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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5616985" data-attributes="member: 54877">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> 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.</blockquote>

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