Fantasy question

[fredo01]

How often do you use active gods in your fantasy settings? Do you like when GMs use active deities in their fantasy campaigns? Would fantasy be better with or without them?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by fredo01

How often do you use active gods in your fantasy settings? Do you like when GMs use active deities in their fantasy campaigns? Would fantasy be better with or without them?

I have no opinion about whether fantasy as such is better with or without active gods; that depends on the specific fantasy campaign. In my own fantasy campaigns, I've sometimes had supernatural abilities based on appeals to the gods; I've never had gods appear on stage as characters, unless you count the campaign where all the PCs and a few NPCs were human avatars of God and Goddess.

Bill Stoddard

[Maz]

It's funny how the simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

By "active" I guess you mean who plays an active roll and "step in" and show up as an NPC, right?

I have never ever done this in any of the fantasy games I've run. The closets things has been people working for deities, such as angels or demons.



I don't know if I like it or not, I have never tried it. It really, REALLY depends on how it is done. In general I don't like NPC's who are just more powerful than me as a player and there's nothing I can do about it, that is, unless they do not take an active part in the story but only act as guides, 'quest givers' and so on.



In general I would say "better without them" but then I am currently planning a game where the players will actually play gods so... again, it depends on how it is done.

[fredo01]

I am sorry if I havent been clear enough. By active, I mean gods who plot, take action through humans or avatars,grant their followers powers or rain destruction upon those who they feel need to be punished, as opposed to gods who dont exist at all or simply cant interfere with mortals.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by fredo01

I am sorry if I havent been clear enough. By active, I mean gods who plot, take action through humans or avatars,grant their followers powers or rain destruction upon those who they feel need to be punished, as opposed to gods who dont exist at all or simply cant interfere with mortals.

I generally don't have gods on stage in any significant way other than as the apparent source of some followers' powers, and the explained source of various natural and historical phenomena. In the real world, no religion exists for which divine intervention occurs on a regular and empirically testable basis. (That's not to say the divine doesn't exist; but non-believers generally don't ever see someone else's god.) Even in religions where divine intervention is a common motif, as with the Classical Greek and Hellenistic gods, much of the religious devotion relies on the mystery of that intervention. To have gods interacting noticeably (to outsiders) with the world is to reduce or alter the sacredness of their existence. I suspect that would result in a form of religion radically different from anything historical humanity has ever seen. Indeed, I suspect it would stop being religion altogether.

So in my settings it's not that the gods don't exist or can't interact with mortals... it's that their interactions are much more akin to their real-world analogues, and retain the sacred and mysterious quality that is in many ways essential for the development of a realistic religion.

[Phantasm]

The most I've done is have gods who grant spells and/or powers to followers of their choice. I really don't like the gods stepping in to interfere on the mortals' behalf.

Occasionally, such as the one D&D game where I had a goblin paladin show up, I have some IC references to "oh, the goddess of reincarnation was careless with placing that soul," or some folks mentioning a god's displeasure being manifest through natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornados, or hurricanes, but no lightning bolts out of clear skies or anything truly blatant.

There was one plot arc which had the PCs trying to retrieve an ancient artifact said to have been forged by one of the gods - a spear head created by the goddess of lust that had recently been stolen from the temple relicuery(sp!) of the goddess of love, but even that was more temple priestesses trying to keep a dangerous object from the public's hands than it was an outright decree from the love goddess.

[jspade]

My PCs are active gods.

[MacGregor]

I use gods as plot devices, starting quests and the like. And of course givers of divine powers for characters. Occasionally the players may even met one of the gods, although they've never actually traveled with the group.

Having gods in the world (or not having them,) does change the feel of the game, but I don't think one is better than the other.

[Kaldrin]

Depending on the campaign I have very active, semi-active or absent deity interaction with the players. The flavour of the game really isn't really impacted in a sense that the gods do something extraordinary, but more based on the culture and overarching feel of the belief systems of the PCs.

[sjard]

<sigh> As I was trying to type before a power blip erased everything I'd gotten down to that point...


For my current campaign it depends on what you mean by gods.

I'm running a series of timeline creation campaigns seperated by about 50 years between each. The first campaign started at TL 0 when the tribe's patron spirit (not quite yet a true god) created the whole tribe out of nothingness, all roughly the same physical age (young adult), all speaking the same language, and all with some basic knowlege required to survive (fire building was granted to the spirit's chosen shaman and has currently been kept secret for the power play aspect).

At current the tribe has developed very crude stone tools (edges are just emerging), and have effectivly destroyed one tribe. This has given them a handful of slaves to improve things for them, and has allowed their spirit to enslave that tribe's spirit granding her (a female spirit who has chosen a thorn bush for her totem) most of the enslaved spirits power.

The idea behind this is that when enough spirits have been enslaved (and ultimately absorbed into one) the surviving spirits will become true gods. At the lower power levels they are more involved in their followers lives, in increasingly powerful ways, but ultimately will aquire so many followers that they will become less involved with their people. To the point where, when (if we can manage to keep playing that long) we reach a more modern age (maybe TL 4-5) their involvement will be so rare as to be something believed never really happened.