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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8729851" data-attributes="member: 42856">Is it? Don't you use "gods" to refer to the lar familiaris or the di manibus? I checked Wikipedia and they use "household gods" and "chtonic deities" to describe them. I can see how "capital-G God" would bring the idea of being big, but "the god of a specific spring" would work without being a contradiction (especially when speaking about Terensis, the god of threshing or Lactans, the goddess who ensures sap flows in tree). I won't further dispute meaning of English words with a native speaker, though. I am just surprised that god isn't used to talk about the countless "little gods".The point you make about in-setting farmers not caring is exactly what I was pointing to: before creating a mythology for a fantasy setting, it is useful to establish how the people in setting relate to their gods. It would be not very useful to develop the rich personalities of 342 gods for a setting if basically nobody in the story is going to care because the only interaction there will be in the story with them is going to be transactional.Because, maybe, we understand Alexa or fertilizers and we don't ascribe a personality or agency to them. They are extremely mundane. Ted the talking turnip can have a temper tantrum. (I like the way this sentence sounds...) and we wouldn't know how he is doing things. Personnally, I would be awed if a random piece of household furniture suddenly developped feelings and the ability to speak, claimed to be called Alexa and proposed to order things to be delivered to me if I gave a modicum of worship and my CC number. It would actually shatter my worldview (once every possibility of a hoax are excluded).But the same would work with the Olympians. Poseidon or Ares are major gods, even with the value of ancient greeks they certainly wouldn't be considered "nice" and inspiring reverence or worship, yet everyone was nonetheless doing propitiation to him, so not to lose wars and fleet in a storm. The prohibition of hubris by the gods (and the countless stories of people being harshly punished for thinking themselves above their lot) is very close to your mafia analogy. "We alloted you some place in destiny, do not ever think to get a larger part or we'll punish you". Yet nobody tried to exorcize Poseidon from the seas (and attempting it would certainly be a prime example of hubris... the same as exorcizing Ted from your turnip patch because who are you, lowly human, to think yourself equal to a god, even it's Ted the Talking Turnip?).I didn't mean that it was to force the supernatural forces to do something but that there was an expectation that ritual would work (do ut des). The basis of worship wasn't connected to the personal feelings or general behavior of the worshipper but to the proper conduct of rituals. If they didn't work, it was either because they were rejected (as the god was of course able to consider a proposed offering insufficent or inappropriate, hence the need to perform omen-taking to ensure the deal was accepted by the god when it really mattered), or because the ritual was improperly conduced, or because some other circumstance wasn't taken into account to explain the failure (such as a former offence to the gods not resolved), not the whims of the god to take the offering and ignore them randomly. You "hoped" the gods to accept the proposed deal, but you didn't expect them to reneg on it willy-nilly after accepting the offering. If you determined what was a good day to have a battle, fought on this day and lost, it wasn't because "hey, the god  we asked said through omens that it was OK, but he wasn't obliged to tell the truth despite accepting our offerings, we were just hoping to get a hint from him anyway and this failure will not lessen the reverence we have for him." It was because one called the god in question by an improper name, the priest doing the omen taking was unclean and so on.</blockquote>

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