Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6425741" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is room in any pastiche of ancient paganism for gray areas.  In fact, one of the biggest problems you might run into is that there is only room for gray areas.  After all, the attraction of that sort of cosmology is that the gods are all basically super-humans, with all the same feelings and failings that you are familiar with - just bigger.   It's the same thing that makes super-hero comic books or vampire 'capes' stories like Twilight so attractive to many people.  You are making the mundane seem meaningful by amping up the scale, and you are making the universe seem relatable.   The king and queen of the gods?  The fight like an old married couple and don't even share a bed anymore.   Kind of makes your marriage seem alright, eh?  And the king of the universe is an old proud lecher with a quarrelsome family filled with political drama.  Pop some popcorn.My gods - at least the 'good' ones - are meant to be a bit more righteous in their best selves than the Greek, more humble, more charitable, etc. but the same basic outlook is intentional in my own cosmology.  Performing the same mental games I recommend above, I came to the conclusion that the gods themselves, being NPCs, were just fragments of my person and could not be better than the best angels of my nature.  Thus, my desire to keep a focus on relatively 'small gods' that anyone with wisdom would not expect to see infinite or perfected attributes in.   Since I can't be perfect in my wisdom and knowledge, neither can the gods of the world that exists in my imagination.  `Since I can't be perfectly righteous, neither can be the gods of my shared imaginary space.  This is sort of a half-campaign level secret, since the gods don't really advertise: "We're not really gods.  We're just uber-powerful beings with some small power over reality." and so many people in the imaginary world attribute to the gods attributes that they don't really have - Metis is assumed by many of her worshippers to not merely be the Goddess of Wisdom, but to be Wisdom embodied - a perfect incarnation of Wisdom.  Metis doesn't necessarily make it her first priority to disabuse every believer of this, but certainly Metis - being wise if not Wise - doesn't believe this of herself, and would disabuse her high priestess of this sort of hubris since she desires her high priestess to be wise.  Players, for their part, are generally steeped in Judeo-Christian religious traditions to degrees that they don't even realize (even the atheists), so they tend to assume a basically monotheistic outlook with deities that think Faith and Charity are really important - and are sometimes shocked to realize this arrangement never existed in the first place. If you have a bunch of imperfect deities, then you have all sorts of room for gray areas.  You potentially could have nothing but neutral aligned deities in either of the systems Gilladian is toying with.  It's quite possible to have a setting where mortals are more good (or evil) than the gods, and the gods think that mortal goodness is something of a strange aberration, or at least, something only valued as a tool and in that sense no different that evil.   And it's quite possible to conceive of the gods as infinite and perfect and still have all sorts of room for gray areas.  A belief system centered on balance for example doesn't really believe 'good' is a quality in and of itself, and can't exist without contrast with evil.   From this perspective, the notion of doing away with evil seems ridiculous.   Analogies like, "If there was no darkness, how would you know it was light" will be made, and so forth.</blockquote>

Verification