Gods! What's their role in RPGs?

[Jay R]

I think many people start from the wrong end.

Did the universe create the gods or did the gods create the universe?

Who are they, and what are they like?

What do they do? How do they feel about each other?

To understand Zeus, and use him as a god character, it's more important to know that he pursues young women, and that his wife disapproves and is actively antagonistic to his children, than to know that he's a thunder-carrier and she's a goddess of women.

Design an extended dysfunctional family first. Start a personal history for them. Then assign them domains based on their characters.

Here's the approach in my current game, in which I wanted to allow PCs to use whatever gods they chose, without having to deal with the problem of competing pantheons.

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

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There are two gods called together The Uncreated. Separately, they are The Lord and The Lady, and nothing is known about them.

Their first children were the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the winds. These four are either the creators of our world, or the stuff of which it was created - it's not clear which. They are, of course, the essence of the four earthly elements, the embodiment of the elemental planes, and the structure of the world. There is a fifth one, representing the quintessence, but since that cannot exist on our changeable and imperfect world, he/she has no influence here.

They have an abundance of names. The Sun God, for instance, is known as Apollo, Aten, Ra, Tonatiuh, Surya, Helios and many others. Similarly, every earth goddess is know to be the true earth, born of The Lord and The Lady - even those with known other parents, or those with no parents, like Gaea. Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

The children/creations of these four are the only gods who will answer prayers or interact with the world directly. They include all the pantheons that have ever existed.

The Lord and The Lady have been identified as the embodiments of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Male and Female, or Light and Darkness, or any other opposing concepts.

Wars have been fought between those who believe they represent Good and Evil, and those who insist on Law and Chaos.

Wars have been fought between those who believe The Lord and The Lady hate each other with a hatred surpassing any passion on earth, and those who believe that they love each other with a love more true than any mortal could ever know.

Wars have been fought between those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Good and The Lady is Evil, and those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Evil and The Lady is Good.

All of the above will be available knowledge to the players. Here is what they will not know.

No arcane or divine magic will successfully find out any fact about The Lord and The Lady. I have three answers, all completely true, and mutually incompatible.

No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

Oh yes, and the fifth child of The Lord and The Lady, representing the Fifth Element? It turns out that he's not the stuff of the heavens, but of the hells. His children and descendants are all the demons, devils, and daemons. His creations are the evil spirits of the underworld. No, he's not out to conquer the world or destroy it or anything of that sort. he just likes to see war, strife, and pain.

[Beleriphon]

But you'll never get anything more than the Greek idea that other religions worship the same Gods under different names and guises. So while you may have an Atheinsfolk polytheist seeing the worship of the Poccner polytheists, and go "Oh, when they worship Otietsbog they're basically worshipping Mattur under another name", as there are great similarities between the religions, but you'd never have a Tiflinian who is a monotheist and has a divinely descended King say "The Shansle god Brashal and their demon-god Kazka exist but because our god Unathrenis hates them, we hate their religion".

Other than the fact that's a legitimate model. Henotheism essentially goes with with the typical D&D for a cleric where there are lots of gods, but only one god is actively worshipped.

Atenism (that is the worship of Aten) in ancient Egypt worked on a monolateral principle. Yes it was a monotheistic religion, but it also acknowledged that other gods existed, but were unworthy of worship. So its entirely possible, and in fact realistic, for your religion to admit Zorg is a real god but you had his followers because they don't worship Banjo.

[Fire Lord Pi]

I like this talk of the problem with gods because I myself feel that the TINY TINY section of the PH pisses all over the concept of these immortal, mighty beings.

In my world, every god has his own "heaven" which they offer. Clerics receive spells if they have been ordained by their respective church and say the words of prayer and preparation.

But alignment isn't tied to religion. Although I firmly believe that D&D's alignment system is very accurate for both the game and life, alignment is a reflection of a character, not the other way around. And there is no in-game knowledge of alignment. A man could be both LG and CE in the different eyes of different priests of different religions.

And the gods still give a bad priests spells. They need the worshipers.

[Averis Vol]

I've always seen gods as the representations of ideals that were so strong, they became manifest as real, tangible entities. Furthermore, in a world with so many creatures beyond the material plane, that, with their power, could destroy the material plane with little effort, you need something to defend you from them, even if it's only because they cease to exist without worshipers.

[Devils_Advocate]

D&D is very simplistic. Everyone knows that the gods exist, and they're also aware of all those afterlives, and how you get into a particular one, yet despite this being a 100% established scientific fact, almost no non-good sentient beings make the slightest attempt to change their alignment in order to avoid an eternity of torture or boredom, and as far as humans are concerned, all afterlives are equally well-subscribed-to.

Where the heck are you getting this from? It seems to be a ridiculous caricature that conflicts with every setting that I'm aware of.

The "Great Wheel" cosmology seems to be the most used, so let's look at that. So, for starters, the afterlife isn't eternal at all. You normally come back as a fairly pathetic being that can totally be killed forever dead, and once you are, that's pretty much it. You "merge with the plane", which is the end of your individual existence, but hey, it's something, I guess.

Secondly, if you're evil, following an evil deity means that you get to go to its divine realm when you die instead of just appearing on the lower planes as a disgusting larva that sits around waiting to be eaten. So, if a deity is publicly known to torture its own followers' souls, then sane people will generally avoid worshiping that deity precisely in order to avoid that fate! They'll choose gods who they at least think offer better fates than that. The prospect of being rewarded for doing horrible things is a major reason why people worship evil gods!

Those who follow the tenets of Evil throughout their lives are judged by Evil Gods when they die, and can gain rewards at least as enticing as those offered to those who follow the path of Good (who, after all, are judged by Good Gods after they die). So when sahuagin run around on land snatching children to use as slaves or sacrifices to Baatorians, they aren't putting their soul in danger. They are actually keeping their soul safe. Once you step down the path of villainy, you get a better deal in the afterlife by being more evil.

The only people who get screwed in the D&D afterlife are traitors and failures. A traitor gets a bad deal in the afterlife because whichever side of the fence they ended up on is going to remember their deeds on the other side of the fence. A failure gets a bad deal because they end up judged by gods who wanted them to succeed.

--- Tome of Fiends

That's not to say that a god of murder will give you hookers and blow in hell for murdering lot of people in his name. More likely, he'll give you the chance to murder a whole lot, and that's at least as much because he has lots of murdering that he wants done as because you'll enjoy it. Similarly, a benevolent god is going to give you greater opportunities to be kind and helpful, because that's what he wants done. If you want "fun" in a shallow sense, then you probably want to worship some Chaotic Neutral god of hedonism whose realm is filled with revelry because he likes revelry so he went and filled his realm up with it because that way he has lots of what he likes. And really, how could a realm of virtue serve as paradise for someone who wishes to commit misdeeds, for any opposed values of "virtue" and "misdeeds"? That makes a whole lot of sense!

There are a multitude of deities, and basically for every possible lifestyle, there is a deity who endorses it. So if you're sensible, you worship a god who endorses whatever you want to do. That way, you can do what you want, maybe even get some divine intervention to help you, and then when you die, you can continue in your favored activities in a supportive environment, which is what you can generally expect, because naturally a deity is going to set up the afterlife it offers to encourage whatever sort of activity it wants people to engage in.

So the afterlife, as a rule, tends to be "more of the same". If you fought untiringly for your god in life, then you can expect to fight untiringly for him after your death, for example. The incentive to treat others as you want to be treated is the prospect of having/getting to deal with a bunch of other people like you, who act the way that you do. And that certainly could be considered a form of justice, but that aspect of it is mostly a side effect. It's not about being in a place that's designed as reward or punishment. Indeed, you can expect your new form to be adapted to your new environment; that's not the point. It's not the climate, it's the company.