How to create gods and religions? I've never played fantasy (only science fiction and Cyberpunk)...

How to create gods and religions? I've never played fantasy (only science fiction and Cyberpunk). So I have problems to create credible religion and gods.

System is gurps.

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Play Dawn of Worlds with your friends and just see where it takes you?

Look up a religion.

Pick a few gods.

Change the names.

Shuffle around some lore details.

Done

>Alternatively

Think of a story that you like.

The characters are now gods.

>The characters are now gods.
Heidi, goddess of mountains.

think about things tribals would find important, the sun, rain, skies are all popular

now give them a name, thats most of your work done

it can even be things you would think is trivial, like pottery, textiles, bricklaying, tht you wouldnt give a second thought, but these are things that people in the olden days would find vital, textiles = clothes, pottery = containers for everything, bricklaying = portection from the elements, you would be surprised by what could make a difference to survival, and when your entire life hinges on whether or not the plants grow, you will definitely worship anyone out there who could possibly do that

Yup

That easy

Been fleshing out a pantheon recently, drawing inspiration from the humanlike Greek pantheon:

The world didn't originally have gods. Sentient creatures have always had souls, however. These souls entered bodies at birth, then went through something like the water cycle before being "rained" back into another baby.

Eventually people figured out how this worked and how to manipulate it - and, inevitably, how to abuse it. One man figured out how to harvest the souls of others to be of use to him in the soul-cycle when he died. Others objected, but his process made him unassailable, so they had to resort to similar tactics to try to get him to stop. And others copied them both simply because they could.

What the world sees as Gods today are those people who, at the dawn of the world, entered into a supernatural battle for the souls of the world. "Good" deities ask their living subjects to be soldiers for them in the afterlife against "evil" deities, who forcefully steal the souls of the unwary.

I recognize that the question "but who made the world and soul ecosystem and shit" could be asked, to which the answer is either "the big bang," or "the actual god/gods that play no part in the story" or "the people who programmed the simulation, duh"

I should also add that a good deity would not oppose a neutral deity who gained his power through the consent of those he is a god to. These deities would be the neutral or nonmartial good ones.

Another thing I like about things working this way is it gives potential for a lot of things. Men literally do create their own gods, with all the possibilities for uplift and downfall that entails.

Look into real religions/mythologies to find inspiration. Think about what matters to the people of your world and what traditions come from it.
I think the worldbuilding general has some material on this stuff.

Or, for the supwerpowered bastards approach, take some characters, give them the most power in the setting and have them fuck around for a few thousand years.

>Think of a story that you like.
>The characters are now gods.

I ... fuck. Why did I never think of that?
Good job, user - now I must go and plumb my dvd collection for gods.

Important things:
Are the gods real? Do they actively tamper with life on Fantasy Earth? Do clerics get magic from them?

Are they animal gods? Nature gods? People who ascended to godhood for deeds? Were they always worshipped?

Did they create the world? Did they just find it? Try to create 5 commandments per god just for fun's sake.

How real do you want your gods to be? Actual mythological style gods who created the universe, etc? Powerful entities who have been mythologised by humans with partial understanding of their nature? Things which are given form by human belief? Ambiguous if they even exist or not? This often depends heavily on how you want magic to work, especially 'holy' magic.

Next, are you going for a standard fantasy roleplaying game type pantheon with each god having a discreet area of interest like the god of fire, the god of love, the god of trees, etc. or something closer to real-world religion? If it's more the latter, are there people who believe in different pantheons? Are some of them closer to the truth than others?

How about monotheism or animism instead of polytheism? Either as the actual true nature of god or as a religion which some people follow.

Have you tried reading the relevant GURPS supplements?

Religion was for 3rd edition, but it is helpful for laying out a framework: mega.nz/#!qo0DyT6Y!xar-wZMK9l1ZHxXSOPlPCaS-0KFCGVH8wKsWA4LPx0A

Dungeon Fantasy: Allies and Dungeon Fantasy: Clerics have good lists which you can use to populate a pantheon of 'god of x' quickly.

I like down to earth gods. Like yeah, they created the world (at least the oldest of them) and set the basic rules but now they too must follow them. So they are powerful and have areas of expertise where matching them is probably impossible but overall they are not that different from other creatures.

So a goddess of earth is a small old lady (no one heard about those people who asked her why she looks old) that drinks too much and doesn't like attention of her worshippers. She is also almost always cranky and can slap you so hard your grandchildren will feel it. She knows things and can help you with your quest or whatever you are doing but most people are so boring that they are not worth her attention. Can you be interesting enough ?

I've been taking abstract concepts and my random thoughts about morality and random concepts from real world mythologies and spinning a cosmos out of that. Basically, I don't exactly do what said and just change the names around, though there is a bit of that.

Mostly what I do is take concepts that stand out to me from real world religions and find a way to incorporate them, for instance, the idea of cthonic deities, with their associations with the underground and sacrifice in pits, and the concept of an imprisoned powerful being seem inherently creepy to me in a good way, so I have one imprisoned god that is attempting to rise from a pit. The concept of Christ as "God sacrificing himself for his creation", the idea of the supreme creator showing people how to be good not by decree, but example, is I think very interesting, so I've made a fictional analogue of that act.

My advice to you is to do something similar, read mythology, look into philosophy and psychology, and find the stories and concepts that are interesting, or powerful, or have some effect on you, and build your pantheon around those feelings.

...

>animism instead of polytheism

If this is not the same?

Think about what the people who worship said god are like?
Are they bloodthirsty, anger_fueled fighters? They probably worship a god of war.
Are the powerful, graceful, and like gold? Probably worship a god of lightning or power.

The line between the two is fuzzy, but polytheists generally believe in a relatively small number of gods who exist in a separate world to humans while animists believe in a basically arbitrary number of spirits who inhabit the same world as humans. If you believe that there's a god of mountains, you're a polytheist, but if you believe each mountain has a spirit, you're an animist. In the real world, no actual religions really fit the ideal form of either (and for that matter very few fit the ideal form on monotheism; most 'monotheists' believe in a large number of lesser supernatural beings as well as the primary god) but real societies are always more complicated than the theory describes.

If the Gods are verifiably real and have an actual interest in the lives of mortals, then you're work is basically done.

Even the God of Rape who blesses his followers with successful and bountiful rapes is going to have his own cult.

This isn't like the real world where religion is treated like a roulette wheel.

Red aligned?

God's explained what the science they didn't have at the time did. Look up the Rape of Persephone and how that explains winter to Greeks, who wouldn't know about the sun rotating.

What is godhood in your setting?

In my setting there is a monotheist GOD but after a while he left the world with most of the Elohim (his angels) and it fell into chaos.

In the chaos, the Grigori (the Elohim who stayed behind) and great sorceror kings known as the Baalim made war against each other. The world was completely mad because everyone had the power of GOD but GOD wasn't there to oversee everything and keep order.

Then a new deity, Tsalal the demiurge, arose and cast the world into shadow and away from the divine light of GOD to keep order. Now the new generations of men are mortal and the powers of the Baalim and the Grigori are greatly reduced.

Still, the pathway remains lit by the gods towards divinity. If only one follows a god well enough or peers deep into fundamental gnostic truths of reality such as nature and death one can gain miraculous holy powers and eventually pierce the veil of the demiurge and ascend to become a god.

My setting suggests four categories of gods: Tsalal, the Grigori, the Baalim and the new gods who ascended afterwards.

My setting suggest two major poles of positions: those who fight against the demiurge and want divinity for all and those who ally with the demiurge and want divinity only for a few. Some Grigori and Baalim allied with Tsalal and some did not.

My setting suggests that new gods tend to either be saints and followers of preexisting gods or that they tend to be highly focused on specific aspects such as death, nature, fire, etc...

There should be many faiths focused on serving the gods and some faiths focused on personal transcendence.

As well, in my setting there are a number of other faiths.

One faith spreads the practise of building magical phylacteries that bind peoples' souls to the plane of Sheol (the spooky plane of undead and stuff) as ghosts when they die.