, and they don't offer any mortal guidance or meaning.

The reasons for worship are based entirely upon the beliefs of the potential worshipers, actual reality is irrelevant.

Psyren
2011-02-26, 01:57 PM
So you have to deal with the question of why the gods are powerful, but the world still needs PCs to play the heroes. Options include:

--The gods are limited in power, and cannot be everywhere at once; the PCs are doing what the gods can't do because they are busy doing even more important stuff. (Corellon isn't dealing with the city threatened by the dragon because he's busy preventing Gruumsh from taking over a whole nation halfway across the globe; instead, he sends a quick vision to the high priest and warns him, and the high priest hires the PCs.)

--Enough of the gods believe in free will and allowing mortals to choose their own paths that they do not interfere, and prevent other more tyrannical gods from interfering, in mortal affairs--a divine Prime Directive. (Corellon could snap his fingers and expose the dragon, but he knows that it's better to let the elves learn on their own, protect their own city, and become more powerful and virtuous through the experience. His LG deity friends agree because they know that Good not chosen freely is not Good, merely coercion; his CE deity enemies agree because they know that Evil not chosen freely is not truly evil; and they outnumber the LE and some LN deities--the only ones who would willingly force sentient mortals to obey, whether they liked it or not. The balance of power forces deities to let mortals choose their paths freely.)

--The gods are in a mutually-assured-destruction deadlock, and they fight mostly by proxy because even the Evil-aligned gods don't want to destroy the world. (Corellon knows that if he intervened directly, his enemies would start a war that would kill many more than the dragon's shenanigans are endangering; so he sends the PCs as his proxies as a way of staying under the radar of the other gods.)

--The gods have drifted away from the affairs of the Prime Material, and while they still grant spells, they think too long-term for small things like mortal kingdoms to really attract their attention. (Corellon is thinking about thousands of years in the future. Small fluctuations of power, a few cities under tyranny, etc., don't trigger his attention--he's too busy thinking on a massive timescale about the ultimate fate of the entire world.)

--The gods are real, but they aren't granting spells; their clerics actually tap into the aligned planes and channel power through simple faith, much like a sorcerer channels magic. This basically turns the gods into powerful NPCs and replaces the gods' guidance with that of the aligned planes and thus the amalgamated souls of all the sentient creatures who compose the substance of those planes. (Corellon is a powerful being, but his high priest isn't getting a vision from him when he gets the warning about the dragon--rather, the high priest is casting a divination that taps into the power of the souls of all the elves who believe in peace and not being ruled over by tyrannical blue dragons.)

--The gods are created by belief and depend on it. (Corellon is an entity created by the power of the elves and their belief, and exists precisely because they believe in him. He is as powerful as the elvish kingdoms are, and defeating the dragon depends on the faith of the elves.)

--The gods do not actually exist; clerical magic is simply a kind of sorcery that is closely associated to the aligned planes. (When Corellon's clerics get the message and defeat the dragon, the only ones involved are the clerics. They may or may not believe that Corellon himself exists, but their belief in an ideal or in the deity can be used as a conduit to channel clerical magic and perform the divination that warns them about the dragon.)

I think this is a very well-written post; I'm not sure how much of it I buy however.

For instance, the limited-power thing: Greater Deities (like Corellon) can do a LOT of stuff simultaneously. Let's assume you're right, and Corellon is mystically restraining Grummsh; that still leaves him a ton of options, like sending an Eladrin to help the heroes (the same way he'd be able to do if they cast Planar Ally) or outfitting them with magical arms and armor.

- The free-will thing is fine for small problems but not for big ones. For small problems you don't need divine intervention anyway; for big ones (say, the evil cult opening a gate to the Far Realm or trying to bring Gruumsh's avatar into the material) Corellon has no reason not to get down and dirty. In the Cleric Quintet, Deneir basically pumped Cadderly up to nearly epic levels over the course of a month; it was that or let Talona take control of his library with vampires AND have an extremely evil artifact running amok in the Realms. Doing this was very much against Cadderly's will at the time.
Another big problem was a certain man who freed a certain people from a lifetime of slavery in a foreign land. I'll say no more. The point is, divine intervention is pretty much designed for the big problems; but at high levels, all the problems are big.

- Mutually-assured destruction: This really depends on the deity you're talking about. Bane and Asmodeus would certainly want to keep the world around; Orcus, Cyric, Garagos, even the OotS' Dark One could care less as long as the current status quo is gone with it. Why then should they restrain themselves? A little chaos in the right place could easily cause a chain reaction - say, starting a wightocalypse in the orphanage in the poor section of a city and having it spread to the castle before anyone even knows what's going on. A low-level wizard or cleric can do this, why not a god?

- Being distant from "short-term kingdoms" is paradoxical. How can Corellon claim to care about the lives of individual elves if he is willing to take such a long-term view? This is the problem all the good gods fail to overcome. Murdering one elf is a horrible crime, but risking the destruction of an entire village for the greater good is okay?

- Clerics channeling planar rather than deific energy I'm fine with, but in that case, why have gods at all? This implies there is an ultimate source of Good for instance, or Law, and the gods simply have access to more of it than the clerics do. In such a case, all clerics are basically clerics of a cause, and the giant NPCs may as well not be considered. If those gods do have the power to cut clerics off, then they are functionally the source, not the planes.

- Being dependent on belief again runs into the problem of why he doesn't intervene. Clearly every elven nation that falls would be a direct hit on his divine rank, and he wouldn't want that. Worse, it leads to the problem of how new deities can arise without having the worshipers - and thus power - to perform miracles of their own.

Thus "the gods may or may not actually exist" - the Eberron approach - becomes narratively easiest to uphold.



Yahtzee touches on this in his Too Human review. "Ancient religions didn't have that problem - they knew their gods were lunatics, who ran around boning their closest relatives and turning their junk into fruit-bearing trees. This made for comparatively greater story-telling."

Altair_the_Vexed
2011-02-26, 02:02 PM
It's certainly not always a lazy option to eliminate gods from your game. I've put a fair amount of effort into researching myth and religion to come up with realistic seeming religions for my game.

The first D&D game setting that I played back in the 80s had tonnes of beings worshipped as deities - but none of them were really gods. Gods were absent from the setting, because it was important for the owners of the D&D game to explicitly state that the god-like beings weren't really divine in the 80s. Can't discuss this aspect more on this forum without straying into political / religious territory - but perhaps you get the idea.

I've just worked on that idea for my current setting - there are powers that mortals worship as gods, but none of them is really responsible for the portfolio ascribed to them. There are dozens of "gods" and several pantheons - just none of them are anything more than demons and angels.

kieza
2011-02-26, 02:11 PM
In my setting, people believe there are gods, but nobody really knows. There have never been any true miracles (events that can't be explained by "a wizard did it"), no god has ever taken physical form, and the angels won't talk about it. But, whenever someone taps into divine power (when meditating or casting a spell with it), they sense some sort of presence that is usually attributed to a deity. Sometimes, it imparts some little bit of understanding of the world. Since different people get different messages when they use divine magic, it's assumed that there are several gods, and people just hear from the one that is most interested in them.

There's a little more to it than that, but my players might be reading...

Chilingsworth
2011-02-26, 02:23 PM
I am working on a world that for a long time was without magic, the general theory is overuse, and only recently reacquired it. This blocked off the gods, but also created, like the Steel King, personification of technology and innovation, both the triumph of creation and the grinding wheels of change, and The Dark Mother (http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05/news/myths-over-miami/#)*, who haunts the tenements and slums that have sprung up around the factories. Few worship her, but many fear her, and that is food enough for a god.
*Be careful, that link may leave you in tears.

Sad, yet those stories could make for an awesome campaign (D&D or D20 Modern)

Psyren
2011-02-26, 02:27 PM
In my setting, people believe there are gods, but nobody really knows. There have never been any true miracles (events that can't be explained by "a wizard did it"), no god has ever taken physical form, and the angels won't talk about it. But, whenever someone taps into divine power (when meditating or casting a spell with it), they sense some sort of presence that is usually attributed to a deity. Sometimes, it imparts some little bit of understanding of the world. Since different people get different messages when they use divine magic, it's assumed that there are several gods, and people just hear from the one that is most interested in them.

There's a little more to it than that, but my players might be reading...

This is probably how I'd do it if I ended up making a setting.

Gnoman
2011-02-26, 02:29 PM
Using actual deities (that is to say, ones believed in by real-world faiths, modern or historical) sounds an interesting idea.


I quite agree, which is part of why I included the Aesir in my setting.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 02:29 PM
Sad, yet those stories could make for an awesome campaign (D&D or D20 Modern)
Indeed. I hope this rough magic I call words is suitable for the telling.

The Glyphstone
2011-02-26, 02:31 PM
For what it's worth, the setup for the world I'm building effectively has the gods as divine junkies. They're addicted to and dependent on mortal worship for sustenance, keeping the supply going by doling out spells and extremely small-scale miracles...but any sort of active intervention would drain them of their stored energy far faster than they could regain it, and open them up to a direct attack by a rival. Instead, they fight by proxy, allowing mortals their independence to maintain plausibly deniability.

Psyren
2011-02-26, 03:38 PM
For what it's worth, the setup for the world I'm building effectively has the gods as divine junkies. They're addicted to and dependent on mortal worship for sustenance, keeping the supply going by doling out spells and extremely small-scale miracles...but any sort of active intervention would drain them of their stored energy far faster than they could regain it, and open them up to a direct attack by a rival. Instead, they fight by proxy, allowing mortals their independence to maintain plausibly deniability.

That's a nice take but still exposes the inconsistency of so-called "good deities" being loathe to make such a sacrifice; furthermore, if the balance is so tenuous that using divine power can open one's defenses, that still raises the question of why they wouldn't be just as reluctant to let their people die. A dragon near some elven settlements would be an even bigger problem if the energy lost from their destruction could tip the scales.

And inaction isn't a solution either, because if the elves' prayers aren't answered and they lose faith, the divine pool of their deity is diminished just as if they had been wiped out.

The Glyphstone
2011-02-26, 04:00 PM
That's a nice take but still exposes the inconsistency of so-called "good deities" being loathe to make such a sacrifice; furthermore, if the balance is so tenuous that using divine power can open one's defenses, that still raises the question of why they wouldn't be just as reluctant to let their people die. A dragon near some elven settlements would be an even bigger problem if the energy lost from their destruction could tip the scales.

And inaction isn't a solution either, because if the elves' prayers aren't answered and they lose faith, the divine pool of their deity is diminished just as if they had been wiped out.

Well, that assumes there are good deities to begin with. I personally detest alignment for its straightjacket-like nature, but that's a different topic. Suffice to say that the only difference between the 'good' and 'evil' gods is the attitude they have towards their mortal worshippers, which amounts to the difference between raising free-range and caged chickens. They're not actually benevolent, but take the approach that happier livestock is healthier livestock - so letting an entire city be wiped out is entirely acceptable if the cost would be leaving themselves personally vulnerable.

As for the inaction versus expenditure - that's really the problem, in the intake versus output equation. It might consume the divine energy of ten thousand worshippers praying for five hundred years to actively intervene and save the settlement, when the settlement itself only contains two or three thousand faithful. It's simply too costly to intervene directly, whereas cashing out the 'currency' of, say, a hundred worshippers for six months in order to convince a prominent priest that he should hire some mercenaries to defend said town.

(if the "people lose faith in the gods who let them die" is a problem, suffice to say it isn't - the actual gods and the names/entities people pray to are entirely separate, and often change from time to time. To clarify

Mortals offer prayers to named titles, and the 'ownership' of said titles (along with their associated domains and worshippers) are used by the gods as a sort of internal currency - there are twelve gods, but dozens of titles covering individual aspects of existence, and who is what changes frequently. People who pray to the Warrior of Golden Armor, the deity of luck in warfare, and are forsaken might choose to invoke the name of the Nighthaunter Lord, a deity of bleak suffering, next time. They might be the same god to begin with though, or in the passing of time, whichever god 'owned' the title of Warrior of Golden Armor may have traded it away, or lost it, and gained the Nighthaunter Lord moniker instead, so he actually loses nothing overall.

Callos_DeTerran
2011-02-26, 04:44 PM
I think this is a very well-written post; I'm not sure how much of it I buy however.

For instance, the limited-power thing: Greater Deities (like Corellon) can do a LOT of stuff simultaneously. Let's assume you're right, and Corellon is mystically restraining Grummsh; that still leaves him a ton of options, like sending an Eladrin to help the heroes (the same way he'd be able to do if they cast Planar Ally) or outfitting them with magical arms and armor.

Okay, but what about all the other cities, on all the other material plane worlds, that are in greater danger? More subtle danger? Etc. Even as a greater deity, there ARE limits to what a god can accomplish and a greater god usually has interests on multiple planes, worlds, and realms. They can't monitor ALL of them and their enemies as well, even with divine ability. I know, in the FR, that a god could be overwhelmed and disoriented if too many worshipers began to demand things or if too many tasks demanded their attention (or at least it happened to Cyric). It's a matter of doing the least amount of effort to accomplish a task, so that more tasks can be accomplished. By just sending a vision to the high priest, Corellon (in this example) has likely just saved enough divine energy to send messages to a thousand more high priests about danger in THEIR cities (so that they can handle it themselves), as opposed to just sending servants and equipment to save one.


- Mutually-assured destruction: This really depends on the deity you're talking about. Bane and Asmodeus would certainly want to keep the world around; Orcus, Cyric, Garagos, even the OotS' Dark One could care less as long as the current status quo is gone with it. Why then should they restrain themselves? A little chaos in the right place could easily cause a chain reaction - say, starting a wightocalypse in the orphanage in the poor section of a city and having it spread to the castle before anyone even knows what's going on. A low-level wizard or cleric can do this, why not a god?

It could be less about mutually assured destruction and more about a physical inability to directly interact with the mortal plane, barring very specific circumstances. For example, Corellon would love nothing more then to step in and stab the dragon to death, but he can't because of some mystical reason (even something as simple as the over-deity of the setting forbidding it works). Now...if that was the LAST city of the elves and the blue dragon was assured to cause the extinction of his beloved elves, THEN Corellon could take a more direct hand in matters but until then the best he can do is take a roundabout approach.


- Being distant from "short-term kingdoms" is paradoxical. How can Corellon claim to care about the lives of individual elves if he is willing to take such a long-term view? This is the problem all the good gods fail to overcome. Murdering one elf is a horrible crime, but risking the destruction of an entire village for the greater good is okay?

Not...really. It's as simple as Corellon cares about elves as a whole, not the individuals. His long term plans ensure the success and survival of the elven race and require his constant attention. Or, in other words, Corellon works towards accomplishing the MOST Good not every good...gah, I'm not saying this right...


- Being dependent on belief again runs into the problem of why he doesn't intervene. Clearly every elven nation that falls would be a direct hit on his divine rank, and he wouldn't want that. Worse, it leads to the problem of how new deities can arise without having the worshipers - and thus power - to perform miracles of their own.


See my first point. It's about cost vs. effectiveness. If he can send a simple vision to a high priest and see the matter resolved (or at least attended to), then it's far more cost effective then getting involved himself since that would cost him belief that could be spent on saving OTHER elven nations.

Telasi
2011-02-26, 05:01 PM
This comes up a lot? I'm surprised by that; I've never played in a campaign completely lacking gods. I've played in campaigns with mostly dead gods, and vague gods in Eberron, but even the DMs that didn't want to make their own pantheons at least used the ones from the PHB.

In my Pathfinder campaign, I get around the literal deus ex machina issue by having the gods be involved in an eons-long war against a poorly defined external threat. If the gods had time, they could and would get involved, but they have more important things to do than deal with ordinary mortal concerns.

kieza
2011-02-26, 05:06 PM
This is probably how I'd do it if I ended up making a setting.

Suffice to say that this only scratches the surface; one of these days, I'm going to run a campaign in which the players start to learn the truth about what the gods really are...but I think I need a group that's more heavily into RP.

Odin the Ignoble
2011-02-26, 05:10 PM
I think it's common because, at least in my opinion, the gods, along with the alignment system, are one of the biggest flaws of DnD.

If the gods regularly act in the material realm, there is no chance for moral grey areas, since there are concrete examples of what is and isn't good.

It also means that there are no real threats to the status quo. An evil wizard is threatening to take over the world? Not a problem, Cuthbert/Pelor/whoever walks in and slaps him down. A new peasant uprising promises to dismantle the feudal system and bring about a new era of prosperity? Nope, Cuthbert/Hextor/whoever walks in and slaps them down.


I think that people say "There are no gods in my homebrew setting", for the same reason people say "Ignore the alignment system, we wont be using it in this campaign."

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 05:14 PM
Suffice to say that this only scratches the surface; one of these days, I'm going to run a campaign in which the players start to learn the truth about what the gods really are...but I think I need a group that's more heavily into RP.
They are all puppets of a neakbearded grognard in a off-brand cheeto stained t-shirt that says 'I ♣ N00BS', in bold lettering?

Psyren
2011-02-26, 05:46 PM
Well, that assumes there are good deities to begin with.

This is exactly what I'm getting at. Truly Good deities could not have the mindset you describe and still be good; any benevolence that comes of their actions are incidental to the selfish desires of satisfying their cravings.



As for the inaction versus expenditure - that's really the problem, in the intake versus output equation. It might consume the divine energy of ten thousand worshippers praying for five hundred years to actively intervene and save the settlement, when the settlement itself only contains two or three thousand faithful. It's simply too costly to intervene directly, whereas cashing out the 'currency' of, say, a hundred worshippers for six months in order to convince a prominent priest that he should hire some mercenaries to defend said town.

At what point does the god step in though? In most D&D stories I've read - including OotS - the protagonists end up literally being the only thing between the world and a drastic shift of the status quo, or even destruction of the world itself. Campaigns are much the same as well.

Applying your deific rules to OotS for instance - surely an epic lich sorcerer, possessing the power to wipe out many thousands of worshipers, would merit some kind of deific response - yet the only group we see willing to do anything overt is the IFCC, and even for them Xykon's destruction is a side-benefit.


(if the "people lose faith in the gods who let them die" is a problem, suffice to say it isn't - the actual gods and the names/entities people pray to are entirely separate, and often change from time to time.

FR does this occasionally too, which I see as another probem - for example, all those schlubs in Chult worshiping Ubtao who were really getting their spells from Auril. How can belief be what matters, if the people's faith can be subverted in this fashion? Or perhaps more pointedly, is it belief in the ideal that matters, or just belief in the name?

Grendus
2011-02-26, 06:01 PM
There's always the Black & White version - gods gain power from worship, but it's not like an AC current, it's more of a battery charge. Channeling this charge through worshipers or doing simple things like sending visions is very cheap. Manifesting an avatar or creating the portal to send a celestial being through is very expensive. So it's to a gods benefit to call up worshipers to solve problems rather than manifest his power directly, because it leaves him with plenty in the tank for empowering other mortals or to actually to go toe to toe with a greater evil or another god.

Of course, when you see things like Contact Other Plane and Gate, it's just because the cleric, being already on the Prime Material (or wherever the destination is), is able to use the divine energy more efficiently. It's not a perfect explanation, but it can be used.

The Glyphstone
2011-02-26, 06:07 PM
This is exactly what I'm getting at. Truly Good deities could not have the mindset you describe and still be good; any benevolence that comes of their actions are incidental to the selfish desires of satisfying their cravings.

I was specifically discussing my solution, inelegant as it is, to the question of why gods don't step in for this setting specifically. I agree that when there are actual gods of Good, it becomes harder to explain away.



At what point does the god step in though? In most D&D stories I've read - including OotS - the protagonists end up literally being the only thing between the world and a drastic shift of the status quo, or even destruction of the world itself. Campaigns are much the same as well.

Applying your deific rules to OotS for instance - surely an epic lich sorcerer, possessing the power to wipe out many thousands of worshipers, would merit some kind of deific response - yet the only group we see willing to do anything overt is the IFCC, and even for them Xykon's destruction is a side-benefit.

OotS follows more standard D&D rules, which does make it strange. But that i, ultimately, the problem you are referring to.




FR does this occasionally too, which I see as another probem - for example, all those schlubs in Chult worshiping Ubtao who were really getting their spells from Auril. How can belief be what matters, if the people's faith can be subverted in this fashion? Or perhaps more pointedly, is it belief in the ideal that matters, or just belief in the name?

That's actually one of my overriding themes - I've refluffed magic to draw heavily on Truespeech ideas....magic is knowing the names and language that defines the world, and knowing something's true name can either draw power from it or give you power over it. The heirarchy of my deities is determined by how many titles they own to draw power from, and they are traded as currency and favors. When the gods intervene at all beyond supplying spells, they do so in small amounts and frequently collectively, because they all have something at stake - the inhabitants of that village aren't worshippers of God Bob; they pray to Joe The Builder when they're constructing a new house for his blessing, the Green Lady before a harvest, or The Bloody Warrior when threatened by marauding orcs.

Fox Box Socks
2011-02-26, 06:08 PM
Because people love atheism.

Coidzor
2011-02-26, 06:14 PM
So people say they worry about the gods being deus ex machinas to resolve plots that the PCs are involved in or mary sue DMPCs and all that rot, but has anyone ever even seen that kind of thing before?

Gnoman
2011-02-26, 06:15 PM
i think it's more the question of why they don't that bothers people.

Grendus
2011-02-26, 06:20 PM
To be fair, I rarely see full atheist worlds. I see a few Ebberon-esque where the gods are impersonal forces, and one or two where the lions share of the gods are dead. Usually, if it's a short campaign or a one shot they just inherit the Grayhawk deities and if it's a more in depth world they make up their own mythology.

I almost never see godless settings.

navar100
2011-02-26, 06:21 PM
In my group's game, the gods exist. They are known to exist. They care about their worshippers. What happens in the world affects them. What happens in the Heavens can affect the world. In a past campaign at high level the party created gods to balance the Heavens. The campaigns have not been only about the gods. They are a plot point but minor compared to the big picture.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 06:24 PM
Because people love atheism.We do? I love adding gods to the worlds I craft from ink and pen, words and pageantry. It adds an interesting dimension to the game when there will always be something beyond the player characters capabilities.

Willfor
2011-02-26, 06:37 PM
I made a setting where the gods died... and since they were planes that could never fully die, they began living through their death-dreams in a constantly expanding hellish nightmare. Celestials managed to hold back the expanding nightmare planes using magics fueled by refined pain and misery.

They could extract this from the souls of mortals from hundreds of thousands of small ideal material planes that had done wrongs over the course of many lifetimes. The celestial bureaucracy would assign these souls to a thousand years of hell, extract the needed misery, and then extract the soul to reincarnate it amongst the planes.

Needless to say that in the face of continual pressure mounting on the magics, they needed more and more pain and misery than they could extract lawfully. And then one of the celestials red stamped five people who had been through mostly idyllic lives, and ... Well, that's the start of the campaign. One that unfortunately didn't get very far.:smallfrown:

Fox Box Socks
2011-02-26, 06:42 PM
We do? I love adding gods to the worlds I craft from ink and pen, words and pageantry. It adds an interesting dimension to the game when there will always be something beyond the player characters capabilities.
You know what the biggest difference is in the day to day lives of people in the real world and the day to day lives of people in Dungeons and Dragons? It isn't magic, or the threat of monster attacks, or the lack of the internal combustion engine on their part. No, it's something much more basic; every sentient creature in the vast majority of Dungeons and Dragons settings knows what happens to them after they die. Not just know, but know; they have actual, tangible proof. Hell, they can go visit if they damn well please.

You know what's a great way to make a gritty, "realistic" campaign setting? Get rid of that. Make them more like us. Get rid of the absolute knowledge of an afterlife, and suddenly magic becomes more frightening and alien, monster attacks become more sobering and scary, and the lack of the internal combustion engine become much more annoying (cars are awesome).

Little bit goes a long way as far as dead gods are concerned.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 06:46 PM
I made a setting where the gods died... and since they were planes that could never fully die, they began living through their death-dreams in a constantly expanding hellish nightmare. Celestials managed to hold back the expanding nightmare planes using magics fueled by refined pain and misery.

They could extract this from the souls of mortals from hundreds of thousands of small ideal material planes that had done wrongs over the course of many lifetimes. The celestial bureaucracy would assign these souls to a thousand years of hell, extract the needed misery, and then extract the soul to reincarnate it amongst the planes.

Needless to say that in the face of continual pressure mounting on the magics, they needed more and more pain and misery than they could extract lawfully. And then one of the celestials red stamped five people who had been through mostly idyllic lives, and ... Well, that's the start of the campaign. One that unfortunately didn't get very far.:smallfrown:

Heh, that's almost WH40K dark. Dark darky, dark of darkness dark. Did I mention I think its dark?
That may be why it died.
Too much darkness creates apathy, and apathy kills immersion. And without immersion, you're not role playing, you're just rolling strange dice.

WitchSlayer
2011-02-26, 06:47 PM
When I make a homebrew setting, I'm usually lazy and throw in EVER SINGLE GOD IN EVERY SINGLE SETTING EVER. Which means there are a lot of gods that compete for divine profiles.

boomwolf
2011-02-26, 06:49 PM
Well, in all the worlds I made so far, either for a short game or a whole world I used one of these:

-A small pantheon that is -mostly- inactive because they don't want other gods to interfere, its like mutual agreement not to do anything and they only brake it when something goes REALLY badly for what they think as "right" (usually there is one who meddles the mortal realm non-stop and the others seriously hate him and constantly work against him behind the scene.)

-the gods are actually quite weak and as such they don't interfere much, but rather manipulate mortal beings into doing their bidding (church, cult, etc...)

-there are no gods at all, but nobody knows that. powerful entities take advantage of this and pretend to be gods.


However, the coolest adventure I ever played was some wacky adventure to find out where the heck so many freaking gods are coming from (we had the "normal" gods, and dozens upon dozens of minor ones, including ourselves)
I mean, a new god was born in almost a daily basis and it got DAMN hard for anyone to do anything with all of them meddling around (mortals having the worse of it)
It ended up in finding out each deity can collect power only from a limited set of sources that are set at his birth and can never change (souls, prayer, and gemstones are the main ones, but stuff like lava, fear, and weirder stuff also showed up) and then we found out that one (ancient by fluff, but actually the DM made him up) gains his power by the death of OTHER deities (even if someone else kills them) but was too weak to handle the existing gods, so he made some artifact that makes mortals into deities (divine rank 0), then allowed them to grow in power and eventually killed them (most anyway, he missed a few..)
He was quite badass at the grand finale. especially the knowledge that every party member and ally we lose and every major enemy we destroy practically levels up the BBEG...

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 06:58 PM
You know what the biggest difference is in the day to day lives of people in the real world and the day to day lives of people in Dungeons and Dragons? It isn't magic, or the threat of monster attacks, or the lack of the internal combustion engine on their part. No, it's something much more basic; every sentient creature in the vast majority of Dungeons and Dragons settings knows what happens to them after they die. Not just know, but know; they have actual, tangible proof. Hell, they can go visit if they damn well please.

You know what's a great way to make a gritty, "realistic" campaign setting? Get rid of that. Make them more like us. Get rid of the absolute knowledge of an afterlife, and suddenly magic becomes more frightening and alien, monster attacks become more sobering and scary, and the lack of the internal combustion engine become much more annoying (cars are awesome).

Little bit goes a long way as far as dead gods are concerned.
You don't need to make them dead, you just need to make them more alien and reserved. Oh and take away the plane shifting, deity contacting, spells, or at least make them unable to contact them and the dead. Include gods who maybe aren't, but are worshipped anyway.
Dragon #77 had an interesting article about called "Elemental Gods" that gave some intriguing ideas on how to make gods that are more mysterious and majestic.

Coidzor
2011-02-26, 07:59 PM
You know what the biggest difference is in the day to day lives of people in the real world and the day to day lives of people in Dungeons and Dragons? It isn't magic, or the threat of monster attacks, or the lack of the internal combustion engine on their part. No, it's something much more basic; every sentient creature in the vast majority of Dungeons and Dragons settings knows what happens to them after they die. Not just know, but know; they have actual, tangible proof. Hell, they can go visit if they damn well please.

Well, no, because if that kind of knowledge is actually common, then so is the fact that the gods destroy everything that makes a person who they are when they die by making them into petitioners.

Far worse to have assured knowledge of your ceasing to exist than having a glimmer of hope in the midst of uncertainty.

Yukitsu
2011-02-26, 08:18 PM
I dislike active, tangible Gods in games, because of two consistant questions that many players have:

1: How can we kill it? and
2: How can we be one?

I am however a fan of Gods and divine powers originating from Gods in a setting, so I do include them. They are however, an omnipresent, non-physical entity that can't be called, defeated or even fathomed. Why don't they interact with the world to defeat teh evils? In my setting, the omnipresent God of all things is a manifestation of all thought and pure essence, which includes chaos and evil. It is its belief that without the conflict of many clashing ideologies, the mortal beings won't grow, and will stay in place.

I've implied as well, that the all powerful "God" is in tentative opposition to the all powerful Arcane, which is a similar entity of the material realms. With drone mortals using pure logic and without the passion of opposition of ideologies, the Arcane would take over everything over time. These two forces act in opposition of eachother very subtly, and set the backdrop to most of my higher level campaigns.

As a side note, that even while these all powerful beings are present in the "canon" of my setting, I wrote that the DM should deny their existance at every chance, and confuse them with countless other divine beings, lesser representations or false Gods.

The Glyphstone
2011-02-26, 08:19 PM
Well, no, because if that kind of knowledge is actually common, then so is the fact that the gods destroy everything that makes a person who they are when they die by making them into petitioners.

Far worse to have assured knowledge of your ceasing to exist than having a glimmer of hope in the midst of uncertainty.

Is it ever determined or stated how long the petitioner transformation takes? I can see people not being so unhappy about petitionerhood if they get a long, happy, enjoyable afterlife 'first', and have everything/everyone they cared about in the mortal world passed by as well. It might not even be considered getting 'destroyed', so much as literally becoming one with your god...for extremely devout people, that could be a bonus.

Coidzor
2011-02-26, 08:40 PM
Is it ever determined or stated how long the petitioner transformation takes? I can see people not being so unhappy about petitionerhood if they get a long, happy, enjoyable afterlife 'first', and have everything/everyone they cared about in the mortal world passed by as well.

IIRC, the Grey Wastes have an amount of time that non-dead creatures have to avoid having to make saves or become petitioners of the plane just by being on it and non-native, IIRC, so that's the closest thing that exists to a process of becoming a petitioner other than dying and being one by virtue of ending up in one's after life and being made one by one's deity's will rather than a disembodied spirit.

I believe a bit more about it is tangled up with the fluff on Incarnum and the Astral Plane.


It might not even be considered getting 'destroyed', so much as literally becoming one with your god...for extremely devout people, that could be a bonus.

Well, no, because becoming one with your god would actually be becoming one with your god. :smalltongue: Petitioners aren't even *fingers,* they're just *frumple* /Orz.

So them believing that would require them to have incorrect knowledge, unlike the posited scenario, or to believe something in direct contradiction of a fact they know.


Some spirits demonstrate their devotion to their deity by traveling to the deity’s home plane. Those that survive the journey across the planes become servants of their deity. While a few may remain disembodied spirits, most become petitioners through the divine will of their patron deity.

In addition to this implied bit of it taking as long as the deity wants, they also know that their deity doesn't actually do too good of a job at shepherding them to their final reward.

Knowing what actually happens to you after you die in D&D is presumably why so many wizards decide to lich it up, even if they started out goodish.

tl;dr: D&D afterlife is a crapsack, not a comfort.

Yukitsu
2011-02-26, 08:43 PM
Knowing what actually happens to you after you die in D&D is presumably why so many wizards decide to lich it up, even if they started out goodish.

Well, there are good liches dedicated to protecting something for an eternity. I think most wizards that start out good are stubborn enough to go that route at the end instead.

Coidzor
2011-02-26, 08:45 PM
Well, there are good liches dedicated to protecting something for an eternity. I think most wizards that start out good are stubborn enough to go that route at the end instead.

Well, gotta do something to avoid becoming Marvin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQqeidrlDyw).

Jerthanis
2011-02-27, 02:00 AM
For me, Greek Mythology, Norse Mythology and Faerun have all three already done a more interesting "Gods as functioning and involved characters in the goings on of the world" than I will ever manage to come up with myself. I could try, but I'd be wasting my time.

So I tend to focus on other things than the gods.

zorba1994
2011-02-27, 02:55 AM
I generally avoid putting gods in my homebrew settings because the some of the people I regularly game with are observant of [insert religion here], and as such I consciously avoid putting them in to reduce awkwardness.

In fact, some of the players that I taught to play DnD aren't even aware that multiple gods are normally a part of the system.

claricorp
2011-02-27, 03:16 AM
The thing i did with gods in my last campaign was to have them and there powers partially blocked by the plot (a war between the gods original tools of creation, destruction and change which at its climax created a massive storm of doom that continuously moves across the land... blah blah blah). The gods could interact, though with difficulty, however they could generally be able to work through other beings(clerics, paladins etc) to do there bidding.

Side quests by the (mostly) good party were often to defeat cultists of evil gods who were able to bring in demons (which were incredibly rare because of the storm, I also made them specifically extra scary)

In the same campaign, the pantheon of gods was in general flux, there were the main big gods but there were thousands of smaller gods which players could create and worship.

Personally I also enjoy seeing divine casters worship something a bit more abstract than a god, one worshiped storms, another worshiped freedom and my personal favorite was one who worshiped his now long dead(and once quite powerful) character from another campaign.

Shademan
2011-02-27, 09:36 AM
the standard pantheon is used so rarely that as a DM, I used it almost all the time. just add a moon god(dess), add a god king aaand remove alignments from the equation and you got a proper pantheon there

onthetown
2011-02-27, 10:25 AM
This may have already been said, but it may be less related to religious beliefs IRL and more about making a unique world. True, around homebrew it's common to have no or very few gods through some sort of event; but we play D&D and homebrew up stuff because it's fun to play in a world that's different than ours (this is a broad statement and I'm well aware there are many reasons for playing D&D and homebrewing, but just bear with me). A world without gods is different from a world like ours, where religion is stressed on in the media and politics and whatnot. So it's unique from our world, though not necessarily from other homebrews.

Trog
2011-02-27, 11:04 AM
I always enjoyed making pantheons for my home brew worlds. Though lately (read: the past several years) I have just fallen back on the default one presented in the DMG because I have gotten away from deity-centric plots. And since the gods don't figure into the action (though religious organizations dedicated to serving them might) there is no real need to customize.

I will say though the creation of Erathis and the changing of Bane to be more a god of warfare that is unaligned rather than evil has been an awesome change in the default pantheon because of the moral ambiguity it allows for. Which makes for a more realistic and complicated setting, imo.

Knaight
2011-02-27, 12:11 PM
A world without gods is different from a world like ours, where religion is stressed on in the media and politics and whatnot. So it's unique from our world, though not necessarily from other homebrews.

A world without gods and a world without religion are two very different things. Though I lack any real data on what is common I can state that from what little I've seen worlds without gods are very different from worlds without religion. Even ignoring religions that don't involve gods (a stone age setting would probably have animism all over the place, which just needs spirits, there is ancestor worship, emperor worship, etc.) there is the possibility for religions that worship gods that aren't actually called out as real within the campaign setting.

DontEatRawHagis
2011-02-27, 12:20 PM
I'm currently working on a campaign world that uses the 4e Pantheon, but the only god that is active is Melora and thats because they are in the woods(and I'm too lazy to make a homebrewed forest god). Other than that there are Guardians of the Forest that protect the settlements. Ranging from the Merchant to the Tree.

I like it when the other power sources are utilized which is why I usually stick with Dark Sun. Psionics are my favorite close second is Martial, with Nature and Arcane tied for third. Divine is on the bottom except I do like to roleplay as a Raven Queen follower from time to time.

Frozen_Feet
2011-02-27, 01:13 PM
Regarding the perceived trend: I think it's a case of people wanting a bit less bloated settings. D&D tries to cram as many supernatural creatures in one place as possible, which creates a scatter-brained and unfocused feel to many. So people start trimming the tree - and often start from the top.

Personally, I've made gods more active in my own settings - they just aren't on the same powerlevel as D&D gods. That's because D&D makes even mid-level characters more powerful than some divinities of RL myths, and subsequently gives small-time deities way too much power and way too many frivolous abilities.

Lowering their overall powerlevel solves many of the same problems not having active pantheon does. The deities don't do everything by themselves because they can't. Nature of divine is a matter of quality, not quantity - sometimes non-divine actors, such as the PCs, can be much more influential to their immediate surroundings.

I also tend to make it so that while divine is present, it's not obvious. Not every miracle is followed by a flash of lightning and announcement of what god was responsible. There's room for misperception, doubt and guessing, which is more influential in creating a "mysterious" feeling than the actual existence of the divine.

randomhero00
2011-02-27, 01:34 PM
Shrug, personally in my homebrew setting there are almost as many gods as there are people. Basically I cover the major gods and make up the minor gods on the spot.

So for instance an agricultural village in the middle of nowhere and not subject to the norm might evolve a belief in a specific god watching over them, which that belief then creates that god and makes it real after a number of generations.

The kicker though is that gods don't need belief to keep existing, so they're practically immortal (practically cause technically other god like beings can kill them, really though its more like they split them up or imprison them tho.) So thousands of gods have evolved alongside the people, some forgotten.

That, combined with in recent history there was a huge war, and then a plague, mortal humonoids have dwindled into something almost rare.

navar100
2011-02-27, 03:50 PM
I generally avoid putting gods in my homebrew settings because the some of the people I regularly game with are observant of [insert religion here], and as such I consciously avoid putting them in to reduce awkwardness.

In fact, some of the players that I taught to play DnD aren't even aware that multiple gods are normally a part of the system.

When I was in college I briefly discussed D&D with two Hasidic Rabbis I knew. I told them there exists in the game devils, demons, polytheism, and spellcasting. One didn't fully understand what I was talking about but didn't have a problem with me playing the game. The other was quite amused and from then on often joke asked me if I parted the Red Sea yet after I mentioned the Control Water spell.

To each his own, of course.

Yora
2011-02-27, 04:04 PM
I'm from a christian pastors family and most of my friends at school were also pastors kids. And our parents never disapproved. Mine are even great fantasy fans themselves.
It's really not a religious issue, but one of social groups.

Frozen_Feet
2011-02-27, 04:34 PM
For the record, I recall few old RPGs from the local library with strong Christian themes - one was about being a follower of Paul of Tarsos, another was about being ordinary townsfolk in Jerusalem during life of Jesus.

Yora
2011-02-27, 04:38 PM
There's actually quite some interesting stuff in that section, but it we talk about this this thread will be censored and we get more warnings.

Dervag
2011-02-28, 09:40 AM
The problem with gods that are merely forces of nature and don't care at all for mortals, is that there's no reason to worship them.
There's no benefit of prayers and services, and they don't offer any mortal guidance or meaning.Who said the gods were indifferent to mortals? They're not indifferent, they're just elemental. Again, desires that are simple, not complex. Beings that are sort of like big people in the sky, but are also inextricably tied to whatever concept they personify.

There's a range of options here between "gods are just like people, only with more power" and "gods are aliens." Many ancient polytheist civilizations were good at splitting the difference, if you look at their mythology; a lot of myths make the most sense when viewed on two planes at once, because there's a "this is what the big sky-people (fire god and earth goddess) get up to" aspect and a symbolic "this is Fire interacting with The Earth" aspect.

You can do the same.


This is exactly what I'm getting at. Truly Good deities could not have the mindset you describe and still be good; any benevolence that comes of their actions are incidental to the selfish desires of satisfying their cravings.Question. Why do "good" deities have to be "goodness personified" deities?

As opposed to, say, being benevolent enough that if you petition them for a favor that is reasonably within their power, and they think you deserve it, they'll give it to you... but having low tolerance for someone who comes to them looking for solutions to every problem, or who asks for more than they've earned. Especially when that someone is a mortal who has (literally) no idea of what it might cost a god to do something really impressive.

This is in contrast to the deity who enjoys annoying people and only grants a favor to others if it's funny (the chaotic neutral jester-type), or the deity who has a deep impulse to bind others into slavery and only grants favors if your will just happens to exactly coincide with what they would want you to do (the lawful evil ones, typically).

The existence of nine alignments does not mean every entity associated with an alignment is a supreme example of that alignment.


When the gods intervene at all beyond supplying spells, they do so in small amounts and frequently collectively, because they all have something at stake - the inhabitants of that village aren't worshippers of God Bob; they pray to Joe The Builder when they're constructing a new house for his blessing, the Green Lady before a harvest, or The Bloody Warrior when threatened by marauding orcs.[Awards Glyphstone bonus points]

Oh, man. This is SO important in a polytheistic setting, and nearly everyone ignores it, thinking of in-game "religions" as identities that dominate your life- people saying "I worship X" in the same sense that they would say "I'm Jewish" in real life, when the reality is more likely to be "I worship X, Y, and Z, sometimes pray to other deities whose spheres of influence only impact my life once in a while, and occasionally offer appeasing offerings to Q because I'm afraid of him."

cfalcon
2011-02-28, 10:01 AM
Even Dragonlance did away with divine stuff.

Some players are uncomfortable playing in a game world with deities- a complaint levied against D&D by some churches, for instance, is that role playing as a character who worships a false god is similar to actually worshipping some other god yourself, or whatever. If your gaming group has a couple people who believe this, at any point in your career, you'll likely work your game worlds to not offend them.

Some people are simply atheistic and don't really like the polytheistic flavor of the game world as presented, and go about supplying divine magic in a different way.

Finally, some people don't like the restrictions it puts on clerics.

Mastikator
2011-02-28, 10:04 AM
[snip]Is it RL antipathy towards religion being expressed?

Basically this. It's pretty passive aggressive when you think about it too.

Yora
2011-02-28, 10:06 AM
You mean using a game to force your believes on your friends by demanding that the setting has to match your own personal believes about the real world?

MarkusWolfe
2011-02-28, 10:10 AM
I read the title and immediately thought of 'THERE ARE NO FLOWERS IN LORD RAO'S KINGDOM!'

Yora
2011-02-28, 10:15 AM
"They have no place in the Zodonian Peoples Republic of Huston."

Frozen_Feet
2011-02-28, 11:09 AM
The problem with gods that are merely forces of nature and don't care at all for mortals, is that there's no reason to worship them.
There's no benefit of prayers and services, and they don't offer any mortal guidance or meaning.


Who said the gods were indifferent to mortals? They're not indifferent, they're just elemental. Again, desires that are simple, not complex. Beings that are sort of like big people in the sky, but are also inextricably tied to whatever concept they personify.

There's a range of options here between "gods are just like people, only with more power" and "gods are aliens." Many ancient polytheist civilizations were good at splitting the difference, if you look at their mythology; a lot of myths make the most sense when viewed on two planes at once, because there's a "this is what the big sky-people (fire god and earth goddess) get up to" aspect and a symbolic "this is Fire interacting with The Earth" aspect.

You can do the same.
Gotta agree with Dervag here. To use my own setting as an example, god(s) of death are responsible for taking deceased souls to the world beyond. They do this by literally going to the dead person and eating their souls. However, since plenty of people die each day and they can't be everywhere at once, they often conscript mortal creatures (mainly scavengers, such as ravens) to help.

God(s) of death themselves are alien creatures who aren't concerned with mortals outside the scope of their duty or nature. They don't have feelings or reason in the sense mortals have them, since they're just representations of an absolute natural law. But you can appeal to them within the parameters of their purpose. In less abstract manner, just like you can use medicine to fight of disease, you can appeal to god of medicine to fight off god of disease.

Besides, natural forces can provide guidance or meaning. It just depends on how "natural forces" are defined within the world. For example, in D&D, Good and Evil, Law and Chaos are true cosmic powers, with demonstrable effect on everyone's life. There'd be examples in RL religions too.

Question. Why do "good" deities have to be "goodness personified" deities?
This is a good question. When talking about good mortals, we can allow them to be good even when they aren't good all the time. When talking about personified gods, there's nothing stopping us from considering their benevolence or malovelence a function of their actions and attitude as persons, as opposed to function of their divinity. This goes double for systems like D&D, where Good and Evil, Law and Chaos are natural forces independent of gods, and more to the point, are natural laws even gods are beholden to.

BRC
2011-02-28, 11:14 AM
For me, it's largely a result of laziness: I don't feel like familiarizing myself with the standard Dnd Gods, or coming up with a pantheon of new ones. If I need a god, I make one up.

I have created three homebrew settings for the three different campaigns I have run.

The first was a campaign where the PC's were part of an inquisition, they technically worshiped the same god (Worship of the others had mostly fallen by the wayside). I Simulated a pantheon by having various Saints, each with their own doctrine and cult, that the PC's could be part of.

The second campaign I had gods, I just made them up as needed.

The third campaign, one of the core parts of the setting was that the Gods were dead. The world had been devestated by a war between Gods and a group of very powerful mages. Part of the overall conflict is a group trying to bring the Gods back.

Jothki
2011-02-28, 12:12 PM
I'd imagine it's also an issue of mythology. Just randomly sprinkling in deities will result in them feeling out of place, but actually building backstories for them is an enormous effort that doesn't contribute much to the world that the players experience.

Edit: Although, someday I want to write up a setting where the gods are actually supercomputers that can directly manipulate the nanotechnology that makes up most of the planet's surface.

Frozen_Feet
2011-02-28, 03:06 PM
I'd imagine it's also an issue of mythology. Just randomly sprinkling in deities will result in them feeling out of place, but actually building backstories for them is an enormous effort that doesn't contribute much to the world that the players experience.

If this ends up being the case, I can safely say the worldbuilder is doing it wrong. Religion and mythology is and was a major part of peoples lives. The players should be running to legends and tales based on the gods and their escapades around every other corner. If the gods (or their servants) are directly involved in keeping the world running, encounters with them should be common-place enough that those legends and tales become useful IC knowledge.

(Just to give examples, in my setting the knowledge of death gods is prerequisite for necromancy. In D&D, it actually pays to know what kind of demons serve which evil god if you're hunting down an evil cult etc.)

An unique mythology is one of the biggest things you can use to set your setting apart from all others and make it feel alive. Neglecting it is a mistake.