D&D General The Role and Purpose of Evil Gods

[Lanefan]

Belief in D&D =/= just knowing they exist.

Except that D&D writings throughout the years say that no, it's not lower than I think. If your standard of "just knowing they exist and can talk to them" was sufficient, no god could die from lack of belief. They do die from lack of worshippers, though, even though your much lower standard of belief is still present.

Do they outright die from lack of worshippers, or merely become powerless? (I've always seen it as the latter)

I ask because the whole deities-are-immortal piece rather plays against their dying...

 

[Lanefan]

Strangely, I can believe you didn't actually read what I wrote. Gods sometimes impersonate other gods for pretty much same reasons that humans impersonate other humans, and gods may even impersonate humans to walk among them or impart valuable gifts or lessons, but yes, it's out of character for one to impersonate another god just to get worshipers.

Trickster deities - Loki in particular - are known for impersonating other deities; sometimes in attempts to fool mortals and other times in attempts to fool other deities. Gaining worshippers would be at best a side hustle, and not the main point.

 

[Faolyn]

Do they outright die from lack of worshippers, or merely become powerless? (I've always seen it as the latter)

I ask because the whole deities-are-immortal piece rather plays against their dying...

There are dead gods floating in the Astral.

It's possible that this is just a god-version of dead, and they could be revived if they got new worshipers. Whether they'd be revived just the way they were, or as something else...

 

[Lanefan]

There are dead gods floating in the Astral.

It's possible that this is just a god-version of dead, and they could be revived if they got new worshipers. Whether they'd be revived just the way they were, or as something else...

Ah.

I take my inspiration for this from the trilogy "The Winter of the World" by Michael Scott Rohan. A good read if you can find it; and I won't say another word so as to avoid spoilers.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Belief in D&D =/= just knowing they exist.

I didn't say it wasn't, but it is still lower bar than you seem to think to worship an extraplanar being that conquered your home.

Except that D&D writings throughout the years say that no, it's not lower than I think. If your standard of "just knowing they exist and can talk to them" was sufficient, no god could die from lack of belief. They do die from lack of worshippers, though, even though your much lower standard of belief is still present.

Lower than you think -==/= "know they exist"

You seem to think though that it would somehow be difficult for an extremely powerful extraplanar being to conquer a massive swath of land and make a state religion where people actually worship him, after having the people as his servants for multiple decades.

It isn't that hard. They don't have to love him, they don't have to have faith that he has their best interests in heart, they have to worship him and perform acts of devotion. Even "I need to perform this prayer so Iuz doesn't kill my family" is kind of enough, since that is the sort of worship the Goddess Umberlee has.

Nope. He's a Demigod, so apparently being a right evil bastard causes people to not actually like you. As in they are not true worshippers.

Or maybe he was born a demigod. Certainly don't see any point where as a Cambion he suddenly ranked up to Demigod.

But, we are just going to keep going in circles, because he has everything you say a God should have, and you are just stating that he must lack worship, because this being who existed before the D&DG book that said worship makes you more powerful and that demigods are weaker than gods, was listed as a demigod. Did it occur to you that if Iuz followed the rules he would be a Greater Deity? They just never bothered to change that because they felt it really didn't matter to the story?

Cool. Are they half-demon bastards who murder people and terrorize them? I'm going to go with no, they aren't. If they were, they'd have a few hundred followers at best.

I'm curious, why does Nerull have enough worshippers to be a greater god? Erythnul? Bane? Vecna? Shar? Malar? I can go on and on, Umberlee? Auril? All of them are murders and terrorize people. In fact, Umberlee's worship is almost EXCLUSIVELY because she has terrorized people into worshipping her. Other than "well, he was said to be a demigod before the rules came out" what reason do you have to believe that Iuz is any less successful than these other evil gods?

It's not a circle at all. That's just your misrepresentation of what I said. What I said was...

1. Gods get their power from worshippers.
2. Yeenoghu being barely a god these days shows that he does not have a lot of worshippers.

End of line, not circle.

But he does have a lot of worshipers. He is worshiped by the entire global Gnoll community. That isn't a small number of worshipers. Additionally, I'd forgotten til I went to look up warband numbers, but Leucrotta's also worship him, so there are TWO sentient races that worship Yeenoghu, without counting human cultists, which he also has.

Additionally, their tactics tell us that there must be a lot of gnolls, because to overrun a castle gnolls will usually just fight and die, until they can climb their dead and overrun the castle. That would take hundreds of gnolls just to make that ramp, and they would still have enough to take the castle.

In other words, there are just as many gnolls as there are orcs, easily.

Are you seriously arguing that a fraction of a race, say 5% of a billion, is less than an entire 100k?

Humanity in most settings, such as Toril, is highly populous. There are more of them than the other races, so a fraction of humanity will often be more than entire race X.

But I don't think there ARE a billion humans in Toril. Maybe tens of millions, but certainly not billions from looking over the numbers.

But, what if we took a population that was noticeably lower. Like Giants or Yuan-Ti. You said that to become a lesser diety you would only need the worship of a single country, that is certainly only around 500,000 people to maybe a million for a big country (using DnD numbers). And I'm talking about an entire race of people scattered in colonies and cities across the entire globe, or across other planes of existence in the case of the Ixichtl's. There are plenty of them to support a god, after all the Hill Giants alone support a god, and there certainly aren't an obscene number of them running around.

Heck, there is the God Kar'r'rga who is worshiped only by the natives of a small island called Jazayir al-Sartan

That is true. There are reasons, such as entire races being less numerous than a fraction of humanity, for it not to be enough. I think you finally get it!

So gnolls are outnumbered by the Uthgardt, the Hill Giants, the Trogolodytes, The Yuan-Ti, Beholders,Hags, Nagas, Rakshasas, Giant Eagles.

I could go on, but all of these people have gods. Are we really going to say that there are more immortal Naga's in the world than Gnolls?

 

[Faolyn]

I'm curious, why does Nerull have enough worshippers to be a greater god? Erythnul? Bane? Vecna? Shar? Malar? I can go on and on, Umberlee? Auril? All of them are murders and terrorize people. In fact, Umberlee's worship is almost EXCLUSIVELY because she has terrorized people into worshipping her. Other than "well, he was said to be a demigod before the rules came out" what reason do you have to believe that Iuz is any less successful than these other evil gods?

He doesn't. If you google him, you'll find most descriptions of him include the following sentences. "Most common folk do not worship or propitiate him, although they fear him greatly. It is believed that any form of appeasement will merely draw his attention, something that is at all costs to be avoided by the sensible. Nerull seems, in fact, to draw power from the very avoidance of his name."

Nerull is effectively the pink elephants of gods. Don't think about him! Oops. Too late. Well, that's OK; for Nerull, the fear people have while trying to not think about him or name him is enough to feed him. And he still has people who do actively worship him or try very hard to avoid worshiping him "on countless worlds".

As for the other gods, they have wider portfolios than just "murder murder murder," and attract a wider variety of worshipers than you might think.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No, that just means that they were either written by different writers who didn't consult each other or who wanted to present different options, or they were written specifically to override the previous rules, most likely because they were part of a different edition.

If the different writers didn't need to consult each other, and came up with opposite rules... doesn't that imply that it didn't really matter and that they were fairly interchangeable? There are even gods who were also specifically Demon Lords, like Thasmudyan from "The Complete Book of Necromancers" from 1995.

Can but don't, because D&D gods--outside of homebrewed individuals for individual worlds--don't do that sort of thing.

And again, my only concern with this portion of the discussion is whether or not they can. Because maybe someone homebrewed a god in a world that does that for a Celestial Warlock pact. No reason that they can't, so it is a story we can possibly tell.

Strangely, I can believe you didn't actually read what I wrote. Gods sometimes impersonate other gods for pretty much same reasons that humans impersonate other humans, and gods may even impersonate humans to walk among them or impart valuable gifts or lessons, but yes, it's out of character for one to impersonate another god just to get worshipers.

Okay, but that wasn't the original example, so maybe you should be more clear that you are altering the example. You are right, it doesn't make a lot of sense to impersonate another god to get worshipers, of course, you still absolutely could have a false face as a different diety to get worship if you happen to be an evil god of some terrible thing, not that hard to do I'd imagine.

That's fine. But since the gods may or may not even exist there, and the archfiends are, IIRC, all imprisoned, it's entirely a moot point. For all practical purposes, Eberron doesn't have gods, it has religions. Religions that, unlike in just about every other D&D setting, have no alignment restrictions and practically no boundaries on what can be done in the religions name. Which is why you have a "good" religion like the Silver Flame that tried to commit genocide.

1) It isn't a moot point. A setting where the gods are distant the archfiends imprisoned is still a setting with gods and archfiends.

2) Nothing you are saying changes anything about the fact that I am including settings like Eberron in the discussion of "things it is possible to do within DnD" since it is a setting in DnD.

3) Um... yeah, so you realize that Helm has a genocide in Matizca right? I'm sure if we dug through the various settings with a fine toothed comb we'd find plenty of "good" beings that committed terrible acts. Dragonlance anyone? Eberron just made it a bit more explicit.

If your sole reason is to say "don't pick both without good reason, because you don't have to feel obligated to include everything" then why do you continue to argue this? Why do you continue to claim that evil gods and archfiends are all but identical and redundant? Why do you continue to dismiss every idea offered you with "no, because they're redundant"? Why do you continue to move goalposts? Why not accept that DMs who aren't you in fact do tell different stories with archfiends and evil gods, or accept that DMs would roleplay them in different ways? Even if Bane and Asmodeus had completely identical portfolios, they're still different people who would go about their goals in different ways.

If your only reason for arguing in this thread is truly to say "don't pick both without good reason, because you don't have to feel obligated to include everything," then why do you care if other people argue otherwise? You would have offered your advice. After advice is offered, it's up to other people as to whether or not they take it. You're not required to continue to beat it into other people's heads until they accept it.

And most importantly, you haven't shown why it's bad to have redundant gods and archthings! There are stories that can be told of two practically-identical entities vying for the same thing.

I have no reason to show that it is bad. I have talked about how it can end up creating a muddled and confused story, which in my mind is fairly bad, but I don't need to prove it is bad, because I don't care if people think it is good or bad. I simply am pointing out that it is.

Why do I care that people are saying "No, you are wrong, this is the truth"? Well, because I don't think I'm wrong. Is it so strange that I'm responding to people who have a different perspective by trying to convince them of my side? Isn't that the point of discussing? I don't believe in just making a statement then abandoning the field. I defend my ideas.

As for the first part, why am I responding to your answers with the fact that they are redundant? Because you claimed you could tell a story with evil gods that was impossible to tell with Archfiends. So, if your evidence doesn't prove that, then I'm going to tell you that it doesn't. Why can't I accept people enforcing differences they made up? Because you are presenting those not as "here is something you could potentially do" but as "You are wrong that they are redundant, because I made up a reason that they aren't redundant" which doesn't make me wrong, it makes you having made-up facts that did not otherwise exist.

No, you've just been telling people that there's no stories that can be told that differentiate them. That's pretty much the same thing.

You don't "need" to have both elves and dwarfs. Sure, one lives "in nature" and the other lives "underground"... in D&D (and that's excluding the drow--or all those dwarfs that live above ground, like those albino dwarfs from Chult). But mythology has elves living underground as well (dokkalfar--which may actually be dwarfs), and quite frankly caverns are just as natural as forests are, and can be just as beautiful--and I'm talking about real caverns here, not fantasy caverns that have a full ecosystem. And at least one popular depiction of dwarfs shows them living in a forest, in small groups of seven. Those guys just commuted to the Underdark for work.

But even if you go the standard route and differentiate the two like D&D does (which I would do), you still don't "need" them both. You don't need either of them. You can easily have a world with no Tolkienesque races in it, especially considering the number of anthro races out there. Most people include elves and dwarfs because they want to.

And yet there are clearly stories that are tied to one and not the other. Elves are not known for many of the same things Dwarves are. In most depictions of them they are incredibly different beings.

If you wanted to say that elves and dwarves are nearly indistinguishable from each other, I'd be interested in seeing your arguments, but just the fact that caves are natural and beautiful doesn't make them the same as living in a forest. And Elves are not really seen in the clan structures that dwarves have, which is a major driver of some dwarven stories.

Except that Ghaunadaurs isn't just the god of oozes. He's the god of oozes AND abominations AND outcasts AND caverns AND subterranean things AND possibly some part of Elemental Evil. You're choosing to actively ignore all the things that make Ghaunadaur different from Juiblex in favor of the one thing they have in common (and moving those goalposts by saying "what if he's not part of the drow pantheon" when there's no reason for him to ditch part of his portfolio). It's like saying Talos and Umberlee are redundant because they're both the god of storms while ignoring all the rest of their portfolios.

So, ignoring my change of the argument to try and avoid confusion to continue pounding on the point of confusion. Would you be happy if I said I must have obviously picked a bad example then? Because, actually, I do think that Talos and Umberlee both being in charge of all storms is redundant. Why do they both need that portfolio?

Does that mean that the character's are identical? No, but it does indicate that their jobs are redundant.

Let's see the statblock for Ghaunadaur to see if he has the same powers as Juiblex. Have one handy? I'm sure at least one edition had stats for him. It sounds like something 1e or 2e would do.

The "control all oozes everywhere" part. But hey, I literally changed the example because you hated the original example so much, so maybe instead of trying to compare the statblocks, we could focus on the changed example, since I made the mistake of trying to use real dnd lore for my example.

The only reason you see those plots as interchangeable is because you're coming into the argument assuming that the gods and fiends are interchangeable and dismissing everyone who feels otherwise. You have shown repeatedly that you are willing to have gods act like fiends and fiends act like gods. And while that may be fine for your campaign, it's not the way that the game itself is written, or the way that the rest of us this thread are using them.

Then how do you run Yeenoghu? You claim you run him differently than me, and I run him how the books say to, so how do you run him?

Unless, like the many of us, you use some of the canonical rules and/or make up our own rules to differentiate them. Like gods can create clerics and archfiends can either create few clerics or can only create warlocks.

But you kept dismissing those rules. This is why I doubt that you're just trying to tell people that they're redundant so they don't feel obligated to have both. You have actively gone out of your way to scrounge up obscure rules in order to tell people that the ways they differentiate gods and archthings is wrong or has been overruled in a different source.

If you really want to show people that they're redundant, then I would think that your goal would be to help remove those redundancies, even if it means completely homebrewing differences. But you haven't.

How would removing redundancies show people that they are redundant? Doesn't that seem counter-intuitive?

And, yes, "only gods can create clerics" is something that is not true. You can make it true for your world if you want, but that doesn't make it a true fact of the game.

 

[Chaosmancer]

He doesn't. If you google him, you'll find most descriptions of him include the following sentences. "Most common folk do not worship or propitiate him, although they fear him greatly. It is believed that any form of appeasement will merely draw his attention, something that is at all costs to be avoided by the sensible. Nerull seems, in fact, to draw power from the very avoidance of his name."

Nerull is effectively the pink elephants of gods. Don't think about him! Oops. Too late. Well, that's OK; for Nerull, the fear people have while trying to not think about him or name him is enough to feed him. And he still has people who do actively worship him or try very hard to avoid worshiping him "on countless worlds".

As for the other gods, they have wider portfolios than just "murder murder murder," and attract a wider variety of worshipers than you might think.

So, Max's point is that Iuz is a terrible guy who conquers and murders, so all the state worship of him isn't "true" and therefore he doesn't get power.

So, how does, oh let's say Myrkul, the god of Murder, have a whole bunch of "true worshipers" but the divine king of a massive empire doesn't? Also, Nerull getting power from people not worshiping him seems to throw a lot of divine rules out the window.

 

[Lanefan]

So, Max's point is that Iuz is a terrible guy who conquers and murders, so all the state worship of him isn't "true" and therefore he doesn't get power.

So, how does, oh let's say Myrkul, the god of Murder, have a whole bunch of "true worshipers" but the divine king of a massive empire doesn't? Also, Nerull getting power from people not worshiping him seems to throw a lot of divine rules out the window.

Maybe Iuz isn't very wise and thus has his worshippers continually murdering each other, while Myrkul is wise enough to make sure his worshippers only murder worshippers of other deities?

 

[Maxperson]

So, Max's point is that Iuz is a terrible guy who conquers and murders, so all the state worship of him isn't "true" and therefore he doesn't get power.

So, how does, oh let's say Myrkul, the god of Murder, have a whole bunch of "true worshipers" but the divine king of a massive empire doesn't? Also, Nerull getting power from people not worshiping him seems to throw a lot of divine rules out the window.

In the Forgotten Realms Ao can and does just assign power levels to gods. It's why no god can come in, gain followers and be a god there. They have to have his approval to be a god.