Need ideas: Land of a Thousand Gods

[kigmatzomat]

Hi Enworld. I'm helping a friend build his first campaign and the general theme we came up with was "Land of a Thousand Gods." This is a setting where every village has some protector and cities have their own "deity" living onsite. The only universal religions are elementalists (sun/fire, water, air/storm, earth) and "nature" (aka druids). The world has no "true" gods, so few priests with more than 2nd level spells, and the lack of broad civilization makes wizardry quite rare.

Each valley, mountain, or river, or particularly notable spot will be an independent community. The land varies between extremes; towering forests, bleak deserts, raging oceans, looming mountains, and only the largest city-state controls the land a week's ride from the gates.

The home setting will be a monastery/library so in many cases the players will be working from little more than scraps of rumors. What I'd like is for people to throw out ideas for locales in this world. We expect the Kurzon Boat people to revere Lady Kurzon (nymph of the Kurzon River), the Oakblood tribe to protect and be protected by the living forest (treants), the city of Tal-Athas to be ruled by their Eternal King (lich), etc, etc.

We'll be adding demons/devils/undead with the ability to possess people so feel free to improvise.

 

[Nyeshet]

Have you ever read J Gregory Keyes books "Waterborn" and its sequel "Black God"?

The setting in these books is almost identical to your 'land of a thousand gods' idea. Every river, stream, etc has a deity, as does every forest, every mountain, etc. Magic is either due to deific nature (eg: a deity or a descendent of a deity may have some power akin to their nature) or from drawing upon spirits / gods held within (either captured or willfully under an agreement to aid).

In, I think, the second book, one of the main characters - apprenticed to a shaman - has a bull spirit she captured, a swan spirit she helped who decided to help her, and a couple other nature spirits as well that she could draw upon for specific types of magic use.

Despite the commonness of deities, magic was itself uncommon. Only the shamans, the priests of the river god, and the children of the various deities could use magic - and the last was typically rare (not to mention the fact that only the children of the greatest deities could use any real magic - most of such children were simply a little stronger &/or faster &/or healthier &/or more cunning / etc than typical humans.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Have you ever read J Gregory Keyes books "Waterborn" and its sequel "Black God"?

I second this.

Great books for this type of campaign.

 

[hewligan]

How about this twist: it is an early world, in the sense that there are a thousand gods, but one day there will be a lot less because some of these gods want to rule over others. You can then have expansionist powers that use their followers to destroy other powers and obtain their followers (and perhaps even some of the energy of that god, thus getting stronger as they consume more). Other gods may want to work to prevent this happening, etc... lots of intrigue, humans getting involved in the plotting of gods, lots of good opportunity for warfare and subterfuge.

 

[kigmatzomat]

My friend's still working on the greater cosmology of the setting. We're not sure if it's post-godwar, a young world where no gods have arisen, or something else. He's planning on starting the game at 1st level so it wouldn't be more than background for quite a while. There are several half-formed ideas and I don't know which one will click for him.

I was thinking of Conan/Hyboria, with lots of little tin gods and tyrants, each isolated from the rest due to some harsh terrain or perhaps the god's power waning with distance. I'll pass along the book recommendations, though.

 

[kigmatzomat]

bumpity

 

[xrpsuzi]

Have you ever read Small Gods by Terry Pratchet? While Disc World's cosmos is drawn out over many titles, this one encapusates many things nicely.

Lots of gods, but they are anthromorphized and well... petty. They gain power with through the belief of their worshippers, and they have their own realms and spheres, and of course, amuse themselves by challenging each other's power-- often through their followers or reluctant mortal pawns of fate (poor Rincewind).

Small Gods begins with a deity that is worshipped widely, but he only has 1 true believer, so while the infrastructure of the church "dedicated" to him is vast and powerful, he power as a deity is greatly dimenished.

Has a lot of possibilities.

-Suzi

 

[ivocaliban]

Isn't this essentially Shinto?

Rokugan (Legend of the Five Rings) basically has the same concept of faith and the spirits (Shintao).

 

[Nyeshet]

Isn't this essentially Shinto?

That is actually a good point. The only exception I can think of is that in shinto the deities are more spirit than manifest / corporeal divine beings. The spirit of Mt Fuji is worshipped, but I don't think they consider Mt Fuji itself a deity - at least not in the western world sense of the term.

Shinto tends to be a veneration of that which inspires wonder - be it a mountain, a scenic view, the emperor, a master craftsman, an ancestor, a master piece, a boulder sculpted by time into an unusual form, a mythic multi-tailed fox or dire boar, etc. Rather like the view of many native american tribes, everything has a spirit - be it a tree, a rock, a person, a sword, etc, but some spirits - for whatever reason - inspire more wonder, awe, etc than others, and so they are venerated. The priests use ritual forms of purification to keep themselves 'clean' and thus not in any way 'taint' or 'pollute' the wonder of that which they venerate.

This is my general understanding of Shinto. Of course, each locale has its own slight variant of this, but the overall pattern is more or less the same throughout Japan.

This is quite a bit different from the concept of a anthropomorphized physically manifest deity such as is seen in the religions and myths of India, Ancient Greece and Egypt, Babylon, Scandinavia, and much of Europe in general, so I am unsure if Shinto is a correct reflection of the type of religion the original poster is describing. It was, however, an interesting and thought provoking statement. Thanks.

 

[Glyfair]

Hmmmm...two places I've recently been dealing with that touch on similar ideas.

Glorantha (mostly Heroquest sources, but some Runequest sources have this as well) has been moving to some lesser version of this. In Sartar every clan has their own wyter (essentially a small protector deity) and each warband can have their own version. Each theist culture has their own local protector as well.

David Duncan's The Hunters Haunt deals with a culture where every family has their own god and it passes in some way to the descendants. At least one family god becomes the god of a culture. It's the sequel to Reaver Road but I haven't read that one.