Help me with my Godless world! (Gods as Thoughtforms)

Exactly, it's certainly ripe for abuse by clever players, but it does have the caveats of; If you want your prayers to be answered you have to sincerely believe, and it has to be within the wheelhouse of that particular "God". Also, the power of that "God" is relative to the number of worshipers and the amount of time that people have been believing in it.

It's a very good point that it really doesn't matter if gods are real or not to the common person (or even the players to some extent) because whatever gets results gets results, and while I knew that going in, you bringing it up makes me realize I'll have to drop a metric ton of clues about the true nature of the "gods" if I want to use this in game.

If you have any particular ideas how to differentiate God-forms from traditional Gods, I'm all ears, So far what comes to mind for me is that Direct requests/prayers work (e.g. Healing spell, cure disease, smite) indirect appeals or prayers with ambiguous requests don't (e.g. "Please help guide my daughter through the Labyrinth on her quest") - But I don't have any hard and fast ideas yet how to really implement this - it's mostly an RP idea so far.

What excites me most about the "Gods Awakening" story arch is that once you give intelligence and autonomy to a process that used to be a law of magical physics, it's going to start acting in ways that are not as predictable. I also like how it's a reversal of the Adam & Eve story, ... Maybe it's a parable about Artificial Intelligence?

I'm not sure how this would affect thing game-play wise, but for the sake of world building you could toy with the idea that while these god-concepts start out as monolithic ideas, the people believing in them can fragment and disagree. Thus, over time, the devotees of say, Rain could be splitting into opposing sects, one of which prays to Rain as a bringer of life and waterer of crops, and the other paying homage to the destructive power of storms and floods. The thought-form god of rain would split into these two aspects as defined by its worshippers. Perhaps your players recognize that a sect or cult is about to empower a violent and dangerous thought-god through their worship, and they must stop it. Perhaps the awakening of gods happens while one of these gods is going through a redefinition or split, and it creates an unstable, split personality deity that must be aided by clerics.

There was a story told on one of my podcasts (I think it was DMB?), about a man who was lost in a desert. A coyote comes to him to eat him. In his fear upon facing death, he imagines the coyote being more than it is in order, almost reasoning why this is about to happen. The coyote must be something more, an embodiment of death or the cruelty of the desert. The coyote then speaks to man, saying that it's the "curse of reasoning" (or something) that gave him intelligence. That the man thought the coyote was something more and this the coyote become more. I think this thought process would help when the thought forms become "awakened".

It would be awesome if you set a number of combinations, then let the players decide on what thought forms are combined with what to create your entire pantheon! I'm sure that would mean a lot to your players.

I read that whole thing Nevvur! Pretty good stuff. I especially liked the very alien thinking of the gods - that they were not aware of the mortals until the mortals did something worth being aware of - that really makes sense to me. I like the idea of the ultimate gods being Creation and Entropy and that they are *not* at war with each other, It seems like every Pantheon revolves around Gods at eternal war with each other, and it's nice to have that shake up (even if in your idea, the lower gods of words do sometimes war with each other).

I particularly like how you describe the Astral Plane and the Third Eye (Drigen), I might have to incorporate some of that into my Astral Plane ideas when I get that far - trying to create a system that lacks conscious gods but has god-like forces creates some interesting problems. I like how you describe souls of dead mortals in the Astral Plane.

Anyway, well done.

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I've been thinking about whether or not there really needs to be a Game Mechanic difference between Traditional Gods, and God-Like forces, and I keep coming back to No. For me, this is primarily a story-telling idea. and Also a plot device that could really challenge truly faithful characters when they discover the truth. I could see a Game Mechanic like Friartook describes of a PC created idea about god becoming real, but for my own games, the process would have to take decades, if not centuries. It'd be something that would let the PCs influence the future of my world, but it wouldn't necessarily influence the current campaign - And even then, If I ran it, that would only create a God-Like force, not a conscious intelligent God.

In a paradigm where gods depend on mortal belief to sustain their very existence, interventionism is a logical outcome. Divine or mortal, an intelligent being prefers existence to nonexistence and will generally strive to continue existing. Granted, this observation suffers from anthropomorphic bias. It works fine for my cosmology, since gods are literally the collective beliefs of mortals, and the will to survive is a suitable byproduct of that genesis.

That said, it's A logical outcome, not THE logical outcome. There are plenty of reasons for gods not to intervene, but once you establish a link between mortal belief and divinity, I think it requires more contrivance to explain why the gods don't meddle in mortal affairs than to explain why they do. The obvious alternative is to hand wave their detachment as inscrutable or unimportant to the narrative, but this isn't satisfying to me as a world builder.