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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Unwise" data-source="post: 6638557" data-attributes="member: 98008">Personally, I run a setting where all of the gods are dead, gone, banished or asleep. This is the best of both worlds. Clerics can still channel power off them, like vestiges. There is an awful lot of residual god-power floating around in the universe and it is fairly easily tapped into. Most people don't know that the gods are gone, after all, they see the priests cast spells.The second upside of this is that I don't have to worry about the gods motivations, deus ex machina, power plays, and why they don't intervene. It effectively lets my campaign have religions, clerics and cults, but saves me the hassles of having the gods themselves.Thirdly, because, for those in the know, the power of the gods is up for grabs, this leads heroes and villains to try and capture it for themselves. For instance, somebody might be a living saint, attempting to follow in the ways of The Ever Peaceful to tap into its power. Another might be the greatest questing knight in the land, and be effectively becoming an avatar of the goddess of valor. Villains on the other hand, try to pillage the power of the dead good gods, wake the evil sleeping ones and commit acts of horror in order to gain the residual power of the evil vestiges.There are lots of places remaining that are 'strong in the darkside/lightside' like places where gods died, or famous last stands happened in the past. At these places, clerics can sometimes tap into the thoughts and feelings of their absent gods. This is a pale distortion though and not a sentience or a ghost.This also leads to one of my favorite cults. The god of prophecy knew that he was going to die, so he wrote down a whole bunch of commands and prophecies to see his people through after his passing. The remaining cult know that he is dead, but it does not matter as he has set the path for them to follow. They go around doing things, often with no idea why, as the god did not deem it necessary to share that. They misinterpret a lot of stuff and do a lot of seemingly dumb stuff, that mostly ends up working out for the best.</blockquote>

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