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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 3222825" data-attributes="member: 14159">Well, they need belief, worshippers are the most powerful and efficient method of doing this.Planescape explained it well, deities get at least a trickle of power from the use of their name, their tales and lore being told.  If that evil deity is part of a pantheon, then the general worship of that pantheon gives them their cut of the power.  Destroying a deity by destroying belief in them is incredibly hard to do, since you have to kill or convert (sincerely) every single mortal worshipper (an already established god can barely hang on to demigod status with a single mortal worshiper), and even then they take a long time to fade as they eke out power from myth, legend, lore, and the residual belief in them from the culture they came from, all the while they will be trying very hard to get even a small cult together somewhere.As for who would worship an evil deity?  Think of rebellious young folk, think of people who really like what the deity has as their portfolio, think of outcasts of society who don't care what polite society thinks of what they believe, think of people who don't care about labels of "good" and "evil" and only care about the promise of power/wealth, think about the people who worship out of fear because it's an evil deity they are afraid the God of Disease will smite them with a plague, or the God of Storms will flood their farm unless appeased.Remember, people in a polytheistic society don't neccesarily worship only one deity.  Somebody could pay some veneration to a deity they don't like to try and appease the angry gods.Looking at it as choosing which deity to worship, only one, from a list like it's some menu isn't the way to think of it.  People will have the deities they prefer to worship or like more, they will have the ones they like to worship and choose to venerate, and the ones they will pay respects to, to appease them.Well, the "time's up" thing is pretty much a 3e-ism, I think that was to prevent it being "easy" to be immortal.  Why bother to become a lich or other esoteric means of immortality if it's a fairly common class feature?</blockquote>

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