hobbygamers ~ View topic

Okay, still reading through these, but offhand points:

-I like the idea of limiting godstones to Master Stones, instead of hundreds of shards. The advantage of this is that they become much more special and powerful.

-Also, the gods are dead. Dead-dead. None of that "It is not dead that can eternal lie..." stuff. Final Dead, unless pieced together.

-The godstones are not sentient. They may influence certain emotional traits, urges, etc, but no clear, malevolent/enlightened intelligence rests within the center of each godstone. The godstones themselves just happen to function easier in certain ways. (War attuned godstones providing War and Protection domains, for example)

-As for the nature of Gods in this setting, I'm thinking more along the lines of an Olympian/Norse kind of pantheon, with gods being more anthromorphic (especially after gaining the essence of mortal faith, becoming more human-like). They were immensely powerful beings, but still possible to outwit or fool. As for divine alignments, there may even have been a few who may have qualified as "good", but remember that mortals were viewed as cattle/slaves/power sources. These good-aligned gods would have taken care of and perhaps defended their own mortal herds, but like whatever "good" noblemen there were in the French Revolution, they were lumped in along with the bad and destroyed.

-Liberators: disaffected faction of Eternals who grew to sympathize with the plight of the Secondborn to the point of attempting to raise the Secondborn from tyranny. When the gods and the Loyalists clamped down, the altruistic attempts of the Liberators became the spark of open warfare. They taught most of what is considered civilization to the mortals (writing, metallurgy, stonecraft, arcana, etc.) and would later on provide them with the artifacts that could be used by Mortals to bring down the gods.

D&D gods are formed by faith and their appearance depend on their believers. Norse gods look like humans because their believers believe they look that way. The same is true for orc gods, elf gods, etc.

However, D&D canon speaking, on the debate whether believers created gods or gods created believers is not answered. It is like a chicken and an egg debate.

Maybe the reason the gods are dead-dead and can't be resurrected is because: (note that some of these have assumptions)
a. Place of death. They got killed on their own homes. Archetypal deity death.
b. Special death. Upon their deaths their connections to faith were also severed. Since they were dependent on worship they couldn't be resurrected.
c. Lack of worshippers. Nobody worships them anymore. Or, not enough worshippers to rekindle their life spark. Wars keep population at bay.
f. Deity-like powers. Some creatures rival the powers of deities.
e. As you mentioned, artifacts! Also archetypal.