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.