"There are no gods in my homebrew setting"

[ffone]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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...

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. 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]

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]

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]

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. 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

AFAICT?

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

[Ajadea]

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]

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]

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]

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*, 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]

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.)