| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Gary Dallison
Great Reader
United Kingdom
6353 Posts |
|
|
TheIriaeban
Master of Realmslore
USA
1289 Posts |
 Posted - 29 May 2022 : 17:20:06
|
Worship and belief are two different things. As an example, people may worship Chauntea but they still believe that Bane exists. Under the FR "rules", both would gain power from that. Chauntea would gain a lot more from those people since it is actual worship and not just belief.
That is also why you won't have some FR god create a crusade to kill off all the worshippers of another god because their deaths would also reduce them as well (not to mention angering every other god because they would lose power, too). A crusade to kill off the other god's priests and convert their followers to be the attacking god's worshippers, that has happened. And, it didn't anger every other god at the same time, either. |
"Iriaebor is a fine city. So what if you can have violence between merchant groups break out at any moment. Not every city can offer dinner AND a show."
My FR writeups - http://www.mediafire.com/folder/um3liz6tqsf5n/Documents
|
 |
|
|
Gary Dallison
Great Reader
United Kingdom
6353 Posts |
Posted - 29 May 2022 : 17:59:41
|
True, there are also lots of other nuances to consider now we are freed from the nonsense that is portfolios.
Firstly is that if belief sustains deities then it could also create them.
The first gods in a pantheon were likely nothing more than vague ideas of death, fire, life, rain, etc. If enough people in a region believed in the same thing and used the same name then a god would have to be born surely?
Then we have the portfolios of a god. These do not exist, its a human construct. So what makes Myrkul the god of the dead. Kelemvor ascended and immediately became god of the dead, it was not because of his portfolio, so is the fact that most people believed he took over from Myrkul and became god of the dead make him become god of the dead. Does belief shape the god as well as sustain him.
If portfolios do not exist then a god does not know everything that occurs in relation to that portfolio, nor does he have control over it, therefore they must look or scry upon the world to determine what is happening (admittedly they can do it more often and with greater power than any mortal but there must also be a chance of failure as with all magic).
I personally am very happy at the news that portfolios are not a thing, and that divine power is directly influenced by belief. |
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions Candlekeep Archive
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 1
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 2
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 3
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 4
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 5
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 6
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 7
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 8
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 9
Alternate Realms Site |
|
|
|
Gary Dallison
Great Reader
United Kingdom
6353 Posts |
Posted - 30 May 2022 : 08:32:28
|
The more i think about it, the more questions this raises.
If portfolios dont exist, what exactly made the Dead Three the gods of tyranny, murder, and death.
It could be that Jergal gave them bits of himself that made them more suited to those roles.
Then there is the possibility that belief shapes the god, but then how would people know that Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul were the gods of tyranny, murder, and the dead.
Then there is the possibility that their powers evolved as did their name. The Dead Three went to Jergal and received enough power to make them demi gods (no belief no god and so at this point in time Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul cannot have become true gods as that would be suicide). They then went out into the world and did what comes naturally to them and that moulded the belief of people in them as gods of tyranny, murder, and the dead.
Then what about Cyric. He did not inherit any portfolios because they do not exist. Did he absorb powers and essence from Bhaal when he murdered him. I'm assuming the because the majority of Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul worshippers switched to Cyric that belief shaped his personality and the choices he made for his powers.
Myrkul however did not die, and his worshippers did not easily embrace Cyric or Kelemvor, so how come Myrkul remains as an artefact. He must have chosen to remain a quasi deity and let his worship fade away. In which case (much like Elminster) you can choose not to become a true-god but instead remain material plane bound as a demi-god. |
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions Candlekeep Archive
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 1
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 2
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 3
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 4
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 5
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 6
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 7
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 8
Forgotten Realms Alternate Dimensions: Issue 9
Alternate Realms Site |
|
|
|
Baltas
Senior Scribe
Poland
955 Posts |
Posted - 30 May 2022 : 10:21:47
|
| I think Jergal could have given the Dead Three the aspects he was worshipped under along parts of his divinity. It's heavily implied with Myrkul - ie giving him his role/aspect/alias of N'asr among Bedine and Nergal among Mulani, and Cyric latter apropriated at least the aspect/alias of N'asr. Thus probably doesn't fully explain the transition, but still would allow them to easier gain belief and worshippers. |
|
|
|
Wooly Rupert
Master of Mischief
USA
36779 Posts |
Posted - 30 May 2022 : 11:40:47
|
Gods being powered by belief has always been a thing in the Realms. This isn't new.
As for portfolios, look at what he said -- "portfolios are mortal attempts to understand/explain which aspects of mortal life deities concentrate their attempts to influence upon"
The way I read that, and look at what we've seen in lore, is that portfolios aren't specific, discrete sets of duties/responsibilities. It's not a concrete thing where "the deity with this portfolio has sole control over X, with specific parameters being W, Y, Z." Instead, it's more like an office or job title where they have certain responsibilities, but they're not rigidly defined. |
Candlekeep Forums Moderator
Candlekeep - The Library of Forgotten Realms Lore
http://www.candlekeep.com -- Candlekeep Forum Code of Conduct
I am the Giant Space Hamster of Ill Omen!  |
|
|
|
Delnyn
Senior Scribe
USA
890 Posts |
Posted - 30 May 2022 : 16:20:44
|
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
Gods being powered by belief has always been a thing in the Realms. This isn't new.
As for portfolios, look at what he said -- "portfolios are mortal attempts to understand/explain which aspects of mortal life deities concentrate their attempts to influence upon"
The way I read that, and look at what we've seen in lore, is that portfolios aren't specific, discrete sets of duties/responsibilities. It's not a concrete thing where "the deity with this portfolio has sole control over X, with specific parameters being W, Y, Z." Instead, it's more like an office or job title where they have certain responsibilities, but they're not rigidly defined.
All of this. A similar response may very well apply to FR cosmology. Great Ring, World Tree and World Axis are all mortal constructs that do not capture the entirety of the planes. |
|
|
|
bloodtide_the_red
Learned Scribe
USA
297 Posts |
Posted - 30 May 2022 : 23:14:33
|
I think the portfolios thing is just a vague toss out that "mortals don't understand the ways of the gods". And that is true enough. I can agree with Ed that the Ways of the Divine are unknown to mortals. And are Unknowable. It's the classic "an ant could never understand anything about humans".
But you can say all day long "portfolios are not a real thing" and are "made up by mortals"......but it does not matter, because from the mortal size that is EXACTLY what is reality. Now you can talk and talk and talk till your blue in the face, that "portfolios are not a thing"......but then EVERY deity we have EVER seen EVER "ACTS" like the are a REAL thing. EVERY SINGLE DEITY ALL THE TIME. So....um, sure, gods are really doing some strange and unknowable thing for real.....THAT JUST HAPPENS TO RANDOMLY BE HAVING PORTFOLIOS.
I guess you can say Gods don't have "portfolios" they have "wakanoodles" or whatever word games you want to play. The truth is that the gods ACT like they have portfolios. Auril ONLY seems to majority care about "Cold", and very little else. so, ok, sure she is playing trillion trillion dimensional deity chess or something mortals will never understand.....BUT she is the Deity of Cold.
And for the Words of AO....well, they are about as vague as words can be: I created the gods for a purpose. Now you, the gods, will fulfill that purpose. From this day forward, your true power depends upon the number and devotion of your followers. Without worshipers, you will wither, even perish entirely"
Well, "true power" can mean anything really. And it can't be pure numbers, as there are more humans then other races....and EVERY non human god has not withered away.
I always took this to be more of something like it was always a Cosmic Rule, but AO was light in enforcing it or always gave gods lots and lots and lots of second chances or something like that. |
|
|
|
Wooly Rupert
Master of Mischief
USA
36779 Posts |
Posted - 31 May 2022 : 00:46:08
|
quote:
Originally posted by Delnyn
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
Gods being powered by belief has always been a thing in the Realms. This isn't new.
As for portfolios, look at what he said -- "portfolios are mortal attempts to understand/explain which aspects of mortal life deities concentrate their attempts to influence upon"
The way I read that, and look at what we've seen in lore, is that portfolios aren't specific, discrete sets of duties/responsibilities. It's not a concrete thing where "the deity with this portfolio has sole control over X, with specific parameters being W, Y, Z." Instead, it's more like an office or job title where they have certain responsibilities, but they're not rigidly defined.
All of this. A similar response may very well apply to FR cosmology. Great Ring, World Tree and World Axis are all mortal constructs that do not capture the entirety of the planes.
We can't really apply the same thing to FR cosmology, though -- at least, not all of it. When 3E came out, they didn't just chuck the Great Wheel out the window -- they changed what gods were located where, as well. It's one thing to say the planes may be arranged in a wheel and they may be arranged in a tree, but when god A lives in divine realm B on plane C, and then suddenly their divine realm is now D and it is all or most of plane E, that's a different story.
Also, one thing that gets overlooked in this discussion: it was never stated "the planes are arranged in this specific shape" and it is in fact impossible for them to be in any shape or formation. The Wheel or the Tree or whatever has always been the mortal understanding of these infinite spaces.
Where it becomes a retcon is when you have numerous sources saying "this is what people believe about the planes" and then it's suddenly something else entirely. |
Candlekeep Forums Moderator
Candlekeep - The Library of Forgotten Realms Lore
http://www.candlekeep.com -- Candlekeep Forum Code of Conduct
I am the Giant Space Hamster of Ill Omen! |
|
|
|
Gary Dallison
Great Reader
United Kingdom
6353 Posts |
|
|
bloodtide_the_red
Learned Scribe
USA
297 Posts |
Posted - 01 Jun 2022 : 02:50:21
|
I'd give Mr. Ed a challenge: if EVERYTHING we know is WRONG and only Ed knows how special secret the gods really are: Then I DARE him to write a couple thousand OFFICIAL words in a published Realms book about his favorite Mary Sue Goddess Mystra where she acts NOTHING like a "goddess of magic" and instead just does weird fruit loops things no mortal can understand.
Gee...bet he won't be willing to do that...... |
|
|
|
PattPlays
Senior Scribe
469 Posts |
Posted - 01 Jun 2022 : 03:31:13
|
quote:
Originally posted by Gary Dallison
Sometimes you take the training wheels off a persons bike and they ask for them to be put back on.
Fact is Ed said that portfolios are a human construct, ergo they do not exist. Now he isnt going to mean that actually the gods call them spheres or tokens or pizza slices because that would be a waste of time and he would have just said that.
He also said that divine power is directly related to belief. Direct relation means that as one decreases so does the other and as one approaches zero so does the other.
Portfios were a means to keep gods alive despite them having no worshippers (lay or otherwise), that safety net no longer exists.
Now the idea of a portfolio can be replicated without it existing using the belief structure of worshippers. If people believe a divine being represents death then that surely changes the being to represent their belief. A church drives this belief but it is not immutable or static.
If the church of mask stops peddling the dogma that mask is the god of intrigue, while the church of cyric starts peddling the idea that cyric is now the god of intrigue you have a change in the material world that is mirrored in the divine. Could such a change have been initiated by visions from cyric and mask (because cyric blackmailed mask into helping else he will destroy the piece of his power he stole from godsbane).
Portfolios dont exist, everything is more complex than an imaginary divine piece of paper that determine which god has what powers and interests.
Or at least that's how I imagine it. You can of course replace portfolios with catalogues and pretend the rules are not different, after all the outcome is already predetermined so nothing has changed.
My thoughts reading this: I love the implication that the Tablets of Fate were introduced by Ao and everyone's brains just go "yeah that sounds like something that has been around since the beginning of time and this offers a simple explanation for the walking catastrophes of the surrounding godswar madness."
His 'fixes' are just gestures meant to convince a population that some narrative beat has occurred so as to reset people's moral licensing. Imagine seeing super-power church alliances rising up with the age of humanity and Ao just says "well yeah but you can't just team up and go to super religion sectarian war because there's these things called portfolios and regional/ethnic pantheons and the gods have to fight a little and their faithful should relocate nigh-arbitrarily."
Sounds like psychological trust-busting over memetics. Wild. Then the faithful take this hand-wave of an answer (where the intended lesson was: don't pool resources and try to conquer the world) literally and bring about heinous destruction for ephemeral titles they infer must have intrinsic values to the gods. What was supposed to push humanity towards neutrality tipped them over into full objectively senseless sabotage from the perspective of the faithless.
Ao the inept inspires more storytelling than an all-comprehending being.. |
:The world's greatest OOTA fan/critic: :"Powder kegs within powder kegs!": :Meta-Dimensional Cheese: :Why is the Wand of Orcus just back?: :We still don't know the nature of Souls and the Positive Energy Plane: :PC on profile, Aldritch Elpyptrat Maxinfield: :Helljumpers, Bungie.net: :Rock Hard Gladiator, RIP Fluidanim, Long Live Pluto: :IRC lives:
https://thisisstorytelling.wordpress.com
T_P_T |
Edited by - PattPlays on 01 Jun 2022 03:31:53 |
|
|
|
Wooly Rupert
Master of Mischief
USA
36779 Posts |
Posted - 01 Jun 2022 : 03:32:31
|
quote:
Originally posted by bloodtide_the_red
I'd give Mr. Ed a challenge: if EVERYTHING we know is WRONG and only Ed knows how special secret the gods really are: Then I DARE him to write a couple thousand OFFICIAL words in a published Realms book about his favorite Mary Sue Goddess Mystra where she acts NOTHING like a "goddess of magic" and instead just does weird fruit loops things no mortal can understand.
Gee...bet he won't be willing to do that......
Or maybe we can stop claiming that Mystra -- or Elminster, or Mirt, or Vangey, or whoever else we're talking about -- is Ed's Mary Sue and recognize that someone who wants to get paid for writing in a shared world will write about what the IP holders tell him to write about.
Maybe, while we're at it, we can also recognize that he didn't say everything we know is wrong -- what he said is that what we have chosen to define as a rigid set of strictly defined parameters actually isn't.
Really, it's one of the same arguments that has come up in D&D for years, now: game mechanics put limitations on things or categorize them in ways that don't match actual applications, but we still run with them because it's a game and having set parameters for X makes it easier to use. |
Candlekeep Forums Moderator
Candlekeep - The Library of Forgotten Realms Lore
http://www.candlekeep.com -- Candlekeep Forum Code of Conduct
I am the Giant Space Hamster of Ill Omen! |
Edited by - Wooly Rupert on 01 Jun 2022 03:33:04 |
|
|
|
Irennan
Great Reader
Italy
3802 Posts |
Posted - 01 Jun 2022 : 05:56:30
|
To me it makes sense that portfolios are an interpretation that people have of how divine stuff works. It's the same thing IRL, really: the various laws of Physics we use are interpretations of the universe that allow us to predict stuff, but they're indeed interpretations. Heck, even things like colors don't exist IRL, they're a way our brain interprets certain wavelengths (and not even all of them--our brain can make up colors that don't correspknd to any wavelenght. Magenta and exists only in our mind as an interpretation of being exposed to mostly blue and red light without green, for example). If we perceive everything in terms of our neural models, why not something even more subjective, like divinity?
And in the end, who cares if a certain god has a certain label. The tenets of the faith remain the same, the character of the deity remains the same, and so on. They have access to a certain kind of power and that's it. |
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. |
|
|
|
Gary Dallison
Great Reader
United Kingdom
6353 Posts |
|
|
Irennan
Great Reader
Italy
3802 Posts |
Posted - 01 Jun 2022 : 09:03:12
|
| Not necessarily. Belief isn't really a finite or quantifiable resources. Deities may conflict simply because they have opposite *personal* goals or incompatible worldviews that they want to spread. And those aren't required to be tied to their portfolios (unless you want to say stuff like "gods don't have free will", in which case you'd be opening a whole different can of worms, because even real humans' free will and the nature of consciousness is object of study). |
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. |
Edited by - Irennan on 01 Jun 2022 09:04:39 |
|
|
|
CorellonsDevout
Great Reader
USA
2708 Posts |
Posted - 09 Jun 2022 : 00:11:22
|
Many gods existed before mortals, so clearly, they were able to survive without worship before their creations, but maybe in a weird sense, being worshiped is a double-edged sword. Once you gain followers, you gain power, but your power is now tied to the faith of your followers.
That said, even though there is evidence that a god dies when they have no followers, they have also come back, and for a god (especially a multipsheric god) to truly die, they have to be erased from everywhere.
But to make worship easier (ie, comprehensible), the gods take on "portfolios". These "portfolios" likely consist of things that relate to the god's personality (perhaps interests?). To use the example of time that was referenced in Sage Advice, as Ed said, no deity is "responsible" for time, but certain deities may have time in their portfolio, based on other things they represent (Amaunataur being associated with the dawn, which is a time of day). As Ed said, the portfolios consist of the aspects of mortal lives/concerns the deities choose to concentrate one--I again think this has to do with their personality.
Gods are beyond mortal understanding, but since they interact with mortals, they have to "dumb it down" for mortals to understand. Thus, portfolios. |
Sweet water and light laughter |
Edited by - CorellonsDevout on 09 Jun 2022 00:17:29 |
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
The Gods
