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## Absens Dei- the absence of the gods

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Prak
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### Absens Dei- the absence of the gods

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Post by Prak » Fri May 29, 2015 12:18 am

So, this concept popped into my head for a D&D campaign the other day- After about 10,000 years of golden prosperity due to highly involved deities, a time in which people didn't get to very high levels because the gods were there to redirect floods and stop volcanoes and put down manticores and shit, the gods suddenly vanish.
The campaign will take place about a year after the gods have disappeared. The general idea I have in mind for what happened is that an Ur Priest type figured out how to redirect almost the entirety of mortal belief to himself, so the gods are still around, but they're greatly diminished, more like very limited sphere users than gods or even high level wizards. They still have their purviews and a modicum of control, but have lost the omnipotence/omniscience/etc and only messenger types can really fast travel anymore. So the gods are keeping their heads down because they can totally be killed if people find out about them and get pissed that they aren't fixing everything anymore. I decided that during the Interventionist Era, priests were mostly low-ish level adepts or classes important to the god (so rogue priests for Olidamara) but the cleric class didn't exist, and is actually starting to exist now as people have to put their faith into something bigger, so cause-clerics are now the order of the day.
Deities and Demigods, unsurprisingly, does not have anything like suggestions for this sort of plot, the AEG Gods book ditto. I have found the TV Tropes Have You Seen My God and God is Dead pages, which may be some help, but does anyone here have any suggestions?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.

> Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.

> FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
> You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.

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Insomniac
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Post by Insomniac » Fri May 29, 2015 12:58 am

I think the fundamental question in this setting is the morality of giving the deities power again. Is that morally good, morally evil, not one or the other but trending one way, or morally indifferent and neutral?
are people aware of this and trying to bring them back and vice versa, suppress them? are cause clerics good guys, bad guys or so nascent in their development that they are not a social order yet? Is the person redirecting worship a hero, a villain or otherwise and will characters ever confront this person?
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Prak
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Post by Prak » Fri May 29, 2015 1:22 am

So the way I'm thinking about this right now is-
The previous status quo was that there were several typical D&D pantheons of gods who were highly involved in mortal life. The agriculture gods taught people how to farm, but also did all the blessing with Plant Growth, gods of magic taught people how to use spells, but wizardry was more a hobby/pious past time and people didn't get above about Wiz5 because Boccob et al. dealt with all the threats that required higher level magic. Hell, there weren't even a lot of people making magic items because gods did that shit as needed. People still fought, and the evil gods were just as interventionist, but generally the evil gods were outnumbered by good and neutral gods.
Then some guy who already knew how to steal small bits of divine power figured out how to take all of it, and the gods were reduced from "Can sense anything related to my purview, travel instantly there, appoint proxies, etc" to "Expert access to a sphere or few spheres related to my purview" because people still believe in gods, but all the actual power is being diverted.
People noticed that Pelor was no longer walking around town and talking to them and smiting undead, and that Ehlonnah didn't show up to bless the crops, and that now the undead are being super bold and not put down and the crops aren't producing enough to support the populations that grew based on 10,000 years of 130% production, but they don't know what happened to the gods, just that they're not there anymore.
The initial thought was that something pulled their attention away. People basically figured the gods had a good reason for not being around, a war in heaven type of deal until someone realized that the interventionist nature of the gods meant such a war would have huge effects on the world, and they would be seeing Pelor being attacked or Kord wrestling with mighty serpents or whatever, and now they're really panicked because instead of the gods obviously having their attention somewhere else, there's no indication where they went and they're worried that the gods actually died, or left, or something.
The campaign will start with the PCs getting a visit from a messenger god that puts them on the path to sorting things out.

So, returning the gods to power would be a neutral/good leaning act since the net effect would be returning a lot of good and neutral gods to power and a few evil ones, as well as reintroducing a check on the forces of evil.
Cause clerics are still nascent. I'm putting the disappearance of the gods about a year prior to the start of the game and so cause clerics aren't above 2nd level yet. But the individuals are all over the map. There are cause clerics of Sun and Healing who see themselves as Pelor's representatives in his absence, and cause clerics of disease and rot who aspire to becoming new gods of same, and everything in between.
I'm thinking about the Ur Priest being a lurking threat rather than active one, something like having the mass of divine power force him into hibernation as it reshapes him, so that I can focus on the lower level threats like rampant ghouls and murderers running around for a bit without having to explain what's going on with a new super being in the mix just yet.
Last edited by Prak on Fri May 29, 2015 1:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.

> Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.

> FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
> You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.

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JigokuBosatsu
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Post by JigokuBosatsu » Fri May 29, 2015 6:41 am

Saberhagen's Swords books have some good gods gettin' whupped action.

> Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep

> JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?

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Antariuk
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Post by Antariuk » Fri May 29, 2015 3:37 pm

'Requiem for a God', an older d20 supplement from Monte C., might be of interest to you (although it discusses what happens if a god really dies and not just diminishes). I read it once and don't remember much aside from a couple of decent ideas and a lot of garbage, especially when it comes to mechanics.
"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style." - Steven Brust
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TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline » Fri May 29, 2015 5:08 pm

My homebrew D&D setting that evolved into a fantasy story took this premise as pre-history. A couple thousand years before the setting takes place something makes the power of the gods go away. It's pretty much Armageddon, because in exchange for worship they keep the earthquakes and the volcanoes and shit from going off. So 10,000 years of repressed natural disasters all kind of blow off within a one year period as the planet catches up.
It worked... I tweaked some ideas so that there was still a limited form of divinity based magic. The idea was that some areas identified so strongly with their patron god for so long that the energies in the location can "infect" people and give them some divine powers. I eliminated the cleric class and introduced something similar as a prestige class anyone could pick up if they spent enough time attuning to these areas. But instead of attuning to a specific god they attuned to an aspect of that god, like War, or Justice, or Goblinoids (that was fun) that they tried to epitomize the virtues of. Basically it opened up relevant domain spell lists and a few other things.
The healing aspect of divine magic though I ended up keeping the sole purview of Paladins, which I renamed as a noble human family called the Paladin House (so Michael Paladin, Joseph Paladin, Sarah Paladin, ect...) who swore a crusade decades/centuries before to find out what happened to the Gods. They scattered to the winds and disappeared for years. Then they came back... changed. Arguably insane. Unquestionably zealous. If clerics exemplified an aspect of the old gods, the Paladins were that aspect taken to extremes. A Paladin devoted to strength might come and kill off all the men in a small hamlet and work to keep it isolated for years to see which survivors were able to survive to find a mate.
However, because they only see things through the lens of their god, when it comes to reality or their will being broken or bent, reality buckles a little. The Paladins can heal readily when they have a mind to, and are the only people in the setting who can raise dead, at the cost of sacrificial victims to transfer the spark of life to the dead person.
At first they were NPCs, but it slowly turned out that anyone particularly susceptible to those places of Old God power were at risk of becoming like a Paladin, and a few people beyond the Paladin family were changed. The name stuck though and nobody really dug into it deeply to begin with.
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AndreiChekov
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Post by AndreiChekov » Fri May 29, 2015 6:16 pm

I didn't actually read everything that you said, but my impression of how D&D writers view deities always bugged me.
You see, I think that the people in the world would be praying more to evil deities that good ones, because of the whol e protection racket thing. So, you bribe Erythuul to not go and cause disease in your village. But, then again the good gods are more active, so you also ask Pelinnor (god of cancer) to grant healing and protection from disease or whatever.
The idea that someone would revere one deity exclusively is a bit silly with how their pantheon works.
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TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline » Fri May 29, 2015 6:22 pm

If that was addressed to me, it's not that clerics/paladins revere one deity, it's that they're given either basically a severe fixation on an aspect of a deity, or a fixation that borders on madness. The Gods are gone... but their... I dunno "mystical scent" still lingers. Like if you fell in love with a woman that you knew only by her perfume or the sound of her voice. You know one limited aspect and you end up coloring in the rest of who you imagine that person is by extrapolating that one aspect.
It's... not healthy mentally. And that was kind of the point. Eventually in the campaign the opportunity of returning the gods or making new ones came up and like was mentioned above, it was a morality question if it even *should* be done.
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