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Today’s release of episode 19 of the Save or Die Radio podcast brought back my trials dealing with gods and deities while playing Dungeons and Dragons.  Everyone has their ideas on how gods should work, and after many years of DMing, I came up with my own structure.  I lay that here for you.

But first, some back-story.

      When I started DMing, I was much more comfortable leaving the gods out of it, so to speak.  They were entities that were prayed to, that were worshipped, but we never really saw any action from (with the exception of the divine spellcasters, of course).  I had trouble understanding the true role that deities played.  It always made little sense to me how we could have all these gods that never seemed to interact with their followers, and for what reasons exactly did they grant their power to their clerics?  Why don’t we see epic clashes of good versus evil on a cataclysmic scale on a daily basis?  I had left them that way for a very long time, until one day a friend of mine was discussing with me an encounter he had participated in where a player challenged a deity to battle.

      I was floored, but the DM went with it, and set up an encounter.  He placed his “god” at the end of a long, straight path, and announced to the party that said god had a single hit point.  He had the party arranged at the other end of the path and roll initiative.  The god had a larger initiative bonus, and summoned fifteen ancient black dragons simultaneously between himself and the party.  Next round, fifteen more dragons were summoned.  At the end, the god revived them and sent them on their way, with pretty much a “Don’t fuck with me, children.”

      While it was an effective method in demonstrating that gods were that much more powerful, I thought it cheap to make a farce of the characters like that (though, the characters DID ask for it).  I wondered how the absence of gods from the game might affect how players work.

      I went about trying to creating a world where there were no gods at all.  Other games do it, but in D&D there is a mechanic of having the different type of spellcasters.  My problem lay in the fact that divine spellcasters are under special rules because their powers are granted to them by deities, such as not having the armor check.  I was forced to keep coming up with reasons why they were able to get their power so easily when there were no gods to receive their power from.  After much tweaking, I ended up with some kind of cross between an arcane Sorcerer and a Cleric, just another Sorcerer with different spells and no armor requirements.  It was not balanced, and way too much work to upkeep throughout a campaign.

      For D&D to work, I decided, you need at least ONE god.  Why not go with that?  I decided a single Creator would make a lot more sense, and would be that much more powerful, awe-inspiring, since there were no other entities like him.  Then there would still be a “someone” to get spellcasters’ powers from, and would keep the distinction between arcane and divine spellcasters.

      This actually worked for a short time, before we ran into a serious problem: this logically eliminated evil clerics.  I never really thought of a “neutral” single god, where he would grant power to just about anyone and let anybody do what they wanted with it.  Part of the D&D environment was the motivation of a character to do their deity’s bidding, and to have greater power the more their actions seem to “coincide” with that of their patron (the paladins are the greatest example of this, with the greatest penalty for going against it).  If my single god were to have interests for them to follow, they could not be both good and evil.  That made no sense.

      Back to the drawing board.  My mind went back to that encounter, where other than the super-godly abilities, the god followed the same rules and game mechanics that the players themselves used.  The DM (although tauntingly) announced that the god had a single hit point.  What if a clever player managed to come up with some feat or chain of events that surprised even the DM and managed to deplete that one hit point?  Could the god *really* be killed?  Was it no different than the player, in the end?

      That is when it hit me.  What if they were?  In the third edition rules, a 20^th level monk gained the Outsider status, where they were no longer of this plane.  What if he kept going?  What happened at 40^thlevel?  At 60^th?

      I imagined a world where there was a single god.  This god created everything, and created a number of magical sources that I call magic engines.  In the beginning, all creatures could freely draw and use the different engines.  Peace reigned, and love flourished.

      Before too long, the different races began to find evil uses for magic.  The world descended into chaos.  The spellcasters began to learn to defend themselves with magic, and eventually, how to seal off access to the magic engines.  Different mortals laid claim to the engines, until the twelve strongest in the land became the sole owners of the world’s magic.  Those who linked directly with the magic engine gained special powers, such as stop aging, which prevents the user from dying from age, and unlimited scry, providing them the ability to see what was going on anywhere in the world.  They also receiveengine rest, allowing them to replenish their daily spells with only a short rest, and are immune to critical hits.  Reaching a kind of cosmic stalemate, unwilling to lose the power of the magic engines to their opponents, they separated themselves from the world, and fought their battles through others, granting them power through themselves, waiting for the opportune moments to strike…

Millennia go by.

      Arcane magic became popular, as people turned to other ways to cast spells.  Fact gives way to rumor, and rumor to legend, until the Twelve are looked upon as gods.  They grant their power to those who would follow their teachings, and fulfill their agendas.

      This is the setting my players begin play in.  The “deities” they worship are simple characters that I level to level 65, following the standard D&D progression rules.  They gain the abilities listed above for being linked with the sources of divine magic.  They are nigh-unstoppable… but not impossible to defeat.

      The players start the game with the assumption that their gods are full-fledged deities.  They still worship them and treat them no different than the D&D manuals provide.  Depending on the setup of the campaign, they may never deal with the Twelve directly, and therefore my little back-story is irrelevant, but there have been a couple of campaigns where someone questioned the authority of the gods, learned the truth, and decided to quest to take one down.  No one has yet to do so, but they are not impossible to kill.

      What makes it really fun in this manner is that the gods are approachable creatures that you can interact with and they have emotions and feelings like anyone else.  They can be happy at what you do, or be completely pissed off.  May the gods help you if you make a personal enemy out of one the Twelve.  Literally. As in, you better go ask them for help.