Becoming A Deity

[deinol]

Not yet, ask again next year.

My Pathfinder group is level 15 now. I've just started them on the first steps of a long path that should give them the option to ascend at level 20. I plan on letting them gain a domain each level and start letting them absorb divine power as they go. We'll see how it turns out.

 

[Olli]

In an old campaign of me, there was a PC with an unknown Father, and as the campaign played out, it was revealed, that his father was the God of Life and the Living, who sacrificed himself in the Godwar and in the wake of the final conflict he asumed his fathers portfolio and power.

We wrapped the campaign up, but started a new one in the Aftermath of the war, with him as a God and the rest of the surviving party important NPC´s (except the mage, but thats another Story)

It has worked great, because the players had a connection to the NPC´s and it was nice for the setting as a whole...

 

[Corathon]

Some years ago, I was a player in a 1E/2E game in which the characters had to make it to the Nexus in time for the Conjunction of the Million Spheres (a la Moorcock) in order to shape the new/changed multiverse that formed at the conjunction. Those who made it became gods in the new multiverse, but that was the end of the campaign.

 

[NichG]

I'm currently playing a character who was once a deity but was stripped of his power when his world (and thus worship-base) was utterly destroyed. It was interesting playing him as a 5th level character, since he assumed he was still as powerful as he had once been and got into some messy situations because of it (for instance, attempting to forge a replacement sword for himself barehanded in a campfire).

Its a fairly high-powered campaign now, and he's gotten back a tiny shred of his former godhood. It has mostly flavor effects - he can receive prayers in his name, grant 0-level spells to worshippers, and is eligible to take things like Craft(Soul) and Craft(Lifeform) which has led mostly to amusing situations as his creations - a race of stone golem-like beings - are not the brightest of creatures. Due to the power-level of the campaign, being a god isn't mechanically that significant compared to the stuff that gets thrown around by the party, though its nice to not have to worry about natural 1s or antimagic fields.

I've run a campaign where one of the players ended up with the office of what passed for one of the gods of the campaign world, after the party witnessed the being's death while defending a breach in their reality. The result in that case was that he got a bunch of sort of weird mechanics that meant he was extremely powerful in certain situations, but very vulnerable in others. It eventually worked out, but I had to change some of my combat balance assumptions significantly. It probably helped that I wasn't actually using the Deities and Demigods rules though. I don't think I could have balanced around some of the salient divine abilities like Annihilating Strike, Life and Death, Divine Splendor, and True Knowledge. Some of the things are just hard to run like Know Death, which requires the DM to predict the future or lock it in, and the divine sensory ranges.

 

[ashockney]

1st - 2nd edition campaign in which characters were promoted to Demigod status at or near the end (the two clerics). These characters were given powers similiar to "at will" abilities of other monsters. The non-divine characters had magic items that provided them "comparable" power level and abilities. Each of the characters was given an "omnipotence" power roll (less than 15%) chance to "know" or "learn" just about anything.

 

[khantroll]

The 3.5 campaign my group just left (not finished per se) was entirely composed of dieties/epic level characters. It was my fault, really; we did a round-robin/guest DM setup to give me a break in the very beginning. I wanted to play a power-mad character, and in that vein I used one of the FFG books with rules for cults in it. This lead to discussions about follows, etc, and all the others decided that godhood would be the goal of the campaign.

They became gods of Death, Chaos, Evil, War, and Fire by first amassing specialized powers and then followers through leadership which the became cultists. Once they had recieved the requisite number of followers, Dieties and Demigods became our primary rulebook. Those saliant abilities are hella cool if you are a player, and a pain the arse if you are a DM. It was fun though, and it showed the phenomenal cosmic power does to equal simple or boring. They tackled advanced celestials, dieties, a few demon princes. Perhaps the best one was a highly customized version of Hellspike Prison that we ran. In our game, Hellspike was the place where the irredeemably evil were sent by the celestial hosts. When one of the characters (a blackguard) died due to an environmenal variable (still useful at this level of play in that system, FYI), he was of course sent to Hellspike. The rest of the group had to go get him in order to have him reincarnated, and that simple setup led to some very memorable NPC interactions as well as battle after battle with some very, very powerful celestials. Epic level divine spells will hurt anyone

 

[juboke]

Yes.

Funny thing is we play a very low magic game. In the 30 years of playing D&D I’ve only had two characters with an item higher than +2 and only had one (maybe two) character reach a level higher than 14th.

However sometimes during the 80’s I had a subscription to Fantasy Gamer/Space Gamer and one issue had an AD&D adventure in which the Sun God had died and the characters had to reach an item called the “Godshead” prior to some villain. Acquiring the “Godshead” gave that character the powers of the deceased deity, which one of my players was able to do. I remember the room which contained the “Godshead” had three powerful being guarding it two of which were the Slaad Lords found in the Fiend Folio. The character was retired after this adventure.

 

[Barastrondo]

In a fantasy Champions game, one of the PCs was pretty much "young fisherman invested with the power of a local deity", and his overall character arc involved full apotheosis.

Hasn't happened in a D&D game. I have played in a D&D game where there was a deity that had formerly been a player character, and that pretty much resolved a reluctance on my part to play a character who worships a god that used to be somebody's character.

 

[juboke]

Fantasy Gamer No. 4 - The Solinar Quest.