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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4555878" data-attributes="member: 4937">I believe the best written D&D supplement of all time is 'The Book of the Righteous', published by Green Ronin, and written by Aaron Loeb.  That's the only 'dieties and demigods' book that has ever given me enough to run a pantheon 'out of the box'.So, for those of you familiar with the work, that should give you a good idea how far away I am from the ideology apparant in 4e.  Fundamentally, I'm not opposed to the notion of god-slaying, but if gods were so easily slain that all it took was a few epic quests and five or so epic mortals, then long long long ago all the gods with their greater knowledge, power, and resources would have managed to kill each other off.  If the PC's could manage to arrange to kill Tiamat, then surely Bahamat or one of her other divine foes could have managed it centuries before they were born.In many ways this is similar to the question, "If the treasure is easy to find, why is it still lying here?"  For all the people trumpeting how 4e is bringing the change, I don't see this as a fundamental change in ideology compared to 3e.  In both cases, we are seeing gods presented as uber-monsters - powerful to be sure - but for the sufficiently powerful really no different than facing ogres or dragons at earlier levels.   Some of the window dressing has changed, but a book of dieties presented this way would just be the 1st ed. and 3rd ed. monster manual all over again.  At least in the 3rd ed. book, some effort had been expended explaining why all the gods hadn't been long since murdered.I don't think my take on polytheistic pantheons is quite as extreme as the take Loeb takes - I don't think anything in a game should be unstatable - but I definately lean more toward 'gods are so far beyond mortal powers as to be incomprihensible' than I do gods as simply epic boss monsters, if only because logical necessity would seem to drive in that direction.</blockquote>

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