D&D General Death of a god

[RangerWickett]

One of the defining elements of the ZEITGEIST setting is that during a holy war, an elvish goddess of womanhood was slain, and every one of her worshipers on the material plane died at the same time. The backlash turned the capital of the opposing side and all the lands around it into a dead magic zone, and transformed their leaders into tieflings. The elvish empire collapsed because only a few hundred women survived.

 

[billd91]

There's no single template for all the things that could happen. But keep in mind some things could be a direct effect, others could be indirect. For example, Paizo's Golarion setting has a dead god - the First Man, Aroden. He's a human who ascended to godhood, did a lot of stuff in the setting, then went off for a while. He was prophesied to come back, but then suddenly didn't because he was dead. The direct effects included:
1) major prophecies stopped working
2) storms wracked the setting and the permanent hurricane the Eye of Abendego came into being, destroying a couple of countries and disrupting the ongoing colonization of another
3) priests of Aroden lost access to spells

More indirectly:
4) The nation of Cheliax, where Aroden was prophesied to appear, descended into civil war and eventually became dominated by a devil-worshiping regime, it's most recent colonies spun off into their own political control in Korvosa and Sargava, and the empire started breaking up in other ways
5) A trio of spellcasters opened the World Wound, a connection between Golarion and the Abyss, wrecking yet another nation - may have been coincidental, but the spellcasters were ultimately working for an old enemy of Aroden, so I'm guessing an opportunity was seized.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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[aco175]

At some point the friends and superiors of these lessor gods will notice and take action.

You could start with a regional effect when a minor god dies. An unexpected storm or deafening thunder through the sky.

 

[Tonguez]

first thing you need epic portents of impending doom (Suns go Dark, Volcanes Erupt, Typhoons and Tidal Waves, Plagues of Slimes fall from the Sky), then you get the Soothsayers and Prophets spontaneously spouting Prophecies before they combust and a simple farm boy raised by his ‘uncle’, must join the ancient hermit to recover the Sword of Power and go on a quest to defeat the Dark Lord, Save the World - possibly by becoming The New God of AWESOME

 

[Tonguez]

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[MechaTarrasque]

If the god of dwarves dies, your dwarf PC will immediately become a stout Halfling (ditto the rest of the dwarves). I suspect for a lot of players that is a bigger deal than earthquakes and signs in the sky.....

 

[Bohandas]

It depends on the god's portfolio.

It also depends on the strength of the god's connection to their portfolio, and there are different levels of this:

To use a sun god for an example, at one end of the scale you could have a sun god who IS the sun. A step down from that you could have a god who the sun is an extension of or who empowers the sun to shine. A step down from that you could have a god who controls the sun, but the sun exists independently of them. A step down from that you could have a god who has some influence over the sun or can use it to do some larger-than-life trick (such as generating targeted solar flares, or using the sun as a giant scrying sensor which can see everything that happens during the day, or empowering it to drive off the undead) but doesn't have full control over it. On a similar level to that you could have a god wherein instead of the sun being an extension of the god the god is an extension of the sun. A step down from that you could have a god who's not so much an extension of the sun as much as just some fragment of it that happened to develop an independent sentient existence. Finally, a step down from that, you could have a god who merely lives on the sun or something, or a god who merely resembles the sun.

The death of a god in one of the first two categories would be cataclysmic and plunge the world into eternal darkness. The death of a god in one of the latter categories not so much. And in many of the established settings the sun gods fall decidedly into the later categories, as there tend to be a multitude of them who are distinct entities and not part of one another.

 

[Kurotowa]

This partly depends on the relationship between deity and domain in your setting. Is the deity a manifest embodiment of the domain, and injuring the god injures the domain? Is the deity part of a pantheon, so that when they're struck down the domain shifts to the next most eligible god? Or are deities simply powerful entities who have established their rule over cosmic aspects that befit their nature, and the domain will carry on naturally without them?

Still, in the broad... let's go with the classics. Their priests have fits and nightmares, their statues weep blood, their shrines suffer unnatural structural failure, and dark omens or chaotic outbursts plague the domains they used to control. Prayers go unanswered, existing blessings falter, and their servant spirits may run wild or compete to ascend to their vacant throne.

 

[Li Shenron]

In the usual RPG game, the death of a deity is trivial. In fact, killing a deity is a trivial task if the deity is given stats, as long as of course the PCs are high level enough, but that's all it takes. As such, the consequences are also trivial... you may get some earthquake here and meteor swarm there, even major cataclysms but guess what, the PCs are going to survive whatever so even if destroys a continent it will still be trivial from the PC's point of view. That's what happens in most games featuring the death of a deity, but that' because after all a killable deity is not much more than just a very high level creature.

Now, if you really treated deities in a RPG as deities are narrated by real world religions, things would be wildly different. Killing the "God of War" wouldn't be a matter of stabbing it enough times until it's down to 0 hp. Perhaps it would require to somehow end all wars in the world, and erase the concept of war from the minds of the people so that there won't be more wars in the future. That's if you treat the "God of War" as the embodiment of the concept of war itself. Presumably the opposite could be true i.e. if you managed to physically kill the God of War you might have the effect that all wars stop because the concept of war disappears from the people's mind. Either way, this approach pretty much means that practically deities don't die. But that's probably not fun for a lot of players, and this approach is followed only by DMs like me who just don't want to deal with that kind of narrative with PCs wanting to ascending to godhood themselves and change the pantheons.

It is possible to have a sort of doable compromise between the two extremes. For example, deities may not be as much as the concepts themselves, but effectively mere proxies for those concepts. This is basically what Forgotten Realms does with the idea that each deity is simply an extremely powerful being which oversees a portfolio of concepts: when a deity is removed, the portfolio becomes vacant but is quickly claimed by competitor deities. This idea can definitely spark some interesting effects on the game while still making it manageable: perhaps the death of the current "God of War" would affect all existing wars in the world leading them to a stall... strategies fail for no apparent reason, any sort of impediment come up unexpectedly so that it becomes difficult to start new wars or win existing ones, newly crafted weapons come up defective and existing one rust more quickly. Generally speaking, I would focus on stuff strongly related to the portfolio, not just general catastrophies, and try to use it to twist the campaign significantly for a few character levels at least.