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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6424655" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, this certainly does map easily to D&D's default three divisions on the spectrum of good.Alright, so the gods are divided.  However, the reign of meteors did occur and its impact is ongoing and producing a world which in your assessment "is all about war and power and the insane grasping after it to the point of madness and beyond."  So I think it is safe to say that at some point in the past, the chaos and disaster loving faction of the gods got the upper hand and has been relishing in that victory ever sense.  Life in the world has been rendered down to a meaningless grasping after power, with the whole world teetering on the brink of madness - and some of it apparently already well over that line.   This doesn't sound like a healthy universe.  This doesn't even sound like a particularly contested universe.   Evil - and particularly in D&D terms we might say Chaotic Evil - has the mastery here.So if you personally are in this setting, what do you personally do?  Who do you empathize with?  The universe is meaningless.  Do you join the power grabbing throng, and try to claw your way to the top to enjoy what you can of life because that's actually what it is all about?   Do you join the forces of Good who, despite getting trounced at some point, are presumably doing what they can to keep this universe from going over the brink?  Or do you damn the whole bunch of pestilent meddling beings, who so far as we can tell so far have never done a lick of good for anyone and don't seem to be really troubled over the mess that they've made?  Extending yourself out through the setting, how do you see the little copies of you responding?  Can you sympathize with all sides of what is going on here?  It's precisely this perspective you have to dwell on.  All those little you's roaming around in your setting - the NPCs - what sort of stories about their relationship to the divine do you want them to have?   Do you want to empathize with the heretics that curse the gods, or do want them revolt you and represent only the worst things you can image?  Can you imagine their priests living quiet yet attractive lives of dignity, wisdom, and contemplation?  Or does the whole idea of that sort of thing make you want to puke?  Make the gods of your world accordingly, the way you want them to be, and the way you want religion to play out.  You want a good deity - make it the sort of god you think you could worship if it were real, whatever that means to your personally.  Can you believe that people would legitimately want to serve this deities and would actively worship them because in some way they are providing something they need, or does the whole setting just make you wonder why anyone would want to worship any of these bozos?  Incidentally, I feel that way about the FR pantheon.  By and large, I feel its completely bereft of mythic power.  I can't imagine anyone getting up the energy to pray to or to curse the FR deities, much less engage in daily pieties or devote their life even unto death on their behalf.   I think part of that is because the roles that the gods have are too pragmatically gamist.  You've got the God of Fighters, the God of Thieves, the God of Magic Users, the God of Paladins, the God of Rangers, and heck, you even have a generic God of Good Aligned Clerics.   Don't make that mistake.  If these gods get worshiped at all, they meet ordinary peoples practical concerns and fears in some way - even the horrific evil ones.  And that's just one of a ton of things that bugs me about it - like its hyper-polytheistic, but everyone seems to be expected to relate to it in a monotheistic way, as if you know, most polytheists don't actually worship multiple gods.Not that it isn't possible to have gods without having widespread religion.  The Lovecraft pantheon is a good example of a pantheon built around the notion of almost anti-gods.  They have divine power.  But worshiping them seems bizarre, both because its not really clear that they care enough to really notice much, and in any event even if they notice it's not like they remotely meet any human needs.  You have to be basically insane to worship one, and maybe even you actually have to be insane before you can communicate to them in a way that isn't sufficiently alien to them that they can understand you.  If you go with the idea of the pantheon of Ur-Monsters, this might be one way to approach things.   They are so remote and alien and perhaps so concerned with a different corner of creation, that even the more benevolent ones might be (paraphrased from the Celestial) "Err.. what's this about meteors?  Why do you people keep going on about meteors?  What sort of meteors?  One moment mortal, I'm losing you..  To much [untranslatable] static from [untranslatable]....  and oh look, it's a 4th hyperbolic translation from the semi-annual migration of [untranslatable].  I got to go.  I'll get back to you in a standard era... you do live that long right?  If not, just arrange your soul to transmigrate through...message ends".  Or as I said, you might not have gods but if you have hosts of active intermediaries, you could still have an extremely baroque Etruscan sort of ritualism as the standard religious practice, based around worshiping every 'small god' you think you could get an advantage from.  Just because you basically only have three gods, wouldn't prevent there being 5 different religious parades a day and thousands of temples in a big city, each dedicated to a different aspect of the deity and a different channel of communicating with them.   Or conversely, every city might just have one huge temple devoted to all three gods and there is a standard and assumed pantheism in the world - you worship the creator and destroyer both.  Everyone does, right?  No?!?? Heretic!!!Of course, each of those choices changes the sort of story options you have.  I can't really pick for you.  It's your story.</blockquote>

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