Gods in the Campaign... Who are they for you?

[Petruchio]

In creating my campaign setting, I am now beginning to deal with the question of deities. Rather than ask for some help, I was wondering what the gods (and outsiders) have been like in all y'alls campaigns. How active are they? Are they all knowing, all powerful and all good? Are they really the creators, or just really powerful outsiders? And how did they interact with one another? Those are just some of the things that I'm interested in, though there is a potentially incredible amount of depth.

And as a sub-question, have any of you been in/DM a campaign where there was a monotheistic religion, either as the dominant religion, or just as a sect who claims to have the One True God?

[Kajhera]

1) Some of them come to chat with almost random mortals who catch their interest fairly often. Getting a visit from a disguised one is not uncommon - aspects of them, at least.
2) They are rarely all knowing, all powerful, or all good. They are often knowing things beyond mortal ken, incredibly powerful, and benevolent. However, the most powerful of deities and cosmic forces being distinctly Neutral, those under are limited in how much of these they can be by comparison.
3) They're powerful outsiders who often create worlds. That which first created cares little for this passing thought of his, and some immortal beings on truly ancient worlds have witnessed many armageddons and changing pantheons of the divine.
4) Alliance, sex, children, marriage, betrayal, war, conversation, the usual.
5) No.

[veekie]

Activity level: Low, except through their worshippers or sometimes influencing their portfolio. Powerful deities generally cover a massive area, and they have limited attention they can deploy to a given task. While they can act, using divine power puts them in a position where their rivals can act. Weaker ones can be very much present, perhaps just ethereal in their one sole temple. Power-Saving-Mode avatars may walk the earth or possess hosts though.

Power level: Mixed bag, most small-time gods don't even go above CR 10. The weakest are basically various Outsiders/Fey/whatever. Yes, their clerics can out-power their deity, but they're powered by their faith, the deity just gives it form. They however, do have exceptional power to influence their portfolios.

Righteousness: Think Greek gods writ large for the most part. They define what is 'good' to their worshippers for the most part. Who's going to call a god to account? They embody justice and the lack of it in themselves, so what they do is Right.

Creationism: They create the world in that they can shape a lot more of it than most, and did indeed forge the region they are creator-god of. Whoever made the whole thing isn't saying, but it is generally that each of their pocket realities merged into a shared universe. Its usually stable by the Current Era.

Interactions: Within a pantheon, they interact heavily, with the feuds, alliances, sex and rivalries in any drama. Outside their pantheons they relate mostly where their portfolios are shared or conflict.

Monotheism: Nope, I always figured monotheism proper takes a lot of the possible variety out of a game.

[Kajhera]

Oh, let me clarify now that I've thought about it: I have been in a game where the antagonists were of the cult of the One True Mother, Ragnorra.

It was of course terrifying, they had no fear of death, were a good deal more powerful than our protagonists, worshipped an elder evil, wanted to remake the world so there *was* one true 'goddess', and crows exploding into spiders.

There are actually, however, worse Elder Evils to lose your world to. It winds up looking pretty cool, all biotechy and immortality of a sense.

[oslecamo]

Gods are either the first beings who learned to harness the power of faith for their personal use, or beings who were born uber-powerful out of dumb cosmic luck.

Make no mistake, reality was there before the gods. The most ancient beings that dwell in hidden places remember the time before deities.

Reality itself was created by elemental forces, be it actual elements (water, fire, earth, etc) or ideals (good, law,evil, chaos, neutral).

The ideals however had no actual consciouness and just made things at random. Gods are sentient, and they sought to re-make the world at their image.

The material plane is their working ground, where they created the mortal races/animals/beasts, first as an experiment. But soon gods started meeting each other, as well as their creations met other god's creations, and the divine wars started, each god trying to make their own vision prevail.

Now Gods are mightiest inside their realms, but they're also static there. They're relatively safe, but also unable to grow in power. Their ability to affect the material plane is also quite limited from their own realm, needing to channel their own powers trough faithful agents, in particular clerics. A god can go into the material plane to adventure and grow in power, but that's extremely risky. A god doing so is either feeling really lucky or really desesperate. An avatar is a nice compromise on walking the land on terms of risk, but it still wields small evolution.

On the other hand, gods found out that after a mortal died, their soul would go to the plane most fiting to its actions in life. If things were carefully arranged, the souls would end up on a certain god's service. Now a single soul may not sound too much compared to the power of a god, but a million souls? A billion? A trillion? A quintilion? Stacking over the ages? Now that's considerable power. Plus, individuals that were more powerful during life would wield stronger souls. Gods thus do their best to watch over their flock, keep them faithful, and make sure they grow in powerful beings.

Gods also make alliances, treasons and conspiracies between themselves just like mortals, which they did create at their own image. Gods that fall out of grace of such unions can easily find themselves out of worshipers and wither to oblivion. New gods are usually mortals that managed to collect a vast amount of power, altough new god-births ouut of deity unions or spawning from ideals aren't unheard of.

And never monotheism(where would be the fun on that?), altough "god X suddenly gets much stronger than the others" is a good plot hook.

[EjoThims]

Campaign I'm building right now the gods are actually epic level spellcasters that decided to fuck off and make their own little perfect plane and were eventually elevated to godhood by the people of the world they had created.

Thousands of years later when they're all faded away into nothing more than barely conscious, belief-driven shadows of their most cliched personalities imprinted onto the vast magical energies they had stored and controlled, they're a pretty distant, abstract bunch as much chained to the monolithic church that guides their worship as vice versa.

And said church, while it's glory and power have faded, is pretty ubiquitous and heavy handed; though most people take the worship as a simple fact of life, just an ingrained part of society, dissenting views are violently suppressed, and the main competition that has arisen is a very loosely organized group of cults worshiping the basic elements themselves.




I've got an idea for another set up I'd like to run at one point, where all gods are simply incredibly strong outsiders who actively feed on and grow from the belief of their followers, and each different race of gods is tied to different domains. A chaotic evil god of life emerges and enslaves his worshipers through brutality and ignorance, commanding them to reproduce at astounding rates, indoctrinate their children on his behalf, and acknowledge no other gods so as to gain all the power of their faith. He forces them to go about their day super ritualistically, constantly feeding him the power of their belief and, after their numbers have swollen, makes them start holy wars to spread his influence. After thousands of years, his people rule the majority of the world and continue to fuel his lust for power by fighting among themselves over how to best worship him. The whole time, said god is using this power to wage war on the other gods, slaying and subjugating them and taking over all of the divine realms as surely as his followers do the material.

The PCs are some of the educated few who understand what this god actually is doing, and journey forth on a quest to free the world and then the cosmos from his cruel reign.

[Sjappo]

I've played in a campaign that started out with a polytheistic pantheon but later on was proven to be monotheistic after all. We travelled to several parallel worlds each with it's own pantheon. (And no access to an other, conversion time for the cleric). In the end it was shown that there was one true god and all the other gods were just aspect or agents of that one god. The one god could only be worshipped by a select few mortals. It was a very rich campaign world.

[Whisper]

In my campaign, the beings that call themselves gods are simply entities that have enough worshipers to elevate them to supernormal levels of power.

Since magic is powered by the ability of the symbol to manipulate the object, belief is a form of magic, and worship is a form of belief. With enough worship, anything develops powerful "divine" magical abilities, and becomes a "god". This means that godhood is essentially a pyramid scheme, with the entity at the top collecting worship and doling a small amount of that power back to its priests (in the form of "divine" spellcasting).

This means that, in the scope of the universe, gods are small and rather limited beings, since their worshipers tend to be limited to a single planet on a single Prime plane. Not much compared to the scope of the material planes, or of the Outside Realm.

This also means that nothing is really the god of anything, it can only be a god of anything. There are millions of different fire gods, for example, depending on different sets of worshipers who all believe their fire god is THE fire god.

Needless to say, sets of worshipers war constantly, trying to assimilate or wipe each other out, mostly at the command of their gods.

Characters may realize that there are no true gods by taking the "atheist" feat, which grants some resistance to divine magic, as well as immunity to salient divine abilities.