Aberrations in a none-traditional setting

[Tvtyrant]

I am currently working on a campaign with a none-traditional, small gods style focus. Essentially the planet is defined by the relationship between prayer eating gods and humans. The gods can only derive their powers from prayer and sacrifices made by humans, and any use of their power diminishes their prayer pool. As a result in order to be successful they have to maximize prayers while minimizing miracles, leading to them developing exclusion clauses, shared prayer energy within pantheons, and spheres of power. The average god is at the level of a faerie or a wight, a being of some power that attempts to make deals trading favors for prayers and sacrifices. At the top are the pantheon heads, who are capable of nearly anything because their pantheon structure lets them siphon off other god's take and not have to spend anything themselves.

This setting does not have alternate dimensions, and I don't want to introduce space travel, but I also want to include aberrations and monsters that aren't made by the gods. What seems like a good way to do so?

[Fayd]

I can see a couple of ways off the cuff:

1. The Spider Method. Going back to D&D's Tolkien roots, Spiders are aberrations. Everything evil in Middle Earth is Morgoth's fault. Except spiders, which are evil of their own accord. Their progenitor crawled her way out of nothing and Morgoth was all "nice." These things just. ARE. No rhyme or reason, and they are destructive and alien.

2. The Nobody Method. Aberrations don't properly exist. They are latent pieces of unreality that found their way into reality through some tear or hole in the fabric or reality or forced their way through a weak conceptual seam. The universe is a patchwork of deific domains, stands to reason that there are gaps, places (being somewhat illustrative here, these places may be things like a color, a concept) that the unreality outside of creation forces its way in... but in so doing must be bound by at least SOME of the rules of the universe, and so they take a form. A terrible form, a form mortal kind was not meant to know, but a form nonetheless.

[Honest Tiefling]

Firstly, what happens if you sacrifice a god to another god?

Secondly, go with the Cthonic route. Stick them in the good ol' underdark or any other underground place. Lots of stories have creatures or gods being trapped underground, so you could have it that the gods chase them into the deepest reaches of the earth. Or at the bottom of the sea, for a more watery themed version.

Heck, you could potentially have a hollow world with the inner world being one of aberrations worshipping a central aberration who functions as the sun and center of this hollow world. Also, they keep things like gravity and the like operating as you, the DM, want.

[Tvtyrant]

Firstly, what happens if you sacrifice a god to another god?

Secondly, go with the Cthonic route. Stick them in the good ol' underdark or any other underground place. Lots of stories have creatures or gods being trapped underground, so you could have it that the gods chase them into the deepest reaches of the earth. Or at the bottom of the sea, for a more watery themed version.

Heck, you could potentially have a hollow world with the inner world being one of aberrations worshipping a central aberration who functions as the sun and center of this hollow world. Also, they keep things like gravity and the like operating as you, the DM, want.

Nothing, gods don't have any value to each other. They are symbiotic with humans.

That sounds interesting, hollow earth is pretty cool.

[Gildedragon]

An idea: the current men and the gods are newcomers. The old powers are still alive, their races and worshipers displaced and dimmed but still around; and they shall return.
Aberrations are as the mortals or as the angels of the old powers

Or they are the gods' first attempts. They couldn't unmake them. They are jealous of the gods' new toys

[Knight Magenta]

What if aberrations are what happens when mortal prayer energy gets out into the wild with no god to give it form. An aberration may be formed when enough mortals pray to a god that is dead, or never existed. They might also form when someone kills a god and that god's pantheon does not clean up the prayer spill. Aberrations are not really sentient. They act based on what prayers make them up.

For example, say you have a hunter gets lost in the woods and gets attacked by a wolf. The hunter wins the fight, but now he is bleeding out and his leg is broken. He prays for healing, but his preferred god is too far away, so he just prays to *someone*. Some confluence of events makes it so that this particular prayer or place has a lot of power, so a gibbering-mouther type thing is formed. It wants to heal the hunter because that's the kind of prayers it is made of. Yet, without an intelligence to guide it it only really knows that it must apply healing. So it goes and turns the hunter into another gibbering-mouther. Success!

In theory, it would be possible to create a sentient or helpful aberration by using a series of very specific prayers, but that way probably lies madness.

Maybe the way that they are really different from gods is that they can use prayer energy without expending it. So aberrations left unchecked will just grow and multiply.

[Gildedragon]

Aberrations could be formed by mortals trying to grab onto divine energy without the intercession of a god... Or via improperly handled spells or incantations