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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Question Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex World

    In the early days of developing my campaign setting, I intended to create a very full pantheon loaded with just about any deity a cleric could want to worship; I wanted my players to have ample choice for any character concept they wanted to explore. I considered having pantheons overlap, much like Greek and Roman pantheons of history, so that any and every sentient species would have their own set of gods to worship. Kobolds would revere a great red dragon as their god of war while dwarves worship a steadfast dwarven god of glorious battle.

    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? 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?

    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?

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    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by Amblehook View Post
    In the early days of developing my campaign setting, I intended to create a very full pantheon loaded with just about any deity a cleric could want to worship; I wanted my players to have ample choice for any character concept they wanted to explore. I considered having pantheons overlap, much like Greek and Roman pantheons of history, so that any and every sentient species would have their own set of gods to worship. Kobolds would revere a great red dragon as their god of war while dwarves worship a steadfast dwarven god of glorious battle.

    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? 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?

    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?
    1) There's a lot to be said for the "same pantheon, with different faces for different races" IMHO. Dragonlance was my introduction to this - Paladine was worshipped as an elf, platinum dragon, even a bumbling old wizard depending on whichever race he appeared before. In this instance kobolds and dwarves that worship Paladine wouldn't go to war, since Kobold!Paladine and Dwarf!Paladine would tell both sides to get along.

    2) Gods have a lot of possible things to offer.
    a) They created various aspects of existence e.g. time, mountains, water, the sun, and if they ever left those aspects would go awry e.g. the sun would fall from the sky or grow too hot etc.

    b) They provide an afterlife for their worshippers (as you mention)

    c) They give quests to PCs (via vision quests, their clerics, etc.)

    d) They create new souls (without which all life would end after the current generation died out

    e) They allow adventurers to return to life.

    I'm not so fond of the "gods need worship" concept - if they created the universe why do they need mortals (part of the universe) to survive?

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    The Elder Scrolls do this as well, with a twist. Officially, the Empire has a set of Nine gods they worship, plus a few more gods they recognize as existing. But these gods are based on local divinities that were united when those areas were conquered.

    My favourite example of this is the case of the Nords and the High Elves, who had been at war on and off for thousands of years before the Empire integrated both.

    The nords and elves met very early on the continent of Tamriel, one coming from the north, the other from the south and west. They were both seafaring cultures, looking to establish new outposts, later kingdoms, though the elves were more builders and the nords more raiders. They came into brutal conflict that lasted for centuries.

    The supreme god of the nordic pantheon is Shor, King of the Gods and the greatest warrior, who looks out over his wandering children, while they try to establish a kingdom. He created the world as an act of mercy, so that humans could find a life for themselves, before he would take the most worthy of them to Sovngarde, their afterlife. One of the greatest enemies that Shor and humanity face is Alduin, the world eater, the dragon of time. He continually gnaws at the world and the souls of men, and is thus responsible for age and decay.

    The supreme god of the elven pantheon is Auri-el, the dragon of time, king of the gods, ancestor of elves. His great enemy is Lorkhan, the despicable trickster god and lord of the humans. Lorkhan created the world as a trap for the gods and the souls of mortals, where they would be trapped and suffer short lives and eventual deaths, away from the light of eternity where they existed before. Without him, elves would still be eternal beings of light. Lorkhan, of course, was killed by Auri-el and his champions and his corpse torn apart, forming the moons. Only fools still worhip that corpse.

    Alduin is Auri-el, Shor is Lorkhan. Each of the gods of these people at war is the other religion’s demon.
    The Imperial religion, which later conquered both, tries to synthesize the two religions. It worships eight or nine new gods, among them Akatosh, a version of Auri-el more palatable to humans, but also recognizes the existence of Lorkhan, the trickster and god of humans, who is not officially worshipped, but did create the world.


    Anyway, this is a very nice idea, and one I think gives a lot of depth to a world.
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    DwarfBarbarianGuy

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by rferries View Post
    I'm not so fond of the "gods need worship" concept - if they created the universe why do they need mortals (part of the universe) to survive?
    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. 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.

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    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. 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.
    Yeah, but then at the beginning of time, when there were no mortal souls, how did the gods create the universe without soul-power? D&D ruled that the dependency on souls (in Forgotten Realms at least) was imposed on the gods by the Overdeity Ao. I like the rest of your suggestion though (provides at least SOME reason to be evil -you'll go to Hell, but at least you have a chance of acquiring power there too).

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    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.

    --------------------

    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
    Darn you PoDL for making me care about a bunch of NPC Commoners!
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    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    That was a very cool read! I didn't know about the Planescape law vs chaos backstory.

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Remnants of it are all over in the backstory. The Rod of Seven Parts, the great weapon used to defeat chaos. Mishka the Wolf-Spider, original war leader of the forces of chaos. Demogorgon, the first Tanar'ri, created as a weapon in that war. Pale Night, Dagon, Pazuzu and the other Obyrith, survivors of the ruling class of chaos, who fled into the Abyss. And the Blood War, the pale remnant of the first conflict, fought by those who think the fighting should never have stopped while there were still survivors.
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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by rferries View Post
    That was a very cool read! I didn't know about the Planescape law vs chaos backstory.
    I actually didn't know about that either. That's pretty good.

    I still think the whole petitioner business is lawful evil, but I guess opinions may vary. I play Pathfinder though, and there are some variations in the way this works which makes the whole thing even more confusing.

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by the_david View Post
    I actually didn't know about that either. That's pretty good.

    I still think the whole petitioner business is lawful evil, but I guess opinions may vary. I play Pathfinder though, and there are some variations in the way this works which makes the whole thing even more confusing.
    What about it seems evil to you? Aside from the FR afterlife situation, which has its own big set of cosmological ethical issues, the only petitioners really being enslaved or exploited are those on evil planes and/or serving evil gods, which is the point of those particular afterlives.
    Better to DM in Baator than play in Celestia
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chambers View Post
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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    What about it seems evil to you? Aside from the FR afterlife situation, which has its own big set of cosmological ethical issues, the only petitioners really being enslaved or exploited are those on evil planes and/or serving evil gods, which is the point of those particular afterlives.
    For me, the fact that they become 2HD outsiders, losing most of their class features, skills, etc - not much of an afterlife if you've still effectively lost everything that made you "you"!

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    (Apologies for the huge post)

    Quote Originally Posted by Amblehook View Post
    In the early days of developing my campaign setting, I intended to create a very full pantheon loaded with just about any deity a cleric could want to worship; I wanted my players to have ample choice for any character concept they wanted to explore. I considered having pantheons overlap, much like Greek and Roman pantheons of history, so that any and every sentient species would have their own set of gods to worship. Kobolds would revere a great red dragon as their god of war while dwarves worship a steadfast dwarven god of glorious battle.
    Despite the focus this thread has taken on the D&D campaign settings, I'm going to talk about these questions in the context of a generalized campaign world (using examples from my own).

    Quote Originally Posted by Amblehook View Post
    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? 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 my experience, the most important part of establishing your world's pantheon(s) is to come up with a basic answer to the question of what the gods are. Are they somehow "ascended" members of a mortal race? Are they aliens? If using all the classic monsters, what makes an angel or archon more holy than an elemental? Are the gods omniscient or omnipotent? How do their worshipers tie into their power, if at all? What happens to a deity who loses all of their worshipers? These questions should be answered before the rest of the system is designed, and possibly before the world is designed, particularly if some huge cosmic struggle shapes the dealings of the outsiders and other powerful beings high-level PCs will end up getting entangled in. As an example, in my campaign setting, the basis of the gods is reincarnation. The gods are powerful outsiders so flush with power(magic) upon their death that they could not reincarnate normally, and so their souls coalesced into beings capable of traversing the planes with a thought and possessing powerful magic that lets them see through the eyes of their worshipers. They are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and an elemental is just as likely to be a servant of their will as an angel is. Note that if you make a world without a cosmic battle between good and evil, you should probably strip your game of alignment (I chose to do this, rather than make each deity their own alignment and deal with that). If you use gods that have goals (See below), the goals can play into which side they choose in a conflict. However, in any world where gods are real, I would have the gods speak to their worshipers and attempt to stop them from fighting one another.

    Quote Originally Posted by Amblehook View Post
    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?
    This is another answer that will depend heavily on the nature of your world and its gods, but for me, the answer is relatively straightforward. Once the gods are simply very powerful magical beings, their granting of spells to clerics is relatively simple (where a wizard writes their spells into their mind when they study them, the gods write their spells into the minds of their clerics when they pray). Once the gods can see through the eyes of their worshipers, the granting of miracles makes sense. The number of worshipers doesn't tie into the power of the deity, at least not in terms of "how powerful a spell they can cast", but their worshipers serve as their agents in the world, to cover for their lack of omniscience. It helps if you set down clear goals for what the gods are trying to accomplish (This is a great way to explain portfolios, by the way. Penelope, the goddess of knowledge in my campaign setting, is considered the goddess of knowledge because she uses her agents to collect and protect books and knowledge anywhere they are found, and her church runs vast book-purchasing and distributing operations in most of the major cities in which she is worshiped.). This lets you play with politics on the scale of gods, as the gods bargain with each other in order to accomplish their goals, and sometimes send their agents to fight one another (rarely). Conflict directly between the gods can be avoided if the gods are unified in opposition to some other force (e.g. in Greek mythology, the gods deposed the Titans, so as long as there's a vague sense that the Titans could return, the gods won't kill each other). The afterlife argument can be convincing, but I think it's very limited. In my world, reincarnation is the norm, so the afterlife argument doesn't work at all. Instead, the gods do grant boons to all their worshipers, not only their clerics and paladins. You can treat this as if all worshipers of any deity have the feat Deific Obedience (can't post links yet, but it's a Pathfinder feat up on the Pathfinder SRD) (with the caveat that you can't benefit from multiple deities at once, if it's a polytheistic world). Being a divine caster represents investing additional effort into devotion to your deity, which the deity rewards with additional powers, and any character can do the same by spending a feat to gain a boon from their god. This just means that in my campaign settings, any PC can sacrifice a feat to get a blessing from their god, and I will design a feat themed around their god that represents that god's favor, usually as a supernatural ability or spell-like ability. Pious and devoted NPCs can get these too, so it is absolutely a world where the local weaver is so pious that she has a few uses of Lay on Hands per day, which helps with convincing the masses to worship.

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    PairO'Dice Lost's Avatar

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by rferries View Post
    For me, the fact that they become 2HD outsiders, losing most of their class features, skills, etc - not much of an afterlife if you've still effectively lost everything that made you "you"!
    Ah, that part. Yeah, I wouldn't call that "evil," just "depressing," since that's not something the gods are doing, it's an inherent feature of the multiverse (and not just the D&D cosmology; plenty of other afterlives, like Hades in Greek mythology and Helheim in Norse mythology, end up with their inhabitants becoming mere shades of the former selves and barely recognizable as such). Plus, becoming a petitioner is as much a partial reincarnation as it is a "real" afterlife, so you can think of it more like "you after you failed a save against baleful polymorph" more than a "yourself with wings and a halo."

    Fortunately, while it's difficult and time-consuming, gods can retrieve a petitioner's lost memories floating in the deep Astral to restore them, and even allow petitioners to (re)gain additional powers from life (or different ones, like a fighter who worshiped Boccob gaining wizard-y abilities). When I run Planescape, I generally rule that fervent belief in a particular god is exactly what enables a god to make a petitioner whole, as it helps the soul leave more of an imprint on the god's divine perceptions to make their lost memories easier to find, so it's actually more common than not for devoted petitioners to mostly remember their former lives. This explains why people often worship single patron gods in a pantheistic setup, makes Outer-Planes-as-afterlife a bit more palatable, and helps make the FR gods look less like totalitarian jerks.
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    DwarfBarbarianGuy

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    What about it seems evil to you? Aside from the FR afterlife situation, which has its own big set of cosmological ethical issues, the only petitioners really being enslaved or exploited are those on evil planes and/or serving evil gods, which is the point of those particular afterlives.
    I guess it takes a little adjustment of your perspective to see it. It might be just as farfetched as Pelor the burning hate.

    The gods need soldiers to fight their interplanar wars. (The blood wars, the law chaos war, etc.) Most of these soldiers are outsiders who have ascended from petitioners, while the petitioners themselves are souls of mortals. In the process of becoming a petitioner, a soul will lose al its memories. There's one more thing, I think I haven't mentioned before. In order to claim as many souls as possible, a god will select priests to spread the good news and convert heathens to their faith.

    So the gods actively collect souls, wipe their memories and then turn them into soldiers. We've got the why (Interplanar wars.), we've got the how (Using priests to convert souls and then erasing their memories.). Sure, this isn't the complete story, but it is happening, and it's not that hard to come to this conclusion.
    When I say all the gods are lawful evil, this is why. In reality, the good gods just have a more benevolent way of doing things.

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by the_david View Post
    So the gods actively collect souls, wipe their memories and then turn them into soldiers.
    As I mentioned above, though, the memory-wiping bit is an intrinsic feature of the cosmos, it's not something the gods are doing and neither is it something they can undo without great effort. So yes, it's not great to wake up in the Upper Planes with no idea who you are and find out you might be tapped to help repel a demonic incursion at some point in the future, but it's not the Good gods' fault that demons are showing up and you're the only one who can help stop it.

    It's the difference between "Joe Necromancer walks into town, snuffs everyone's life out with death spells, and animates an army of zombies to conquer the neighboring kingdom" (entirely Joe's fault, and definitely evil) and "Joe Necromancer walks into a town where a curse reanimates everyone who dies as a zombie, and seeing this, he rebukes the zombies, arms them, brings them to the walls, and uses them to defend the town against those who would try to attack its living inhabitants while resurrecting individual zombies as time and resources permit" (not Joe's fault at all, and arguably the best thing Joe can do in the circumstances).

    (And again, the Forgotten Realms are a special case to which the above rationale does not apply. The gods of Toril are actively complicit in their afterlife scam and are gigantic jerks, mitigated only by the fact that Ao the Even Bigger Jerk forced them into it.)
    Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2018-05-02 at 07:49 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    I'm pretty sure turning Waterdeep into a sheet of glass wasn't the best win condition for that fight. We lived though!
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    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    The case could be made that it IS the fault of the gods though - they created the universe, so the petitioner system is their fault. Or failing that, the principle of "with power comes responsibility" - even if they didn't create the system, the gods of Good (and even those of Chaos) should be fighting to change it. As it is, they all seem content to profit...

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    Quote Originally Posted by rferries View Post
    The case could be made that it IS the fault of the gods though - they created the universe, so the petitioner system is their fault.
    Ah, here's another difference between Planescape and most fantasy cosmologies: the gods didn't create the multiverse, and in fact laregely didn't come to power until after the War of Law and Chaos was concluded--and, heck, after the aboleth race was well-established, so they came after at least one Prime world was created with oceans ready for their presence--which makes sense since the Outer Planes and the gods are both strongly associated with mortal belief and with each other, and the planes weren't really "finalized" until after that war.

    Certain Prime worlds may have gods creating races or gods shaping worlds within the crystal sphere, and the timeline is more complex than just "War ends, gods poof into existence," but basically the gods are at the mercy of the fundamental laws of reality rather than the other way around.

    Or failing that, the principle of "with power comes responsibility" - even if they didn't create the system, the gods of Good (and even those of Chaos) should be fighting to change it. As it is, they all seem content to profit...
    The denizens of the Upper Planes are largely unwilling to rock the boat too much, because currently the Blood War is keeping all of the fiends' attention (and hatred) focused on each other, and the good gods are worried that if they try to tilt things too much toward Good then the fiend might call a truce in the Blood War to go after them instead...and they're not so sure that they'd end up winning a war between them and the fiends, since aasimon may be individually stronger than comparable fiends but the fiends have the millennia of combat experience and total lack of morals in their favor.

    So the forces of Good have to work within the system as much as possible and are largely stuck being in balance with Evil, and that's just how the forces of Law who set the system up like it...and with Good and Evil preoccupied, Law very much in favor of the status quo, and Neutrality in favor of keeping Good and Evil balanced, Chaos can't do much on its own to disrupt the system either.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chambers View Post
    I'm pretty sure turning Waterdeep into a sheet of glass wasn't the best win condition for that fight. We lived though!
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    HalflingPirate

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    Default Re: Do you have an issue? I have a god for that! Developing Deities in a Complex Worl

    In the Greek Mythos the gods did not create the world. This was done by the Titans, who were later displaced by the children of Chronos and Rhea. Even then, they did not need mortal worship. This came later, from one of the titans who joined the six original Olympians.

    Prometheus was fooling around with dirt, animating it and whatnot and he came up with an idea to make something like tiny godlings. Zeus, having recently overthrown his parents in an epic conflict, wanted nothing to do with tiny godlings who might overthrow him. He was mad. But Prometheus promised they'd be good and all, so Zeus said, "Okay, but whatever you do, don't go giving them fire or they will think they are gods and they'll plot against us."

    Well, the more Prometheus thought about it the more it made sense to create something that would overthrow Zeus. So he taught man about fire. Zeus had a hissy fit. He got so mad he tied Prometheus go a rock and had his prize pair of eagles nest on top. Every day they would swoop down and help themselves to a bit of fresh liver.

    Zeus wasn't finished, though. He set about destroying everything man had built, and was on track to kill off all the humans when he became aware of something interesting: humans were burning offerings to appease his wrath and it smelled real good. It was a source of power he had ndver dreamed of.

    Well, he re-thought the whole wipe them out strategy, and instead gave them laws, mostly having to do with worshipping him.

    The other gods wanted in on the extra power thing. And as we all know from the film, Earth Girls Are Easy, and some of the gods wanted in on that action too. Which kind of sucked because Prometheus did all the work to create them and got tied to a rock with liver-eating jailers keeping an eye on him while Zeus, whose only goal was to destroy them all, wound up getting most of the worship.

    And Zeus was behind the whole Pandora's Box thing as a scheme to keep humans down and constantly praying, which was the original case of The Man Holding Us Down.

    But, the idea here is that the creator(s) of a universe may not be among the approved list of deities to worship in a given campaign.

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