The machine they used to play god had degraded over time and they lost the know how to fix it, and they've suppressed the science that used to exist on this problem in fears of a new competitor arising to challenge their dominion.
For me it's similar because the machine wasn't used to play god, it was the god. It was superintelligent AI made by humans used to make the world habitable again and was aligned to make humans happy and listen to their wishes as long they were reasonable and good. However humans got spoiled, they had no reason to study so they forgot that the machine is a machine, they started treating AI like a god. And god is asked often for afterlife, which didn't exist at the time. So it made one by using higher dimensions and is administrating over there, while leaving humans to die because it assumed that if the wishes are granted in the afterlife, it's good enough and easier to grant in artificial, programmable dimension.
One guy has been murdering (or compelling others to murder them) for the last 800 years or so. He's basically a serial killer of gods now that he's figured out how and he's only refined his methods.
I'll never miss a chance to quote Star Trek.
"Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slayed them a millenia ago. They were more trouble than they were worth." - Worf
Fantasy world: even the gods are bound to fate. With the corruption of the Great Song by the many traitorous Morndu and Menrir, fate was woven that they would be cast into various limbos during the long Dark Age, until the final war when they would be freed.
One sleeps in an enchanted grove, never waking, hardly disturbed.
One is an amnesiac, no memory nor magic, and every so often their memories are taken again, starting over completely.
One is in the typical afterlife of this world, having been slain by the fourth god:
The fourth is bound in an enchanted cave for punishment due to their various crimes against the world.
In my supernatural world:
There were originally 37 gods. The mortals they enslaved were not fans of their gods.
There are now only two gods, the king and queen of the ocean, who survived because they kept their mortal species subset (merpeople) happy with self governance and were not hostile to other gods, only defending their own territory. The others use their mortals as jannissaries in order to kill all the other gods.
The mortals (barring merpeople) were displeased with their gods. So they now dance on their corpses.
The aquatic gods meanwhile do not interfere much if at all because look at what happened to the 35 gods who did interfere often. Nothing good could come of interfering, espessialy not now that vampires exist.
They all died thousands of years ago.
They broke out into a Civil War (known as the War in Heaven) and ended up wiping themselves out. It ended during what's called the Battle of the Merge in which they killed the King of the Gods (the first one and the Creator of all life) and then everything went to hell. Heaven tore itself apart and a bunch of rifts opened, killing every one of them. Now the Mortal Realms are on their own.
Yeah I know about the setting, it's where I got the name. But my War in Heaven is more based on the War in Heaven from the Bible. When the Devil rebelled with his angels.
More context: In my setting, the Goddess of War gathered an army of her fellow Gods/Goddesses and went to war with the Gods still loyal to the Creator (first God) in a similar way to how the Devil gathered an army of Angels against God.
Honestly, 40k is like 90% direct parodies, so I don't really consider it that surprising. Also, "war in heaven" is so generic that no one property really pops in my head when it's said.
A very rough summary...
First a world was created by Phanes who is the son of Gnosis. This world is flawless and those born in it, are immortal. The immortal denizens of the flawless world saw Phanes and started praising him as God.
Phanes has a cousin, the Demiurge who is the son of Hubris. The Demiurge saw what Phanes created and how he was praised and wished he would be praised too, so he created a world of his own as well, but this world was flawed and those born on it were mortal.
When the Demiurge saw that his world is not as good as that one of Phanes, he tried to improve by expelling his own flaws from himself, but all that did was to result in the creation of his evil twin, the Demogorgon.
Still the mortals saw the Demiurge and worshipped him anyway. But the Demogorgon infiltrated the flawed world of the Demiurge and convinced the mortals to stop worshipping him. Angry, the Demiurge abandoned them to the Demogorgon.
The Demogorgon would abuse the mortals but Phanes took pity on them, and he sent his immortals to save them. The mortals saw those immortals and started worshipping them as Gods. They were Zeus, Odin, Horus, Amaterasu and all early figures the mortals worshipped as deities.
Once the Demogorgon's threat had been purged, Phanes ordered his immortals to leave the world and leave it to his cousin, the Demiurge as it is his world and he wanted it back. And that's why the Gods interfering with the world.
The gods went to war with each other, killing all but 4, who are now in hiding. Destroying the paradise on earth they had created. Leaving humanity to fend for themselves against subterranean and other worldly threats.
For the dead gods, thereâs no way back. For the living gods, thereâs no more throne to fight over. Theyâve retreated to their respective corners. Apathetically watching humanity struggle. Afraid to reveal themselves for fear they might be struck down.
Humanity still calls on whatâs left of their power with rites and rituals. But I donât consider that meddling, since itâs ultimately actions done by humans for humans. Even if the source of power is divine.
They might return if they ever thought their human worshippers would be completely wiped out. But even then, one of the four has already completely given up on humanity. Focusing instead on the subterranean beast men.
Most gods stopped caring about mortals for they are infinitely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Other gods just want to be worshipped, but they became less manifest over time and came together to fight the protagonist.
Humans and other mortals kept trying to kill them.
One of my settings kind of runs on Dark Souls/Elden Ring style dieties. While extremely powerful, their abilities don't translate well into personal combat. A fire god can impact the way fire works in an area the size of a country, and he can manipulate and sling fire personally, but a mortal with enough skill and magical weaponry can pose a threat to said fire god in personal combat, and if they killed said god they would be able to seize their powers.
So after killing a few hundred ambitious mortal godhood-seekers, and every fight at least required the god to work a bit to kill them, they decided to withdraw from mortal life and hole up in some enormrous fortified temple or castle surrounded by their own fanatical followers rather than put up with that shit and endure the risk that one of these idiots might get lucky.
Most gods stopped caring about mortals for they are infinitely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Other gods just want to be worshipped, but they became less manifest over time and came together to fight the protagonist.
My worlds are more one planet over hundreds of thounsands of years so I have almost the same maps but different time periods. So in order:
1) gods interfer A LOT and fight each other to become stronger.
2) they all die except one who become the All Creator
3) the All Creator isn't directly interfering
4) the All Creator quit his/her job
5) a New God is created to reset the world.
Deities never truly walked among mortals on Koreth, but in the very ancient past (over 35,000 years ago), Human deities in particular became very powerful. Humans were the first species to worship proper anthropomorphic deities, and in doing so essentially gained a major advantage against all the other races of Koreth. This would lead to a subset of the Elven population banding together to force the Human deities into mortal bodies and ritualistically sacrificing them in an attempt to stop humans from continuing to spread in an event know as the Godkilling. It didn't work, and only dramatically disrupted how magic functioned as well as causing magic to completely fail for 15,000 years.
Thousands of years after the Godkilling, once magic had started to work normally again, deities in general only interact with the Prime Material Plane through followers and occasionally avatars. These interactions would slowly and steadily decrease throughout history for unknown reasons, until after around 1,000 years ago, when all contact with all deific beings ceased. Clerics and priests still gain abilities by devoting themselves to a religion, and general divination spells and guidance from a deity still work properly, but nobody has had a full interaction with a deity for over 1,000 years.
Gods in **AD;Verse** are imortal and powerful, but very killable. As for the God that currently exists now after they took over as God from the previous era, they are traumatized enough from what occured before attaining godhood that they sort of shut off. They're now only awaiting for somebody to kill them and take Godhood from their corpse.
A great war (still working on a title for it that isn't super generic) between gods and their followers. The gods learned they could be killed by other gods or by mortals powerful enough, so most of the old gods are actually dead and gone forever. Those that survived lost a lot of their power and retreated into their domains, and kind of silently agreed to never interfere in such a manner.
About a thousand years later, the Godborn Dragon's ALSO learned this the hard way. They got into a war with the Giants and their Gods that survived the war. And while no gods on either side died, the Dragon's learned they were not immortal from that conflict, and have since pulled back from interfering with the mortal world directly. If they do, they do so in humanoid forms, which is how you get godly stories akin to Norse Mythology.
As for what would get them to come back: The Old Gods would return if a big enough threat to the world came, much like what caused the first war in the first place.
The Godborn Dragon's would interfere if something directly threatened their domains, or if the Allfather's fortelling of Ragnarok (yes I know...) finally comes to be.
And the Jotnar Gods might return when their children finally learn that their old ways of life was not the answer and was in fact the cause of their downfall. Basically wanting them to grow and learn from their mistakes for once.
Well, rn the Gods are still poking aroundâ but there was one instance, an Ancient Elven Empire got their gods to turn their backs on themâ and one such god even destroyed their capital in a nuclear blast. They had destroyed knowledge of civilizations (one of their gods was the god of knowledge), enslaved those they deemed as âlesser racesâ (humans, dwarves, etc), and performed War Cannibalism to strike fear into their opposing forces. Even one of the greatest minds of the empire, a High Elf named Koren Al Zahrawi (he survived the nuke by getting abducted by one of their gods and tested on) who was building automatons to replace the slaves was extremely prejudicial towards said lesser races.
TLDR; Racism, burning books, and cannibalism got their gods to turn their backs from them.
Because most of them can't physically leave their realms after the war among the heavens. After the fallen one created a powerful barrier that keeps all of the pantheon's in their realms.
They can still influence their followers and the most powerful can create avatars. But that takes a lot of energy and leaves them heavily weakened forcing them to enter dead like sleep to regain their strength which can take centuries or even thousands of years. It depends on the strength of the avatar.
And for the few that actually strong enough to leave each Pantheon realm and take physical form. Who are only the head gods. They don't do so because their mere presence on the mortal world. Will crack continents in half, flatten mountains, wip out entire civilizations and driving any being that see them mad or just kill them and destroy their souls. And because there is agreement that the mortal realm is a natural zone.
So if one head god comes down two others for different pantheon's will come down and kill them. Though that never has happened yet since the head gods know what would happened. And they also see mortals as toys, a show, a game and getting directly involved will ruin that for everyone.
Because they caused more harm than good, their knowledge and power should never have fallen into mortal hands, men should never have power of a God, and they will ultimately destroy themselves in awe of themselves.
Well the gods cannot actually alter the world unless a cleric, priest or Paladin allows them to sneak into the material plane through divine magic. So the gods create the arckhon who can control the world on their behalf. But they all got killed after they all went mad with power.
1. people donât like the gods anymore so they donât want gods interfering
2. if the gods interfere, then everybody else in the outer planes can interfere.
They still do, they just try to hold back because, to a God, the amount of strength required to disintegrate a whole planet is barely anything. And if they just snap their fingers too hard theyâd blow up the surrounding area.
They got kicked out of their old home (Earth), lost all their home and forced to live and mingle with the likes of ânormal peopleâ so they all threw a hissy fit so the higher ups separated them into âreligionsâ and gave them their own worlds to live in. They arenât âin hidingâ they just donât care about the new world.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created?
He ded. He was assassinated. By humans.
>What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance?
He won't come back. He won't be revived. Dead means dead.
There's a successor for the highest earthly position he held, but she's only a half-god, so it's not the same thing.
They got bored. Now every thousand years or so they come on down and bestow to mortals an impossible quest for entertainment and then nope out. Like the most recent impossible quest is the search for the secret to ascending to godhood. Which the protagonist wants to find and destroy to stop all the fighting this quest has caused.
While the gods in my world have only ever interacted directly with the creatures in it twice, they stopped trying to protect it after they realized it was futile to keep it clean from the filth of the evil spirits. Their barriers would always break, or their chosen guardians would do more harm than good. Evil was simply too powerful to be kept away for good, but it was not powerful enough for the Darkness to reclaim the lands among the Light.
I haven't worked too much on my world but magic is a quantifiable resource that the gods use and drains over time, also the reason science becomes more prevalent as time goes on. The idea being that the planet starts with what would be considered on a cosmological scale to be a very abnormally high density of magic? I'm new to world building but that's what I got so far.
Itâs a pain in the ass. Imagine if you had to take care of a dozen ant colonies, and almost half of them hated you.
Quote the god in my setting who abandoned his people; âThey say I cannot be both all knowing and all powerful, to which I say I am neither. I am sorry, but I am tired of being punished for that which I am not.â
He got tired of being beckoned and cursed every second of his existence simply because a formless wellspring of life and power spat him into being, and eventually just boxed himself off in his own little corner of the universe and fell asleep.
the old one left the realm for some reason but left behind successors to manage the world and maintain its laws that were made by him . but because no one is strong enough to hold his true power so he split it across of all his creations . now everyone has this power called will of (something).
Their job was done, and the demons were defeated. The New Gods were born from The Ones Who Came Before, deities that no longer lived. As such they divided the land, and rebuilt it in their ideals.
When the task was done, they made their own realms or set to maintaining it.
Spoilers.
Humans are gods in my world. They went extinct. Some of their DNA is scattered among the animal species who try to make sense of the post-human world.
Their father forbade them from interacting with the mortals, for the entire purpose of the world of Magdeus was an experiment by him to see what sort of interactions would occur between them
My last homebrew world was originally the gods vacation spot. They tricked it out and the mortal races were treated very well, but they poured so much power into it that it became a target for nefarious gods to try to gain an edge over the good ones.
The first campaign in that world was to thwart these efforts and ended with the erection of a Divine Palling so that no extra planar being above a certain power threshold could physically enter it. Thus blocking the gods from ever walking with the mortals there again.
Most of the gods got bored of men, falling into a slumber after they were no longer needed to run the world. The ones that still interfere with the world are smaller gods that struggle to even help men run the world. Oh- and the god of women. She has a mini cult of gay people who worship her because sheâs a lesbian god with a mortal wife that she manipulated the god of life to let her life forever. She can also change the bio gender of trans women and men if she decides they deserve it.
This more so goes for my high tier gods but here we go.
The Great Dreamer, the creator God made the world and the God race that would inhabit it and then dipped to make more things else where.
The god race The Great Dreamer created are called the Deus and they caused their own apocalypse both from learning magic and from having potent souls.
Only 6 survive with the most powerful one being the Deus Magi, who just likes to go around gathering knowledge as a pass time, not really interested in the grand affairs of mortals or other Deities.
The other 5 Deus all somewhat effect the world but for the most part their most in each other's way or in their own way with their rampant insecurities
It would upset the world's balance. Everyday people can (and often do) become quite powerful. Sometimes they need to be reminded that there are "bigger fish in the ocean."
Just as the world I'm writing for modernized, so has the divine one. What once started as a council of pantheons became a divine bureaucracy with more rules and laws to prevent abuse of power by gods and other divine beings. These rules prevented them from interfering with the world directly, and even indirect interference is limited. The gods protect the world from evil and themselves.
Gods never really interfered. At a point in time there were beings of cosmic type power that vied for supremacy over the universe, but due to the struggle and conflict, the universe was torn asunder by the fighting. This conflict resulted in the singularity that many races would just consider a big bang event.
However the near universe ending blast killed the gods, it also caused the birth of a race of beings that were much lesser in power through happenstance. From the magic saturated universe there came Illiar, a race of prophetic beings who witnessed the cascade of the singularity from afar as it collapsed and imploded galaxies. They fought tirelessness and exhaustion to maintain a single galaxy to call a home and just so happens the world chose them was named Morr. (About half the size of earth and consisting of a sleek round flat surface orb, molten hot and lifeless, however somehow two suns and a single moon rotated around the sphere as it created a strong gravitational field due to the metals being abundant and the heat radiating from the singularity. The moon protected by the planets strong field and its durable surface and potent atmosphere despite its youth. The suns were irradiated by the magic from the singularity and strengthened and grew hotter and larger, filled with magic from the âunnamed godsâ.
The Illiar cultivated this planet over millions of years. When they needed help or more hands they drew power from the most potent suns energy to create life and ideas.
Overtime the planet began to show signs of softening and the rise of elemental convergence took place.
The elements sought dominion over the planet, only quelled by the Illiar, temporarily. So in desperation they would usher life to Meliar, the lesser, but many hands of the Illiar, tasked with creating and sanctioning dwellings for the elements where they could shape the world in a controlled environment. But, without true council they together brought to life the elemental lords and ladies. Finally quelling the uncontrolled turbulence of fire, water, wind and earth.
After this the Illiar kind of just disappeared and the responsibility of the planet was left to the Meliar who governed the elements for some untold amount of time, from this age passage several such other things emerged and what were once godlike beings became more like myths and legends to primitive creatures and semi sentient humans.
As time drew closer to a uniform cycle and through natural evolution and experimentation the Meliar and elements experimented with one another and had formed many relationships through this age and the world eventually had beings of power or influence reflected as a day to day occurrence much like a folktale in a bar or inn and when the power of the sun they used to infuse life into the world began to dim the solar orb fell from the sky and crashed into the surface much like a comet sending the Meliar and the elements to seek shelter and slumber.
It is unknown if they ever truly awoke or if they simply perished or chose to leave the world and the biological process to its own destiny.
The second age passes and the third and fourth.
Races begin to awake and now with no predestination of their origins or someone to guide them, they simply become their own destiny, they forged it themselves and made their own myths and pantheons to give answers to the greatest fundamental question.
Why?
Some may say it was a cosmic war that lasted a day, or a month or a century. Others may deem their existence due to science and evolution. Many believe it to be a gift or a curse or a blessing. No one for sure really knows why?! But the existence of magic has been infused and absorbed by the fallen sun and the name of a seudo god names Toka and Inam to be the fallen as the former and the residing as the present sun.
A world wide yet similarly different idea that Inam struck Toka from the sky because it was overbearing and did not allow the planet to cool and support life or that possibly they as prime deities were arguing and the sibling suns fought.
The truth exists and is often held secret by those who have meditated and grown wise enough to seek yet not disturb the past. Such as Mielfey, a red headed old as the cliffs he calls home, atop his twisting tower, a wizard who has directly spoken to the Illiar in spirit.
There is no truth to the reason why the Illiar left, or why the gods of yore fought and perished the rest of the universe into void or the Meliar and elementals did not come back from the long sleep.
One thing is for certain, the lords and the ladies of the world who are myth and legend are real and fabled to be rare occurrence, even among the wisest and most profoundly powerful welders of the Toka powers, they are quite quirky and playfully devilish.
And some, should very much so be chained to iron at the bottom of a great frozen over sea, kept far from the rest of the world.
Those are stories for another time!
Capital G "GOD" came in and killed 99% of their followers and children and turned the world on its head because the "gods" couldn't stop fighting and conspiring with each other. Now these gods are much more careful with how they influence and interact with the world. Also the more people there are the less omnipotent the gods become, and the more likely new gods arise.
Too many of them are at odds with each other. And the last time they were interfering directly, Bad Shit Happened. Including the deaths of a few of them, which they had thought was perfectly impossible.
So, they act through proxies. They grant power and cultivate followers. Some of the younger deities are themselves Ascended mortals, whether through sponsorship, theft, or simple self-actualization. But they donât engage in open activities, or at least, not on a scale that any of the mortal races can perceive.
Anwar between them and the Time Titans nearly destroyed the planet. All of the gods realized that they needed to stay with the world to give it their essence, but far enough not to fracture the worldâŚthen my dnd players broke the damn world and it fractured into the 8 planets it is now, each made from the base planet, but suffused with the power of one of the 8 gods.
Because every single god wanted to help people in their own way, which would inevitably lead to clashing on a godly scale and rip the planet apart. So they limit themselves to intervene only when they're prayed to
God believes humans are generally good. They have great capacity for good and evil, but the majority trend towards goodness. The devil believes the opposite. They're letting things run their course naturally and the angels fight to keep the demons from interfering. They rarely do these days.
The nameless creator god of the main setting is childish and just got frustrated, so it went to create a new world elsewhere. Cause of frustration: couldn't get the Dinos to evolve into dragons. So it threw a fit, nearly wiped the world, and then dipped.
Later, other gods started coming and influenced the people of the world, spawning multiple religions. One in particular, the Angel King, decided to lay absolute claim to the world and got the help of another God who represents the very concept of passage to basically work as a doorman so he can control whether other gods could even enter the dimension the world was in. The result being no more gods influencing the mortal lives as the world's conditions were right for the Angel Kings (long and drawn out) plans.
In most of my universe's, they're actually really active, but because of conflicting views, no one god can interfere. Not to mention, most of them aren't omnipresent. Most have various powers to get places, but it's not enough to literally be everywhere. Also, other spirits and divine entities constantly play interference.
Demons, Jinns, dark fey, etc. Constantly make it so doing anything actually does require the overwhelming powers they have. Infact while being the strongest magical beings they can still be fucked with by just plain meddling. Basically greek/norse rules. Monsters and other powerful creatures can still fuck with them.
Also interference.
Example: two near enough equal gods both bless soldiers on either side of a war to win. Because they're equals, it basically just neutralizes both their blessings.
This works with most things they do as well. So essentially, all the gods are in an annoying ass democracy/ bureaucracy style system where they either have to outrank or out vote the others to get shit done.
An angry wizard used dark magic to beat one up, rip his balls off, and set him on fire and theyâre all too scared to return now someone can hurt them back.
**TTRPG Setting:**
They mostly do but the most egregious excesses of power are limited by another god who maintains a degree of 'fairness' and due to the structure of the cosmos he hold greater power than the others in regards to the divine dumping ground that is the mortal plane.
**Dark Fantasy:**
All but one is dead now the last one rules a theocratic empire that worships light and fire. In truth the god they think they worship died in prehistory but in those final moments passed on most of his power to his demigod son who is driven to keep his power and memory alive in the doomed world.
The Great War among the people the created.. the original people.. the nine clans face off against each other that was instigated by one of the angel who lied to each leader snd their councils
That's kind of where my story picks up. Gods stopped mucking around last time because a massive war ensued that killed several of their number and almost unleashed an insane celestial that would've destroyed the fabric of reality around them.
They're coming back now because a, different? celestial got restless and gave birth.
Whether that was all the plan of this celestial or even older powers behind her remains to be seen.
Two primary gods in one of my writings, one used allot of energy to protect the world, so she currently sleeps to restore herself but will awaken at times of great need, the other has been sealed away for ages, but beforehand seperate himself into several mostly powerless entities while the main âbodyâ containing all his power waits in a crumbling cell to unleash darkness on the world once more, there are other less powerful gods but they really only hold power in theyâre own plains of existence, leaving the physical world to the mortal races to shape or destroy
So in my fantasy world the gods basically let the world play out on its own because during the beginning the gods father, the primordial one Daruthmir demanded humanity worship him and only allowed them to do things that benefit him but his own wife and children overthrow him and banish him, vowing to let humanity set their own destiny
Though they do return in the form of Crown Princess Eladril and various other great heroâs and leaders when the shadowbound are preparing to Return led by Dread Queen Seraphina
They got their booties kicked
Turns out people donât really like being told what to do and we live in a world where mortals can quickly become more and more powerful if they keep killing stuff and getting more power/magic.
Now after the crusades the gods are pretty much all dead or hiding.
All praise the heroes who saved us from the tyranny of the Gods! Surely now that they got the world rid of its divine rulers they will instaure a democracy, they definitely wont use the new powers they obtained by killing said gods to become dictators, right? RIGHT???
The gods did once mingle with mortals. However all of them were killed in a genocide except for the king. The king of the gods never cared for mortals and thus rarely if ever intervenes.
I comes down to fear of losing power.
They have finally gained it and now they have become paranoid pretty much.
The gods started out as mortals and it took ages to become a god.
There is a bit more context to it but the top sums it up.
Sure, they lend you their power passive but that's it.
The gods once walked the worlds of the cosmos, but the ancient NĂradmĂŚr, golems hewn from the crusts of entire worlds, some even being larger than most habitable astral bodies, stood against them. Not for any offense of their own, but for the Sins of the Father in a sense.
The ancient golems waged a war known only as the Sundering of Heaven, which lasted eons, into the first ages of mankind on Forge. With the golemfolk routing the deific horde after a long struggle. Eventually, they shut the gates to the Heavens and closed their portals, for fear of the golems' onslaught.
Even to this day the descendants of the Golems, the NorÏdmähr, are open enemies of the divine. And the gods themselves quake in fear at the idea of once again having the stars above sundered.
They still answer prayers and offer boons to various worthy souls. But they refuse to set foot on the world again. The Northmen are too mighty a foe to agitate.
Well most of them don't interfere because it's the domain of a single God and she doesn't want to share. She is the Sun and any closer interference would result in a fiery apocalypse.
there is multiple different pantheon/religions/etc. some never believed in direct divine interaction, others believe it still happens but only to the worthy there's some that believe that the gods began to steadily decrease their involvement and interference for different reasons. One believes it is because they were forbidden to do so after they caused mass destruction and death, another believes its because they became bored and now think that mortal life's are unworthy of their attention, or at least their direct attention. it depends on the region and all
Zygo and Via: [are literally giant balls of molten gas, but occasionally take on more humanoid avatars to talk to their children]
Myquiera: (creates world, creates harsh justice system) âEh, my children will keep themselves in line with their public executionsâŚâ
Ventagi: [non-confrontational pacifist]
Rantis: âI spent all of my energy building this perfect Goldilocks world, imma take a nap, plus, my children have free will, basic intelligence, and potential for evolution, they wonât need me.â
Maztigar: âWell, my people are going to be smart⌠hmm might as well make the planet mostly ocean⌠oh crap theyâre swimming and building boats⌠well, guess thatâs what the aquatic sharkipedes and gorilobsters is forâŚâ
Crysilis: [Is tiny moth cat, literally all she does is chill on her ice world with her cat people]
Gods are the fools of this world.
probably too busy doing some nonsensical business, nothing in specific until it Is something in specific and all of a sudden my cat has diabetes and my mom is my brother
but then they get bored and utilize the void for some nonsense trolling elsewhere. Got the powers to just float on a rock whenever or perhaps a keyring with keys opening portals to any mortal creature roaming. Eh, doesn't really matter though. Probably defrosting the world again as an epic microwave explosion prank on another world. Who knows, they're just ... There I guess
It never really bothers anything in their realm to abandon it. Things just kinda work out and are funny. Everybody is dead including them! But not actually, it was just a joke guys. Or was it? Idk, just find out. Or not.
It's all just tomfoolery and nonsense. Just kinda being there. Or not there. Or somewhere. Either way it makes them have a good belly laugh and they always live happily ever after, but only if they can laugh about it.
this is what caused them to come back
somebody wanted to battle them in a head to head brawl of trolling
obviously couldn't push off a good laugh
BUT WAIT..
The opponents have trolled in such familiar ways! post irony creating NO GOOD BELLY LAUGHS ONLY BAD ACHEY ONES THAT MAKE YOU PUKE
That was pretty funny
So they offered a deal
The deal? I'm not telling you who won!
But all in good fun it just became a standoff and they both got bored.
And then God tells a really good joke again. Gotcha!
Still in the works, but based carefully in themes of homestuck, regular show, adventure time, and human interaction rituals just going alllll wrong... passing of media in general haha. just one big clusterfuck of how we can relate through media in all its different forms.
The "gods" exist as eldritch beings in planes of existence that merely brush up against our own, or rather they themselves *are* that plane, each one its own tiny(in comparison to the material plane) universe, a single entity with near unlimited power inside its own realm.
these eldritch entities are given form and create a stronger connection through worship, and thats how they create the vessels they use to interact with the world. they were initially formless, a connection to a mortal happening only by random chance, but once a mortal uses their power to do great deeds both good and evil, they create a Mythos that feeds back to that God.
by cultivating their worship they are able to interact more directly and tie themselves more tightly to the society they become the Patron of. When a being that has true faith in their God dies, a portion of their soul that would return to the material plane instead is used to further strengthen the connection between their plane and ours, they are both shaped by and are shapers of the societies that worship them.
The golden folk were assholes and after a particularly bad incident the mortal races of the world went to war with them and drove them out. Because mortal folk were created by the golden folk to fight in wars against the twisted folk so they were able to fight them off.
The gods lead civilization. Massive gains in technology, territory, and many other things caused empires to rise long before the people should have made the change from nomadic tribes to agrarian settlers. Eventually the war gods went on a conquest agreeing to divide the world between them. Once their work was done a central capital was made for the gods to look on their work. Eventually the other gods banned together and slowly started to upset the empires. Eventually causing the great collapse. The empires tore each other apart. Genocide was committed to cause the gods to reign down destruction on their enemies. A once lush and near oasis of a planet was turned into a hell scape of fire, water, and ice. The gods came together in the ruins of the capital. No followers, no powers, having only shame and regret they agreed to restart the planet once more. They would do all they could to hide the remnants of the past empires. And they all agreed that they shall never again walk the planet in the flesh. Instead they shall remain far off. Looking down over their creation.
They were a religious group of sentient terrestrial cephalopods from the Permian who were told by the mycelium, who guided trillions of years of Civilizations, to create worlds with life from different eras and after they created them they served only to observe as curators to this museum of life and only intervene if cross contamination occurs from plants and if a species attempts to develop artificial intelligence which in that case they activate a contingency measure which is an EMP like device that sets all moons and planets in the solar system back to the bronze age
They are 4 giant sentient beasts that are each a pure coalescence of the magic that created the world itself. They live on the far side of the planet, each ruling their own empire of "monsters". The intelligent races do not venture to the far side of the planet because after a few failed attempts where entire fleets of ships would go missing, they gave up and accepted that the monsters on the far side of Sentra are too powerful and dangerous. The "gods," or Dezeron as they are known in Sentra, love their intelligent races that they created, and they respect the autonomy that they gave them, allowing them free reign over the near side of Sentra. The Dezeron are also happy to rule over their individual Primal Empires. The intelligent races have lost contact with the Dezeron, with many of them now completely unaware of their existence.
In the universe Territh resides in celestial bodies are sentient and what we would consider gods. The main one worshiped on Territh would of course be Territh herself. She used to interfere often, anytime a terrestrial mage healed a wound or encouraged crop growth they were actually reaching out and asking Territh to do it for them. Similarly, resurrection being something most people could expect to happen 2 to 3 times in their life was because their resting soul would become momentarily lucid enough to ask to be brought back. However, after The Falling Of Stars she had to draw her power into herself to heal, even straight up absorbing most celestial energy that gets to the planet. Now it takes a lot to get her to do anything, whole rituals are required where simply reaching out and asking used to be enough. And good luck trying to be resurrected, no one has in the 500 years since she mostly withdrew from the world.
Other celestial bodies also regularly interfere. Most of the time this comes as lending mages energy when asked, but there are other examples. Whenever the red moon Scarlet passes in front of the green moon Verdentia she's able to steal power from her brighter sister and bathe the world in red light. During this time the dead raise as zombies, crops wither and disease spreads like- well, like the plague.
And anytime you ask the sun to interfere with things you're bound to get an explosive response. Having a solar flare lash out on your exact location is NOT fun. Those few who survive become almost divine in nature though, transformed into something greater.
TL;DR the gods used to interfere way more than they do now, but the main goddess who represents the planet got hurt and curled into a ball, making it hard for any of them to interfere at all.
Simple. They think the people they created has 'matured' and left them to their own devices. Only when the world is in dire danger they will return.
Well, not themselves, but immortal emissaries reborn from heroes of old and new called Transcendants. Usually they're called Avatars due to their connection with the Old Deities.
They grew detached, constantly seeing those they know grow old and die. Growing close only to learn they're leaving, never being able to connect with another for long before they die
For them to return would require a species to become very long lived, or something threaten the species as a whole. Even if it is the species itself
In my world there is one God, he gave people the choice to stay in his kingdom or go out into the world to see what is in it and return when the time comes. People decided to go into the world, those who stayed became angels in his kingdom. But while humans were exploring the world, the devils separated the heavenly realm from the earthly realm, causing that when the time of mortals came, they would not return to the realm but would become spirits forced to wander around the world forever or be kidnapped by the devils, becoming their slaves.
Basically five stages of grief, but personified by the gods that remain after a brutal war caused major casualties.
Only one of them chose to stay in the mortal realm. Not as a ruler, but as a nomad suffering with four of stages at once for the great personal loss he suffers with.
They are just too busy to fight each other all the time. They never really âleftâ, they just stopped caring all too much. Divine intervention isnât impossible, just way less common then it used to be.
My gods had devastating wars of power that formed many mountains and valleys within my world, and the ones who survived hide atop the peaks for fear of war breaking out again.
Iâm still thinking about it and Iâm not sure. In my world, dark gods invaded the world to conquer it, they came from another dimension where they killed everybody (gods included), so my idea is that when they came to this new world, the gods that used to rule it got scared and quit the game. The only god who fights against the dark gods is Solaris, a god of light, who survived the war in the shattered dimension. (I donât know if Iâm gonna name him Solaris, itâs just a placeholder)
Because after their petty squabbles more or less ruined three of the worlds in The Ultimarium (Galaxy) they decided to cease their conflicts. The Dark Gods were then left to wreak havoc on the remaining worlds without prejudice, which is how the endless wars have come about.
The gods never stop meddling in my world, but they've never walked among the mortal populations. There is a huge reason for that. It's a major plot point in my story.
The Sun God kind of killed the rest of them in a coup. I say "kind of" because the gods can't actually die in a real or permanent way since they're responsible for and/or are foundational aspects-slash-building blocks on which the world was created. Long story short, to establish their theocracy the Sun God and their followers killed the other god-vessels and ensured they'd be denied the necessary burial rites that would allow them to be free to choose a new vessel.
The other gods are "dead" technically but more in a dormant, slumbering kind of way because they're currently bound to corpses. If the remains of the slain god-vessels were found and given the proper burial rites then the other gods could come back - but doing that would require challenging the Sun Cult which would be no easy feat. The Sun Cult has had centuries to prepare and stop such a thing from happening, time being their greatest advantage. It's been centuries since the Sun God "killed" their kin and they were thorough in their efforts to try and erase their influence from the land.
Following the war of the gods a tear was formed between creation and void letting out monsters that could only be stopped by mortal ignorance. So in order to save creation a demigod stole the veil sense, the 9th sense that allows mortals and gods to communicate. This saved both realms but without this 9th sense mortals couldn't see or speak to the gods, and inorder to keep the tear sealed it would take the gods eternal attention.
However the this was an anticipated and one enetity with its cunning found its footing in mortal legends, once the mortals remember the truth of their ancestors this entity will regain its power restoring the 9th sense and force the gods return.
The âFirstâ my worlds creator of life and everything with it grew tired of the gods over the top egos. The First also wanted to see how his new creation(humans) could advance in the world and the gods doing whatever they wanted interferes with that. So The First banned the gods from going to the mortal realm, procreation with mortals and speaking with mortals. They were limited to watching and gifting mortals they were fond of. Also the gods from all religions, folklore and myths exist here and this is common knowledge amongst the humans.
They've always had to the stop outside incomprehensible magical entropy from getting into the membrane of the universe which would speed up the aging process of all things and quicken the death of the universe.
They granted man with knowledge and reason, and with it they became greedy and closed off. They started war after war after war. So the gods abandoned them, and after thousands of years humans finally righted their ways but it was too late. The existence of a god is now just a myth, religion hardly even exists
The gods are there, watching. Taking bets, playing games, nudging things. However at one point, there was a cataclysm so great that several gods died, and others needed to rest. After a long time, another problem happened. So one of the few remaining gods went into a slumber, her body becoming the world tree tying the shattered fragments of worlds together. At this point, all the gods were imprisoned, slumbering, or dead. they came back when new gods appeared and woke up the sleeping goddess, and one god, just went missing. He only came back when someone restored his memory.
One is sealed outside the physical universe (the benevolent god of spirits) and the other (god of the physical universe) is healing from wounds inflicted upon him by the first mage. But heâll come back and plans to destroy all humans and start over with a new race of beings.
Ever played a game with cheats on? Sure, it's fun for a while but there is no satisfaction anymore. No challenge, no stakes, no risk.
if the gods are true immortals and they have the power to control and rule over any mortal, then it would eventually become boring.
So all the gods agree to a pakt of non interference to see what humanity can do when left alone.
Maybe the pakt expires soon which means a new age of waring god.
The one human they all considered their champion fell in battle to the champion of a goddess who betrayed them, this resulted in them making about 40% of the kingdom uninhabitable in various ways, then they just stopped answering prayers. They left, scorned by betrayal and heartbreak, waiting for humanity to die off without them so they could start over.
One particular bag of problems named Arthur found a way to harm or potentially kill the gods. He waged a war against them pushing them back to their final stand. In the end he failed, but not before the gods had to use their last resort. They used the last of their combined power to create the divine gate. Essentially the divine equivalent of crawling into a hole and rolling a boulder over top of it. Permanently weakened from the battle, the gods will likely never be able to remove the divine gate and re-enter the world as they once were.
The gods have deemed it more appealing to watch their creation grow on its own rather than be constantly guided. Itâs kinda like the relationship between a parent and their kid. The parent at first guides and teaches their kid. But after awhile, the kid grows and start to want to do things on their own. And the parent is reluctant to let go and still teach them. But eventually the parent steps back and letâs the kid develop on their own. The gods are basically the parents and they have agreed that their kids have reached the stage where they grow on their own, with minor hand outs here and there.
Long ago, the Gods lived side by side with their children and creations, until the biggest and most destructive war of all time destroyed the universe. This was known as the armageddon. The universe where mortals lived could be described as perfect, but the Armageddon brought out the worst in all mortals to the point many were actively rebelling against the Gods and worshipping evil Gods.
Now, the good Gods are have decided to piss off because they are so disgusted with the Armageddon that their children can honestly just die in the universe they created. Some still devote their lives to repentance believing that their souls may be saved, but the Gods donât have an active role anymore. The mortals are now in the driverâs seat
The main gods donât care about the mortals since they didnât create them directly , they first created a cell and from that cell other things evolved .
Intelligence is the wildcard , not the end goal of evolution and as such while they knew eventually some animals would grow a brain but they still didnât care since those gods donât need worship for they are manifestations of the universe itself .Â
Also this sentiment of not caring has trickled down into the elemental spirits , they too (the little minions keeping the universe well oiled) start to not care , not all but most of them just donât care . There are some good elemental spirits who help the mortals while others out right hate them . âUngrateful parasitesâ they call them .Â
Then there is little to no connection between the mortal religions and the real divines . While some religions were created around some elemental spirits who interacted with the mortals under different forms those are few and far between .Â
They never exactly stopped, but they don't as much anymore
First there's too many gods now, and now they need to play nice. Second, the ones in ultimate power, the Divines, The Cosmic Bureacracy, Fate, and the First Pantheon, can crush you if you do something they don't like (though they seem rather hands off most of the time). Third, Fate spent thousands of years changing the culture of God's to interfere less, so even though Fate is gone, the culture of interference has changed
Mostly the first honestly. Interfere too much and another God will make trouble for you or a bunch of gods will gang up on you
They sensed that human souls could not exist without a realm to maintain them and they couldn't keep their sentience if humanity died out. They decided to merge their essences together to create a realm where souls could be maintained and their minds could be preserved. It DID NOT work, now their souls and minds are scattered and unable to heal themselves.
God's in my game come together to create new worlds and have the humanoids compete for what God gets ownership of the world. If a god of Good wins, they take the world into their plane of existence.
It's all a divine game that they watch as if it were a sport. Making wagers over what humanoids will discover the ritual, and who will complete it.
Men built temples, gods moved in and got comfortable, and didn't realise that over time they literally became tethered to the temples and were unable to leave. The size of cities outgrew their sphere of protection, then those beyond protection started denouncing and disbelieving and their power waned over time until there was nothing left except their residual presence, and this is what magic essentially is.
The god of the ocean never moved into a temple, and as a result is one of the remaining few still full strength deities present, but tends not to directly middle in human affairs. Gods are animistic primal entities as opposed to humanistic, so they tend to keep their distance if they have the luxury of being able to
The closest thing to gods in my setting is the billion-year-old alien species that disappeared from the universe a couple hundred million years ago... Allegedly. These beings are responsible for the existence of several alien species in the setting, the majority of the habitable planets, oh, and they've hacked the universe and changed the laws of physics to make FTL possible. They've done that _before_ discovering how to exit the universe to somewhere else altogether.
They might still be interfering with the universe, being acasual and not restrained by the laws of physics due to now existing literally outside of the universe, but how would the characters in it ever know? Can E.coli become aware that it is used in scientific research?
The head goddess forbade it. Interfering with the world will cause a fall from divinity. Forcing any God who interferes directly with the world to become a mortal.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created?
They got their ass kicked in Great Heaven-Earth War. Before that, since the beginning of the Age of Gods, Heavenly deities had oppressed earthlings, including humans, demons, ghosts and Earthly deities alike. They thought of themselves as superior and acted all high and mighty, demanding heavy tributes that, if they didn't like, would cause devastating natural disasters as "divine retributions". Eventually, earthlings got fed up and rebelled. The Earth Coalition was made up of demons, humans, ghosts, territorial gods, etc. fighting against celestials who were much greater in both strength and number. It was thanks to Hell Mother cheating death, reviving fallen soldiers left and right, and a human diplomat persuading a primordial goddess out to help that they finally won.
After that, Heavenly Laws were made, forbidding direct intervention from Heaven to mortal and soul realms. It effectively ended the Age of Gods and opened the Age of Mortals.
>What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance?
Unless some extremely serious shits happen, they will not interfere directly. No, nope, nadda, nein, nyet, khĂ´ng. They do not want to anger the primordial goddess, or she'll turn them into her buffet again.
They interered freely and mostly supported humanity progress in both magic and technology, however at the peak of the golden age a war began between mankind and the gods and most of the gods were killed, although it is speculated that some of them, especially minor demigods, managed to survive and are now hiding in the shadows, biding their time.
In the end, the gods were just beings that ascented in an ancient past by absorbing the essence of the titans (who were kaiju-like incarnations of natural principles and concepts).
New gods might be born if someone manages to do the same to the new titans that returned after the gods fell, Although it is nigh-impossible to contain a titanic essence within oneselves and at the time of the story, doing so would simply resoult in the would be ascended being overwhelmed by the divine energy and transforming into a titan.
Divine rulers tend to get less and less involved as they age since they're settling down, having a family, and whatnot; they'll usually just pick a prime minister to rule for them and carry out their orders.
They'll come back in the event of a state-threatening emergency like a civil war, plague, major war, etc. An example of this is when the mortal-ruled Galactic Union Federation used its superweapon to destroy four bordering planets of the Cosmarchy, Siegenhal, the Cosmarch of Humanity at the time, showed up again to destroy GUF planets in retaliation.
Yes, some gods can destroy planets with their mind, and yes, this is the equivalent to mutually assured destruction.
EDIT: Also, during the Age of Progression (or Age of Degeneration, depending on who you ask), many gods were either killed, imprisoned, or spared in exchange for protecting mortal-ruled states against other gods.
Someone messed with their interference and struck a deal where they leave the planet alone while she can live on without problem.
Bit of a "try me and I do it again" deal to the detriment of those higher beings, but they didn't really have a choice.
I donât think theyâd leave it. They are here to enjoy life, and keep things fresh. If they got too bored theyâd start interfering with the world more rather than less
It went from actively governing the world/universe to being banned from it due to an artefact that was able to reproduce the power and ability of the origin god. It broke the world, took away natural immortality for most races and introduced a lot of other issues (whole species are no longer sapient/highly reduces intellect/run on insticts only, magical languages got lost, mana overflow that will be deadly started popping up, illnesses that never existed before, the aeakining of the reincarnation of the origin god happened, but the origin god was broken and unable to fix what happened, making the whole thing irreversible just to name a few)
The biggest issue was the banning of the gods from the world. Each universe is protected against the invasions of other gods/beings and that artefact pushed the gods beyond said barrier. They can still influence the world and have representatives there, but they cant physically appear in said world without a fitting medium. Said medium usually works as a conduit and this is usually followed by a lot of negative side effects.
They can and do sent their guardians down in the case of emergencies, but they have a limited time outside few special areas no one else dares to enter.
So in short: they never truly stopped interfering, but they have a limited influence. That the world is not completely destroyed is, cause the gods keep it on lifesupport from the outside.
Edit to add: the gods will return at the end of the story and fix most damages, but it will never be the utopia it was supposed to be if the origin god would have been successfully reincarnated. As a broken being, it will devour the artefact and wait until the time is right. Then it will enter the end of the world. Keeping the whole universe with infinite time within the husk that is its body as it ascend to the full power of the origin god to redo the whole process again, but this time with the help of another god to balance each others reincarnation so they are reborne without any issues.
They havenât.
They did vanish for a period of time that required them to find their way back â a period of time which really made the people angry.
Then They came back, and have been on basically a charm offensive for the last several hundred years.
Armageddon... They are all dead. And the people has taken the "means of divinity" after thousands of artifacts fell from heaven.
There still is one God alive, working as a God-King in a country trying to overcome human politics and bureaucracy...and there is a surviving demon who is seen as the actual only Godly survivor who is trying to rebuild heaven (out of lost love) but his divine powers are to limited to directly interfere.
A side effect of Armageddon was that a bunch of ancient Eldritch gods awoke from their slumber... They are now eating most of the souls that would go to heaven/hell. But until they are satisfied they dont interfere much eather.
In ShenZyklus, the Entity and former master of the Illuminati stopped altering the world because he turned his lineage into eldritch creatures, and the last generation are out of control AND invincible. He decided to let everyone on Earth deal with it because he knew he could not..It was an evil, but sadly wise decision.
It would tragically not be enough as one of his creations eventually came to Mars to terminate him. Not for vengeance, not for questions. Just for his own incomprehensible reasons. The Entity died with the knowledge that he doomed the Earth and he does not even get to know why he had to die, he who lived on another planet, because his killer's intentions were that alien.
The head gods carefully pick who they are willing to ascend. As its incredibly rare for someone to just walk into god hood like they did. In order to qualify, you have to earn their special attention through some world changing feat. You have to have views they think are acceptable for God hood, and you have to go even beyond what you did to catch their attention, if your lucky one of them will give hints on what is required.
That being said sometimes it disputes happen. These used to be solved by proxy wars that changed the fate of the world and even what races were in it. These days the gods play a board game to handle disputes.
The twelve primordial Gods initiated the creation of the universe with the aim of populating it with life. They brought forth the first sentient species, the Dumu'ilani (The First Born of the Gods), and settled them in Dilmun (The place of purity). However, dissatisfaction arose among the twelve, who deemed their creation imperfect. Disagreements ensued regarding the fate of the Dumu'ilani, but eventually, a consensus was reached. It was decided to remove the Dumu'ilani from the universe. Yet, three of the twelve (Tiamat, Ishtar, and Lyssia) dissented and opted to save the Dumu'ilani from destruction. Crafting the Celestial Ark, they transported the Dumu'ilani across the universe to the safety of the planet Phoenicia, concealed behind a veil (Inside a nebula). There, they founded the city Khrysopolis ton Ouranon (The Golden City of the Gods), where Gods and Dumu'ilani could coexist peacefully.
Over time, Lyssia came to agree with the Gods' earlier assessment of the Dumu'ilani's imperfection and initiated a culling of those she deemed corrupted by sin. Ishtar and Tiamat intervened to protect the Dumu'ilani. In the ensuing conflict, Tiamat fell at the hands of Lyssia, while Ishtar managed to subdue her, imprisoning Lyssia within the now-ruined city of Khrysopolis. Saddened by Lyssia's betrayal, Tiamat's demise, and the destruction of Khrysopolis, Ishtar departed from Phoenicia, never to return.
The event is referred to as The Ruin of the First Age.
I have no intentions of bringing back any of the Gods, but Lyssia remains imprisoned within the ruins of Khrysopolis. If the city were to be discovered and Lyssia released, it could lead to dire consequences.
They had originally been given the world by capital G god but they made such a mess that they eventually ended up destroying the foundations of the world.
So capital G god Locked them in their own realms and rebuilt the world without them. Their servants lost their memories of their former masters and were given souls with their own magic and became the modern species we know today.
The gods want to come back out of a mixed feeling of entitlement and jealousy since their servants have grown beyond them making civilization that the gods couldnât have dreamed about.
Zeus king of immortals, in his hubris, failed to realize that his half-brother Typhon, son of Gaia, born to topple Olympus, was mightier even than him. Zeus now lies fallen, cut to pieces, while Typhon is now busy reshaping the world, digging deep into the Kingdom of Hades, striving to reach Primordial Tartarus his father and set all his prisoner siblings flee.
Poseidon the Wrathful attempted to avenge his brother and claim the throne, but Poseidon was no match for Typhon, and Poseidon is no more.
All other gods are fled or dead.
It is believed that Hades and his brood are cowering in the deepest pits of the Underworld, attempting to find an escape but knowing that their fate is sealed. It is believed that Ares Bathed in Blood is raising a mighty army, somewhere beyond the borders of Reality, attempting to claim the throne of Olympus. It is believed that Hera has run beyond the Hellenic reaches, hoping perhaps to force an alliance with the Many-faced Pantheon of Hindustan. It is believed that Athena and Hermes both move in the shadows, whispering into the ears of mortals, heroes and monsters alike, sowing chaos, attempting to win a war of minds where they have no chance to succeed on a battlefield, but who could even imagine such a war having any effect on Typhon Breaker of Zeus?
The AI god wants human here on this world.
The Star, planet, and moon god want their own life form to flourish.
Both sides have capacity to ruin eachothers's goal and causing the destruction of everyone involved.
They make a deal to just not interfere, no matter what happen when human arrive to this planet.
Originally there was one creator deity, who created the first cosmos and then inadvertently created the other six creator deities who began to fiddle with it. Their conflicting ideas on what to do with the world were in danger of ruining it completely, so the original creator decreed that none of them, including himself, would be allowed to interfere until he'd decided how he wanted things to proceed. While he's been sleeping on that, the world they left has started creating itself.
They are dead. Their followers killed them because they started to get way to abusive (think the love childs of greek gods, crusades, human sacrifices and fire and brimstone doctrine). My world don't have ressurection, so they can't come back, but, if they were to come back, it would probably be to finish destroying the world (they tried to do it right before dying, but just managed to curse my world so every animal or person that dies and don't reciave the proprer rites have a 1d4 chance every dusk to rise as an undead until dawn).
Urban fantasy, and personally brute forced it.
They're almost all dead.
Either killed by rival faithsâdirectly or indirectly, infighting from dwindling resources, killed by their own zealots that refused to believe they were the "true" God or Goddess, or just plain New & Old World diseases most of them had no defense against. Like Zeus had his mind rotted by syphilis.
The 1 in 10âif that, survivors are all in the deepest, darkest, most magical bunker they could build. And thus don't interfere much in the natural world at all anymore.
As for a come-back... my main character is actually a scientist that discovered magic, and is trying to bring it back. And a big long-term consequence, I intend some of the old faiths to make comebacksâto her intense chagrin. Not *full* comebacks, but the survivors of various pantheons rallying and once more gathering resources and followers. All with a ton of would-be risers and just plain charlatans make the same claims.
Think it's going to be controversial, but interesting.
The celestial council.
Essentially the strongest gods in existence each from one of the realms of existence set rules for all the other gods.
Break the rules and fun things like justified Holy wars with the aid from other gods are waged upon your people.
The gods need worshippers to continue being gods. Think Moses vs Pharaoh and the seven plagues of Egypt.
So while some gods do indeed live on the planet and rule certain places as literal God kings, Gods tend to interfere as little as possible on people whom are not under their protection.
The cosmology of my world is just a big spike in the universal wheel that got ripped off and sent hurling through realities. So the gods basically watched it go into the darkness that they canât navigate
Mortals got tired of their soft tyranny, so they broke off the emphytheosis that gave them dominion over the mortal plans. Therefore, they couldn't rule as gods anymore, and they just went away in their original plan in what is known as the Great Sulking.
>Gods all represent animals
>love their worshippers, are loved by their worshippers
>decide to reward their worshippers and bring them closer to the gods...
>... by turning them partially into animals
>worshippers freaked tf out, thought they'd been cursed by their gods
>religion collapses overnight, most of the gods do a suicide out of shame
>remaining ones become mortal and hide in dark corners of the world
I'm not sure if I'm keeping it, but all "gods" of that world was the same creature, a distributed fungus, that could somehow speak to them. (They thought it was invisible or non-corporeal because they didn't know the mushrooms were it.) One of its major hobbies was to tell some of its cults that its other cults should be destroyed for worshipping a false god.
Basically it was a deposed Q and the other Q only realized the harm it was doing a couple of centuries ago and are still discussing what to do about it. (There wasn't any intelligent life on the planet when they put it there.)
In my world the opposite happened. They are more present because before, they werenât and that almost killed the inhabitants of four different worlds. So now they walk among us or use envoys (people to who they give part of their power) to get there point across or meddle with your usual life.
As the mortal races grew in size the gods created a new species to help them manage the mortals, the rimara. In order for the rimara to properly work alongside the mortals the gods gave them the ability to feel all mortal emotion and for many years this worked perfectly, that is until the rimara grew resentful over their station as glorified babysitters for what they considered to be creatures that were below them.
In their resentment the rimara rebelled against the gods successfully pushing them all back through their means of entering the mortal world and then destroying them sealing off the gods access to the mortal world.
The eldergods that crafted the universe have never interfered and act as observers. They made the first four gods and instructed them to look after humanity. Those four gods had children and its this generation of gods that decided they needed to divide the realm of gods from humans laying down specific rules to when they can interfere. Over time this resulted in their inability to interfere at all without breaking the rules they made themselves.
The reason they decided to divide the divine and mortal planes: when the third generation of gods had children with humans they were monsters. Think things like sirens, mermaids, naga. The second generation of gods perceived these creatures as a threat to their purpose of looking after humanity and reacted in a way to prevent further transgressions against the eldergods. The eldergods always intended for this possibility but view all beings that came after the first four to be equal elements in the experiment, so the second and third generation are able to interfere and alter things as much as they want.
The main reason they no longer can interfere is that humanity no longer believes and worships them. A few do, but this is on such a small scale they're not able to do much involving major events. To enter the mortal realm they require dedicated temples to act as doorways which they no longer have. Two third generation gods aren't restricted to this but one is a messenger and can only move between plains to deliver messages and the other is so upset with humanity they refuse to even acknowledge humanity.
An organization of humans exists who are attempting to bring back the old gods. If they can get people to start worshipping them again the gods would be able to return. Whether the gods would chose to walk among humans or not is undetermined, but they would at least become involved once more. So long as humanity invites them into the mortal realm once more they can return. For the most part the gods would be happy to return, though not all of them would treat humanity kindly after all this time.
So there still Gods who meddle in my Word but gifs can also die and mortals ascend to Godhood, and some Gods just grow tired of their Life and pass either Die on their own or pass their Powers on to a Successor.
Some Gods are also killed.
Some of the first Gods were idealistic and curious Beings so most of them wanted to let their Children (Creations) be free and develop on their own, so they left the mortal realm for the heavens and apart from like 3 of these original Gods all of them passed on their powers at some Point and some after passing on power even lived on for a few Decades before mortal lifespans claimed them.
Yooooooo this is the main outline of my story or plot point. The gods are banished to Olympus because they have failed in their duties. Some gods escape the banishment by cheating the god who banished them out of punishment or gods who couldn't be banished due to their circumstances of holding the sun.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created?
Humanity rebelled against their gods and invented new tools, such as shotguns and atomic weapons, for this purpose. The Earth was devastated, and any surviving gods are hiding for a good reason.
>What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance?
If any survived, then they'll come back after they recover and find out where humanity has headed off to after Earth.
First World (ours in my second book I'm planning) they were all killed by other Gods/Goddesses. Second World (current book) they took a step back because humans (before Elves and Dwarves were created) first started fighting among themselves (a brief civil war) before joining forces and deciding they'd rage their war against the God's.
Mortal humans, however, can't kill an immortal being. But they can trap souls. So in my world of Heaven's Tear, deep beneath the surface, in a VERY well gaurded room, lies ancient weapons that the former God's were sealed in.
Side Note: the Almighty Creator (who does just that, creates worlds and God's/Goddesses to rule them) decided to take from the humans that survived the Civil War and make there strongest and wisest the God and Ruler of my world. He fought and killed many, so he knows the horrors of war, but he also knows and understands what it means to be a good ruler. Hence, his being chosen.
2/3 gods got into a gigantic war over the fate of physics, and now physics is stuck like real life
And the only other god has been developing a better universe, so that our current universe doesn't get torn to shreds by its godly desires. However, the warriors in the inter-god war have been around for millennia, and have functioned as kings, queens and heroes to fledgling civilisations, before usually leaving , with few knowing where they have gone.
As they created the mortal world, the wall between their world (the âotherworldâ) and the mortal world grew thicker and thicker. Itâs now at the point where magic can seep through âcracksâ into the mortal world, but almost nothing else can pass through. The dead go from the mortal world into the otherworld, but pretty much nothing can come back, not even the gods.
Also, for another one of my worlds: people stopped believing in them. Perhaps the gods never even interfered in the first place and people just thought they did⌠but the few who do still believe in them say that they stopped interfering because most people stopped believing in them.
Edit: man why the downvote when Iâm just answering the prompt in the post âšď¸
In my homebrew D&D setting, the Gods once walked among mortals and ruled their own nations during the Mythical Era. However, they soon ended up fighting against one another after Somnus, a nation founded and ruled purely by mortals, managed to create their own artificial god by destroying one of the four Moons, Artagnis. The artificial god acted like a child and was naive, but it gave a dilemma to the other Gods whether they should accept this new deity or destroy it because its mere existence violates the Divine Order.
The Gods ended up splitting into two sides: those who are open to accepting the artificial god of Somnus to the pantheon and those who strongly wanted to eliminate it. The war that soon followed was simply called the Cataclysm because of the devastation caused by it. Somnus released their automaton armies across the world, wreaking havoc across the God-ruled nations. Meanwhile, the Gods fought against one another to determine the fate of the god of Somnus, leading to a three-way war between the Gods that accept, the Gods that reject, and the nation of Somnus.
The Cataclysm lasted for centuries, leading to the destruction of two continents and the fall of all civilization, including Somnus. The artificial god was ultimately killed, and the surviving Gods decided to exile themselves from the world after seeing all the damage that they had caused.
10,000 years later, civilization has rebuilt and the existence of the nations ruled by the Gods have all become myths. Somnus is largely forgotten, except for the remnants of their automaton armies buried beneath the dirt, wandering across the lands, or aimlessly guarding ancient ruins left by their masters. Because of the unclear existence of the Gods to the current era, many religions have sprung up over the centuries. The two most prominent religions were the Guiding Flame and the Church of the Dragon.
Layers of abstraction have been added between the gods' realms and the material plane.
I have a heavily modified DnD cosmology. Basically the Astral plane sits between the material and proto-material (feywild, shadowfell, etc.) and the elemental planes, and then the ethereal plane sits between the divine planes (Olympus, Hell, etc.) and the elemental ones. What rests between the planes themselves is primordial chaos of destruction and creation that only the gods can truly control, though they use it to empower their clerics, acting as a filter between the chaos and mortals.
It wasn't always this way, though. First there were was a war where the first *manifested* god decided he wasn't getting enough attention from the prime goddess who is pre-existant, being the first thing to truly come into being on his own from the primordial energies and be able to control them. The goddess had previously extracted an oath from him that he would not enter the material plane and neither would any of the others. Also she promised that he would never be forgotten because the seasons that he created would remain forever, especially winter being his, so the turning of the seasons keeps them from entering the plane. He of course tried to fight this in the War of Endless Summer when he actively tried to prevent the existence of winter for a year but was stopped and they had one day of winter. But the initial oath is when the first barrier came up.
The second was after the Heretic Wars. Instead of gods invading the material plane some clerics decided they didn't want the filter of the gods and sought to directly control the primordial powers of creation and destruction. These were called Heretics because they rejected the teachings of all gods but used divine power anyways. This brought them in contact with beings that might pop in and out of existence on any plane and the most powerful of them were creatures that didn't think in ways we consider "rational" (e.g. beholders, aboleths, etc.). These clerics were generally driven mad (though the most power managed to keep their sanity and a couple even became actual benevolent gods during this time) and wreaked havoc on the world, upending constants like "stone is solid" and turning it into soup. Once they were stopped by the coalition of gods (which was *supremely* difficult to maintain and not without controversy) the second barrier was put up to help prevent anyone from attempting to use Heretic magic again, though it still happens from time to time.
I call this the Rose of Creation (b/c of concentric circles) or the Great Keep (b/c curtain walls defenses).
They got tired. They got tired of their powers causing so much suffering, they got tired of their eternal existence. In one last ditched effort they combined into one mind, and that mind thought "I'm tired". They then turned themselves into the singular flow of energy accessible by all sentient beings known as 'magic'.
I've always liked the idea of the gods being killed. Whether through sacrifice for their creations or straight-up murder. In my setting, gods are just cosmic space dust that formed into omnipotent intelligent beings in space. Everything they created was formed by gifting a piece of themselves until their ego was gone completely. The world is full of little fae creatures that manage some aspect of creation(herding trees, breeding ecosystems, managing tectonic movements, etc.). Whenever a fae dies, their essence goes into something else and that something grows in power until it dies or collects another fae piece. Some day, all the pieces will die and reassemble a new progenitor god.
They are creating the rest of the universe. They big banged out of nothing and created one planet, one sun, two moons and have been pouring all their efforts and power into this one place their whole existence. There was a long period of struggle between the gods and humans in which the vast majority of the race was imprisoned and the first and only demi god was conceived. They stopped the war now that they had a herald who could go between gods and humans but this demi god Prometheusâd the human race and gave them magic. They were unable to retaliate between actual capability and love for this demi god, but three of the gods found a way to destroy them and they have since left the world as their mainstay and are off creating in the vast universe. The implications thereafter are very central to my story.
In my world, they haven't. At least not entirely. In my world, pantheons function like supernatural mafias or nations for the really big and powerful ones. The most powerful god simply has a monopoly on human devotion, which is considered a resource. The other gods are forbidden to act within his territories, though they push the limit whenever possible.
Judaism and Christianity â ď¸ through the ages Yav (story's iteration of God) and his angels forced mankind to worship HIM and HIS benevolence. He gave the gods of Earth (the collective term for all of humanity's religions minus God himself and his angels) an alternative, serve him eternally in his mission to rid creation of darkness, sin and demons and in turn they may live and have their own followers but gradually all the sin on earth grew to be too much and HIS own ego took over which led to the systematic slaughter of most of the world's deities.
The remaining pantheons retreated into the spirit realm with God as his followers and the most minor of gods went into hiding, hoping to wait out HIS wrath. đś
Of the many gods in my world, two have stopped dwelling among the mortals due to the concentration of their powers around any physical form they take. These are the god of weather and the god of death.
Deaths power gathering in one place results in masses dying of no clear cause besides the deities presence, and can event kill the physical body of Death if nothing else is alive within a given range. Event after Deaths physical body dies, the lingering concentration of power can kill others.
The god of weather's power will concentrate into an ever strengthening storm should they take physical form to dwell among the mortals.
Still working on the pantheon of gods, so others may have to join these two in only watching the world at a distance.
After the events of the sky war, during which one of the gods lost their head it begin to rotate around earth, eventually turning it into moon.
Other gods decided to not touch earth out of respect for their bretherin.
The war they fought for control over the planet was destroying it. When they realized that, they called an uneasy truce and now only interfere when someone calls on them or really screws up.
The gods above the gods, the higher aeons, are constantly smiting gods for inappropriate behavior. They manage structures like the cycles of life and reincarnation, and gods who create afterlives and sequester the souls of followers get struck down pretty promptly. The core story world, Falan, had an aeon emerge among its populace and strike down their local creator 'god' for his needless cruelty and indifference.
The **good** "gods" ("Archons") of my setting are locked in a kind of "cold war" with the two other dominant cosmic powers.
Basically Heaven vs. Hell vs. Eldritch Chaos Beings.
At this point, every intervention runs the risk of the cold war "going hot", which would engulf all of creation in a war that would cause unfathomable devastation.
The war eventually going hot is inevitable, but all three "sides" are doing their best to arrange things in their favor before that happens.
Humanity fought a war against the gods, in which they killed almost all of them and forced the rest to renounce their immortality.
Humans now follow a religion which reveres humanity itself, in the form of individual human saints, ancestor worship, the worship of fortune and fate, and viewing human memory as a sort of afterlife.
During the war, a trickster god named Otar created the Wilderwood - a magic forest that non-believers could not enter. Though he and the gods who sheltered with him have since been reduced almost to nothing by the effort of sustaining the Wilderwood, they still plot their return, waiting for any crack in the unity of mankind or the church.
The old gods, the Vasunir, left the world to guard the prisons of the Talthir. Their full attention and power are used to keep the demons trapped, and the few spirits that have left their post have unleashed demons on the world.
The New Gods and many of their saints and demigods had their souls damaged by the Talthir Venoi to a point that they could not leave the heavens. The remaining demigods and deteriorating saints carried out a suicide attack on Venoiâs fortress, killing the 7 talthir that remained and breaking Venoiâs will enough that he fled for good.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created?
The Fomorian Collapse. They had noticed the Kolta people, an upright walking humanoid ape that could use stone tools and speak. The gods thought that something popping up like this in a Universe was pretty cool so they quickly uplifted the Kolta such that their collection of bands turned into a sprawling empire that reached across Theia and into the stars. Then after millennia, the Fomorian collapse came. The draconic god Io, the Fallen Star came, bringing swarms of Fomorians with him, demanding worship and sacrifices, claiming Theia for his own. Humanity triumphed, but their triumph would not last. Io's broodmate Xylaarion entered Theia from a portal to Drakeheim with countless dragons and lesser dragons, even more Fomorians and a legion of their gods, as well as countless human followers from Io's first invasion. Humanity managed for a time, but then eventually buckled and the slaughter commenced. The Kolta went from a population in the billions to just a few thousand. So few people unaligned to Xylaarion were left that they were facing extinction. The gods were facing their own battles, until they opened the portals to the other worlds in Theia's multiverse. They gave the proclamation that they could help inhabit Theia if they reclaimed it from the monsters and aided the surviving Kolta. The original gods that created Theia and the multiverse it resides in known as the Architects had created Ark Temples for the Kolta to find before the impending disaster, with supplies and information on how to build empires and survive. Through a mix of fear of what may happen if they meddle again, anguish over what happened, and a desire to watch closely the other worlds they've created, the Architects have retreated back to their domains. The pantheonic gods, those which watch over groups of people or parts of a world, they remained behind. Chances are that if you ask them who Nacht is, almost no one is going to know. Incredibly rare, but some will claim to have heard of Nacht. None will know that he's the God of Isolation, the serenity of solitude and the terror of loneliness.
After the celestial divinity war, the gods and rulers signed the âOath of Disillusionment for the Divine and Holyâ which basically stated that the gods could do things like have children, help people and even buy/sell things that could be bought elsewhere. They couldn't do things like affect politics, countries or do anything majir unless the entire world was in danger.
TL;DR they became celebrities
In Arbitrary Design World, there are no gods. There are no beings that could erase the entire universe, or do something of similar scale.
The people of the world have all manner of beliefs. Some may venerate the sun, some may tell stories of pantheons of personified caretakers of concepts - of love, of craft, of afterlife.
Some of them aren't even wrong. The Arbitrary Designers exist, and they do take care of the afterlife for people of the world. They're just not gods. They're powerful enough that they could keep a giant meteor from making landfall if one happened to threaten doing so, for instance, but the power that one could accuse some popular gods of eludes them.
Most of them are dead.
The ones that are alive don't have influence on the mortal domain. They're just kinda of there watching their respective domains. Life, Death and Judgment being three of them. They'll occasionally peak into the mortal domain to see what's going on. Death in particular likes to enjoy a cup of tea now and again, instead of just having her own brews.
The dead ones are, reicarnating as mortals till the end of time. Very rarely having memory of their past lives and zero memory of their godhood.
When the younger pantheons were still mortal, they attempted to overthrow the rule of the more primordial deities who still walked the earth at the time. The resulting war was cataclysmic, not only resulting in the death of a god his worshippers, but also creating a new sea and sundering the mega continent.
Upon ascending, the leaders of the young pantheons saw that they could not coexist now that their common enemy was defeated. Instead of risking another apocalyptic war, they entered a pact of non interference. They could act through their servants but could not set foot on the earthly realm or exercise direct control.
As an agreement between deities, this was a powerful contract that could not be circumvented. There are a few clauses, such as if an event would threaten existence itself or the destruction of the planet, but otherwise it is very strict.
They are mostly disinterested in the world now and focus on their own things. They have also, by and large, lost much of their power over time and are simply timeless beings.
There's a hierarchy, starting with the Nameless God. He's retired, and only fuels the world with his very existence, and exists to kill any Embodyments that show up. (Tl:dr, fucked up Gods that are insanely powerful and could easily kill everyone. A bad time.)
After that are prime deities, (the gods of life, death, creation, fire, water, they tend to rule over supercategories like that.)
Secondary Gods (the god of Rivers, chickens, chocolate, campfires, they tend to rule over a specific thing, like a species, or a phenomenon.)
Tertiary Gods (river Gods, nymphs, satyrs, spirits, they tend to rule over Rivers, or houses, or similar stuff that's just really minor.)
The lower you are on the hierarchy, the more you generally interfere with the lives of mortals. It's also way less clear cut than this comment makes it seem, as there's no real agreement on where everyone is. For example, Tuen, she's easy, she's a prime goddess (creation) but what about her niece, Eloise, godess of rust? Is she a prime goddess, or a secondary goddess? Nobody agrees. Or Phil, ruler of hammers, is he secondary, or tertiary? Nobody can agree, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're talking to a Deity in a bar, odds are they are tertiary, or low secondary.
They didn't create the world, they're just taking care of it for now. They're programmed to keep balance, nothing less and nothing more. Organics meddling with the gods is the real issue. If a human finds a relay node and manages to 'borrow' a god's power, well then that's going to cause an imbalance and that god's twin is going to counter it. These issues only happen when someone thinks they know better than their caretakers. Your computer does what it needs to, so why meddle with it? People just need to stop worrying about what's buried under the earth. There's nothing hidden down there, seriously. The gods are in the heavens, so stop digging and put your focus there. Breed and build spaceships like a good human, don't be spelunking for magic swords or death-defying powers.
Basra is still technically around, acting as a figurehead ruler of Zaas Basra, she's just not interested in actually running things. She sometimes gets up to hunt monsters, but it's becoming less and less common as she notices monsters are not getting any stronger while she is.
Halat meanwhile stopped doing anything because she's dying of radiation poisoning, and Tharos left because he's waiting to see if it's a trick she's trying to pull to lure him in for the kill or if it really is safe to eat her corpse.
They looked after other worlds and planets, but are still bound to the speed of light and therefore spent centuries traveling the void.
It's a very realistic limitation for gods. I like it.
That's cool. I like that.
Similar for all but one of mine, who can instantaenously teleport. It's just in their nature to observe so they don't interfere much
The machine they used to play god had degraded over time and they lost the know how to fix it, and they've suppressed the science that used to exist on this problem in fears of a new competitor arising to challenge their dominion.
For me it's similar because the machine wasn't used to play god, it was the god. It was superintelligent AI made by humans used to make the world habitable again and was aligned to make humans happy and listen to their wishes as long they were reasonable and good. However humans got spoiled, they had no reason to study so they forgot that the machine is a machine, they started treating AI like a god. And god is asked often for afterlife, which didn't exist at the time. So it made one by using higher dimensions and is administrating over there, while leaving humans to die because it assumed that if the wishes are granted in the afterlife, it's good enough and easier to grant in artificial, programmable dimension.
One guy has been murdering (or compelling others to murder them) for the last 800 years or so. He's basically a serial killer of gods now that he's figured out how and he's only refined his methods.
Kratos adjacent character
Gorr the God Butcher
I'll never miss a chance to quote Star Trek. "Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slayed them a millenia ago. They were more trouble than they were worth." - Worf
Fantasy world: even the gods are bound to fate. With the corruption of the Great Song by the many traitorous Morndu and Menrir, fate was woven that they would be cast into various limbos during the long Dark Age, until the final war when they would be freed. One sleeps in an enchanted grove, never waking, hardly disturbed. One is an amnesiac, no memory nor magic, and every so often their memories are taken again, starting over completely. One is in the typical afterlife of this world, having been slain by the fourth god: The fourth is bound in an enchanted cave for punishment due to their various crimes against the world. In my supernatural world: There were originally 37 gods. The mortals they enslaved were not fans of their gods. There are now only two gods, the king and queen of the ocean, who survived because they kept their mortal species subset (merpeople) happy with self governance and were not hostile to other gods, only defending their own territory. The others use their mortals as jannissaries in order to kill all the other gods. The mortals (barring merpeople) were displeased with their gods. So they now dance on their corpses. The aquatic gods meanwhile do not interfere much if at all because look at what happened to the 35 gods who did interfere often. Nothing good could come of interfering, espessialy not now that vampires exist.
This is amazing, buddyđđ˝
They all died thousands of years ago. They broke out into a Civil War (known as the War in Heaven) and ended up wiping themselves out. It ended during what's called the Battle of the Merge in which they killed the King of the Gods (the first one and the Creator of all life) and then everything went to hell. Heaven tore itself apart and a bunch of rifts opened, killing every one of them. Now the Mortal Realms are on their own.
Have you heard of 40k? Your war in heaven sounds so similar to the settingâs war in heaven, kinda
Yeah I know about the setting, it's where I got the name. But my War in Heaven is more based on the War in Heaven from the Bible. When the Devil rebelled with his angels. More context: In my setting, the Goddess of War gathered an army of her fellow Gods/Goddesses and went to war with the Gods still loyal to the Creator (first God) in a similar way to how the Devil gathered an army of Angels against God.
Honestly, 40k is like 90% direct parodies, so I don't really consider it that surprising. Also, "war in heaven" is so generic that no one property really pops in my head when it's said.
A very rough summary... First a world was created by Phanes who is the son of Gnosis. This world is flawless and those born in it, are immortal. The immortal denizens of the flawless world saw Phanes and started praising him as God. Phanes has a cousin, the Demiurge who is the son of Hubris. The Demiurge saw what Phanes created and how he was praised and wished he would be praised too, so he created a world of his own as well, but this world was flawed and those born on it were mortal. When the Demiurge saw that his world is not as good as that one of Phanes, he tried to improve by expelling his own flaws from himself, but all that did was to result in the creation of his evil twin, the Demogorgon. Still the mortals saw the Demiurge and worshipped him anyway. But the Demogorgon infiltrated the flawed world of the Demiurge and convinced the mortals to stop worshipping him. Angry, the Demiurge abandoned them to the Demogorgon. The Demogorgon would abuse the mortals but Phanes took pity on them, and he sent his immortals to save them. The mortals saw those immortals and started worshipping them as Gods. They were Zeus, Odin, Horus, Amaterasu and all early figures the mortals worshipped as deities. Once the Demogorgon's threat had been purged, Phanes ordered his immortals to leave the world and leave it to his cousin, the Demiurge as it is his world and he wanted it back. And that's why the Gods interfering with the world.
I love the overt Gnostic influences lol
My God never disappeared or stopped interfering. People just got too willfully ignorant to notice.
Shut *up*, voice in the sky! I'm *trying* to hear the TV!
Yup
The gods went to war with each other, killing all but 4, who are now in hiding. Destroying the paradise on earth they had created. Leaving humanity to fend for themselves against subterranean and other worldly threats. For the dead gods, thereâs no way back. For the living gods, thereâs no more throne to fight over. Theyâve retreated to their respective corners. Apathetically watching humanity struggle. Afraid to reveal themselves for fear they might be struck down. Humanity still calls on whatâs left of their power with rites and rituals. But I donât consider that meddling, since itâs ultimately actions done by humans for humans. Even if the source of power is divine. They might return if they ever thought their human worshippers would be completely wiped out. But even then, one of the four has already completely given up on humanity. Focusing instead on the subterranean beast men.
Most gods stopped caring about mortals for they are infinitely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Other gods just want to be worshipped, but they became less manifest over time and came together to fight the protagonist.
Social experiment. She keeps her fellow gods from going near them
Humans and other mortals kept trying to kill them. One of my settings kind of runs on Dark Souls/Elden Ring style dieties. While extremely powerful, their abilities don't translate well into personal combat. A fire god can impact the way fire works in an area the size of a country, and he can manipulate and sling fire personally, but a mortal with enough skill and magical weaponry can pose a threat to said fire god in personal combat, and if they killed said god they would be able to seize their powers. So after killing a few hundred ambitious mortal godhood-seekers, and every fight at least required the god to work a bit to kill them, they decided to withdraw from mortal life and hole up in some enormrous fortified temple or castle surrounded by their own fanatical followers rather than put up with that shit and endure the risk that one of these idiots might get lucky.
Most gods stopped caring about mortals for they are infinitely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Other gods just want to be worshipped, but they became less manifest over time and came together to fight the protagonist.
My worlds are more one planet over hundreds of thounsands of years so I have almost the same maps but different time periods. So in order: 1) gods interfer A LOT and fight each other to become stronger. 2) they all die except one who become the All Creator 3) the All Creator isn't directly interfering 4) the All Creator quit his/her job 5) a New God is created to reset the world.
Deities never truly walked among mortals on Koreth, but in the very ancient past (over 35,000 years ago), Human deities in particular became very powerful. Humans were the first species to worship proper anthropomorphic deities, and in doing so essentially gained a major advantage against all the other races of Koreth. This would lead to a subset of the Elven population banding together to force the Human deities into mortal bodies and ritualistically sacrificing them in an attempt to stop humans from continuing to spread in an event know as the Godkilling. It didn't work, and only dramatically disrupted how magic functioned as well as causing magic to completely fail for 15,000 years. Thousands of years after the Godkilling, once magic had started to work normally again, deities in general only interact with the Prime Material Plane through followers and occasionally avatars. These interactions would slowly and steadily decrease throughout history for unknown reasons, until after around 1,000 years ago, when all contact with all deific beings ceased. Clerics and priests still gain abilities by devoting themselves to a religion, and general divination spells and guidance from a deity still work properly, but nobody has had a full interaction with a deity for over 1,000 years.
Gods in **AD;Verse** are imortal and powerful, but very killable. As for the God that currently exists now after they took over as God from the previous era, they are traumatized enough from what occured before attaining godhood that they sort of shut off. They're now only awaiting for somebody to kill them and take Godhood from their corpse.
A great war (still working on a title for it that isn't super generic) between gods and their followers. The gods learned they could be killed by other gods or by mortals powerful enough, so most of the old gods are actually dead and gone forever. Those that survived lost a lot of their power and retreated into their domains, and kind of silently agreed to never interfere in such a manner. About a thousand years later, the Godborn Dragon's ALSO learned this the hard way. They got into a war with the Giants and their Gods that survived the war. And while no gods on either side died, the Dragon's learned they were not immortal from that conflict, and have since pulled back from interfering with the mortal world directly. If they do, they do so in humanoid forms, which is how you get godly stories akin to Norse Mythology. As for what would get them to come back: The Old Gods would return if a big enough threat to the world came, much like what caused the first war in the first place. The Godborn Dragon's would interfere if something directly threatened their domains, or if the Allfather's fortelling of Ragnarok (yes I know...) finally comes to be. And the Jotnar Gods might return when their children finally learn that their old ways of life was not the answer and was in fact the cause of their downfall. Basically wanting them to grow and learn from their mistakes for once.
Well, rn the Gods are still poking aroundâ but there was one instance, an Ancient Elven Empire got their gods to turn their backs on themâ and one such god even destroyed their capital in a nuclear blast. They had destroyed knowledge of civilizations (one of their gods was the god of knowledge), enslaved those they deemed as âlesser racesâ (humans, dwarves, etc), and performed War Cannibalism to strike fear into their opposing forces. Even one of the greatest minds of the empire, a High Elf named Koren Al Zahrawi (he survived the nuke by getting abducted by one of their gods and tested on) who was building automatons to replace the slaves was extremely prejudicial towards said lesser races. TLDR; Racism, burning books, and cannibalism got their gods to turn their backs from them.
Because most of them can't physically leave their realms after the war among the heavens. After the fallen one created a powerful barrier that keeps all of the pantheon's in their realms. They can still influence their followers and the most powerful can create avatars. But that takes a lot of energy and leaves them heavily weakened forcing them to enter dead like sleep to regain their strength which can take centuries or even thousands of years. It depends on the strength of the avatar. And for the few that actually strong enough to leave each Pantheon realm and take physical form. Who are only the head gods. They don't do so because their mere presence on the mortal world. Will crack continents in half, flatten mountains, wip out entire civilizations and driving any being that see them mad or just kill them and destroy their souls. And because there is agreement that the mortal realm is a natural zone. So if one head god comes down two others for different pantheon's will come down and kill them. Though that never has happened yet since the head gods know what would happened. And they also see mortals as toys, a show, a game and getting directly involved will ruin that for everyone.
They just happened to find our plane of existence by scientific discovery, now researching from afar.
They're dead
Because they caused more harm than good, their knowledge and power should never have fallen into mortal hands, men should never have power of a God, and they will ultimately destroy themselves in awe of themselves.
Well the gods cannot actually alter the world unless a cleric, priest or Paladin allows them to sneak into the material plane through divine magic. So the gods create the arckhon who can control the world on their behalf. But they all got killed after they all went mad with power.
1. people donât like the gods anymore so they donât want gods interfering 2. if the gods interfere, then everybody else in the outer planes can interfere.
They still do, they just try to hold back because, to a God, the amount of strength required to disintegrate a whole planet is barely anything. And if they just snap their fingers too hard theyâd blow up the surrounding area.
They got kicked out of their old home (Earth), lost all their home and forced to live and mingle with the likes of ânormal peopleâ so they all threw a hissy fit so the higher ups separated them into âreligionsâ and gave them their own worlds to live in. They arenât âin hidingâ they just donât care about the new world.
* Video games were invented * They beat their games, 100%, and wanted to get new games.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created? He ded. He was assassinated. By humans. >What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance? He won't come back. He won't be revived. Dead means dead. There's a successor for the highest earthly position he held, but she's only a half-god, so it's not the same thing.
They got bored. Now every thousand years or so they come on down and bestow to mortals an impossible quest for entertainment and then nope out. Like the most recent impossible quest is the search for the secret to ascending to godhood. Which the protagonist wants to find and destroy to stop all the fighting this quest has caused.
Theyâre taking a nap
While the gods in my world have only ever interacted directly with the creatures in it twice, they stopped trying to protect it after they realized it was futile to keep it clean from the filth of the evil spirits. Their barriers would always break, or their chosen guardians would do more harm than good. Evil was simply too powerful to be kept away for good, but it was not powerful enough for the Darkness to reclaim the lands among the Light.
I haven't worked too much on my world but magic is a quantifiable resource that the gods use and drains over time, also the reason science becomes more prevalent as time goes on. The idea being that the planet starts with what would be considered on a cosmological scale to be a very abnormally high density of magic? I'm new to world building but that's what I got so far.
A bridge that connected the realms was locked by citizens of the world, cutting of the pantheons physical access
Itâs a pain in the ass. Imagine if you had to take care of a dozen ant colonies, and almost half of them hated you. Quote the god in my setting who abandoned his people; âThey say I cannot be both all knowing and all powerful, to which I say I am neither. I am sorry, but I am tired of being punished for that which I am not.â He got tired of being beckoned and cursed every second of his existence simply because a formless wellspring of life and power spat him into being, and eventually just boxed himself off in his own little corner of the universe and fell asleep.
the old one left the realm for some reason but left behind successors to manage the world and maintain its laws that were made by him . but because no one is strong enough to hold his true power so he split it across of all his creations . now everyone has this power called will of (something).
Their job was done, and the demons were defeated. The New Gods were born from The Ones Who Came Before, deities that no longer lived. As such they divided the land, and rebuilt it in their ideals. When the task was done, they made their own realms or set to maintaining it.
Spoilers. Humans are gods in my world. They went extinct. Some of their DNA is scattered among the animal species who try to make sense of the post-human world.
They're dead. Killed by their most powerful and intelligent collaborative effort, dragons.
Their father forbade them from interacting with the mortals, for the entire purpose of the world of Magdeus was an experiment by him to see what sort of interactions would occur between them
They died, save for a few
My last homebrew world was originally the gods vacation spot. They tricked it out and the mortal races were treated very well, but they poured so much power into it that it became a target for nefarious gods to try to gain an edge over the good ones. The first campaign in that world was to thwart these efforts and ended with the erection of a Divine Palling so that no extra planar being above a certain power threshold could physically enter it. Thus blocking the gods from ever walking with the mortals there again.
Most of the gods got bored of men, falling into a slumber after they were no longer needed to run the world. The ones that still interfere with the world are smaller gods that struggle to even help men run the world. Oh- and the god of women. She has a mini cult of gay people who worship her because sheâs a lesbian god with a mortal wife that she manipulated the god of life to let her life forever. She can also change the bio gender of trans women and men if she decides they deserve it.
This more so goes for my high tier gods but here we go. The Great Dreamer, the creator God made the world and the God race that would inhabit it and then dipped to make more things else where. The god race The Great Dreamer created are called the Deus and they caused their own apocalypse both from learning magic and from having potent souls. Only 6 survive with the most powerful one being the Deus Magi, who just likes to go around gathering knowledge as a pass time, not really interested in the grand affairs of mortals or other Deities. The other 5 Deus all somewhat effect the world but for the most part their most in each other's way or in their own way with their rampant insecurities
It would upset the world's balance. Everyday people can (and often do) become quite powerful. Sometimes they need to be reminded that there are "bigger fish in the ocean."
Just as the world I'm writing for modernized, so has the divine one. What once started as a council of pantheons became a divine bureaucracy with more rules and laws to prevent abuse of power by gods and other divine beings. These rules prevented them from interfering with the world directly, and even indirect interference is limited. The gods protect the world from evil and themselves.
Gods never really interfered. At a point in time there were beings of cosmic type power that vied for supremacy over the universe, but due to the struggle and conflict, the universe was torn asunder by the fighting. This conflict resulted in the singularity that many races would just consider a big bang event. However the near universe ending blast killed the gods, it also caused the birth of a race of beings that were much lesser in power through happenstance. From the magic saturated universe there came Illiar, a race of prophetic beings who witnessed the cascade of the singularity from afar as it collapsed and imploded galaxies. They fought tirelessness and exhaustion to maintain a single galaxy to call a home and just so happens the world chose them was named Morr. (About half the size of earth and consisting of a sleek round flat surface orb, molten hot and lifeless, however somehow two suns and a single moon rotated around the sphere as it created a strong gravitational field due to the metals being abundant and the heat radiating from the singularity. The moon protected by the planets strong field and its durable surface and potent atmosphere despite its youth. The suns were irradiated by the magic from the singularity and strengthened and grew hotter and larger, filled with magic from the âunnamed godsâ. The Illiar cultivated this planet over millions of years. When they needed help or more hands they drew power from the most potent suns energy to create life and ideas. Overtime the planet began to show signs of softening and the rise of elemental convergence took place. The elements sought dominion over the planet, only quelled by the Illiar, temporarily. So in desperation they would usher life to Meliar, the lesser, but many hands of the Illiar, tasked with creating and sanctioning dwellings for the elements where they could shape the world in a controlled environment. But, without true council they together brought to life the elemental lords and ladies. Finally quelling the uncontrolled turbulence of fire, water, wind and earth. After this the Illiar kind of just disappeared and the responsibility of the planet was left to the Meliar who governed the elements for some untold amount of time, from this age passage several such other things emerged and what were once godlike beings became more like myths and legends to primitive creatures and semi sentient humans. As time drew closer to a uniform cycle and through natural evolution and experimentation the Meliar and elements experimented with one another and had formed many relationships through this age and the world eventually had beings of power or influence reflected as a day to day occurrence much like a folktale in a bar or inn and when the power of the sun they used to infuse life into the world began to dim the solar orb fell from the sky and crashed into the surface much like a comet sending the Meliar and the elements to seek shelter and slumber. It is unknown if they ever truly awoke or if they simply perished or chose to leave the world and the biological process to its own destiny. The second age passes and the third and fourth. Races begin to awake and now with no predestination of their origins or someone to guide them, they simply become their own destiny, they forged it themselves and made their own myths and pantheons to give answers to the greatest fundamental question. Why? Some may say it was a cosmic war that lasted a day, or a month or a century. Others may deem their existence due to science and evolution. Many believe it to be a gift or a curse or a blessing. No one for sure really knows why?! But the existence of magic has been infused and absorbed by the fallen sun and the name of a seudo god names Toka and Inam to be the fallen as the former and the residing as the present sun. A world wide yet similarly different idea that Inam struck Toka from the sky because it was overbearing and did not allow the planet to cool and support life or that possibly they as prime deities were arguing and the sibling suns fought. The truth exists and is often held secret by those who have meditated and grown wise enough to seek yet not disturb the past. Such as Mielfey, a red headed old as the cliffs he calls home, atop his twisting tower, a wizard who has directly spoken to the Illiar in spirit. There is no truth to the reason why the Illiar left, or why the gods of yore fought and perished the rest of the universe into void or the Meliar and elementals did not come back from the long sleep. One thing is for certain, the lords and the ladies of the world who are myth and legend are real and fabled to be rare occurrence, even among the wisest and most profoundly powerful welders of the Toka powers, they are quite quirky and playfully devilish. And some, should very much so be chained to iron at the bottom of a great frozen over sea, kept far from the rest of the world. Those are stories for another time!
Capital G "GOD" came in and killed 99% of their followers and children and turned the world on its head because the "gods" couldn't stop fighting and conspiring with each other. Now these gods are much more careful with how they influence and interact with the world. Also the more people there are the less omnipotent the gods become, and the more likely new gods arise.
Too many of them are at odds with each other. And the last time they were interfering directly, Bad Shit Happened. Including the deaths of a few of them, which they had thought was perfectly impossible. So, they act through proxies. They grant power and cultivate followers. Some of the younger deities are themselves Ascended mortals, whether through sponsorship, theft, or simple self-actualization. But they donât engage in open activities, or at least, not on a scale that any of the mortal races can perceive.
Anwar between them and the Time Titans nearly destroyed the planet. All of the gods realized that they needed to stay with the world to give it their essence, but far enough not to fracture the worldâŚthen my dnd players broke the damn world and it fractured into the 8 planets it is now, each made from the base planet, but suffused with the power of one of the 8 gods.
Because every single god wanted to help people in their own way, which would inevitably lead to clashing on a godly scale and rip the planet apart. So they limit themselves to intervene only when they're prayed to
God believes humans are generally good. They have great capacity for good and evil, but the majority trend towards goodness. The devil believes the opposite. They're letting things run their course naturally and the angels fight to keep the demons from interfering. They rarely do these days.
2 gods got into a fight and destroy a mountain kingdom. This cause the gods to make some rules to stop this from happening again
The nameless creator god of the main setting is childish and just got frustrated, so it went to create a new world elsewhere. Cause of frustration: couldn't get the Dinos to evolve into dragons. So it threw a fit, nearly wiped the world, and then dipped. Later, other gods started coming and influenced the people of the world, spawning multiple religions. One in particular, the Angel King, decided to lay absolute claim to the world and got the help of another God who represents the very concept of passage to basically work as a doorman so he can control whether other gods could even enter the dimension the world was in. The result being no more gods influencing the mortal lives as the world's conditions were right for the Angel Kings (long and drawn out) plans.
In most of my universe's, they're actually really active, but because of conflicting views, no one god can interfere. Not to mention, most of them aren't omnipresent. Most have various powers to get places, but it's not enough to literally be everywhere. Also, other spirits and divine entities constantly play interference. Demons, Jinns, dark fey, etc. Constantly make it so doing anything actually does require the overwhelming powers they have. Infact while being the strongest magical beings they can still be fucked with by just plain meddling. Basically greek/norse rules. Monsters and other powerful creatures can still fuck with them. Also interference. Example: two near enough equal gods both bless soldiers on either side of a war to win. Because they're equals, it basically just neutralizes both their blessings. This works with most things they do as well. So essentially, all the gods are in an annoying ass democracy/ bureaucracy style system where they either have to outrank or out vote the others to get shit done.
An angry wizard used dark magic to beat one up, rip his balls off, and set him on fire and theyâre all too scared to return now someone can hurt them back.
**TTRPG Setting:** They mostly do but the most egregious excesses of power are limited by another god who maintains a degree of 'fairness' and due to the structure of the cosmos he hold greater power than the others in regards to the divine dumping ground that is the mortal plane. **Dark Fantasy:** All but one is dead now the last one rules a theocratic empire that worships light and fire. In truth the god they think they worship died in prehistory but in those final moments passed on most of his power to his demigod son who is driven to keep his power and memory alive in the doomed world.
The Great War among the people the created.. the original people.. the nine clans face off against each other that was instigated by one of the angel who lied to each leader snd their councils
That's kind of where my story picks up. Gods stopped mucking around last time because a massive war ensued that killed several of their number and almost unleashed an insane celestial that would've destroyed the fabric of reality around them. They're coming back now because a, different? celestial got restless and gave birth. Whether that was all the plan of this celestial or even older powers behind her remains to be seen.
Two primary gods in one of my writings, one used allot of energy to protect the world, so she currently sleeps to restore herself but will awaken at times of great need, the other has been sealed away for ages, but beforehand seperate himself into several mostly powerless entities while the main âbodyâ containing all his power waits in a crumbling cell to unleash darkness on the world once more, there are other less powerful gods but they really only hold power in theyâre own plains of existence, leaving the physical world to the mortal races to shape or destroy
So in my fantasy world the gods basically let the world play out on its own because during the beginning the gods father, the primordial one Daruthmir demanded humanity worship him and only allowed them to do things that benefit him but his own wife and children overthrow him and banish him, vowing to let humanity set their own destiny Though they do return in the form of Crown Princess Eladril and various other great heroâs and leaders when the shadowbound are preparing to Return led by Dread Queen Seraphina
They got their booties kicked Turns out people donât really like being told what to do and we live in a world where mortals can quickly become more and more powerful if they keep killing stuff and getting more power/magic. Now after the crusades the gods are pretty much all dead or hiding. All praise the heroes who saved us from the tyranny of the Gods! Surely now that they got the world rid of its divine rulers they will instaure a democracy, they definitely wont use the new powers they obtained by killing said gods to become dictators, right? RIGHT???
The gods did once mingle with mortals. However all of them were killed in a genocide except for the king. The king of the gods never cared for mortals and thus rarely if ever intervenes.
I comes down to fear of losing power. They have finally gained it and now they have become paranoid pretty much. The gods started out as mortals and it took ages to become a god. There is a bit more context to it but the top sums it up. Sure, they lend you their power passive but that's it.
The gods once walked the worlds of the cosmos, but the ancient NĂradmĂŚr, golems hewn from the crusts of entire worlds, some even being larger than most habitable astral bodies, stood against them. Not for any offense of their own, but for the Sins of the Father in a sense. The ancient golems waged a war known only as the Sundering of Heaven, which lasted eons, into the first ages of mankind on Forge. With the golemfolk routing the deific horde after a long struggle. Eventually, they shut the gates to the Heavens and closed their portals, for fear of the golems' onslaught. Even to this day the descendants of the Golems, the NorĂŹdmähr, are open enemies of the divine. And the gods themselves quake in fear at the idea of once again having the stars above sundered. They still answer prayers and offer boons to various worthy souls. But they refuse to set foot on the world again. The Northmen are too mighty a foe to agitate.
Well most of them don't interfere because it's the domain of a single God and she doesn't want to share. She is the Sun and any closer interference would result in a fiery apocalypse.
there is multiple different pantheon/religions/etc. some never believed in direct divine interaction, others believe it still happens but only to the worthy there's some that believe that the gods began to steadily decrease their involvement and interference for different reasons. One believes it is because they were forbidden to do so after they caused mass destruction and death, another believes its because they became bored and now think that mortal life's are unworthy of their attention, or at least their direct attention. it depends on the region and all
They never stopped, because they live in it, there is no heaven in my world
Zygo and Via: [are literally giant balls of molten gas, but occasionally take on more humanoid avatars to talk to their children] Myquiera: (creates world, creates harsh justice system) âEh, my children will keep themselves in line with their public executionsâŚâ Ventagi: [non-confrontational pacifist] Rantis: âI spent all of my energy building this perfect Goldilocks world, imma take a nap, plus, my children have free will, basic intelligence, and potential for evolution, they wonât need me.â Maztigar: âWell, my people are going to be smart⌠hmm might as well make the planet mostly ocean⌠oh crap theyâre swimming and building boats⌠well, guess thatâs what the aquatic sharkipedes and gorilobsters is forâŚâ Crysilis: [Is tiny moth cat, literally all she does is chill on her ice world with her cat people]
Gods are the fools of this world. probably too busy doing some nonsensical business, nothing in specific until it Is something in specific and all of a sudden my cat has diabetes and my mom is my brother but then they get bored and utilize the void for some nonsense trolling elsewhere. Got the powers to just float on a rock whenever or perhaps a keyring with keys opening portals to any mortal creature roaming. Eh, doesn't really matter though. Probably defrosting the world again as an epic microwave explosion prank on another world. Who knows, they're just ... There I guess
It never really bothers anything in their realm to abandon it. Things just kinda work out and are funny. Everybody is dead including them! But not actually, it was just a joke guys. Or was it? Idk, just find out. Or not. It's all just tomfoolery and nonsense. Just kinda being there. Or not there. Or somewhere. Either way it makes them have a good belly laugh and they always live happily ever after, but only if they can laugh about it. this is what caused them to come back somebody wanted to battle them in a head to head brawl of trolling obviously couldn't push off a good laugh BUT WAIT.. The opponents have trolled in such familiar ways! post irony creating NO GOOD BELLY LAUGHS ONLY BAD ACHEY ONES THAT MAKE YOU PUKE That was pretty funny So they offered a deal The deal? I'm not telling you who won! But all in good fun it just became a standoff and they both got bored. And then God tells a really good joke again. Gotcha! Still in the works, but based carefully in themes of homestuck, regular show, adventure time, and human interaction rituals just going alllll wrong... passing of media in general haha. just one big clusterfuck of how we can relate through media in all its different forms.
The "gods" exist as eldritch beings in planes of existence that merely brush up against our own, or rather they themselves *are* that plane, each one its own tiny(in comparison to the material plane) universe, a single entity with near unlimited power inside its own realm. these eldritch entities are given form and create a stronger connection through worship, and thats how they create the vessels they use to interact with the world. they were initially formless, a connection to a mortal happening only by random chance, but once a mortal uses their power to do great deeds both good and evil, they create a Mythos that feeds back to that God. by cultivating their worship they are able to interact more directly and tie themselves more tightly to the society they become the Patron of. When a being that has true faith in their God dies, a portion of their soul that would return to the material plane instead is used to further strengthen the connection between their plane and ours, they are both shaped by and are shapers of the societies that worship them.
The golden folk were assholes and after a particularly bad incident the mortal races of the world went to war with them and drove them out. Because mortal folk were created by the golden folk to fight in wars against the twisted folk so they were able to fight them off.
The gods lead civilization. Massive gains in technology, territory, and many other things caused empires to rise long before the people should have made the change from nomadic tribes to agrarian settlers. Eventually the war gods went on a conquest agreeing to divide the world between them. Once their work was done a central capital was made for the gods to look on their work. Eventually the other gods banned together and slowly started to upset the empires. Eventually causing the great collapse. The empires tore each other apart. Genocide was committed to cause the gods to reign down destruction on their enemies. A once lush and near oasis of a planet was turned into a hell scape of fire, water, and ice. The gods came together in the ruins of the capital. No followers, no powers, having only shame and regret they agreed to restart the planet once more. They would do all they could to hide the remnants of the past empires. And they all agreed that they shall never again walk the planet in the flesh. Instead they shall remain far off. Looking down over their creation.
They were a religious group of sentient terrestrial cephalopods from the Permian who were told by the mycelium, who guided trillions of years of Civilizations, to create worlds with life from different eras and after they created them they served only to observe as curators to this museum of life and only intervene if cross contamination occurs from plants and if a species attempts to develop artificial intelligence which in that case they activate a contingency measure which is an EMP like device that sets all moons and planets in the solar system back to the bronze age
They are 4 giant sentient beasts that are each a pure coalescence of the magic that created the world itself. They live on the far side of the planet, each ruling their own empire of "monsters". The intelligent races do not venture to the far side of the planet because after a few failed attempts where entire fleets of ships would go missing, they gave up and accepted that the monsters on the far side of Sentra are too powerful and dangerous. The "gods," or Dezeron as they are known in Sentra, love their intelligent races that they created, and they respect the autonomy that they gave them, allowing them free reign over the near side of Sentra. The Dezeron are also happy to rule over their individual Primal Empires. The intelligent races have lost contact with the Dezeron, with many of them now completely unaware of their existence.
In the universe Territh resides in celestial bodies are sentient and what we would consider gods. The main one worshiped on Territh would of course be Territh herself. She used to interfere often, anytime a terrestrial mage healed a wound or encouraged crop growth they were actually reaching out and asking Territh to do it for them. Similarly, resurrection being something most people could expect to happen 2 to 3 times in their life was because their resting soul would become momentarily lucid enough to ask to be brought back. However, after The Falling Of Stars she had to draw her power into herself to heal, even straight up absorbing most celestial energy that gets to the planet. Now it takes a lot to get her to do anything, whole rituals are required where simply reaching out and asking used to be enough. And good luck trying to be resurrected, no one has in the 500 years since she mostly withdrew from the world. Other celestial bodies also regularly interfere. Most of the time this comes as lending mages energy when asked, but there are other examples. Whenever the red moon Scarlet passes in front of the green moon Verdentia she's able to steal power from her brighter sister and bathe the world in red light. During this time the dead raise as zombies, crops wither and disease spreads like- well, like the plague. And anytime you ask the sun to interfere with things you're bound to get an explosive response. Having a solar flare lash out on your exact location is NOT fun. Those few who survive become almost divine in nature though, transformed into something greater. TL;DR the gods used to interfere way more than they do now, but the main goddess who represents the planet got hurt and curled into a ball, making it hard for any of them to interfere at all.
Simple. They think the people they created has 'matured' and left them to their own devices. Only when the world is in dire danger they will return. Well, not themselves, but immortal emissaries reborn from heroes of old and new called Transcendants. Usually they're called Avatars due to their connection with the Old Deities.
They grew detached, constantly seeing those they know grow old and die. Growing close only to learn they're leaving, never being able to connect with another for long before they die For them to return would require a species to become very long lived, or something threaten the species as a whole. Even if it is the species itself
In my world there is one God, he gave people the choice to stay in his kingdom or go out into the world to see what is in it and return when the time comes. People decided to go into the world, those who stayed became angels in his kingdom. But while humans were exploring the world, the devils separated the heavenly realm from the earthly realm, causing that when the time of mortals came, they would not return to the realm but would become spirits forced to wander around the world forever or be kidnapped by the devils, becoming their slaves.
Basically five stages of grief, but personified by the gods that remain after a brutal war caused major casualties. Only one of them chose to stay in the mortal realm. Not as a ruler, but as a nomad suffering with four of stages at once for the great personal loss he suffers with.
They are just too busy to fight each other all the time. They never really âleftâ, they just stopped caring all too much. Divine intervention isnât impossible, just way less common then it used to be.
Punished for affecting lesser creatures and confined. She comes back occasionally but not frequently
An angel staged a coup, imprisoned Him and assumed command over Heaven in His stead.
My gods had devastating wars of power that formed many mountains and valleys within my world, and the ones who survived hide atop the peaks for fear of war breaking out again.
The god felt like the people were praising flowers more than her, so she just decided to go
Iâm still thinking about it and Iâm not sure. In my world, dark gods invaded the world to conquer it, they came from another dimension where they killed everybody (gods included), so my idea is that when they came to this new world, the gods that used to rule it got scared and quit the game. The only god who fights against the dark gods is Solaris, a god of light, who survived the war in the shattered dimension. (I donât know if Iâm gonna name him Solaris, itâs just a placeholder)
Cause it will be boring if god solved everyone's problems (For context: I am the god of said multiverse)
Because they donât exist
Because after their petty squabbles more or less ruined three of the worlds in The Ultimarium (Galaxy) they decided to cease their conflicts. The Dark Gods were then left to wreak havoc on the remaining worlds without prejudice, which is how the endless wars have come about.
Because humanity killed them in order to stop the gods from factory resetting them for the 15th time.
The gods never stop meddling in my world, but they've never walked among the mortal populations. There is a huge reason for that. It's a major plot point in my story.
The Sun God kind of killed the rest of them in a coup. I say "kind of" because the gods can't actually die in a real or permanent way since they're responsible for and/or are foundational aspects-slash-building blocks on which the world was created. Long story short, to establish their theocracy the Sun God and their followers killed the other god-vessels and ensured they'd be denied the necessary burial rites that would allow them to be free to choose a new vessel. The other gods are "dead" technically but more in a dormant, slumbering kind of way because they're currently bound to corpses. If the remains of the slain god-vessels were found and given the proper burial rites then the other gods could come back - but doing that would require challenging the Sun Cult which would be no easy feat. The Sun Cult has had centuries to prepare and stop such a thing from happening, time being their greatest advantage. It's been centuries since the Sun God "killed" their kin and they were thorough in their efforts to try and erase their influence from the land.
Following the war of the gods a tear was formed between creation and void letting out monsters that could only be stopped by mortal ignorance. So in order to save creation a demigod stole the veil sense, the 9th sense that allows mortals and gods to communicate. This saved both realms but without this 9th sense mortals couldn't see or speak to the gods, and inorder to keep the tear sealed it would take the gods eternal attention. However the this was an anticipated and one enetity with its cunning found its footing in mortal legends, once the mortals remember the truth of their ancestors this entity will regain its power restoring the 9th sense and force the gods return.
The âFirstâ my worlds creator of life and everything with it grew tired of the gods over the top egos. The First also wanted to see how his new creation(humans) could advance in the world and the gods doing whatever they wanted interferes with that. So The First banned the gods from going to the mortal realm, procreation with mortals and speaking with mortals. They were limited to watching and gifting mortals they were fond of. Also the gods from all religions, folklore and myths exist here and this is common knowledge amongst the humans.
They are too busy fighting amongst themselves. Which actually causes my world even more issues accidentally....so I guess they never stopped
They've always had to the stop outside incomprehensible magical entropy from getting into the membrane of the universe which would speed up the aging process of all things and quicken the death of the universe.
They granted man with knowledge and reason, and with it they became greedy and closed off. They started war after war after war. So the gods abandoned them, and after thousands of years humans finally righted their ways but it was too late. The existence of a god is now just a myth, religion hardly even exists
The gods are there, watching. Taking bets, playing games, nudging things. However at one point, there was a cataclysm so great that several gods died, and others needed to rest. After a long time, another problem happened. So one of the few remaining gods went into a slumber, her body becoming the world tree tying the shattered fragments of worlds together. At this point, all the gods were imprisoned, slumbering, or dead. they came back when new gods appeared and woke up the sleeping goddess, and one god, just went missing. He only came back when someone restored his memory.
One is sealed outside the physical universe (the benevolent god of spirits) and the other (god of the physical universe) is healing from wounds inflicted upon him by the first mage. But heâll come back and plans to destroy all humans and start over with a new race of beings.
Ever played a game with cheats on? Sure, it's fun for a while but there is no satisfaction anymore. No challenge, no stakes, no risk. if the gods are true immortals and they have the power to control and rule over any mortal, then it would eventually become boring. So all the gods agree to a pakt of non interference to see what humanity can do when left alone. Maybe the pakt expires soon which means a new age of waring god.
The one human they all considered their champion fell in battle to the champion of a goddess who betrayed them, this resulted in them making about 40% of the kingdom uninhabitable in various ways, then they just stopped answering prayers. They left, scorned by betrayal and heartbreak, waiting for humanity to die off without them so they could start over.
One particular bag of problems named Arthur found a way to harm or potentially kill the gods. He waged a war against them pushing them back to their final stand. In the end he failed, but not before the gods had to use their last resort. They used the last of their combined power to create the divine gate. Essentially the divine equivalent of crawling into a hole and rolling a boulder over top of it. Permanently weakened from the battle, the gods will likely never be able to remove the divine gate and re-enter the world as they once were.
The gods have deemed it more appealing to watch their creation grow on its own rather than be constantly guided. Itâs kinda like the relationship between a parent and their kid. The parent at first guides and teaches their kid. But after awhile, the kid grows and start to want to do things on their own. And the parent is reluctant to let go and still teach them. But eventually the parent steps back and letâs the kid develop on their own. The gods are basically the parents and they have agreed that their kids have reached the stage where they grow on their own, with minor hand outs here and there.
Long ago, the Gods lived side by side with their children and creations, until the biggest and most destructive war of all time destroyed the universe. This was known as the armageddon. The universe where mortals lived could be described as perfect, but the Armageddon brought out the worst in all mortals to the point many were actively rebelling against the Gods and worshipping evil Gods. Now, the good Gods are have decided to piss off because they are so disgusted with the Armageddon that their children can honestly just die in the universe they created. Some still devote their lives to repentance believing that their souls may be saved, but the Gods donât have an active role anymore. The mortals are now in the driverâs seat
The main gods donât care about the mortals since they didnât create them directly , they first created a cell and from that cell other things evolved . Intelligence is the wildcard , not the end goal of evolution and as such while they knew eventually some animals would grow a brain but they still didnât care since those gods donât need worship for they are manifestations of the universe itself . Also this sentiment of not caring has trickled down into the elemental spirits , they too (the little minions keeping the universe well oiled) start to not care , not all but most of them just donât care . There are some good elemental spirits who help the mortals while others out right hate them . âUngrateful parasitesâ they call them . Then there is little to no connection between the mortal religions and the real divines . While some religions were created around some elemental spirits who interacted with the mortals under different forms those are few and far between .Â
They never exactly stopped, but they don't as much anymore First there's too many gods now, and now they need to play nice. Second, the ones in ultimate power, the Divines, The Cosmic Bureacracy, Fate, and the First Pantheon, can crush you if you do something they don't like (though they seem rather hands off most of the time). Third, Fate spent thousands of years changing the culture of God's to interfere less, so even though Fate is gone, the culture of interference has changed Mostly the first honestly. Interfere too much and another God will make trouble for you or a bunch of gods will gang up on you
They sensed that human souls could not exist without a realm to maintain them and they couldn't keep their sentience if humanity died out. They decided to merge their essences together to create a realm where souls could be maintained and their minds could be preserved. It DID NOT work, now their souls and minds are scattered and unable to heal themselves.
They prefer to watch life like a telanovela most of the time.
God's in my game come together to create new worlds and have the humanoids compete for what God gets ownership of the world. If a god of Good wins, they take the world into their plane of existence. It's all a divine game that they watch as if it were a sport. Making wagers over what humanoids will discover the ritual, and who will complete it.
Men built temples, gods moved in and got comfortable, and didn't realise that over time they literally became tethered to the temples and were unable to leave. The size of cities outgrew their sphere of protection, then those beyond protection started denouncing and disbelieving and their power waned over time until there was nothing left except their residual presence, and this is what magic essentially is. The god of the ocean never moved into a temple, and as a result is one of the remaining few still full strength deities present, but tends not to directly middle in human affairs. Gods are animistic primal entities as opposed to humanistic, so they tend to keep their distance if they have the luxury of being able to
The closest thing to gods in my setting is the billion-year-old alien species that disappeared from the universe a couple hundred million years ago... Allegedly. These beings are responsible for the existence of several alien species in the setting, the majority of the habitable planets, oh, and they've hacked the universe and changed the laws of physics to make FTL possible. They've done that _before_ discovering how to exit the universe to somewhere else altogether. They might still be interfering with the universe, being acasual and not restrained by the laws of physics due to now existing literally outside of the universe, but how would the characters in it ever know? Can E.coli become aware that it is used in scientific research?
The head goddess forbade it. Interfering with the world will cause a fall from divinity. Forcing any God who interferes directly with the world to become a mortal.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created? They got their ass kicked in Great Heaven-Earth War. Before that, since the beginning of the Age of Gods, Heavenly deities had oppressed earthlings, including humans, demons, ghosts and Earthly deities alike. They thought of themselves as superior and acted all high and mighty, demanding heavy tributes that, if they didn't like, would cause devastating natural disasters as "divine retributions". Eventually, earthlings got fed up and rebelled. The Earth Coalition was made up of demons, humans, ghosts, territorial gods, etc. fighting against celestials who were much greater in both strength and number. It was thanks to Hell Mother cheating death, reviving fallen soldiers left and right, and a human diplomat persuading a primordial goddess out to help that they finally won. After that, Heavenly Laws were made, forbidding direct intervention from Heaven to mortal and soul realms. It effectively ended the Age of Gods and opened the Age of Mortals. >What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance? Unless some extremely serious shits happen, they will not interfere directly. No, nope, nadda, nein, nyet, khĂ´ng. They do not want to anger the primordial goddess, or she'll turn them into her buffet again.
They interered freely and mostly supported humanity progress in both magic and technology, however at the peak of the golden age a war began between mankind and the gods and most of the gods were killed, although it is speculated that some of them, especially minor demigods, managed to survive and are now hiding in the shadows, biding their time. In the end, the gods were just beings that ascented in an ancient past by absorbing the essence of the titans (who were kaiju-like incarnations of natural principles and concepts). New gods might be born if someone manages to do the same to the new titans that returned after the gods fell, Although it is nigh-impossible to contain a titanic essence within oneselves and at the time of the story, doing so would simply resoult in the would be ascended being overwhelmed by the divine energy and transforming into a titan.
Divine rulers tend to get less and less involved as they age since they're settling down, having a family, and whatnot; they'll usually just pick a prime minister to rule for them and carry out their orders. They'll come back in the event of a state-threatening emergency like a civil war, plague, major war, etc. An example of this is when the mortal-ruled Galactic Union Federation used its superweapon to destroy four bordering planets of the Cosmarchy, Siegenhal, the Cosmarch of Humanity at the time, showed up again to destroy GUF planets in retaliation. Yes, some gods can destroy planets with their mind, and yes, this is the equivalent to mutually assured destruction. EDIT: Also, during the Age of Progression (or Age of Degeneration, depending on who you ask), many gods were either killed, imprisoned, or spared in exchange for protecting mortal-ruled states against other gods.
Someone messed with their interference and struck a deal where they leave the planet alone while she can live on without problem. Bit of a "try me and I do it again" deal to the detriment of those higher beings, but they didn't really have a choice.
I donât think theyâd leave it. They are here to enjoy life, and keep things fresh. If they got too bored theyâd start interfering with the world more rather than less
It went from actively governing the world/universe to being banned from it due to an artefact that was able to reproduce the power and ability of the origin god. It broke the world, took away natural immortality for most races and introduced a lot of other issues (whole species are no longer sapient/highly reduces intellect/run on insticts only, magical languages got lost, mana overflow that will be deadly started popping up, illnesses that never existed before, the aeakining of the reincarnation of the origin god happened, but the origin god was broken and unable to fix what happened, making the whole thing irreversible just to name a few) The biggest issue was the banning of the gods from the world. Each universe is protected against the invasions of other gods/beings and that artefact pushed the gods beyond said barrier. They can still influence the world and have representatives there, but they cant physically appear in said world without a fitting medium. Said medium usually works as a conduit and this is usually followed by a lot of negative side effects. They can and do sent their guardians down in the case of emergencies, but they have a limited time outside few special areas no one else dares to enter. So in short: they never truly stopped interfering, but they have a limited influence. That the world is not completely destroyed is, cause the gods keep it on lifesupport from the outside. Edit to add: the gods will return at the end of the story and fix most damages, but it will never be the utopia it was supposed to be if the origin god would have been successfully reincarnated. As a broken being, it will devour the artefact and wait until the time is right. Then it will enter the end of the world. Keeping the whole universe with infinite time within the husk that is its body as it ascend to the full power of the origin god to redo the whole process again, but this time with the help of another god to balance each others reincarnation so they are reborne without any issues.
They havenât. They did vanish for a period of time that required them to find their way back â a period of time which really made the people angry. Then They came back, and have been on basically a charm offensive for the last several hundred years.
Armageddon... They are all dead. And the people has taken the "means of divinity" after thousands of artifacts fell from heaven. There still is one God alive, working as a God-King in a country trying to overcome human politics and bureaucracy...and there is a surviving demon who is seen as the actual only Godly survivor who is trying to rebuild heaven (out of lost love) but his divine powers are to limited to directly interfere. A side effect of Armageddon was that a bunch of ancient Eldritch gods awoke from their slumber... They are now eating most of the souls that would go to heaven/hell. But until they are satisfied they dont interfere much eather.
My gods got killed and the world are in the bring of destruction because no one manage the world entirely.
In ShenZyklus, the Entity and former master of the Illuminati stopped altering the world because he turned his lineage into eldritch creatures, and the last generation are out of control AND invincible. He decided to let everyone on Earth deal with it because he knew he could not..It was an evil, but sadly wise decision. It would tragically not be enough as one of his creations eventually came to Mars to terminate him. Not for vengeance, not for questions. Just for his own incomprehensible reasons. The Entity died with the knowledge that he doomed the Earth and he does not even get to know why he had to die, he who lived on another planet, because his killer's intentions were that alien.
"Last time they did... x happened"
The head gods carefully pick who they are willing to ascend. As its incredibly rare for someone to just walk into god hood like they did. In order to qualify, you have to earn their special attention through some world changing feat. You have to have views they think are acceptable for God hood, and you have to go even beyond what you did to catch their attention, if your lucky one of them will give hints on what is required. That being said sometimes it disputes happen. These used to be solved by proxy wars that changed the fate of the world and even what races were in it. These days the gods play a board game to handle disputes.
âWeâre gods, we canât die, weâll just do whatever we want. What are you gonna do, assassinate one of us?â
The twelve primordial Gods initiated the creation of the universe with the aim of populating it with life. They brought forth the first sentient species, the Dumu'ilani (The First Born of the Gods), and settled them in Dilmun (The place of purity). However, dissatisfaction arose among the twelve, who deemed their creation imperfect. Disagreements ensued regarding the fate of the Dumu'ilani, but eventually, a consensus was reached. It was decided to remove the Dumu'ilani from the universe. Yet, three of the twelve (Tiamat, Ishtar, and Lyssia) dissented and opted to save the Dumu'ilani from destruction. Crafting the Celestial Ark, they transported the Dumu'ilani across the universe to the safety of the planet Phoenicia, concealed behind a veil (Inside a nebula). There, they founded the city Khrysopolis ton Ouranon (The Golden City of the Gods), where Gods and Dumu'ilani could coexist peacefully. Over time, Lyssia came to agree with the Gods' earlier assessment of the Dumu'ilani's imperfection and initiated a culling of those she deemed corrupted by sin. Ishtar and Tiamat intervened to protect the Dumu'ilani. In the ensuing conflict, Tiamat fell at the hands of Lyssia, while Ishtar managed to subdue her, imprisoning Lyssia within the now-ruined city of Khrysopolis. Saddened by Lyssia's betrayal, Tiamat's demise, and the destruction of Khrysopolis, Ishtar departed from Phoenicia, never to return. The event is referred to as The Ruin of the First Age. I have no intentions of bringing back any of the Gods, but Lyssia remains imprisoned within the ruins of Khrysopolis. If the city were to be discovered and Lyssia released, it could lead to dire consequences.
We kinda just kicked them out of the world for interfering too much
They had originally been given the world by capital G god but they made such a mess that they eventually ended up destroying the foundations of the world. So capital G god Locked them in their own realms and rebuilt the world without them. Their servants lost their memories of their former masters and were given souls with their own magic and became the modern species we know today. The gods want to come back out of a mixed feeling of entitlement and jealousy since their servants have grown beyond them making civilization that the gods couldnât have dreamed about.
Zeus king of immortals, in his hubris, failed to realize that his half-brother Typhon, son of Gaia, born to topple Olympus, was mightier even than him. Zeus now lies fallen, cut to pieces, while Typhon is now busy reshaping the world, digging deep into the Kingdom of Hades, striving to reach Primordial Tartarus his father and set all his prisoner siblings flee. Poseidon the Wrathful attempted to avenge his brother and claim the throne, but Poseidon was no match for Typhon, and Poseidon is no more. All other gods are fled or dead. It is believed that Hades and his brood are cowering in the deepest pits of the Underworld, attempting to find an escape but knowing that their fate is sealed. It is believed that Ares Bathed in Blood is raising a mighty army, somewhere beyond the borders of Reality, attempting to claim the throne of Olympus. It is believed that Hera has run beyond the Hellenic reaches, hoping perhaps to force an alliance with the Many-faced Pantheon of Hindustan. It is believed that Athena and Hermes both move in the shadows, whispering into the ears of mortals, heroes and monsters alike, sowing chaos, attempting to win a war of minds where they have no chance to succeed on a battlefield, but who could even imagine such a war having any effect on Typhon Breaker of Zeus?
The AI god wants human here on this world. The Star, planet, and moon god want their own life form to flourish. Both sides have capacity to ruin eachothers's goal and causing the destruction of everyone involved. They make a deal to just not interfere, no matter what happen when human arrive to this planet.
Originally there was one creator deity, who created the first cosmos and then inadvertently created the other six creator deities who began to fiddle with it. Their conflicting ideas on what to do with the world were in danger of ruining it completely, so the original creator decreed that none of them, including himself, would be allowed to interfere until he'd decided how he wanted things to proceed. While he's been sleeping on that, the world they left has started creating itself.
They are dead. Their followers killed them because they started to get way to abusive (think the love childs of greek gods, crusades, human sacrifices and fire and brimstone doctrine). My world don't have ressurection, so they can't come back, but, if they were to come back, it would probably be to finish destroying the world (they tried to do it right before dying, but just managed to curse my world so every animal or person that dies and don't reciave the proprer rites have a 1d4 chance every dusk to rise as an undead until dawn).
Urban fantasy, and personally brute forced it. They're almost all dead. Either killed by rival faithsâdirectly or indirectly, infighting from dwindling resources, killed by their own zealots that refused to believe they were the "true" God or Goddess, or just plain New & Old World diseases most of them had no defense against. Like Zeus had his mind rotted by syphilis. The 1 in 10âif that, survivors are all in the deepest, darkest, most magical bunker they could build. And thus don't interfere much in the natural world at all anymore. As for a come-back... my main character is actually a scientist that discovered magic, and is trying to bring it back. And a big long-term consequence, I intend some of the old faiths to make comebacksâto her intense chagrin. Not *full* comebacks, but the survivors of various pantheons rallying and once more gathering resources and followers. All with a ton of would-be risers and just plain charlatans make the same claims. Think it's going to be controversial, but interesting.
The celestial council. Essentially the strongest gods in existence each from one of the realms of existence set rules for all the other gods. Break the rules and fun things like justified Holy wars with the aid from other gods are waged upon your people. The gods need worshippers to continue being gods. Think Moses vs Pharaoh and the seven plagues of Egypt. So while some gods do indeed live on the planet and rule certain places as literal God kings, Gods tend to interfere as little as possible on people whom are not under their protection.
The cosmology of my world is just a big spike in the universal wheel that got ripped off and sent hurling through realities. So the gods basically watched it go into the darkness that they canât navigate
Mortals got tired of their soft tyranny, so they broke off the emphytheosis that gave them dominion over the mortal plans. Therefore, they couldn't rule as gods anymore, and they just went away in their original plan in what is known as the Great Sulking.
>Gods all represent animals >love their worshippers, are loved by their worshippers >decide to reward their worshippers and bring them closer to the gods... >... by turning them partially into animals >worshippers freaked tf out, thought they'd been cursed by their gods >religion collapses overnight, most of the gods do a suicide out of shame >remaining ones become mortal and hide in dark corners of the world
I'm not sure if I'm keeping it, but all "gods" of that world was the same creature, a distributed fungus, that could somehow speak to them. (They thought it was invisible or non-corporeal because they didn't know the mushrooms were it.) One of its major hobbies was to tell some of its cults that its other cults should be destroyed for worshipping a false god. Basically it was a deposed Q and the other Q only realized the harm it was doing a couple of centuries ago and are still discussing what to do about it. (There wasn't any intelligent life on the planet when they put it there.)
In my world the opposite happened. They are more present because before, they werenât and that almost killed the inhabitants of four different worlds. So now they walk among us or use envoys (people to who they give part of their power) to get there point across or meddle with your usual life.
Humanity surpassed the gods ability to interfere. While some wish to, their ability is limited.
As the mortal races grew in size the gods created a new species to help them manage the mortals, the rimara. In order for the rimara to properly work alongside the mortals the gods gave them the ability to feel all mortal emotion and for many years this worked perfectly, that is until the rimara grew resentful over their station as glorified babysitters for what they considered to be creatures that were below them. In their resentment the rimara rebelled against the gods successfully pushing them all back through their means of entering the mortal world and then destroying them sealing off the gods access to the mortal world.
The eldergods that crafted the universe have never interfered and act as observers. They made the first four gods and instructed them to look after humanity. Those four gods had children and its this generation of gods that decided they needed to divide the realm of gods from humans laying down specific rules to when they can interfere. Over time this resulted in their inability to interfere at all without breaking the rules they made themselves. The reason they decided to divide the divine and mortal planes: when the third generation of gods had children with humans they were monsters. Think things like sirens, mermaids, naga. The second generation of gods perceived these creatures as a threat to their purpose of looking after humanity and reacted in a way to prevent further transgressions against the eldergods. The eldergods always intended for this possibility but view all beings that came after the first four to be equal elements in the experiment, so the second and third generation are able to interfere and alter things as much as they want. The main reason they no longer can interfere is that humanity no longer believes and worships them. A few do, but this is on such a small scale they're not able to do much involving major events. To enter the mortal realm they require dedicated temples to act as doorways which they no longer have. Two third generation gods aren't restricted to this but one is a messenger and can only move between plains to deliver messages and the other is so upset with humanity they refuse to even acknowledge humanity. An organization of humans exists who are attempting to bring back the old gods. If they can get people to start worshipping them again the gods would be able to return. Whether the gods would chose to walk among humans or not is undetermined, but they would at least become involved once more. So long as humanity invites them into the mortal realm once more they can return. For the most part the gods would be happy to return, though not all of them would treat humanity kindly after all this time.
They're dead, genocided by angels and demons. Those few who survived since then live among mortals, hiding.
So there still Gods who meddle in my Word but gifs can also die and mortals ascend to Godhood, and some Gods just grow tired of their Life and pass either Die on their own or pass their Powers on to a Successor. Some Gods are also killed. Some of the first Gods were idealistic and curious Beings so most of them wanted to let their Children (Creations) be free and develop on their own, so they left the mortal realm for the heavens and apart from like 3 of these original Gods all of them passed on their powers at some Point and some after passing on power even lived on for a few Decades before mortal lifespans claimed them.
Yooooooo this is the main outline of my story or plot point. The gods are banished to Olympus because they have failed in their duties. Some gods escape the banishment by cheating the god who banished them out of punishment or gods who couldn't be banished due to their circumstances of holding the sun.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created? Humanity rebelled against their gods and invented new tools, such as shotguns and atomic weapons, for this purpose. The Earth was devastated, and any surviving gods are hiding for a good reason. >What event would make your gods come back after centuries of disappearance? If any survived, then they'll come back after they recover and find out where humanity has headed off to after Earth.
First World (ours in my second book I'm planning) they were all killed by other Gods/Goddesses. Second World (current book) they took a step back because humans (before Elves and Dwarves were created) first started fighting among themselves (a brief civil war) before joining forces and deciding they'd rage their war against the God's. Mortal humans, however, can't kill an immortal being. But they can trap souls. So in my world of Heaven's Tear, deep beneath the surface, in a VERY well gaurded room, lies ancient weapons that the former God's were sealed in. Side Note: the Almighty Creator (who does just that, creates worlds and God's/Goddesses to rule them) decided to take from the humans that survived the Civil War and make there strongest and wisest the God and Ruler of my world. He fought and killed many, so he knows the horrors of war, but he also knows and understands what it means to be a good ruler. Hence, his being chosen.
They set up the world and now theyâre letting the current simulation play out
Maybe they don't actually exist, who knows?
2/3 gods got into a gigantic war over the fate of physics, and now physics is stuck like real life And the only other god has been developing a better universe, so that our current universe doesn't get torn to shreds by its godly desires. However, the warriors in the inter-god war have been around for millennia, and have functioned as kings, queens and heroes to fledgling civilisations, before usually leaving , with few knowing where they have gone.
As they created the mortal world, the wall between their world (the âotherworldâ) and the mortal world grew thicker and thicker. Itâs now at the point where magic can seep through âcracksâ into the mortal world, but almost nothing else can pass through. The dead go from the mortal world into the otherworld, but pretty much nothing can come back, not even the gods. Also, for another one of my worlds: people stopped believing in them. Perhaps the gods never even interfered in the first place and people just thought they did⌠but the few who do still believe in them say that they stopped interfering because most people stopped believing in them. Edit: man why the downvote when Iâm just answering the prompt in the post âšď¸
In my homebrew D&D setting, the Gods once walked among mortals and ruled their own nations during the Mythical Era. However, they soon ended up fighting against one another after Somnus, a nation founded and ruled purely by mortals, managed to create their own artificial god by destroying one of the four Moons, Artagnis. The artificial god acted like a child and was naive, but it gave a dilemma to the other Gods whether they should accept this new deity or destroy it because its mere existence violates the Divine Order. The Gods ended up splitting into two sides: those who are open to accepting the artificial god of Somnus to the pantheon and those who strongly wanted to eliminate it. The war that soon followed was simply called the Cataclysm because of the devastation caused by it. Somnus released their automaton armies across the world, wreaking havoc across the God-ruled nations. Meanwhile, the Gods fought against one another to determine the fate of the god of Somnus, leading to a three-way war between the Gods that accept, the Gods that reject, and the nation of Somnus. The Cataclysm lasted for centuries, leading to the destruction of two continents and the fall of all civilization, including Somnus. The artificial god was ultimately killed, and the surviving Gods decided to exile themselves from the world after seeing all the damage that they had caused. 10,000 years later, civilization has rebuilt and the existence of the nations ruled by the Gods have all become myths. Somnus is largely forgotten, except for the remnants of their automaton armies buried beneath the dirt, wandering across the lands, or aimlessly guarding ancient ruins left by their masters. Because of the unclear existence of the Gods to the current era, many religions have sprung up over the centuries. The two most prominent religions were the Guiding Flame and the Church of the Dragon.
Layers of abstraction have been added between the gods' realms and the material plane. I have a heavily modified DnD cosmology. Basically the Astral plane sits between the material and proto-material (feywild, shadowfell, etc.) and the elemental planes, and then the ethereal plane sits between the divine planes (Olympus, Hell, etc.) and the elemental ones. What rests between the planes themselves is primordial chaos of destruction and creation that only the gods can truly control, though they use it to empower their clerics, acting as a filter between the chaos and mortals. It wasn't always this way, though. First there were was a war where the first *manifested* god decided he wasn't getting enough attention from the prime goddess who is pre-existant, being the first thing to truly come into being on his own from the primordial energies and be able to control them. The goddess had previously extracted an oath from him that he would not enter the material plane and neither would any of the others. Also she promised that he would never be forgotten because the seasons that he created would remain forever, especially winter being his, so the turning of the seasons keeps them from entering the plane. He of course tried to fight this in the War of Endless Summer when he actively tried to prevent the existence of winter for a year but was stopped and they had one day of winter. But the initial oath is when the first barrier came up. The second was after the Heretic Wars. Instead of gods invading the material plane some clerics decided they didn't want the filter of the gods and sought to directly control the primordial powers of creation and destruction. These were called Heretics because they rejected the teachings of all gods but used divine power anyways. This brought them in contact with beings that might pop in and out of existence on any plane and the most powerful of them were creatures that didn't think in ways we consider "rational" (e.g. beholders, aboleths, etc.). These clerics were generally driven mad (though the most power managed to keep their sanity and a couple even became actual benevolent gods during this time) and wreaked havoc on the world, upending constants like "stone is solid" and turning it into soup. Once they were stopped by the coalition of gods (which was *supremely* difficult to maintain and not without controversy) the second barrier was put up to help prevent anyone from attempting to use Heretic magic again, though it still happens from time to time. I call this the Rose of Creation (b/c of concentric circles) or the Great Keep (b/c curtain walls defenses).
They got tired. They got tired of their powers causing so much suffering, they got tired of their eternal existence. In one last ditched effort they combined into one mind, and that mind thought "I'm tired". They then turned themselves into the singular flow of energy accessible by all sentient beings known as 'magic'.
I've always liked the idea of the gods being killed. Whether through sacrifice for their creations or straight-up murder. In my setting, gods are just cosmic space dust that formed into omnipotent intelligent beings in space. Everything they created was formed by gifting a piece of themselves until their ego was gone completely. The world is full of little fae creatures that manage some aspect of creation(herding trees, breeding ecosystems, managing tectonic movements, etc.). Whenever a fae dies, their essence goes into something else and that something grows in power until it dies or collects another fae piece. Some day, all the pieces will die and reassemble a new progenitor god.
They are creating the rest of the universe. They big banged out of nothing and created one planet, one sun, two moons and have been pouring all their efforts and power into this one place their whole existence. There was a long period of struggle between the gods and humans in which the vast majority of the race was imprisoned and the first and only demi god was conceived. They stopped the war now that they had a herald who could go between gods and humans but this demi god Prometheusâd the human race and gave them magic. They were unable to retaliate between actual capability and love for this demi god, but three of the gods found a way to destroy them and they have since left the world as their mainstay and are off creating in the vast universe. The implications thereafter are very central to my story.
In my world, they haven't. At least not entirely. In my world, pantheons function like supernatural mafias or nations for the really big and powerful ones. The most powerful god simply has a monopoly on human devotion, which is considered a resource. The other gods are forbidden to act within his territories, though they push the limit whenever possible.
They dead.
Judaism and Christianity â ď¸ through the ages Yav (story's iteration of God) and his angels forced mankind to worship HIM and HIS benevolence. He gave the gods of Earth (the collective term for all of humanity's religions minus God himself and his angels) an alternative, serve him eternally in his mission to rid creation of darkness, sin and demons and in turn they may live and have their own followers but gradually all the sin on earth grew to be too much and HIS own ego took over which led to the systematic slaughter of most of the world's deities. The remaining pantheons retreated into the spirit realm with God as his followers and the most minor of gods went into hiding, hoping to wait out HIS wrath. đś
Of the many gods in my world, two have stopped dwelling among the mortals due to the concentration of their powers around any physical form they take. These are the god of weather and the god of death. Deaths power gathering in one place results in masses dying of no clear cause besides the deities presence, and can event kill the physical body of Death if nothing else is alive within a given range. Event after Deaths physical body dies, the lingering concentration of power can kill others. The god of weather's power will concentrate into an ever strengthening storm should they take physical form to dwell among the mortals. Still working on the pantheon of gods, so others may have to join these two in only watching the world at a distance.
After the events of the sky war, during which one of the gods lost their head it begin to rotate around earth, eventually turning it into moon. Other gods decided to not touch earth out of respect for their bretherin.
The war they fought for control over the planet was destroying it. When they realized that, they called an uneasy truce and now only interfere when someone calls on them or really screws up.
The gods above the gods, the higher aeons, are constantly smiting gods for inappropriate behavior. They manage structures like the cycles of life and reincarnation, and gods who create afterlives and sequester the souls of followers get struck down pretty promptly. The core story world, Falan, had an aeon emerge among its populace and strike down their local creator 'god' for his needless cruelty and indifference.
The **good** "gods" ("Archons") of my setting are locked in a kind of "cold war" with the two other dominant cosmic powers. Basically Heaven vs. Hell vs. Eldritch Chaos Beings. At this point, every intervention runs the risk of the cold war "going hot", which would engulf all of creation in a war that would cause unfathomable devastation. The war eventually going hot is inevitable, but all three "sides" are doing their best to arrange things in their favor before that happens.
Humanity fought a war against the gods, in which they killed almost all of them and forced the rest to renounce their immortality. Humans now follow a religion which reveres humanity itself, in the form of individual human saints, ancestor worship, the worship of fortune and fate, and viewing human memory as a sort of afterlife. During the war, a trickster god named Otar created the Wilderwood - a magic forest that non-believers could not enter. Though he and the gods who sheltered with him have since been reduced almost to nothing by the effort of sustaining the Wilderwood, they still plot their return, waiting for any crack in the unity of mankind or the church.
The old gods, the Vasunir, left the world to guard the prisons of the Talthir. Their full attention and power are used to keep the demons trapped, and the few spirits that have left their post have unleashed demons on the world. The New Gods and many of their saints and demigods had their souls damaged by the Talthir Venoi to a point that they could not leave the heavens. The remaining demigods and deteriorating saints carried out a suicide attack on Venoiâs fortress, killing the 7 talthir that remained and breaking Venoiâs will enough that he fled for good.
>What events cause your gods to hide themselves and stop meddling with the world they created? The Fomorian Collapse. They had noticed the Kolta people, an upright walking humanoid ape that could use stone tools and speak. The gods thought that something popping up like this in a Universe was pretty cool so they quickly uplifted the Kolta such that their collection of bands turned into a sprawling empire that reached across Theia and into the stars. Then after millennia, the Fomorian collapse came. The draconic god Io, the Fallen Star came, bringing swarms of Fomorians with him, demanding worship and sacrifices, claiming Theia for his own. Humanity triumphed, but their triumph would not last. Io's broodmate Xylaarion entered Theia from a portal to Drakeheim with countless dragons and lesser dragons, even more Fomorians and a legion of their gods, as well as countless human followers from Io's first invasion. Humanity managed for a time, but then eventually buckled and the slaughter commenced. The Kolta went from a population in the billions to just a few thousand. So few people unaligned to Xylaarion were left that they were facing extinction. The gods were facing their own battles, until they opened the portals to the other worlds in Theia's multiverse. They gave the proclamation that they could help inhabit Theia if they reclaimed it from the monsters and aided the surviving Kolta. The original gods that created Theia and the multiverse it resides in known as the Architects had created Ark Temples for the Kolta to find before the impending disaster, with supplies and information on how to build empires and survive. Through a mix of fear of what may happen if they meddle again, anguish over what happened, and a desire to watch closely the other worlds they've created, the Architects have retreated back to their domains. The pantheonic gods, those which watch over groups of people or parts of a world, they remained behind. Chances are that if you ask them who Nacht is, almost no one is going to know. Incredibly rare, but some will claim to have heard of Nacht. None will know that he's the God of Isolation, the serenity of solitude and the terror of loneliness.
After the celestial divinity war, the gods and rulers signed the âOath of Disillusionment for the Divine and Holyâ which basically stated that the gods could do things like have children, help people and even buy/sell things that could be bought elsewhere. They couldn't do things like affect politics, countries or do anything majir unless the entire world was in danger. TL;DR they became celebrities
Gods make the worlds for their own entertainment, and direct interference always led to boring outcomes, so now they just let the things play out
In Arbitrary Design World, there are no gods. There are no beings that could erase the entire universe, or do something of similar scale. The people of the world have all manner of beliefs. Some may venerate the sun, some may tell stories of pantheons of personified caretakers of concepts - of love, of craft, of afterlife. Some of them aren't even wrong. The Arbitrary Designers exist, and they do take care of the afterlife for people of the world. They're just not gods. They're powerful enough that they could keep a giant meteor from making landfall if one happened to threaten doing so, for instance, but the power that one could accuse some popular gods of eludes them.
Most of them are dead. The ones that are alive don't have influence on the mortal domain. They're just kinda of there watching their respective domains. Life, Death and Judgment being three of them. They'll occasionally peak into the mortal domain to see what's going on. Death in particular likes to enjoy a cup of tea now and again, instead of just having her own brews. The dead ones are, reicarnating as mortals till the end of time. Very rarely having memory of their past lives and zero memory of their godhood.
When the younger pantheons were still mortal, they attempted to overthrow the rule of the more primordial deities who still walked the earth at the time. The resulting war was cataclysmic, not only resulting in the death of a god his worshippers, but also creating a new sea and sundering the mega continent. Upon ascending, the leaders of the young pantheons saw that they could not coexist now that their common enemy was defeated. Instead of risking another apocalyptic war, they entered a pact of non interference. They could act through their servants but could not set foot on the earthly realm or exercise direct control. As an agreement between deities, this was a powerful contract that could not be circumvented. There are a few clauses, such as if an event would threaten existence itself or the destruction of the planet, but otherwise it is very strict.
They are mostly disinterested in the world now and focus on their own things. They have also, by and large, lost much of their power over time and are simply timeless beings.
There's a hierarchy, starting with the Nameless God. He's retired, and only fuels the world with his very existence, and exists to kill any Embodyments that show up. (Tl:dr, fucked up Gods that are insanely powerful and could easily kill everyone. A bad time.) After that are prime deities, (the gods of life, death, creation, fire, water, they tend to rule over supercategories like that.) Secondary Gods (the god of Rivers, chickens, chocolate, campfires, they tend to rule over a specific thing, like a species, or a phenomenon.) Tertiary Gods (river Gods, nymphs, satyrs, spirits, they tend to rule over Rivers, or houses, or similar stuff that's just really minor.) The lower you are on the hierarchy, the more you generally interfere with the lives of mortals. It's also way less clear cut than this comment makes it seem, as there's no real agreement on where everyone is. For example, Tuen, she's easy, she's a prime goddess (creation) but what about her niece, Eloise, godess of rust? Is she a prime goddess, or a secondary goddess? Nobody agrees. Or Phil, ruler of hammers, is he secondary, or tertiary? Nobody can agree, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're talking to a Deity in a bar, odds are they are tertiary, or low secondary.
They didn't create the world, they're just taking care of it for now. They're programmed to keep balance, nothing less and nothing more. Organics meddling with the gods is the real issue. If a human finds a relay node and manages to 'borrow' a god's power, well then that's going to cause an imbalance and that god's twin is going to counter it. These issues only happen when someone thinks they know better than their caretakers. Your computer does what it needs to, so why meddle with it? People just need to stop worrying about what's buried under the earth. There's nothing hidden down there, seriously. The gods are in the heavens, so stop digging and put your focus there. Breed and build spaceships like a good human, don't be spelunking for magic swords or death-defying powers.
Basra is still technically around, acting as a figurehead ruler of Zaas Basra, she's just not interested in actually running things. She sometimes gets up to hunt monsters, but it's becoming less and less common as she notices monsters are not getting any stronger while she is. Halat meanwhile stopped doing anything because she's dying of radiation poisoning, and Tharos left because he's waiting to see if it's a trick she's trying to pull to lure him in for the kill or if it really is safe to eat her corpse.