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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 2981678" data-attributes="member: 3649">For the 'how did people arrive at their gods' thing: from what I remember of anthropology (and fusangite is probably way better equipped to answer this), most cultures had no problem with multiple gods. They meet culture X, then they add some of Culture X's gods to the gods they worship. Culture X does the same. Now, how do they come up with the gods in the first place?Probably through observation of natural phenomenon and the brain's ability to fill in patterns by itself from incomplete data. There's a blurb in the first edition of Mage, where the writer talks about looking up at the moon and briefly seeing a face instead of the moon. A trick of the light, the brain's hasty construction of a pattern that makes sense out of a nonsensical pattern and boom, you have Ada the proto-city-builder who thinks that there is a lady in the moon. Same with the stars; once you start to see patterns in the sky, patterns that always return, you're going to think they are something special. A rock that happens to look just like the fierce cheiftain two valleys over... So you tell tales of the fierce cheiftain. You take people out to the rock. You die, but your son continues to tell the tales only now he changes some stuff. Things snowball over a few generations and suddenly somehow that rock has become the feirce cheiftain who was turned to stone because he didn't obey the local magic man. More generations pass and the tale grows in the telling. Then you have a woman who gets a reputation as a good healer. The babies she delivers thrive and grow strong. She sets a broken leg and through chance it doesn't get infected and wither. She finds that chewing a certain plant makes her gums stop hurting, so she thinks.. if I mash the plant and mix a little water with it.. it'll create a paste like the grain does. If I put that on a cut.. it will stop hurting. She's invented medicine. People are freaking amazed. They tell tales about 'good old Buta' long after her death. Soon the tribal tale teller is Wise Old Mara, who is not so wise anymore because she fell last year and hasn't been right since then. She tells the kids about Buta, but she mixes it up with some tales about the fiece warlord. You get fifty kids who grow up with these tales and pass them on. Now they tell tales about Butan, who came from the north with a great army but seeing the destruction that was wrought, turned his hand to being a healer. He raised the dead with a touch. He promised to come back to us from beyond the sky when things got really bad. What? Things are bad now? No they are not; if they were really bad, Butan would be here, would he not?It's not so much how a person would be revered in life, but what their life becomes after it passes through five or six incomplete tellings and gets mixed up with other tales. Also: people remember the hits and forget the misses. This is how magic and prophecy work. Combine the two....That's how you get gods.In a fantasy world where the gods are likely to come down and interact, it can become a lot easier. The god shows up and does things: he parts a river, tears down a mountain, heals the sick, brings the dead back to life, etc. He probably has an aura that can command obedience. He shows up and suddenly the elders and strongest warriors are bowing to him... the rest fall in line.</blockquote>

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