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 Post subject: Deities
PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:34 pm 
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Prismatic Pangolin

Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:50 pm
Posts: 2283
Note that this listing is still under construction. It is not a complete listing, nor is it 100% accurate.

Nemiriya. The Bright-Eyed Sleeper. Goddess of dreams and nightmares. Patron deity of black dragons. Her holy symbol is a sleeping black dragon.
Allies: none.
Enemies: none.
Afterlife: plunged into the deepest reaches of the plane of dreams.
Notes: There are no clerics of Nemirya; mere devotion and study is insufficient to access her power. See also Path of Dreams and Path of Nightmares. A popular deity among the masses, since followers of her will (very rarely) manifest notable amounts of power literally overnight.

The Golden Circle
Afterlife: Elysium. This plane has many of the features and terrains of the material plane. The souls of the dead can wait in hopes of ressurrection for as long or as short a time as they choose.
Artemis. The Huntress. Keeper of the Hounds. Artemis is one of the few deities known to have survived the end of the third age.
Her symbol is a claw.
Allies: The Golden Circle, Chronos, Feruna, Eryx, Bastet, Bahamut.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, Durandal, the vile gods.
Avoden. The Storm Lord. Stonebreaker. God of the wrath of nature - storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, etcetera.
His symbol is a lightning bolt.
Allies: The Golden Circle, Eryx, Marris, Bahamut.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, the vile gods.
Lyssis. The Lady. Goddess of luck (or cleverness and magic made to look like luck...)
Her symbol is a hand closed around some unknown object - or perhaps nothing at all.
Allies: The Golden Circle, Selene, Bastet, Ducander.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, the vile gods.
Hydram. The Navigator. The Trader. God of sailors, commerce, and contracts of all sorts.
His symbol is a coin stamped with his holy symbol - to the uninitiated, a set of concentric circles.
Allies: The Golden Circle, Feruna, Marris, Moradin, Ducander, Tempess.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, Durandal, the vile gods.

The High Court
Feruna. The Harvest Maiden. The Earth Mother. The Lady of the Trees. Goddess of plant life and fertility.
Her symbol is a sheaf of grain. Depictions of her usually show her as with child, or holding a baby.
Allies: The High Court, Ducander.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, Durandal, the vile gods.
Marris. The Sun. The Paladin. The Shining One. I think you can figure out what he's a god of...
His symbol is a sunburst.
Allies: The High Court, Avoden, Bahamut, Moradin.
Enemies: demons, undead, The Shadowflame Cult, Durandal, the vile gods.
Notes: Marris is very much bound by a strict ideal of law and good. He is often seen (outside his own followers) as overly authoritarian, and as following an extreme ideal that (much like too much sun spells drought and death) is not actually practical in the real world. Fortunately, his wife Feruna does much to curb Marris' extremes.
Eryx: death (wizard, fatespinner, archmage, spellsword - scythe)
Selene: love, stealth, the moon (ninja shifter - clasped hands)

The Shadowflame Cult (This is an outsider's term for them. They regard themselves as the Harbingers of Light; the fire that holds darkness at bay - while the followers of other deities would call them a smoldering torch that merely throws more shadows into the darkness.)
Balor: war (weapon master / tribal protector - khopesh)
Korai: beauty (sorcerer virtuoso - diamond)
Wyrr: shadow (shadow priest ninja of the crescent moon; assassin - dripping dagger)
Ikaria: magic (mystic theurge Artificer)

Assorted other deities:

Chronos. God of time and rats. His holy symbol is half a feather - the lower half to be precise. Nobody knows why.
Allies: Artemis and Coyote.
Enemies: demons and undead.
Afterlife: no details available.

Coyote. Raven. The Patchwork One. The Shapeshifter. God of trickery and creation.
His symbol is a shattered disk.
Allies: Chronos and Bastet.
Enemies: demons and undead.
Afterlife: Coyote keeps the souls of the dead in a small bag. After 1d6 months, he reincarnates them - at which point the only way to recover them is to find whatever they got reincarnated into and use wish or miracle to restore their memories of a prior life.

Bastet. Cat. The Inscrutable One. God of cats, distractions, and defender of women and children.
Her symbol is (surprise!) a cat.
Allies: Artemis, Lyssis, Selene, Coyote, Ducander.
Enemies: demons, undead, Avoden, Eryx, Wyrr, Vyce, the vile gods.
Afterlife: A glittering realm of stars, strings, bags, and cats, where souls of the dead may remain for as long as they choose before being reincarnated or reforged into a celestial cat.

Bahamut. The Judge. The Dragon God. The Avenger. God of justice and vengeance.
His symbol is a scale balanced on the tip of a sword.
Allies: Artemis, Avoden, Marris, Balor, Chronos, Moradin.
Enemies: demons, undead, Korai, Wyrr, Ikaria, Durandal, Vyce, the vile gods.
Afterlife: Followers of Bahamut are turned over to the celestial courts for judgement. However, they recieve priority treatment, and can expect their case to be processed within about a hundred years.

Moradin, forge & dwarves

Ducander. The Teller of Tales. The Maestro. bard

Lema: knowledge, god of the high kobolds

Tempess: travel

Durandal: slaughter/massacre


The Vile Gods: (note - clerics of the vile gods channel negative energy, unlike clerics of all other deities. Also note that resurrection for a follower of a vile deity is typically not an option [unless your allies were quick with that gentle repose spell] - being raised as sentient undead is much more viable.)

Karpuzlu: sickness

Tycho: madness

Atrus. The Lich King. The Undying. God of undead, darkness, and secrets.
Allies: none.
Enemies: Everything that lives. Yes, that includes most demons.
Afterlife: none. If you can't animate your own dead body by sheer force of will (or carefully prepared rituals), then you're going to get reforged into a demonic weapon for Atrus' undead followers.

Hunger-In-Darkness. Lord of the Pack. God of displacer beasts.
Allies: none.
Enemies: anything edible. And anything non-edible and moving. And things that don't move if they happen to be in the way.
Afterlife: Hunger-In-Darkness eats you. The end.

Ortuul. The Dead One. Heart-Eater. Lord of the Behir.
Allies: none.
Enemies: undead (Atrus in particular), dragons (Bahamut in particular), all of the "good" deities.
Afterlife: Dead behir are re-forged into demons as quickly as Ortuul can manage to do so.
Notes: Bahamut slew Ortuul millenia ago and thus rose to the status of a deity. Some time afterwards, Ortuul rose as undead - a state that pleases no-one except perhaps Atrus.

Surl. Goddess of gnolls.
Allies: almost any other vile god, but usually not for long.
Enemies: everyone who stands in the way of a gnoll-dominated world.
Afterlife: Gnoll heroes that Surl wants resurrected can expect to stay in lavish quarters in her palace. All others are reforged into demons.
Notes: Standard Gnoll doctrine claims that they were at the forefront of the fight against the titan at the end of the third age - but that, in winning, they were weakened too badly to withstand it when the rest of the forces involved turned on them afterwards. The gnolls strive to return to the "golden age" where they dominated the world. Non-gnolls generally consider this a pipe dream, and point to the complete lack of evidence that there ever was an age of gnolls in the first place.

There are a number of other monsterous deities under the "vile god" category:
Beholder, sea serpent, etc.


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 Post subject: Re: Deities
PostPosted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 3:32 pm 
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Prismatic Pangolin

Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:50 pm
Posts: 2283
The next question, of course, is "What does it mean to be a god?"

I run the gods as being fairly similar in style to the ancient greek gods. They're powerful, more-than-mortal beings, but they've got their own flaws and foibles, and aren't even really close to omniscient or omnipotent.

Most notably, a god does *not* get any advantage over a mortal in information processing. A god with even a mere one thousand followers is unlikely to be able to keep track of them all; most gods can't even keep track of all of their clerics, never mind less empowered followers.

The primary distinguishing feature of a god (as opposed to other powerful entities such as demon or fey lords) is the ability to grant divine magic to their followers; primarily clerics, but also paladins, and occasionally other more unusual practitioners. For the deity in question, this ability runs on automatic; a follower of sufficient devotion and dedication can tap into this power, even if the god doesn't even know that particular follower exists. More interestingly, a sufficiently self-righteous follower of a deity can maintain access to this power even when doing things that run clearly counter to their deity's wishes; atonement is only necessary to maintain your power if you actually realize you did something wrong.
Of course, such situations only last until the god in question notices; while the ability to grant power runs on automatic, a god can deliberately (and permanently) deny power to any follower. (And, in many cases, chooses to follow up such a denial with massive pyrotechnics - the most famous example was the high temple of Bahamut in the city of Arabus; when the god discovered that the temple had been systematically denying justice in favor of whoever could offer the largest bribe, he personally appeared and demolished the site. The only survivor was one of the janitors, who was quite surprised to find himself suddenly elevated to local high priest.)

Similarly, the vast majority of divination spells are - no matter what the clergy might like you to believe - not actually equivalent to asking the god what to do. While answers may come couched in the sort of terms and phrases that specific deity might have used, they are actually dependent solely on the skill and personal strength of the individual cleric who cast the spell. Even the normal use of the "commune" spell functions like this; it is, for example, unable to reveal anything about a mind-blanked subject - the spell is simply too weak to pierce such a potent defense against divination.

If, for some reason, you want to get the personal attention of your deity, there are a few ways you can go about doing this.
1) Personally travel to your deity's home plane, and petition the local celestials for the opportunity to speak with him (or her, or it, as the case may be.)
2) Cast commune simply to open a communication channel. This doesn't suffer from the normal "one word answer" limitation, but also doesn't magically provide answers - making it, for most purposes, a less effective use of the spell.
3) Cast miracle - this spell, in essence, is just a big ball of magic and a request that your deity pay attention, right now, and do something with all this energy you're providing. In general, the power of the resultant effect is dependent on the cleric casting miracle, though if it's particularly important, a god may choose to provide additional oomph.
4) Get someone else to do one of the first three options for you. For a low level cleric (or especially a non-cleric), this is typically the only viable choice; either talk to someone higher up in the church, or (if you have access to such magics) summon a celestial and request that it pass a message on.

A more powerful cleric can expect better results from any of these options; someone the deity hasn't even heard of is likely to spend hours on hold if they try to cast commune for direct communication - and it had darned well better be important when they *do* get through. Whereas one of a god's high priests is likely to be able to gate directly to the god's inner sanctum, bypass all the normal bureaucracy, and be talking to their god, in person, in five minutes or less. (Assuming the god isn't currently working on something that's horribly time-sensitive, at least.)

(There is one apparent exception to the above. Coyote shows up, in person, to deal with even the most minor of tasks. Or, well, he claims to; perhaps he just has a swarm of shapeshifting celestial servants to allow it to appear that he shows up in person to every commune or summoning or suchlike spell cast by one of his clerics.)


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