Quote Originally Posted by the_david View Post
The gods don't need worship, they need souls.

When a mortal dies their soul is stripped of all memories and travels to the outer plane of their deity to become a petitioner in service of their deity. A petitioner can become a stronger outsider with time. These outsiders fight on behalf of their deities in interplanar wars such as the bloodwar.

It's probably a bit more complicated than that. It still gives me the impression that all deities enslave souls, which would make them all lawful evil tyrants.
As noted by rferries, gods needing souls is purely a Forgotten Realms thing. In other settings, souls of particularly pious worshipers go to their deities' divine realms but other souls merely go to somewhere on the Outer Plane most appropriate for their ethos and aren't beholden to any particular god. A worshiper of Bahamut goes to Bahamut's divine realm and a worshiper of Moradin goes to Moradin's divine realm, not because Bahamut and Moradin are soul collectors who gotta catch 'em all and need minions for divine conflicts but because the souls of their worshipers would find that afterlife most pleasing and expect to end up there, and a Lawful Good soul who didn't worship a particular deity ends up in Celestia because that's the afterlife that a Lawful Good soul would find most pleasing in the absence of any other strong beliefs.

Same thing with worship. Outside of the Realms, deities exist regardless of the strength and purity of their followers' faith in them and belief in the gods is similar to the more pragmatic setup found in the ancient Greek and Norse faiths. Joe Farmer doesn't worship Zeus or Thor (and they don't coerce him to worship them) because they need his worship to survive, rather he worships them because his crops need a good amount of rain and worship ensures that there won't be too many storms (when the gods are angry) or droughts (when the gods feel unappreciated), and Zeus or Thor provides the rain because of the bonds of obligation/duty/honor/etc. from being worshiped--and in D&D, from the gods' need for mortal servants to act on their behalf.

Only in the Forgotten Realms do gods need fervent worship or they cease to exist, so if Lathander doesn't want to the sun to go out one day and turn Toril into a frozen ball of ice, he kinda has to coerce mortals into worshiping him, which is how you end up with Lathander, goody-two-shoes god of the sun and morning and healing and all that, turning petitioners into blades of grass to bask ceaselessly in his glory for eternity and punishing any Neutral Good souls who didn't worship a god with eternal torment in the Wall of the Faithless. He probably doesn't want to do that to his followers and NG atheists, but Ao doesn't give him much of a choice.

There's also the idea that the great wheel cosmology symmetric shape goes against the chaotic nature of at least 9 of the outer planes.

In other words, the great wheel cosmology makes no sense whatsoever.
The Great Wheel and chaos's position in it makes perfect sense if you keep in mind the Planescape creation myth: shortly after the creation of the universe there was a massive war between the forces of Law and Chaos, and the war ended when Law won.

That's why both Law and Chaos have equal portions in the same Great Wheel instead of having a bunch of organized planes of Law in a Great Wheel/Tree/Box/Whatever and a bunch of disorganized planes of Chaos somewhere else (because the forces of Law imposed their rules on the multiverse after the Battle of Pesh when there were no great powers of Chaos to oppose them), why the Inner Planes are a set of elemental planes combined and subdivided into paraelemental, quasielemental, etc. planes instead of a big Limbo-esque shifting mass of elements (because the forces of Law were led by the Wind Dukes of Aaqa whose empire originated on the Inner Planes and who held the Inner Planes against the forces of Chaos), why the Abyss is a collection of layers instead of one formless mass (because the rule of Law declared that Planes Shall Have Layers, No Exceptions), and so forth.

Eladrin, demons, fey, and so forth are similarly forced into distinct, predictable, stat-able forms with defined powers and hierarchies and such because of this overarching Law (but not slaad; they have their own issue with the Slaad Lords forcing them into defined shapes). The Far Realm and its denizens are what things looked like before the war and what Chaos would look like without Law imposing on it: formless, indistinct, contradictory, and un-statted...and unable to affect or enter the multiverse without conforming with Law to some degree, hence the tentacles-and-eyes theme to what should be completely unfathomable monsters.

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To answer the original questions:

Quote Originally Posted by Amblehook
In a universe where the gods are real, does the portfolio overlap mean that the deities of different civilizations are really one and the same, two aspects of the same being, or would they be better as distinct beings, perhaps even competing for supremacy of a domain or a portfolio?
There are two published settings with enough competing faiths to have a standard answer for this question. In FR, two gods in different pantheons can have dominion over the same portfolio and are distinct beings, but if they end up in the same pantheon because their worship base overlaps enough, Ao decrees that they must either merge into one being or split the portfolio. For instance, Lathander and Horus-Re are both gods of the sun, but one is in the Faerūnian pantheon and one is in the Mulhorandi pantheon; the people of Mulhorand don't really know or care about the western gods of greater Faerūn and vice versa, so they can both be sun gods without issue. However, if the Mulhorandi started worshiping Lathander en masse, Ao would decree that either the two gods would have to duke it out and one of them would become the sun god of both pantheons, or they'd have to split the portfolio and e.g. have Horus-Re give Lathander the "nice" parts of his portfolio (gentle dawn, guiding light, nourishing crops, etc.) and Lathander give Horus-Re the "mean" parts of his portfolio (blazing noonday sun, smiting undead, crusading against evil, etc.) so they don't overlap.

In Eberron, meanwhile, no one knows if the gods actually exist. Similar to the Elder Scrolls example Eldan mentioned, the gods are viewed differently by different cultures. The Sovereign Host are a group of nine gods who have dominion over most "civilized" portfolio (gods of battle, law, learning, the home, etc.) and are viewed as nine humans by the humans of Khorvaire, nine dragons by the dragons of Argonnessen, and so forth. There's also the Dark Six, a pantheon with dominion over various "uncivilized" portfolios (darkness, plague, monsters, etc.), who some say are the Sovereign Host's enemies, some say are their siblings, some say used to be part of the Host before they were cast out, and so on. No one has a definitive answer except the gods themselves--assuming they exist--and the gods aren't talking.

And if they are one and the same, what happens when the god receives competing prayers for victory if the dwarves attack the kobolds? Does the more pious side win the ultimate favor of that god?
In FR, if two groups pray to the same god for victory in a conflict, what happens depends on the god. If a human city and a dwarf clan each pray to Tempus, god of battle, before fighting one another, he might favor the individual strongest warriors among them and the outcome would depend on their individual faith. If two drow houses each pray to Lolth for victory, she might sit out and eat some metaphorical popcorn to see who comes out the victor without her aid. Other gods might intervene to stop a conflict between two groups of their pious worshipers, while yet other gods might actively encourage conflict to weed out the weak.

In Eberron, if the Eldeen Reaches and Aundair are going to battle, both sides might pray to Dol Arrah for victory in battle and the winning side will claim that they were destined to win because of their faith, and no one can really say otherwise. What's more, an Aundarian praying to Dol Arrah fighting against a Thranite praying to the Silver Flame might think that the Silver Flame is obviously merely a wrong name or a misinterpretation of his own god and he will be favored because he's worshiping the right way, and the Thranite would think the opposite about Dol Array being an imperfect understanding of the Silver Flame, and again no one can prove things one way or the other.

Next, that concept plays slightly into my next query, what is the point of having gods in a campaign setting? They serve as the source of divine magic, as the answerer of the request, "Would you please destroy these undead before me?" as through a spell, but what else do they do for their worshipers? In many fantasy settings, it seems that deities gain power based on the amount of those who worship them, so wouldn't their effectiveness in the daily lives of the lowliest of people be in their interest? Or do they really only offer benefits to magic users (clerics, paladins, etc) in this life, while earning lowlier worshipers by promising better rewards in the afterlife?
In D&D, gods basically consist of three parts: There's the portfolio they control, there's the big ol' mass of divine power they hold, and there's the person holding the power. Take any one of those three away, and the god isn't really worthy of worship anymore. No portfolio? It's a really powerful creature who might be able to help you on a personal level (like a demon prince making a warlock pact), but he either can't make the rain come or your crops grow or doesn't particularly care about doing so, so there's no point in worshiping him. No divine power? It's a weak being like an ancestor spirit or a dryad that has some area of concern but can't really do much on its own; you might worship them in aggregate as all your ancestors or all the spirits of the woods, but one by itself is insignificant. Not a person? It's an impersonal force, and it might grant power (like druids drawing power from capital-N Nature instead of nature gods, or paladins being empowered by the concepts of Good and Law), but you can't really change its opinions on anything.

So commoners care about weather gods and sun gods and death gods and such because they (A) are intimately connected with an aspect of reality the commoners care about, (B) are powerful enough to alter that aspect of reality in the commoners' favor, and (C) can be personally influenced with prayer, service, sacrifice, and the like to make said changes. If the gods also empower their priests to go smite evil things that might eat the commoners and provide a special afterlife for their followers, that's certainly nice, no one likes to get eaten and turning into an angel after you die is cool, but it's mostly the gods' influence on the here-and-now that earns them worship.