D&D 5E Life Without "the Gods" or Playing D&D without the DDG.

[FormerlyHemlock]

In his place are Avatars, mortals made immortal by finding the Avatar Stone while one Avatar is dies. Each Avatar embodies a force: light, darkness, life, death, war, peace, storms, seas,

Fred Saberhagen has a whole series of books about this concept, starting with The Face of Apollo, in which Apollo is slain at the beginning of the book in a battle with Hades (which grievously wounds Hades), and Apollo's disciples attempt to find a new person who is worthy of wearing the Face of Apollo before Hades' men can seize it. You might find those books entertaining. I enjoyed them anyway, especially The Face of Apollo and The Arms of Hercules.

 

[Nifft]

I like my campaigns to have more ambiguity and room for disagreements between one Good faction and another Good faction, so I prefer the Gods to be merely one (partially correct) interpretation of the truth.

That means another region might have different Gods, or no Gods, or just one God -- and their Clerics work just fine.

Then you can have wasteful wars between them, which is very good (but not very Good).

 

[Parmandur]

The Weave isn't exactly the best example IMHO. In the Realms the Weave basically is Mystra, their existences are deeply entwined and the characteristics of the goddess of magic and the properties of the Weave are also related. That is unless you are taking the Weave without Mystra, but then it would be just generic ''magic power'' that permeates and flows through everything.

Yeah, I meant the latter;the Weave is part of the stated assumptions in the Core books, not necessarily the Realms version. Hypothesizing a homebrew following core book assumptions, including the Cleric class, but removing the gods, the Weave would seem a good culprit. Or for god-skeptics in any other setting: the Wizard suspects the "gods/Immortals" are jumped up magic users granting their followers methods for manipulating the Weave.

 

[evilbob]

I don't know that many of our divine casters ever specifically went deep into the whole "gods" thing. It's easy to ignore. I can't recall a game I've ever run or been in where there was some kind of active pantheon. Just our taste I guess.

I'm running a campaign now where there's a centralized religion with only one deity for the majority of the world. Of course that doesn't mean that there are / were groups that believed in a different deity, or deities. None of that interferes with the game in any way.

I've always taken it that the divine caster's power came from their belief in a thing, not the thing itself. Frankly if you want to get all philosophical it really comes from themselves, they just think it comes from another source. But don't tell the paladin. But it's easy to extrapolate that into a "no gods whatsoever" campaign. It just changes flavor, nothing else.

The only trick I've had is incorporating material from outside sources which tend to lean heavily on the "gods" concept. But it's not tricky in that it's difficult - I just have to remember to edit one or two phrases in flavor text, typically.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Frankly if you want to get all philosophical it really comes from themselves, they just think it comes from another source. But don't tell the paladin.

It's okay, the AD&D paladins already know this. "My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure." Not because Pelor or some other pagan god is blessing me. It must have been at some point in 3E or so that paladins turned into war-clerics, and personally I don't like that view and am glad that 5E paladins are more differentiated. (They don't use Wisdom like clerics do, they use Charisma, just like self-powered Sorcerers do. Charisma is the "force of personality" attribute.)

ObDresden Files: Sanya the agnostic paladin and Knight of the Cross. And now the other Knight of the Cross is Jewish...

 

[Jester David]

I initially had no gods in my world. Clerics instead drew energy from non-anthropomorphized concepts: creation and destruction, with philosophies based around those acting similar to churches. But this was in late 3e/early 4e and I decided that the no-gods idea didn't mesh well with 4e's assumptions and design. Especially not with every got having a feat. So I dumped the idea and went with standard gods.

You need some external force for clerics (to differentiate them from wizards), but it need not be gods. There's lots of options. I go into different religions and ways of thinking of gods in my Guide to Worldbuilding. (Please buy, my video card just died and I cannot afford a new one.) But, in passing, it'd be easy to swap gods out for things like the spirits of ancestors, the essence of the land, immortals, angels, leftover power of creation, or abstract philosophies.
Heck, Dragonlance had a slight variant magic system for a while where sorcery and mysticism were basically the same thing and cleric type magic was just tied to life and living things over wizard magic being elemental.

 

[Viking Bastard]

In my current game, while there are gods who are worshipped, they are merely powerful (mortal) beings who have ascended to a higher plane of existence--basically like Mystara's Immortals. Being worshipped gives you power, so many (but not all) such beings seek out establishing religions centered around themselves. Archfey, Demon Lords, etc, are all examples of such beings.

Not all religions worship these immortals--many religions have no real basis in reality, and many worship regional spirits, The Source/Presence/One True All-Encompassing God, the Teachings of Prophet Bob, etc.

Clerics, though, are not connected to any of those at all, although they may align themselves with such powers if it suits them. Clerics are the chosen/imbued champions of the Cosmic Functions, astral concepts given existence by the minds of mortals. Clerics' jobs are not to promote worship, but rather to lobby for these concepts around the cosmos--a Cleric of the War/Life domain' purpose is to promote War or Life, however he feels this is best done, as these Concepts are not sentient per se and as such do not have opinions on the matter. Rather, they exist as metaphysical hyper-memes, who "want" to spread to as many minds as possible like a virus "wants" to spread itself to as many host bodies as possible.

Each Cleric will have his own reasonings for why they think spreading War/Life/whatever is important, but it doesn't need to be rational. They may just really like War.

 

[JeffB]

midichlorians....

 

[Sunseeker]

My favorite "god" in any universe is Karona the False God.

Why? Because she was only as powerful as what her believers believed her capable of.

I recall in Neverwinter 2, there was a mention that the belief of the faithful was actually what was behind the power of a god and that a god couldn't really "die" until the last of their faithful was gone.

In godless settings, I apply a similar concept. The energy that is behind all magic is an alignment neutral magic-stuff. How it forms in reality depends on how it is channeled. In the case of "divine" (good and evil) it is the will of the user that defines what sort of form is takes. "Gods" are the will of the faithful shaping the magical reality of the universe. They're as strong and as capable as their followers are numerous and faith is strong but they aren't "real". Some "gods" have metagame this system in order to perpetuate their "existence". There's some neat tricks to this system which are somewhat existential and difficult to explain in a text post.

 

[Unwise]

Personally, I run a setting where all of the gods are dead, gone, banished or asleep. This is the best of both worlds. Clerics can still channel power off them, like vestiges. There is an awful lot of residual god-power floating around in the universe and it is fairly easily tapped into. Most people don't know that the gods are gone, after all, they see the priests cast spells.

The second upside of this is that I don't have to worry about the gods motivations, deus ex machina, power plays, and why they don't intervene. It effectively lets my campaign have religions, clerics and cults, but saves me the hassles of having the gods themselves.

Thirdly, because, for those in the know, the power of the gods is up for grabs, this leads heroes and villains to try and capture it for themselves. For instance, somebody might be a living saint, attempting to follow in the ways of The Ever Peaceful to tap into its power. Another might be the greatest questing knight in the land, and be effectively becoming an avatar of the goddess of valor. Villains on the other hand, try to pillage the power of the dead good gods, wake the evil sleeping ones and commit acts of horror in order to gain the residual power of the evil vestiges.

There are lots of places remaining that are 'strong in the darkside/lightside' like places where gods died, or famous last stands happened in the past. At these places, clerics can sometimes tap into the thoughts and feelings of their absent gods. This is a pale distortion though and not a sentience or a ghost.

This also leads to one of my favorite cults. The god of prophecy knew that he was going to die, so he wrote down a whole bunch of commands and prophecies to see his people through after his passing. The remaining cult know that he is dead, but it does not matter as he has set the path for them to follow. They go around doing things, often with no idea why, as the god did not deem it necessary to share that. They misinterpret a lot of stuff and do a lot of seemingly dumb stuff, that mostly ends up working out for the best.