Gods

by Andrew Gronosky

Everything in Drintera has a spirit: rivers, mountains, trees, and even manufactured items such as houses and clay pots. Gods are simply spirits with whom mortals have learned to interact. Specifically, gods receive offerings from mortals and bestow blessings in return.

Gods are usually the spirits of natural features or forces that are important to mortals: the sun, the earth, the wind, the sea. The abundance of spirits means Drintera has countless gods, great and small. Each culture and each settlement decides for itself which gods are most advantageous for them to petition.

In real-world mythology, the roles of gods and their influence are often multifaceted. Consider Apollo in classical Greece. He’s often described as god of the sun, but that’s only one of his divine aspects. He was also a god of music, archery, and medicine. He delivered prophecies through his famous oracle at Delphi. The gods of Drintera are often similarly complex.

The Council of Heaven

Twelve of the most powerful gods personify worldwide forces of nature, such as the sun, the moon, and the sea. These twelve gods are universally recognized by all people. They didn't create the world, but they work together to keep it running. Mortals call them the Council_of_Heaven.

Throughout history, individual gods of the Council have tried to guide chosen mortal societies toward a better world. Each of the gods has different ideas about what a perfect society would be and how to achieve it. When gods' competing visions lead to bickering and then heated argument, the Council of Heaven convenes to settle their disputes before the world literally stops turning.

All people in Drintera recognize the Council of Heaven and agree on its members' powers and personalities. But each society views the Council through its own lens. When orcs sculpt an idol of Taecant, god of war, they portray him as an orc. The sun goddess Zuvinar might be the chief god to a culture of cereal farmers, but may be much less important to hunter-gatherers.

Myth, Dream Logic, and Magic

Drintera’s mythology is governed by dream logic, similar to real-world myths. This results in events that appear weird and disorienting to the typical mind, with meaning open to myriad interpretations. In myth, events often flow into one another without explanation. For example, in the ancient Roman poem Metamorphoses, living snakes grew out of the spilled blood of Medusa. In a myth from China, the goddess Nüwa one day started kneading water and fine earth together and the first humans took shape. In myth, the actions of the gods sometimes cause world-changing events without their conscious intent.

The non sequitur of one event morphing into another is called magic. Magic is how Drintera works. It can't be understood by mortals on a rational level. The gods didn't create magic. They have learned its mysterious rules through millennia of experience. They live and breathe magic the way mortals breathe air.

The Council of Heaven has worked for ages to make the world more stable and predictable, establishing what mortals call the laws of nature. Nevertheless, Drintera is still full of strange happenings that even the gods can’t explain. Gamemasters, remember that dreamlike weirdness is an option whenever the gods and magic are involved.

Religion

Main article: Religion

In a world where all people recognize the same gods of the Council of Heaven, one might presume they'd also agree on how to conduct religious ceremonies and build institutions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is mainly because the gods don't see any use in telling mortals exactly what do. Most gods prefer to let mortals run their own day-to-day affairs, offering only the occasional prophecy or holy text as guidance. As long as mortals show up on time with the proper offerings, the gods are pleased and grant their blessings (or withhold their wrath).

A secondary reason is that religion is part of society, and each society has different needs that religion can fill. Certainly religion always has a spiritual component. But it also has an important social role. In some societies, religion supports the government, or it may even govern the people directly. Religious authorities often shape or write laws. Religion may have an economic role, with the priesthood levying tithes, directing public works, or distributing charity. Religious organizations may be responsible for formal or informal education of the laity. Finally, most societies rely on divination for making important decisions, such as when to begin an ocean voyage or who to select as king. Religious leaders usually perform such divinations.

Religions therefore differ not only in their doctrine (including which gods are considered most important), but also in their degree of organization, leadership structure, status and power, separation from or integration with secular society, and ceremonial and divinatory practices. There's an endless variety of religions in Drintera.

Offerings and Blessings

The primary characteristic that distinguishes gods from other spirits is that gods can be appeased or petitioned through offerings. Offerings take many forms. Valuable objects such as silver, gold, and gems may be cast into deep water or into a fissure in the earth. Incense, herbs, or food may be burned on the god’s altar. Animal sacrifice is commonly practiced: typically the god only requires a small choice part of the carcass be burned, and the rest is cooked and served to the community or to the priests. Ceremonial dances and music are another very widespread form of offering. In organized religions, offerings may be accompanied by high ceremony, officiated by priests in special regalia, performed before a crowd of thousands or conducted in secrecy in the inner sanctum of a temple.

No god in Drintera accepts killing sentient beings as an offering. We don’t think that’s a fun attribute of a game world. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of dark cults that sacrifice people to forbidden spirits, but the gods condemn sentient sacrifice and any spirit that accepts it.

The blessings gods bestow in exchange for these offerings usually boil down to good outcomes from whatever the people are spending their efforts on. The gods' blessings ensure that crops don't fail, that buildings don't collapse, that natural disasters don't strike, or that the people aren't conquered by their enemies. Whether the petitioners achieve these outcomes by seeking favor from friendly gods or leniency from unfriendly ones depends mainly on the people's cultural and religious outlook.

Patronage

Most societies choose a handful of gods as their primary deities and honor them with the richest offerings and the grandest shrines and temples. There are simply too many gods to give equal attention to them all. Pragmatic societies usually select as their primary patron gods those who have dominion over the things that matter most to the society.

It's important to note that patronage doesn’t imply exclusivity. Gods have a limited scope of power, so it's considered normal to make offerings to whichever deity has power over the matter at hand. A society's patron gods are simply the ones people turn to most often. It's more common for a society to have a handful of patron gods than to give primary importance to just one.

Although the gods generally try to be even-handed, most would admit that they do have their most-favored nations. Being a deity's favorite society has obvious benefits, but it also has costs, and commanding the full attention of a god can pose significant risks. The gods tend to use their favorite societies to advance the plans they have for the world. If the people fall short of their patron's hopes, their patron may abandon them in favor of the next most-promising protégée.

Abodes of the Gods

Because every god is literally the spirit of something in the world, the gods of Drintera reside in the world. Manani, god of the dead, is an earth spirit and dwells in a complex of caves beneath a mountaintop. Sivora, goddess of the sea, lives in the largest coral reef in the world. These homes of the gods are physical places in the world that adventurers could travel to, not some other plane of existence. (Of course, if your game system describes alternate planes of existence and you want to keep them, you can make these physical locations simply portals to the gods' extraplanar homes.)

Roleplaying the Gods

Gods embody natural forces of the world, so they’re eternal for practical purposes. It’s conceivable that a god who personifies a river could disappear if the river dried up. If a god’s living form were to die while its source of power still existed, the god could potentially reincarnate after a short time.

Drintera's gods didn't create the universe, they are literally part of it. As a player, it’s better to think of the gods as immortal wizards than as an all-powerful, omniscient deity from a real-world religion (including Pagan religions).

Our fictional gods are singular beings that can’t generally manifest in multiple places at once. They don’t fully understand the mysteries of the universe, though they've figured out a great deal more than any mortal has. Gods often perform miracles that have effects beyond what they originally intended, due to the dream logic of myth.

Most importantly, the gods have personalities, hopes. fears, virtues. and frailties, just like any other sentient beings. The Endless characters from The Sandman comics and TV show are a good illustration of what gods of finite knowledge and power might be like.