Favorite Deities

[Username17]

You're still thinking of gods as being omnipotent, or at least omniscient. Why should they be? People can do messed up things in the name of the United States Government without it saying a whole lot about what the United States Government does or does not want.

You're also discounting legalistic aspects of the god/priest relationship. If the priest keeps their covenant with the god, why would the god be allowed to not keep his covenant with the priest? Even if the priest was being a douche while not violating the terms of the covenant, why do you assume the god has the ability to unilaterally violate their end of the agreement?

Why would you assume that the god even knows whether the priest is being a douche while he isn't upholding the covenant? Basically, your entire objection is that gods have to simultaneously be omniscient and above their own laws. Why should they be? The gods in almost every religious system aren't.

-Username17

[Maxus]

I suppose it's called an investiture for a reason. A priest has been found worthy of having some power invested into him, and he will have that power unless he screws up so bad that he gets direct attention from the deity, and is otherwise assumed to be fighting the good fight and advancing the deity's agenda

Edit: Why hasn't anyone ever written up guidelines of how Deific Surveillance would work? It can be assumed that gods can find out a -lot- about their devotees and priesthood and deific portfolios, but I don't think they have infinite attention spans/processing power. They have to consciously pay attention, but some stuff dings their mini-map and they can choose to check it out or not.

It would be why gods make priests to begin with: To get more sets of hands out there to take care of things, because even a god empowered by the prayers of the faithful can't be everywhere at once.

[Sashi]

Lago, get off your moral absolutist horse, it's not useful.

In a DnD world with divine magic you have deities who definitively
a) exist
b) intervene in the world

That means that The Problem of Evil is alive and kicking in the world and must be dealt with.

And the best way to do that is not to say "Gods don't Intervene" (because they clearly do) or "Evil Wins Because Good Is Dumb" because that's a joke from spaceballs. You literally need moral relativism except there are actual deities acting as the competing moral foundations.

So Nature deities have blood sacrifices because it's natural to kill things. Nomadic tribes totally dress a dude up as a totemic boar then chase him down and kill him with sticks, and there's really no way you can call that "evil" from the nature deity's point of view, since the tribe chases real boars down and kills them with sticks all the time.

And there's an agrarian civilization across the mountains that worships the same deity (because growing grain and birthing pigs are totally within the "nature" purview) and they call the boar hunters "evil barbarians" because of their blood sacrifices. But the boar hunters say the same thing about the agrarians because they slaughter pigs by the thousands but never perform the boar hunting ritual that shows understanding of the cycle of life and predator/prey relationships.

[Lago PARANOIA]

People can do messed up things in the name of the United States Government without it saying a whole lot about what the United States Government does or does not want.

Why would you assume that the god even knows whether the priest is being a douche while he isn't upholding the covenant?

Depends on the extent of and pattern of the messed-up behavior of its adherents. I'm sure that the Catholic Church vehemently denies being anti-child abuse, even to this day, but at the end of the day you have to conclude that the organization is secretly pretty okay with it.

You're also discounting legalistic aspects of the god/priest relationship. If the priest keeps their covenant with the god, why would the god be allowed to not keep his covenant with the priest? Even if the priest was being a douche while not violating the terms of the covenant, why do you assume the god has the ability to unilaterally violate their end of the agreement?

Unless you have a Very Specific Level of divine covenancy in which covenants are literally designed in order to maximize the amount of omission bias for dramatic effect, I find the unbreakable suicide pact explanation as to why Pelor doesn't excommunicate his vampire priests when he discovers them rather contrived.

I mean, if the metaphysics of the campaign setting make it so that the deity can't read minds or terminate contracts under extraordinary conditions or send assassins or send investigations or have other deities regulate their hierarchies or etc. etc. etc...

Then I suppose that you could eventually throw up enough loopholes and special pleading to make it so that you can have the entire command hierarchy of Bahamut be child abuse enablers without it impacting one's moral judgment on Bahamut. But really, what's the fucking point? Just have big bold letters that say 'IGNORE THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE' and save us some fucking space.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That means that The Problem of Evil is alive and kicking in the world and must be dealt with.

And the best way to do that is not to say "Gods don't Intervene" (because they clearly do) or "Evil Wins Because Good Is Dumb" because that's a joke from spaceballs. You literally need moral relativism except there are actual deities acting as the competing moral foundations.

Do you even know what the Problem of Evil is, Sashi? Your solution of 'solving' it by herping-derping about moral relativism is completely laughable. Not least because when you invoke moral relativism, the Problem of Evil doesn't even exist! It's like asking a nihilist about the Euthyphro Dilemma or a creationist about the importance of natural selection v. genetic drift.

[Sashi]

Do you even know what the Problem of Evil is, Sashi?

Sure, it pretty much boils down to "how can evil exist if God is both all-powerful and all-good?".

In a pantheonic DnD world it becomes more like "How can Pelor say that the Ultimate Good is helping the weak and needy but Obad-Hai says 'cull the weak to strengthen the flock' without either of them being Evil?"

Not least because when you invoke moral relativism, the Problem of Evil doesn't even exist!

Sounds like that solves it to me.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Normative moral relativism dismisses, not solves, the Problem of Evil. Which may be fine in this instance, but realize that declaring that normative moral relativism is the default ethical system of a TTRPG opens up its own can of worms.

[nockermensch]

The gods only make their wishes known if the designer has decided that they are active NPCs in the setting.

K, you're arguing about degree of intrusion. Lolth doesn't have to give all of the drow mass hallucinations of her 'peace, justice, prosperity, equality' cult being slowly flayed and tortured for people to know that's not what she wants; she can just cut them off from her divine power or just send a fucking press release.

Yes, not all deities will nitpick their followers on the details of their doctrine. Pelor might say that his favorite color is yellow and that his symbol is a sun, but I doubt that he's going to get too much of a bug up his butt if all of the priests say that his favorite color is green and his symbol is a moon. However, if his priests start doing things like endorsing child sacrifices or enslaving sapients and he doesn't give a forceful enough rebuke then one should either suspect that he's A.) too weak to do anything about it, B.) secretly supports or doesn't care about it (which will throw him into the evil camp), or C.) has some sort of Xanatos-like hidden agenda.

Dude, why the fuck Gods need to have a consciousness/ego that interact with humans like that? D&D Gods are literally superheroes. There's nothing actually divine about them, and this kind of sucks.

Remember that while the RL religions that inspired the D&D pantheon had gods being characters in their epics and mythologies, there was also the idea that these stories were just metaphors providing insights into deeper stuff. So in the same society you could have simple people believing Zeus literally turned into a swan and porked someone, and other people discussing what that story explains about divine providence, or something.

[jadagul]

Lago, if you think that there necessarily has to be a difference between "gods" and "nature", then you are demanding too much anthropomorphization from your gods.

-Username17

Well, I don't, I just don't see the point of actually making a big deal about it if the god can't or won't interact with other sapients in an intelligent and/or knowable way. Apollo is worthy of literary discussion in a way that the Spirit of Fire -- a personification of fire whose wishes and behavior are completely unknowable and unable to be influenced -- is not.

I think this might actually be the core of the problem. If you want to tell stories about the gods then the gods need to be real people who interact with other sapients in a comprehensible way. You're right about that.

But we don't want to tell stories about the gods. We want to tell stories about the gods' worshippers, and that's actually much harder if the gods are real people because any story the gods get involved in automatically becomes a story about the gods because they're gods.

It's easy to tell a story about Apollo, but hard to tell a story about the Cult of Apollo that isn't really a story about Apollo. It's hard to tell a story about the Spirit of Fire but really easy to tell a story about the Flame Cult that worships it.

[fectin]

Wait... why is it hard to tell stories about Minos when Poseidon exists?

[Omegonthesane]

Wait... why is it hard to tell stories about Minos when Poseidon exists?

You need to expend conceptual space explaining why Poseidon doesn't hijack the story, in a way that doesn't violate Poseidon's prior characterisation.

[fectin]

So then, why was the Minotaur story so easy to tell? You have Icarus and Daedalus, Minos himself, Ariadne and Theseus, etc. They all stand up just fine as characters, even while Poseidon set the whole thing in motion.

[Wiseman]

Isn't much of this solved by the fact that DnD gods are neither omniscient nor omnipotent?

Thus it could all be handwaved by some sort of arbitrary restriction on divine power, whether it some sort of limited-interference law, or that other opposing gods would get in the way if one tried to do too much, or the fact that that the gods are actually epic level guys with class levels and all the limitations that come from that.

EDIT: Also, looking at the first post, i think we've sort of derailed the topic, haven't we?

[Almaz]

Unless you have a Very Specific Level of divine covenancy in which covenants are literally designed in order to maximize the amount of omission bias for dramatic effect, I find the unbreakable suicide pact explanation as to why Pelor doesn't excommunicate his vampire priests when he discovers them rather contrived.

I mean, if the metaphysics of the campaign setting make it so that the deity can't read minds or terminate contracts under extraordinary conditions or send assassins or send investigations or have other deities regulate their hierarchies or etc. etc. etc...

It'd be funny if the deity isn't allowed to annihilate members of their priesthood outright, so they have to send an assassin instead, and cannot directly commission their angelic hierarchy (or whatnot) to do so, so they have to establish a Mr. Johnsongo-between to hire a crack team of shadowrunnersadventurers to take out their own high priest.

I generally assume that deities are effectively supernaturally bound by their own oaths to not break faith with their high priests and such, but may intrigue against their own priests (via above means) and may also punish random worshippers (and it is the priest's job to intercede to stop such punishment from growing too severe).

[jadagul]

So then, why was the Minotaur story so easy to tell? You have Icarus and Daedalus, Minos himself, Ariadne and Theseus, etc. They all stand up just fine as characters, even while Poseidon set the whole thing in motion.

Because after the wooden cow exits the scene the story has nothing to do with any of Poseidon's interests. You can tell stories that aren't about gods in worlds that have active gods. That's easy. They just have to be stories about things the gods don't happen to care about.

But it's nearly impossible to tell a story about a Poseidon Cult in a world that Poseidon is active in without having Poseidon show up and steal the show. Because either it's a story about stuff Poseidon cares about and is involved in, and then he's so much bigger than everyone else that he overshadows everyone else. Or it's a story about stuff Poseidon doesn't care about or isn't involved in, and then it really isn't a story about a Poseidon Cult.

Compare with, say, the Odyssey, where even though Poseidon doesn't care _that_ much about what's going on, basically the entire story is "Poseidon comes up with some way to screw with Odysseus, Odysseus tries to find a way to respond." And the story moves to its last act when Odysseus finds a way to placate Poseidon. Really, the whole story is "Odysseus wanders around dealing with shit Poseidon throws at him until Poseidon gives up and says he'll stop fucking with the dude if the guy does a fetch quest for him." That's how stories like that have to go.

[hogarth]

The whole point of having a whole mess of gods is so that you can mix all of these options together (e.g. some deities are distant and mysterious, some are demigods who rule their own country, some are just really old trees or bits of rock, some are morally questionable, some are paragons of good/evil, etc.).

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dude, why the fuck Gods need to have a consciousness/ego that interact with humans like that?

There's nothing wrong with that approach at all. But if you do that, they cease to exist as characters. There's literally no point of talking about them any differently than you would do about magical items or spells. Any stories told about them thereafter are meaningful only in the sense that, say, The Biting Cold is a 'character' in To Build A Fire.

@jadagul: That's more of an argument to tie the deity's hands in one or more ways. There's a continuum of will and interaction between 'Big Brother with superpowers' and 'Maintenance Program'. Even in God of War, the deities weren't able to continually override and railroad the plot to have things go exactly like they wanted. Put a huge amount of influence onto it, sure. But I don't think that they should just be like the Spirit of Fire and be aggressively indifferent to what people say or do; otherwise, why waste ink on them? You can tell stories about the Spirit of Fire that you can't with Apollo, but the stories about the Spirit of Fire aren't actually that much different about the stories you could tell about the Order of the Rotten Cask or the Swedish Pirate Party.

To this end, I don't think that the gods need to be omniscient or omnipotent -- or even very powerful at all, with the position being bureaucratic or symbolic -- but they still nonetheless need to be able to have some kind of meaningful influence on their portfolio, have some measure of will, be able to tell what's going on in the world at large, and also be able to be diplomatically interacted with by sapient beings in a meaningful way.

Again, they needn't be omniscient for this. If a deity can just disguise themselves as a traveler and go around in the city and discover that their priests have been embezzling money to go to orphanages, that's fine. Nor do they need to be omnipotent or even just have a Stalinesque level of totalitarian control over their sphere. Priests being subversive and having secret agendas is a staple of the genre. But being a mere figurehead who can't do anything godly about their second-in-command deciding to declare that the Order of Pelor is totes cool with human trafficking from now on -- not even sending a mass vision to a few loyal worshipers to fight against this guy -- makes the whole exercise pointless.

[jadagul]

Lago, that goes back to K's (and hogarth's) point that you can have a bunch of different deity-type things, as long as you don't do what D&D did and insist that spells actually come from gods. Then you can have the Church of the Sun and the Cult of Asmodeus and the Followers of Bahamut and the Disciples of the Prophet all in the same world.

The Church of the Sun worships the Sun. It's the Sun. It's a source of real and magical energy and gives life to the world. Members of the Church of the Sun can get into long and wanky arguments about the right way to venerate the Sun. They can do this because it's the Sun, and it doesn't actually have "desires" in the sense humans understand the word. Some people venerate the Sun by nourishing all forms of life, some people venerate the Sun by purging the world with fire of everything they consider "wrong". Whatever.

The Cult of Asmodeus is trying to bring Asmodeus into the world. Asmodeus is an extremely powerful spirit, more than mortal. But he can't enter the world completely. He sends messages to his followers telling them "give me sacrifices so I can become stronger" or "open this rift so I can enter the world fully" or even "go fuck with these guys who've pissed me off somehow." He's extremely powerful, on a level that can't be confronted directly, but he's also extremely limited in the ways he can confront _you_ directly. But he is a real dude who has actual desires.

Bahamut is a big dragon. He's really big and powerful. Consequently a lot of people respect and worship him, and he's accumulated an organization of followers who will do what he tells them to do (and do what they think he wants them to do when he's not around). But in the end, he's just a dragon. He's level 28 in your 30-level system but high end PCs could actually fight and kill him.

The Prophet is a guy. He started giving speeches one day and people follow him. He has a lot of followers because what he says makes sense. If you wind up in a room with him though you can stick a sword in him and he'll die because he's just another dude, just one whom a lot of people follow.

[Captain_Karzak]

EDIT: Also, looking at the first post, i think we've sort of derailed the topic, haven't we?

Heh. What I was actually expecting was people would suggest their favorite D&D deities (and maybe an SRD link), and a bit of explanation about why that deity was cool.

But I don't mind a discussion about what design principles I should follow when making my own array of deities.

Mostly I just want to populate my setting with Gods that you don't have to be an idiot or a raving lunatic to worship. Good-aligned deities earn their keep pretty easily, IMO. So I've been mostly stressing over neutral and evil deities whose religions are interesting while producing benefit to the societies that tolerate or embrace them.

As for the afterlife, I was planning on taking the Tome of Fiends approach where mortals are rewarded for excellence whatever alignment/religion they adopted in life.

I generally assume that deities are effectively supernaturally bound by their own oaths to not break faith with their high priests and such, but may intrigue against their own priests (via above means) and may also punish random worshippers (and it is the priest's job to intercede to stop such punishment from growing too severe).

In this homebrew, the Gods are distant entities who never manifest in the Prime Material. They communicate via dreams, the various cleric divination spells, and by dispatching outsiders as heralds.

They also can't revoke the power they've already invested their clerics with, but they can deny further gains in spell level if they break faith.

So if a level 8 priest of Kord kills a prostitute in a 'roid rage episode and discovers he actually really likes killing weaker people, Kord doesn't have to deliver any 5th level spells when this piece of shit hits level 9. [dumb example - deities are generally a good judge of character regarding their priesthood, but you get the idea].

This dynamic creates a serious principle-agent problem between gods and their high priests who have already been granted access to top-level spells. The misbehavior of various high priests, especially among evil or chaotic religions, is the cause of many schisms and internal intrigue.

But we don't want to tell stories about the gods. We want to tell stories about the gods' worshipers, and that's actually much harder if the gods are real people because any story the gods get involved in automatically becomes a story about the gods because they're gods.

That's a great point. I've been focused a bit too much having cool gods, when it's much more important to focus on their priesthood.

As an addendum to his post, I'll add this: gimmicky deities like the Libris Mortis woman mentioned in the initial post are cool, but if all of your deities have some weird gimmick then your pantheon sucks. That's my problem with Paizo's Golarion campaign setting; they try so hard to give every deity (and country and NPC, etc.) an unusual twist that there's little room to tell stories that require a more vanilla flavour.

I basically just want a group of "interesting" (gimmicky?) gods, and the players can import whomever the hell they want if they need something more vanilla, which is how I would describe the PHB deities.

Is there a reason this approach might fail?

[Whatever]

Since not everyone follows Frank's pbp game, I thought I'd repost a bit of it here. Because it is awesome.

Does korbahl have a state religion? Mabe we can organize some charity programs or somthing?

I'm going to assume this question is directed to Silas, because he is physically with you and also an accomplished master at comparative religions [Bear Lore == 26]. After all, no man can quote orthodoxy like the heretic.

The Korbahl has a super majority who follow the Acheronian Paradigm. So much so that if you don't, you're seen as either some sort of immoral freak or just treated as if you did but happened to be a member of some sect of Acheronism. So if you happen to be a Nerullite (like Silas), it's generally best to keep that to yourself, though if you pray to Nerull in public most people will just assume it's a Bane aspect they haven't heard of or something.

The Acheronian Paradigm has been rent by two separate events which are both known as "The Great Schism", but if you talk about the Schism within The Korbahl, you are almost certainly talking about the second one. The first Great Schism was between the Trinitarians (those following the three gods/triple god of Maglubiyet-Hruggek-Nomog-Geaya) and the Pervadists (those following the flaming eye of Gruumsh). There was a big fight and a lot of people were killed over whether the Trinitarians were "true" Acheronites or whether they were Pandemoniacs. This ended with the Trinitarians having a solid grip on Grimsol, and the Pervadists being masters in The Korbahl. Still, those wounds are now so old that most of the faithful don't even remember that there is such a conflict.

The more recent "Great Schism" is amongst the Pervadists, where a few hundred years ago there was an Activist reformation movement. They followed prophets and gods who preached interventionism rather than merely all seeing. And so they represented themselves with a Hand rather than with a Flaming Eye.


The sacred image of the all-seeing flaming eye at the Dark Tower of Kruul - one of the great holy sites of the Pervadists.

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[/img]
Symbol of Bane, one of the great Activist heterodoxies.

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Symbol of Hextor, one of the great Activist heterodoxies

The division resulted in several wars across several nations, and some lands settled out to being all Pervadist or all Activist in nature. But The Korbahl did not. Temples to Hand or Eye denominations exist side by side, and most villages of any size will have at least a modest temple to both. Some regions have battle lines drawn clearly, but by the time you get to the coast no one much cares which temple you go to (as long as it's an Acheronian temple, because what else would it be?), and marriages between followers of the Hand and followers of the Eye happen on a regular basis. There's even a mystery cult that tries to heal the Schism with a lot of obfuscation and agnosticism called Vecnaism, where they claim to follow both the Hand and the Eye.

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[/img]
A carving of Vecna's Hand and Eye united.

Regardless of whether you read the Hand or Eye texts, it's a pretty brutal religion. The Apocalypse of Bane is considered to be an important chapter of the scriptures by most (but not all) Handists (only chin stroking theologians still call them Activists), but Gruumsh's Revelation of Might is in all the versions. Might is Right, and if you don't like it you can Fight.

If Urkad is anything to go by, were the Handists to actually take control of things, they would quickly turn on each other and Baneites and Hextorists would brand each other traitors and heretics. Inquisitions would form and there would be much gnashing of teeth. But in The Korbahl, no Handist denomination much cares what version of Hand scripture you read from. May have something to do with being a minority faith in The Korbahl and the state religion in Urkad.

The Case For Charity

If you are looking for scriptural support to be against charitable giving, you do not have to look very hard. There are over a hundred verses about crushing the weak in most versions of the Acheronian holy text, and many of them seem to portray it in an unambiguously positive light. Strength is good, Weakness is bad, and the religion is fairly clear on that point whether the altar has a black fist, a flaming eye, or a triangle of weapons.

It being religion, there is however wiggle room. Weakness is bad, and helping those who are currently weak makes them less weak. Which would be... good? There's a passage in one of the early chapters on Gruumsh's Revelations about eating pork that is traditionally interpreted as being a commonsense piece of advice about limiting gluttony, but which radical Balancers take as evidence that the Strong should give to support the Weak. Basically, there's a parable about a chief who passed out after eating too much and gets messily stabbed to death by a captive concubine, but the moral at the end is that Gruumsh says "Your First plate of pork makes you Strong, but your Fifth plate of pork makes you slow."

The most extreme Balancer interpretation of that is that everyone needs to give up 20% of what they take in with the proceeds being used to give food to the weak and stuff. Apparently there's a Balancer cult compound where they actually do that.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

I've gotta say, I definitely see Lago's point. To expand on his position ......
The game says "piss-off your deity, lose your spells, etc."; but in a game where the deities are absentee or not even real powers, how does that happen?
Further, not only does it open the door for some cognitive dissonance, but it kinda flattens-out the concept space: The white wizardsgood priests of Kord struggle with the black wizardsevil priests of Kord for control of the gray towertemple. Seriously, righting "Pelor" on your character sheet can quickly boil down to being no different that writing "evoker" with some different window dressing.

That being said, if you're running a game that has religious politics as the centerpiece, then I agree that the actual gods need to be forcibly and permanently shoved in to the periphery.

[icyshadowlord]

Lago, that goes back to K's (and hogarth's) point that you can have a bunch of different deity-type things, as long as you don't do what D&D did and insist that spells actually come from gods. Then you can have the Church of the Sun and the Cult of Asmodeus and the Followers of Bahamut and the Disciples of the Prophet all in the same world.

The Church of the Sun worships the Sun. It's the Sun. It's a source of real and magical energy and gives life to the world. Members of the Church of the Sun can get into long and wanky arguments about the right way to venerate the Sun. They can do this because it's the Sun, and it doesn't actually have "desires" in the sense humans understand the word. Some people venerate the Sun by nourishing all forms of life, some people venerate the Sun by purging the world with fire of everything they consider "wrong". Whatever.

The Cult of Asmodeus is trying to bring Asmodeus into the world. Asmodeus is an extremely powerful spirit, more than mortal. But he can't enter the world completely. He sends messages to his followers telling them "give me sacrifices so I can become stronger" or "open this rift so I can enter the world fully" or even "go fuck with these guys who've pissed me off somehow." He's extremely powerful, on a level that can't be confronted directly, but he's also extremely limited in the ways he can confront _you_ directly. But he is a real dude who has actual desires.

Bahamut is a big dragon. He's really big and powerful. Consequently a lot of people respect and worship him, and he's accumulated an organization of followers who will do what he tells them to do (and do what they think he wants them to do when he's not around). But in the end, he's just a dragon. He's level 28 in your 30-level system but high end PCs could actually fight and kill him.

The Prophet is a guy. He started giving speeches one day and people follow him. He has a lot of followers because what he says makes sense. If you wind up in a room with him though you can stick a sword in him and he'll die because he's just another dude, just one whom a lot of people follow.

But can Bahamut and the Prophet grant spells and domains to Clerics , or is that something only the Sun and Asmodeus can pull off?

[jadagul]

Lago, that goes back to K's (and hogarth's) point that you can have a bunch of different deity-type things, as long as you don't do what D&D did and insist that spells actually come from gods. Then you can have the Church of the Sun and the Cult of Asmodeus and the Followers of Bahamut and the Disciples of the Prophet all in the same world.

The Church of the Sun worships the Sun. It's the Sun. It's a source of real and magical energy and gives life to the world. Members of the Church of the Sun can get into long and wanky arguments about the right way to venerate the Sun. They can do this because it's the Sun, and it doesn't actually have "desires" in the sense humans understand the word. Some people venerate the Sun by nourishing all forms of life, some people venerate the Sun by purging the world with fire of everything they consider "wrong". Whatever.

The Cult of Asmodeus is trying to bring Asmodeus into the world. Asmodeus is an extremely powerful spirit, more than mortal. But he can't enter the world completely. He sends messages to his followers telling them "give me sacrifices so I can become stronger" or "open this rift so I can enter the world fully" or even "go fuck with these guys who've pissed me off somehow." He's extremely powerful, on a level that can't be confronted directly, but he's also extremely limited in the ways he can confront _you_ directly. But he is a real dude who has actual desires.

Bahamut is a big dragon. He's really big and powerful. Consequently a lot of people respect and worship him, and he's accumulated an organization of followers who will do what he tells them to do (and do what they think he wants them to do when he's not around). But in the end, he's just a dragon. He's level 28 in your 30-level system but high end PCs could actually fight and kill him.

The Prophet is a guy. He started giving speeches one day and people follow him. He has a lot of followers because what he says makes sense. If you wind up in a room with him though you can stick a sword in him and he'll die because he's just another dude, just one whom a lot of people follow.

But can Bahamut and the Prophet grant spells and domains to Clerics , or is that something only the Sun and Asmodeus can pull off?

Look back at my post. This was all premised on the idea that we stop having gods grant spells at all, because that leads to all sorts of stupid--firstly, that we can't have a religion of the Prophet, and in fact can't really have a religion without a quasi-activist deity. And second, you can't have the PCs get powerful enough to challenge gods, because that does really weird things to your cleric's mechanical interactions.

Really, you should just go that Divine magic is a type of magic, and some people can use it. You can even say that its use comes from a type of focus and devotion usually associated with religion, but that it doesn't need to be tied to an actual god--which even D&D does, since you can have clerics of ideals or whatever. But stop having gods grant spells and then everything else becomes more sensible.

[Almaz]

I generally assume that deities are effectively supernaturally bound by their own oaths to not break faith with their high priests and such, but may intrigue against their own priests (via above means) and may also punish random worshippers (and it is the priest's job to intercede to stop such punishment from growing too severe).

In this homebrew, the Gods are distant entities who never manifest in the Prime Material. They communicate via dreams, the various cleric divination spells, and by dispatching outsiders as heralds.

They also can't revoke the power they've already invested their clerics with, but they can deny further gains in spell level if they break faith.

So if a level 8 priest of Kord kills a prostitute in a 'roid rage episode and discovers he actually really likes killing weaker people, Kord doesn't have to deliver any 5th level spells when this piece of shit hits level 9. [dumb example - deities are generally a good judge of character regarding their priesthood, but you get the idea].

This dynamic creates a serious principle-agent problem between gods and their high priests who have already been granted access to top-level spells. The misbehavior of various high priests, especially among evil or chaotic religions, is the cause of many schisms and internal intrigue.

Not quite. I actually do assume gods can show up and do shit, but only under certain extremely restrictive binding clauses, which usually sort out to be relatively sensible for the deity, but which are inherently limiting. The Old Friend can only show up at the moment of death to guide someone to their final end, and can't run around killing people when he does so. He Whose Name is Lord can only manifest as a cloud within a certain range of his cult icon, which is transportable by a team of consecrated bearers, if very slowly. On the upside, he can still throw thunderbolts now and then, even if he can't personally crush the skulls of unbelievers (because he's still a fucking cloud). The Huntress walks the world on nights of the full moon to track her quarry. Those who join the hunt become her hounds. Those who oppose her, or worse, spy on her bathing in the aftermath, are viciously slain. All else are unmolested, and save for the baying of her hounds and call of her hunting horn, it is as if she wasn't there. The Giver has the night of the winter solstice to give presents to the youth of the world, so long as they adhered to his arcane rules of conduct and the gift does not exceed 1% of their parent's annual income. If you beat any of these deities up, they retreat to their plane like any outsider who just got punched in the cvnt, sob a little, and probably can't come back for a good while, depending on how they were killed, which may or not matter, and they may or not have to get an obscure "resurrection" rite performed to return them.

None of these are suitable conditions under which to go adventuring, but make brushes with the divine possible, so you can have actual myths and legends happen. For various reasons, they don't choose to spend their limited time on the world weighing in on various theological debates, with a few exceptions of those who have lasting (if usually rooted) manifestations that happen to value theological debate. What's more important to most deities is action and consequence, not intent, so they usually don't bother to clarify what "right thinking" is. This allows for factions without making it seem ridiculous.

In short, the defining characteristic of the Divine is not power, but restriction. Gods are every bit as "bound" by the world of Matter as humans and such are, just in a different way.

[icyshadowlord]

Look back at my post. This was all premised on the idea that we stop having gods grant spells at all, because that leads to all sorts of stupid--firstly, that we can't have a religion of the Prophet, and in fact can't really have a religion without a quasi-activist deity. And second, you can't have the PCs get powerful enough to challenge gods, because that does really weird things to your cleric's mechanical interactions.

Really, you should just go that Divine magic is a type of magic, and some people can use it. You can even say that its use comes from a type of focus and devotion usually associated with religion, but that it doesn't need to be tied to an actual god--which even D&D does, since you can have clerics of ideals or whatever. But stop having gods grant spells and then everything else becomes more sensible.

So where would Divine Magic, domains and such come from in a setting like that? If the gods don't grant spells to the party's Cleric, what will? What is the Cleric class in such a setting?

Edit: Had to fix this post a bit. I find the suggestion equal amounts intriguing and confusing, so I figured I might as well start asking questions about it.