Fearing the End: Good Deities

Now.

Good deities.

As I stated in the last post, you want to make a world where your players fear the end. Then I went on a several paragraph rant about how evil deities need to give something. I did that for a reason, so I can set up an important counterpoint.

Good deities need to take things.

A lot of good deities in core games are sunshine, rainbows and self-esteem boosting nonsense. Their philosophies sometimes are pap that people can go along with. This is because most publishers don’t want to offend anybody.

To quote G.K. Chesterton, “The Christian Ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

Good deities typically should make demands. But the trick is, the demands have to be reasonable. Those demands can however be onerous because well, people are jerks.

And that, is why you need to work on the good deities to make the end scary. Because for a really scary end? You need the good guys to do it.

Ragnaroks aren’t scary. Going to die with Odin might be grim, but its something you’re average player character can undertake with an almost jovial mindset.

Cosmic Horror stories can be filled with despair, and the concept that life and existence are meaningless can be terrifying, but there aren’t really many true apocalypses in Lovecraft.

But the idea of  the good, loving deity letting the world’s sky roll up like a scroll, flames raining from heaven, death riding on a pale horse across the world, and a final judgment? That’s a bit more frightening. Its more frightening because it’s the /good guys/ doing it.

My campaign setting has one of those ‘end of the world prophesies.’ Supposedly after the recurring bad guy who shows up every few centuries or so to try to destroy the world runs out of ideas, his good superior counterpart is going to wake up and put an end to ‘everything that is not good.’ This unsettles people.

It unsettles the damn paladin.

It unsettles the paladin whose nickname is ‘Heaven’s Guillotine.’  

Why? Well, I think it ties in with a Lewis quote.

“As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable. Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played”

Imagine being found wanting. You who thought you were a good person, discovering you just weren’t good enough at the end. That your vices, your shortfalls and shortcomings have resulted in you meeting a terrible fate.

And it is a fate, which you know that you deserved.

That, in my opinion, is a hell of a lot scarier than some blind idiot god in the center of the galaxy deciding not to play his flute today and condemning all to nonexistence.

Good deities should have bits that make average people frightened of them. Not like secret evil aspects, but dogmas they struggle to really deal with, events they struggle to justify.

The party will be a bit less blasé about threats of the end of the world, if instead of approaching it like a place where they get to face down the legions of hell, they instead have to face down the prospect that if they fail to stop the apocalypse clock from counting to twelve, then their time, and the time of the people they love and care about runs out, and that fair, just judgment starts.

Fearing the End: Evil Deities

Fell behind already on my posting schedule. Yeesh.

Anyway, today’s theme is making the end of the world scary. And by that, I mean approaching a problem common in world design.

Let say our prospective deity designer sits down, has his map, has his cultures set up, but somehow doesn’t have his gods or religious philosophies built. Well, firstly I wonder how this guy has his culture’s set up, but..

He needs gods. Why? Well, gods are important, whether they be “powers,” “wizards,” “eidolons,” or the dozens of other stand ins for them in fiction and world design. They’re little polestars for PC philosophy, but where we have good aligned clerics worshiping good deities and good people following good deities, what about the evil ones?

That, you see, is the frequent problem. One I want to touch on before we move on to that whole ‘making the end of the world scary,’ thing.

Now back to the “where do enemy clerics come from?” problem, some get around this by having different cultures both have goodly deities but are in opposition. This works, because after all you had European history to go off of there. However, it seems trickier when you’re dealing with the objective good-and-evil baked into some settings.

Why would people build a temple to Lovitar, Bhaal or Bane in Forgotten Realms? Who wants to spend months erecting a benighted terror building to a deity who’s literal guide post is betrayal, murder and pain? What kind of lunatics worship Xon-Kuthon from Golarian? That we know. But who actually builds his temples, and why? Why does Bob down the street decide he’s going to throw in with a guy who’s literally a lunatic deity dedicated to pain? Finding workmen, supply trains and the like of crazy folk is difficult and not every hedge temple can be erected by zombiefied build teams or fiends.

It’s for this reason that your well designed evil deities have to have, well, a point. The point they have, is of course wrong, but it has to be something that could honestly seduce someone to following them, showing them homages and building them a doom fortress. If you can’t think of why the common man would have some reason to toss some blood on the altar, make them treated like a cult.

Only in Japan does organized crime hang a shingle outside saying ‘Hey Fuggadaboutit!’ Similarly an evil god whose sole function is to be propitiated isn’t going to have an enormous bleeding temple in town with ample underground adventuring space. Someone’s got to be motivated to build that, dig up stone, move through the earth, lunch beneath the leering eyes of the soon to be animated statuary and construct the spike lined electric shark pits. Also, even in the case of organized crime, they tend to be Lawful Evil, and give something to the community. See that’s the thing.

Evil gods like Bane from Forgotten Realms? They give something. Worship me and I will give you stability. Emulate me, and you will be strong. You can picture somebody telling you about how Bane’s religion is one of peace and order, with everyone having a place in the grandiose order set down by his iron hand.  Evil gods like Second Edition’s Cyric? They don’t give anything. “Follow my orders or I’ll freaking cut you!” has trouble dealing with the marketplace of deities. And when your clergy and practitioners pray to not be an unreasonable raving maniac like you, well, something is up.

Let’s do a more one-for-one comparison so I can try to make my rambling point clearer. Namira the daedric prince from Elder Scrolls, and Urgathoa from the Pathfinder core setting.

Urgathoa is one of those ‘why would anybody not crazy follow this god’ gods to me. The pallid princess is all about how death is the true state of the living, and also bizarrely about gluttonous and lustful excess. Her worshipers are like if you took epicureans but made them all think it’s their job to speed people along the ‘tomorrow we die’ part.

But, see the thing is this.. she’s not the only deity offering parties and licentiousness to her worshipers. We’ve got Desna, Cayden, Callistria, and even an (in my mind) inappropriately NG angel all focused around ‘do what thou wilt and pass the beer.’ Except none of those guys are demanding you murder people or consort with the dead on a regular or intimate basis. Ugathoa really works better as someone running a cult, but there she sits, pallid princess and queen of depravity with suitably large terrifying temples in creepy bad guy towns. Who, aside from necromancers, lunatics and the undead would worship this one? Like can you picture a ‘ground level’ Urgathoa follower who isn’t an orc?

Now Namira? Namira doesn’t have temples. She is entirely about cults. Secret cults. She’s a deity (of a sort) dedicated to the outcast, the things that crawl in the dark, cannibalism, ugly people and things people would rather not think about. To be honest, I think I can see people making a temple to her much more easily than Urgathoa. See, one of Namira’s thing is she also looks after the ugly, the forgotten, and those looked over. She’s the protector of beggars and undesirables. Cannibalism falls under her purview because its practitioners are those people who others despise and look down on. So you have a deity who could be worshipped not only by cannibals, necromancers, assorted weirdoes, but also by beggars, the cast off, the deformed, and people who are otherwise, well, normal but looked down on by their society.

I can see a Namiran opening an orphanage and it operating entirely normally, right down to the happy well-fed and healthy kids, except until you find out how she’s been making ends meet on her meat budget.  Urgathoa? I have more trouble there.

To summarize. Evil deities need to give something to their worshippers besides cleric levels. Otherwise they’re something that only crazy people should follow. And that’s ok. But crazy people rarely have the where withal to make large dungeon complexes.

Second Post, I guess

Second Posts, I wager, require a bit less awkwardness and more content.

Eventually I'll figure out how to embed pictures and all that junk.

Now, the content.

I, like many others, have an ongoing campaign. Two campaigns in fact, since I'm a lunatic. Both, presently are Pathfinder and both are in my homebrew campaign setting, but I'm intending to spin off and start running one in ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King) one of the new OSR games.

However, this new 'campaign' is designed around three loves of mine. Laziness, World Building and Crusader Kings.

Now see, Second Edition D&D had this campaign setting called Birthright. Birthright was mostly about kingdom management, but tacked on adventuring nonsense to it as well because well, D&D is a game you play collaboratively with your friends. Birthright, being a kingdom simulator (everybody gets a kingdom) kind of, well..

Let's just say that I don't think that the King of Medieval France, The Pope and the King of Medieval England were in a huge hurry to go and fight goblins together, in between making edicts and dodging assassination attempts.

Now, there's a play test for the Birthright Campaign out there. Its a lovely mixture of insanity, Player-Character associated goofiness and friends getting together to deal with one another like they were nations who had a barely function detente with one another. That is to say, the playtest looked like a lot of fun, but didn't really waste much time with 'I attack the darkness' boots on the ground adventuring.

That's why I decided I would run my ACKS campaign by selecting four of my players, having them think up kingdoms and then running them through the ringer. With the intention that later on down the line, those same players, or others, will have to deal with the stuff in my campaign setting. At one point I even intend to try to give them some McGuffins, treasures or dangerous beasties they have to deal with and see how they seal things up, defend them and so on. I never intend for the players in this game to swing a sword, its all about the high level management. Which works for me fine since they're all already in my Friday game.

So, it has the fun of world building as I let the players be responsible, and I get to explore new locales.

It has the fun of crusader kings because they get to be somewhat cut throat to one another and run their kingdoms how they like.

And it has the benefit of laziness since the world building will kind of mostly be accomplished by them as they play. Which will also help to make things feel more organic and further one of my aims of letting players have a 'buy in' to my campaign world. 

I figure this might make for a good ongoing topic as well. So, I'll probably drop some more posts as time go on, on this subject.  

First posts are always a weird thing.

I guess that's exacerbated when you're trying to start making a blog in 2017. I honestly should know better, but figured, what the heck.

It makes for a good locale for me to drop my thoughts into the ocean of the internet and hopefully provide some interesting reading, or insight to anybody who pops by.

Mostly, this is another nerd-opinion-game blog. One among many other.

I hope its entertaining and updated semi-regularly.