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Post by grimmhelm on Apr 23, 2016 7:37:41 GMT
So a little thing happened recently in a friends game that I was able to watch the end of the session.
I don't know all the details and to be honest it doesn't much matter for this, but for some context here is a quick rundown of what happened.
The 'Last' god is trying to use all of his power to create a new spawn, The god's have been unable to reproduce for a very very very long time in his games timeframe and this particular god is called 'Last' not because he is the final god but because he was the last born.
He has power beyond that of his parents and is attempting to spark a new divine life into being -creating life on the level of humans and elves is still well within their power of any of the gods and is a simple thing to them.
However the god fails...badly (Nat 1 ladies and gents) and his very essence is scattered across the Astral plane of existence and his consciousness lost, a tragic end to any god.
Of course this popped a question into my head.
God's are practically all powerful beings in any world setting but what if they discovered there power had a cap, the above story could be how they learn about it if you wish.
A power cap that was slowly been drained away by every prayer, healing, attack and blessing by those that follow them in the mortal realms!
I'm still trying to figure it out for my own Godlings, though something I'm certainly going to play with.
How would the gods in your world react to such a discovery?
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Post by gholkan on Jun 5, 2016 20:53:01 GMT
This is neat, and makes me think of a place like Olympus, only the land is dark and gray, full of stumbling and fallen titanic figures: Gods who are being killed by being worshipped. If every prayer, spell, etc. slowly leached away not only part of a God's power, but the God's life force.
Like maybe there was a "Golden Age" where people figured out the rules for tapping into Divine energy almost perfectly, with completely consistent results. Over time it got harder and harder to tap into that energy, and people began to feel abandoned by the Gods, when really, their worship had almost completely destroyed them.
So, when the campaign starts, clerics who can actually call down Divine magic have started to become rare. They're rare not because the Gods no longer listen, but because the Gods are almost all destroyed.
This is kind of awesome, and I wonder if I can incorporate it into my campaign somehow.
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Post by gholkan on Jun 5, 2016 20:55:07 GMT
Sorry, went off on my own tangent without answering your question. In the scenario I outlined, the Gods would be panicking and trying to communicate with their followers to get them to stop, until they were so drained they could no longer muster the energy to do anything about it.
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Post by grimmhelm on Jun 7, 2016 7:09:01 GMT
No need to apologise, some great ideas in there.
I also like the idea of the gods assuming mortal form in order to conserve more power -massive godly forms must take a toll too.
What happens if a cleric of the same faith tried to heal the tired old man with his own essence :3
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Post by gholkan on Jun 7, 2016 12:19:42 GMT
Healing a god with his own energy would probably just weaken him overall a little bit. I am sure that there is some energy lost in the act of channeling divine energy into a spell, so it would be a net loss for the god.
Of course, if there are gods taking mortal form and getting healed by mortal clerics, is there potential for a situation like Jet Li's movie "the One" where a rogue god is trying to absorb all the energy of the other gods in self-defense?
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Post by grimmhelm on Jun 7, 2016 12:23:31 GMT
Hmm true, but you also get the moment when your Cleric realises there right infront of there god and hes just this old old man
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Post by gholkan on Jun 7, 2016 13:17:17 GMT
So, further out on a limb here, normally in D&D campaigns the gods live on a separate plane of existence. I could see a really interesting campaign idea where the gods exist on the same plane as mortals, kind of like Mount Olympus. In this scenario, clerics accessing the power of the gods slowly drains the gods of their power, but the gods didn't realize what was happening till it was too late.
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Post by gholkan on Jun 7, 2016 13:19:38 GMT
The church realizes what's going on, and rather than help the gods to escape or to heal, the church essentially puts a fence around the home of the gods and stations guards there to keep gods from escaping.
Then the church slowly uses the gods to build itself up as an institution, while destroying the beings it publicly venerates.
Several of the gods could escape, adopting mortal guise to go out and find help.
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Post by gholkan on Jun 7, 2016 13:20:27 GMT
So, it becomes a kind of divine version of "The Great Escape".
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Post by kirklas164 on Jun 7, 2016 19:52:03 GMT
There was a short story I read a while ago with gods of both limited and incredibly great power who were unable to speak a lie. And not in a "can't say something that isn't true" way, but in a "whatever I say will become reality" way. But they had a limited store of power that would recharge very slowly after being expended, and each time they altered reality by speaking about it they would lose more of that power than what had been recharged. So the worshippers of gods would often ask them for help by offering things to help them recharge their power in exchange for the ability to ask questions of the god, because if the god wasn't careful enough with the answer (or cared about the person enough), their answer would become reality. This made the gods careful and guarded, but their desire to have enough power to create if need be also meant they had to walk a tense line, giving just enough of themselves away to gain more in return. It was a really interesting story.
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