[Phil Swift Voice] "THAT'S A LOTTA GODS"--The planes sure seem crowded...

[Prak]

So, I'm working on setting up a campaign set in Greyhawk, and currently, I'm specifically working on doing write ups on the gods on the wiki I'm building so my players don't have to crawl through a hundred books of various editions, random webpages that don't necessarily distinguish between canon and what the specific writer is making up, and asking me about what I'm specifically doing. (and because I like this stuff)

And as I do, well, the Baklunish pantheon has 20 gods. The Suel pantheon, even if you cut out the imported deities that some people say are part of it, has 24 gods. Just looking at the Wikipedia page for Greyhawk deities, the Oeridians have, like, 23, and any functional player-race pantheon is expected to have at least 9 gods, which, if we take that as a minimum and multiply it by 10 to cover the other human cultures and the PHB non-human races, that's another 90 gods. And I'm better that, at least, most of the remaining human cultures have closer to 20 gods each than 9.

Which, I mean, fine. I'm not looking forward to sorting out all of these gods and having to exercise some "not a white christian man in the midwest in the 80s" judgement on the write ups, but, 134 gods, not including gods for, like, lizardfolk, I don't really have a problem with that inherently.

But... There are 17 Greyhawk gods who reside on Celestia, seven on Mechanus, 14 on Ba'ator (including archdevils), and 19 on the Outlands.

Like, I know the planes are infinite, but that still seems pretty fucking crowded.

So, really, my question is- in your games, whether homebrew or published settings, how do you deal with the gods, and more specifically, gods of different cultures? Do all humans in your game worship the same pantheon but with culturally specific names? Is there only one god of mining who lives on (whatever plane) and is called one thing by humans and another by dwarves? Do you say "fuck it, here's a table for the cleric mechanics that rely on having a god, but beyond that, no one cares"?

[angelfromanotherpin]

In the last few games of mine that dealt with gods at all:
1) Norse pantheon only, final destination.
2) Six cultures collide in this region, the most significant gods of each have mashed into an informal pantheon and the rest forgotten.
3) Once there were many gods of different degrees of power, but they all died some time ago.

[erik]

How closely do you need to interact with the gods of different regions? In Greyhawk it's pretty much like you go to a new region and can either read up on the local customs or just rely on knowledge checks. Unless you are in a region where the locals worship a certain deity then it doesn't really impact play or setting. It's just what the people in another region are doing. The gods may dwell on various infinite planes, but their influence on Oerth is mostly limited to their followers who tend to be clustered in various regions. So it's just the regional flavor.

So one of the upsides for Greyhawk is that they have their regions sorted out with more depth. So if you want to you can use their source material to have dozens of different regions with their own power structures and quirks. Then going to one region or another actually has a different feel. You don't have to interact with them, but if you want to, there they are.

[Chamomile]

If you have more than thirteen gods in your pantheon, you have more than your players can keep track of or will care about.

A very easy way to trim down divine redundancy is to stop having gods of specific races. The orcs might have a specific patron deity, but that deity does not need to be exclusively an orc god, nor does every god worshiped by the orcs need to be the "orc god of [thing]." If an orc is a blacksmith, they can jolly well make sacrifices to both the blacksmith god (who's probably patron of the dwarves) and the orc god (who's probably also a god of war) because that's how polytheism works.

[Harshax]

Squirreled away somewhere on a harddrive I salvaged from a PC are writeups for all the Greyhawk Gods for RuneQuest. It's a pretty good document and I wish I could tell you to DM me so I could send it to you.

The way I've treated gods since any edition of D&D as far back as I can remember is that people generally worship pantheons, not individual gods, and go to every party and festival related to their pantheon regardless of how pious they are. The Suel, if I remember correctly, have one god for each wind and or season. I demoted them to servant/orders of a greater god and choosing one the these lesser deities to adhere to changed your spell list.

I guess this is a good enough place to sedgeway into a different take on GreyHawk gods in general. The edition of D&D that birthed the Greyhawk pantheon created Greater, Intermidiate, Lesser an Hero deity statuses. These statuses had direct impact on what level spells you could expect from your religion - having an 19 wisdom ultra pious cleric worshiping a less deity meant you only received 3rd level spells. There were alsp demi-gods and quasi-gods too, which amount to just very high level PCs that some staff player refused to retire.

When I write up pantheons for whatever rule set I'm using, I only focus on the greater gods. These are the major color palettes for your religions. All the other gods fit somewhere as major servants, heralds or hero-gods somewhere under the major ones.

Organized this way, Greyhawk only as 11 you really need to focus one. Then just stop. If a greyhawk fanboy is at your table and they really want to worship Babba Yaha, encourage them to pick a greater god, describe how that lesser god fits a role there and give them a different spell or two change the flavor from a stand cleric.

[JonSetanta]

In a setting I developed 20 years ago named Aiou, some friends and I decided divine interference was too rampant and creationistic, so I created a long-dead culture of Arcane scientists that left behind monoliths that cancel out all divine power within about 100 miles of each stone.
Every humanoid species/race dwelling in this world was a descended from an immigrant population from the many other D&D planets, before the dead "Founders" technology became feared and mostly destroyed and forgotten.
The remaining stones are sometimes collected by city builders and used to keep Arcane and Psionic influence predominant near populated areas, but in the wilds it's mostly animalistic deities or abstractions since the deities themselves are beyond physical definition.

There's a god of war, for instance, named Ruenas that has maybe dozens of appearances, all interpreted by different species and cultures, but it's literally the same figure.

Healing and "cleric magic" is more like Final Fantasy White Mages, where it's just another school of application without channeling divinity. Beings found ways to heal and raise the dead in the absence of godly power.

Undead lich lords that achieved semi-divinity through magical power, amassing "nations" of vampires, ghouls, zombies, and Necropolitans in the Southlands push further north each passing year to the point where I would say "so-and-so region is now enshrouded in mist, the sun darkened, the plants withered, and all residents either fled or were converted" and a player would say "Is there anything we can do about it?"
My reply the first time it happened was "You could push back against the threat but it's billions of undead beyond that zone"
One player chose to join a vampire cult, became a vampire, and used his influence and newfound powers to rebel against this invading hegemony, but his keep was destroyed by a single lich at one point when he wiped out an entire city of other undead, when the lich teleported in, Meteor Stormed and Earthquaked the structure to rubble, and the player's elf vampire cleric/assassin returned from his "crusade" to.... repercussions.

[Dogbert]

Being my gaming preferences of the luciferan persuasion, deities rarely have an important role in my games. They're more often than not world-building details that are made up on a need basis.

Currently, I'm running a game in what is less and less Dragonstar by the session but I'm increasingly more pleased with the differences. The latest addendum was that the first thing House Mazorgrim did upon their ascension to the throne was restricting worship to starve the gods (it started subtle, and populist-sounding enough to gain traction, something about "equal worhipping hours to all deities"). Enough worship for holy men and their convenient miracles to still exist, not nearly enough for them to even try to personally butt in their business.

Also, while it hasn't come up yet in the game, if someone asks, I'll just flat out say my gaming world is not creationist, so deities are not pivotal to the world.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

So, really, my question is- in your games, whether homebrew or published settings, how do you deal with the gods, and more specifically, gods of different cultures? Do all humans in your game worship the same pantheon but with culturally specific names? Is there only one god of mining who lives on (whatever plane) and is called one thing by humans and another by dwarves? Do you say "fuck it, here's a table for the cleric mechanics that rely on having a god, but beyond that, no one cares"?

I just have one 'god', who is a mash-up of the Yellow Emperor, the Lord Buddha, and Vishnu. He's just a dude who attained enlightenment, founded the ancient super-empire that supplies most of the ruins in my game, and fucked off just as the whole 'civilization' thing was really starting to come together. I've found that it's much more fun to just have a bunch of different interpretations of the same basic teachings than to have a bunch of different gods with one or two stereotyped sects. As you might be able to tell from my inspirations, he isn't really known for direct intervention.
That being said, some people actually do worship various legendary Pokemon, although they have no idea they're really Pokemon. They're just regarded as 'destroyer gods' who come about at the end of time to collect all the extra soul energy going around and gather it up in one spot so the universe can be remade, but slightly differently from the last time. Naturally, these filthy heathens are heavily persecuted for their disgusting anti-human beliefs. In turn, that validates them further, which leads to eco-spiritual warfare.
Good times! The real fun part is that these actually aren't opposing forces at all, and the god-emperor is fully aware that the world is going to be annihilated every 3000-4000 years and exactly who is going to do it, and he's totally fine with it since it's going to (eventually) lead to someone else discovering transcendental enlightenment just like he did.

[Thaluikhain]

If you have more than thirteen gods in your pantheon, you have more than your players can keep track of or will care about.

A very easy way to trim down divine redundancy is to stop having gods of specific races. The orcs might have a specific patron deity, but that deity does not need to be exclusively an orc god, nor does every god worshiped by the orcs need to be the "orc god of [thing]." If an orc is a blacksmith, they can jolly well make sacrifices to both the blacksmith god (who's probably patron of the dwarves) and the orc god (who's probably also a god of war) because that's how polytheism works.

Seconding this. Though maybe have some local or ancestral gods specific to certain places or people, but keep them minor.

[Prak]

Well, I tend to get obsessed about detail, and I don't yet know what my players are doing for characters, save one who was talking about playing a gish sort of character. So when I look at creating this document my players can use as their primary source for the setting, I think about "well, if someone plays a cleric, they'll need a god." And maybe some of this is just how I make characters who care about gods, where I'll pour over everything I can find to find a god, no matter how obscure, that fits who that character is. But, I shot my players a message, and beside the gish (who so far as I know will be arcane, and so will only care about gods as an after thought, and knowing this player, if his character is particularly interested in a god, it'll probably Pelor, Heironeous, Bahamut or maybe Moradin), I know my other friend who is playing never worries about the gods beyond enjoying reading about them as a player. And checking the discord just now, I see the other player was thinking about a sorcerer.

So I put several hours into sorting out the Baklunish pantheon and writing up short blurbs on the ones that seemed vaguely interesting and making sure their culture has coverage of the core domains and the alignments for nothing. Although I sort of knew that when I did it, since I don't expect any of my players to play a Baklunish character. I started with them because I was going alphabetically. I'm my own worst enemy.

But, now I know that largely the gods won't matter to the PCs, and I don't really need to worry about a big, easy to reference, reasonably comprehensive thing about the gods, and can focus on gods that interest me or I specifically know I want to do something not-cannon with, like Beltar, who... when I looked at a short blurb about her on a greyhawk wiki, realized "oh, these Boomer cishet white men that wrote her have her all wrong." So I did a few paragraphs about her, reframing her from a malevolent goddess of caves into a "evil because she cares about herself and her interests first" patron of the oppressed. Then I did a few paragraphs about Joramy, who I was somewhat familiar with from when I needed a god of fire for a paladin I was playing that wasn't evil (why the fuck are all the D&D gods of fire evil, dwarven or both? Nevermind, I know why), creating my version of her who was more about righteous fury than being an angry unpleasant woman who happened to control fire, and finished up writing up Wee Jas, because I think she's inherently interesting, but wanted to change a few things from the consensus canon of her as just a vain, superficial woman who happens to have a vague death theme and "oh yeah, she's a goddess of magic."

Which was actually pretty useful to me, even if my players don't make devout characters, because it got me thinking about an overall plot for a campaign that was originally just going to be episodic.

But also talking to my players about just how many fucking gods Greyhawk has, I started thinking about... not necessarily syncretism or "many versions of one god" type stuff, but the idea that maybe there are universal constants, and then the way that different cultures view them gave rise to deities that are aspects of those constants. So, like there's The Sun, and maybe it's a sapient spirit, maybe it's just a powerful magical force that doesn't really have enough sapience to be a person, but the Baklunish saw this powerful spiritual force and called it Al'Hatha, and eventually through their belief Al'Hatha became an actual person who is basically The Way the Baklunish see the Sun, and the Flan called it Pelor, and eventually through their belief Pelor became an actual person who represents how the Flan see the Sun, and so on. I don't know whether I want to really go with that, but it's an interesting idea to me, that has the benefit of sort of explaining how cause clerics work, but I think if I go that direction, especially if these universal constants either eschew worship because it creates pieces that aren't really them, or aren't sapient at all and so can't care about worship one way or the other, I'd want a divine caster that's more based on being a champion of a specific, but nebulous, idea, rather than being devoted to a god.

If you have more than thirteen gods in your pantheon, you have more than your players can keep track of or will care about.

A very easy way to trim down divine redundancy is to stop having gods of specific races. The orcs might have a specific patron deity, but that deity does not need to be exclusively an orc god, nor does every god worshiped by the orcs need to be the "orc god of [thing]." If an orc is a blacksmith, they can jolly well make sacrifices to both the blacksmith god (who's probably patron of the dwarves) and the orc god (who's probably also a god of war) because that's how polytheism works.

Seconding this. Though maybe have some local or ancestral gods specific to certain places or people, but keep them minor.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I like having a lot of gods, but the way D&D works, Greyhawk's 100+ gods makes things weird. It's all well and good for Earth to have hundreds of pantheons of multiple gods each, because they're not all kicking around in the same realms. Even if a Norseman and an Egyptian get together and agree that each others' gods probably exist, Odin has no business in Osiris' hall of the dead, and Osiris isn't kicking around Asgard. Even if you tore out the Great Wheel, and replaced the planes with pantheon specific realms, so the Suel Pantheon all lives on one plane, maybe with a layer or two, and the Baklunish Pantheon all lives on their own separate plane that is separate, that at least makes more sense than saying "there are 20 LG gods from different pantheons and they all live on Celestia like a divine fucking HOA, and there are also seven goddamned celestial lords who say they run the place, but if you look at the actual stat blocks none of them are standing up to Heironeous if he decides he wants to put a pool where their palace is.

[Emerald]

My current homebrew world has two main pantheons. The larger pantheon of 12 gods is worshiped as the same set of beings and in the same way by pretty much everybody pretty much everywhere, but various local sects differ on the theological details (like how some MCU Thor fans prefer the earlier more dramatic version and some prefer the later more comedic version, but they all agree he's the same guy and know he looks like Chris Hemsworth and such).

The smaller pantheon of 7 gods only has titles, not names, and those gods are worshiped slightly differently in every town and city across the land, with any depictions of or myths about them deriving almost entirely from the creator's own imagination because there are no "official" depictions, no mortal-like familial relationships between the gods, and so on.

The former gives a very "fixed D&D gods" feel, the latter gives more of a "syncretic real-world polytheism" feel, so it kind of lets me use one or the other pantheon based on what I need plot-wise and players can pick which kind of religion they prefer to roleplay.

When I write up pantheons for whatever rule set I'm using, I only focus on the greater gods. These are the major color palettes for your religions. All the other gods fit somewhere as major servants, heralds or hero-gods somewhere under the major ones.

Organized this way, Greyhawk only as 11 you really need to focus one. Then just stop. If a greyhawk fanboy is at your table and they really want to worship Babba Yaha, encourage them to pick a greater god, describe how that lesser god fits a role there and give them a different spell or two change the flavor from a stand cleric.

This is essentially what I was going to suggest. If you look at the Greek pantheon, they have upwards of 200 deities before you even start getting into local variations on individual gods, but if you were writing up an Ancient Greece-inspired setting you'd only want to bother fleshing out the Olympians because those are the 12 (or 13 or 14) gods everyone knows and cares about, and if a player really cares about a more obscure god you can figure out a way to slot that in later.

I don't know whether I want to really go with that, but it's an interesting idea to me, that has the benefit of sort of explaining how cause clerics work, but I think if I go that direction, especially if these universal constants either eschew worship because it creates pieces that aren't really them, or aren't sapient at all and so can't care about worship one way or the other, I'd want a divine caster that's more based on being a champion of a specific, but nebulous, idea, rather than being devoted to a god.

In a previous campaign, the way I handled "cause" clerics was by creating a set of 5 actual "gods" who were full-on deities that had been around from time immemorial and were broadly worshiped, and then declared that there were innumerable "saints" around (one for every possible pair of cleric domains, specifically) who were ascended mortals with much more localized bases of worship, often just a single town or city, and were more figures of guidance and inspiration than actual sources of divine power who wanted or demanded worship.

So a cleric with the Sun and Healing domain might worship Totally-Not-Pelor, the god of Sun, Light, Fire, Life, Healing, Goodness, and half a dozen other things, drawing his power from Totally-Not-Pelor and be part of a Universal Church of Pelor known throughout the continent, or he might worship Elishar, a local god of Sun and Healing with a few thousand worshipers who doesn't so much grant divine power directly as teach his church the kinds of koans and mantras one might use to draw upon the abstract power source he calls the "Light of Life" that he took advantage of to ascend to godhood eight hundred years ago and so knows more about than anyone else.

As with the two different kinds of pantheons above, having two kinds of gods with their own corresponding kinds of religions gave us a lot of flexibility in the kinds of plot points I could use and the kinds of clerics people could play.

Even if a Norseman and an Egyptian get together and agree that each others' gods probably exist, Odin has no business in Osiris' hall of the dead, and Osiris isn't kicking around Asgard. Even if you tore out the Great Wheel, and replaced the planes with pantheon specific realms, so the Suel Pantheon all lives on one plane, maybe with a layer or two, and the Baklunish Pantheon all lives on their own separate plane that is separate, that at least makes more sense than saying "there are 20 LG gods from different pantheons and they all live on Celestia like a divine fucking HOA, and there are also seven goddamned celestial lords who say they run the place, but if you look at the actual stat blocks none of them are standing up to Heironeous if he decides he wants to put a pool where their palace is.

I mean, Odin might not visit Osiris's halls of the dead, but Hel might, to swap tips on mummification to pass on to their followers, and Sól and Ra might gather at night while they're not on the clock to commiserate how much it sucks getting chased across the sky by huge monsters every day. Just because different pantheons don't share the same realms and theology and such doesn't mean they can't live on the same planes and have some divine politicking going on.

Regarding the Celestia situation specifically, firstly, it's a really really fucking huge mountain, sufficiently so that all 20 LG gods could be on the same layer (much less the same plane) and still have their divine realms nowhere near each other. Secondly, the 3e planar lord stat blocks make them fairly anemic compared to their Planescape incarnations, where the Hebdomad (and the Court of Stars, Archdevils, Demon Princes, and so forth) were assumed to be roughly on the same scale as gods but with the two states of being having different advantages and disadvantages, so one should generally assume that the Hebdomad have a home turf advantage against Heironeous when it comes to pool installation but that they're not nearly as good at exerting influence beyond their own layers of Celestia.

Which isn't to say that you shouldn't go with pantheon-specific planes, or clusters of planes (personally, when using the Norse pantheon I like to give them nine small planes based on the Nine Worlds, with Yggdrasil serving as a pseudo-Transitive Plane between them kind of like it connects the Chaotic planes in the Great Wheel), just that it's not all that hard to make them make sense with the default cosmology if you don't want to put in the work to whip up your own.

[Prak]

Well, I didn't mean to say that "Odin never goes to see Osiris." Just that they're not divine roomies. Or even next door neighbors. I like the kind of ...mythological fanfic that has things like Hades, Hel and Anubis swapping stories and sharing uzo, mead and beer. Or, hell, Odin and Osiris getting together to bitch about being divine fathers while laughing at that fuck up Zeus. Mostly it's just the way Greyhawk says that all the gods across the pantheons share the same real estate that just feels... nebulously weird to me. And probably a lot of that has to do with the fact that the guys who wrote the early D&D stuff were not mythologers, or even really writers in much of a literary sense, so they, much like when they wrote "Arabia, but in Fantasy Land!" or "Africa! But in Fantasy Land!" kind of didn't know what they were doing. Although even a bunch of sheltered midwest christian guys before the age of Wikipedia probably had some rough familiarity with classical myth, so they had a general sense of that sort of thing that they didn't about Pre-Islamic Arab religion, or African cultures. And then also there's probably an element of post-2nd D&D seemingly feeling kind of embarrassed about Planescape where a lot of the cosmology got more sketched out, even as they import things from it when they need to fill holes or make page count.

[Thaluikhain]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I like having a lot of gods, but the way D&D works, Greyhawk's 100+ gods makes things weird. It's all well and good for Earth to have hundreds of pantheons of multiple gods each, because they're not all kicking around in the same realms. Even if a Norseman and an Egyptian get together and agree that each others' gods probably exist, Odin has no business in Osiris' hall of the dead, and Osiris isn't kicking around Asgard.

IIRC, Herodotus believed that Ahura Mazda was the Persian version of Zeus. Exactly what that meant I'm unsure of, whether he meant they had similar beliefs, or whether they had the same god who wore different hats when traveling. Even amongst the Greeks themselves, you had different versions of the same Gods, in that Zeus is the benign father/chief type and also a total bastard in different aspects.

There's also precedent for neighbouring regions to have their neighbours good gods as their demons and vice versa.

[NigelWalmsley]

Though maybe have some local or ancestral gods specific to certain places or people, but keep them minor.

Or just local interpretations/aspects of the various gods. Ares and Mars are the same guy, but the ways Greeks and Romans worshipped him aren't identical.

[hogarth]

As a D&D player whose favourite character has always been the cleric, I like having a lot of deities to choose from but I care zero about having separate pantheons for separate races.

At a bare minimum, you sort of need a separate god for each class (e.g. a god of justice for paladins, a god of thieves for rogues, a god of magic for wizards, etc.) plus some boring gods for peasants to worship (e.g. a god of farming, a god of blacksmithing) plus some evil gods for bad guy cultists to worship. I'm much more interested in having a bunch of more narrowly-focused gods to choose from rather than having a small number of generic gods to worship.

Having said that, each god can have one or two sentences describing them and I can fill in the blanks myself.

[erik]

I dunno. Gods in Oerth and much of D&D I think of as just the next step above kings. They're super powerful adventurers who have finagled a way to get power from and redistribute power to their followers. Whether their zone of influence is global or regional is up to your setting.

[Foxwarrior]

Gods are a bit like character classes in our games. They don't really have any power unless someone decides to bring them in. Sure there are a lot of deities who know what will happen all over the infinite multiverse weeks in advance, but they're just sitting around waiting for some guy to ask them questions (we usually ask Vecna, but occasionally someone else), or send them some reinforcements. In an infinite universe, that could be taking up literally all their time

[Aryxbez]

Golarion also seems to have a gallon of gods. I feel like going the route of (going back to) Gods Being Boss Fights, or Higher CR Monsters will help to cut them down. I sincerely doubt anyone things Hruggek is High Level, or Blibdoolpoolp, Yeenghou, Achaekek, etc. Seems like really could just have some cool Cthulhu-adventure w/Blidoolpoolp as a CR 6-10 monster, have her die, driving all the Kuo-Toa insane, murdering each other for a time until they need to matter again.


the Other solution seems to be that the same god is mantling different titles. So if you end up with like 17 different gods of Magic, then it's because it's all the same kat.

[JonSetanta]

the Other solution seems to be that the same god is mantling different titles. So if you end up with like 17 different gods of Magic, then it's because it's all the same kat.

Setting builders could have a "pantheon" of Endless-like Gaiman figures that taught, sired, or fuel the basic divine archetypes.
PCs and whoever else could worship these amorphous concepts instead of pantheons or single deities, but spells like Augury would fail because their consciousnesses are so beyond comprehension it would be like a human giving a TED Talk to an insect.

[Prak]

the Other solution seems to be that the same god is mantling different titles. So if you end up with like 17 different gods of Magic, then it's because it's all the same kat.

Setting builders could have a "pantheon" of Endless-like Gaiman figures that taught, sired, or fuel the basic divine archetypes.
PCs and whoever else could worship these amorphous concepts instead of pantheons or single deities, but spells like Augury would fail because their consciousnesses are so beyond comprehension it would be like a human giving a TED Talk to an insect.

When I started thinking about the idea of ...non-god overbeings that fuel cause clerics, one of my thoughts was something like the Endless. I'm still not sure whether I want to do that for the Greyhawk game I'm working on, but I am shameless Gaiman-trash and do like the concept overall. Something I'm continuing to think on.

[JonSetanta]

Well for the longest time I could not find any numerical rules for what the whole "divine rank" does, but thanks to wikis, there's this:

https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_rank

[deaddmwalking]

Any time I see a thread like this I remain convinced that distant/non-provable Gods work best for every setting.

Of course each culture would have gods that they call on to smite their enemies. Even when both sides worship the same god in the same way, they both claim that god is on their side.

When Gods are real, you have to explain why the Elf god is very powerful and the Kua-Toa god is very weak and why the gods aren't solving real problems. When gods empower their servitors and those servitors claim their power comes from a divine being (a la Joan of Arc) that nobody else can confirm the existence of, you can actually have a variety of pantheons that make sense in a cultural way.

Even in a D&D setting, deities are indistinguishable from other powerful outsiders. Just demoting them from 'god' to 'Titan' and let them claim a mantle and enslave a world (a la Star Gate SG-1) and you get everything you need form deities and nothing you don't.

[Dogbert]

Any time I see a thread like this I remain convinced that distant/non-provable Gods work best for every setting.

Alas, dnd is meant to cater to Gygaxian players, and thus provides gods as the ultimate RPeen NPCs.

In dnd-land there is no "Problem of Evil" because everyone knows their world was created by onmipotent, omniscient entities and they're all dicks, because they exist to be the DM's penis extensions and the Gygaxian DM is malevolent by definition.

[Prak]

Any time I see a thread like this I remain convinced that distant/non-provable Gods work best for every setting.

Alas, dnd is meant to cater to Gygaxian players, and thus provides gods as the ultimate RPeen NPCs.

In dnd-land there is no "Problem of Evil" because everyone knows their world was created by onmipotent, omniscient entities and they're all dicks, because they exist to be the DM's penis extensions and the Gygaxian DM is malevolent by definition.

This is why I like the vasharans (also their bombass body mods and public fucking festivals). I only differ in believing that it is possible for entities with divine ranks to learn to be better.

[Emerald]

When Gods are real, you have to explain why the Elf god is very powerful and the Kua-Toa god is very weak and why the gods aren't solving real problems.

I mean, you theoretically also have to explain why 1st-level adventurers are wandering around slaying goblins to protect their town from invading hordes when a 10th-level cleric could nip the whole thing in the bud in an afternoon, and why the dwarf clan hasn't wiped out all the kobold tribes in the area when the dwarf clan chief is a 15th-level fighter and all the kobold chieftains are 3rd level at best, but no one really worries or complains about that. It's only when more powerful NPCs do interject themselves into things uninvited that people tend to take issue.

Most settings have either an overdeity (or multiple) preventing local and/or interloping gods from meddling too much (e.g. Dragonlance, Ravenloft) or a divine noninterference pact to do something similar (e.g. Planescape, Greyhawk) or both (e.g. Forgotten Realms), and that explains most godly aloofness most of the time while leaving space for the various "a cult is trying to summon an avatar of X to the Prime" or "X is trying to do Y without the other gods stopping them" plots that people like to use.

Even in a D&D setting, deities are indistinguishable from other powerful outsiders. Just demoting them from 'god' to 'Titan' and let them claim a mantle and enslave a world (a la Star Gate SG-1) and you get everything you need form deities and nothing you don't.

They're hardly "indistinguishable," what with the spell-granting and the church-having and so forth. It's entirely possible to keep all of the mechanical and flavor aspects of actual gods in the setting while reducing their power level to the original "can be killed by a particularly motivated 15th-level fighter" baseline to avoid DM dickery, there's no need to replace them all with Goa'uld-style imposters.

I've never really understood the "actual demons and dragons and stuff in my game are fine, but let's make the gods not be actual gods" thing; it reminds me too much of the "Nobody but Yahweh is a real god!" Christian rhetoric that I was surrounded by growing up and that convinced my folks that D&D was Satanic for depicting "false gods." Let settings have actual gods, and then go stab them in the face because lots of gods deserve face-stabbing, I don't see what the problem is.