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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6120682" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, though it would be extraordinarily difficult for a mortal to do so.  Mortals have been known to slay divine avatars however.The way I try to explain it to people is if a person from my world went to medieval Europe they should be shocked by the lack of involvement of the clergy in the day to day lives of the people.  The Western separation between secular and sacred, between private and public, doesn't really exist in my campaign world.  In effect, one church or the other controls virtually every aspect of social and economic life.   The public baths are run by a church.  The homeless shelter is run by a church.  The streets are cleaned by a church.  All the gymnasiums are owned by a different church.  The hospitals are ran by churches.  The orphanages are ran by churchs.  The undertakers are run by a different church.  In many cases, most of the butchers are laybrothers in a church.  No professional army will take the field without a priest along to bless the affair.  Every trade and business belongs to a guild and each guild funds a shrine or temple a pays for the upkeep of a priest if they are able, and nominally at least that priest is the head of the guild (or rather the representative of the head of the guild, the diety) and looks to the priest for guidance.  Each guild and business is inspected, overseen, and regulated by a church, and for most people education and schools means a temple.  Even the head of the thieves guild in the city I started the game in is a priest(ess).  Likewise, I always try to have a god appear to the players during the kick off adventure (though, because of player choices, they ended up missing that scene in my current game).  I see the involvement of the gods in the lives of the PC's as being something like the involvement of the gods in the the lives of Odysseus or other greek heroes.   There has been at least three cases of divine intervention by the gods directly on behalf of the PC's since the game started - one god cast Sanctuary on a PC two save him from some conjured fiends, another granted a non-cleric a spell in exchange for a blood sacrifice (the PC's own blood), and a third sent an angel to rescue a cleric that had fallen on the field of battle.It depends.  There can be pretty intense rivalry between any dieties with overlapping portfolios.  Because of the way alignment works in my game, it's rare for two dieties to have the same portfolio and not be of radically different alignment and often, if they are similar in outlook and portfolio its because they are siblings.  But for example, a good sun goddess and a good rain goddess can be at odds with each other.   However, keep in mind that the people are exclusively polytheist.   Farmers are likely to worship or at least propitiate the gods of light, night, rains and storms regardless of the alignment of the farmer or the diety.  A farmer that only worshiped gods of goodness would be seen  as a bit odd by most of the community, and perhaps inflicted with hubris if he refused to make a blood offering to the god of floods just because (or maybe especially because) the god was violent and bloodthirsty.  Who is he to judge the gods?  Most people see worship as a practical matter, rather than as an act of love or devotion.  If the church does.  You'll note that most temples operate quite openly as businesses that provide services.  Again, no one really expects anyone to 'tithe' as an act of love and devotion.  The idea that you would love the gods and they would love you is pretty foreign to the setting.  The idea is that the gods are deserving of worship simply by being greater beings, and besides as a practical matter there is a valuable economic transaction going on.   The gods need something from you, and in return for service you'll recieve their blessing.If the cleric does something that significantly departs from the gods teaching or casts the god in a bad light, then yes.  Most gods take a pretty broad view on what advances their cause though.  This can lead to divisions among their followers.  For example, one PC (now dead) belonged to a secret order of assassins operating within one of the major 'good' faiths.  They considered it their divinely ordained mission to kill necromancers whereever they were found.  Officially, their order had been banned centuries ago.  Unofficially, different leaders of the church had continued to quietly support it.  If this got out, it probably would have led to a violent schism within the church, as many members of the faith would have assumed that the church had been invaded by an alien philosophy that needed expelled.  OOC, I would use this as an example of why you can't always expect a Commune spell to work - sometimes dieties have very good reasons for just not answering questions or even lying to their own clerics.   Regardless of how the diety would weigh in on this question, she would have a falling away of followers disenchanted in their faith and yet, each faction in her faith believed that they were doing good and serving her.  In my campaign, the gods had a war (very 'originally' called the Godswar) which killed a lot of them and nearly destroyed the world (this is bad, because the world was made by a departed creator diety that has left the multiverse, so if the remaining gods break it, they cant' fix it).  As a result, they signed a treaty called 'the Compact', that limits how they interact with the world.  The exact rules aren't known by mortals, but it is known that each time a diety intervenes a rival diety can claim the right to intervene to an equal degree.  So if a diety saves the life of a follower, a rival diety can now intervene to kill one of the first dieties followers.   As a result, dieties have to be careful how they intervene because the Compact forces balance on the universe.   The gods don't necessarily like this balance, but they can resolve the issue in their favor only by risking another gods war, so the gods are continually using mortals to maneuver against each other in a high stakes 'game' presumably with the end of aggragating enough power to themselves to win the Godswar rematch outright.They are very not omniscient in my world.  Often they can't even see the present clearly.   But they can definately blow things up good if they ever want to.  Whether or not gods get power from their worshipers is an intence point of religious debate in my world.  Some say 'Yes', others 'No'.  One of the heresies even says that the Gods get existence from worship, and only exist because people worship them.  The truth is not known to mortals, and the gods aren't talking and if they do, no one is sure if you could trust them to tell you the truth anyway. (If a trickster god says the heretics are right, do you believe him or not?)Every town's churches have a unified front on one issue - keep out any rival faiths.  It's the one thing that they can be gauranteed to work together on.  The heads of temples generally form a 'white council' (or 'black council' as the case may be) which meets secretly to discuss what should be done in the town or city.  Even though most towns have a nominal secular leader, if the 'white council' ever advices the leader to do something you can be pretty sure it will happen.   However, this is balanced by the fact that if the churches are ever working against the will of the people too openly, there is a good chance the people will demand new priests or religions more suited to what they desire.  And there are alway rivals ready to step into this gap.  So a more hands off and behind the scenes approach is typical.</blockquote>

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