D&D General The Role and Purpose of Evil Gods

[Minigiant]

For my own part, "god"/"deity" connotes something more...fundamental to existence than these other things. A powerful devil is, to be sure, a dangerous supernatural force with a particular agenda, and an evil god is likewise a dangerous supernatural force with a particular agenda. But "godhood" connotes something more deeply-tied to the nature of reality.

This is part of why I prefer the 4e conception of what godhood means, as compared to earlier editions. In a very real sense, 4e gods are living concepts. Something about what hope IS, exists in Bahamut and in Pelor. Something about what storms are exists in Kord. Etc. When you kill Tiamat in the end of Scales of War, you aren't JUST defeating a powerful supernatural force of evil. You're literally making greed, envy, and malice less impactful in the world. That doesn't mean greed will cease to exist, but it does mean that her death should herald an age where the things she embodied are weakened:. Charity, kindness, and benevolence will flower in the wake of her destruction. These could, of course, eventually become problems in their own right (e.g. these good things being warped into extreme and oppressive things), but at least for the time being, vice will be diminished and virtue will thrive.

You wouldn't get that kind of result from killing a "mere" fiend or celestial. Kill a powerful angel and sure, the forces of good have lost a powerful member, but you haven't damaged the cause, you haven't hurt Good-ness itself. Take out a succubus, even the queen of the succubi, and you'll certainly cause a stir and probably weaken Abyssal ambitions due to the resulting infighting, but you won't make Evil-ness less prevalent. Killing a deity-level figure, on the other hand, has serious implications that go beyond the direct personal schemes and servants of the dead god.

I'm using an idea like this in one of my settings.

The gods are living concepts of aspects of the world. When a god has a god-child and that child god comes to take own an aspect, that aspect is born into prominence. Spring doesn't become a thing or doesn't gain impotence until Persephone becomes Queen of the Underworld.

Likewise a god can be spontaneously created by a worldly aspect gaining power. This is the Eldar spawning Slaneesh in 40k by being too indulgent.

So a powerful devil, demon, or fey doesn't become a god until they embody an aspect of the world and take that spark.

So your Evil God of Murder should kill another god. Your Evil God of Undeath should have created an new kind of undead and took an undead creature as their heralds.

 

[Faolyn]

Note that I don't have Warlocks in my game; if I did I'm fairly sure I'd end up making them a variant of Cleric rather than of Wizard.

I've always seen warlocks as clerics for things that aren't quite gods.

 

[Helldritch]

I've always seen warlocks as clerics for things that aren't quite gods.

Or fools that enter contract with powerful being because they can't accept to worship something beside themselves. Especially warlocks of infernals and Great Old ones. Those of the Archfey are either fools or simply took a short cut in exchange for (The few know what...). Other patrons save maybe celestials, are on the par with evil vilains giving powers to fools so that they will get either a soul or a pawn or maybe both? Sooner or later...

 

[Scribe]

Or fools that enter contract with powerful being because they can't accept to worship something beside themselves. Especially warlocks of infernals and Great Old ones. Those of the Archfey are either fools or simply took a short cut in exchange for (The few know what...). Other patrons save maybe celestials, are on the par with evil vilains giving powers to fools so that they will get either a soul or a pawn or maybe both? Sooner or later...

I like this. My personal take, is it's people who have gained access to power outside their control/understanding, and there should be a mechanical cost in having that.

My GOO Warlock didn't sign a pact, because my GOO Entities wouldn't register his existence anyway, and there is a cost (sanity) in using those powers.

Someone said something about how Warlocks are just Clerics, or the other way around, and it's bugged me ever since.

 

[Minigiant]

I've always seen warlocks as clerics for things that aren't quite gods.

Well that's what it is.. sorta.

Not Quite Gods can't grant divine spells. Creating warlocks is a workaround by sharing power or transforming the mortal.
Technically actual gods can create warlocks as well.

 

[Scribe]

I've always seen warlocks as clerics for things that aren't quite gods.

There was a tweet on this, it's stuck in my mind since. Perkins maybe.

 

[Faolyn]

Well that's what it is.. sorta.

Not Quite Gods can't grant divine spells. Creating warlocks is a workaround by sharing power or transforming the mortal.
Technically actual gods can create warlocks as well.

Yeah, but they don't have nearly as much reason to do so. Unless you go with the idea that warlocks allow the gods to have a secret war because they don't register as divinely-empowered clerics with other gods.

 

[Helldritch]

I like this. My personal take, is it's people who have gained access to power outside their control/understanding, and there should be a mechanical cost in having that.

My GOO Warlock didn't sign a pact, because my GOO Entities wouldn't register his existence anyway, and there is a cost (sanity) in using those powers.

Someone said something about how Warlocks are just Clerics, or the other way around, and it's bugged me ever since.

Warlocks are not clerics. Definitely not.
They signed a contract, a pact or pledge to do whatever their patron needs in order to achieve power.

Whenever a warlock is created I make a contract with the player. A real contract.
We stipulate the duration(life, 10 years or whatever else might seems logical for the patron, limitations (and usually there are some such as not acting against the patron), the warlock's obligations toward his/her patron and different penalties if push comes to shove. The current warlock has signed a life long contract of servitude to the Raven Queen in my campaign world but she does not have deity powers over there. She wants a specific church (the one of the god of death) to be brought down. So our warlock does his best to slay any clerics of the god of death, preach about the Raven Queen (celestial pact by the way) and hope that someone will eventually become a cleric of the Raven Queen. Should he succeed, he will keep all his power as a warlock as long as he can live. Being raised will restore powers (as stated in the contract).

But woe to a warlock that goes against his patron's wishes. All his/her powers are stripped down and in the case of a life long contract (or soul selling in Infernal or Abyssal contract) then the warlock forfeits his life and his soul. I will start sending stronger and stronger fiends to collect. My players know this fact and have actually experienced it twice.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Why did Greece have Ares? There was no need for multiple gods of war, as Athena covered that space quite nicely and was definitely better-liked than Ares. He has no other major qualifications for relevance, other than having been born earlier than Athena was. The other gods, even his own father, openly dislike him, with Zeus even openly telling him in the Illiad that if he were the son of some other god, he would've been punted from Olympus long ago. The only deity shown to have positive relations with him is Aphrodite, and the exposure of their affair resulted in ridicule for both of them, so i doubt that lasted. He's the god of bloodlust, slaughter, needless violence, and indiscriminate killing on the battlefield. He's pretty much as close as you can get to an actually "evil" deity in Greek myth, portrayed with effectively zero redeeming qualities until he was syncretized with the FAR more dignified and diverse Roman equivalent, Mars, who was an agricultural deity and not NEARLY as closely linked to mindless slaughter.

A few reasons. I'm not a major Greek Scholar though, so take my rememberances of dozens of bits of trivia with a healthy dose of "history is hard"

1) Ares was explicitly supposed to be terrible, because most Greeks saw war as being terrible and pointlessly destructive. The Greeks didn't LIKE war. The Romans LOVED war.

2) Athena is a much much older deity. Her, Zeus, Aphrodite, Persephone and Poseidon can be easily traced back to the Minoans (spelling) before the Greeks. And she was a big deal. Like, she was reduced to being the Daughter of Zues sprang fully formed from his head in the Greek Myths. In her originating form, she was his equal (Poseidon was king of the gods, covering the underworld and the oceans. Hades didn't exist) and was a goddess of war and wisdom even back then (I think)

2.5) Part of her being reduced to the daughter of Zeus, and the creation of Ares likely (or maybe, again, not a scholar of this stuff) is because the Greeks were very very misogynistic. They couldn't stand having her be who she was (same with aphrodite, who also had war goddess connotations, which survived in Sparta) but she was also too important to fully get rid of. So, since they couldn't erase her, or make her terrible, they made Ares, the REAL war god.

Also, syncretization and mythological drift make having a "set" mythology and such basically impossible.

But we don't even need to go that far from ancient Greece to find another real-world "god of evil." Just a short ways to the east, in Asia Minor, you have the Avestan/Zoroastrian tradition, which is specifically near-dualist (depending on time and place; sometimes Angra Mainyu is presented as almost but not quite Ahura Mazda's equal-and-opposite, other times Ahura Mazda is objectively superior in all ways and Angra Mainyu is foolishly wasting his time trying to win an impossible battle.) You also have the once quite widespread but now defunct Manichaeism, which is expressly dualist, with an eternal World of Light led by a good ultimate deity and an eternal World of Darkness led by an eternal evil one, with all of creation being just a byproduct of the constant wars of aggression perpetrated by the Dark against the Light.

So...sometimes, yes, you really can have actual deities that most people despise or fear, that are "on the prayer roll" to some extent and which are recognized for their power even if not for any positive qualities they might have. D&D definitely makes a lot more "evil god" type entities than is typical for most real-world religions. However, it also makes those gods very personable and often literally actually human beings who ascended to godhood, rather than demigods by birth who shed their mortality or gods who forgot their status and regained it, which is similarly unprecedented in mythology. So, given that the nature and process of godhood is already quite a bit different from how ancient peoples understood the divine, I don't really know that this particular divergence stands out as needing change, unless you're proposing to heavily rewrite how divinity works in a D&D context (as, for example, Rich Baker did with Eberron's deities.)

I think the bolded part is more of the problem. Almost no religion or mythology I know of has both Evil Gods and powerful evil spirits that oppose the gods. Generally either both sides are divine or one side is divine and the other fiendish. You don't have a good divine, an evil divine, and a fiendish.

 

[Lanefan]

Almost no religion or mythology I know of has both Evil Gods and powerful evil spirits that oppose the gods. Generally either both sides are divine or one side is divine and the other fiendish. You don't have a good divine, an evil divine, and a fiendish.

I think for D&D purposes we can just consider "evil divine" to just be the divine-grade high-powered end of "fiendish" and have done with it.