What if the higher powers vanished?

[pallen]

I was tossing around some ideas with my gaming group today, and one seemed to generate a lot of conversation:

Take a generic D&D setting with deities who grant divine powers to clerics, paladins, and the like. They provide guidance (either directly or indirectly) to their favored mortals. Now imagine that, in one otherwise unremarkable moment, the entire pantheon of deities went silent. They (and their agents) didn't respond to any prayers, didn't communicate in any way to the mortal realm. Divine powers stopped working. Even the most powerful arcane divinations showed no sign of the deities' existence, what had happened to them, or if/when they would ever return.

What would happen? What would the immediate impact on common folk? Kingdoms/nations? Churches?

And if this were the status quo for years, what would the long term effects be?

 

[Quartz]

Dragonlance, anyone?

 

[Varianor Abroad]

The immediate impact? Protests from all the rich adventurers suddenly sucking wind when all the cures run out.

 

[Slife]

The immediate impact? Protests from all the rich adventurers suddenly sucking wind when all the cures run out.

Bards become rich and influential?

Clerics of an ideal become even more munchkinny?

 

[Asmor]

Not really relevant, but in my homebrew the world was cut off from the rest of the cosmology (and the deities) dozens of millenia ago. There are still churches, but they're more like a real life church (i.e. just a religious organization, they don't actually get special powers as a direct result of their worship). Clerics all get their powers from their own beliefs, and even Paladins are fueled by their own self-righteousness.

 

[Robbs]

On the practical front, you need to decide how to handle the healing gap you will create. A simple fix is to make Cures and such arcane spells. Another option is to develop other means of healing, i.e. alchemical methods. Also makes for a lot of very wise, but otherwise wimpy, fighters. And are druids still viable (depending upon how you view their power, earth goddess or other)?

On the world front you could easily see a degeneration into mass worship, that is worship of anything that might provide (whether that provision be healing or protection). So demons, devils and such would have huge opportunities to carve out spheres of power and influence. Militant churches (those churches that favor arcane or military aspects) would have a huge advantage and may have embarked upon holy wars to eliminate competition (expecting a day to come when their gods return).

Just a couple of things that come to mind. I'm actually working on a similar concept where a series of god wars will condense the world from 5 pantheons to one mixed pantheon. Obviously it is going to suck for certain churches when their god/dess is suddenly gone. Makes for a lot of free agents.