I just finished reading five Percy Jackson books at my daughter’s suggestion and not a week goes by that I don’t bring up the Marx Brothers or Mystara in conversation to the annoyance of my daughter, so excited by the topic links already
I have problem with my PC becoming a god because I have a whole raft of practical questions. Like if I’m God of the Sea, will the tide cease to come in and out if I take a day off? If it doesn’t, then what aspects of the sea am I actually in charge of? Or am I just a super-powered protection racket who demands offerings and pretends that good fishing/lack of storms/a zero rate of kraken attacks is by my divine will?
Well, the problem that justified the PCs in my game becoming divine was the barriers between worlds crumbling because no-one was taking care of that.
They were replacing a unified God-Over-All-The-Gods so I suspect they would have to assign themselves domains and departments and try to find replacements for the lesser gods who got slaughtered en masse.
They would have someone qualified for a God of Magic, someone else who would be a God of A Different Kind of Magic, a God of Hunters, a God of Healing (with domain over Fire as well), a God of Scribes and Knowledge and a God Of Warriors (mostly martial artists).
Thinking back the world I depicted after the murder of God is very much as I envision the future of the United States, things falling apart because there’s no one available to fix the basic systems with a few remnant civil servants hanging on to preserve what they could while the barbarians batter at the gates.
In THE SANDMAN Destruction can happily set his realm to run on automatic while he goes and sees the universe and learns to paint.
If I wanted a universe where the Gods are all blowhards I could have done it but I don’t suppose that would have meant an accelerated decline in religion.
I would have thought that like most gods you would just ignore those pesky mortals who keep bothering you until you were bored or fancied having sex with them and then you could really screw-up their lives.
Looked back over the Wrath of the Immortals books for Mystara and there’s a nice break there between using temporary and permanent power points and it explicitly sets up an idea of daily “divine chores”. But I think Mystara is fundamentally different in a way that makes it The D&D setting for me.
The Immortals are just another level of advancement for PCs to attain. Immortality is mechanical and not ineffable in a way divinity has been historically understood. It’s just a way to play the game with bigger numbers and I think all RPGs in their “serial advancement play”aspect will have this issue with divinity
My experience from Rifts and Champions play is that players use “divine” as a power source to signal that they don’t want to ever be at a disadvantage. It’s a way to say “it’s not a power suit I have the power in the shower” and “it’s not magic no effect should dispel this”
Away from a mechanical side, Unknown Armies is the only game I’ve seen that puts narrative weight on divinity. In some scenarios there is discussion of what kinds of things happen in the environment as someone approaches elevation to the Invisible Clergy of archetypes and it’s wild and reads to me as “it should be disturbing, mysterious, and unexplainable in the rules” in about the only way I can really conceive of it from the game examples I’ve read
I have not read a lot of Runequest on god walking or whatever it’s called but that’s the other place I feel like I need to dig in on this
I really liked what Moorcock did when he killed off all the gods at the end of The King of the Swords (that can’t be a spoiler after 54 years, surely?) but it does seem that most players, faced with the same situation, don’t think, “Yes, finally. Humanity is in charge of its own destiny.” Like former Soviet bloc states they look instead for new authoritarian leaders.
A bigger question might be how would we know if the gods were dead anyway? If the universe is constructed to be self-sustaining, the absence of gods doesn’t make much difference. Even in a world with actual manifestations of gods, in their absence somebody will falsify those manifestations so as to take charge of the organized religion. Like they do in this universe.
Oh (sorry, bit of a random thought-dump here) I just remembered Volkhavaar by Tanith Lee. Wasn’t that about a character who made himself into a god? Might be worth looking at for inspiration.
One might take the approach that the gods are parasitic beings evolved to take advantage of the debug hooks into the universe’s fundamental forces. At which point, when they die, the system tries to repair itself from the damage they’ve done, but how effective it can be…
URESIA (which I mention a lot, especially in relation to this topic) is a setting where the death of the gods (caused by divine idiocy and civil war near as anyone can tell) has led to terrible changes in the universe but seems to be in a stable state. And a lot of people are quite content to go on with their old religious habits, despite the reports of their gods no longer answering prayers; a few have sought out new gods and even tried to create them and a very, very few are in contact with the two or three gods who actually survived, not all of whom are actually of much use to people.
A related topic would be what a ‘fantasy’ universe looks like with no divine powers. Not after the death of the gods, just none at all in all the history of the world. What fantastic elements do we have? Magic has to be mortal magic. Ghosts? Souls? What is their purpose and destiny? Multiple species, surely.
Well there’s another approach. The gods are dead (thanks to a HeroQuest or whatever) and so magic has been freed from their control. All of a sudden the priests have lost their powers and a whole bunch of other people have gained them.
If the amount of magic force is fixed and the population is large perhaps it is spread too thin to acheive much. Minor sparks of luck, but nothing focussed.
Which causes the rise of technological civilization which raises the population until someone invents something that kills off a lot of people.
Which means that when the population falls there is more mana about per person. Which causes some of them to gather more and more of the available power. Which causes them to become gods and the whole cycle starts again.