What do gods do when their worshipers are being systematically wiped out...

I would say that it depends on the god. A god of marriage or something might die out if not worshipped, or just fade into obscurity only to reappear later under a different name once people's worship conventions have changed, but a god of death or time would remain, nameless but eternal and absolute.

Depends. If their worship gives them their power and they catch it early enough, they go smiting.

If they don't get anything form worship other than getting their ego stroked...the response can range from there being an upsurge in smitings and miraculous healings, to them not actually noticing.

Depends on the execution.

They join the catholic church as saints

they get interrupted less by whiny hairless apes

Cry like such bitches that they flood the planet.

At least that's what some lil bitch gods do.

Interestingly, a few gods in Slavic and Finnish mythology willingly accepted the Abrahamic God and became recorded in history as saints.

They become the landscape. Every mountain, ocean,and blade of grass was once a god.

I don't think a shitty book without explaining anything about how it's relevant answers OP's question.

Hating HFY is a dumb meme and you are retard, we are humans and its fantasy, just because you hate humans being cool doesnt means you get to pretend its an objectively bad theme

Today Veeky Forums taught me something.

A greyhound saint. This pleases me.

Liking HFY is the dumbest shit, and the only people who do are idiots better off stuck in r/HFY.

Humans being cool isn't the domain of HFY, HFY is celebrating "humanity" is the most inept and cringiest manner imaginable, by largely ignoring actual humanity and inventing "my donut steel race" by exaggerating something and then slapping the name "humans" on top of it.

They become demons. Very weird, very powerful demons.

In the old setting I used to run, the basic premise was that gods and demons were the product of belief, but in different ways. Gods were created out of deliberate, intentional belief, and strengthened by it. They had rituals and sacrifices, and as their religions spread, they gained power from that.
Demons on the other hand were the product of unintentional belief. They were what happened when people told urban legends, folk tales, ghost stories, and other things that they didn't worship, but believed in, even if in passing. They could actively attempt to become gods by gaining worshipers and forming religions around them, but in the end they were accidental creations in a way.

The common point between the two was that as long as they were worshiped in their current aspect, they couldn't really die. The belief would bring them back. However as both aged, their belief tended to "crystallize", their form and powers becoming stronger and more solid. A young demon or god could flit between domains and shapes as its believers dictated, but ancient gods and demons were unparalleled in their specific sphere of influence. There aren't a lot of old demons, but there are a lot of old gods.

So a god without belief would basically be a demon. A very old, very powerful demon, who is very angry about losing it's worship.

The book is literally 'what happens to a god when it loses all it's followers

Ok you are just retarded and will brand anything with humans having anything nice "cringe" then, thanks for clarifying

I like this idea a lot, I might steal a few old spurned gods for my campaign.

Which ones were they?

Well if we're talking about the Aztec gods, without regular sacrifice they die and the sun goes out. So that's pretty bad.

Also, the moon and stars turn into skeleton women and eat the earth.

Knew about the first part, but can I get sauce on the second? That sounds metal as fuck.

>a greyhound saint with a cult that practiced live infant sacrifice, and operated until the 1900s

>skeleton women with snakes for penises that eat the earth
fixed
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzitzimitl

Why did you think that replying "NO U!" would convince anyone to accept your position?

They become annoyed, depressed, and bitter, chewing old grudges and old regrets, and trying to communicate with the first intelligent beings that enter into any of their shrines.

Sent my players on a quest as such, where they break into this old, thousands of years old temple, and uncover this idol. It represents a long forgotten deity who sends them on a quest to go to a temple of another forgotten deity and urinate on his altar, because even though their worshippers have both been dead for aeons, why let go of a good grudge?

Is there such a thing as god retirement?

The way I personally like to do it in fantasy settings is to create a dependency on mortals: believers fuel the divine. This is also why many of these deities are moderately interventionist: they grant spells to their followers, give orders to their clergy but never actively intervene themselves. I imagine that this is mostly a gentleman's agreement among the gods so to say: the various gods and pantheons still try to undermine one another for their own personal benefits, but personally intervening leads to a MAD scenario, where everyone will try to destroy everyone else's followers before their own followers are destroyed. None of the gods want to be in that situation, so they just agree on a more hands-off approach and collectively BTFO anyone who doesn't fall in line.

Other than that, forgotten gods just... "die". They're no longer a thing, and if enough people disbelieve in them their existence truly becomes a fiction. On the plus side they're immortal, so they can be "revived" if there's a resurgence in faith. This could explain those "old gods" cults.

Consider Spice and Wolf. Lazy local harvest/forest spirit who never really liked them anyway comes to realize the entire village is tired of the deal they made centuries ago. Religous practices are done half heartedly and technology is actually outstripping her ability to impact crops for better or worse. She decides to do something different/less boring (/is run out of town) and goes on an adventure t elsewhere.

They disappear. Faith creates gods.

many fade into nothingness, but i think some disguise themselves as things that aren't gods to eke out the worship needed to continue existing. A possible example is Fortuna, the greco/roman goddess of luck and fate. Worship may have no longer been as direct after rome went christian, but even today we can see her holding the scales of justice. Not to mention the pseudo-divine connotations we humans have always had with luck, hell even /v/'s prayers to RNGesus are only half-ironic.

They retain nothing but their immortality, and eke out pathetic existences over the millennia, trying to recapture their former glory.
slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/

It's like everyone's first twist on divinity though and it's had prominence in some big Veeky Forums culture things like Discworld, American Gods and FR, so I'm really sick of it at this point. I want gods who just are gods and who don't rely on worship to survive.

The question is, are all religions real or not. What impact would a god being real or not have on the development of a faith toward it?

>Why does every mortal always figure that gods’ power comes from people believing in them? Like you’re all some kind of god power experts? Do they teach that to baby mortals in their little mortal schools? Stupidest thing I ever heard. You think we ruled the world for a thousand years and didn’t check where our power came from? We figured that out a long time ago. Divine power comes from meat.
>We were at the height of our power. People were sacrificing rams to us right and left. Then it stopped working. One year the meat started having a little less effect. The next year it was a little less than that. Eventually it was gone. And then when the gods became powerless, the cults collapsed, and then the Christians and Muslims and all the rest stepped in to fill the gap.