Quote:
Originally Posted by Anomylous
Steve P: Thanks for the kind words!
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Well deserved! And I thought me and my group had gone too far down the rabbit hole of inventing gods and religions, with pages and pages written on certain sects and their beliefs and rituals, but your system is even deeper and more detailed! But where ours was a minestrone designed by committee (3 GMs and lots of player input accepted) yours is all cohesive, tidy, and internally consistent. I'm jealous! Hahaha.
One thing about a fantasy setting is that one can include "real" gods, and for me and my friends that was too good an opportunity to pass up. The extent to which that part of the backstory influences actual play can be dialed up or down as much as the GM prefers, so there's no need to be reluctant if one enjoys creating and utilizing mythologies.
We did name our days after principle members of our pantheon, but we never named the months. There is only so much detail players can handle comfortably.
None of our Greater Gods ever appeared as NPCs, although the last campaign I ran for my 70s-90's group was to climax with a cameo appearance of our equivalent deity to Thor (Thunor) because the artifact that was the goal of the last quest was to turn out to be his missing hammer -- much too powerful an item to leave in the hands of PCs! So I was going to surprise them with the god actually assuming physical form, calling the hammer to himself, fighting in the climactic battle, then disappearing with his hammer and a "Thanks! I was wondering where this was!" Alas the group disintegrated before we finished the campaign.
Then there was a Lesser Goddess who did make a couple of appearances, or at least her arm did. She lived in lakes and passed out a really kick-ass enchanted sword to the next passing warrior naive enough to think accepting swords from women in lakes could be a good idea. My own PC was the first victim of this "trap", quickly learning it was NOT a sword you ever really wanted to own. (It came with 3 suicide missions in the form of geases, and you couldn't lose the sword for trying until all the missions were completed, unless of course you died first).
Our most "fickle" god was the Greater God named Attallah, god of the sky, who didn't want people to believe in any of the other gods. Three generations before our campaign play begins, Attallah had charged his Prophet to lead his desert people to conquer and convert the whole world to this new religion, and slay all the wizards in the process. The Prophet succeeded to a large extent, but his empire was broken and reduced to a much smaller kingdom by an upstart secular general we based on Alexander The Great. Our Alexander died without heir, this secular empire fragmented into the city-states where most of our PCs were born, and the remnant of the Prophet's empire became a new, smaller kingdom ruled by the Prophet's heirs. It was still sending out Attallah's priests, armed with limited divine powers, to convert people and kill any wizards in our PC's time. This factored into many of our PCs adventures.
And we used all this to explain the differences in the Spell Tables from
Wizard to
Advanced Wizard. None of our wizards knew the new spells when
Advanced Wizard was published because (we all ruled) the knowledge of these spells was lost when Attallha's first jihad had killed off most of the wizards, and destroyed all the institutes of magic. There were no Enchanters left, and all magic items were rare artifacts leftover from the lost Age.
Eh, sorry for the long post! Just some examples of how to entangle gods in the plots of your PCs adventures :)