I'm starting a new campaign of 5e and one of my players has expressed interest in killing deities.
I have no problems with this but how do you kill a god? Can you even fight a god, or do you just kill all the followers?
Also once that god dies, what happens? Does their body just float around in the astral plane? Who if anyone takes their place?
Has anyone else done something like this in the past and how did you handle it?
Use a gun. And if that don't work?
Use more gun.
But if anyone has a good answer I'd also like to know. I need the god controlling the Shadowfell (whoever that is in this setting) dead.
Well for starters everyone with the 'Faithful' trait for them loses it and gains the 'Faith in Dead Gods' trait
Watch/read Terry Pratchet's The Hogfather. It's about an assassin who has been hired to kill Santa and The Grim Reaper's attempts to stop him.
>and the granddaughter of the Grim Reaper's attempt to stop him
ftfy
unfortunately, the assassin goes somewhere Death can't reach, so he calls in help
continuing on the 'in Burning Wheel' line of thinking: Gods have White Shade Mortal Wound, so you need a White Shade weapon in order to kill them, and then in order to win the fight with them you'll probably need a White Shade weapon skill.
So you need a character who's managed to advance one of his combat skills to White Shade (which will generally require the completion of several campaigns) and another character with a White crafting skill (same time frame).
So an experienced enough Burning Wheel character could reasonably fight and kill a god.
A god by definition is immortal; so to kill one you have to remove what makes them a god.
Personally i like the idea that to kill one you first have to starve them of power, trap them and cut there connection and start eliminating whatever powers them and as they grow weaker keep strengthening the prison until he is mortal, then you kill them.
Kill via level draining effects on home plane, then banishment/exorcism on corpse, followed by disintegration of said corpse and a wish to prevent any time travel crap undoing your hard work...
...since when has that been part of the definition? Gods die in mythology all the time!
Immortal does not mean "invulnerable". I like your idea, too, but I also like the idea of hurling a javelin torn from the heart of a live volcano through their chest.
In my setting gods can only be reliably killed by other gods but even then they come back in five years, and five days. Until that day the world drifts towards the opposite moral alighnment. Killing the CE goddess created a brief golden age.
5e seems to have some pretty inane rules for gods.
>do you just kill all the followers?
That only works if you're using Forgotten Realms or Discworld. Gods have followers because they're powerful, they're not powerful because they have followers.
Thieves World method has always been my favorite.
Gotta get them on their home plan. It takes a very special/powerful weapon, each deity is different. Killing them ends their plane.
The easiest method though, is to remove their followers. This "blinds" the god to our plane, and they forget about it. They live forever in their own plane/paradise.
Forgotten ones sometimes return if enough people start praying to them again.
Is 4e really the only game that spelled this sort of thing out?
>When a deity is bloodied, its mind leaves its body, and it is unable to assume physical form for a certain length of time. This discorporation lasts anywhere from a few months to several years, during which time the deity's power is weakened but not negated.
>Characters who want to truly kill a deity must fulfill one or more conditions specific to that deity and to your campaign. If the specific conditions are satisfied, the deity cannot discorporate, instead becoming bloodied as normal.
Quests to be able defeat a deity included:
>Destroying the Hand and Eye of Vecna.
>Using a legendary treasure to draw Tiamat out of her domain, and into one controlled by Bahamut.
>Finding the Loom of Fate, crafted by Lolth and hidden by Corellon, to reweave Lolth's destiny.
>I need not the rank of Grand, but in my blade now dwells the proof of the strongest. Thou may be a god that has fallen to a beast, but thou art still the primordial mother, so I must reveal my name. From the abyss of the ethereal valley, I came to deliver the dark death. I am the old man of the mountain, Hassan-i-Sabbah. The Evening Bell has called thy name. Let those wings be deprived from you under the mandate of heaven!
That's how you do it.
Someone want to dump the demigods story screencaps?
There is only ONE GOD and he is all powerful, all wise, all knowing, all loving, and beyond comprehension. Cease this rebellious thought or our lord will drown us all in a flood of epic proportions.
Didn't your almighty lord promise he wouldn't flood the earth?
5E. My group killed Asmodeus. That was a mistake as he was part of an ancient pact that had him as the last line of defense against demons spilling out into the everything.
In retrospect, we were played for fools. In a fit of pettiness, we killed him by throwing an exarch at him. Ol' Asmodeus had her (and us) on the ropes, we gave her a boost. Apparently they knew each other.
I know my group is here somewhere.
The folks at Bohemian Grove routinely practice god-eating. I'd start there.
Even in the Judeo Christian interpretation that's not true. YHWH did battle with the gods of Egypt, who performed very real miracles themselves, and smote the fuck out of them in a display of "don't fuck with me"
Even in the first commandment there's the implication that there are other gods and that it's ok to worship them, just not before Them.
This book has an interesting take on it. I recommend.
You'd need to be Level 20 to even scratch their ankles, first off. Then you'd need an enchanted weapon to bypass whatever resistances/immunities they have towards physical damage. Finally, you'd need to buff yourself to the point where you can easily beat an impossible DC (30) and pray that you keep up a string of lucky rolls that forces them to use up all of their legendary resistances and whatever extra bullshit they have active.
The effects of doing this would pretty much lead to a class X apocalypse based on what the god represented (killing Hades means that nobody dies, killing poseidan means the seas overtake the land, etc.)
Fucking stop.
He very specifically promised he wouldn't flood ALL of the earth.
The only way to kill a god is for them to have something that they would give anything to protect, poison them with enough emotion to turn them mortal.
If you're a dawn you'll be able to destroy all but the strongest of gods from the very start
And they'll just be replaced some other god in yu-shan
What about raping deities?
opposed grapple check I guess
in Burning Wheel that's an opposed power check. Gods will generally have White Shade power, so assuming the average stat of 4, in order to have a good chance of success you'd need
>black 12 (humanly impossible)
>gray 8 (human maximum for a heroic character)
>white 4 (average for a supernatural character)
You could do it like DBZ and have the gods be both:
1)Stupidly strong, like at least ECL 25
2)Simply be another level of power that requires the PCs to do some quest or become divine themselves. I personally like the idea that you require at least some divine power, like a God's knife or the skull of a God's mortal body, etc. plus an extremely powerful mortal or demigod wielding it.
As for actual rules, dunno. There was a deities and demigods book for 3.5 but they would be almost untouchable using that.
That's my plan. Going to wrest divinity from the orc pantheon for myself and then usurp my own god.
In general, to kill a god you need another god's weapon. That keeps players from being too powerful afterwords: they just have a weapon which categorically can kill gods, not one which does so because it is simply that powerful.
After a god dies their domain should be out of wack. Simple as that.
Depends on the setting. Forgotten Realms you just have to take over their domain. One of three things happens then.
1) the weaker dies off
2) they fuse
Or 3) they start separate domains
But remember what happened to poor Mystra. And the spell plague and the weave fucking up. The chaos. So remember to include reprocutions for killing gods.
And yeah let him. It's the players who wanna have fun.
no more worshippers = no more divinity
Either the god is mortal or no more
No.