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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DragonLancer" data-source="post: 9850783" data-attributes="member: 11868">In my homebrew setting, gods are simply aspects. They aren't like the deities of the Forgotten Realms or GreyHawk, who scheme, plot, create avatars and interfere in the mortal world. They are simply the creation of mortal and immortal beliefs.This is how gods are described in my setting document.   "In Hyborea, the divine is not a distant, unknowable force but a reflection - an echo of the mortal spirit cast into the firmament. The gods are not creators of life but its consequence, born from the dreams, fears, and passions of the living and the dead. They are manifestations of thought given shape, the crystallised essence of mortal belief, emotion, and instinct. Where mortals worship courage, a god of war takes form; where they fear the endless dark, a goddess of the night awakens to watch from within it.    Unlike the deities of other worlds, the gods of Hyborea are sentient aspects of ideas, their power waxing and waning with mortal devotion and the strength of the concepts they embody. Love, vengeance, hunger, mercy are each a seed from which divinity may sprout. Some are ancient and vast, their existence spanning millennia undreamed of since the dawn of the First Age, while others flicker briefly into being when new philosophies, empires, or terrors seize the mortal imagination.    To the scholars of Byatis, this divine symbiosis explains the ever-changing pantheon: gods rise and fall as cultures do. The elves of Sylvanost say that even the stars shift their course when faith wanes, while the druids of Hollowdale hold that the gods are but the world dreaming of itself. The priests of Keoland insist that the divine is law made manifest - living order given purpose. None can truly say who is right, for in Hyborea, faith itself writes the truth.    Thus, the gods are not masters but mirrors. They embody the highest aspirations and deepest cruelties of those who believe in them, shaping mortal destiny even as they are shaped in return. Some are benevolent guardians who bless the harvest, heal the wounded, or inspire courage in the face of darkness. Others are born from hatred, envy, and fear - gods of plague, blood, and ruin whose worship spreads like infection. Yet all, whether luminous or terrible, serve the same unending cycle: the interplay between thought and existence, between mortal and divine.To understand the gods of Hyborea is to understand its people - for the divine realm is not beyond reach, but within the soul of every living thing. The gods are the collective dream of the world and it's inhabitants."Gods would still exist without clerics or followers, because it isn't faith that sustains them - it's the fact that what their portfolio represents exists. Artifice is coming back into the world, so an ancient god of technology and invention is slowly regaining power even though hardly anyone knows they exist.</blockquote>

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