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

[Crimson Longinus]

Gods that are just basically very powerful people, are not interesting to me. They seem metaphysically needless, and have same issues (except magnified) than having a loads of very powerful NPCs; that is they boss the PCs around and logically should actually sort most things out. making the PC heroics unnecessary.

My current world Artra is very animistic, the various gods and spirits are integral part of the world and basically they are making the world to function and exist. Mostly this just happens in the background, beyond the perception of the mortals, but sometimes these spirits interact with the people. This also means that they are really not people as we would understand it. They are conscious and have personalities, but their desires and goals are not like ours. Their main focus is performing their specific role in making the world work. For example Belet Ummur, the Shepherd of the Dead is making sure that things die and that the souls are properly escorted to the afterlife, and from there recycled to the potential reincarnation. They may help people who pray to them (mainly via clerics and shamans,) but they are not going to directly interfere in mortal matters. There are two historical exceptions to this, and both resulted a major civilisation ending cataclysm.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I really struggled with how to introduce deities into my world, just did not like my ideas. And the players weren't looking to engage with anything that needed deities, like we didnt have any clerics or paladins, and the lack of temples, worshippers, etc., just went mostly unnoticed or unmentioned.

So after a few years, I mean. I just kind of went with there being no gods. When it finally became relevant to talk about it, I didnt want to just say "uhhhh, yeah, war god has been here this whooole time." So I said there used to be gods but not anymore. Some things that are usually of divine domain have been taken over by others. The vagueness at the time was presented as a mystery because time has moved on for so long that there are no mortals who even know what a god is, and most immortals too.

This ended up being latched onto and became a driving force for the rest of the 8 year campaign. I created a divine war that ended eons ago, between the gods who wanted to sacrifice the world for their own survival and the gods who wanted to sacrifice themselves for the world's survival. The latter won, and they followed through. The gods removed themselves. Eventually the party learned of a threat beyond the Beyond, out past the Outside. A threat that made gods afraid enough to choose between destroying their tether or destroying themselves to avoid it.

The BBEG of my campaign became someone who also came to this knowledge, and who wished to call this Entity forth. His motivations for doing so were thwarted, but the summons went through and the Threat became imminent. The party accumulated as much remaining divine energies they could and fought a three-stage battle that I definitely based off of the OG FF7 final boss fight, against an eldritch horror who preyed upon gods.

The party did win. The threat is over. Deities can now exist, and the party is choosing to relinquish their powers rather than rising to godhood themselves. So for the next campaign, when we get to it, I'll be right back to where I started.

At least jow you have a place to start!

Thinking about what gods might arise in a world that had them, lost them, and is just now gaining new ones, is totally different from a blank slate. Maybe gods are regional and small themed like god of this city and goddess of silversmiths of this region.

Maybe they are instead formed from will (not worship that is silly) or mortals, like mortals want retribution when justice fails so there is a god of assassins, and a god of proper justice, and maybe they are identical twins of opposite gender or something.

People want good harvests so harvest gods abound and begin congregating into a divine congress of the harvest.

Maybe it is more animistic and the sun's natural animistic semi-comscious Will becomes more and more conscious and becomes a god. And also thst boulder. Its a nice boulder, so it has a nice peaceful little god in it. People name him Ferrank The Peaceful.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

At least jow you have a place to start!

Thinking about what gods might arise in a world that had them, lost them, and is just now gaining new ones, is totally different from a blank slate. Maybe gods are regional and small themed like god of this city and goddess of silversmiths of this region.

Maybe they are instead formed from will (not worship that is silly) or mortals, like mortals want retribution when justice fails so there is a god of assassins, and a god of proper justice, and maybe they are identical twins of opposite gender or something.

People want good harvests so harvest gods abound and begin congregating into a divine congress of the harvest.

Maybe it is more animistic and the sun's natural animistic semi-comscious Will becomes more and more conscious and becomes a god. And also thst boulder. Its a nice boulder, so it has a nice peaceful little god in it. People name him Ferrank The Peaceful.

Imagine if a culture of orcs harbored the desire to be heroic and to honor strength that serves the community and basically calls forth a heroic paladin-of
-the-ancients-like goddess to lead them into a completely different society than what they had before. Imagine the world adjusting to that.

 

[Hussar]

+1 for Scarred Lands. LOOOVE the setting.

Also Primeval Thule had a really cool way of doing it. The gods in PT are very far away. They do not interact with mortals, like, at all. Each faith is essentially cabalistic with older clerics teaching magic to newer clerics. Basically, they are better organized wizards. I really like this take because it means that a cleric of a given faith can act totally against that faith and still cast spells. You can have heresy and whatnot.

Another version, I think similar to the Ghibli one mentioned above, is the notion of Small Gods. I ran a homebrew setting where pretty much anything extra planar could be a "god". A small nature spirit is a god of a very small pond in a forest. Small gods can grow through belief and become bigger gods. Really borrowing heavily of Pratchett's Small Gods. Worked fantastic. One player played a Hollyphant Paladin and I basically said, yup, you are a god. Just a really small one. She loved the idea and really ran with it.

Next homebrew I run is going to really lean into the Small Gods idea.

 

[Clint_L]

I go the opposite direction: in my world, deities are metaphysically needless. They have nothing to do with the functioning of the universe, unless they also happen to be entities so powerful that they can interfere with nature on a large enough scale.

I figure deities in my D&D world are essentially the same as they are in this world: anything that has worshippers. However, in D&D world magic is real, so the power of that belief, along with training in how to harness it, is what allows clerics, paladins, druids, etc. to also cast spells. It's just a different magic vector than, say, the arcane training of wizards, etc.

On top of that some deities are also beings of considerable power, and often that is what has has caused people to worship them. But the magic is not actually coming from them, it's coming from the worshipper. You could be an atheist cleric in my world, or worship a piece of toast and still have magic.

Warlocks, on the other hand, are directly channeling power from whatever entity they've entered into a deal with.

 

[cbwjm]

I've been reading a lot of conan stories and rpg books lately and you could run gods like that setting. Some gods are just powerful entities worshipped it of fear and just waiting to be killed by an angry barbarian.

Other gods like Set and Mitra are unknowable, do they really exist or do they only exist in the minds of their followers.