D&D General The Role and Purpose of Evil Gods

[Mirtek]

About Orcus' history (pre-4e ditching everything), there one Shane O’Conno once took the effort to compile everything into a single PDF. Unfortunately I no longer have a copy stored (or stored away where I have idead it is) and google only yielded one hit for an attachment to an old post here at Enworld, that unfortunately no longer can be accessed.

However the cache is our fried here, so here's the cached version. Better save it way if you're interested, who knows when this cache will be gone as well.

The gist on his origins as a mortal BTW, it's not from an FR source but from a Planescape source indeed.

A Brief History of Orcus

 

[Scribe]

Sorry, I got lost in this thread, but @Helldritch I believe you posted something about Spell Levels, and Hierarchy of Outsiders granting those Spells.

Can you point me to where that is all defined?

 

[Faolyn]

All I have done is try to prove that the Evil Gods and the Archfiends taken together is redundant. And therefore, if someone wanted to get rid of the evil gods for their homebrew, they aren't losing anything. Which was the initial question asked "what are we losing" the answer is very much nothing of substantial value.

If you want to argue that they should be left in the game because redundancies are perfectly fine... go ahead? It literally has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is purely about showing that they are redundant.

Yeah, but as I showed, there's already tons of redundancies in D&D. If you want to get rid of the redundancies, then honestly the best thing to do would be to make a brand new setting that doesn't include them. If people are saying that gods and arch-fiends aren't redundant, it's because in their games, they're not. But in D&D as a whole, they're no more (or less) redundant than anything else.

So let's say we get rid of either arch-fiends or evil gods. What are we losing? From a purely mechanical standpoint, not much, by RAW.

But from a storytelling perspective, there's a lot that could be lost. Whether you homebrew a mechanical difference or just say it's purely a social issue, there's interesting stories that can be told. What if Asmodeus wants to be considered a god because that's more "legitimate" (in some beings' eyes) than being an arch-fiend? I can see mortal societies tolerating or even accepting temples to Bane but being against an arch-fiend's cult. The stories of the gods tend to play out more on the Prime than those of arch-things, which means that there are more hooks for players who don't have plane-hopping abilities. In earlier posts, you said it was bizarre to have a god of murder, a god of envy, and a god of sin. But there's stories to be told there, where one of those gods (or arch-fiends) wants to have its portfolio expand to encompass additional concepts. I

If those aren't stories you want to explore, that's totally fine. But it shows that what looks like redundancy doesn't have to be.

 

[Maxperson]

Because "core" DnD is inextricably linked with the settings. If you go forth with the idea that every setting is homebrew, then there is no Core DnD, because everything you would reference as "core" is tied to a setting.

I don't agree with that. Orcs are core, but they aren't linked to a particular setting. Same with the races, classes, spells(other than named spells), virtually every monster in the MM, and so on. Being in a setting isn't the same as being tied to a setting. Very little of core is tied to any particular setting.

 

[Maxperson]

I disagree. And in fact, it is casually easy to disprove this.

Vecna. Cyric. Kelemvor. St. Cuthbert.

There are dozens of mortals who have ascended to godhood. They didn't win any pantheon wars. They weren't more part of the cosmic order than an immortal being who literally runs part of the cosmos.

I'm not sure what he meant by winning pantheon wars, but as soon as you become a god, you become part of the cosmic order and are tied to it. A mortal ascending to godhood and taking on a portfolio becomes tied to the natural order of things and has to run that portfolio indefinitely. Disrupting the balance runs you the risk of an Ao killing you or stripping away your godhood.

And Archfiends have created aspects of reality that still affect the running of the cosmos, such as the creation of mortal races.

Can you prove that as a fact, or is this one of those, "Sages believe that archfiends...." things.

 

[Maxperson]

Note that Yeenoghu creating the gnoll race started as a gnoll myth in 4e and was made fact in 5e. Until then it was always stated that Yeenoghu did not create gnolls. He merely discovered them, like how they looked similiar to him and wiggled his way into their original pantheon and managed to slowly but steadily replace all their other deities. During this he actually ascended to become a full fledged deity in his own right (he was a demi- or lesser power)

He didn't really create them in 5e, either. They sprang up in his wake, implying that it was simply the chaotic demonic power of the Abyss pulling a fast one on some hyenas that created the gnolls. Yeenoghu was just the instrument of the Abyss at the time.

 

[Faolyn]

Note that Yeenoghu creating the gnoll race started as a gnoll myth in 4e and was made fact in 5e. Until then it was always stated that Yeenoghu did not create gnolls. He merely discovered them, like how they looked similiar to him and wiggled his way into their original pantheon and managed to slowly but steadily replace all their other deities. During this he actually ascended to become a full fledged deity in his own right (he was a demi- or lesser power)

It should be noted that there was another gnoll god, Gorellik, who has since vanished into the ether (or, well, the Astral). From what I can tell, he also didn't create gnolls but thought they looked like him. Maybe Yeenoghu ate Gorellik and took his backstory.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Note that Yeenoghu creating the gnoll race started as a gnoll myth in 4e and was made fact in 5e. Until then it was always stated that Yeenoghu did not create gnolls. He merely discovered them, like how they looked similiar to him and wiggled his way into their original pantheon and managed to slowly but steadily replace all their other deities. During this he actually ascended to become a full fledged deity in his own right (he was a demi- or lesser power)

I was referring to him in the 5e capacity.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The whole primordial concept did not exist at all until that point

Which reads to me like 4e made a massive improvement, because Primordials are an amazing concept.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's linked with the example setting(s) but by no means are those links inextricable - despite what WotC sometimes seems to want DMs to believe.

Er...wha??

Core D&D is the basic rules - here's how you roll up a character, here's how each spell* works and what it does, here's some pointers on how to flesh out your character's personality, here's the details on how combat abstraction is handled, etc.; and for DMs a separate book with here's how to run a game, here's the DM-side nuts and bolts, etc. - and none of those things are setting-tied. In fact, the whole point is that they can be ported into a DM's homebrew setting without any extra work required (that said, though 99% of the time a DM who is homebrewing her setting is also going to tweak some rules, there's nothing saying she has to).

The only aspect that might - and only remotely might - be considered setting-tied is monsters, and even they can be ported wholesale into any homebrew setting with no work needed.

Core D&D is at its heart setting-agnostic; and that they provide and use a sample setting to show how it all works doesn't change this.

* - even including named spells e.g. Leomund's Hut, Mordenkainen's Hound, etc. - trivially easy for a homebrewing DM to say those are historic mages from her own setting rather than some other world.

Exactly. Only the character creation rules (which reference settings anyways with things like the various dieties for the Domains, the difference between cleric and druid, warlocks, and the various races and the details about them) are not tied to some setting.

But the moment you want monsters or extraplanar powers, or heck other planes fo existence, you start referencing settings.

So, if you want to say that you are only going to reference the non-setting gods... there aren't any. They are all tied to settings. Same with the Abyss and ect ect ect.