Beginning

How were the gods, or the equivalents, "born" in your setting, Veeky Forums?

In the beginning, all was one. A singular being of true omnipotence. But with the division of mass and energy to create the universe, so did the one being divide into many.

Every God, great or small, is a fragment of the original. Some tiny gods rule over the space between blades of grass, while others command entire worlds or continents. And yet all can rise and fall, being divided or united once more. Some Gods try to consume all others, to achieve oneness, yet they are always torn down by those who fear true unification, whether mortal or divine.

Thus the world exists in a state of stable equilibrium, where the divine is neither created nor destroyed, simply changing shape and name and nature over long eternities.

They evolved from organic to digital to divine in the future, and because they are omnipresent they exist before their ancestors.

I've not yet fleshed out my setting too much, but I do want to keep it vague. Different cultures have different myths, some might be true, others false or wrong retellings or flat out lies.

I like Dark Souls.

No gods or kings, only man.

Origenaly there were only two gods locked in eternal struggle. They both created minions and stuff and both eventually died in the battle. Their minions continue the battle without them and seek to resurrect their respecive masters.

God killed himself and shattered his consciousness.

The resulting seven gods killed each other, fragmenting again, until there was One and The Myriad. The Myriad slew the One and used his corpse to build Creation and the Planes.

Been trying to make a birth story for my gods of love and war
>The First god fights his brothers
>They defeat him and bound him to a huge rock
>They start to chop off and take out his body parts
>They put his Xs on the left and his Ys on the right I still haven't figure out which body parts to use
>After they were finished, they start to party
>Distracted, they didn't see the First god rise up
>With the last of his strength and rage, he killed them all while they were drunk and weak
>He dies with anger and the need to see his family
>The blood from the organ piles start to flow and connect to form a pool
>Out emerges the twins, the god of love and the god of war

> Maybe his left and right testicles?

I can't even figure out how gods exist in my setting
Are they actual tangible beings? If so how and where do they exist and in what capacity and what's their significance, how do they interact with the world
Like imagine a god of fertility and agriculture, what do they do? Just sit in some godly Heaven and by just existing make crops grow? If people pray to them, what happens? Do they hear it somehow, if they do then what
How do they help

Fuck I'm just making myself more confused the more I try to figure it out

I imagine the prayers are used to notify the gods about your requests and depending on their mood, they grant the blessing the seekers wanted.

Basically you have 3 levels of "gods".
First circle are just aliens that existed before time and matter, ergo are almost omnipotent
Second circle are humans/aliens that needed to colonise planet and guide it's population.

Circle zero are guys in charge of everything. Time, death, souls etc.
Propably mindless, focused only at one tasm

>Great unrest was brewing within the lower gods
>They decided to wage with each other
>Went to the moral plane to fight
>Since they are low-level gods, they became mortals
>It was massacre with mountains of bodies
>Some time later, Erissa, the first fairy, saw the aftermath of the massacre
>Sadden with how ugly the land became and how hungry her people were getting, she thought of the plan to make it beautiful and feed their clan
>She buried the corpses and planted seeds of all types
>They start to grow and bloom
>A raspberry bush in the center has grown largely
>In it is the infant god of agriculture
>Erissa found him and took him back home with her

Tiamat. Mother of Chaos, and her mate who is now nameless. Together they birthed the numerous gods. When she and her mate tried to rest the gods were young, loud and foolish, causing calamity. The Father of the gods sought to quiet his children, and they killed him for it. Tiamat in grief sought to kill her children, making 13 kinds of beasts. Two of these beasts are known today as Dragons and Giants. The Giants instead betrayed their creator and allied with the gods in exchange for power and dominion. A great war in Heaven was wrought, many gods and monsters died, and Tiamat was slain by a storm god. She was split in twain, half-sealed below to create the Underworld, half above to create the Firmament. The dead gods and monsters festered in the Underworld creating what we know as the fiendish Demons. The gods wrought their homes in the Firmament.

>There is no space. All that emptiness we think is space, isn't.
>The cosmos is made up Luminous Aether, or Mana as a more bronze-age civilization might call it
>The Big Bang is more like a sudden Dawn, as though a great mana engine started firing up and sending out pure energy into the Mana
>It started waking up
>The universe is made up then of Mana-Gods, beings who are both independent of, and One with, the cosmos itself. Truly Omnipotent Elder Gods
>But they are blind. Or rather, they see too much, and so create lesser beings in order to vicariously experience "New" through them
>While these Elder Gods set the stars and planets and other bodies in their places, their first creations begin crafting a world for themselves
>These New Gods create and inhabit the Earth, but they get a little too wild
>Early Greek Gods on steroids, constantly fucking each other, humans, animals, trees, etc
>Like to sink islands a little too often or turn oceans into deserts
>One of the invents the next lower order of life: People
>Other gods think he's mocking them since it looks like them a little, nail his ass to a tree forever
>New Gods then straight up steal his shit and make their own people
>A group of said people eventually figure out the Earth is heated by a Sun made of raw energy, the Earth is raw inert Mana/Matter, and the core of the Earth is also pure, unadulterated Fire Magic
>Become Gods themselves, rape New Gods in endless war for mortals everywhere
>No clear sides or factions, just chaos
>War ends in truce, new united pantheon, rules against altering the world further
>World is still a little janked to hell, but it's livable, mostly islands and small continents
>piratesofdarkwater.wav

There are many kinds of gods, thus many sources.

The Cosmic Gods were born together with the Universe, but they might as well not exist, because they're larger than entire galaxies and made of fields rather than matter. No race can worship or even comprehend them. There's not even a theoretical limit to their abilities. The Arimaspi are the only race worshipping a proper cosmic god.

The Cosmic Dragons are the next step, they were created by the Cosmic Gods to be their agents in the material world. They're nigh omnipotent and omniscient to your average character, and comparable to the Abrahamic God in their capabilities. While they can register the presence of mortals, in most cases they ignore them like we ignore unicellular organisms.

The Guardian Dragons were created by the Cosmic Dragons to serve as soldiers in their conflicts and watch over different regions of the Universe. They're the first kind of gods that the mortals can comprehend and meaningfully interact with, though ultimately they tend to be disinterested in such interactions.

Finally, we get to the proper gods. The Elven gods were created when a guardian dragon prince fell in love with an elven princess and assumed the form of a mortal elf to be with her. To protect his adopted race, he dreamt up a pantheon for them, which then became real by his power. In order for the elven pantheon to exist, his direct descendant, the dragon emperor of the elves, must spend nearly the entirety of his life in sacred sleep which sustains the gods. He's only ever woken up to conceive a child or if the future of the entire elven race is compromised.

The dwarven gods can trace their lineage directly to the elven gods. The dwarves used to be a slave race of the elven empire, up until their greatest leader started an uprising. The stunties eventually got the upper hand, and the elven god of war had to interfere personally to stop the rebellion. But the dwarves managed to trick him, shattered his material form and stole his shards, which became the magical runes and allowed the dwarves to use a form of magic. However, some of the shards were embedded in the bodies of those dwarves present at the shattering, elevating them to godhood. They lived several times longer than a normal dwarf and eventually died, but a part of them lingered in the world to watch over their race.

The dark elves are a special case. When they split off from the bulk of their race, their leader, the greatest elven commander of all time, organised a seemingly insane raid on the holy mountain where the elven gods live, which surprisingly ended in a success - his forces managed to take one of the gods captive. He's been kept in a magical prison under the dark elven pontifex's citadel ever since, and his divine power is being sucked out and channelled into the pontifex, making him a deity by proxy. He's still very much just an immortal elf wielding godlike power, but don't tell that to the dark elves.

The panotians never have never had gods or religion, as they understood the true nature of the world, detected the presence of the cosmic gods and realised that they're just enormous blobs of energy not worthy of being worshipped. However, they do have a hibernating cosmic dragon in their realm, a being whose dreams make magic possible. They treat it more like a power plant than a divinity, though. They also have a plenty of godlike wizards whose power far surpasses that of many actual gods, but nobody worships them.

The gnomes made their god themselves. Back in the day, they saw all the other races worshipping divine powers in exchange for protection and vowed to use their technology to create a god of their own, better and more powerful than any other. The result of this project, which took several centuries to accomplish, was Gnomotron - an incredibly powerful computer wielding truly divine power, in strength if not in origin. He proceeded to create a virtual reality to which a digital copy of ever gnome's consciousness was sent after death. Unfortunately, Gnomotron was buried under a deep layer of ice in the catastrophe that destroyed the old gnomish civilisation, but he kept functioning, although he started glitching a lot lately due to lack of maintenance.

The goblin gods are just fake, plain and simple. Theirs is a scam religion not unlike scientology that was created in order to rip off the gullible and was extremely successful at it. It worships the twin founders of the Goblin race as the gods of money and power respectively, but the truth is that, contrary to their claims, they never achieved apotheosis in spite of their attempts and died by ordering each other's assassinations. Every high ranking goblin knows that their religion is a sham, but they feign piety because it helps to keep the working class in check.

The halflings don't have a real religion, but their worship their fomorian creators who made them to look after their lands after they went into hibernation. This is more of a tradition than anything, since their masters can't hear their prayers. Even if they could, they couldn't grant them divine powers, as they're no gods, just a very powerful ancient race. On the other hand, the halflings are so superstitious and follow so many obscure ancient traditions that this could be called a form of a religion.

The orcs worship a huge range of spirits of nature, elementals, ancestral ghosts and demons, their deities all together easily rank in the thousands. It's not uncommon in some tribes for every family to have a unique pantheon, and there's a particularly crazy one where each individual is expected to have a personal pantheon and set up a private temple near his house. Conversely, there are strictly monotheistic tribes and even some that practise atheism. As with all things orc, their attitudes towards religion are in constant flux, new religions are born and extinguished every day.

The blemmians worship their greatest hero, who is, coincidentally, the only being in history who managed to achieve apotheosis solely by his own wit. After being killed by the elven emperor, he fell into the underworld, but it turned out that he had planned it all along. He ignited a rebellion, stormed the gates of the underworld and bargain with its custodian for a share of his power, which he got. Eventually, he was slain by the god of humans, but his power and spirit remained bound to his armour. It was put into the tallest tower of the blemmian capital by his priests, who then proclaimed that anyone who could put it on without being burned by its power would become the new god of blemmians.

Most human gods originate from an ancient dragon temple that held a relic that allowed anyone to transform the belief of others into divine power. Many prophets over the course of the history made a pilgrimage to this temple and, if their teachings were appealing enough, were transformed into gods. However, when a great conqueror who sought to unite all of humanity captured it and went to see the relic, his belief in the future of the human race was so strong that the relic shattered, imbuing him with the entirety of its power and forever preventing the creation of new gods. Most humans him and his friends with whom he shared his power now, but some still cling on to their old gods.

They existed kinda forever.

There was original 2 Gods, the grandfather and grandmother, they mated and birthed other gods. This tore them both apart and infused them with their godly power. With this the grand time dies and the new gods create a new world.

After some time some of the new gods die and their might fuse into the grandfather and grandmother. Than they consume the other new gods and end the new world. They use hte new world and create the grand world.

Its kinda comes full circle, but every cycle its slightly different.

Also, post some godly pics.

Or monster-ish

...

So basically, post whatever you feel like?

This is great, I'm stealing it.

Why not? At this point there's 3-4 character art threads at once anyway. What's one more?

cool setting