LogFAQs > #897011695

shadowsword87 posted...

I... don't actually like directly gendering my gods. I think it's much more interesting if they are personified power from the collective devotion of their followers. So all of their followers can think that their god is a man/woman, but the god can choose to have a male/female/gender neutral form, after all, they're not real.

Then you can have more fun liberally shape-shifting them to do stuff.

The problem is, the gods as described aren't really the gods. The gods as described are pretty explicitly the form those gods choose to manifest to their followers, and the lens through which their followers see them and represent them in culture and worship. And those representations almost ALWAYS have gender (and other personality or physical traits that are fairly consistent).

Even in real history, gods like Zeus could turn into a swan, a bull, a cloud, or a "shower of gold" (and even into a copy of Artemis to seduce one of Artemis' followers), but the Greeks would always describe him as being male. And Loki turned into a mare, had sex with a stallion, and gave birth to a horse, but he was still MALE in Norse eyes. For all modern talk of gender flexibility or the tendency to see gods as being more ineffable or formless, for most of human history the gods were very much human in nature if not in scope. They were basically versions of what you'd get if a bunch of humans had cosmic power (which is why so many of them fought, screwed, and got drunk all the time).

True, you could have a scenario where a divine glowing ball of energy chooses to manifest as a young woman clad in golden armor to one civilization but as an old greybearded dude to a different group, but those groups are still going to describe their god as BEING that and not "Well, you know, divinity and all that, we should refuse to represent our god with physical traits because physicality is an illusion for a being of pure energy and thought." No, they're going to worship Lady Trueheart or Lord Grumbleduke.

So even if we have to preface it by saying something like, "This is a description of the god's usual chosen manifestation form, and not their "natural" form", they're still going to have a preferred body type and appearance that's going to be the default their worshipers tend to see them as.

(And honestly, the idea of gods as beings of pure thought or energy is very modern, and tends to clash with fantasy settings - most D&D gods are pretty inherently more like the Greek or Norse gods they were copied from, in that they're more like physical beings with cosmic powers rather than cosmic beings that occasionally take on physical form.)

Granted, it's entirely possible for a specific given god to deliberately appear as a different gender every time it shows up, or as something androgynous like Desire of the Endless, or even as an amorphous blob of goo, but most gods are going to pick a form and be consistent with it, and most worshipers (especially Clerics and Paladins) are going to have a very clear image in their minds of what their god looks like.

And with elves, it's implied their gods definitely look like them, because they're not Corellon's magical creations as much as they are his metaphysical descendants.


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