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I was thinking about this month’s Blog Carnival subject (Gods Of The Multiverse), hosted by Gonz over at Codex Anathema, when I was struck by a thought that had never occurred to me before.

Deities, by their very nature, don’t belong in Dungeons and Dragons – or in most other RPGs, for that matter.

Before you can look for solutions, you need to identify a problem. In order to solve this problem, I need to explain why I think that’s the case.

Exceptional Characters

The PCs in almost every RPG are not supposed to be ordinary, they are supposed to be extraordinary. No matter what the situation is within the game, they are supposed to be able to cope with it and turn a difficulty into victory.

And, most of the time, they can do so – but all that changes as soon as Deities enter the picture. Beings of immense power that can literally rewrite reality with a snap of their fingers – what can even an exceptional mortal do about that?

AD&D solved this problem by handicapping Deities to the point where they were not much better than extraordinary mortals of high power. Shortchanging them as a concept is the only solution.

Later versions of the game restored some of the conceptual heft of Deities, but only barely enough – and the Deities & Demigods of 3.x managed to be incompatible with the rules contained in other official supplements, so it was hardly a perfect solution.

I have often accepted the principle of these rules structures while finding other ways of expressing the concept, limiting deities within my campaigns in other, less obvious and more subtle ways. I hinted at some of this in an early post at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs.

Bottom line: Deities, as promised on the lid, negate player agency, and the only solution is to handicap them.

Ordinary Characters

Not all games employ the Heroic Fantasy mode. Johnn used to run a Murder Hobos campaign, back when he was still contributing to Campaign Mastery, for example.

Deities are even more overwhelming in such a campaign, at least in pure form. But because the characters are more down-to-earth, the watered-down official version of the deities can be just as overwhelming and not quite as out-of-place.

Limiting Deities

In both cases, though, the more integral to the campaign world you can make the limitations of deification, the better, because it permits the deities that may occur in the campaign from time to time to be more pure conceptually. In other words, it lets deities be deities.

In general terms, that’s the solution to the problem, and it’s one that I’ve been putting into practice for many years. So the sort of limitations that I have been imposing on the very concept of Deities are exactly what we need to be talking about.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to offer up a series of ways of limiting Deities. I’ve used all of these at times, sometimes just in one specific campaign, sometimes in several – and all of them (usually) without explaining the very existence of these limitations to the players in advance of the campaign; to players (and to PCs), Deities are the shiny all-powerful beacons of mythic might that they purport to be. Only through play do the cracks in this facade become revealed.

1. Conceptual Limitations

Most Deities have what my players call a “portfolio” – some attribute that is their specific focus. Thor is the God Of Thunder, Neptune is god of the Seas, and so on. The question is always, how much power, knowledge, skill, and authority do they have outside this conceptual framework?

In a lot of my games, Deities have their special portfolio and all that goes with it, in which they are supreme (or close to it); each pantheon (and there may only be one pantheon in a campaign) then has a set of more general attributes which are at a lower standard than their specialty; and there may be a third tier at a lesser standard again that is generic and applies to all Deities unless otherwise specified.

Some of my games impose a fourth layer of attributes that are applicable to demigods; in other games, demigods and ‘true’ gods differ only in their origins.

I have occasionally defined a ‘flaw’ or ‘ignorance’ – the opposite of s specialty, this is an area in which the deity is no better than the average mortal.

But always, these are conceptual limitations, i.e. limitations that derive directly from the character concept.

2. Hostages to Belief

In a number of my campaigns, I have made Deities hostages to the belief in them. Sometimes this is simply because it is Belief that gives them their power; sometimes it is because true faith is the conduit by which Clerics and Priests are empowered; sometimes, it is something more exotic.

In my Fumanor campaign, Deities found that their natures, personalities, portfolios, and abilities were in part a direct product of the belief in them, and were in part a fundamental reflection of who they were in prior belief systems. Theology was codified because that created stability and predictability in their relations with each other, but they were often blindsided by human creativity.

In the Shards Of Divinity campaign, this was taken a lot further; the Deities were not only expressions of the belief in their natures, but were hostage to changes in those beliefs. This fact was weaponized by their enemies at one time, which led to the creation of Paladins to root out heresies and dispel them.

3. Power Supply

I’ve touched on this already, but the question of where the Gods get the power that they employ to work miracles (and bestow on mortal followers) is an almost ubiquitous limitation in my campaigns. Sometimes, this is inherent, and capped somehow; sometimes, it is external and limited in some other fashion.

I always like to have Belief play a significant role – so if belief doesn’t hold deities hostage, it is not uncommon for belief to be the power supply. But at least once I decided that there was a completely distinct potency that was blocked by belief except within the scope of a portfolio. You might think that this means that deities would do their absolute best to fly under the radar and not be subject to the restrictions of Belief, but ‘unspecific deities’ were nigh-on powerless against deities within the scope of their portfolios, so it was generally considered to be a necessary evil. Nevertheless, there were a few beings who had the potential to be deities but chose not to subject themselves to that limitation.

Having deities powered by belief can create an interesting dynamic in which miracles for the faithful are needed (occasionally) to sustain belief, but to gain further power, the miracles have to be for, and be seen to benefit, the general public. At the same time, such miracles consume some of the power granted to the deity, so the results are a delicate three-way balancing act, with many different valid choices.

4. Mortal Hands

One of the most common restrictions is the Great And Powerful Oz – in which the gods have NO power against anyone but their own kind, but are able to empower mortals to be their hands, eyes, and ears.

The major variations that apply to this restriction revolve around omniscience, not omnipotence (which has already gone by the board). Are the Gods aware of everything their worshipers do and see? Are the aware only of what those worshipers choose to share? Are the gods omniscience but trapped by the multiple possible pathways of destiny? Or perhaps they are aware of everything in some fashion, but that awareness is cloaked in symbolism and allegory, with interpretation both necessary and difficult?

One idea that I’ve never used treats the Gods as the directors of a celestial intelligence agency, sending mortals (the PCs) into dangerous situations so that the Deity knows what is going on and can plan to resolve it. Of course, this puts the PCs into all sorts of dangerous situations – and once they have done their job, they have to get out all on their own….

5. Ancient Treaty/Unlocking a Door

Sometimes, Deities can have virtual omnipotence – but so do their enemies. To prevent the destruction of everything, there has been a treaty or agreement between those enemies that provides a functional restriction where none existed.

A variation on this theme gives the deities virtually unlimited power – but they have ancient enemies of similar power that have been ‘locked away’ somehow, and if the deities use too much of their power, they risk unlocking the door…

6. Cosmic Problems

Another popular choice amongst GMs who favor high fantasy is not to limit Deities very much if at all, but instead to redirect that might by giving the deities problems commensurate with that power.

A common variation is to have both deities and their enemies be equally matched, and so both sides need to resort to mortal proxies. This solution is sometimes dismissed because there is an impression that this sort of ‘proxy conflict’ needs to be imposed from an even greater force; this is actually not the case. What you need is someone at the same power level who is neutral to both sides, but who will ally with the enemies of whichever side breaks the rules. Since the addition of this third party would make either side unstoppable, neither would chance it – overtly, at least (There would undoubtedly be all sorts of stealthy under-the-table maneuvering going on!)

7. Public Relations Nightmares

Something that isn’t used as often as perhaps it should is reduction of effective power due to public opinion. You can be as omnipotent as you want, but if actually using that power overtly would cause a mass uprising against you – and potential ending of your power supply – then you are hamstrung.

Picture some divine enemies who dress themselves up as a seemingly-legitimate Faith, then willfully abuse their power (stopping just short of annihilating the mortals being deceived)… True deities might well find that they are all tarred with this brush and become forced into a low-profile existence, even though innocent. This would effectively give the clever enemies who orchestrated this PR Nightmare something close to free reign.

Deceptions of all sorts can be used in this way, effectively strangling the power that Deities can bring to bear.

8. Nonexistence

What if there were no Deities, just a bunch of Faiths who had access to Spiritual Power through the worship of congregations? If every “Divine Visitation” was a deception to further the belief in the figurehead?

Not even existing is the ultimate restriction!

9. Fragmented Divinity

This is a concept straight out of my Shards Of Divinity campaign. The story – which the PCs never learned fully while that campaign was underway – was that there was a Deity, singular, who created the universe. But he was lonely, so he attempted to create more of his kind, expecting that his seniority would keep his children in line while the resulting universe was populated with sentience and wonders.

Like all children, they chafed at the restrictions that he placed on them, and especially at the fault that he found in their creations when they sought to emulate him. Ultimately, they rebelled and tore him to pieces, shards of which were then scattered throughout reality.

When those shards encountered the fevered imaginations of mortals, they became Deities. Together, these Deities were able to expel the “Angry Ones” – the spoiled brats – from Reality, but lacked the power to destroy them; only their Father had sufficient might to achieve this.

The Deities that were so created believed fully the creation myths of the mortals, not knowing any better. They exiled the angry ones out of self-preservation, with no appreciation of the history involved. Nor did they realize that reassembling the Creator would lead to the complete destruction of his universe, which was sustained by them due to their existence as the remnants of the Creator. Of course, they also possessed all the human flaws that their mortal creators could think up.

Meanwhile, the creations of the Angry Ones were themselves a threat, and many of them the equal of anything that the Gods could create. Lacking the power to confront these enemies directly, they set about empowering mortals.

The ultimate goal of these enemies was to bring back their creators, and they worked diligently at this, to the point where success was imminent.

The PCs were supposed to discover that the Fey gained their powers of illusion from the largest fragment, which retained some ‘echoes’ of the thoughts and will of the Creator. These master manipulators had orchestrated the rise of one particular mortal and were shepherding him down the path that would leave him in possession of the Fey Shard, and able to use it to summon all the others and reconstruct the Creator, this being their ultimate and only defense against the Angry Ones.

The Fey thought that in so doing, they would be ascended and would supplant the Angry Ones as the children of the Creator. But the mortal they had caused to be born and who they were manipulating and protecting was a PC with a will of his own, and the intelligence to deduce what the Fey did not know themselves – that reassembling the creator would require the totality of the Creation to be sacrificed.

There were a couple of alternate outcomes that could result.

  • The PC could fulfill the destiny carved out for him by the Fey, destroying them and him in the process;
  • The PC could be subverted by the Angry Ones, elevating himself to primacy over them, supplanting the Creator that they had destroyed; and destroying everything else in creation;
  • The PC could choose to gather, refocus, and re-scatter the Shards, sacrificing the Angry Ones to perpetuate magic throughout existence, and elevating himself to Primacy over a new generation of Deities.
  • The PC could permit Magic to die throughout reality, erasing his own source of power, annihilating the Angry Ones, ending the existences of all beings who relied on Magic to survive, and let a Mundane World exist for eternity – and having to live with the knowledge of that choice throughout his remaining life.

Everyone involved was able to see the potential destiny of this PC, and were attempting to manipulate him toward the end that they favored while undoing the manipulations of their rivals and enemies, which was ultimately what the Campaign was all about.

10. The Snow Job

Deities in the Rings Of Time campaign were quite different. Essentially, they were flim-flam men with little actual power of their own, who ‘borrowed’ mortals of sufficient power to solve problems for them. The PCs, inheritors of a vast Dragon Hoard, whose betters had sacrificed themselves in capturing, found themselves to be the latest such trouble-shooters, and eventually ferreted out the truth. Once they had solved the immediate problem (a rogue faction of ‘Gods’), they were thanked and dumped back on the Prime Material Plane with virtually nothing to show for it while the “gods” went around taking credit for it.

They then set out to earn the rewards that they felt should belong to anyone doing the hard work of being a deity (themselves, in other words), thereby making themselves the enemies of the “gods”, who promptly recruited a new troubleshooter (the sister of one of the PCs) to deal with the upstarts.

These “gods” were not without power, but it was nowhere near what legend ascribed to them. They were more Micromanagers than Deities.

(It’s worth remembering that all this was cobbled together on the fly with ZERO prep in advance, using leftover and discarded ideas developed for the Fumanor campaign. As such, it’s surprising how coherent it all turned out to be).

The Difficulty With Deities

Most of these solutions have fundamental impacts on the truth of mythology and religion within a campaign. They may or may not have any impact at all on what is commonly believed by characters within a campaign, but the underlying reality usually gets changed – either a little, or a lot.

It therefore becomes important to have that impact integrated into your campaign in any other appropriate way; consistency is important.

These limitations will also impact greatly on the look and feel of clerical magic, on the potential for corruption and excess within organized religion, on the viability of non-belief, on the presence of multiple pantheons, on the ways Deities interact with mortals (if they do so at all), on the origins of Demons, Devils, and Undead, and on many other aspects of the campaign world.

Once you have settled on one or more limitations, you need to think through the implications in search of other ways in which these limitations will manifest within the campaign.

I especially want to call out the impact that these different solutions have on the truth, and on the perceived truth, of creation myths. These should be at the heart of the questions, “Who are the Gods?” and “Where does their power come from?” It’s no coincidence that the Shards Of Divinity example was all about the Creation Myths – both the true but incomplete ones of the Angry Ones creations, the true-but-even-less-complete ones of the Dragons who taught Mortals to use Magic, the partially-true-but-incomplete ones of the Fey, or the completely inaccurate ones told by the Faiths and the Deities that they had inadvertently created to be their centerpieces.

Where does the universe come from? Who are the gods, really? Where do they get their powers? And where does magic come from?

And, most importantly, How do you avoid the existence of Deities from treading on the toes of PC Agency in your campaign?

That last one is the real question; the others are signposts to the answer.

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