Chaosmancer
Legend
Hi all,
I've been doing some preliminary work on converting an older edition adventure to 5e. I am planning on setting it in a homebrew world of my own devising, which has religions / spiritual traditions borrowed from such sources as Game of Thrones and Dragon Age, both of which borrow from real world traditions, of course.
While in the process of doing some of this work, I came across an evil NPC who is written up as a cleric of Erythnul, the Greyhawk god of "hate, envy, malice, panic, ugliness, and slaughter" (to quote one source Google found for me).
That got me thinking: what is the purpose / role of evil gods in D&D? Why do we have gods of (un)death, murder, strife, disease, tyranny, slaughter, etc? Especially when you consider that D&D also has demons, devils and other foul entities that embody and promote all of those things. Why the overlap?
Looking at the real world pantheons included in the 5e PHB, the evil gods are primarily gods of trickery, gods of magic (which, in the real world, has historically had sinister connotations), gods of war/battle, gods of predators like crocodiles and serpents, gods of the elements like storms and the sea (which can be viewed as "uncaring to the point of cruelty"), and gods who serve as judges of the dead/keepers of the underworld. These gods all make sense to me in one way or another.
What doesn't make sense is having gods who fulfill basically the same function as demons and devils and Lovecraftian Far Realm entities. Why have a god of tyranny like Bane, when you also have archdevils like Asmodeus and Levistus who promote tyranny? What does Bane have to offer someone that Asmodeus et al can't also offer? Why have a god of chaos and murder like Bhaal when you've got demons that are all about that sort of thing? Why have a god of death/undeath like Myrkul when you've got a "demon prince of undeath" in the form of Orcus? What sets Tharizdun apart from Cthulhu and Hadar and their ilk?
Haven't read the rest of the thread yet, but this subject has come up a few times, and the reasons are generally pretty simple, though I find them incredibly uncompelling.
1) People assume that Demons and Devils must be weaker than gods. This is the biggie, in all honesty, and I can see where the mixing of traditions led to this, but it has a serious problem if all the gods are good or neutral and the Lords of Evil are weaker than the Gods of Good. Which is the classic problem of evil, "why does evil still exist if it is weak"
And many of the traditional answers to that question don't work in DnD. Because they rely on conceits that many multi-theisitic mythologies and structures don't have. So, they made Evil Gods, beings just as powerful but malevolent.
I think though where this goes wrong is that the "problem of evil" doesn't exist in many mythological frameworks, because Demons/Devils ect AREN'T weaker than the gods. I'm probably oversimplifying, but look at the variety of "enemies of the gods". In Greek Mythology the major enemy of the Gods are the The Titans, and they are most assuredly not weaker than the Olympians. In Norse Mythology the Aesir fought and then aligned with the Vanir, but then both were fighting the Jotunns, who again were not "weaker" than the Gods. If you go into a more Shinto tradition with Yokai (very roughly "evil spirits") and Kami (Very badly misunderstood as "gods") you'll find not only are they not more powerful than each other, but at certain points in history, they were considered the same type of being, just one was more malevolent and dangerous than the other.
For my setting, I am taking the same approach as Eberron and making it so no one knows for sure if the gods and god-like beings exist. I am now also considering getting rid of any gods that overlap with the demon princes and archdevils and Great Old Ones and the like. Instead of a cleric of Erythnul, I might make the aforementioned NPC a fiend-pact warlock.
In my setting, I might also make it so the gods are all about salvation -- that is, saving their followers from the damnation that comes with selling their souls to the fiends and other evil entities. Instead of good gods/entities vs evil gods/entities, the spiritual conflict of the setting would be gods vs fiends. Evil is seductive, so the fiends can be like "The gods are the ones who want to enslave you; we just want to give you your freedom -- the freedom to do whatever you want, without having to obey some stuffy god's rules". Plenty of room for nuance still. There just wouldn't be any clerics of death and murder and that sort of thing. They'd all be cultists, and if any of them have magic, it would most likely be of the warlock pact variety (with the more fighter-ish types being paladins of conquest).
Thoughts?
2) And this is the other big thing. This removal of evil clerics, because we think that the Demons and Devils can't have clerics. And people want evil clerics. However, this line is way blurrier than a lot of people make it out to be. We've had clerics of Orcus in older versions of the game, and the Cultist Fanatic in the MM NPC section is clearly using clerical spells.
Since we have celestial warlocks, I'm fine letting Demon Lords and Archdevils have clerics. We have to remember that in real world sources, many of the beings we consider to be "powerful demons" like Baal and Beelzebul were actually gods of competing religions. So, in terms of the "source material" having clerics and priests of those beings is exactly what you would see.