D&D General In the Beginning ...

[Shiroiken]

The creation myths in official setting don't matter by design. D&D clerics don't really do much religious stuff by default. They are warriors sent by churches to crush enemies, protect flock, and bring back riches.

But it is easy to make a creation myth matter.

What is created can be destroyed or altered. And the processes can affect both immortal and mortal.

I'm saying that for 99% of games, official or homebrew, that the creation of the setting is normally irrelevant. It's nothing more than setting the stage for current events, which is handled just as easily with a historical account of the past few centuries (as Greyhawk does it). You can easily make a campaign around it, but IME this usually leads to the end of the setting at the climax of the campaign. It's not a bad thing, but not something most DMs are going to run.

When I mentioned the priesthood, I wasn't talking about clerics, but the actual priests who perform rituals and services for the people (e.g. the acolyte background). Clerics (and potentially paladins, druids, and rangers) are specific types of holy servants granted the favor of the gods, as you rightfully pointed out. Not all priests would necessarily be granted spellcasting abilities.

 

[jgsugden]

The quick version:

The universe was all there was, and it created two children - the Light (Good) and the Dark (Evil).

The light and Dark spawned Tiamat, Bahamut and Vorel. Tiamat and Bahamut feuded for tens of thusands of years, spawning the matter of the universe and killing Vorel in their fervor. Tiamat and Bahamut put an end to death once they understood it.

From the cast off matter of their battles rose Giants and Dragons. The dragons created Elves and Dwarves.

The Dragons, Elves, Dwarves and Giants discovered 12 great power sources, and 12 amongst tem rose up as the first Gods. They in turn created other Gods.

The Gods fought each other. Some were banished to other planes, others were killed when new beings took their power source. In their battles, they created angels as their servants.

One Angel, Asmodeus, convinced the Gods to reinstate death to allow their neverending battles to reach a conclusion. He took stewardship of the dead. He evolved his Angels into the first Devils.

Then, the Far Realm crashed into the known universe, shattering the barriers between planes (and spawning the Shadowfell, Feywild and Etheral Plane). In the Hells of Asmodeus, countless Devils were corrupted and became Demons. They sought to control and expand the rift to the Far Realm in the Hells, and the Devils rose to stop them - thus beginning the Blood War.

Soon after, the Gods realized their powers could be enhanced by using the souls of mortals. They began to trade power for access to souls, creating priests (who gave their faith in exchange for power) and warlocks (who contracted for power). The Gods began to create a vast array of races to worship them.

The Raven Queen, a mortal of great guile, slew a God and spread the Gods power amongst the people of the world, creating God Touched. A PC that follows the rules of the PHB and DMG. If you're not God Touched, then hitting negative HPs kills you, etc...

I have a simple cosmology: One Prime Material Plane, One Hell (with regions), One Heaven (with regions), One Astral Sea (with pocket dimensions), One Elemental Plane (with pockets of each element), The Positive Energy Plane, the Negative Energy Plane, the Far Realm, and three Transitive Planes: Shadow (Negative/Prime), Feywild (Positive/Prime)and Etheral (Far Realm/Prime).

 

[Charlaquin]

I have a simple cosmology: One Prime Material Plane, One Hell (with regions), One Heaven (with regions), One Astral Sea (with pocket dimensions), One Elemental Plane (with pockets of each element), The Positive Energy Plane, the Negative Energy Plane, the Far Realm, and three Transitive Planes: Shadow (Negative/Prime), Feywild (Positive/Prime)and Etheral (Far Realm/Prime).

In a slight digression from the main topic of creation myths, I find it interesting that this is indeed a relatively simple cosmos for D&D. D&D really seems to love having a bajillion inner planes and outer planes and boarder planes and transitive planes and demiplanes...

My own cosmos has the World (what you might call the prime material plane), the Otherworld (combines elements of the feywild, the shadowfell, and the elemental planes), the Astral Sea (which does contain various astral domains - it’s lifted pretty much directly from the World Axis cosmology), and the Abyss. And one could argue that the Abyss is part of the Otherworld. The Far Realm is kind of a thing in the setting, but it exists outside of the cosmos. It exists pretty much exclusively as a place of origin for Aberrations, not as a playable space you can access.

 

[MarkB]

In my Shadowrun-esque setting, The Conjunction, our world had always had only a trickle of magic, and was what would be considered an Urban Fantasy setting. Magic users of various sorts existed, but based on the magic available to them in our world the most they'd be able to do is throw around one or two cantrips in an entire day.

So most practitioners developed variants of conjuration rituals based upon simple summoning circles in order to draw magical energy from one of two parallel planes - the Feywild and the Shadowfell. They'd spend an extra hour each morning drawing the power that would allow them to cast a day's worth of spells, and hoping that nothing else tried to come through while they were doing it.

Which was fine up until 2025, when a group of European druids came up with a plan to simultaneously solve the problems of global warming, deforestation and starvation, by combining their powers to cast a massive global-scale version of the Plant Growth spell. To do that they'd need to draw huge amounts of power from the Feywild, and would need a massive and perfectly-engineered circle to do it. So they decided to co-opt the Large Hadron Collider without telling anyone, or checking whether it was in use at the time.

What actually happened was that the combination of their spellcasting and a major high-energy physics experiment ripped through the barrier between realities and created a global planar conjunction that pulled areas of the Feywild into our world and vice versa, also pulling through enough magical energy that spellcasting in our reality went from practically impossible to routine.

In the resulting setting, set 25 years later, D&D's common humanoid races (once denizens of the Feywild) live amongst humanity, and they've brought a lot of their culture with them. Divine magic is based more upon belief than the certain existence of any deities - any sufficiently focused faith allows the believer to channel the magical energy that's now prevalent in the world. So clerics on Earth include many members of major religions, but also anyone with enough faith in a concept. There's one Klingon cosplayer in Las Vegas who gained magical powers purely from being so invested in his character.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm saying that for 99% of games, official or homebrew, that the creation of the setting is normally irrelevant. It's nothing more than setting the stage for current events, which is handled just as easily with a historical account of the past few centuries (as Greyhawk does it). You can easily make a campaign around it, but IME this usually leads to the end of the setting at the climax of the campaign. It's not a bad thing, but not something most DMs are going to run.

When I mentioned the priesthood, I wasn't talking about clerics, but the actual priests who perform rituals and services for the people (e.g. the acolyte background). Clerics (and potentially paladins, druids, and rangers) are specific types of holy servants granted the favor of the gods, as you rightfully pointed out. Not all priests would necessarily be granted spellcasting abilities.

Well that's my point. Many RPGs don't even attempt to make their creation myths matter unlike the real world where creation myths form entire religions and the religious struggles that come from it. RPGs tend to focus on adventurers and don't should the cosmos into the foreground like Wargames do. RPGs based on wargames like Warhammer will focus on creation myths more. Same as RPGs with internal mental crisis like Vampire.


One thing I hope is the WOTC grows some courage and makes a true Clash of the Pantheons setting. Different pantheons create parts of the world then collide to conquer the other planes. Not Asgard vs Pseudo Olympus vs Fake Heaven vs Almost Miclan vs I can't believe it's not Takamagahara. Give a good reason why all those clerics and paladins are being trained.

 

[Lanefan]

I have an overarching universal creation 'story' that I can fit any world into (this to explain how the deities etc. came to be), and from there it's pretty easy to figure out how any world or culture has interpreted it, or even if they know much about it at all.

After that, I make stuff up for each world-culture as needed; either during worldbuilding or (not as often) on the fly.

 

[NotAYakk]

I'm using Dawn war base cosmology.

In the beginning there where the Elemental Titans.

The Divine rose up. And they disagreed.

Then there was a war between the Divine and the Titans. In my cosmology, however, they killed each other. Well, mostly (both Titans and Gods are beings for whom death is a gradient, not a sharp line)

The Celestial planes are graveyards; the Celestial beings surviving living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Asmodeus and the hells are an attempt by an archangel and other Celestials to keep their "civilization" intact; mad max, beyond heaven. Demons are the post-apocalyptic elemental spawn of the Titans; the Blood War, an attempt to prevent leftover Titan-spawned Demons from overrunning reality.

Mortals don't know this. I mean, some theologians suspect it. The remaining Celestial apparatus continues to answer divinations and prayers; but this is one of the reasons why "Contact other Plane" can render you insane, and why Divine divination spells are so unreliable.

In general, Divine power is channeled through Divine Relics, fragments of the Gods and Saints, which imbue mortals with power. As the source of such Relics is cut off, cults steal them from each other and corrupt them for their own purposes; for example, the Pearl of Melora is currently in the hands of the Cult of Zehir, who has stabbed it and from it harvests a poison that burns away all that is not faithful to the Mistress of Snakes. (that is how I get yuan-ti)

The campaign is then about the end of the world and what happens next. Because if you are building a castle of stardust, it is really fun to smash it.