A few questions about your game's deities.

[Clistenes]

I am curious about how do you like your deities in your games.

1.-How dependant on Faith/Belief are your deities? The default assumption is that worship is useful for deities, but, how dependant do you like your gods to be on worship? Have they been created by belief? Do they need worship to keep their divine power? Can they die due to lack of worship? Can belief change the mind and bodies of the deities themselves?

I understand that, since many gods are *******s, and in most settings Good can't really defeat Evil forever, the fact that they have limits and weaknesses and are dependant on their worshippers' support is kind of a consolation, but, on the other hand, if the gods are nothing but dreams given shape by belief, then all the Paladins and Clerics PCs who have dedicated their lives to their deities are basically chumps who serve their own delusions...Even if the gods aren't created by belief, if they are leeching faith from their worshippers the devout who sacrifice their lives for them seem like a bunch of dupes.

Also, that makes the Multiverse feel too ephemeral: The Powers who shape the Planes are in turn shaped by the belief of mortals, so there aren't hard truths, everything is fleeting and mutable. The fabric of the Multiverse itself seems flimsy.

2.-Do you think deities can "run out of fuel"? Hallowed Ground, from 2nd edition, implied that gods have to carefully manage the power extracted from belief or they will spend too much. Deities & Demigods (3rd edition) on the other hand, present the gods as being able to use their Salient Divine Abilities without restraint.

If the gods can "run out of fuel" that would explain why Lolth doesn't have a billion Simulacra created with Alter Reality guarding her Demonweb Pits and instead relies on regular drows and monstrous spiders. On the other hand, regular wizards can use most of their spells every day without losing their essence, so, why shouldn't deities be able to do the same?

3.-At what level do you think a character would be able to face the weaker deities in the Deities & Demigods, with and without Epic Magic?

Thank you very much.

[Troacctid]

Deities in my settings gain power from their followers' faith, but it's not something I've ever had cause to explore, plot-wise. It pretty much just means that larger factions have stronger gods--but since gods mostly rely on their mortal followers, rather than direct intervention, to enact their will on the material plane, the specifics of the cause and effect aren't really important, are they?

[Werephilosopher]

I am curious about how do you like your deities in your games.

1.-How dependant on Faith/Belief are your deities? The default assumption is that worship is useful for deities, but, how dependant do you like your gods to be on worship? Have they been created by belief? Do they need worship to keep their divine power? Can they die due to lack of worship? Can belief change the mind and bodies of the deities themselves?

Deities in my campaign typically need worship for power, although they can have other sources - being patron of some important domain, possessing powerful artifacts or reservoirs of energy, having native power stored up in case of loss of worship etc. Most gods weren't created by belief, and most of those that were existed in some mortal form before ascension. Gods can sometimes be changed by widespread changes in belief, but only very slightly - belief alone won't make Moradin switch to Lawful Neutral, for instance. Gods that lose worship won't die if they have enough power from other means, though they will lose their ability to influence the Material Plane.


I understand that, since many gods are *******s, and in most settings Good can't really defeat Evil forever, the fact that they have limits and weaknesses and are dependant on their worshippers' support is kind of a consolation, but, on the other hand, if the gods are nothing but dreams given shape by belief, then all the Paladins and Clerics PCs who have dedicated their lives to their deities are basically chumps who serve their own delusions...Even if the gods aren't created by belief, if they are leeching faith from their worshippers the devout who sacrifice their lives for them seem like a bunch of dupes.

Also, that makes the Multiverse feel too ephemeral: The Powers who shape the Planes are in turn shaped by the belief of mortals, so there aren't hard truths, everything is fleeting and mutable. The fabric of the Multiverse itself seems flimsy.

That's not too big of a stretch, though. Clerics of concepts or ideals gain their power purely through their "delusions," just without the whole "channeling it back through a god" deal. Also, if mortals weren't so important, why would gods constantly fight over them?


2.-Do you think deities can "run out of fuel"? Hallowed Ground, from 2nd edition, implied that gods have to carefully manage the power extracted from belief or they will spend too much. Deities & Demigods (3rd edition) on the other hand, present the gods as being able to use their Salient Divine Abilities without restraint.

If the gods can "run out of fuel" that would explain why Lolth doesn't have a billion Simulacra created with Alter Reality guarding her Demonweb Pits and instead relies on regular drows and monstrous spiders. On the other hand, regular wizards can use most of their spells every day without losing their essence, so, why shouldn't deities be able to do the same?

My gods are unstatted. They can run out of fuel if they perform incredibly powerful feats, like destroying a planet or something, but that typically doesn't happen. Their own defenses don't include things like simulacra and other such things simply because their powers are beyond such simple mortal magic. Only the most powerful epic-level mages could hope to challenge them.


3.-At what level do you think a character would be able to face the weaker deities in the Deities & Demigods, with and without Epic Magic?

Thank you very much.

Can't say much about fighting them without epic magic, but with epic magic? It'd be a cakewalk.

[GilesTheCleric]

1) Mine are almost entirely independent from worshippers. Since they're all anthrocentric deities, they wouldn't make any sense existing if there weren't intelligent creatures around to worship them, but the numbers matter little -- once a deity has been created for a portfolio, they remain the deity for that portfolio, despite name changes (eg in my game, Bane, Kelemvor, and Jergal were all the same "physical" god of death, but there were factions for each with their own orthodoxy).

2) I see divine ranks as being in most cases a one-way street. Until the need for a deity to have a portfolio disappears (eg. if there were no more strife in the world, the war portfolio would stop existing), then those deities will always be around. Sucks to be a deity with only one portfolio if that's one that's no longer needed.

3) In my interpretation, destroying a deity could have severe ramifications -- would all of the aspects of "humanity" related to those portfolios just disappear? Would they be picked up by other deities? I don't see deities as beings to be fought in my current setting, since the multitudes of cults and un/orthodoxy are more important to my campaign setting (the players interact with them for a longer period of the game). Depending on the level of op, they could be beaten before 20 for sure; In my estimate of what's PO, I'd say that by level fifteen it's doable; with some TO or purpose-driven PO, then probably 11 or lower. Rubik has probably built a monk who can do it at level one.

Edit: opening to a random page in DaD, I got Surtur (191). It's a 40th level creature, only SR 46, no regeneration, 1k hp, 60+ AC, and 50+ saves. It can teleport at will. So, there's a couple methods. 1: deal 1k hp damage vs AC 24 (the only AC that can't be negated); definitely doable with an ubercharger. 2: deal 1k damage against it with no save or a failed save, or 2k on a successful save. This is a little trickier, but with circle magic and uncapped twinned repeated admixtured spells, very much within the realm of possibility. 3: I assume that "divine immunities" includes immunity to death effects, but not destruction effects. Hit it with one of those; again, circle magic makes boosting the DC require only one feat (two with leadership).

I think any other method of doing things like negative levels it's probably immune to, but it still has a stat for hp, and that number isn't so big as to be unobtainable in damage. Unfortunately its dex is actually reasonable (27), but its con isn't much higher (31), so just dealing 31 points of con damage could work, too. At 1 point of damage per hit, and a TWFer (not to mention the number of attacks a natural attacker can get), that means five rounds of smacking it until it dies at 7 hits per round. Use a belt of battle or White Raven Tactics to do it in fewer or one round.

[Afgncaap5]

In my games, the deities are almost entirely self sufficient and have no actual need for their followers. They tend to be busy with matters of cosmic importance that are ill-defined and unimportant to the story the players face, but as to the question of why they bother associating with humans and other such entities at all... it really varies from god to god. Most of them value sentient life forms for companionship, or because those sentient life forms (their worshippers, usually) tend to value the things that the deities value. Exterminating other sentience? The good gods won't like you because that's clearly not good, but the evil gods may be interested.

Now, there are occasions where I'll have deities discussing worship and worshippers as a form of getting energy, but it's more of a force multiplier than an actual change to their stature (or, in semi-rare cases, deities can gain actual power from worshippers if they're "new gods" who've ascended or transitioned from some other state of being.) One weird plot I ran for a while involved a brand new deity coming up with a sort of grey-goo scheme wherein he would start altering other entities to be the sorts of creatures who would both worship him and be influenced by his domain, and this transformative process even extended to other, more powerful, gods. The "converted" worshipers among the gods didn't consider this new deity they worshipped to be their better, and didn't delude themselves into thinking that this new deity was significant to their being, but they did consider the deity to be their new ideal, that which they wished to allow to steer their destinies. Fortunately, the "little godling that could" was curb stomped as soon as players made it apparent to non-converted deities just what was happening.

As to the question of if deities can run out of power... no, not in my campaigns (except, again, in semi-rare cases involving "new gods"). I tend to envision deities as cosmic forces with free will. (So, if Gravity or the Weak Nuclear Force suddenly decided to be selective in how or where they were observed, something like that. The main thing that opposes them is other cosmic forces.)

Having said all that, I tend to work with fast and loose rules for my cosmology, so any "rule" I devise is one I may change if I have a good story in mind for it down the line and/or if it becomes inconvenient to be consistent. The gods work beyond the ken of mortals, so if the players don't think something makes sense, it's merely their limited mortal frame of reference that makes it appear so.

[Clistenes]

Deities in my settings gain power from their followers' faith, but it's not something I've ever had cause to explore, plot-wise. It pretty much just means that larger factions have stronger gods--but since gods mostly rely on their mortal followers, rather than direct intervention, to enact their will on the material plane, the specifics of the cause and effect aren't really important, are they?

Well, at 1st level, when they are fighting kobolds and goblins they should have enough with their native mythologies (that is, what their gods tell them), but at higher levels, if they cross to Sigil or the City of Brass or the City of Glass, or they visit the Eladrins or the Guardinals or the Archons, they will hear different theories.

Mechanically, it won't make any difference for the characters, but from a RP point of view you have to choose to have your cleric stick stubbornly to his/her previous beliefs and claim that Planars, Efreets, Jann, Marids, Djinn, Eladrins, Guardinals, Archons, Bariaur, Rheks, Formians...etc., are all stinking liars who lie, pants on fire, or have him/her acknowledge that their god is a product of their own worship, which would drive them to a crisis of faith.

[Gnoman]

The way my gods work is that they are not dependent on faith to survive, but require worshippers to ascend in power (or to become gods in the first place, if they weren't one of the First Gods), to recover after performing some great feat, to come back from death, or to do something that is far beyond their normal strength (which is likely to require a major sacrifice as well - the last time a god tried to do this, the "sacrifice" was an apocalyptic war) such as fighting a war with other gods (or bigger gods).

There's also a certain link between a god and their followers which varies by alignment and the specific god - as a rule Good gods tend to have sympathetic links (feeling pain when a devout follower is assaulted or killed, joy when they accomplish great deeds, etc) while Evil gods are parasitic (feeding on the emotions of their followers without directly experiencing it, sort of a malicious super-empathy).

[OttoVonBigby]

1- My gods are pretty hands-off, and the most important ones existed before mortals. Some of them are almost wholly dependent on mortal affairs for their degree of relative power, while others are barely affected in any way by the doings of lesser beings.

In my cosmology, I find it helpful to keep in mind that these gods are gods of the entire multiverse--so if somebody blows up a planet, it'll anger certain of the gods, but probably less than being rear-ended in a car would anger us. (Unless it was a cosmologically/philosophically important planet.)

2- Never bothered to delineate all that. I do have guidelines for what divine ranks mean (I changed up a *lot* from DaD) and how many salient divine abilities each deity gets, but I think I'd manage a storyline involving a "weakened" god in vague, centuries-long, beyond-mortal-ken terms.

3- I consider the DaD stats woefully low, esp. for my setting, and Epic Magic from ELH woefully overpowered, which is why I don't use either.

[GilesTheCleric]

1- My gods are pretty hands-off, and the most important ones existed before mortals. Some of them are almost wholly dependent on mortal affairs for their degree of relative power, while others are barely affected in any way by the doings of lesser beings.

This approach seems a little bit different to a similar one others in the thread have taken, enough to make me ask: do you include overdeities (a binary delineation), or do you have more of a sliding scale and all deities are just deities?

[OttoVonBigby]

Sort of and sort of.

There's the Primal Gods (chaos and fire), which are the oldest, least person-like, and least worshipped. Then there are two elder gods (sun and moon) that emerged from natural forces; they created, one way or another, all the non-evil deities besides the Primal Gods, and most of these are considered "lesser" gods. The evil deities also emerged, but from Bad forces, and the oldest evil gods created some other evil gods, who are therefore weaker. I gave all of these divine ranks, but in practice I seem to use divine ranks more as an approximation of their power relative to each other than for anything else.

[Tvtyrant]

1. The original beings that made the universe are not gods but Primordials and Elder Evils. The gods are super-immortals who use worship and souls as a power source. Think Asuras Wrath but the 7 deities conquered the universe eons ago. If you kill a god the others vote on giving you their slice of the mantra or not. 2. Yes they can, since they use giant prayer and soul batteries. Hrantong Clerics magic drains a lot less than intervention does, so they make a greater power profit by acting as indirectly as possible.

[McStabbington]

. . . on the other hand, if the gods are nothing but dreams given shape by belief, then all the Paladins and Clerics PCs who have dedicated their lives to their deities are basically chumps who serve their own delusions...Even if the gods aren't created by belief, if they are leeching faith from their worshippers the devout who sacrifice their lives for them seem like a bunch of dupes.

Also, that makes the Multiverse feel too ephemeral: The Powers who shape the Planes are in turn shaped by the belief of mortals, so there aren't hard truths, everything is fleeting and mutable. The fabric of the Multiverse itself seems flimsy.


I suppose that's one way of interpreting it. Another way is that our very belief is so great, so strong and so powerful that it can shape the very fabric of reality. There are of course problems, as when the billionth person to cry out to a god at seeing their phone bill accidentally invoked Comcastius, malevolent deity of internet hookups, but on the whole it actually works pretty well.

[Troacctid]

Mechanically, it won't make any difference for the characters, but from a RP point of view you have to choose to have your cleric stick stubbornly to his/her previous beliefs and claim that Planars, Efreets, Jann, Marids, Djinn, Eladrins, Guardinals, Archons, Bariaur, Rheks, Formians...etc., are all stinking liars who lie, pants on fire, or have him/her acknowledge that their god is a product of their own worship, which would drive them to a crisis of faith.

I don't see why knowing that deities are fueled by belief (maybe a DC 20-25-ish Knowledge check) would result in a crisis of faith. If anything, it would increase my conviction, because I'd know that my devotion is directly empowering my god.

[Crake]

In my game the worship of deities is used to garner their favour, and in return, power. Either that, or it's due to a moral and ethical alignment between worshiper and deity. If you die without worshipping a deity, you either go to the plane that greatest exemplifies your alignment, or if you don't sway any way in particular, you get reincarnated through my campaign's equivilent of the ethereal plane. As such, people are incentivised to worship a deity if simply to secure a comfortable afterlife. The deities, who in all the games I have run so far have been dead, had no incentive to banter over souls and worship, and as such stayed mostly out of mortal affairs, due to no real need or desire, as they were actually caretakers of the planet, watchers of the unspeakable horrors trapped within the planet.

Once they died though, the paragons (think demon lords/archdevils and their celestial, anarchic and axiomatic counterparts) took over, and due to the way magic is generated, have a much more vested interest in collecting souls. As such, they will typically try and garner as many souls as possible to expand their territory, souls give them power over the planes, but not so much direct power. Thus the more souls you control, the larger an area of say, heaven or hell you could manipulate as if you were a god, having absolute control over it. As such, it's not so much the worship, as much as it is the soul for the paragons.

Edit: Feel like I should add, the gods in my game were merely a race with the ability to re-shape reality. They were destroyed by infighting that was orchestrated by followers of the horrors that lurk below. A few still reminan, though in isolation, not directly attracting followers. They were powerful, but not infallible beings of creation. They did change reality around the planet my game is set on, to create the planes, and "standardise" the existence around them, which is why the days, months and years are so perfectly rounded (360 days, 40 day moon cycles, an elliptical orbit which makes the entire planet share a single seasonal cycle). They actually changed the rules of physics, which, when people started eventually using science after the gods died and the world fell into a dark age, things just didn't make sense, because the laws of physics didn't actually properly apply. Once the planes collapsed though, things went back to 'normal' and science made it's return (to the detriment of magic, since the planes are where magic was generated).

[Milo v3]

1. Not at all, if I went that way then all the forgotten deities would be rather feeble. Also, if gods are simply based on belief it would make deities far less important.
2. I have my deities run out of energy, physically-ish. Most can get tired, they run out of magic for the day, most need to eat to remain strong, etc.
3. I've had players battle deities as early as 10th level.

[Darth Ultron]

1. Very dependent. A deity only exists as mortals believe in them. But it's the gods that shape the mortals.

2. No a deity can never ''run out of fuel''....unless they are beyond foolish. Deities use power all the time. Don't go by the lame book examples of what a deity has in their realm. They have lots more.

3. Never. More or less. At like 15-20 level most character can take on and kill an avatar....maybe. But that is not such a big deal. It has as much effect on a god as when someone kills a knight in service to a king. And characters can never, ever face the real, true deity....the one that just can literally do anything. The one that has has ''Infinity+1'' to prepare and ready things.

Though even at level 1 characters can mess up or even stop a gods plans....but not ''face'' the god.

[Clistenes]

I don't see why knowing that deities are fueled by belief (maybe a DC 20-25-ish Knowledge check) would result in a crisis of faith. If anything, it would increase my conviction, because I'd know that my devotion is directly empowering my god.

Mechanically speaking that makes sense. Clerics who worship recently ascended demigods probably react that way, since they knew that their patron is new and weak.

However, if you believe that you are worshipping the creator of the Universe, and you discover that your god is in fact a construct of belief, that would come as a great shock.

We aren't allowed to mention real-world religions, but think that a member from one of the great monotheistic religions on Earth discovered that God is a construct that only coalesced from belief like 3,000 years ago...that isn't what you believed in, what you worshipped, that isn't your God.

Think of Moradin or Corellon. Elves and Dwarves think that their patron gods created them at the beginning of Time. Then they discover that Moradin was a Dwarven warrior and blacksmith who was promoted to divinity by Vulcanus, and that Corellon was a forest's Genius Loci who became a god due to the worship of a tribe of primitive elves.

[Ottriman]

1. My dieties are not in any way powered by faith, they just use clerics as agents outside of their own planes (ie themselves). The mortals benefit from magic, but the god gets closer to achieving it's agenda as well win-win.

2. No my gods have unlimited reserves of energy in all functional respects.

3. N/A None of the dieties and demigods gods are in my setting, nor is the awful rules for epic magic. As to actually beating my gods, you could maybe with a party at the cusp of ascenscion gank a gods avatar projected to outside itself, that would give it massive headaches and shut it down for a few months to a few years.

But actually truly killing off a diety is impossible in my games.

[Ganorenas]

1. Only where the deities and demigods book dictates that faith is important in gaining divine ranks, after that they subsist on their own abilities.

2. They have their powers and abilities, I don't see why they would need to lose their power just because mortals don't believe in them anymore. They aren't main stream Santa =P

3. Couple points:
My players purposely pick fights with deities...
They haven't won yet, possibly because they choose to battle Vecna, Nerull, and Tiamat. Which are all exceptionally powerful and intelligent.
So far as I am concerned, they can pick a fight whenever they are able to send a message to the deity in question (or have sufficiently damaged their follower base, less due to a loss of power but more from the surviving followers asking or demanding assistance).

[BWR]

I run Mystara, and that setting is a bit unclear on whether the Immortals need worship. One source says they do and will begin to wither without worshippers but many of the write-ups of the existing Immortals indicate that faith isn't necessary. Some are ancient (millions of years, in some cases) and don't seem to need worshippers, and some have come to Immortality through 'cheats' and don't seem to need worshippers. Also, power doesn't seem based on number of worshippers or age.
IMG, worshippers are not necessary. If you want to get things done on various worlds you need followers because doing everything by yourself is tiring and the other Immortals don't like it when you throw your weight around on fragile little worlds, but you don't need worshippers to survive.

[Jowgen]

1) In my game, deities require worship as the main source to gain divine power, and have varying degrees of need for continued worship to avoid "running out of fuel" dependent upon their rank.

Worship can either spontaneously generate new deities (there is a thing in Fiendish Codex II about where their "birth" takes place), or can form the main ingredient for the ascension of a mortal; although there are other mysterious factors involved that usually can only be added by aid of a current deity (unless you're real crafty, like Vecna was).

As worship increases, deities can gain in divine rank, although this represents a slow process that is also impacted by how much of its divine energy the deity expends on a regular basis. Once enough individuals worship hard enough, the deities "full" divine energy stores start to adapt and expand, moving it up the divine rank ladder. The points in the divine rank system where one switches from Lesser to Intermediate, for example, represent hurdles/plateaus; in that it takes a proportionately longer time/more worship to move up to the next category.

The greater a deities rank, the more self-sufficient it becomes. For example, if everyone stopped worshipping Corellon immediately , it would likely still take a lot of time for him to start diminishing, especially if he conserved his power or even recalled power he invested in any ascended he's sponsored. With enough inegnuity, he could even retain his status indefinitely, provided he barely ever used a smidgen of his power. Intermediate deities are in the middle, in that a complete lack of worship might knock them down to lesser, but from there the deterioration would be slow (and potentially stall-able). Lesser deities essentially need worship on a 1:1 ratio to avoid being somewhat quickly demoted to Demigods. Sinking below divine rank 1 is nigh impossible though, as the core of divine power persists in the absence of external intervention.

2) As described above, "running out of fuel" can happen; but it only really becomes a factor in the face of decreased worship. If there is constant worship, the deity would either have to actively oppose another deity in direct confrontation or use the full extent of its power over a very extended period of time (could be centuries, depending on its rank) in order for it to affect his overall power.

One instance where this can also become relevant is in inter-deity conflict. A large expenditure of power at any given time might not affect a deities rank, but it might just reduce their momentary maximum power output enough to make them vulnerable to attack from a deity of similar power. Lets say Bahamut decided to use his power to stop some kind of inter-planar cataclysm. The act itself wouldn't noticeably impact his overall power, but during this expenditure and for a short time after; he might be just so ever slightly weakened for Timat to be able to swoop in and deal an effective blow before he fully recovered.

Similarly, certain deity actives can represent a temporary de-facto reduction in power. Sending out an avatar, for example, or sponsoring a new deity, or creating any other kind of permanent creature/object, basically represents partitioning part of the deities overall essence and worship-entitlement into smaller pieces. The deity can re-absorb those (e.g. recall avatar, undo their Simularum army, etc), but that likely takes time and effort.

3) I made a thread about this some months back. With Epic Magic, arguments can and have been made for yes. Without epic magic, it is still possible in some cases, but only really for lesser or lower deities (they can't see the future). The key is essentially to locate the deity, somehow get to it un-noticed (dodging its portfolio sense and such) while overcoming it's divine aura, and winning initiative as to have a round to obliterate it via heavy optimization, as to avoid it insta-destroying you with its salient divine abilities or escaping on its go.

Tiamat is arguably the simplest "famous" deity to kill, as her location is well known, reasonably accessible, and her lack of non-dragon levels coupled with her huge size and ego makes her the least likely to have sufficient counters prepared. Also, dragons are easy to optimize against; thanks to them being the titular enemies of the game.

EDIT: Apologies for my flawed use of apostrophes, having an off-grammar-day.

[Clistenes]

Another question: How focused on their portfolio do you think deities should be? Should they be monomaniacs obsessed with their portfolio, or just powerful NPCs who just happen to be very good at controlling a particular aspect of reality? Or something in between? Could the God of Swords, for example, behave like a mostly normal person, or would he be like "Swords, swords, swords, sworddity, swordy, swo-swo-swo-swo-swoooooo-o-o-o-ords. Swords. Swords. And scimitars. And Falchions, and claymores and katanas and rapiers. Swords. I like swords. Don't you think swords are the greatest thing in the whole Multiverse? Say yes or I will kill you. With a sword. You are boring, you don't speak enough about swords. I'm going. Here, have a sword as a parting gift."

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5511/481/400/Ilikeswords.jpghttp://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3o85y3yGJ1qarkg3o1_400.jpghttp://www.google.es/url?sa=i&source=imgres&cd=&ved=0CAkQjBwwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcaffeinecrew.files.wordpress.com% 2F2014%2F09%2Ffighter-8-bit-theater.jpg&ei=woJUVYuVLYm4Uc2YgZAJ&psig=AFQjCNG3MrFF0V6IRXCIY9KAYuxhIBuVxw&ust=1431688258823479

[Milo v3]

I go with the Greek style, where they don't even have to like their portfolio (hades) or they might be horrible at their portfolio (ares).

[Jay R]

By fixed design, my players do not and cannot know the answers to any such questions. No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves with the delusion that they know something. See Chicxulub, below.

There are two gods called together The Uncreated. Separately, they are The Lord and The Lady, and nothing is known about them.

Their first children were the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the winds. These four are either the creators of our world, or the stuff of which it was created - it's not clear which. They are, of course, the essence of the four earthly elements, the embodiment of the elemental planes, and the structure of the world. There is a fifth one, representing the quintessence, but since that cannot exist on our changeable and imperfect world, he/she has no influence here.

They have an abundance of names. The Sun God, for instance, is known as Apollo, Aten, Ra, Tonatiuh, Surya, Helios and many others. Similarly, every earth goddess is known to be the true earth, born of The Lord and The Lady - even those with known other parents, or those with no parents, like Gaea. Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

The children/creations of these four are the only gods who will answer prayers or interact with the world directly. They include all the pantheons that have ever existed.
Except Lovecraft.

The Lord and The Lady have been identified as the embodiments of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Male and Female, or Light and Darkness, or any other opposing concepts.

Wars have been fought between those who believe they represent Good and Evil, and those who insist on Law and Chaos.

Wars have been fought between those who believe The Lord and The Lady hate each other with a hatred surpassing any passion on earth, and those who believe that they love each other with a love more true than any mortal could ever know.

Wars have been fought between those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Good and The Lady is Evil, and those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Evil and The Lady is Good.

All of the above will be available knowledge to the players. Here is what they will not know.

No arcane or divine magic will successfully find out any fact about The Lord and The Lady. I have three answers, all completely true, and mutually incompatible.

1. The Lord is Fate, and The Lady is Luck. Neither can exist without the other, and each action in the world, from a sneeze to the fall of an empire, is a victory of one of them over the other.
2. They are Yin and Yang, and the heart of each beats in the breast of the other. They represent complementary, not opposing, forces. Each is in fact all of the universe except the other, but neither one represents any specific principle (not even male and female), and whichever one represents goodness in one situation might be the evil in another. Together, they represent wholeness and balance
3. They are the Creators - the mother and father of the world, which they birthed and/or created for some great purpose which is not yet fulfilled.

No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

Oh yes, and the fifth child of The Lord and The Lady, representing the Fifth Element? It turns out that he's not the stuff of the heavens, but of the hells. His children and descendants are all the demons, devils, and daemons. His creations are the evil spirits of the underworld. No, he's not out to conquer the world or destroy it or anything of that sort. He just likes to see war, strife, and pain.

[Flickerdart]

I tend to play around with gods in various settings I run - I find pre-written gods (and expies thereof) incredibly dull. In one of my worlds, godhood is bestowed by a literal divine spark that can be usurped from a deity by any mortal powerful enough to best them. In fact, the deities basically are exceptional mortals who stole their sparks from primordial forces of nature, and the "classic" outsider deities are only now beginning to usurp them. In another world, the gods are themselves forces of nature, pseudo-beings directly responsible for making the world work. There are only three so there are no "gods of swords" and if one were to be slain then, for instance, there would be no more Cold in the world, with dire consequences. In yet another, the gods as entities have been slain in a massive conflict, and only pools of their divine essences remain for faithful clerics to draw power.

[Emperor Tippy]

Depends on the setting I am creating.

My general default though is that deities were all former non divine entities that have managed (through any number of methods) to make themselves divine.

Some do it with raw, personal, power of one stripe or another. Others do it by finding a way to embody a concept or mantle a domain. Others do it by gaining power from souls dedicated to them (or to a lesser extent pure worship). Others do it by stealing power from another divine.

There are pretty much as many separate methods as their are gods running around and all come with their own advantages and limitations. Some have limited power, others have limitless energy reserves. Some will wither and die without worship and a constant supply of souls, others wouldn't even notice. Some would be greatly weakened if a specific geographic location is destroyed, others would find the idea of being dependent upon a volcano existing to be farcical (for example).

[Hrugner]

1. Independent of belief: I present gods as avatars of some concept or ideal, and they gain power with how essential that concept or ideal is to the mortal realm. To balance that, the more focused a gods concept, the more power they derive from it's presence.

2: They can run out of fuel: When a god uses their power they make power more essential to the world than their actual concept

3: No idea, statted gods is a weird concept.
3b: For my version of gods, the process of removing a concept from the world requires vast cultural change or replacement of that concept. I doubt players would finish before moving beyond standard progression.

[Telonius]

I am curious about how do you like your deities in your games.

1.-How dependant on Faith/Belief are your deities? The default assumption is that worship is useful for deities, but, how dependant do you like your gods to be on worship? Have they been created by belief? Do they need worship to keep their divine power? Can they die due to lack of worship? Can belief change the mind and bodies of the deities themselves?

I understand that, since many gods are *******s, and in most settings Good can't really defeat Evil forever, the fact that they have limits and weaknesses and are dependant on their worshippers' support is kind of a consolation, but, on the other hand, if the gods are nothing but dreams given shape by belief, then all the Paladins and Clerics PCs who have dedicated their lives to their deities are basically chumps who serve their own delusions...Even if the gods aren't created by belief, if they are leeching faith from their worshippers the devout who sacrifice their lives for them seem like a bunch of dupes.

Also, that makes the Multiverse feel too ephemeral: The Powers who shape the Planes are in turn shaped by the belief of mortals, so there aren't hard truths, everything is fleeting and mutable. The fabric of the Multiverse itself seems flimsy.

2.-Do you think deities can "run out of fuel"? Hallowed Ground, from 2nd edition, implied that gods have to carefully manage the power extracted from belief or they will spend too much. Deities & Demigods (3rd edition) on the other hand, present the gods as being able to use their Salient Divine Abilities without restraint.

If the gods can "run out of fuel" that would explain why Lolth doesn't have a billion Simulacra created with Alter Reality guarding her Demonweb Pits and instead relies on regular drows and monstrous spiders. On the other hand, regular wizards can use most of their spells every day without losing their essence, so, why shouldn't deities be able to do the same?

3.-At what level do you think a character would be able to face the weaker deities in the Deities & Demigods, with and without Epic Magic?

Thank you very much.

Numbers one and two are kind of related, in my games (and opinion). Basically the questions amount to, how does your setting solve the Problem of Evil. For mine, the actual "gods" themselves are more like Jungian archetypes or Platonic Forms. Their main existence is separate from the material plane, but interact with the material plane through the mediation of what the people there believe. To take a comparison to Discworld, it's like everybody seeing the Death they expect to see. Similar archetypes can have different faces, so you might have (for example) Artemis, Selune, and Mani drawing on the same archetype but mediated differently into their various Clerics.

If the deities have to interact more directly, they do so through Aspects, Avatars, and heralds. A person's faith is what allows them to channel the essence of that deity. If enough people stop actively worshiping a deity, it doesn't die, it becomes "faceless." The archetype still exists, floating in some weird Platonic ether, but nobody matches a personality and a face to it. Because of human (or elvish, or whatever) limitations, it's really hard to channel something without that kind of a personality. There are some exceptions, like Clerics and Paladins of Causes, Ur Priests, Binders, and so on. It's possible for a person to "ascend to godhood" - what actually happens is that person's face and personality become attached to an archetype. It's possible for a god to "change" through time, but what's happening is that people are attaching a different personality to that archetype, giving it a "new face." In extreme cases, the change may be enough that people are following an archetype completely different from the original worshipers. The old deity is still there, but might now be faceless. Because all of the old deities are still existing out in the ether, it's possible for any or all of them to be brought back, given a sufficient number of followers.

They archetype doesn't particularly "care" whether or not they're worshiped, though the individual face attached to the archetype might. There are some rules instituted by the overdeity, Pun-Pun, about how directly they can interact based on number of followers. (Pun-Pun, having granted himself an arbitrarily high Wisdom and Intelligence, has deduced that he's a theoretical exercise created on a message board. He's just kind of going with it to see how the game turns out). That's where "running out of juice" comes in. The deity itself doesn't get tired, or "spend" its power, it just can or can't do things depending on how many people believe in it.

The other posters will probably have a better idea on question number 3. Deities and Demigods is fairly early 3.0 material, back before the Internet Hive Mind had broken the game apart six different ways before level four.