My take on deities

[Drache64]

So I'm really enjoying my current run on deities, I'm playing it where there is a multiverse and gods are ranked as either universal or multiversal.

Universal Pantheons are simply very strong, very magical beings. Example: Asmodeus is simply a king devil, I'm running the god of time as a psychic aboleth with time manipulation psychic powers.

Multiversal deities are aspects of reality: war/hate/love etc. They choose an Avatar in a reality and empower it, ex: Bane is a mortal who is powered by war itself.

And then the chief diety is two persons in one, me the DM who's reflected as a force for good and a force for evil both simply exist to challenge heroes and grow characters. He's a sick twisted being who thinks everything is fun and will scrap a whole universe when he's bored with it and create new ones on a whim.

I don't tell any of my players any of this, it's up to them to piece things together. And I have universal dieties mostly ignorant of the way things work, but the multiversal dieties I give a vague sense of awareness.

Currently my players are in a world where Asmodeus has United the other evil dieties under one banner to defeat the good dieties, but Asmodeus is being manipulated by Zehir who is really the chief diety of chaos (me the DM)

[Millstone85]

Here is my own classification for deities in fantasy settings.

Creators
Older than time itself and responsible for its inception. Possibly from a place like the Far Realm.

Powers
These *are* the world as the characters know it. To hurt one is to hurt the very fabric of reality.

Tulpas
Magically empowered by others' faith and prayers. Possibly shaped by belief in the first place.

[dino_park]

Sound familiar :P

[martixy]

So I'm really enjoying my current run on deities, I'm playing it where there is a multiverse and gods are ranked as either universal or multiversal.

Universal Pantheons are simply very strong, very magical beings. Example: Asmodeus is simply a king devil, I'm running the god of time as a psychic aboleth with time manipulation psychic powers.

Multiversal deities are aspects of reality: war/hate/love etc. They choose an Avatar in a reality and empower it, ex: Bane is a mortal who is powered by war itself.

And then the chief diety is two persons in one, me the DM who's reflected as a force for good and a force for evil both simply exist to challenge heroes and grow characters. He's a sick twisted being who thinks everything is fun and will scrap a whole universe when he's bored with it and create new ones on a whim.

I don't tell any of my players any of this, it's up to them to piece things together. And I have universal dieties mostly ignorant of the way things work, but the multiversal dieties I give a vague sense of awareness.

Currently my players are in a world where Asmodeus has United the other evil dieties under one banner to defeat the good dieties, but Asmodeus is being manipulated by Zehir who is really the chief diety of chaos (me the DM)

An interesting take, and somewhat the opposite of what I do.

I have lower-tier gods called "Muses". They are born of the desires of people, and represent aspects of what we call "the human experience"(though in-universe humans are a vanishingly small part of it) - love, war, justice, hearth and home, the hunt, lies, etc. They are worship given form and sentience.

Then there are so called "objective gods", requiring no worship, responsible for abstract or fundamental aspects of existence - time, space, balance, magic, death.

See, love, war, etc are sentiments, other alien sentiences may not share with us. But time, change, magic(in a fantasy multi/universe) are likely fundamental aspects of creation found everywhere. I mean sure, one can speculate of a deterministic universe, with no arrow of time, no discernible past/present/future, where everything that can be, already is. But I doubt it'd make for a good game.

That's the skinny, rest can probably be considered boring details.

[Anonymouswizard]

The current setting I'm designing works as follows. Beings that humans worship are divided into the following teo categories.

Gods: the Gods are the beings that are, eternal and changing beings that created the world and everything in it. I've not settled on how many there actually are, I'm considering going for a power of 2 (4, 8, or 16, to allow each of their 'current' forms to be easily differentiated). They can't interact directly with the world, but can send dream-visions, one or more of them is the source of every major religion in the setting, and can grant access to magic (which will give the recipient a mark, placed so that it not being visible is suspicious). Note that none of them actually have any form of appearance, although most of them will at least use the same image for members of the same religion.

Spirits: spirits are old, powerful, and unchanging, but theoretically mortal supernatural beings. Mostly worshipped because they're powerful, some as intermediaries for actual Gods others in their own right, and some have learnt how to give humans (relatively limited) magic.

In general a God has a broad (and in flux) domain and has to work indirectly, while a Spirit has a narrow domain but can work directly if needed to. This means spirit cults tend to appear where that domain is important enough that people are specifically looking to influence it, while the major religions all began in areas with a multitude of reasons to pray (although sometimes that just led to worshiping multiple powerful spirits...).


There's also other categories of supernatural (and natural beings, one classification is 'inhabitants of an old universe who cheated their way into this one' and fulfil the role of apparently all-powerful material beings), but those aren't important to the story.

Note that magic in this setting is entirely the domain of Gods and Spirits, anything material can't access it unless allowed. This is half of what's led to the setting having just entered a period of rapid technological advancement (the other being that there was a recent demonstration of what technology is capable of, as those 'older than the universe' people decided to just kill a dragon in order to be left alone).

[LudicSavant]

Older than time itself

The problem here is that the way we measure "older" and "younger" is with time.

[Millstone85]

The problem here is that the way we measure "older" and "younger" is with time.

True, but bear with me. The Far Realm is sometimes described as lacking an unified arrow of time. Things there experience time but interact with each other completely out of order. And somewhere within that timey-wimey spacey-wacey scoubidou is the beginning of time as we know it. In a sense, that makes whatever started it older than time.

[martixy]

And this is why even one of two overgods of my setting - the goddess of time CANNOT time-travel. No one can.
Well, certain spells and powers like time regression work, but those are minor alterations, as she's there to make sure they don't turn into a major one.
You cannot make causality violations work. End of story.
So I don't bother.

[LudicSavant]

Saying something's older than time is kinda like saying something's 3 meters to the left of space.

If you've got things like "meters" and "left," you've got space.
If you've got things like "younger" and "older," you've got time.

If something exists without space, it has no position.
If something exists without time, it has no age.