Doing Justice
to the Gods

By Joe West


Since you have clerics in the game you must decide on which gods are available for worship and spells. Every society since the dawn of man has had some god or another to make sacrifices to. But the problem begins wlth deciding which gods to include in a campaign.

May I suggest a basic starting point then about picking gods to have in your campaign. Step one, DONT PANIC!. This is a very easy way to get started with this process.

All cultures have a common theme to which gods are worshipped, generally the culture needs to explain reaility to people by saying that "the gods" are the cause of things; floods are the Seagod's wrath unleashed.

So start from the point of your campaign and ask how might things that are happening right now be interpreted as "acts of gods." The Greeks thought that the gods fought each other because they saw things they couldn't explain, Iike eclipses, as a fight between the Sun and Moon gods, where the Moon god tried to capture the Sun god and so forth.

So what is happening in your campaign that might spawn a god story? In my DARKWINTER campaign, half the world is covered in eternal winter and darkness, while the rest of the world enjoys perfect sprlng and there are occaslonal encroachments into one half by the other.

Now how might this be seen? We'll make up a god to explain it! We have a Winter/Cold god, a Night god and a Spring god for starters. They are seen as enemies, different alignments maybe, and they flght constantly for control. Here is a possible War god to consider, and since sleep in winter most often leads to being frozen to death (hypothermia), there may be a Death god allied with the Cold/Winter god.

This can bo the start of chooslng which gods to have in your world and what the politics are like among the gods. The Death god may be a neutral contender who ends winter and starts spring in one area or evil and enjoys the souls he gets who freeze to a bitter death, a god of Hardship might be in order here. So there is a prophecy about the end of the DARKWINTER, maybe Death ends it but most certainly we have to consider a prophecy/deliverer god.

Let's take another example; suppose you were doing a Dune campaign. A planet that is mostly desert, women with psychic powers, giant monster worms, etc. What does this suggest for starters? A Sun god, definitely, who rules above all, a god of mental powers (whose followers are women only), a monster god/Animal, the water god (a weak but very important), maybe an Elemental-Earth (sand) god is in order too. Since the spice helps space travel maybe an Astral god and so forth.

Any event in your campaign can be seen as an action of a god if you think it would (a) help the game by developing a god (b) be likely to be seen as a divine act (c) there really b a force behind the reality.


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