D&D General Religion in D&D: Your Take

[Aldarc]

I see where you are coming from but don’t necessarily agree angels can’t be powerful messengers that inspire awe. There are many example in the Bible that have angels as messengers and the people they appear to are afraid or in awe. Those experiences can still be transcendent.

I’m also not saying the gods can’t have a moral compass or ideals but only that their power and is so beyond mortal understanding. That power isn’t dependent on mortal worship. That’s my preference is all I’m saying. Would a god be upset if a mortal was breaking its laws? Probably. Does it care enough to do anything? Probably , if it wasn’t so involved in its own dealings. Clerics are there to deal with mortals. Angels can send messages and dispense Justice if need be. The god will rarely intervene.

I once had a setting partially inspired by Diablo, so a lot of stuff dealing with angels and such. One of the chief background conceits was that there was a "God" of sorts acting as something of a cosmic force, universal principle, or formula. However, Outsiders had diverging views about their cosmic role in relation to this "God." One branch viewed their role as being subservient to "God." The other branch believed that "God" gave them a mandate to rule. The first branch became angels. The second branch became devils. Demons are not proper outsiders with similar origins as the aforementioned group. Instead, they are more like viruses or spirits corrupted in the reincarnation cycle who seek the destruction of this cosmic order. So mortals were all dealing with these intermediary forces, and it was never clear for mortals whether or not "God" was one and the same for these various extraplanar forces.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, this is the kind of design I dislike when integrating gods and religion into a campaign. To me the gods exist exclusive of mortals and mortal worship. The gods could wipe mortals off the planet and they’d still exist. I feel gods should be pure forces of nature, the building blocks of the cosmos. Most origin stories start with the gods creating creatures, including the mortal races so I’m not sure why they are so dependent on mortal worship unless they’ve invested a good portion of their power into those mortals. Which is kind of a neat way of explaining why they need to maintain their followers. I just don’t happen to like it.

I don't have a problem with it. Those stories are wrong. Over the prime planes there are thousands of different gods who all created everything all by themselves. That makes those stories very clearly wrong. They didn't all create everything. Instead the mortals created the gods through their belief. They believe that X god created everything, so X god comes into existence with a story about that god creating everything.

That's why the gods are so dependent. They are essentially figments of group imagination given form. Lose that imagination and you go back to being nothing.

This of course assumes that there are many prime planes and many different gods. If you create a campaign where your world is the only prime world in existence, you can have the one god who created everything, including the other gods.

 

[Maxperson]

This has got to be one of the worst fantasy cosmology conceits; that gods need worship to exist and it exists entirely to justify why gods would be active rather than passive and mysterious.

It's just one way to do it. And it's a logical way to do it given the multitude of gods who all created everything all by themselves. Not really better or worse than any other, since those are just subjective opinions and we all have different ideas of what is better or worse.

 

[Maxperson]

Definitely not true of Oerth of Greyhawk, Oerth of Faerun, or Krynn. What D&D setting are you thinking of?

They are rare in those settings as well. They happen, and when they do they are big and bad, but they are not common. Centuries go by without such a war.

 

[Raiztt]

They didn't all create everything. Instead the mortals created the gods through their belief. They believe that X god created everything, so X god comes into existence with a story about that god creating everything.

You don't see the flaw in this...?

 

[Staffan]

And the most frustrating thing is...there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this goal. 4e's World Axis cosmology does not do this--the gods genuinely do not require anything of mortals, especially since they predate the existence of the mortal world to begin with. Yet its gods are still quite interested in actively shaping affairs in the world, to the point that other powerful forces (the Primal Spirits, mostly) prevent them from interfering as much as they would like to.

And that's a good way to explain why gods want followers even when they demonstrably exist and have power independent of those followers: followers are agents. Bahamut is the god of justice, but he can't just manifest and make a society just. He needs mortal followers to push the society in the direction of justice.

 

[Raiztt]

And that's a good way to explain why gods want followers even when they demonstrably exist and have power independent of those followers: followers are agents. Bahamut is the god of justice, but he can't just manifest and make a society just. He needs mortal followers to push the society in the direction of justice.

This is largely my angle - gods champion certain ideals/ethics/etc; they believe there is a right/best way to live and therefor promote and reward people for conforming to how they think the world ought to be.

 

[Maxperson]

You don't see the flaw in this...?

Nope. We don't know why the planes came into existence. The existence of Ao the overgod having a boss indicates that at the very least it ain't the gods that mortals think did it. Ao's bosses may have created the planes, or the planes may have been there when they came into existence and they may have no idea who created it or why, or if it even had a creator at all.

Since the gods of the pantheons didn't create the planes, and they didn't create the races that gave them life, there's no flaw in it at all.

 

[Maxperson]

And the most frustrating thing is...there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this goal. 4e's World Axis cosmology does not do this--the gods genuinely do not require anything of mortals, especially since they predate the existence of the mortal world to begin with. Yet its gods are still quite interested in actively shaping affairs in the world, to the point that other powerful forces (the Primal Spirits, mostly) prevent them from interfering as much as they would like to.

I agree that there are other ways. What I disagree with is the idea that gods needing worship/belief to exist is a bad way to do it or one that doesn't make sense given how D&D works. We should all just pick the way we prefer and not try to slam the ways of others as "bad" when bad is just your(general you) opinion.

 

[Celebrim]

This is largely my angle - gods champion certain ideals/ethics/etc; they believe there is a right/best way to live and therefor promote and reward people for conforming to how they think the world ought to be.

Mine as well.

In my game the gods were the original inhabitants of the planet - called Korrel - and they originally just largely lived together as a family with petty drama but as a largely loving and functional family. They flirted, married, had affairs, broke up, reconciled, had kids, and did all the family things. They thought of each other as a group of friends might think of each other, accepting largely each other's personalities.

Then a murder happened and a schism happened, and a feud broke out that ended up killing a good number of the gods and wrecking the Earth. And suddenly that the gods had different personalities and wants was something they no longer found to be cute. Things had gotten real. And now those disputes that they used to laugh about are no longer funny, but serious (well, there are a few that might disagree and say the whole problem is everyone is so serious now, but that is itself a serious dispute).

To stop the war, the gods made a treaty with each other and abandoned the planet. As part of the terms of that treaty, they made mortals ostensibly for the purpose of repairing the now damaged planet. Because each god feared the mortals would be the agent of one of their enemies, they all agreed to have a hand in the creation and that the mortals would have the right to serve which ever god they wanted - the gods created 'free will'. The setting is in the aftermath of that divinely created freedom with the gods by treaty not making war on each other but vying to convince this thing that they created that they might not have fully understood when they created it to listen to them and conform the world into the image that they want it to conform to.

I know the terms of the treaty, but mortals (even clerics) generally do not. As a campaign level secret in the sense of I don't tell players this and it would require convincing a god to tell you this to discover it, whenever a god intervenes he is effectively giving credit to other deities that allow them to intervene. So if you are Lado the god of building things and you decide to miraculously intervene to protect something, that puts a "voucher" as it were out there that Balmut the god of breaking things can pick up and use to miraculously intervene to destroy something. So any time you work a miracle you are taking a risk, and playing the game is all about efficient use of your power. Everytime you bless something something else is probably going to be cursed or some enemy is going to be blessed.