The Divine Faction

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This post is going up too late for the conclave blog trend. Dan is still posting it despite the implied schism it will cause.

In dungeon fantasy, the gods have some consistent observable traits.

They primarily work through intermediary institutions rather than directly exert control or influence.
They have the ability to grant supernatural abilities to adventurers and choose to do so.
They expect the recipient to take vows, engage in acts of service when called, and generally support one ideology over all others.

In this way, it is useful to compare a divine being to an intelligence agent from a global superpower in the field. They’re here, they have something you need, they’re maintaining plausible deniability, and they’re fighting a war through you that you can’t fully understand.

welcome to Charlie Wilson’s Holy War.

Representing the divine

Instead of building out a new type of information, lets work with what we already have. Instead of using the format of Monsters to describe a god, I propose we use the format of the Faction. They are killed not by loss of hp but by loss of reputation and territory (more on this later). Lets leave the hitpoints to the individual angels and demons and let the gods be something more esoteric.

This is, of course, distinct from the religions that represent them. Tension between the god and their church is too delicious an opportunity to lose, here. The needs of a religion as a political, material entity are unique from the needs of higher beings.

Like factions, gods have different levels of influence depending on where you go and who you ask. They have broad agendas and, from the outside perspective, hypocracies and contradictions. They work in mysterious ways. They have relationships with other gods and institutions. They care about the big picture.

The way factions tend to be described in tabletop rpgs almost works 1:1 for our needs. They have multiple presentations on earth, which are functionally your MVPs. They have goals, even if they don’t make sense to mortals. They have assets to give you in miraculous powers and wants they expect in mortal behavior. The biggest issue is one of turf. Some depictions of the divine say they wont even touch the earth lest it dirty them, why in heaven or hell would they fight over it?

Domain Maps

We can give the gods a battlemap by writing down their domains as interconnected points, with other significant and symbolic ideas thrown in as well. Anything of interest to the adventure and its players could do. The demons of Chainsaw Man would make excellent inspiration.

From here the game plays itself like a secondary faction map. The gods take their actions, have their turns, fight over congested domains until they win. The hardest part would be capturing the inscrutable. One can recruit the dwarves to their army by winning their hearts and minds, but becoming the new god of the Dwarf domain should be a lot harder to understand. We do not make our symbols, our symbols make us. Perhaps it is enough to complete a second Taj Mahal on the other side of the planet to unseat the bearded lord of the underworld? We are but mortals, how could we understand.

So long as their agendas are difficult to achieve and impossible to understand it should work well enough at the table.