[D&D 3.X/Tome] How do you handle gods?

[Prak]

I'm starting a campaign centered around the disappearance of gods. People think the gods are gone, but they are going to appear, so I need to know how I'm going to handle them. I'm curious how others have handled the gods in their games.

[AndreiChekov]

It hasn't taken off yet, but I'm running a campaign based on 10th level being maximum, and the gods are 15th level, and in the world.

Horus is the pharoah of the upper kingdom, and set is the pharoah of the lower kingdom.

bast and others like her just wander around doing whatever

[PhoneLobster]

If "the gods" are making an appearance, then they need to basically just be very powerful characters/monsters not utterly outside of the bounds of power levels achievable and defeatable by the PCs.

No "Omni-X" bullshit. Not the proper stuff anyway.

That's about it. I mean ideally you've got some sort of thing where their religion feeds them power and maybe visa versa etc... but you're going Tome/3.x so you might be better off just ignoring divine ranks epic levels and so forth and just "winging it" on the "why so godlike" power sources/unique mechanics.

[Prak]

Oh, certainly. I wouldn't fuck divine ranks with shadzar's dick. Unless a gm is saying "you guys can have divine rank" then I'll take all the power gaming.

I'm basically treating the gods as powerful sphere users who can sense their purviews, get greater teleport and gate effects at will, and basically get extreme range increases to their spell-likes. I might get rid of the range increases for the most part, and just give them the ability to cast through their purview and worshippers. In fact, I think I am going to do that, rather than "you can cast for miles!"

[Shady314]

I've handled them lots of ways usually depending on how the setting we were trying uses them.

1) The "gods" are just like gods in our reality. People believe and have their "evidence" while others disbelieve and also have evidence. Players never found out one way or the other because that wasn't the focus of the story.

2) The Greek Gods sort of situation. Larger than life personalities rife with conflicts and human emotions. PCs are the ones with the fate/power whatever to defy them or serve one of them and fight agents of opposing gods which can change based on nothing more than a whim. The Gods may or may not be actually related but they act like a big dysfunctional family because they can't die. This was FR back when I was first getting into GMing and didn't even really realize there was stuff besides DnD. I came up with all new relationships and added backstory for the gods relying heavily on the Time of Troubles stuff.

3) In M&M3e I had an NPC people called God because he had a shit ton of points and world spanning powers like the ability to remote view anywhere on earth through any barrier, contact people in any dimension etc. His limitations were just that he couldn't do multiple things at once so he couldn't spy everywhere at all times and he was a mostly squishy human otherwise. In DnD terms he was really just a McGuffin. People wanted him dead because they thought he'd get more powerful and absolute power yadda yadda yadda while others wanted to protect and guide him. It was a baby.

4) Never done it but I wanted to do a Scion type situation except the PCs aren't the children of gods but rather the gods reborn. I couldn't decide between having the apocalypse be cyclical or having a few gods that had slain/imprisoned the others in times past. Explains rapid leveling, the class system in general and the breakdown of the game at higher levels. They would have all been gestalted with a useless martial type and a useful magical type.

Mechanically If I make the gods interactable (So anything not option 1) I always make it possible to take them out. They have stats. Mostly just being high level outsiders.

But usually not in a stand up fight. Like you could fight them and could win but they will be back. If you want a permanent solution you might have to kill their believers tear down their temples etc. Or they may have some sort of ban that will destroy them. Like to destroy the God of War you have to defeat him in a tournament he has agreed to (breaking the spirit but not the letter of the agreement highly encouraged!) or to destroy the God of Love you have to break his heart etc. It's never really come up though. My players never made it past level 9 in DnD and we moved on to other systems.

[Prak]

For #4 look up an Image comic called "The Wicked and the Divine." It's very good and deals with the gods being reborn in the bodies of adolescents every 99 years or so. There are only 12(ish) actual gods.

What I've got going on in my game is someone stole the gods' worship, a la Hogfather if Teatime was an ur priest rather than a rogue. So the gods are still around, but greatly diminished and hiding out for a mixture of shame and being vulnerable. I need to figure out how I'm going to deal with deicide if only so I can know how threatened the gods are and write the actual "now you guys get to rock up and slay the ur priest" adventure. I want to play with the idea that the players can become gods too, so some way of handling ascension would be good to have too, I guess.

[Grek]

I prefer a Yoruba situation, where there is a singular Creator, both powerful and indifferent, who is not regularly interacted with. Instead, the Creator has messengers (mostly outsiders), who are entrusted with making sure that some aspect of Creation (like fire, or thunderstorms, or bears) is running properly. Clerics gain spells by petitioning the Outsider in charge of whatever it is their spell does to do some thing, and cast their spells with the magical equivalent of "That, there, that is what I needed set on fire, Fire God!".

[Prak]

So, what I'm looking at is making god-hood a couple templates, I guess. You start out as a personification, which means you can control a preview through Expert sphere access, and can use analyze dweomer and object reading on specimens of your purview, and thematic detect spells. You also get a vague remote sensing power with your purview- a personification of fire gets to know that there's a giant fire raging somewhere, but didn't know where of much else.

With mortal worship you become a god and can use touch spell likes from your spheres out to medium range, use spell likes, see and communicate through your purview and followers, share spells without range limits with followers and proxies, and use greater teleport, gate and plane shift at will. They also get to us Wish at will for thematic stuff and can raise mortals abilities, but only the the abilities that are their own the highest, albeit by 10/7/5 points, and use xp wish uses if they have wish economy currency to burn. Only time of luck gods can turn back time or undo misfortune, though.

Still mtp-ish, but at least not "they get all max rolls and can kill anyone who even thinks about fucking with them."

Ideally the chassis for this is an appropriate normal class, so Hextor is a Soldier and Boccob is a Wizard, etc.

[Koumei]

I don't think I've ever actively used gods in a game, but in games where I was planning on that eventually being a thing, it'd just be so the players could stab them in the face and/or dick, then take their belongings in a sack. Including their godliness.

Actually, in that respect they're exactly the same as special Demon Lords who trade in souls, or as Overlords in Disgaeagame. So yeah, I'd just do that, treat them as Overlords.

Which means they're generally high-level dudes who are created as characters and not just pulled from a monster manual, with a reasonable amount of nice loot and optimisation used in making them, without overdoing it. Then give them an awesome lair that they vaguely control, a bunch of powerful minions wandering around the place, then perhaps grant them a bonus Sphere Access that is keyed to them being a god/overlord, and when you kill them you can steal that from them.

So the thing that sets Death-God-of-the-Week apart from all other tenth level True Necromancers is that he carries a kick-ass scythe (Major Magic Weapon: Vorpal and Ghost-Touch) and has Basic Access to the Carnage Sphere. And Lolth is just something like a Drider with whatever spellcasting class (or even Assassin or Jester or something) that works well for that, and who also has Attuned the Spider Domain for one of her feats, and has lootable Basic Access to the Venom Sphere or something. And probably has a special lair where it's a giant web, and as long as she's touching the web and has at least one victim bound in it, she has Regeneration.

Then I'd go "Cool, that's done." and have a drink. Speaking of which.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

When I run my world, if any particular god can actually be proven to exist, you can potentially find them and kick the living shit out of them. Most gods don't exist, or rather not anymore. Many are hero-deities, some are famous kings of the past whose exploits grew with every generation's retelling, many religions are based on concepts that might have exemplars and avatars who you can totally murder them and steal their stuff which doesn't affect the concept. For example, you can totally murder the Autarch of Flame* and steal his cloak but you can still venerate fire and draw divine magic from it.


*

When I wrote that, I was unaware that some fartknocker took that name and now that's the only thing that comes up when you google that. I was referring to this guy:

[Zaranthan]

My world has two flavors of gods: a handful of nebulous powers who run the show from behind the scenes and the unwashed horde of demon princes, racial patrons, ascended heroes, etc.

The Powers literally run the world, and as such can hurl $TEXAS challenges between themselves and any would-be usurpers. Which is good, because if you were to somehow kill/imprison/disable, for example, the Destroyer (who holds the Death domain), nothing would actually die until you fixed her. If a player actually wanted to do so anyway, I'd have to work with them as I just don't know how I'd go about it. They're generally too busy making the sun come up to bother with mortal concerns.

Everyone else tops out around level 30 or so, with levels beyond 20 only gained by causing world-altering events, but also coming with the ability to grant prayers if you manage to rustle up some worshipers. I've tossed most of the material from the Epic Level Jokebook and Deities & Dickheads. Instead when you gain an epic level, you come away from the adventure with a new artifact forged in the fires of whatever the hell you just did. If somebody comes along and stabs you in the dick, they can totally just pick up your loot. Race patrons like Corellon and Kurtlemak are a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts position, with new heroes ascending to godhood every couple centuries and the old patron retiring to a quiet corner of the outer planes, passing along a few artifacts people expect you to have and taking the rest out of the economy.

[Prak]

It's really awkward when an orc stabs the current Corellon in the dick and becomes the new Corellon, I'm betting.

[Zaranthan]

Yep, that sort of thing usually leads to a dark age for the pointy-eared tree huggers until one of them can stab the orc and take back the goods.

[ishy]

The Powers literally run the world, and as such can hurl $TEXAS challenges between themselves and any would-be usurpers. Which is good, because if you were to somehow kill/imprison/disable, for example, the Destroyer (who holds the Death domain), nothing would actually die until you fixed her.

I disagree. Having the powers that run the world so powerful they can't interact with the game in anyway whatsoever, seems like a really bad idea. Especially, since if you / your plot ever becomes interesting enough that they'll care about it, they'll just $texas your ass.

[OgreBattle]

If somebody comes along and stabs you in the dick, they can totally just pick up your loot. Race patrons like Corellon and Kurtlemak are a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts position, with new heroes ascending to godhood every couple centuries and the old patron retiring to a quiet corner of the outer planes, passing along a few artifacts people expect you to have and taking the rest out of the economy.

When the dick stabber ascends, do they keep their personality or are they affected by the position of the god they're becoming

[maglag]

I use the "gods are powered by the faith of their worshipers", because otherwise why do gods bother to promote cults around them at all?

It becomes particularly ridiculous when you use the "If you kill a god, you get their divine powers" method suggested above. It would means every god with an actual cult is a complete idiot who's painting a giant target on their face for no gain whatsoever. If anything, gods whose power can be stolen by murderizing should instantly kill anyone who even mentions their name or abilities, because the only way they'll be safe if if nobody knows they're gods.

Worship power also means gods need to care about puny mortals. Gods who get too secretive or passive wither and die. They need to make themselves public. Also killing another god's worshipers weakens them, so that's why you have holy crusades and jihads and shit, instead of the gods duking it out in personal duels that nobody else would get to witness.

Of course, since you need worshipers to have gods, that means worshipers came before gods. Aboleths totally recall the good old days when there weren't any gods after all.

Faith gods aren't completely parasites however. It's how the fast-breeding puny races can take on dragons and demons and shit. Have enough faith in your champion and he'll ascend into a divine being to protect you.

[silva]

I prefer the glorantha approach where gods are more like nature primal forces myself. This way its impossible for PCs to challenge them or some other bizarre idea.

If I remember right, Planescape, even having a more trad D&D approach, still makes gods invulnerable to mortals meddling. I like that.

[Zaranthan]

I disagree. Having the powers that run the world so powerful they can't interact with the game in anyway whatsoever, seems like a really bad idea. Especially, since if you / your plot ever becomes interesting enough that they'll care about it, they'll just $texas your ass.

I thought I had put in a bit about working with a player who wanted to go stab the true gods, as that's a rather important plot turn. The idea behind them being able to throw all the trials of Hercules at you at once was just to explain why it hadn't happened yet.

When the dick stabber ascends, do they keep their personality or are they affected by the position of the god they're becoming

You keep your mind, though there's an incentive to keep some of your predecessor's trappings in the existing worshiper base.

[AcidBlades]

They are something that is a part of a character's backstory, current religious and whatnot.

I'm not too interested in the actual gods themselves, so I am rather agnostic as to how I handle things. I call Clerics who don't actually follow a religion, or follow it shallowly would be considered to be occultists or operate how the modern chaos magick tradition works.

[Omegonthesane]

I use the "gods are powered by the faith of their worshipers", because otherwise why do gods bother to promote cults around them at all?

Same reason humans bother to promote cults around them - free source of willing bootlicks, whether to stroke your genitals ego or to actually get shit done. The degree to which it isn't worth it because you have the powers of a god can conceptually just be offset by the degree to which it's easier because you have the powers of a god.

It becomes particularly ridiculous when you use the "If you kill a god, you get their divine powers" method suggested above. It would means every god with an actual cult is a complete idiot who's painting a giant target on their face for no gain whatsoever. If anything, gods whose power can be stolen by murderizing should instantly kill anyone who even mentions their name or abilities, because the only way they'll be safe if if nobody knows they're gods.

Arrogance and laziness are things. Presumably the gods want something from the world, or else it's not worth writing them into a fictional world at all; this being established they could easily be some combination of too impatient to implement a secret plan, too lazy and/or stupid to think of a secret plan, and too arrogant to think that they could ever be slain. If anything, it's more immersion-breaking to assume a majority or even a plurality of hyperintelligent superbeings are Rational Actors who are also as paranoid as Gary Gygax's players than to assume the reverse, since most people's idea of immersion will involve projecting vaguely human psychology onto vaguely human things.

Worship power also means gods need to care about puny mortals. Gods who get too secretive or passive wither and die. They need to make themselves public. Also killing another god's worshipers weakens them, so that's why you have holy crusades and jihads and shit, instead of the gods duking it out in personal duels that nobody else would get to witness.

Worship power is not necessary for jihads to be explainable in a world with literal gods. If there is shit that gods want done which their planetside minions (knowing or not) are doing, then killing the planetside minions dedicated to that task thwarts a thing that the god wants done. This is likely to be a task that would maintain their power or make them stronger.

EDIT: Though admittedly the above all assumes that worshippers can do things that are useful to gods in a direct sense, even if it isn't literally "gods need prayer badly" to the point that no longer being worshipped is a cause of death.

[maglag]

I use the "gods are powered by the faith of their worshipers", because otherwise why do gods bother to promote cults around them at all?

Same reason humans bother to promote cults around them - free source of willing bootlicks, whether to stroke your genitals ego or to actually get shit done. The degree to which it isn't worth it because you have the powers of a god can conceptually just be offset by the degree to which it's easier because you have the powers of a god.
...
EDIT: Though admittedly the above all assumes that worshippers can do things that are useful to gods in a direct sense, even if it isn't literally "gods need prayer badly" to the point that no longer being worshipped is a cause of death.

But then there's zero difference between a "god" and "powerful dude who gets less powerful dudes to do his bidding". By your definition, the king, vampire noble, orc bandit leader, school bully and the janitor's superior are all automatically gods because they have some degree of power over somebody else.

A god implies a religion and religion implies worship rituals. The god demands sacrifices and festivals and whatnot in Their name for people to prove their faith. A holy crusade/jihad isn't just dudes stabbing each other for loot and land like a regular war, it's also the soldiers holding mass prayers before/after the carnage and then erecting shrines for their gods and getting the surviving locals to join the prayers.

[Prak]

I prefer the glorantha approach where gods are more like nature primal forces myself. This way its impossible for PCs to challenge them or some other bizarre idea.

If I remember right, Planescape, even having a more trad D&D approach, still makes gods invulnerable to mortals meddling. I like that.

It's actually easier for players to kill gods in Glorantha because of it's shitty rules and setting.

Hero Questing is a thing. You go to the hero plane to pursue the myth of "that time the sun god was killed" and take the role of the god who killed him. Then, through knowing the myth really well, you just reenact the myth, kill the sun god and leave, declaring "the sun god is dead and I am now nigh unto a god in power without the shitty compulsions that go into being a god," or whatever.

I'm not sure, but since you can declare whatever effect you want when you come down off your acid trip hero quest, you might be able to declare gods dead just for completing any hero quest.

Planescape kicked the gods out. It's supposed to primarily take place in the city of Sigil which is ruled by an omnipotent dominatrix in a sword mask who will kick gods in the nuts if they enter her city.

Also, I don't care what flavour of Abrahamist you may be, but setting aside the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) gods have always been totes killable. It may be difficult, but you could always do it.

Edit: Just remember, anytime you're about to say you like something about Glorantha-
Glorantha was written by a modern reconstructionist shaman, ie, a person who looked at the complete dearth of knowledge we have of what all people older than Ancient Rome believed beyond "I don't know, spirits?"and said "yeah, I'm going to follow that!" Possibly because drugs. He then proceeded to write Glorantha, where all the old human myths and completely nonsensical stories to explain the world are true, and no scientific phenomenon exists. Gravity doesn't exist in Glorantha, people fall because all things yearn to return to the earth father. If you combine saltpeter, sulpher and charcoal in Glorantha, you don't get gunpowder, just a mess. Because science doesn't work. If you want to make gunpowder, first you have to piss off a bunch of literally made of earth dwarves by stealing their magic, then you have to use their magic. If you get hit in the face by acid in Glorantha, and you try to neutralize it with lye, which would be common in sculeries of the replicated time period, you'll just hurt yourself more, because science doesn't exist and acid burns because it is basically fire. So contrary to what your modern mind tells you, you actually want to wash acid off with water. Because science doesn't exist.

When I say Science Doesn't Exist in Glorantha, I don't mean the scientific method. That totally exists. There are guys who basically recognized the whole Hero's Journey thing going on with the gods called the Godlearners, and they are totally scientists. They switched the fertility goddesses of two religions with a hero quest just to see what would happen. When I say Science Doesn't Exist in Glorantha, I mean physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, the basic foundations of the real world.

This is why Glorantha sucks. None of your assumptions are valid, and while a good GM would answer any given question with how something is believed to work, that basically leads to sitting around for a Myth Science Class rather than actually playing. It's worse than Ars Magica because these bullshit myth-physics things come up for more than just the magic system.

But then there's zero difference between a "god" and "powerful dude who gets less powerful dudes to do his bidding". By your definition, the king, vampire noble, orc bandit leader, school bully and the janitor's superior are all automatically gods because they have some degree of power over somebody else.

And?

A god implies a religion and religion implies worship rituals. The god demands sacrifices and festivals and whatnot in Their name for people to prove their faith. A holy crusade/jihad isn't just dudes stabbing each other for loot and land like a regular war, it's also the soldiers holding mass prayers before/after the carnage and then erecting shrines for their gods and getting the surviving locals to join the prayers.

The peasants believe the king will murder them if they do not perform the ritual of paying taxes. The orc bandits believe their leader will murder them if they don't perform the rituals he gives them in the form of orders, the school bullys' victims believe he'll beat them if they don't perform the rituals of trying to avoid him or giving him their money, the janitor believes he'll be fired if he doesn't perform the ritual of doing his rounds.

[momothefiddler]

It becomes particularly ridiculous when you use the "If you kill a god, you get their divine powers" method suggested above. It would means every god with an actual cult is a complete idiot who's painting a giant target on their face for no gain whatsoever. If anything, gods whose power can be stolen by murderizing should instantly kill anyone who even mentions their name or abilities, because the only way they'll be safe if if nobody knows they're gods.

Arrogance and laziness are things. Presumably the gods want something from the world, or else it's not worth writing them into a fictional world at all; this being established they could easily be some combination of too impatient to implement a secret plan, too lazy and/or stupid to think of a secret plan, and too arrogant to think that they could ever be slain. If anything, it's more immersion-breaking to assume a majority or even a plurality of hyperintelligent superbeings are Rational Actors who are also as paranoid as Gary Gygax's players than to assume the reverse, since most people's idea of immersion will involve projecting vaguely human psychology onto vaguely human things.

It would be kinda cool to end up with a situation where one day someone's like "Wait, there's not a god of secrets! Why isn't anyone the god of secrets? Shouldn't that mean there couldn't be any Divine secret-ing spells or whatever the results of gods are around these parts?" and then, because they're a PC, they don't get instamurdered by Vecna and the story could build on that.

[Chamomile]

In my settings, gods are CR 25-ish dudes with very tall hats who run planar governments and can't generally be bothered with backwater material planes. Also sometimes there are sleeping gods of power more in the vein of a personification of primal forces, like that one setting when Vorpal, Neutral, and Mithral were the embodiment of destruction, stability, and creation respectively, and all of them were dormant but when they were active they ripped islands out into the sky where ambient magic keeps them suspended in orbits through the atmosphere to this day, thousands of years later, and the old gods did this accidentally, while fighting one another. Compared to Pelor, who is just the Solar in charge of all the other Solars. I didn't even level him, just gave him a few extra skills and buffed his mental stats a bit.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

. If you get hit in the face by acid in Glorantha, and you try to neutralize it with lye, which would be common in sculeries of the replicated time period, you'll just hurt yourself more, because science doesn't exist and acid burns because it is basically fire. So contrary to what your modern mind tells you, you actually want to wash acid off with water.

My modern mind tells me that you dilute the acid with water because:

A: It's literally on the SDS for every acid I've worked with to flush the affected area if skin contact occurs (granted, I haven't worked with EVERY acid that exists).

B. I can't imagine any situation at any time where anyone would have sodium/potassium hydroxide handy but not have water.

C. If you exceed the acid's buffering capabilities you're just going to add caustic damage on top of the acid burns, and I can't imagine being able to do that kind of calculation when your face is getting melted off.

D. If you are referring to the scene in the Fight Club, keep in mind that literally everything that happened in that scene was wrong in some way.