How do you prefer gods to be depicted...

I'm kind of on the same level as you -- gods are just really magically powerful individuals who happen to be worshipped as such, and probably have a vested interest in maintaining their monopoly on said power. The godking of one of the nations in my homebrew setting is a lot like the Lord Marshal in that regard, now that you mention Riddick, in that he peered into an alternate dimension / communed with some eldritch shit and came back . . . changed.

But the real way I prefer to depict my gods is that they don't fucking exist, or if they do they're so inscrutable and distant that agnosticism is a valid philosophical position in-universe. Although some magical forces might well have a level of sapience that could lead to them being described as gods.

I agree. I do like the part in the Book of Sorrows where Oryx puts a bit of the Darkness into an Ogre and talks to it and it has a rather friendly conversation with it as if Oryx was a good buddy.

Then again, I was also amused at how he responds to his daughters practicing the Death Song and perfecting the Oversouls because the tone of the conversation doesn't seem to be what you would expect out of creatures like the Hive

>Eventually, Oryx decided to grow new wings and wrestled with his worm. While wrestling, he came upon his two daughters dying in a rift between dimensions.

“What are you doing, my daughters?” he asked. He was afraid that Ir Halak and Ir Anûk were trying to go into the Deep, where only the Tablets of Ruin allowed Oryx to go.

“We are dying, father,” they said. “As many times as we can manage.”

“That’s adorably precocious.” Oryx shook out his new wings. “But why?”

There's virtue in not explaining mysteries in your setting. However, at the same time there's virtue in having an answer, even if it's never meant to be revealed.

If you don't have an answer in mind, all you're doing it making up bullshit as you go along, and players can tell the difference.

Implimentation doesn't impact quality of the story. Just your experience of it. Also, just because you ignore most of the ingame stuff doesn't mean it isn't there. Same shit people bitched about with Reach. Their own lack of observation.

I enjoy the incomprehensible variety where man can only describe it using vague descriptions. Less Lovecraft, more Biblical. Lots of eyes, wings, seemingly mechanical bodies or geometric shapes.

The closer one appears natural, the more likely it is a lower class deity or messenger so mortals don't immediately run away screaming.

I disagree, especially in the context of tabletop games. If you're a good GM, you HAVE to know to know how to present your story and it's information in an engaging and interesting way. If you don't do this, it doesn't matter how good your story is, your players will be bored and won't care. This is EXACTLY where Destiny fucked up. The good story is there, but it's presentation is just a disorganized clusterfuck that instantly kills your desire to care of be invested.

I'm playing around with a D&D setting right now where the gods take family and responsibility pretty seriously, so for a lot of the more traditional "god" spots you have associations of related deities handling different parts. Like for ocean gods, you have one great superior ocean deity dating back to the creation of the world who doesn't interfere on such a minor scale as one civilization or religious pantheon, and bunch of lesser local deities who are children or officers of that greater deity who govern specific oceans/seas/rivers, etc. Part of the reason for this division of power is that the use of a god's powers leads to an equal and opposite reaction in the creation of demons/devils and/or curses in proportion to the power expended. While clerics and priests can dispell such errant emanations of divine might with the proper rituals, and mortals can destroy others outright depending on the tools used, the excessive use of divine magic leads to terrible calamities. Thus, the gods try to limit the powers that they use and the powers they grant.

The gods themselves exist in a "heaven" beyond the mortal plane. I still haven't decided if that leads to the D&D multiverse/planes/Astral Sea or something distinct from that, but mortals can, through worship and faith, reach the level of the gods themselves upon death. Then they either steal the sphere of influence of an existing god, or claim their own, hitherto unclaimed sphere.

The biggest event of the last 10 years of the setting was the murder of the god of the Sun and Protection and the usurpation of his position by a human general. He then used his power to wipe out a race that had enslaved him, and became a new god of the Sun and Vengeance.

Reminds me of the Asian/Chinese concept of a divine bureaucracy. Where you have gods, and the gods of the gods, and the gods of the gods of the gods, etc.

>Implimentation doesn't impact quality of the story. Just your experience of it.
StoryTELLING user. Proper implementation is vitally important to the quality of storytelling.

Current setting I'm playing in the gods are just high level characters with immortality [of that 'doesn't die of old age' variety]. All of them are either the children of existing gods, or became gods after contact with a magical mineral that also acted as the initial catalyst of sentience. All such supplies of said mineral are currently inside powerful artifacts of power, usually owned by said gods, who rule as thearchs over some of the largest nations in the setting.

Some creatures, such as the largest monsters, as well as a few Q-level beings, and the lovecraftian abomination that is seeking to destroy all reality, outrank them in power and influence.

Well, that was the belief system I was sort of brought up in, so I guess I kind of defaulted to that when making my own in earnest. The idea of having a bureacracy or ranking of gods just makes sense to me, both to reflect the same sort of hierarchies that appear in mortal life but also because you oftentimes have a separate pantheon for every civilization in a continent, no matter what Forgotten Realms says.

With that in mind, how would you explain having similar but different gods with different legends and rituals in neighboring pantheons? This was the answer I came up with.

I like it too, but I don't use it to build a hierarchy.

I was brought up in a hardcore fundamentalist Christian sub-sect, so I naturally gravitate to Lovecraftian horror.
It has the oppressive YHWH cosmic death, destruction and HATE that I crave, as well as the uncaring infinite universal indifference that I've come to appreciate.

So I create ecosystems of Gods.

The last time I ran a fantasy universe, the Gods that the players interact with are "recent" uplifted mortals - heroes of forgone eras that have transcended past their mortal limitations. Above them are typically races that came before the apelike humans, dwarves, elves and orcs - I typically have Lizardmen-based "overgods" that transcended their mortal forms millions of years before apelike lifeforms even appeared.
And these "overgods" live in fear - in fear that one day those Things that lord over all that exists outside the solar system might one day gaze in their direction and be displeased with that they see.
These Things however are not actual entities. They are kind of like tools - like scissors, pincers, rulers, scalpels. They peek into the plane and alter things as their Users see fit. Their Users of course are pretty fucking absurdly powerful and do not in any capacity matter to the plot. The Users are basically the equivalent of children that get their own personal universe if they do well in gradeschool and get straight A+'s.

Whump

I've always liked Asian/Hindu interpretation of dieties that exist on various levels from low level spirits that may be venerated by a villaged all the way up to the Buddha.

The game Muramasa: The Demon Blade illustrates this when you go from fighting a dragon god to Inugami to Acala and then meeting Amitabha himself.

>Until Underverse Come.

I do how there's more shit like this in the Riddick-verse. I just love the contrast between the modern stuff and then esoteric space magic shit like this.

I confess, I love the Riddick-verse, I just wish Riddick wasn't 'that guy', Vin Diesel is a solid world builder. His background shows in the Necromonger Empire, the aesthetic and technology.

I mean, I get it but it's his DMPC, at least he's not on the level of Elminster or anything so I can put up with that to a degree until Riddicks overall story arch is concluded.

That said, Vin should definetly publish Riddick-verse as a PnP game.

He should make a Firefly-esque show, set on the founding of the Necroism Philosophy, there is so much in the movies that is easily missed, the first few Lord Marshals, what they are doing and more on the Underverse and the Threshold.

But yeah, PnP would be good. I suspect he has notes on it given his love of the hobby.

There's also this prophecy thing going on with Riddick and the Furyan. You could do a pre-Riddick time line that explains what the Furyans were like and what greater purpose they serve as well as expand on various factions and places (like wherever the hell the dude from the first movie and his father from the third movie come from, I can't remember their names).

Yeah, I think the setting would be better served with Riddick being moved to a background character. Tame down the Furyians ability to do stuff.

Let Diesel focus on making the movie, not acting in it.

Yeah. I was so mad the third movie wrote Riddick out in the first five minutes and dumped him into a rehash of Pitch Black crossed with the opening of Chronicles. I was so hype for Necromonger politics and all we got was a few shots of him sulking on a throne and being unmoved by bare tiddies before he got left for dead.

While true, I hope it provides for some new opportunities like a new Lord Marshal finding their way to the Underverse and leading to more stuff about it. I also want more info on the Elementals.

Necromonger thread?

Necromonger and Hive thread.

That said, I would love to incorporate these guys into a game of some sort. The idea of turning someone into a walking sensor dog thing is really cool, especially the scene where the Lord Marshal plugs one's brain into their computer to get a read out of it's last vision.

Personally, I'd like to see the human-settled systems of the setting fleshed out a little bit more. There seems to be a disproportionate number of awful prison planets managed privately that pay ridiculous sums of money for bounty hunters to dump criminals off on them. The society in which such a system operates must be incredibly fucked up, by Helion Prime looked like a pretty rad place to live.

Yeah, this was rad and I stole the idea for a type of servitor that appeared in my 40k games to fuck with my party's stealth approach.

The weirder the better.

...

I would imagine Helion is not one of the main powers in the system if the Necromongers stomped it's ass pretty handily like it did but it would be good to see more populated planets like it to get an idea of what the rest of the people in the setting are like and especially what technology is available looking at the shit the Necromongers were rolling around with.

>larger version of image available
quentinvcastel.deviantart.com/art/Lady-Galaxy-627967728

Whoever the powers of the setting are, they're not doing jack yet about the marauding army of death cultists laying waste to planets and slaughtering whole populations. Which implies the Necros are either small fry preying on the weak and they haven't done anything to antagonise the top dogs yet, or worse, the Necros have already conquered them.

My headcanon is that the Lord Marshals' exposure to the Underverse has given them an insight into some kind of theoretical physics that results in their apparent technological edge, which is why they can throw their weight around with comparatively limited numbers. This holds out from what we see on Helion Prime, who for their part seem to have energy weapons of their own, but given that the rest of the setting is packing slugthrowers I'd say these are probably the preserve of professional militaries.

They also might not be as unified as we are making them out to be. Going across the universe seems to be a fairly simple thing so maybe you might have a few systems/planets/whatever that are in alliance and are powerful militarily and economically and thus have a better chance of fending off the Necros better then Helion did. This could also help explain the different prison planets if it's just more convient to drop off the dregs of your society of on whole planets given over to that purpose.

I like my gods as maybe there, maybe not. Maybe it really was divine intervention, maybe not. Just no outright acts of god. If a god really intervenes hard, it'll show up as a freak event (eg snow in paris in june), and not as outright VOICE BOOMING FROM THE SKIES THAT KILLS THE UNJUST

>a god is a 4D entity
What does that even mean?

The entity from Xenosaga was a neat depiction of a "god" that recognized the fact that lower lifeforms would see it as such. Granted it was nothing more then a super battery the basically powered the special powers (ether) of the world and just wanted to go home.

I like gods as entities that enable faith. That is, being present as little as possible. (But perhaps still existing, maybe?) I just would very much like there to be an actual debate on whether or not a specific god exists.

As for what kind of mythologies/religions... Well, one of the favourites I've come up with is that there's just two gods/deities/whatever: Life and Death. Life is madly in love with Death, and in order to please it, constantly sends the most precious gifts it can - us. The journey from Life to Death just happens to take a while, as mortals traverse it in their literal lives.