D&D General Gods: What role do they play in your campaigns?

[Composer99]

In my homebrew setting, the gods are aloof: they have to be, since in Elder Times their quarrels with one another caused massive devastation and tore the Veil that has allowed fey and fiends to reach the world. The Divine Compact ensures they avoid directly intervening in mortal affairs unless they are all, or very nearly all, in favour of it.

There are a few less powerful gods (or god-adjacent beings? It's deliberately meant to be vague on that score) who live in the mortal world, but they have little to do with the quarrels of more powerful gods.

The gods work through mortal agents, by providing clerical magic, and can send signs and omens to anyone they please. As a whole they might be effectively omnipotent and omniscient, but any given god certainly isn't.

Mortals can visit the Divine Realms, in theory, although few do. Because of the agreements constraining their actions, any given god will almost never appear, either in person or in avatar form, in the mortal world if they don't already live there.

 

[Thunder Brother]

I love the world of Glorantha and it's extensive mythology, so my own homebrew setting borrows extensively from it, meaning the god's are a strong influence on the world as a whole.

I don't like treating gods as aloof, as in uncaring. Rather, they are distant by cosmological necessity. They cannot act directly on the world anymore, only through their followers, similar to the Great Compromise in Glorantha. The logic is partly that a god is such a force that even a seemingly benign intervention could have cataclysmic effects, similar to how the Valar's intervention in the Silmarillion are often disasterous.

I like comparative mythology, such as how many deities from ancient European cultures have common roots (Thor/Taranis/Perun being essentially the same god). So for example I have a single "Storm God" but different cultures will maybe know him by different names and slightly different myths.

I try to avoid anything that comes across as vaguely Christian, not because of any political stance, but because I want to harken back to a more pre-Christian worldview. There are no churchs, no Inquisitors, very little doctrine. Religion is local and esoteric. More about exchange than faith, because faith in a setting where the gods definitively exist is cheap. The gods are not moral actors, but do have personalities and drives. The Earth Goddess is all-loving because it's the Earth, the Storm God is tempermental because he peronifies the winds and weather. The Sun God is kinda aloof because, well the sun is as well.

 

[R_J_K75]

When I ran Forgotten Realms campaigns almost exclusively up until 2010 I would usually build the background metaplot of the campaign around a few Deities of the world. Depending on the PC's, if there is one that is directly involved with the religon of any of those gods, there may be more interaction with them and that meta plot may come to the forefront more than if the players had no religious bent PC's. A few times myself and another friend were DMing the same DM where the gods played a major role and avatars made appearances. One of the PCs even gained a small portion of one of their power for a short time and used it to do what PCs do, flew over Waterdeep and made it rain gold. Come to think of it that was the same game where he spilled beer on my map of Waterdeep, only took me 23 years to realize the coincidence. There have also been the instances of divine intervention although very few and far between. Nowadays we dont (or have had any in the recent past) PCs who are clerics or any of the other religious type classes so they are in the background of the campaign relegated to being represented by their clergy and even then its more generic. If they need holy water or healing they'll find a nameless church, any church to get what they need. I would equate it to being 15 and looking for a buyer to get a case of beer, you didnt care who bought for you just as long as you got beer. I think this shift can directly be linked to time. The players in our group only have so much time to dedicate to the game so adding complex machinations of squabbling deities and the particular details of their clergy arent worth including. When we had more time to play, read, and prep games I preferred campaigns that were heavily influenced by the gods of the setting and they were alot of fun.

 

[Stormonu]

For my home brew, there are two major types - the original gods (known as the Ancients) composed of the pantheons from Deities & Demigods, and my campaign gods.

The Ancients are physically asleep, but calls and deeds done in their name are answered by calling on their latent power. That does mean they can’t directly manifest avatars, but you can still get spells and miracles. There are cults who are “in the know” that these gods sleep and are involved in plots to awaken them - which most others agree would be “a bad thing.” The Young Gods devote a lot of attention suppressing these cults actions, but can’t destroy them outright as the sudden loss could be like taking a hammer to the alarm clock right next to the sleeper’s bed.

The Young Gods of my home brew are ascended mortals who are now caretakers for the world. By mutual edict, they are not allowed to directly manifest direct avatars on the prime plane, but can influence matters behind the scenes and have been known to sneakily make appearances in lesser guises (in the last few centuries, one had manifested as a mortal tyrant, trying to conquer the continent. When his guise was revealed, he was forced to leave the mortal plane and the capital of his mortal kingdom was sunk beneath the waves). The Young Gods are relatively careful in their interactions lest they wake the Ancients Ones - which happened once in the distant past and resulted in a near Ragnarok-level apocalypse.

 

[Yaarel]

My main campaign is animistic. There are no gods. In the Material Plane, each natural feature, including a stone, a tree, a lake, a thunderstorm, a star, the sun, has a mind. The more significant a feature is, the more present and influential its mind is. The desire of a stone is to be a stone. So the mental presence of landscapes tends to be calm but ambient. The universe is moreorless psionic.

The mind of a feature is completely nonhuman. Occasionally, its mind can project to appear to a human as if in a human form, or rarely manifest physically as if actually a biological human, but its desire is being whatever it really is.

I use the Astral Plane as a realm of thoughts, and various domains in the aster correspond to the collective unconscious of respective cultures.

 

[Voadam]

I generally go with divine magic and divine magic spellcasting traditions are not powered by gods, so gods can be fully divine beings, divine anthropomorphic manifestations of phenomena, ascended beings, powerful supernatural beings (like fiends or dragons), powerful beings who are worshiped or considered gods (like giants or heroes), or made up beings entirely.

I run a mashup setting with a ton of pantheons and believed cosmologies so there are theological theories in the Holy Lothian Empire that the old Heldannic Olympians are not actually divine beings or divine anthropomorphisms as different Heldannic peoples traditionally held but that they were actually demons masquerading as gods or were various giants who were worshiped and legends grew around them over time.

This leaves a lot of flexibility to run gods in different ways from a present demigod like Iuz to blown up legends about giants to absent mysterious forces.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Are the gods aloof and mysterious, do they intervene frequently in the world's affairs or are they narcissistic beings who love to torture their creations just for the fun of it? Maybe the don't even exist?

Since we are currently going through The Horde of the Dragon Queen, gods have a significant role in the game. However, even my supposedly cleric players don't use their gods nearly as much as I wish they would. They just use them as an excuse for their powers. sigh

 

[Bitbrain]

Since we are currently going through The Horde of the Dragon Queen, gods have a significant role in the game. However, even my supposedly cleric players don't use their gods nearly as much as I wish they would. They just use them as an excuse for their powers. sigh

At least you have them in a major role. The guy currently DMing for my group became a nervous wreck when I chose to play a cleric and then asked him for some details on the gods in his homebrew world.

Turns out he hadn’t given religion (or any form of belief in the supernatural) in his games any thought whatsoever.

 

[The Green Hermit]

At least you have them in a major role. The guy currently DMing for my group became a nervous wreck when I chose to play a cleric and then asked him for some details on the gods in his homebrew world.

Turns out he hadn’t given religion (or any form of belief in the supernatural) in his games any thought whatsoever.

I'd tell him not to worry and then make up your main deity/pantheon, along with any deity/deities that are your natural antagonists.

 

[Marc_C]

At least you have them in a major role. The guy currently DMing for my group became a nervous wreck when I chose to play a cleric and then asked him for some details on the gods in his homebrew world.

Turns out he hadn’t given religion (or any form of belief in the supernatural) in his games any thought whatsoever.

You should create your own religion and present it to him. ;-)