>The gods people worship are actually horrible demons
What's the best way to do this?
Zendikar-style, with functional religions complete with divine servants, built on distorted ancient myths of sealed eldritch horrors?
Or the classic JRPG "you've all been duped, God is evil, now you must kill God"?
Or just the "God's absent, the Devil is taking his place and doing a shit job until you help restore God"?
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So close!
and then OP was the demons
One of my worlds has people worshipping servants of the illithid god (who is a Christ expy, long story). I plan to have the two show up eventually and make people realize "oh, we were all just pawns for something that wants us dead". It's far easier in worlds where the gods don't show their presence often or at all, making misunderstandings much easier and deadlier.
technically /v/, but the storyline is up this thread's alley so what the hey.
Ultima VII featured a plot point kind of like this. Not!Asmodeus finagled his way into the world, and managed to change the dynamic of the world's religion. The basic beliefs were still the same, but it became much more strucutred and Catholic-y, with the head of the church secretly serving the villain.
The people weren't knowingly worshiping him, but him and his followers had successfully mutated the common religion into a system which benefited him.
How about "God died and the devil had to take his place because someone has to fill the role or else the universe stops"
The earth was already ruled by horrible demons as a hellscape, but one of them developed a moral dilemma over the eons and co-opted l the role of archdemon in order to save at least some of existence from the torment.
The best he could do without having all the other demon lords overthrow him was to convince them that by removing the demons from mortals day to day life and only allowing them to corrupt mortals to destroy and torment themselves they were producing even greater torment. The other demons believe that one day when mortals finally have corrupted themselves fully they will be permitted to return to 'punish' them and fulfill a ragnarok-like orgy of evil.
In truth the Archdemon knows that this is the only means to give mortals even the faintest chance to produce heroes or some means to toss of the yoke of eternal torment.
Thus he waits, guised as the greatest villain of the game's world- holed up in an immense fortress of legend and producing many of the worlds evils and curses to force the mortal civilizations -who have by now forgotten their hellish past- to produce a hero(es) of legend who can cast him down, and perhaps with his power destroy or strike back the others of his kind.
The PCs and 99.9999% of NPCs of course have no idea about this, and believe him to be the greatest monster in existence; ignorant for the most part to the greater evil which is always chomping at the bit to finally corrupt the world enough to return, and plunge it back into fucktown 3000.
I've always preferred the concept that the gods are primal and fundamental forces of nature. Like gravity or something. It doesn't do what it does out of spite, it does it because that's how the universe works.
So you get gods that are not necessarily evil, but will totally destroy the shit out of you, your city, possibly even the country the city is in, if you try to fuck with it.
I think that falls more into the "eldritch horror" category that you have.
Just remember that every religion, no matter how fucked up, thinks they worship the best case scenario guy. No religion in history has ever actively worshiped a god that they feel is "evil" out of anything but fear.
This is literally how christianity sees most pagan religions
do it the way warcraft did it. kil'jaden (sp?) disguised himself as a benevolent god and came to naz'ghul and told him "do this and you will receive these holy powers" even though he was actually making the orc race make pacts with demons
1 and 2 aren't mutually exclusive and co exist in the same universe fairly easily, hell you can even have the 3rd one be the cause of the first, with a well meaning but ultimately evil demiurge having locked the *giant ball of writhing tentacles* away, but then worshippers who had worshipped the satan for good reasons fell out of love wiht it for its evilness, and resorted to worshipping the locked away *giant ball of writhing tentacles*
Bonus points if the satan locks itself away because it felt it was getting too evil, and the villains of the campaign work hard to unleash his evil only for the satan to no be pleased with this turn of events and destroy villains before turning his ire down onto the heroes.
of course, after defeating the satan, you can have the heroes find out there was actually a way to redeem the satan and make him truly good... and then they learn of something else sealed away exactly like the satan was and go out to try to release and redeem it only to get their face eaten off by *giant ball of writhing tentacles*
This is like the Screwtape Letters meets Maoyū Maō Yūsha crossed with Final Fantasy V with a touch of Lucifer.
Make a nihilist golem
Considering that one of the most influential real religions is the one where the chief diety coerces people into following his exact, abritrary ruleset with the threat of eternal torment, I'd say it wouldn't be too difficult.
In my setting:
>God creates mortals since he doesn't want to be alone in the universe
>he wants them to love and worship them out of their own free will
>for centuries, he sees how we use religion for our own profits and use his name as a reason to be assholes to others.
>he snaps, turns heaven into hell turns angels into demons and decides to become "exactly what the humans want"
So... not really demons, but God turned asshole. A bit edgy, but meh.
How about;
>Yeah, our God is a horrible terrifying daemon from the Netherzone.
>Does your God personally drop by every thirteen years to make sure everything is still going alright in exchange for all the first borns of the generation?
>No? Then fuck off. We love our religion. Our population growth is kept under control and our economy has been booming.
The demon is actually not horrible, infact gorlash, god of luck, was already known to be a foul creature, one who might even be sitting across from you at a game. Praying to gorlash is not akin to praying to god, but more hoping that he is somewhere near sharking a whole table, if you are truly lucky that day the odds will be tipped in your favor and gorlash will show you the fruits of your prayers. No one has ever seen his face, or anyone who has was too drunk to remember it. He is always depicted as a gambler, with a visor obscuring his whole face.
>"God's absent, the Devil is taking his place and doing a shit job until you help restore God"?
You know, it'd be kind of a neat twist for the Devil to finally take over after God's death, only to discover just how much WORK is involved just to keep everything running moment to moment. He falls in the seat not knowing what he's doing and as a result, for the next millennium or so he doesn't have a moment to spare between putting out fires for a power trip.
By the time he's got it all worked out, has a routine going, and can take a little time off to indulge himself, he finds he no longer WANTS to destroy. He's spent all that time and effort getting things to work that messing with it feels like he wasted the last thousand years of toil. As he sat on God's throne and saw what God sees, he gains a new perspective on the universe and the mortals within it, and with God dead, his stubborn pride no longer demands that he act contrary just for spite.
In the end, he willingly aids the party in restoring God to the world, and it turns God planned the whole fucking thing. It was the cosmic equivalent of a father letting his son run the house for a while to teach a lesson about responsibility.
en.wikipedia.org
Turns out the bible is fucked up enough that some serious people have claimed, and even died for claiming, that the old testament god is the satan of the new testament, because of how unreasonably cruel and arbitrary he is.
Gnosticism casts the Old Testament God as a demon called the Demiurge, subordinate to the supreme God of the New Testament, and representative of the imperfect physical world he created. The God of the New Testament is the representative of the perfect spiritual world world. Jesus is varyingly cast as the supreme spiritual God incarnated into the Demiurge's world to bring it enlightenment and free its inhabitants from the Demiurge's tyranny, or as a human who attained enlightenment and taught his followers to do the same so that they could be brought into the court of the supreme spiritual God.
Like Jewish mystics did it in real world, consider pagan gods to be demons.