How would you handle and characterize a god of depression?

How would you handle and characterize a god of depression?

The God of Depression is a great shadow with hundreds of arms and ten million long, spidery fingers. He slips his fingers through reality and attaches them to people. A person touched by the god's finger becomes withdrawn and loses interest in life. They gradually lose the ability to feel happiness, and then believe they deserve this. If he drives them to commit suicide, they live for all eternity in his grey realm as his slaves.
Needless to say, he is one of the most loathesome and evil gods in the setting.

Depression as an elder god? I like this. Good job.

Literally picrelated.

Just make the Raven Queen more like the Teen Titans character Raven. Watch as your players start waifuing her.

That’s how you become the god of depression, from being disappointed in your players.

I dunno.
Do it yourself, I just can't be bothered.

>The God of Depression is dead. He has been dead for a long, long time.
>How he died, no one remembers. There are many stories across the many lands of the world, but all know that that he died in some manner.
>His corpse however is still very much in play.
>From the corpse of the god faint, thin shadows come, shaped like matchstick people. They are featureless, but float like ash in the shape of men. They seep from his black blood and find their way into the waking world, unseen by mortal eyes.
>From there they follow people, out of some confused longing. Those who feel sorrow, those who are losing their way to continue, those who feel hollower and hollower as the days go by they follow behind, silent and watching.
>Perhaps they remember how their god shepherded over these lost souls, or perhaps they wish to help. Whatever their intention, their presence exacerbates these problems, slowly eroding the souls of the people they follow.
>Once a soul has eroded completely from their presence, the person dies. It is a quiet, unassuming death, devoid of any acknowledgement. From their corpse seeps another stick-thin shadow, and so the dance continues.

This is also really good, damn.

The God of Depression isn't one that speaks as those effected by them do. When you meet someone under their powers, they are withdrawn, or distant - or occasionally, smiling a little too long and laughing a little too hard.

The God of Depression, if you were to approach their darkened room, makes you hear whispers in your ears. They tell you every insecurity you've ever had, read the minds of others to you to remind you that they think lowly of you because of that. The God of Depression remarks on your failures, and finds a way to turn everything you speak to them about into a point of your own failings.

The God of Depression's realm feels numb. It doesn't have sensation, good or bad; it leaves you nothing to distract yourself with as the mistakes of your past are laid before you, elevated tenfold, and the good times shrink smaller and smaller as you lose the hope of them for the future, and appreciation for them in the present.

Once the God of Depression has you, it's incredibly hard get them off. Their servants cling to you, wrapping themselves around your back, like a weight, and continuing to pour their god's poison into your ear. Very rarely do those affected ever have times of peace or reprieve. And who are you to fight a God, you who could not succeed at even the simplest of tasks that those around you excel at?

And why does the God do this, what malevolent entity could possibly want to cause such harm?
The God of Depression hurts you, tortures you, gives you something that sometimes you wish death could let you escape... so it can keep reading your own failings, keep thinking about it's superiority, so it doesn't have to look inwards and hear all the same things it forces you to listen to.

He’s also the God of Sleep

fickle, melancholic, withdrawn, they're often critiqued for not caring about their followers enough when it truth, its the opposite. supposedly birthed from the wellspring of eternity, it is one of the few deities to actively wander the mortal realm, changing its form each time, but generally appearing as an unremarkable, vaguely human-looking deity save for one feature- their eyes. a single glance can render a person unable to look away, and therefore is usually depicted with their eyes closed.

drawn to warzones and places of human suffering, it cannot fully understand the human mindset, and rarely interacts with people as other deities do. despite the vast power at their disposal, the deity knows that to aid many would stretch itself thin, rendering it unable to aid any at all. thus, it actively pushes the majority of its followers away by sending them bursts of hope and joy when they feel lost.

only when the devoted are on the edge of an irrevocable decision to they directly intervene, taking onto itself the majority of their sorrow but condemning them to do the same for others in return. they know that those faithful strong enough will ease the pain of others around them, but they also quietly mourn the future dooms of their chosen.

it has done so for the last 1200 years, always walking, watching and waiting.

I would make the god of depression a smiling, cheery sort. His avatar (or just the people that he influences around his target) talks like someone oblivious to your situation, needling all your soft spits without it ever seeming intentional. He'd say something along the lines of "Got the best cookies yesterday, I don't know what I'd do without my mother" in casual conversation the day after your mother died. He'd send you funny cat videos after you got told your cat had to be put down. He'd forget to invite you to an event that all your friends are attending. He would chip away at your emotional stability and sense of self worth slowly, with hundreds of tiny incidents you can't quite point to as individually causing your depression but which all add up to an insurmountable psychological hurdle over time. And all the while he'd be smiling and seemingly oblivious to your situation, because if he was some edgy dark shadow thing then that would mean he understands, that it's something else causing this, that it's just a DC 15 will check to resist, that it's not just the fact that you are shit and no one likes you even though they try their best to pretend otherwise.
Basically he'd be the concentrated, ultimate form of the people who "just don't understand" and make things worse when they try to make them better.

Self insertion with the power of a deity chucked in.

Eh

A gigantic grey amorphous blob that lives in solitude in some kind of bleak swamp as its own deity.

His/her only distinguishable feature is a collection of plant life that has grown atop of it that drapes into a smiling face.

He/she often mutters depressing maxims to passing travelers that accidentally wander too close to him/her with extremely convincing results as seen by the dozens strewn around her/him, sunken in the root and mire of their very own doing.

He/she is revered by his/her wisdom that humanity is but a fragile beast, desperately clawing at every opportunity at satiety.
Despair is his/her curse and reconciliation her sought after blessing.

I imagine him as a sorta deluded fool who thinks of himself as the god of truth or some shit like that, not necessarily depressed himself.

I think an actual depressed god would have a different domain with ties to escapism like pleasure, wealth or ignorance.

There is already actual iconography, historically connected to depression: It's melancholy. Read Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.

Pic related is also arguably the most famous depiction of personalized melancholy and/or depression in history.

Personally though, I think the symbolism needs to be a little more refined and perhaps less figurative. The God of Depression should have many forms, each subtle: a thin spiral of smoke, and autumn apple tree surrounded by rotting apples that nobody picks up, the caw of a crow.

If you must embody it in a form of a person, I'd say an image of a woman rather than a male one makes the most sense: one that invites, embraces you, wraps you in her cloak. She wears a veil over her face, but she takes it off for those she deem worthy: She is beautiful at first glance, and adorned by jewelry. Only once she approaches you and holds you in her embrace you notice her face is just a porcelain mask, and her robe hides the disgusting, unnatural thinness of her limbs - her body being little more than skeleton wrapped in skin. But by that time, it is too late for most people.

The Sleepwalking Lady, they call her. She is said to wonder lonely roads in fall or winter, her black coat lined with black fur. Others say she is always accompanied by a flock of crows, and can indeed turn into one herself. Her eyes are cold and dead, but her voice is soft, beautiful and inviting.

That is how I'd envision the embodiment of depression.

>magic square has 1514 in it, the year that the painting was commissioned
that shit will always impress me

That'd just make me self-insert as a god in my setting

Well, since you are going to spend a good couple of months working on that painting, you might as well spend some time thinking how to have fun with it. Advantage of art that comes from craft rather than conceptuality.

A being who realized taking all off the sadness and depression of the world is useless and stupid, as such she envoys vindication and vengeance to make the sadness and depression go away.

Even if doing that ends up in a cycle of further sadness and vengeance and hence death and depression.

>you might as well spend some time thinking how to have fun with it
and learning mathematics

I actually think that for people making this kind of technically very elaborate art (engraving is not just fucking around with a chisel), solid math skills are actually pretty much given.

I'd basically fluff her like Death from Sandman. Very nice, happy, pleasant, unfortunately she knows what her presence does to people and is very sympathetic. Doesn't change a fucking thing.

Not to mention renaissance painters knew their shit. They put in little details and snipes like that all the time, like that one painting of a baby angel flipping off the Pope.

Depression would be a moe hikkomori girl who never comes out of her room

She's a fickle goddess but offers of take-away and gunpla can be exchanged for miracles

It's a horrible psychic thing that latches onto people's brains and just leaves them drained. Makes everything feel grey and hollow. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it'll just be there for a single season. (Usually winter.) Other times, it stays forever.
I quite like this one.

Which, again, I think comes from the sheer amount of actual hard and time they had to invest in their works.
For a moment, I actually wanted to argue that making a gnomon magic square should not be that hard considering that all you have to do is to make all five four-digit squares add up to 34, but then I realized that the numbers have to go from 1 to 16 and can't repeat themselves. I'm dumb.

A whiny faggot deity who self diagnoses himself with a disease he doesn't understand or by some quack, because he decided that this would be what eats away at him because that's his go-to crutch, as he can't come to grips with the fact that his petty pride is just unfulfilled. An absolute meme supreme of a god that chuuni shitters eat up.

Damn, that is a lot of salt.

Someone touched by the god of denile

How is this even a question?

God of Depression has no mouth nor eyes, his fetus like body is wrapped in chains. He manifests himself through absence of activity or through blank mental work.

It lives shrouded not in darkness but in greyness. It's realm isn't unpleasant but simply grey and without interesting features. An endless plain of featureless grey, dotted occasionally by its reclusive denizens. It looks out into the world and finds mortals that give It even the faintest flickering of interest, and bestows upon them Its misguided gift.

Those touched by the god of depression slowly lose feeling and emotion. Their moments of happiness are less intense, but so too are their moments of sadness. This God believes this tradeoff to be perfectly fine and balanced. It comforts mortals in their desperation to be rid of Its blessing, shows them how to join It in its realm. It loathes suffering, and so invites these mortals to Its grey realm, so that they might be together in their emotionlessness.

It is not evil. But It does not understand mortals. Still It seeks to give them It's gift.

South parks interpretation of Edgar allen poe

No gods of depression in my settings, they all committed suicide shortly after they came to existence

Actually quite happy all the time and pleasant to be around


But everyone around him becomes fucking melancholy and the only way they can be happy is to hang around him more. The melancholiness fades after awhile, but why be melancholy when he's always there for you.


He only hangs out one on one and stuff. He can be in many places at once, but only one person can see an instance at any given time

...

Depressingly

I imagine it as a sort of comforting figure. It comes to those susceptible to it, and embraces them, numbing them to their pain. But like a painkiller addict that started because of an injury, at first it was helpful but it spirals out of control. Like a doting nurse the god gives them more and more numbness, until the mortal cannot bring themselves to even exist anymore. Then the god, disappointed at the mortal giving up but ever loving, brings the mortal personally to their afterlife.

What's the afterlife like?

This but it has the gasalt personality of everyone who posts on /r9k/

>This level of shit taste
Pic related, Depression incarnate, literally imposes it on you.

Whose worse, the God of Depression or God of Madness?

Holy shit, why did no one else think of this? Now we just need to make a Dementor god.

Because there are other options.

Like this worthless dyke, who gets bullied by her own familiars (who are all named after basically every flaw she sees in herself), and genuinely believes that she deserves every moment of the hell that her life has become by betraying her bff / love interest.

like this.

Give them a broader role, first off. Not just clinical depression, but every form of mental misery. Grief and mourning, ennui and longing, paranoia, apathy, dread, guilt, and suspicion, and more besides. In all his forms he eats your soul from the inside out - maybe he's your guilty conscience, refusing to let you live with what you've done, keeping you awake at night. Maybe he's your existential despair, consuming your ability to care for those around you - they'll all turn to dust in a blink of the gods' eyes, anyway, why bother helping? You're not accomplishing anything.

Maybe he's that nagging feeling that the world simply expects too much of you. The burdens you bear are so heavy, aren't they? No one ever prepared you for this, no one told you how you're supposed to carry the weight of the world. Everyone just expects you to know how and suck it up? Why are they all so cold?

Maybe he's that feeling you get, as you lie awake, that no one ever loved you and no one ever will. You exist because they allow it, and you will end when they demand it. Killing you is simply less convenient to them than letting you continue to stew in this.

And he does, specifically, EAT the souls from the inside out, and digest them. Sometimes he's done eating, but the body still has decades left to live - so he leaves a few crumbs and lets it go through the motions, the person inside the shell having ceased to exist.

Obviously physical injury would go to a different god.

Maybe a god of despair would work better? He would be quite powerful, especially since despair and self-loathing tends to be a self-reinforcing loop.

Hope this isn't from anywhere because
>Y O I N K E D

>Dementor god.

I see them as angels of the depression-god. Possibly his tormented metaphorical kids, or the product of premeditated suicides.

Constantly happy and energetic clown/jester that sucks the happiness away from people ten mocks them for being sad

His happiness and energy are part of a literal mask he wears. Unknown to most mortals, when he takes it off, he's even more down in the dumps than his victims.

I always get the last laugh

I came here to post this

Interesting dementors stuff

This is a great book.

Pic related

I would say he is not a god, but a great mage cursed by the gods to live for all eternity, without being able to feel happiness. But as a great mage with eternity to use, he is now able to steal happines from other people. The ones who kill themselves because of him become cursed as well, becoming his servants

Dementors literally cannot die, they're some sort of actual spiritual fungus Wraith caused from the stagnation of suffering borne from horrible events. Some mad wizard had a fucking Hostel island going on where he tortured non-wizards day in.out in his tower, then after being defeated, these things showed up.

Statistically, they drain levels, spells, prepared anything, ability scores, and impose heavy roll penalties, because again, when they suck out your happiness, you end up left with nothing but the bad stuff, and even then, there's the fact that these things basically have an illithid tier Coup-De Grace that works when you have low INT or Wis or basically are on the brink of madness, depression, and the incomprehensibility of True Nihlism, And even then, sucking out your soul DOESN'T EVEN KILL YOU BUT RENDER YOU A VEGETABLE.

Oh, and nothing actually kills them or hurts them beyond the application of a simple trick.

So yeah, these things are basically the omni-wraith. Oh right, aura of cold, so frost damage to boot with frostbite effects. They're like, the one obstavle that can only be beaten by using consumables, namely, food, but if you're not in a d20 modern or HP setting, then you're fucked without chocolate.

Poorly

>his "insightful reference" is harry potter.
>calls anyone else shit taste
not even the best British metaphor for depression.

Spooky

Fpbp, holy shit.

She's a young girl with a distant stare and a grim smile. Depression is sickly pale and residing in a calm ocean. She appears to those dwelling on suicidal tendencies, an echo of a siren song lulling them into a sort of sullen trance until it's the only thing on their mind.
For the truly sullen that make it to her realm after death, she holds her arms out beckoning them to come to her. She cradles their head in her arms against her breasts. "It's alright. It's over. Everything is going to be okay." she soothingly whispers as they begin to drift to sleep.
Suddenly, the rush of water as you begin to drown, her deceivingly strong arms holds them under as the waters start to rush and rob them of their breath.
It's a cold and slow death as you slowly sink to the bottom. The ocean is clear, at the bottom of the sandy seafloor are thousands of others deceased and undisturbed. They sleep undisturbed as the waters seem to preserve them.
Just as you're about to hit the floor and join them, everything goes white. The last thing you hear is the girl again, this time with a friendly and playful laugh. "It's going to be alright. I'll take care of you."

Creepy