A chapel to a forgotten god. A tomb with an alter(sic) to the same god. That’s the detail you get. Nothing special. All abstracted. Everything boring and generic, when it exists at all.
I will, for the millionth time, link to Joseph Manola's 'Conceptual Density'. Nine times out of ten when an RPG product is unsatisfying, you can reference that post and find something applicable.
Here, it's the fact that a forgotten god can be cliche, generic and boring. To begin with, gods in fantasy are mysterious and powerful beings, and can be used to effectively communicate your themes, conflicts and world. The idea of a forgotten god, whatever that means, should immediately be evocative and surprising.
Instead, we're so saturated in Howard/Lovecraft clones that, like their close relatives The Unknowable Horrors Beyond Human Understanding, forgotten gods are just part and parcel of a dark-ish fantasy world. Find an unholy altar carved with incomprehensible runes and frescoes detailing a scene of torture and bloodshed, and the immediate reaction will be, 'oh, an altar to a forgotten god, is there anything worth looting?'
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| Another day, another altar |
Which is a shame, because the potential of the concept is immense, if you just detail it a bit.
Namely, HOW DO YOU FORGET A GOD!?
It should be hard to lose track of something that big. There's a few ways I could think of that going down, and none of them merit a 'meh' response. Forgetting a god should be a big, traumatic deal. It's not guaranteed that anyone would know that there used to be a god where there is now a deity-shaped hole.
Here's a few ways I can think of treating forgotten gods, and how players can interact with them.
How To Forget a God
Belief Equals Power
This is an extension of the fairly well-known trope that deities feed on worship. As a result, a truly forgotten god would be starved, either dead or too weak to act on its own, in a state of hibernation. Once, long ago, their cult was put to the sword, and their worship banned. Some gods might not be totally forgotten, kept on life support by a cult numbering just tens, but they're usually not a threat in that state. If a god has been forgotten this way, there's little chance the party would ever know. That is, after all, the whole point of forgetting.
A God Imprisoned
Maybe they weren't forgotten per se, but locked away. Either their fellow deities united to imprison them beyond time and space, or an ancient ritual sealed them in a terrestrial vessel. You can do some fun stuff with reincarnation or MacGuffins in this case. An alternate take on this is the god captured as a trophy; if a deity physically dwells in a place, moving it elsewhere can turn the god into a political prisoner, weakened and on display for the glory of the conqueror. As usual, Arnold K treats this well.
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| Now THAT'S what I call evocative! |
A False Deity
Perhaps as a variation on imprisonment, a god is impersonated by another being, whether another divine or a mortal. This other being steals their worship, draining the old god of their nourishment and empowering themselves. If this deception isn't discovered, then you don't end up with a 'forgotten' god as much as one who underwent a strange shift and is probably less competent/crueler/less cruel than they used to be. This has some decent interaction potential, what with a mantled usurper, return the true deity to power twist.
Erased
This god's name was struck from books, rituals burned, icons literally defaced. The god is still around, but nobody remembers how to invoke it. It may be weakened if it relied on worship, or it may be an angry and frustrated shadow of its former self. I think this is a very fruitful version of the trope, as there is direct evidence of a god once existing (broken statuary, crossed out names, etc), and the possibility of discovering its name and gaining a great deal of power through that is attractive. The area near its old temple is likely blasted and haunted by what remains of the deity, faceless, nameless and pathetic.
Murdered
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| We've been over this before, Dagoth, sit down. |
If you want to kill a god, sometimes you gotta do it the hard way. This is likely the fault of the rest of the pantheon, and the dead god in question may or may not have deserved it. If evidence of this crime was well and truly erased, and the god can't return, the players won't be able to interact much with it, and that's boring. I'd prefer a FOUL MURDER setup where the true circumstances of the god's death are kept hidden.
On the other hand, it's possible that the god can come back from the dead. If so, one cult or another is definitely working on that. What a grand and intoxicating innocence!
All this talk of cultists and rituals has me thinking about how generic and lame most 'dark rituals' in RPGs are, for the same reason 'forgotten gods' are generic and lame, lack of thought and detail. I'll likely write about that next in this... series?
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