Gods and the Multiverse

[Voadam]

Spelljammer was a little odd in that each world was inside a crystal sphere and this somehow limited divine interactions within the sphere with only a few gods of travel being operative in the spaces between spheres.

The division of clerical spell power listed above is how I remember it.

However, since the gods are on various planes (usually outer planes) it would make sense that any prime material world that was connected to those planes should be sufficient to carry divine power to a cleric, so a Greyhawk priest should get his spells when visiting faerun.

Why this is not (was not) so I couldn't say.

 

[Kemrain]

Why is it arnwyn that we are in agreement so reliably?

Because you're a genius. Or Canadian. Or both.

I think it's because you're really the same person!

- Kemrain the Conspiracy Theorist.

Wingsandsword, thanks for that reply. Big and concise. Interesting ideas ya'got there, and in books too. Thanks. I'll see if I can't find a copy of On Hallowed Ground online.

Now that I've been given the skinny on the rules, I'm getting myself interested in the House Rules aspect. How do the Gods work in your campaign?! Share with the world, or at least the ENWorld.

- Kemrain the Conspiracy Theologist.

 

[Arnwyn]

Spelljammer was a little odd in that each world was inside a crystal sphere and this somehow limited divine interactions within the sphere with only a few gods of travel being operative in the spaces between spheres.

The division of clerical spell power listed above is how I remember it.

However, since the gods are on various planes (usually outer planes) it would make sense that any prime material world that was connected to those planes should be sufficient to carry divine power to a cleric, so a Greyhawk priest should get his spells when visiting faerun.

Why this is not (was not) so I couldn't say.

Well, the Planescape box actually had a nifty little diagram that showed how the Crystal Spheres (on the Prime Material Plane) fit in with the rest of the planar multiverse.

It really was all interconnected, and the designers definitely put in the effort to make all the campaign settings fit, if you wanted to use them that way (the results of such can be debated, but they did at least try).

My games (that - to this day - include FR, SJ, and PS) shows that it does work, at least for my particular group (and there's the rub).

 

[Vlos]

In reading this my suggestion would be DiceFreaks. http://Community.dicefreaks.com/

They have a publication (Gates of Hell) which deal with cosmology and all that stuff about Overloards and such things that go beyond Gods of a realm and stuff.

Not sure if it will answer all your questions as it is geared towards the lower planes, but a good read non-the less.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Now that I've been given the skinny on the rules, I'm getting myself interested in the House Rules aspect. How do the Gods work in your campaign?! Share with the world, or at least the ENWorld.

I've never liked the idea of different worlds and conflicting pantheons, and all the headaches such concepts bring. It relegates gods from being omnipotent beings to merely "powerful alien sorcerers." Bleh.

The Gods in my campaign are tied to the fundamental reality of Existence. Their existence is what defines ours. We know and label them as aspects of our reality, because it's the only way for us to understand them. Change. Understanding. Life/Death. Passion. Hunger/Need. Hope/Dream. Malevolence. Perversion/Madness. Fate/Destiny.

Various cultures might give them different names, or worship them in different ways. Some cultures may worship only some of them, or none of them at all.

 

[Klaus]

On Hallowed Ground is an amazing tour-de-force by Collin McComb. It has crunch, it has fluff, it has all the right stuff!

In Planescape, since all (or most) of the Powers live in the Outer Plances, they are aware of each other's existence. They have formed a sort of truce, so all clerics receive their spells in the Prime Material Plane, no matter if it's the Prime they're from (it is assumed that the local god with the same portfolio will forward your spells to you, and expects your god to do the same for his followers).

Things get tricky on the Planes. For each Plane you're removed from your god's home Plane, your effective caster level is dimished by one. So if you worship Zeus (who hangs his toga in Olympus) and you happen to be adventuring in the Abyss, you have to go through Pandemonium, Limbo and Ysgard to get to Olympus. That puts you at -4 caster level.

But there's a loophole! If you worship a pantheon (say, the Olympians) you can use any plane that houses a deity from that Pantheon as the home plane. Our olympian priest in the Abyss would then be just at -2 caster level, since Hades skulks about the Gray Waste (going through Carceri/Tarterus to get there).

 

[Southern Oracle]

With the advent of "godless" clerics and those who worship concepts, as well as druids, rangers, and paladins who cast divine spells but are not tied to one deity, I've slowly introduced the realization that the gods really ARE just powerful alien beings into my campaign. Of course, I run a Planescape campaign, so take my ideas with a grain of salt.

I found the whole clerical-power-reduction procedure cumbersome in 2E Planescape, so I abandoned it when I switched to 3E/3.5E. Barring magic restrictions (which I impose on both arcane and divine magic) by plane, clerics function normally anywhere in the multiverse. The concept of "Overpowers" has been around awhile...Faerunians are familiar with Ao, and the Athar tout the praises of the Great Unknown, and the gods of Zakhara (Al-Qadim) are beyond the ken of normal gods...they are more aspects than physical beings.

In my campaign, there's a paladin who worships a deity of law and righteousness, and an arcane disciple who worships a deity of magic. Both saw their world destroyed before being cast out into the multiverse. They've been told they're the only living creatures left from their planet...and they both still have full spell ability. They haven't given that much thought until now. The arcane disciple was told by Nemamiah the Leper (an outsider from the Oathbound campaign setting by Bastion Press) that all that remains of his god is within him (the arcane disciple). The paladin will be told more or less the same thing when he visits Raziel on Mount Celestia (he's going into the Fist of Raziel prestige class). I'm currently running The Modron March and then planning on going into Dead Gods and then Faction War, so the concept that the gods are not as powerful as they purport to be is an overriding theme.

 

[fusangite]

Now that I've been given the skinny on the rules, I'm getting myself interested in the House Rules aspect. How do the Gods work in your campaign?! Share with the world, or at least the ENWorld.

Every campaign I run, the gods function differently. Furthermore, I usually have multiple operating theories within the world about the gods' nature. None of the theories fully explains the gods' properties but is usually adequate. There is usually somewhat of an objective reality about the nature of the universe but I don't usually nail everything down.

I tend to borrow the theory of whatever culture I'm emulating when it comes to gods. If I'm running an early medieval or late antique European style campaign, I'm likely to use the theory of gods embodied in the Neoplatonic worldview: gods function like demons/angels, affecting the sense-perceptible world through their actions in the intelligible world. The power of a demon/angel can be used either by invoking it without their consent (arcane magic) through knowledge of the god's properties/name or with it (divine magic).

The last game I ran was based on Taoist and Mexican theology, with a physical rather than intellectual heaven -- there, magic use was contingent on obtaining the favour of a god. Sometiems I run arcane magic as natural magic; other times I run it as magic dependent upon lesser demons/angels/gods.

Generally, the universe is eternal or created by a superior divinity who is directly worshipped by a minority or by no one at all and is indirectly honoured through devotion to another divinity.

EDIT: How gods interact with the mortals and with eachother is a tough tough thing to systematize. So I borrow shamelessly; I doubt I could construct a consistent and realistic system on my own.

 

[Voadam]

Now that I've been given the skinny on the rules, I'm getting myself interested in the House Rules aspect. How do the Gods work in your campaign?! Share with the world, or at least the ENWorld.
.

The gods in my game are socially important but functionally irrelevant. Everyone believes they provide power to their followers and you have to follow their churches and dogma to get clerical power, but it is not so. The gods can gain some power from worship so they like this belief system. The churches use it to bolster their own importance. However divine power is actually tapped directly and does not come from the gods. All clerics are actually godless clerics at base for the true source of their powers. The gods and churches only provide a focus and training in tapping this power, they are not truly needed. However most everybody including clerics believes that most clerics gain their powers directly from gods and that godless clerics are rare exceptions powered by faith in some unknown manner.

Faith isn't even necessary in my game, everyone pretty much believes it is but actually divine is just a different flavor of magic as arcane and psionic are.

So in my game you can worship false gods and still get power, or worship demons or dragons or spirit ancestors or be devoted to abstract causes, or for the truly enlightened, not worship at all.

This also explains how a cleric can have powers not attributed to their god. The class is more important than the focal deity.

 

[Maldin]

Part of this thread really is about creation myths. Where (and when) did it all start? Why is the multiverse what it is today? And who exactly is running things? Is it really the gods?

While Spelljammer is often derided as a "joke", and yes, a freely admit that some of SJ was played for laughs, there was alot of thought put behind it, and how to integrate it with the rest of the DnD multiverse. And the physics of SJ are quite a serious attempt at crafting a new type of gaming environment. Why does DnD "space" need to be like real "space"? It doesn't! With magic, and dragons, and gods you can shake hands with! But many people hate SJ exactly because it does not resemble "real space". Hypocritical if you ask me. Open-deck ships with gravity are much more DnDish then the alternative necessary without SJ's unique physics.

As pointed out already by Arnwyn, the idea of crystal spheres in the phlogiston serves quite nicely to isolate individual worlds and their gods, yet provides a means of getting from sphere to sphere without spending centuries in transit. So where does this all start? The spheres must necessarily be very old, yet gods change. IMC, the "present" gods therefore had nothing to do with their creation. They may delude their followers into thinking they were the "creator gods" but nothing could be further from the truth. Many people choose to use the boring idea of present gods as creator gods, an idea that I personally do not like.

To quote my website, the average DM's creation myth goes as such: Anthropomorphic God A pops into existence out of the firmament. (Here I stop reading). God A gets lonely and creates God B, either by budding, or shaping out of clay, or "poof... God B", or some other tired cliche. God A pops God B, producing children Gods C, D, E and F. They fight amongst themselves, pop eachother, divvy up spheres of influence, create planes for homes, create mortals, perhaps produce another generation of young gods. The End. All these gods have names we recognize. All these gods are still around.

Boring.

IMC, as with other who have commented in this thread, gods are merely another rung on the ladder of "beings". They are far more powerful then mortals, and immortals such as fiends, yet they are still just critters. IMC, the Athar (from Planescape) are correct. There are beings higher up the ladder as well. Ultimately, at the top, are the beings responsible for the shape of the multiverse itself. While it is a rather long read (MUCH too long to post here), I point to anyone interested in my theories to my "Life, the Multiverse, and Everything" webpage in the "Epic Mysteries" portion of my website (which I just finished rewriting and expanding) at http://melkot.com Hmmm... let see, the direct link would be http://melkot.com/mysteries/multiverse.html

On that webpage I explain the formation of the Multiverse, and how the rules of physics and magic came to be - accounting for everything from ethos (law, chaos, good, evil) and how the outer planes came to be, extradimensional space, differential time across the planes, sentience, matter and magic energies, and, pertinent to this thread, what the gods (Powers) are and where they came from. I also describe the beings that are actually at the top of the Multiverse food chain.

As for the present-day gods themselves IMC, they are merely the most recent in a long line of gods, the names of the previous generation wiped out by the propaganda of the next. I consider that their energy for sustenance can come from a variety of sources. Some derive energy from their followers like divine parasites. When those gods lose their worshipers, they starve and may eventually die (their husks banished to the Astral). Other gods derive their energies from other sources. For example, Boccob derives energy from the flow of magic itself, hence as long as wizards are casting spells and creating magic items, he will live on and hence is "uncaring" of any worshippers. Others may exist by merging with or feeding off of planes. IMC, the current gods are relative newcomers, and none of them are responsible in any way for the formation or modification of the multiverse, any of the planes, or any pieces of it. Oerth, Faerun, Athas, Krynn... all existed long before any of the gods who claim those worlds as their own, and will exist long after the present gods are gone and replaced.

Denis, aka "Maldin"
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