Part 3.
I was literally just given the name of this article with no further context and told to make an article on it. So I did.
Deities. I see them used in a lot of RPG settings in a few defined contexts, so here's a discussion.
Immortal extraplanar entities of great power.
Tyr, Pelor, Pan, Zeus, whatever. They have their own realms and afterlives and grant spells to clerics. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. You'll see tables of them in any Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide. I doubt I could write anything new there.
Mortal extraplanar entities of great power.
Often treated the same as the ones above, but more likely to have an actual 'challenge rating' or stats. There's still tables upon tables of info on them in countless published settings, but a 'mortal' deity sits closer to the player's level as something that can be spoken to, bargained with or even killed. In D&D 5e parlance, the above Gods would empower PCs using the Cleric class, whereas these lower-case gods would be closer to a Warlock PC's Patron. (Except the Great Old One class, but see below.)
Incredibly powerful mortals, mages or spirits.
These guys play by the 'rules' way more than anyone else. For a good pop-culture example, think of the forest gods & demons from the (excellent) film Princess Mononoke. Lord of the Rings technically isn't an example of this (see below), but it's entirely valid from a surface reading of the books (or from watching the films) to see characters like Gandalf, Saruman, Sauron and even Shelob simply as mortal beings of immense power and knowledge. Worthy of worship and adoration, capable of enforcing their will upon the world by means incomprehensible to many mortals.
Charlatans, grifters, con-men and men behind curtains.
This probably works just fine in a no-magic or low-magic setting, and can be a great mix-up for a high-fantasy or sword & sorcery campaign. The bolts of lightning are just a big taser! The booming voice is a megaphone! The terrifying winged beast is a taxidermied chimera only seen in silhouette! I'll probably do a bit on fake-out campaign themes & villains in the future so this'll be better covered there.
Calamari-themed eldritch beings from beyond the stars that are dead but dreaming.
Cthulhu! Zalgo! Hadar and Gibbeth and Acamar! The Eldrazi! Anything TVTropes would call an 'eldritch abomination!' I hate these. Hate, hate, hate. The concept is fine, but in Dagon's name is it easy to abuse these. Why give your entities cohesive motivations when you can just say they're 'eldritch' and leave it at that? Why create a unique visual appearance for your monster when you can just rip off a racist paranoid weirdo from the 1920s? That said, you can do them well. Guess I just found myself another article.
God, G-d, Allah, Jesus, Yeshua, The Light, The Lord, The Tetragrammaton.
There are 'gods' and then there's 'God.' This is the second one. They're omnipotent, or may as well be. They're outside context and do things that 'lesser' gods cannot. Most importantly, they're just a straight-up stand in for the Christian god in that they have no flaws, are perfect, do no wrong, and are an absolute moral arbiter of everything ever. You'll probably know them as Eru Ilúvatar from Tolkien's writings, or Aslan and the Emperor from Lewis. More recently, you've got the 'White God' in Butcher's Dresden Files novels, a being that seems ineffable from the point of view of not just people that regularly shake hands with Hades and Odin, but from Hades and Odin themselves.
So now we have an idea on what we regularly see, how can we mess around with it to create new stories? Find out in Part 2.
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