Do your Gods give a flying ^#$%, and if so, how does it affect gameplay?

[Knight of Ravens]

[blockquote[Cavalier de Corvus]the goddess of dance is now the goddess of war[/blockquote]

Are you paraphrasing Confucius? :fencing:

Not that I'm aware of. Just a notion I found rather appealing.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

"Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." (It's a notion I find appealing as well - buried a little more in the details of this religion.)

[Knight of Ravens]

"Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." (It's a notion I find appealing as well - buried a little more in the details of this religion.)

That's funny. The quote is almost precisely something I wrote in some fiction I toyed with a while back.

The Lyricists seem very similar to the priesthood of the goddess I mentioned, in fact. Weird.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

Because I'm on a roll tonight and can't stop myself: [blockquote[LV]Do your Gods give a flying ^#$%, and if so, how does it affect gameplay? [/blockquote]

Of course they do, if only to rub the faces of mortals in the fact that they can and it's so much more full of awesomeness when you can ignore the laws of gravity while doing it. When the Rimenosha discovered the surface you couldn't look at the sky for at least a century without seeing one or more of their First Ancestors engaging in a fireworks display with some other race's deities. (Except for Rimilnix - he didn't want to find himself in the embarrassing position of being unable to deny how hot he secretly thinks Salistreah is. . .) As to the second part of your question, it motivates characters to learn to levitate. And while I'm on the general topic, would a Flathead halfling subrace be going too far?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled topicality. . .

[EvilElitest]

In my games gods tend, like D&D deities to be very pagan, as in they are still aloof and powerful, but not infallible and certainly not omnipotent.  And yet in my games, beyond them there are gods who are bit more like Monotheistic Deities in the sense they are absurdly powerful beings who are almost beyind the mortal realm.  And beyond them we have actual elder evils who are beyond the universe itself on every level.  And then there are the four great beings, True Law, True Chaos, Good and Evil.  And finally there is the creator, nameless
from
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[LordVreeg]

I'm using two different sorts of deities in the Cadaverous Earth.  The first are the possibly fictitious deities worshiped by most of the world's inhabitants: Striga, the star-gods, the many gods of Lophius Driftwood District (which are worshiped outside of that city as well), the Weeping Lady, Verlum, the Gibbering Goddess, and more planned.  The other group are more like the Tarrasque or something, huge quasi-divine monsters like Hirud, the Ravager Worm - Lovecraftian things and elemental destroyers, the so-called "Chained Ones."  They're revered by a deranged few but most consider them more like enormous demons.

A few crazed nature-worshipers revere the Fecundity, but most get eaten in short order by the beasts that dwell within or the cancer-forest itself.

The  Many Gods of the Lophious Driftwood District?  Quasi-divine totemic monsters?  AS always with your fiendishness, you tease...
How does worship feel, in this setting of despair and where the past is so muffled and lost?  Why do people worship....where do they find hope?

[LordVreeg]

Steepike, Llum, LightDragon, and others...do your Gods care?  DO they give a flying *)&^&^%?

[Steerpike]

My gods tend to be ambiguously real, for the most part.  Hirud is definitely real, but he doesn't care so much as want to devour everything and leech the entire world dry.  The Beast Gods seem to be real, but they're asleep and dreaming.  The others are probably all human inventions and aren't actually real at all, although many people in the Cadaverous Earth claim to have met such figures as the Bloodletter or Melmoth the Wanderer.

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=sTEERPIKE]The others are probably all human inventions and aren't actually real at all, although many people in the Cadaverous Earth claim to have met such figures as the Bloodletter or Melmoth the Wanderer.[/blockquote]

Somehow, the CE seems like a place like the nightside, where belief and human invention can be enough to make a dread real...

[Steerpike]

Yeah, maybe I should play more with the idea of the gods becoming real... certainly the oneiroi fulfill the whole belief-made-manifest thing.  It might be cool to extrapolate that idea.

[Llum]

In the latest three creations of mine here is how it goes down.

The Bronze Setting has gods, lots of em. Some care, deeply about the sentients they've adopted as their own. Others are just out to cause as much chaos and havoc as they possibly can, maybe with the help of some like-minded mortals elevated to demi-gods. Kinda works both ways because a lot of people try and take advantage of the gods as well, like he whole Dominii fiasco.

In Hen Mut I've only thought up a few gods and how religion would work. The Soul-King is a Pharoah type person who says he is a god-king. Otherwise there are only the Phage-Gods, viral deities who bless plagues and poxes to cause humanity even greater trouble.

In the Advent of the Ninth Zenith, there are nine mountains, each revered as gods by those who live on them. (Some are actually volcanoes and one is mostly a glacier). Not sure how much they care, if anything they're probably annoyed. I mean going to sleep and waking up with all these people building junk and living on you, how rude :p

[LD]

Well, I suppose this is part of the initiation process. Thank you Lord Vreeg.
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It should be noted that I have never adventured in either WonderWorld or Gloria- both settings were created especially for this board. In neither do the gods play a large role. The world was created in some fashion, but there are no heavy-handed deus ex plays.

In the setting I play and DM DnD in- "Rebirth", the Gods also do not intervene in the world. They give their magic to the world but do not visit. Religion however plays a large role. The entire world was destroyed in a magical cataclysm called the "Demise" and everyone who survived transported themselves (or had their gods transport them) to a new planet crafted by the "Recreator," a powerful mortal.

He has his own Church, but does not grant divine spells per se. The old religions and his clash mightily and many choose not to believe in any gods; others only believe in the Recreator. The old religions are mainly based around dualistic gods/goddesses. But there are no "evil" deities per se. In one city, the shrine of the Goddess of Pestilence is located in the city, as is the Graveyard of the God of Death, the Goddess of Luck, the Goddess of Misfortune, the Goddess of Light. (The only really negative God would probably be the God of Darkness.)

I do not generally like to have Gods too involved in the world itself- their involvement seems to abstract a lot of the struggles that characters can make into mere "good/evil" battles. I see every god as necessary for my worlds to work and want the characters to behave like characters in a well-written novel. Everyone has interests that must be acknowledged and fulfilled by the characters' adventures.

In one game, I amusingly had a treaty of versailles-sort of argument between players and three other sides over what to do with an artifact that had, over the course of 6 game sessions created a domino effect of the world's creatures running into each other. (In very brief form: Characters are adventuring in session 1, 2, and then in session 3 they jump onto the main story-line) signs of the problem have been building in the early sessions. In session three they actually have to deal with the actual problem- lizardfolk are coming into conflict with human settlers at the edge of the city; so the characters are supposed to push the lizards back somehow through a negotiation. Well, they find that the lizards have been fighting and moving south because the Kobolds pushed them south. Then the characters discover, from fleeing fey, that the Sahaugin (who have been sinking ships since episode 1) are the real problem- Nazi Sahaugin storm the beaches, flood the land and enact war on landdwellers ! It turns out they are seeking the return of an artifact that was stolen from them by a witch (characters find this out in session 5 and locate the witch) then the characters are captured by the witch and then capture the sahaugin king, her mortal enemy... (much left out) long story short- the negotiations came down to: Sahaugin King, Witch, Wizard, Emissary of the Interior-- all of whom had interest in the artifact... When negotiations broke down (because I realized we would never solve this problem equitably... after 2 hours of talks) it was discovered that the Witch didn't even really have the artifact, she had sent it to her sister! Regrettably the game broke apart at that point and we will never be able to adventure to the interior to end the menace.

[Polycarp]

I've always come down more on the side of real "faith," which requires that either the existence of the gods is suspect, or that it is uncertain whether they are really gods.

In the Clockwork Jungle, I use both.  There are "powers," such as the Elder Wyrms, the Caretaker, the greater Aras Tay, and so on, who have abilities far in excess of anything mere mortals can offer.  Mylsegemmen, an elder wyrm, can shapechange into anything; the Caretaker is apparently invulnerable and can reduce sentient beings to its silent, willing slaves with a touch.  Yet the mere fact of their inarguable physical existence makes many question whether they are indeed gods, since beings of their stature have indeed died before.  As for how interested they are in the world, many have long since tired of meddling in the world many thousands of years ago - Mylsegemmen in particular once was effectively "Emperor of the world" (if the legends are believed), but grew disgusted with it long before the current "civilized races" emerged.  He and his kin have long since explored every aspect of power and want nothing of it.  One of my main priorities with the Clockwork Jungle is to portray a world that is much, much older than its present mortal inhabitants.  It has seen civilizations rise, fall, and vanish into the jungle many times before, and one might say the world itself no longer really cares.

Other powers have a mindset so clearly alien that no communication with them is possible; the Caretaker, for instance, does not even seem to recognize that its worshippers exist.  It is consumed only with its everyday duty and never leaves its little domain.  Such entities might be powers so old that they can't even relate to reality any more, or - like the Aras Tay - creatures who embody the cycle of life and death itself, with no concern at all for "minor fluctuations" within that cycle.

This leaves gods that aren't physically present - and by their nature, any influence they have on the world is inferred by their worshippers.  As a world-builder, I believe in a policy of non-intervention - if something doesn't absolutely require my clarification, I don't give it.  Is the world really made up of the serpentine coils of Fthawy?  Do the gods of the Ivetziven pantheon really exist?  I (purposefully) have no comment.  I believe that it should be the DM's place to decide how real such gods are, and how much influence they have on the world.  Certainly I don't intend to introduce "divine magic" or anything else that would remove such doubt, because without doubt, there is no faith.

[beejazz]

The campaign setting I'm working on isn't hugely detailed yet, but I'm working on a cosmology and a certain framework for how things work.

Deities exist on a spectrum. Things that are nearer to the material world are also less powerful, more mortal, and less strange than things that are further away. Also, the more powerful, less mortal, stranger things that are higher up are less and less concerned with the "real" world, or influence it less and less directly. There are little fey and nature spirits and gods of the grove. There are monsters (like the bull in the cedar forest) and strange demigod champions (less like hercules and a little more inscrutiable... maybe the green knight is a good example?) as well as demonic and angelic things (a little more ambiguous than usual maybe... angels might still kill you however good you are for convoluted reasons). There are petty feuding gods, always arguing, breaking things, etc. (think the mesopotamian pantheon) and the bigger badder pantheons they replaced in coming to power (as the titans and giants). At the very highest level there are the gods one would find in Pegana or on Kadath or in Lovecraft's mythos.

Hypothetically, there may be a One God figure at the very top of the totem pole, but anyone who's gone looking for Him hasn't come back. They've either been killed by all the nasty stuff on the way up or by God Himself. People have hypothesised that looking on the face of God will kill you or that there is no God, among other things. The fact that no one has come back to tell the tale of what's up there means it's impossible to verify.

As for why and how the gods' impact on the material plane actually diminishes with their power... the real world is less and less important to them, and they are preoccupied with other things that interest them more. Mainly their interaction with other gods and the stuff that drives the universe (the latter part is why I say that they may still be influencial, but indirectly and on a larger scale). That isn't to say that the higher gods don't occasionally look down and see something they don't like and kill everyone... it's just that it doesn't happen very often.

I hope I explained all that okay.

[Ghostman]

Hypothetically, there may be a One God figure at the very top of the totem pole, but anyone who's gone looking for Him hasn't come back. They've either been killed by all the nasty stuff on the way up or by God Himself. People have hypothesised that looking on the face of God will kill you or that there is no God, among other things. The fact that no one has come back to tell the tale of what's up there means it's impossible to verify.

Strangely, reading that made me imagine a supermassive black hole that swallows everything that approaches it. The ultimate trap where even gods can't escape :weirdo: