>It's a setting where mortals can ascend to godhood
How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with gods? If you have one god, it's an ultra-badass god of everything. With a small number of gods you can still have gods of cool things like fire, the ocean, the winds, justice et cetera. But if the numbers keep swelling you simply run out of cool shit and you get incredibly arbitrary domains that exist purely to make sure everyone feels apprecated. You'd end up with such things as:
>The god of tax returns
>The goddess of the shards after you break a cup on accident
>The goddess of that weird feeling when you're in a train that's going through a tunnel and you realize you've been going backwards instead of forwards
>The god of prime numbers
>The patron deity of parodies of other deities
After a while being a god would mean about as much as being a civil servant.
It's a setting where mortals can ascend to godhood
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>How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with gods?
Some people are financially predisposed towards godhood.
>After a while being a god would mean about as much as being a civil servant.
And now you understand mortal. It's been this way for eons pass, in fact Eugene here could tell you all about it being the God of Gods' History.
Now this is your cubicle, you'll be taking over for Fl'thagan as the new Patron God of Weird Names. It's his 500th year and he'll be retiring to Elemental Plane of Retirement.
Good luck in your new role user
My main setting I run is like this and its great.I always ascend my player's characters at the end of a campaign, so far we've had a God of Insatiable Greed, God of Unrequited Love, Goddess of Badgers, Goddess of Burning Trees, and God of Dual Wielding Greatswords.
Its fun because there's so many gods bumping around the players have to be careful not to accidentally piss off the God of Dirty Street Urchins when they mess with a homeless dude or whatever. It makes them a bit more accountable. Plus gods make good quest givers and godhood is something to strive for.
> But if the numbers keep swelling you simply run out of cool shit and you get incredibly arbitrary domains that exist purely to make sure everyone feels apprecated.
why would you not want this? the god of tax returns is a hilarious title, and not a completely LULSORANDUM way of lightening the mood of any one scene. how fucking badass wouldn't it be to recieve a letter of marque, signed by the godess of sea administration? orders from the god of pikes?
"anthicus, god of caskets, company chaplain will accompany you on this travel."
You could have gods of similar things meld together over time, eventually all melding into one of a few prime gods of things, to make room for new gods.
Maybe it's really fucking hard to become a god? Maybe you can only become a god by killing one and taking its place? Maybe some overgod culls lesser entities every now and then?
>The god of tax returns is just a burnt out, midlde-aged government worker. He spends every day doing his {god} given task, looking through the entire kingdom's village censuses to calculate how much each reeve should recieve at the end of the year. He does this because he's slightly better at it than the rest.
Its simple enough, you just make most of them quasi-deities or demigods at most. In fact, its more or less what I've done in muh homebrew setting that's a mix of Planescape primarily and then other settings as inspiration (mostly Eberron in terms of actually making sense and FR in terms of holy shit dats a lotta gods). Gods are roped together by the stronger, lawful oriented guys (because Law v Chaos/Order v Freedom is much more interesting than good v evil) to maintain balance on the prime material so that armies of extraplanars don't spill in and muck things up.
Why would you need to? Take a look at any animist religion. In China they refer to their heaven as "Home of One million Gods". In fact, their Gods ARE civil servants of the afterlife.
So you're complaining about something that LITERALLY EXISTS in multiple religions on the very planet you fucking live on, you ignoramus.
>It's a setting where mortals can ascend to multibillionairehood
>How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with multibillionaires?
>Ascension being extremely rare.
>Ascension coming only at a world-shattering cost.
>Ascension only being possible through violently dethroning an existing god.
>Ascension only being possible by having an existing god fall in love with an marry you, then divorcing them and getting half of the divine estate.
>Ascension being nice and all that, but it turns out divinity is actually all work and no play. As a result, the gods have a suicide rate that makes Finland seem mentally healthy.
>Ascension happens all the time, but the gods are locked in an endless war with otherworldly creatures and need to be replaced constantly.
Its usually not as easy as just snapping your fingers and suddenly being the god of finger snapping. You've gotta kill a god and take their place, or gather the plotballs, or turn a country into a giant blood sacrifice, shit like that. The sheer difficulty of ascending keeps the numbers low.
And if it IS that easy, then yeah, you wind up with tons of gods. Nothing inherently wrong with that, just means you've got a Shinto-ish system instead of Abrahamic.
>when the head maid says she's under the stairs, her word is god's word, that's because she is a literal god in the land below
>ere mortals can ascend to godhood
>How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with gods?
99% of FR is this.
Also, it's dependent on where the deity gets their faith from, there are multiple planes, material and otherwise, and everyone has a focus and interest.
There are a limited number of divine positions that can be filled. What you don't realize when you ascend to godhood is that the role you fill defines you more than you know.
As a god, you are in a symbiotic relationship with your worshipers and their faith. But it turns out that divinity isn't sorted by god name, but rather portfolio.
Lets say you rise up to be a God of Storms. There have been a bunch of Gods of Storms throughout history, and there are even other Gods of Storms being worshiped elsewhere by other people right now. When you first ascend to divinity, you are a dominant personality your your own will can impact things. But, over time, your very existence is digested and subsumed by the larger, metaphysical concept of 'God of Storms', until you are nothing more than yet another mask for the single God of Storms divinity, as has been the case for every god of storms throughout history since the first. This is true for every brand of god. They are all the same in the end, even if they don't start that way.
To become divine is for all of your moral nature, the good parts and the bad, to fade away until you are just a story that acts as an interface between worshipers and godly power. This is why every god has a relatively short history of easily understandable stories that involve a lot of direct intervention with the mortal world, and after that the stories just sort of... stop. And the god is still there, but they rarely seem to do anything anymore. The gods individual will has been extinguished, so they are not fucking around with the mortals as much and there are no new stories.
"Can" doesn't mean "often do". Pathfinder's default setting of Golarion has something called the Test of Starstone where anyone who passes can become a god. To date, only two people have passed it despite it existing for centuries; One was a legendary paladin, the other was some drunk who doesn't even remember how in the fuck he pulled it off.
>After a while being a god would mean about as much as being a civil servant.
To pull from another existing setting, Exalted does this and it's actually interesting. Heaven is basically a giant bureaucracy, and even with all the small and inane shit someone can be a god of, there's so damn many that they -still- can't give a job to all of them. So you have an actual slum in Heaven where all the unemployed gods live. There's quite a few of them.
>How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with gods?
The existing ones don't like competition.
In Forgotten Realms mortals can only ascend to godhood by acquiring a divine portfolio, and there's only so many of those around. Usually this happens when a god dies or is otherwise kicked out of the job, but there's been examples of deities just straight up giving their portfolio(s) away, like Jergal did with Bane, Bhaal and Myrkul.
It also comes with a lot of responsibilities that the mortal might not be too happy with. Kelemvor tried to judge souls by his own morality and got a ton of shit from all the other gods for it. One of the mortals who became Mystra (and there's been so goddamn many) was NG and wanted to de-power evil mages, but wasn't allowed to. Finder Wyvernspur inherited the portfolio of Moander, god of rot and decay, which he hated so much that he locked most of it away (so no one else would be able to claim it) and had to reinterpret what little he had left as "the rise and fall of art trends" and became a chump god in the process.
Oh yeah, and to add to the stuff I said about Exalted, because Heaven and the gods work as a bureaucracy they're -also- super corrupt. You've got the gods that do their job, sure, and even the ones that try to be nice and help people in their role. But then you've also got the corrupt ones, who take bribes and who also extort mortals for prayers (which is both a currency and essentially food for them). And also shitty subordinate gods that are constantly looking for a chance to replace their bosses.
Came here to post this. There are also more than a few RPG settings set up with very similar systems, for example Exalted.
Multibillionaires can die, lose their cash, merge their funds with other multibillionaires, etc.
Gods are immortal.
Since when has that stopped them getting killed/deposed/replaced? Whether in fiction or in real world mythology.
Yes, but it's a matter of how often either happens.
If the god's are being made faster than they're being killed, then after a few millennia, it would make perfect sense that you'd have hundreds of gods.
Hell, even greek mythos, arguably the basis for a lot of fictional polytheism, has lots and lots of minor gods for many different things.
Can there be a God of Pads?
A god doesn't have to be "god of" anything.
In ancient mythology, when a demigod is accepted into Olympus, he doesn't suddenly become "god of whatever" just because.
because Elder Scrolls lore is pretty complex also if you fail at reachig CHIM you are zero-sum
Praise vivec
There can only be a certain number of gods, if you want to be a god you will have to kill one first or make a deal to change places with him
Dominion has interesting way of doing this.
In the setting theres one top position among the gods called the pantokrator and all other divine positions are filled with either appointees or creations of the pantokrator.
How do you become pantokrator in this setting?
You can only do so when the current pantokrator abdicates his position which happens pretty regularly.
Then everyone who has any power/worshipers fight over the position and the winner becomes the next pantokrator.
Do it the way the Mystara setting did it and you won't have a problem. You have to undergo a long and difficult quest and need the patronage of an established god.
Include a way to either romove gods from power or to eliminate them.
Exactly, hell look at the pic related just to get an idea. You go and fight a Dragon God, two gods of storms Inugami and then fucking Acala himself and there is a definetly a sliding scale in their importance and power.
>the other was some drunk who doesn't even remember how he pulled it off
Got a pretty sweet portfolio out of the deal, though. You're also forgetting Four Halfling Rogues In A Tenchcoat.
>it's a setting where a God descends and becomes a man
I thought the Malazan series did ascension to Godhood well.
Each 'Godhood' has a certain portfolio. You don't become a God by trying, you become a God by essentially walking in that portfolio, being so autistic about that portfolio that you eventually come to be the mortal representative of it. When you reach the final point of enlightenment, you look back on your journey, walking towards that idealised concept, and you realise that you outpaced it. The idealised concept is walking towards you now. This cannot be a conscious process, you cannot 'attempt' to become a God, it has to be unintentional, a dedication to the concept that isn't just a means to an end. When you do this, you become a God.
You ascend, becoming the God of that particular portfolio. The portfolio itself doesn't really matter, there are effectively an infinite number of them, even for things like tax returns, prime numbers and the like, but understandably, the more obscure and odd a portfolio is, the less chance somebody will come to embody it and achieve ascension.
Most Gods will be of minor concepts, and will fade away after only a few centuries, but Gods of major natural processes, or concepts which appear in everyday life, last a lot longer because they're basically powered by people thinking of them. Not actually worshipping them, even, though worship is basically just directed thought, but any thought at all is enough, so the God of Tax Returns might actually last longer than you think, in a modernised society.
tl;dr Become a god by sperging out harder than anybody ever sperged out.
It depends on how rarely it happens, and how often gods are forgotten.
>>The god of prime numbers
That guy would actually have an inordinate amount of power in a setting with computers.
>How
It's real fucking hard to become a god. The only guy who made it to godhood went insane. Yes, it's techically possible, but only with Simon and co. vs Antispiral-tier of powerlevel endgame.
>inb4 "there are other god"
The first one created them
>Gods die when they stop being worshipped, Gods appear when they are worshipped
>To become a god, a human has to be worshipped, during his lifetime or not
>He will cease to exist as a god when people stop worshipping him
>>It's a setting where mortals can ascend to godhood
Who are you quoting?
You're assuming that once you reach nigh-omnipotence you're gonna give a shit what all these little mortals scurrying around are doing.
Sure, you might spend a few centuries getting worshiped and having your ego fed, but that starts to get old. Its not like the mortals actually have anything to give you of value.
Plus your control over this particular world is actually pretty limited. Sure, you could have clerics and paladins who run around doing what you tell them, but pretty soon you're gonna start getting in the way of other Gods, your clerics start drying, questioning their faith, and boy howdy is getting a cleric to the point where he can do something meaningful without him getting corrupted by someone else, falling from grace, dying in battle, or getting lynched for diddling kiddies is hard.
So you decide "fuck all this noise, I'm a fucking God!" and you go off to go fuck around with metaphysics, pay chess with Cthulhu, maybe make your OWN world (this time with no way to ascend to Godhood). There's things you can do and experiences you can have that mortals couldn't even comprehend.
When you're a motherfuking god, why WOULD you faff about trying to play chess with mortal lives?
Unless you're in a world where Gods need worship to survive, in which case the problem with a bloated pantheon solves itself. Only so many divines are going to be worshiped en masse. Sure, you might get a faithful little cult in the middle of nowhere, but only a handful of gods are going to actually amass a following.
I like this.
Becoming a god could be insanely difficult in and of itself, and even then divinity could not necessarily grant you eternal life.
In Pathfinder, for example, it's possible to become a god through various means (the starstone has made several mortals into gods) but doing so is so difficult in all cases that a new god usually only pops up every few thousand years on average. In Pathfinder, Gods can also die, so there's that.
Many gods don't have any particular domain, and many eventually grow bored of interacting with the mortal realm and fuck off to dedicate more attention to stuff on higher plans of existence. As such, there are a ton of gods, but only a limited number who particularly care to intervene in anything.
The primary goal of worship is really just to hold the gods attention and flatter their ego to keep them from leaving out of boredom, rather than them being dependent on faith for survival.
>How do you explain that such settings aren't oversaturized with gods?
It's really hard?
>being a minor god is actually more of a short term deal, after a while you lose your mind, and your essence is essentially reused by the creators to make new planes.