How do your Gods get Power?

[Sejs]

The way I run it, the gods just are, not because. I'm with Angcuru in that I find the idea that gods need their worshipers to give them power to be... wrong. The gods are the embodiment of a major thing. The Earth, the Sun, War, Death, Mercy, Knowledge. Even if noone uttered a prayer to the god of the sun ever again, it wouldn't cause him to waver one bit. The sun still rises and sets, therefor the god of the sun is still around. He was there before there was anyone to worship him, and he'll be around after the last person passes on.

At no point were the gods mortals. Likewise a mortal cannot become a god, not that that fact would keep some of the more power hungry mad villian types from trying, mind you. A mortal becoming a god would be like a person trying to become a car.

Anyway, the way I do it is a god gets power from how prevalent and important the thing they represent is.

 

[Cerubus Dark]

My Gods don't get Power, my Gods are Power. The fact that people worship them has absolutely no influence on what they can or cannot do. They only require worship and obedience because they want to see the world evolve in a certain way, and influencing the way people think is the simplest way to achieve that goal. There are only four true Gods, and they will stay unchanged until the end of time.

Bingo!

Although, the way I see it the more followers a God has the more power he can use without using his own personal powers up.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

as a literary device, I've always liked the idea of gods gaining power (or even existance) through belief. I use it as a default theology when gods actually exist (as oposed to an atheist cosmology with people inventing gods [inflamatory comment deleted! ] which is probably closer to my default-default.) The idea was laid out wonderfully in Terry Pratchett's (sp?) Small Gods, and ties a cosmology together pretty well. I'll probably use the "acheiving perfection in an ideal and thus acending to godhood of that" idea in another project, but I've never liked it quite as much, and may still require worship and recognition of your idealization...

It would be an interesting (but bannable) experiment to see if people's preference for game gods' power origens mapped at all to their beliefs or lack thereof on actual gods, or if its purely a literary preference.

Kahuna Burger

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Oh! Here's another from a game I was in about 10 years ago.

The gods were originally part of a structure made by the Creator. Where the lines on the structure intersected was a locus of power. These loci had independant thought and were in harmony. However the Creator wanted more voices. So he used the lines from the stucture to create the universe and other life. The loci found that they could grant power to the newly created life and became their gods.

However, one of them wanted the original harmony that existed before. So it set about a plan to reunify the structure lines. Of course, this would mean the end of the universe as humans and such knew it, but that wasn't something the god was overly concerned with because they were just part of the structure anyway.

So the "evil" god was just a focal point of power that wanted the universe the way it was before and didn't see why some mortals would care that their conciousness would be stripped from them when they became re-integrated with the rest of the original pattern.

Trippy.

 

[WayneLigon]

I've done it a number of different ways.

The desert campaign has about ten gods, plus one upstart Power. the gods need nothing and no-one; they are eternal and primal beings with little care or concern about the world. Most 'worship' is trying to keep things from happening. Priests get powers from sacrifices to those powers; the god gets most of the energy, while the priest soaks up the 'leftovers' (yes, the occassional mad priests decides to try and create a way to take all that power and ascend to the realm of the gods. That never works out well. So far.). Suta, the upstart power, derives her power from the worship of subjects, tithes, sacrifices, etc.

Another game I ran had no gods that didn't exist before they were created by humans. The world and the universe were created by physical law and chance, but when humans evolved, they also evolved with a psychic means of changing their environment. Gods and spirits were born out of that mutation; they are tremendous vortices of psionic energy that have a vague means of persisting. Gods are born, grow, flourish, shrink and eventually die depending on the changing face of the cultures and the people. It's possible to direct the efforts of tens of thousands of people and create a god; many cults have done this in the past. Created deities almost always have their own minds, though, and it rarely works out well. Gods have all the foibles of humans, just with vast amounts of power.

The Greatwood game is mostly an animist universe; spirits live in everything, and some spirits can grow very powerful. Some of those are called gods. They are manifestations of places and events as well. There is no technical difference between a cleric and a druid in that world; clerics take two or more domains representing the spirits they serve, while druids tap into the more fundamental elemental and life spirits. There are four gods, through, that came from another plane and set up residence. They make all sorts of claims as to what they own or hold sway over, but really they're just big bullies that have managed to cow or convince the natural spirits of those 'spheres' to give them power.

 

[jerichothebard]

IMC, there is one god - ORB - and he draws his power from the worshippers. When his church warred on the other churches, and won, their gods fell, and he went from a mid-level god to a highly powered (the only) god. They won the war not through divine intervention, but through sheer mortal tactical genius.

Divine power is a potent force - ORB draws a spark from each worshipper's prayer, and then focuses it and returns it to his servants in concentrated form.

However, implicit in the setting is that this is a created world, which came into being through the sheer will of an over-being, who wove together the elements and the arcane and divine to create a pocket world, and seeded it with the mortal races.

"Modern" scripture has muddled it to the point where that over-being is now almost always thought of as the same as ORB. (blame the translation from Celestial to Common, along with some "editing"... ) It wasn't... But the over-god has not concerned himself with this world in a looooooong time.

I am not sure if the old gods are actually dead, or just greatly diminished. I have made a point of stealing the constellations=gods trick from dragonlance, and there are no stars left in the sky. ORB is the god of the sun and moon, so has no constellation.

(Side note - I am DMing a bunch of total newbies, so they don't even know I stole that constellation bit!)

In the end, I like the idea that the buck stops with the mortal races - that their god of harmony and healing (and war, incidentally, a portfolio he picked up along the way for obvious reasons) exists and does good work in the world because they give him the power to do so. It seems to make religion much more relevant.

I suspect I would be a far more religious man IRL if the same were true here.

 

[Emirikol]

The gods are just middle men. They're like "managed healthcare." They get the magic from the simple arcane existence of magic, then weaken it, taking some for themselves and distribute it to their 'worshippers.'

Wanna simplify your campaign? Say all magic is arcane and all spells are available to all spellcasters (with this benefit clerics and paladins are affected by armor obviously, but the trade-off is worth it).

It sure simplified things in my CONAN campaign.

jh

 

[Rel]

I've dealt with this issue a lot in my campaign recently as it is fueling a major storyline. Basically, it goes like this:

There was a being that created the universe, kind of an uber-god. He made the world and soon (cosmologically speaking) there were beings who became the epitomes of certain races or concepts. These became gods.

When these gods came into conflict, massive powers were unleashed. These battles threatened to destroy the prime material plane. The uber-god called a meeting and said, "I don't want my creation destroyed. Leave this plane and never come back and I'll give you True Immortality." (True Immortality in this case means that it is simply impossible to destroy one of the gods, against their will, by any means.) The gods agreed and departed the prime.

They were not going to stay out of the game however. They immediately set about crafting the Heavens, Hells and Spirit Realms (representing the ideals of Good, Evil and Neutrality respectively). The gods created ideal beings for each of these realms (Celestials, Demons/Devils and Spirits) and these became their go-betweens who could enact their will upon the prime.

Each of the gods has a supply of "Essence". They produce this power slowly over time by themselves. But they can also get it when sacrifices are made in their names upon the prime. These sacrifices correspond to a given god's sphere of influence and are represented as the various rites and rituals of the religion dedicated to that god. The more followers you have and the better they go about making sacrifices, the more Essence the god accumulates.

The ideal creatures of the outer planes (Heaven, Hell, Spirit Realm) require Essence to go outside their home planes and survive. So, the more Essence a god has, the more Outsiders he can urge to do his bidding upon the prime (and other planes as well) and the longer he can sustain them there.

Residents of the Prime can also "cut out the middle man" and make sacrifices directly to these Outsiders (usually in exchange for a benefit of some sort), giving them the Essence they need to act outside their home planes. Most Celestials find this practice blasphemous, most Demons/Devils find it delicious and the Spirits are rather split down the middle.

 

[jerichothebard]

I am not sure if the old gods are actually dead, or just greatly diminished.

oooooohhhh... I just got a great idea.... Stealing again, this time from the Forgotton Realms, sorta.... I think the old gods are now walking the earth, reduced to mere mortal form... hafta think this one over...

I was going to send them after the last remaining Master Wisard, but what if they were chasing a fallen god?

hmmm...

ok, I'll stop hijacking the thread now.

thanks all!

jtb

 

[Dyir]

I run a Forgotten Realms game where there are no gods. Or rather, religion there is exactly the same as it is in reality: completely based upon faith. Clerics believe that they gain their magic from their gods, and nobody can really tell them that they can't, but nobody's actually been able to definitely prove that they exist. I really prefer this approach to my game: if my players wonder why some god didn't stop the dark elves from invading Raven's Bluff and turning all of the mortals into zombies, then they have to wonder about what faith really means to them. That and it allows me to have a campaign where the dark elves and Red Wizards plan to blow up the entire world without worrying about some uber-deity stepping in .