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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Grassy Gnoll" data-source="post: 6876642" data-attributes="member: 6788652">The idea of a deity being the personification of a given concept (eg justice), phenomenon (eg storms), or nature (eg greed) fits perfectly with a by-another-name worship of said deity by a number of races, precisely because the personification itself is reflective of the person relating to the concept/phenomenon/nature.All races have a shared experience of these what I'll call concepts as a catch all term, but they personify that concept in a way that makes sense to them, culturally. An Orc will see an Orcish physicality when that concept is embodied, an Elf an Elven form, a human a human, a gnoll a gnoll. The gods are quite literally, to each race, "one of us" because the deity embodies that which is understood by us, lies within us, or is thought by us. So naturally the races will call the God by a name from their own language and clothe it in a form acceptable to their eyes. Or rather, the better to instil worship, the deity will appear to each race in the manner most suited there to do.Each race's own nature will accentuate aspects of that concept to suit itself, so there are differences. One race may view storms and vengeance as so closely aligned that one deity covers both; in another race the storm may be more aligned with death.If this were the case, then things such as the great old ones may be a matter of the deity being seen for its true, unfiltered, non-racially presented, self: a form with no relation to normal physics, a colour unseen, a being existing simultaneously in infinite different dimensions rather than the paltry three we understand.It may be interesting to create an interlocking pantheon of these deities, each of which is itself merely a facet of one of a small number of ultimately divine or supercelestial beings, constantly jockeying with one another for power but being stopped from plain old war by the need to share worship among different races and cultures by theses cultures' free will determining differing axes of power and alignments of concepts forcing the supercelestials to cooperate more than they'd like. Which explains why beings of such unimaginable power and properties haven't wiped all life out yet; in the end the only thing keeping reality together is the very differences between races, the things that the races themselves wish to eradicate ('our gods are the only true gods'), but if successful would actually be catastrophic for all life.So, yeah, Gruumsh = Talos = Shub Niggurath. Why not, it might make an interesting theme to have a world where a war is fought by two races in the name of two different gods who are in fact the same god, which in turn is merely one aspect on one plane of another being who job shares that aspect with another being when in a different plane of being.But for all intents and purposes, on a day to day level, it's business as usual for your cleric of whoever. Just don't listen to those crazy telepathic warlocks with the flecks of spittle on their beards from trying to articulate their 'patron''s name. They're just mad.</blockquote>

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