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Author Topic: Deities  (Read 4571 times)

Sabreur

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Re: Deities
« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2012, 08:51:21 pm »

I'm all for anything that gives religion more of a punch past "This God Cursed This Guy (Who profaned his temple) with some Werechinchilla disease" or something like that.

Agreed.  I like the idea of gods playing a more active role besides just handing out curses during worldgen.  Holy wars sound interesting, but that's already sort-of handled by the ethics system. 

Maybe make it so that if a deity is pleased with your fortress (nice temple, lots of worshipers, regular sacrifices?) they will bless your fortress in some way.  Maybe give all of their worshipers a happy thought, give a useful mood to one of your dwarves, or a gift your fortress with an artifact weapon.  A pissed-off deity could curse your fortress - an unhappy thought for all their worshipers, causing an undead outbreak, driving a random dwarf insane, or cursing a random dwarf (players will probably weaponize this, but that's part of the fun).

Make some artifacts 'divine' in nature.  When a dwarf enters a fey, fell, or possessed mood there is a chance that the inspiration is from a deity instead of a random spirit or their own drunken brain.  The artifact produced will be appropriate to the deity in some way - incorporating an image of the deity, made out of a material the deity favors, recording an event the deity was responsible for (like cursing someone), etc.  Deities get angry if anything bad happens to a divine artifact.

It would also be neat if deities could make demands, perhaps by possessing one of their worshipers.  "Deity McBig, god of magma, speaks through Urist McWorshiper, demanding that a great temple be built in his name!" They could demand a temple, demand a better-quality temple, demand an appropriate sacrifice, etc.  Meet the demand and the deity becomes happier and more likely to bless your fortress.  Fail and the deity curses your fortress.  This could be especially fun if a god of death takes an interest in your fortress and starts demanding the sacrifice of sentient beings!  I like to imagine players deliberately provoking a war with another civ to ensure a steady supply of sacrifices - or maybe just using an altar as an 'immigration services' department.  Or maybe even deliberately ignoring demands for the sake of performing science on the inevitable curse victims.

Bohandas

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Re: Deities
« Reply #16 on: June 06, 2012, 08:59:38 pm »

Quote
There should only be one type of each deity, if possible

In Greek Mythology there was Hades, Cronos (who later took control of the Elesium fields), and Death (who I forgot the name of).


Thanatos. His name was Thanatos.

And yours is definitely a good point. A lot of pantheons had multiple deities of certain things.

An even more potent example would be the fact that the Ancient Egyptians had at least nine sun gods: Ra, Horus, Khepera, Bast, Sekhmet, Aten, Hathor, Nut, and Uadjet.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2012, 09:07:07 pm by Bohandas »
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Nyan Thousand

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Re: Deities
« Reply #17 on: June 06, 2012, 09:41:31 pm »

Quote
There should only be one type of each deity, if possible

In Greek Mythology there was Hades, Cronos (who later took control of the Elesium fields), and Death (who I forgot the name of).

And those arn't all the "death sphere" gods in greek mythology but it gives you the idea of multiple gods of the same type. Though a more well known combination would be Ares and Athena who are both gods of war.
Hades was a god, not the god of death, but more technically the god of the Underworld. I'll give you this one.
Cronos was a titan, and he was usually either still imprisoned in Tartarus (you can think of this as Hell), ruler of Elysium (Heaven) or King of the Cyclops.
Thanatos was the demon personification of death, think of him as the Grim Reaper.

As for Ares and Athena, while they might be both gods of war, Ares focused on the actual warfare aspects while Athena was more of a god of wisdom and intelligence, which included military strategy and not being dumb enough to do dumb shit during wartime.

My point is, gods don't really conflict themselves. There might be two gods in one pantheon who are both "gods of X" but only in the most general sense, if you go to the specifics you'll see that they're not the same at all.

On the topic of the Egyptians and their many sun gods: I don't really know a lot about Egyptian mythology, but I would assume that the case is the same as the Greeks, or they worshiped different sun gods at different eras (like, Ra back in 1000BC then he went out of style and people worshiped Bast instead, that thing).

I like OP's idea. We really should do more with religion. I'd like to see monotheistic cults too, since that's actually a thing (i.e. Christianity is a thing).
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Neonivek

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Re: Deities
« Reply #18 on: June 06, 2012, 11:19:24 pm »

There are two other names for Titans: Primoreals and Elder Gods.

It is weird how people have transformed gods into a non-godly form when really... by all means they are gods in everyway.

But I've grown a tad tired of people saying stuff like "Gaia wasn't a god she was a titan" where I have to go "Then Gaia is an elder god"

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I'd like to see monotheistic cults too, since that's actually a thing


True that has often made its way into fiction. Religion with only a single diety.

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if you go to the specifics you'll see that they're not the same at all

I was speaking on a sphere basis. Though you can get dieties who do the exact same thing. Often it is from major and minor gods. In some diety systems there is single gods who rule over one aspect (lets say the sun) but they have lesser gods who they rule who are supposed to control lesser aspects.

So there could be a god of the sun. Under him is the God of the sun in the east and another is the god in the west... So on and so forth.

It would be neat to have a Divine Beaucracy but that may be a bit beyond Dwarf Fortress (I mean no offense to Dwarf Fortress... but it is a complex system)
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Nyan Thousand

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Re: Deities
« Reply #19 on: June 06, 2012, 11:34:10 pm »

Except Athena's main thing was wisdom and not necessarily war, unlike Ares, who was straight up Laconian in his stride. And fine, Cronos was an elder god. He still doesn't have any conflict with Hades, since he was either imprisoned, somewhere else entirely or doing something completely different, depending on who you ask.

I see your point though. Since Death or Fire is such a broad topic, we could get a lot of gods handling different aspects. God A could be the god of oxygen atoms, god B the god of ignition, god C the god of hydrogen, god D the god of combustion and god C the god of flashpoints, for (an extremely ridiculous) example. I think, however, to keep things simple we should just stick to one god per topic. Imagine if you had seven gods for seven aspects of warfare. Imagine how annoying conducting war would be.
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Neonivek

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Re: Deities
« Reply #20 on: June 07, 2012, 12:49:23 am »

Quote
Except Athena's main thing was wisdom and not necessarily war

Dieties had multiple spheres. For example Hermes was the messanger of the gods as well as the god of roads and luck.

Now Athena and Ares were gods of war and Athena was also the goddess of wisdom. Though you are right Athena was more about strategic neuanced war while Ares was about hardfought near barbaric warfare.

Afterall Athena was the patron goddess of Athens and Ares was the Patron god of Sparta.

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Imagine if you had seven gods for seven aspects of warfare. Imagine how annoying conducting war would be

Is there a reason you need to involve all of them? They can share. I mean... There were a LOT of Greek gods of Fire.

No reason two gods cannot share the EXACT same job and just share responsibility. Though nothing to say that the divine word is that ONLY one god can be the TRUE god of lets say... sportsmenship.
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Broken

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Re: Deities
« Reply #21 on: June 07, 2012, 06:39:16 am »

I would like to see a world gen parameter that allow to change then number of gods, ranging from abrsudly amounts of them to a few, or even
one or none. And, when gods begin to actually doing something, parameters that check how much the gods affect the world.
So you will be able to make a world whithout gods, or a god with lots of godsthat don't actually do anything(like now) a world with two
rival gods who send emissaries in a regular basis, or wharever you want.
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Sabreur

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Re: Deities
« Reply #22 on: June 07, 2012, 12:33:25 pm »

I think we're overthinking the whole 'spheres' thing.

The core idea is that rivalries and holy wars between deities would be cool. The exact mechanics of how it happens is less important. Perhaps dieties have personalities that affect how they interact with other gods. So a jealous god might hate similar deities - so one fire god might hate another fire god.  Another god might hate deities that are too different (like a death god hating a nature god).
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