NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7162788" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the common sense of the word clerics and wizards are supernatural, and hence - if worshipped - would be gods!Sauron and Morgoth are clearly supernatural beings, and can empower their followers (at least, that seems to be implied) but they are not gods.Well, I don't think I'm adopting a different view. At least, not different from anything ever found in D&D. Nor do I think I'm trading in "technicalities".Classic D&D includes supernatural beings who are (i) worshipped, and (ii) can confer supernatural powers upon their cultists, but who (iii) are not gods: the demon lords/princes and arch-devils.4e contains beings that also satisfy (i) to (iii): demon lords/princes and primordials. (Another way in which 4e harks back to the classic game.)The theology of classic D&D is rather implicit, but in 4e it's spelled out, and the reason that primordials are not gods is explained: gods created mortals, and fixed the world as a place fit for mortals to inhabit. Primordials supplied the matter, but gods the form - in that sense it's a rather Platonistic cosmology. A recurring theme in HPL - intellectually driven at least in part by his understanding of relativity, but presumably driven by emotional concerns also - is that form is, in fact, an illusion - hence the obsession with chaos, with "unnatural" and "hyberbolic" angles that defy conception and description, etc.There is a tendency in D&D post-DDG, only strengthening, I would say, in the 2nd ed and Planesape era, and continuing in 3E and 5e (with 4e an interruption in the tradition), to downplay these cosmological/theological aspects of godhood (and its potential contrast with other modes of supernatural power) and to focus on questions of cataloguing (see eg the original DDGs demi-, lesser and greater gods, with attendant special abilities; 2nd ed's introduction of "intermediate" gods; and 3E DDG's use of divine ranks to systematise the special abiliites).I think the classic/4e tradition is inherently more interesting, truer to the (diverse) literary roots of the fantasy genre, and also is more fruitful for trying to make sense of the views that [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION], [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] and some others are expressing - which is how this particular branch of the thread began.He's a god of wine, intoxication, fertility, passion. He establishes an understanding and orientation towards wine's capacity to intoxicate, the relationship between intoxication and the shedding of inhibition, the resultant lucidity of the drunk, etc.In The Hour of the Dragon Conan enters a temple of Set. There are cultists and snakes. There's nothing to suggest that Set - a divine being - exists as a fact of the setting.Conan himself observes that Crom does not intervene in the affairs of mortals. Nothing suggests that Crom is an existent divine being.And stepping back a bit to more general points: there is a radical difference between the fantasy of REH and HPL, and the fantasy of JRRT. The former two are modernist; JRRT is anti-modernist. You don't capture this just by noting the differences between the catalogues of their settings and cosmologies. (There are differences between REH and HPL also - but they are differences of a type of humanistic optimism in REH vs pessimism in HPL.)One way to capture it it this: Conan is a model of human striving, and the success it can lead to; LotR is a critique of human striving and a hymn to humility. Straight away, this reveals something about the role that divinity might play in each setting.</blockquote>

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