Tropic of Evil, Part 5/5: Volcano God
Well then. Looks like our friends in The Evil Party managed to find their way off that island. And from the looks of it, not a moment too soon. Dealing with the divine is always a fraught business, even if it’s “just” a minor deity.
I’ll never forget the first time I met a god. It was way back when I was a gold-dragon-lawyer-paladin. This was an ongoing, high-level campaign, and that session was to be my welcome-to-the-story session. At the time I was still brand new to the group, the setting, and gaming in general. In other words I was badly addled, both in and out of character.
This was epic level 3.5 D&D, and my character sheet was more of a character packet. My dragon dude had just woken up from a millennia-long petrification, and there were all these new proper nouns and PCs to remember. Worse though was the absence of the familiar, comforting presence in the back of my head. The pantheon I worshiped was long dead, their divine essence reconstituted into new divinities. And so, when I prayed for guidance, it was a bizarre sort of, “New god, who dis?” moment. And let me tell ya, it is all manner of intimidating to call God and have someone you don’t know pick up on the other end. I froze up. I honestly couldn’t conceive of a way to respond to that situation. If memory serves, my RP consisted of the words, “Wow,” and, “Ummm.”
Clearly, it is possible to psyche yourself out when confronted by a deity. By the same token though, there’s this equal and opposite problem that comes up when players get a little too familiar with the pantheon. If you’re on a first name basis with the gods—or worse, dare to backsass them—sublime awe gives way to farce.
For these reasons, I tend to favor divine servants, heralds, and “lesser avatars” rather than the full-on glory from on high. For example, the volcano god from my own group’s tropical island adventures was “just” a powerful elemental. He was a theoretically-possible-to-kill CR +5 encounter, but his sweet volcano lair, island full of worshipful minions, and ability to make said island explode in a fiery cataclysm was more than enough to add tension to negotiations. Despite these powers, however, he was still a being you could talk to like a normal person. And that, I think, is a key difference. An entity that possesses human-scale wants and needs rather than multiverse-spanning divine portfolios is much easier to play off of. At the very lease, my group managed more than “Wow” and “Ummm.”
So how about it, gang? How do you like to run your divine encounters? Is it all about ineffable beings that never speak directly to the PCs? Do you prefer intermediaries and servants? Or are your all about letting the heroes access the divine directly? Tell us all about your favorite The Creation of Adam moments down in the comments!
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Our group only had one direct divine encounter in an AP. My Wizard (wisely) informed the party of exactly who they were talking to. Everyone else sort of tensed up. One player was sassy on purpose however (being an atheist).
Thankfully, the Goddess of Death and Afterlife-Judging was kind to us, as the reason she appeared was that we freed the trapped souls of some of her very ancient clergy who were missing for centuries. So we were left with a very useful divine boon and only a bit of sass from the disrespectful player.
Outside of that, there was one DM-scripted divine interaction for my Desna-worshipping Vanara, after his girlfriend died in a pretty gruesome (and drama-filled, OOC) incident and he contemplated quitting adventuring. She appeared in his dream as a vision and pretty much gave him a mood lift / pep talk to not quit.
Pharasma seems to like atheists: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Death%27s_Heretic
In the sense that she can use their souls as a sacrifice/bribe to keep Groetus at a safe distance, perhaps…
If I had to DM a divine entity, I’d probably go with the ‘wrinkly friendly old person asking for assistance in a humble task’ approach, or otherwise turn an otherwise simple friendly NPC the PCs befriended into a deity in disguise.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/selfless-charity
Such an approach of course might get you accusations of railroading, or of being very predictable if they call it on the spot. It’s best used if it’s a recurring NPCs that the PCs don’t suspect of anything weird (or if the NPC keeps getting into accidental shenanigans and became a meme for your campaign).
Otherwise, Divine Heralds and dream messages are fairly ‘safe’ indirect interactions. Otherwise for very helpful good deeds or misdeeds, a divine boon or smiting-from-above is viable.
My usual approach is that players won’t directly interact with gods unless it’s a key plot point that they do. In most of my campaigns, the gods are not characters so much as ideals, only affecting the world through their believers’ actions and open to interpretation as to what they’re really like (including whether they actually grant power or clerics and paladins just draw upon their own convictions and inner strength). On the other hand, if the premise is that the heroes are personally-chosen champions of a god, have to take sides in a divine war, or are trying to overthrow the ruling pantheon, they’re bound to meet personal agents or avatars of deities at the least. It’s a case-by-case thing.
Witch can’t really complain: she was milking the blasphemy for all it was worth as well. And it looks like Succubus’ latest squeeze might be joining them as the team’s new muscle, which is a huge boon. Possibly even a gargantuan one.
Also, any scheme gone south you can walk away from is one that hasn’t killed you.
While I’ve yet to encounter this bit myself, I can’t help but be reminded of that ONE sequence in Pathfinder’s Wrath of the Righteous adventure path; where the PCs, who are supremely powerful by this point, are summoned to Heaven by Iomedae, the LG goddess of valor, justice and honor so she can brief them on a mission to the Abyss she’s sending them on to rescue her kidnapped herald.
The encounter is INCREDIBLY polarizing on the Paizo forums because Iomedae quizzes the PCs on some basic lore anput herself and essentially asks “My Herald has been kidnapped by demons. Are you bad enough dudes to rescue my Herald?” But if the PCs don’t have the right answers, or show some sort of hesitation in answering, or as you say backsass her, she responds by having her attendant angels give a divinely loud trumpet blast that causes divine sonic damage, and though she obviously stops if one of the PCs falls unconscious, some people felt that this was essentially torture, unbecoming of her alignment, especially when this sequence is her asking the PCs for their help.
To this day, some people feel Iomedae is now a LE bully, demanding arbitrary responses from the PCs and punishing them for not reading her mind. To be fair to her, though, the questions are simple enough that the answers are common knowledge to her own faithful, and the AP kind of expects the PCs to have an enthusiasm for demon-slaying, as in the book prior to this encounter they’ve already made a successful raid into the Abyss itself, so at least I personally felt the trumpets would only come out if any PCs were being deliberately confrontational in the face of a literal deity who’s on THEIR side, especially given a lot of it depends on the GM’s presentation, but even the books writers have admitted it could have done with a revision or two. Given that Owlcat Games are now hard at work converting WotR to a PC game following the runaway success of Pathfinder: Kingmaker, it will be interesting to see how they handle this sequence…
Not to get too much into the weeds, but the book is clear that Iomedea will attack you with the trumpets if you fail to answer any of the questions correctly. Actual confrontational behavior, (say because she just attacked your friends and your extremely powerful champion of goodness isn’t the kind of person to stand by meekly in the face of narcissistic cruelty) results in maiming (in the form of incurable permanent blinding and deafening if the first maiming wasn’t enough to cow you).
And failing the question is as easy as rolling below a 25 on knowledge religion/35 on history, or alternatively either giving a clear answer to to the question of whether to grant villains begging for their lives mercy, or killing them. No matter whether that clear answer is yes or no.
Sure hope you didn’t talk that over at any point during the prior 4 books where redemption is a theme complete with more than one significant NPC seeking it. also sure hope there aren’t any Sarenrae worshippers among your group.
If you somehow haven’t, you also get attack if you are too slow to answer.
The idea that Iomedae would specifically target worshippers of an aligned god with a clashing personality fits the Classical image of gods as petty overpowered douches, which I find amusing. I definitely see why people wouldn’t be amused by the god of justice pulling that though.
I’ve only seen a god-tier in a conversation once. I watched a Bard demand to speak with the metaphorical manager (an eldritch abomination) and actually got his wish.
I was the one who suggested skipping to after he died horribly.
On a less grim note, I suppose Succubus’ real name is Ann, then.
So is his hair actually fire or just look like fire? If the former, I demand (if not already done) a comic where his hair gets put out like Hades in Disney’s Herculies.
Check this page. Dude washed up on the beach bald as an egg.
I remember thinking, “I should point this out” when I saw this comment last week. TY for beating me to it!
I really need to put aside time on the weekends for correspondence….
Alright, now I have to see your Epic level stuff. I am a huge geek for that. What was your character’s basic class writeup, at least?
Also, “millenia long petrification”? Seems to be you will have some serious modernization to catch up on, a la Cap America but on a larger scale.
Luckily (in this case and no other), fantasy worlds are usually trapped in a weird sort of socio/technological stasis. There’s a decent chance the same dynasties are ruling over the same areas, without so much as a Magna Carta shaking up the political landscape.
“fantasy worlds are usually trapped in a weird sort of socio/technological stasis.
You know, just ONCE I wish someone would run a serious campaign focused around the “Captain-America”-ing of players and not just have every be the same after 10000 years or something.
Something like the first priests of an ancient god awakening to a modernized version of the city they were ceremonially entombed in.
“There’s a decent chance the same dynasties are ruling over the same areas,”
This is the worst sin. I miiight buy tech stasis, but the same polities? Really?
Note: do not use Marvel/DC as general examples though, despite my accidental usage. They have gotten BAD, to the point where they basically are unreadable.
Seriously, Marvel/DC have gotten to be medias I can’t interact with anymore, due to how shitty and often staright-up internally self-destructive they have become.
Incidentally, the average “fantasy cosmology” has gotten really overused as well.
Never discount the stories local people tell just because they’re “primitive’. They’ve learned how to live here, and they know more about how it works than a bunch of interlopers.
Granted, the fact that they assumed their volcano god incarnated as a fire genasi instead of remaining in the volcano does damage their credibility a bit…
It could happen. Uncommon, but conceivable as something that happens.
In my personal campaigns, i generally try and run deities as being very… far away, so to speak. Absent clerics or other worshipers, their ability to manipulate and interact with the mortal world is very heavy and ham fisted. When Moradin had to tell his followers “no, seriously, dont do that, youll break everything” he dropped his hammer on the world and turned the capitol of the dwarven empire into an ocean.
Mostly i do this so that the players dont expect the gods to solve anything for them. Involving the gods directly is a civilization ending nuclear event. It is basically a loss scenario for the campaign.
When you only want to ask them questions though, all you really have to do is ask nicely. My gods are fairly chatty to genuine followers and other people who follow their way of life correctly. It makes them a nice exposition dump whenever the players dont know what to do next.
I like to experiment with different ranges of gods in my setting. The largest and most powerful, Yael, is an infinitely powerful god who rules over an infinite multiverse… and is thus infinitely far away, and can’t be directly reached by any means. Detractors claim that Yael is just a concept and doesn’t really exist, and it can’t really be proven one way or the other.
The main plot revolves around the battle between two gods, Matador and Skyla, who are much closer to home. The PCs treat them with respect when they’re called for an audience, but since both gods are known to lie constantly to further their goals, they constantly sass them behind their backs.
There are a range of other gods as well, including Ztargon, a volcano god who manifested as a mindless, destructive four-armed giant, and whom the players actually managed to kill. Fun times.
When it comes to inflicting the divine upon my players, I have a very specific approach. Gods essentially have to be fractal beings that can instance themselves infinitely, and at any given time, at least one of those instances is laying on a couch in its undies watching reruns of who knows what at 3am asking themselves what they did to deserve this. Come to think of it, I think Thor Ragnarok hits on this too.
Anyways, an elite cadre of interlopers are used as intermediaries until plot or events warrant direct visitation, which I then specifically build up to be both more and less ‘as expected.’
As a PC though, it’s happened a few times… I’d like to add the flat ‘what’ to the list of opening exclamations. Sometimes meeting a god is just that unexpected. Especially if they present unconventionally or are like a super young god. And I’ve been playing long enough that I don’t consider the meddling of the gods to be all that uncommon. You might have the same experience.
Not myself, but in one of my current campaigns our Paladin has now met with two separate Deities, in person, in the span of a single level.
First to note, this is a PF2e Adventure Path campaign, though neither of these are actually scripted events. The first was during the most recent big Downtime period, going into the sixth book. The Paladin woke up in Heaven to discover he’d been summoned by his Deity, Ragathiel, directly. Now at the time, we’d just recently finished a pretty big Heist, involving a lot of minor infractions on the Paladin’s Code, and then directly violated the commands of a valid legal authority (on suspicion that doing so was in fact the authority’s intended, but unstate-able, goal), so the Paladin is reasonably concerned, and at one point his Companion (a Warg, long story) attempted to attack Ragathiel to defend him… but ultimately it turns out he’d just been summoned so Ragathiel could personally deliver the effect of his newest Feat and turn him into a proper Celestial.
As an upgrade (we’re batting pretty above official power level because the DM’s been very giving with letting us get homebrew power ups) to the feat he also got the power to Plane Shift to Heaven on Command. So, in the next adventure, when we discover that someone we need to work with knew Iomedae back when she was Mortal (another long story, and mildly spoiler-y for the adventure so I won’t go into detail), well, he popped back into Heaven, and this time he sought out audience with her. And she obliged. All in all, she was more chill than Ragathiel was. They had a pleasant conversation, and he came back to the Material Plane to fill us in on some tips he got from the Inheritor directly.
Gods are tricky out of pure asymmetry:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/epic-level-npcs
Either they think they are over you and they are right, or they think they are over you and they are wrong. Interesting thing: “An entity that possesses human-scale wants and needs rather than multiverse-spanning divine portfolios is much easier to play off of” is the reason our DM and us, roleplay gods the other way around. They are more easy your way, but more fitting of their divine status and rewarding for playing our way. A god can understand humans wants and needs but they got their own. Also we got titans, think common humans who go devil-tiger route, to have really powerful beings that can actually understand wants and needs because they still got them 🙂
Confession time: My first time having to involve a deity in a campaign was… lets say less then stellar. I dont regret getting hard with the player, but i do think i handled it in a less-then-optimal fashion.
In session 0, i made verry clear that in this world, they could expect gods to be more-then-averagely involved in the goings-on of the world.
The party (Minus a rogue, who’d missed the session due to scheduling issues) had been contracted by a local noble, and tasked with “dealing with” a cult forming in the woods. The party travels into the woods, and discovers that this so-called cult was in fact just a small church, dedicated to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis, in her aspect as the godess of “justice-through-punishment”. and that the lord is in fact merely afraid they’ll go after him for the crime he hired the party to investigate.
The party really hits it off with the priest and their daughter, and the session ends with them back in the woods getting ready to confront the noble.
The rogue makes it for the next session, and a combat-encounter goes kind-of-awry, forcing the party to return to the small steeple in the woods to get some healing in. As soon as the players enter the steeple, i realise the rogue missed last session and give him a description of what the temple looks like.
At this point i am, quite rudely interrupted, by the rogue. Who proceeds to tell me he “doesn’t care about the symbolism, or whatever… Is there anything that looks valuable”
I desperatly try to warn him about the fact that this temple is dedicated to the godess of “Punishing those who commit crimes” and that MAYBE stealing a holy relic from that god is a bad idea.
The rogue insists he doesn’t care, and rolls high enough to recognise a holy artifact that might be worth some money.
Now, in hindsight i might’ve been able to use this better. (curse him so that whenever he steals, he loses an equivalent amount?) but at the time my logic was something like “Nemesis is famous for her hatred of hubris, and what is more hubristic then thinking you, a lvl 2 rogue, can get away with stealing from the god of punishing thieves”, and just had her choose to smite him (Then had the clergy cast “reincarnate” on him, putting him and the party in debt to the church) as punishment.
Now in hindsight, i don’t know wether i made the right call in smiting him. I definitly wasted an opportunity for creative constraints, but it felt OOC for the deity in question to show any mercy in this case, as this would definitly count as a “personal offense” to her, and i did give him multiple advanced warnings NOT to steal from the temple.
(before someone asks, the cleric’s daughter was raised by druids. Hence reincarnate rather then resurection)
Depends very much on the deity. In my campaign, a few of the players actually are demigod, with all the power that entails, and basically function like normal PCs writ large. At the high end of the power scale, however, are “archetype deities” – things that a mortal could only ever interact with through an intermediary, because their presence would literally kill a mortal. The next major event of the campaign is actually going to involve the archetypal deities taking a direct interest in the ongoing war in the setting, and intervening with overwhelming force for a short period of time before the even higher ranks of universal forces, those you probably aren’t even aware of until DR 16, show up to tell them to knock it off.
I’ve never codified it before, but my scale of deific humanity is broadly as follows (note that I use DR, even though I play 5e):
Dr 1-5: you are whatever you were before, albeit with more power. Most archdevils, demon Lords, deified heroes.
Dr 6-10: you are more of what you were. Ordinary mortals barely register for you. Emotions are more fundamental, opinions more absolute. Typical archduke of hell, archangel ect.
Dr 11-15: there are still mortal elements to your nature, but your personality is now mostly what your worshippers believe and what your portfolio dictates. Only legendary mortals can earn your respect; anyone less significant than the ruler of a province or stories hero doesn’t register at all unless you’re looking for them. Your sense of self-value is accurate, and affects your view of lesser beings heavily. Powerful archdevils, demon Lords ect.
Dr 16-20: Mortals are less than ants to you. The most legendary and heroic might rise to the stature of a beloved pet rat or vicious pest. Even Dr 1-5 deities seem insignificant. You are what is believed of you – no trace of humanity remains. Your understanding transcends planes, and you exist on many levels at once. Deity in a large faith.
Dr 21-25 – Mortals, and even lesser deities, are invisible without immense effort. Your thoughts are incomprehensible to lesser beings. You are aware of the limited nature of the world, and of the presence of other worlds. All levels of power are known to you. Great enforcing power, maker of fundamental laws, sentient plane or deity of a monotheistic world of billions.
Dr 26+ – You are a force indescribable. Deities of below Dr. 11 are too small for you to notice, and all below Dr 16 are unworthy of your attention. You interact on a multiversal level. Overgod
The volcano elemental is all “Get lost! My agent’s stopping by later today to discuss my chances of getting cast as Sauron in that stage play version of Lord or the Rings!”
I’m sure the Orcs of New York will be thrilled to hear about the casting call.
There’s nothing quite as eyeroll-inducing as the player who wants to play an atheist in a world full of gods who actively smite people, and then try to argue ethics with them, almost invariably using a christian basis as their moral platform for deciding what a “good god” should act like, care about, and butt their nose into. The whole while, it’s like they’re expecting the DM to go “oh my me, your sound logical reasoning showed me the paradox of my existence, and therefor I must not even exist at all, poof! I am gone.”
To be fair, it’s a very fine balance, and you, the DM, has to be absolutely sure of yourself, because you are the “god” of the game, and therefor set the tone for all gods that you portray. There’s a fine line between “I AM OMNIPOTENT POWER INCARNATE ABOVE ALL WORLDLY TROUBLES!” and “I’m just some guy with a lot of power” that needs to be ridden to get players to buy in while still maintaining a basic modicum of respect.