D&D General Gods, huh, what are they good for?

[Minigiant]

I personally like Dieties as Professions.

Being a Diety gives a Portfolio and a Responsibility. They have near full control of their Domain. But a god has to manage and foster whatever they are in change of.

Clerics and Patron races are their outlets. They are their eyes, ears, voices, and hands.

The edges where 2 domain touch as uncontrollable. Thats the place of monsters and conflict.

For example in my setting the Goddes of the Sea creates sea storms but once they hit land its in the territory of the Goddesses of Earth, Nature, and Fairies. And the whole time the God of the Sky can swoop and snag a storm. And if it is too dark, the God of Darkness can shift it to the north or south.

And where does the majority of rain come from? This process.

So you have 5-10 gods jockeying for popularity as they all can influence rainfall on crops and are canceling each other out.

So hence the clerics and paladins doing good or bad PR to control whether Riverton or Hallowstone gets a drought or not.

And the Goddesses of Earth, Nature, and Fairies creating and managing a whole druidic religion to not be under the thumb of a Sea Goddess.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

The Scarred Lands aren't official but they also have real and active deities in them.

PCs can even petition them and gain mechanical benefits for doing so.

I love the Scarred Lands. It's such a delicious and lethal and harsh setting.

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OK, for me deities are all about something is going to happen.

Every day, every week, every month, every festival day, every holiday, every change of the seasons and the year.

My job as the DM is to pass this info on to the players, so they develop a sense of what's going on in the campaign world. This helps with immersion and with dropping opportunities for players to take advantage of situations in the campaign.

Since I play mostly in the Forgotten Realms, this means:

A cleric of Tyr, the Even-Handed, won't remain long at a temple if their reputation begins to precede them. Instead they will either experience a dream vision from Tyr warning them to cool it down, or discover orders have been issued for the cleric to quietly (and quickly) leave their temple for a remote location in some other region of the Realms.

• If this is an NPC the players know, they may be surprised to learn the cleric they relied on has disappeared. They may want to investigate why.
• If this is a PC, then I have an excuse to move the players out of whatever region they were adventuring in. This is useful when they move from one Tier to another.

The Queen of the Deeps (aka Umberlee), as Ed Greenwood writes, "suffers none of her clergy to become famous." They are to be feared, never loved by the people.

• This is practically a demand for me to put players on a ship sailing between parts of the Realms with a ship captain low on coins, high on greed, and foolish enough not to make offerings to the goddess before departure. Wise players will remember what to do on their next voyage, so as to avoid Umberlee's rage (and the endless numbers of dead sailors she can summon up by night to swarm a ship like ants on a carcass).

If my players come up with a ridiculous investment proposition, there's a chance a priest of Lathander may show up to invest in it--and then perhaps bend the law a little to see the players succeed, but not be around when certain investors (and lawgivers) come to investigate.

I use deities to help me move a campaign ever forward. Each day mortals make choices, the deities and their worshippers react, and something happens.

 

[plecostomus]

Clerics and Patron races are their outlets. They are their eyes, ears, voices, and hands.

This is exactly how my cleric character describes himself. He believes clerics and communication between gods and mortals are essential for gods to have any meaning at all, or to be defined as gods. Gods are immortal, but by looking through their clerics' eyes, they maintain an understanding of the mortal world, and with it their own relevance. A god that fails to do these things is no different from a randomly acting force of nature to be guarded against, or a monster to be slain.

Here is a bit from his diary where he describes meeting the god of death:

I begged him to take worship from the Living. They are the ones this divinity must be for. Rocks do not cry when the river breaks them, and the Dead serve. Only the Living provide perspective. The Crying God says divinity is a veil upon compassion, so I understand the centrality clerics must have in this instruction. Not just the gods’ hands, but their hearts.

 

[Piperken]

...A problem I am facing as I try to develop my setting is that I want a closer connection between the divine and mortal realms. This is partly because I imagine the deities to be archfey (a concept explored in the Gargoyles tv series). Some of my thoughts running thus:

1) Where the Other World touches the Prime, various types of circles form. Most common are fairy circles. Larger and less common are crop circles. And, finally, there are henges. The henges are sites of worship, and I could easily imagine some round temple forming in its center or somewhere close by where the resident archfey resides (when it so desires).

2) There's no technical reason Archfey can't have Clerics given fey deities do exist. However, it still leaves unresolved what the difference would be between a Cleric and a Warlock in terms of worship vs pact.

3) If the Fey are involved more in the Prime and even responsible for various natural phenomena (if the Spring Sprites don't show your area gets literally stuck in winter; the Fey in charge of the sea can literally save your ship or sink it, etc.), then how is best to work this all in without it becoming too much? It's one thing to imagine a world not too dissimilar to that of Disney's The Nutcracker Suite combined with The Pastoral Symphony; it's another to figure out how that sort of thing works in practice (having house-hold protectors would make thieves have issues, but also PCs who need to get into a stronghold).

How do deities figure into your campaigns? If they are an engaging bunch, how do you keep things interesting? If they're not, why not?...

I think from a lot of the responses you have a wide variety of possibilities and options to look at in terms of how you resolve the particular challenges you are facing.

Focusing on above, it feels like the issue at hand more is what are the relationships between the otherworldly (not necessarily divine or deities, but could be) and the mortal realms.

If you are seeking closer connections, then by extension people will be dealing with the otherworldly every day. It will be common. Knowledge of what one is supposed to do or not do would be widespread, whether genuinely accurate or not.

It also brings up other possibilities as well. Are there relations? Is there trade? How do those look?

What roles then do medicine peoples, wise women/men, shamans, oracles, witches, priests, nuns, monks undertake in society based on this? Under what circumstances might they be consulted or appealed to?

To this end, I'd look toward cultures and esp. stories from them that feature this. One example given was Japanese culture, which has 神道 as one of its indigenous systems.

In early Rome, it was commonplace among households to have many interactions with different deities through the course of the week, even the day. While the state religions and official priesthoods were inextricably tied to the elite (and naturally, their power), Romans were very religious!

 

[Marandahir]

Record of Lodoss War's B/X D&D setting famously had its deities all dead from the War of the Gods.

But they still have an active hand because fo the faith of their followers, and because a particularly powerful Cleric could use their body to open a door to that deity's resurrection or at least to carry out divine intervention (basically an I-Win button during major battles, but the only Clerics we ever see powerful enough to pull this off while still retaining their sense of self and coming back, are Neese the Elder, Flaus, and Neese the Younger. I don't think Melissa does it in Rune Soldier Louie, but I may be misremembering, or she might in the novels that I haven't read. In any case, the Lodoss stories treat this act of divine intervention as basically suicidal last resort. It's just that the 3 heroes we care about and see do it all somehow survive their acts (though I'd note that Neese the Younger's version of this is trickier because the BBEG is also trying to use her to open a door for the CE Goddess of Destruction Kardis, while she's a priestess of the CG Goddess of Creation Marfa and tries to open a door to Marfa instead).

And there's also a handful of deities that opted out of the war of the gods, that live on vampirically using the bodies of people over in the Crystania continent. There's a separate module / light novel / anime series about Crystania, but again I've never seen it. I just know the most evil of them steals Ashram's body as part of a refugee deal for Crystania to take in the Marmo and people of Kanon that he sailed off with after RoLW.

I really like the idea that the Gods are dead, but that doesn't mean their wills aren't carried forth by the people who venerate them. it's almost a form of ancestor worship, or at least got a more Shinto-esque veneration tied to them. And this makes sense for Lodoss too because Lodoss Island is the part of the continent of Alecrast that was essentially Kardis' body, cut away from the corpses of the other gods at the end of the war so as to contain most of the evil god's power in Lodoss.

 

[Maxperson]

but none of those are reasons to have them in a game -
Reason 1 is just a justification for a mechanic, but we know spells exist even if gods are otherwise ignored
Reason 2 only happens if the DM decides to make that happen
Reason 3 is worse as its just a minigame the DM plays on his own, until he decides to invoke 2
Reason 4 Ideals and Alignment embody aspects of life in the game, love and wind exist regardless of gods

the only good Reason for something to exist in the game is to motivate gameplay, so certainly a DM can use them as a narrative tool, but in terms of actually helping a PC play a cleric/paladin/religious character its the Temple/Church and its doctrine thats important not the diety.

They're all reasons to have them in a game. Your alternate reasons are ALSO reasons, but they were not the reasons I put forth.

I think it's fantastic that you can have settings like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, which use the reasons I stated. And also have Eberron, with a different set of reasons and distant gods that are unprovable. While still allowing Dark Sun which has no gods and has a different set of reasons for why things are. It's a strength of D&D.

They are all still reasons, though. You look at what you want to happen and create reasons for it. You can pick gods as the reason clerics get spells. Faith as the reason clerics get spells. The magic of dawn as the reason that clerics get spells. The planes themselves powering cleric spells. Or any other reason(s) you want to come up with. If you pick gods, gods are the reason for those spells.