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Ixtellor
2020-10-28, 11:55 AM
Preface: In an effort to create a low magic campaign world, I adopted/stole/modified an idea for deities.

Concept: The only way godhood is attained is when a normal living being attains followers that pray to and make sacrifices for that individual. As the potential deity gains actual worshippers they slowly gain actual powers until they eventually have enough worshippers that they attain full god hood, progressing through demi-god hood status and other steps along the way.

Campaign: All PC's will be humans in the dawn of man, hence no human deities. The other races have been around a long time and there many elven, dwarvish, and other humanoid race deities. There will only be two very minor human deities, a secret evil one, and the much more famous "God of the Harvest" both of which are based around actual humans who through their efforts in life have attained followers.

My question: Has anyone done anything similar and discovered if it makes clerics unplayable, or come up with a rules system based on this idea? (I am aware of the basic D&D immortals set)

Clistenes
2020-11-07, 05:06 AM
I have never done something like that, but I have played Clerics empowered by spirits and ancestors (kinda like Shamans and Shugenjas). They were diplomats, messengers and brokers between both worlds, treating spirits almost as equals, rather than servants of their patrons.

Maybe humans Clerics are all spirit-worshiping Shamans, and these two new deities are trying to recruit them?

Vahnavoi
2020-11-07, 05:59 AM
I've done these concepts. There's no special difficulty in running this. It mostly means this:

Player: "I want to play a cleric."
GM: "You have this small pool of deities and religions to choose from." (<---In my games, the actual number is typically two or three.)
Player: "None of these tickle my fancy."
GM: "Play something other than a cleric, then."

In a system I came up with for playing deities, the level of spells a deity could grant was capped by their rank. And clerics without deities could only ever get up to 5th level spells. There's a table in 1st Edition DMG which might be useful: it tells what kind of being you are dealing with when requesting divine spells. For low level spells, you are dealing with intermediaries of a deity (angels etc.) while high level spells are negotiated directly with a deity.

You could adopt a synthesis of those two: human clerics who are not satisfied with their two human gods, have to appeal to sympathetic intermediaries of non-human deities and can only get low level spells. This makes clerics weaker, but doesn't make them unplayable. At low levels, the difference is negligible.

False God
2020-11-07, 11:57 AM
I've modified the gods, but I've never done so in a way that limits the power of the cleric. Be they servant of the most powerful Sun God or heretic, they still function as normal.

I just don't see the gain. Someone determined to be a cleric will just go worship a god that's powerful enough to give them clerical abilities. Someone who isn't may, instead of an interesting character, make a bland Bob the Fighter.

What have I as DM gained? What has the party gained? What has the player gained?
The former player just went around all my rules.
The latter player is now less interested in the game.

Mastikator
2020-11-07, 01:33 PM
Does the limited amount of human deities make humans mostly secular? I can see a few other options:
* Humans all worship the same deity, the harvest one
* Humans worship various deities from other races
* Humans worship nature spirits/ancestors/ideals rather than deities

I don't think it makes clerics unplayable, you just need to have an answer to the question: "who do get to they worship?".

Mr.Sandman
2020-11-09, 08:12 PM
I have done this as one of the ways to achieve godhood, it doesn't really change much except giving a cool backstory to the diety, like why people started worshiping them. The most important one I did was Tiamet, her people started worshiping her specifically to get some information/ help in a massive intersteller war with demon like creatures. When she got the godly update that included the knowledge that the gods had all planned this she went a little nuts, creating the godess of evil dragons we know and love today. It really helps to give evil gods more backstory than 'Lol I'm evil', especially if the expectations of their worshipers can warp their goals and personality. Another example following this is a devil Lord that wanted the powers of a diety, so helped out some heroes to appear redeemed to make himself the god of redemption for the power, only to find himself actually redeeming.

Misereor
2020-11-10, 09:05 AM
My question: Has anyone done anything similar and discovered if it makes clerics unplayable, or come up with a rules system based on this idea? (I am aware of the basic D&D immortals set)

Sorta kinda.
Based on the Forgotten Realms setting, I elaborated a bit on a couple of nuggets.
- The path of the Dark Three (Myrkul, Bane, Bhaal) and their quest for godhood, which involved the binding or slaying of several primordials.
- The Arcane Age supplements, in which the Archmages stayed away from clerical magic because they believed it would prevent the from ever attaining divinity themselves.

So basically, I went with a cosmology in which reality was gradually formed from primal chaos. Life energy first manifested by chunks of reality coming to life as primordials. At first these chunks were purely physical (proto-elementals), but gradually taking more and more advanced forms as reality grew and developed, first based on natural phenomena (storms, darkness, plants, time, etc), and in later incarnations as mortal lifeforms started appearing, based on purely metaphysical concepts such as love, fear, hunting, guardianship, duty, etc.

Some primordials discovered how to draw energy from mortal lifeforms. First in the form of raw life energy (sacrifice), but later refined the method by drawing directly from faith. The act of drawing this energy changed these primordials (you become what you eat), and some even went as far as creating new life forms in their own images, and eventually inventing the optimal vessel for faith energy, Souls, and were able to insert them into their creations (which explains why certain entities are so interested in trading in them).

Other primordials, worried by this perversion of variously their natural forms, the alteration of reality that the new lifeforms were causing, and the power these primordial proto-deities were attaining, tried to stop them, making for a great, but now mostly forgotten, war in the heavens.

Primordials, due to their innate power were ideals candidates for godhood, but later other beings would be able to attain it. All it really came down to was being able to feed on and being able to contain enough of this divine life/faith energy, and one could become a god. Naturally gods aren't particularly interested in everybody knowing this, and so set up great hierarchies of checks and balances to prevent just anyone from becoming so. Those with enough knowledge (like Arcane Age archmages) would usually figure out the rules eventually, while everyone else thought in lines of divine rules and sponsorships.

Many of those in the know tried shortcuts and experiemtns, explaining at least some species that feed on life energy or trade in souls. As for the The Dark Three, they simply found out that the most convenient source of enough energy to ascend to godhood was to find primordials and either suck them dry or imprison them and use them as batteries, until they were strong enough to go directly for a full deity, and steal their energy and portfolios.


Anyway.
I see the kind of campaign you are talking about as something fitting in pretty early in the timeline I've outlined above. Fairly primitive deities and religions, with accordingly primitive rituals and miracles. At this point the gods are still figuring out how to maximize their worshippers' faith output, so they are experimenting with stuff like lunar eclipses, great faces carved in rock, the granting of spells to selected faithful, and the occasional wild hunt. Some deities will be focusing on driving their worshippers into religious frenzy whereas others will prefer deep devotion, and every so often religious genocide with attendant blood sacrifices will result. The worshippers don't know any of this of course; they will most likely be focusing on survival for themselves, their societies, and what will eventually become alignment structures and civilization. Could be a lot of fun :)

wheelmaker
2020-11-10, 10:47 AM
I like it.
Sounds similar to how gods are 'created in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.