Mythological Musings - More on Gods

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can see lots of cool stories about why gods need worshipers for power or even to survive, but I agree with the OP that this can detract from the wonder and awe one might feel towards them.

To me the reason gods recruit mortals is that worshipers allow a god to spread its ideal reality to wherever its followers are as well as draw strength from that area. So a god of winter like Skadi can start pushing the world into her ideal version of winter as well as draw power from the winters of the worlds her followers are on.

So worshipers are a resource, but there isn't an exact ratio where 10 worshipers equals 20 spell points or anything. Some of the more mysterious or hostile gods might eschew large congregations in favor of spreading their portfolios. So a plague god might spread plagues across the Prime using jackalwere cultists because every person with one of its diseases is a power source. A god of conspiracies and anarchy might only have a hundred followers, but the god sky rockets in power when the 7 kingdoms go to war.

Really, I think the mystery of why gods recruit mortals helps keep the game's sense of wonder alive. Also, personally I don't like stats for gods but that's just me.

Yeah, overall I eschew hard and fast rules. After using the same basic homebrew setting since the early 80's I still haven't settled on any exact 'rules'. It is enough that the PCs can effect the history of the world when it is interesting to do that, and the gods are mysterious forces that mortals don't really understand. Even if now and then one of them becomes powerful enough to claim to be a god (and maybe is, who knows).

 

[generalchaos34]

Ive been working on a homebrew setting where I am blending a bit of both of the ideas youre talking about.

The gods themselves are bit unpredictable and for the lack of a better word, amoral at times, even your lawful good gods will be wrathful and destructive if something hits the right chord, and all are generally selfish and want to be the top god, not too much unlike your Nordic gods. Its set during something like the dawn war where the gods spent so much time fighting the primordials they forgot about the world itself, which allowed a rogue group of ultra powerful psionic Eladrin to take over the world and craft all of the base player races in genetic experiments (using humans and orcs as the baseline). The gods begin to notice after the Eladrin accidentally "nuke" themselves to stop a slave uprising and now the Gods and Primordials have started a sort of cold war in the world in order to collect worshipers to aid them in their war.

However, im taking a different approach on how the gods gain followers. Im going for while the gods are living conscious beings, they really really want followers, and have created hundreds of cults to worship them in any way imaginable. I havent decided if this is because they are fueled by prayers, or if they need to amass souls of dead followers to gain an upper hand. So in that way the god of death is unaligned, but she has a devoted cult of Evil necromancer cultists, a group of lawful good undead hunting cultists, and the largest group of cultists will worship her as an uncaring unaligned type deity. This is more of worshipers taking up the concept of a gods portfolio and worshiping the part they "believe" to be the most true or important part. Naturally this creates a ton of infighting between the sects. The primordials will also play the worshiper game, but they wont do it for the same goals as the gods, more than to amuse them and deny the gods worshipers.

Its a start, and youve got a great interpretation on how to make the gods work more dynamically, any suggestions?

 

[Tymophil]

In my present campaign, religion plays a big part in everyday life. But it doesn't mean Gods do. There are two rival religions that people adhere to in my setting. The Old Gods are identified with the Natural Forces and revered through the manifestations of the grandeur of the world. People gather around some great fires at certain spots, to worship and pray. They are not given names, and are considered so alien to human being that they cannot be understood at any level.
There are are also more anthropomorphic Gods that have relations to one another, and form a loose pantheon. The most important is the Sun God. He is considered to have his own will, his own agenda and shares interest in the life of mortals. So this god is not to be mistaken with the Sun.
Where his power comes from ? No one knows, but he rewards the prayers on a semi-regular basis. If he doesn't answer your prayer, it means that you were simply not worth. But one thing is clear: he does answer some prayers and some miracles occur when the prayer was fervent enough. He's especially keen on destroying the undead, but he cannot protect the dead from undeath. Undeath is a real problem for humans in my setting. If a human being dies at a moment of unrest, and death very frequently creates such unrest, the dead will very likely return as a hateful undead. Only priests of the god of death can perform a ritual that will preserve the dead from undeath. Unfortunately, very few such priests exist. Priest of the Sun God can only ask their deity to beg its brother/sister/cousin (it's not clear) to welcome the dead in his/her realm.
The clergy of the Sun god is quite intolerant with other religions, but it can only forbid other cults in part of the lands. His cult is also divided in a lot of sects that worship different aspects of the God with different dogmas.
Those who don't believe that the Sun God is more than the (super)natural power of the sun, the light, the heat or whatever, simply think that the prayer are answered by the supernatural power of the Sun of an aspect of Nature. Morevoer, as they can see some druids and shamans perform similar miracles without revering the Sun God, they know that they are right.
Most people know very little about the gods and they only trust their own beliefs (and fears) more than the tomes written by theologians.
My players seem to like it, they never laugh at any man of religion they meet. They seem to like the mystery around the religion, rather than a system where they would know who are the real gods, where they get their power from, etc.

 

[catastrophic]

The gods in my campaign are a pretty varied bunch, and various sorts of entities, too. Some are the full on supernal deities, others may be false, and different cultures have differetn ideas as to what a 'god' is.

For instance, the goblins in a particular region have a pantheon of gods, each of which is basically the super-enhanced guardian of a given tribe- literally just abominations created by various sorts of dark magic which they keep in deep pits in their home bases, and release if some kind of big trouble starts up.

They keep them fed and appeased, but they only venerate them isofar as they do any powerful entity, and since each goblin god is completle insane from the proceses they go through, it's not like they'd let them be in charge or anything.

Of course, the death of such a god would mean disaster for the tribe, since it's not like it's thar easy to make one, or anything. Most are simply extremly poweerful spellcasters that ended up turning into monsterous giant mutants at some point, while others are bound demons or elementals which were extremly difficult to gain the service of.

This has some interesting implications- for instance, for a goblin tribe to rise to great power and gain vassals from other tribes, they need to have a god, or at least convince the other tribes that they do.

On the other hand, since the goblin gods are without doubt the most powerful combatants in the tribes, the result is a more meritocratic leadership within tribes- rulership by strength is gradually replaced by more organised system, because being the toughest or the meanest is a lot less impressive when everyone knows the real heavyweight champion is the crazy magic giant who you have chained up in the basement.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

In my present campaign, religion plays a big part in everyday life. But it doesn't mean Gods do. There are two rival religions that people adhere to in my setting. The Old Gods are identified with the Natural Forces and revered through the manifestations of the grandeur of the world. People gather around some great fires at certain spots, to worship and pray. They are not given names, and are considered so alien to human being that they cannot be understood at any level.
There are are also more anthropomorphic Gods that have relations to one another, and form a loose pantheon. The most important is the Sun God. He is considered to have his own will, his own agenda and shares interest in the life of mortals. So this god is not to be mistaken with the Sun.

My present campaign I'm working with the idea of reversing it.

I have the old gods. They are anthropomorphic, making the mortal races in their own image. But they are gone or lost, few people know that they even existed. Those that do, some believe they are missing, some believe they are dead.

They have been replaces by less anthropomorphic current gods. A great beast, body like an ape, head like a wolf, said to be consumed by lust. A bloody hawk, a squid beast who's tentacles reach every shore.

In my campaign Divine power is a thing, it can be stolen, but additionally worshipers enhance it... just being worshipped can't make you divine, you have to have the spark.

 

[Calzone]

Mixing "the gods created the world" and "the gods get their power from their worshipers" can lead to problems:

• How did the gods get the power to create the world if they had no followers? After all, there aren't followers until there's a world for them to exist on.

• Similar to the above, if the gods created their followers, where did they get the power to do so?

• If people worship the gods because of their power, How do they ever convince the first follower to worship them? Just picture it:

"Umm, hi, I'm Kord...uh...well, I was kinda hoping you'd trust in me to guide your sword... ... ... What? Oh, well... No, funny thing that, I can't really stop a blow, yet... ... an arrow? Well, sure I... ... actually, no, no I can't... ... ... No, I'm not really in a fear-instilling mood right now...I can cheer you on from up here in the ether, though...Surely that's worth something, right?"

• How did the gods make their first followers aware of their presence? If you can't appear as a ghostly shape or a booming voice in the heavens, how will people ever know to beseech you for strength in war or healthy crops?

There are ways around these problems, but you generally have to presuppose the gods having a measure of god-like power.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

When I'm running a published world, I'm not to picky about the strategy, as long as it is semi-coherent, and hangs together enough for players and NPCs to be priests.

When I'm running a homebrew, I like for there to be some mystery about how it all works. So there will be a few myths or treatises available to the players to show them what their cultures believe, but I'll almost always have a few mistakes or misunderstandings or outright lies in that material. Part of the fun of a homebrew is uncovering such things.

A couple of other suggestions for reading for a different twist: "To Reign In Hell" by Steven Brust, and the "Dance of the Gods" series by Mayer Alan Brenner.

That last one embodies a version that I like to use in homebrews (though not exactly the way it is in the book), where the gods are defined as beings that have got access to something that operates on a more fundamental level of understanding/power than mortals, and that is what makes them gods. By varying what this is, how it works, how you get it, what you have to know to make it work, how you can lose it (if at all), and so forth, you can get very different interactions off of the same basic plan. And that gives you all kinds of room for misleading the players just starting a homebrew, because frequently the gods in that kind of environment don't want you to know.

That can play like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain if you are careless, but it need not. And if worried about that aspect, you can always cheat a bit by having more powerful, truly mysterious and real, but remote gods operating beyond the the lesser beings. Ao occupies a pretty important niche in the Forgotten Realms.

I'm also fond of having at least some of the gods be animist in nature, and tied more to geography than people. That is, gods emerge from the world and are dependent on it, but not on people. "The spirit of the mountain" is powerful in his areas, and all the spirits of the mountain in a given range exert a tremendous if subtle influence on the surrounding area. They aren't normally concerned with day to day human activities, and thus direct prayers aren't much of an option, but they definitely can be aroused. I'm not so hot on the PCs getting thrown into a volcano to appease the volcano god, but I'm definitely hot on the PCs ticking off the volcano god by rescuing the desiginated sacrifice.

 

[klofft]

This is an interesting topic and near and dear to my heart.

My last world had a distant, unknown Creator God and all the "gods" were essentially angels of various power levels. It was similar to the theology of Middle Earth.

Now, moving to D&D4 (and wanting to use the "core pantheon"), I'm toying with something new. My problem is that part of me wants to appeal to the mythic "gods are petulent children warring with each other." But my actual day job is being a theologian, so I can't escape some ideas: where did the gods get their power? Without getting into a formal philosophical/theological discussion, the so-called Five Proofs too strongly suggest a single god to me and my group.

An idea we're toying with is that the pantheon is like the Christian Trinity, in that they are individual persons of one divine nature. The big difference is that the persons are unaware that they are one god, so they squabble and fight among themselves.

So either God has a personality disorder or there is a mystery to the divine nature that we haven't fully figured out yet. In either case, the people of the setting have not yet philosophized the existence of a single god.

(This is still a work in progress, so if anyone has any comments on it, they'd be welcome.)

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Mixing "the gods created the world" and "the gods get their power from their worshipers" can lead to problems

Well, only if you consider it an all or nothing proposition - the Gods could easily be able both have the power to create the world and still have a reason to desire/need the worship of followers. Indeed, having both elements can lead to some interesting decisions as to why worship is important - perhaps the act of creation weakened the gods or somehow chained them to the world/its creatures.


Darren, if you are reading this, now's the time to stop, as I'm about to discuss our campaign.



Anyway, in my own game, I didn't need to answer that question, as the active dieties are "derivative gods" (the original gods lost the Dawn War and were killed - the current set are ascended mortals). In my campaign, the gods direct the resurrection of the souls of their worshippers - if you don't worship a god, you're likely to return as an undead. However, the gods are also "tainted"/shaped by the worship of their followers - so, if that if they accept the souls of evil/good persons, they too are shifted towards evil/good. Indeed, in one world, there was only one god, but he "shattered" into a vast pantheon of multiple gods.

 

[Major Moab]

This is how I have always perceived gods. Not right or wrong, simply my stance:
-Gods function on belief, not worship. Worship is simply an accepted and verifiable form of belief. Thus, in real world myth/theologies, Davy Jones and Mother Carey exist because the sailors needed something to believe in. They don't need priests or a church. This idea is explored humorously in "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett.
-A powerful enough god can retroactively create the universe that it's followers live in. Trying to find the source; however, is a chicken and egg argument.
-Destroying believers, or even non-believers is sensible in this context. If you saw someone burst into flames as a great voice boomed down, you would increase belief. I think of it like finance, spending a portion of your metaphorical wealth increases your wealth.
-Evil gods could, easily, function under this concept with no worshipers. As long as his antithesis god still had worshipers, he would have believers.
-It also allows pantheons to wax and wane in power, depending on region, political climate and natural disasters. It could even be accidental. A natural disaster that was not divinely caused, could become a source of belief, if someone were to blame a god for it. That's part of the reason gods like missionaries and priests. They tend to give their god credit for everything.

I am always worried that I've stepped on toes when I talk about religions, real or imaginary. If you are offended, please accept my apologies. It most certainly wasn't intended.