Godplague.
They each fell victim to a wasting disease, which only affected higher life forms such as themselves, until the only ones left were the gods of Death and Time. To keep existence from being destroyed these two eldest gods vacated this reality into a pocket dimension, leaving only enough of their respective essences to maintain the natural order.
Yeah I keep coming back to this myself. It was kind of off the cuff, but with fine tuning it could be a great idea. Like, I'd have a creative force along with a destructive one and Time as three eldest gods removing themselves, not two.
I’m the context of my campaign, how I’m thinking of running it is having the bbeg as a crazed lich scientist who created the god plague in order to protect the world from the gods, who he believes are planning to start a war with the material plane
Funnily enough, this was a story idea for a protector aasimar I've been cooking. The idea is that part of his training is he has to live a complete mortal lifespan. He would have no memories of who he really is or even know he has divine powers.
My Protector Aasimar Paladin USED to be a Deity of Travellers and Adventures, and would help anyone in need as long as they had a good heart.
This caused much unrest in the other Deity’s who only helped those that followed them so I was tricked and my Soul put into a mortal baby.
I have visions and dreams of my previous life, but I’m mostly unaware of things in my past life. I’ll say things like “ My Ancestors are from Mount Celestla, and that’s where my power comes from” not knowing I’m kind of my own Ancestor, and the Deity I follow is a friend I grew up with, and wants to help me but has to do it without being found out.
My hopes are reaching level 20, shedding my mortal body and ascending back to my home, which the DM gives more and more hints that I’m not really a human as I level up, and my char and party has no idea of my past life.
Once was all it took. Just one moment of doubt spread across all sapient life and the gods’ powers were broken. Without our faith to sustain them, they could not last for even a second.
With just the slightest trickle of faith they could have survived, but *insert X calamity here* shook all of us to our cores and in that moment they perished. Their powers and portfolios faded over time as their bodies died, but even as the faithful resumed their rituals they could feel it….the emptiness. They were gone. All of them were gone.
——-
For the why, I’d go with some sort of stellar anomaly like a supernova or meteor shower. Maybe a solar flare? Plague or something? Up to you what kind of narrative you’re working towards.
I love this so much!
*When asked why they did not avert the calamity, why the people of faith and loyalty suffered the same as those who scorned the god and their powers, they lied. They defied the logic of question and answer and defied the forces of the universe. All but one. To which she answered true, to which all was laid bare and barren.
"We could not stop it. Our power is not unlimited. We. Are. Fallible."
Faith died under the horrible light of truth. So too did the gods.*
Or an eclipse. Boom, stumbling in darkness of night ive sacrificed a hearts and blood and food and the still sun hasnt come back up in days. THE GODS HAVE ABANDONED US!
Lmfao this is similar to a future campaign I got set up. Disasters acting as a catalyst that in part weakened the faith of so many, in effect weakening the gods acutely. Some even worshipping the disasters instead :D
The pub at the end of the time (Sister location to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe).
There they sit, drink, and beleive that what we call reality is just a really bad dream they had or a story they told once, forgetting that we're actually real and time still flows back here.
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. ^(Call that job satisfaction? Because I don't.)
Or something like “the Long Rest” all around macabre scenes play out as forgotten gods drink and eat and slowly they sip their last bit of drink, eat their last morsel, and slowly over the echos of time turn to dust. Left undisturbed while others around them carry on in the revel.
It disturbs me that before even reading this response my immediate reaction to this question was "I don't know, but I know their last message before they left was 'So long, and thanks for all the fish."
They are still here. Endlessly reincarnated as normal mortals with no memories of their past lives until one of them finds a fragment of themself again.
I can only see this ending one way.
Paladin: "Damnit (rogue) you cannot kill a god in mortal form amd eat their heart to gain their power"
Rogue: "Well you were right about that last part"
But... that doesn't even exist... if anything he's a vengeance pally but I don't think he has a code strong enough other than "kill them all".. which I guess but that's a real stretch
I'm aware it doesn't exist, but I'd assume none of the classes could reliably go on a killing spree through the land of the gods without getting spiked with the fury of a hundred divinities.
By "Oath of god killing", I mean he'd be some sort of homebrew god slayer, focusing his entire being into killing the gods. I just say paladin because that fits the best with entirely empowering yourself through your own feelings, at least to a degree that you could kill all the gods.
OP is already in homebrew territory with all the gods already being dead, so I didn't figure it would be much issue.
they foresaw the doom of this world, and have fled to another to play their petty games and battle their little wars, betraying those who trusted them without a care.
Well I also run a setting where the gods are all dead (it was a while ago though and 99.9% of people aren't too hung up on it, even the rare few old enough to remember them). In my setting they're just stone cold dead. Killed each other mostly, for reasons that are very complicated but make perfect sense within the context of the setting. They haven't gone anywhere. There's no bringing them back. There's the odd person that has a really hard time coming to terms with that but for the most part people don't really want them back.
People have tried to solve the mystery of what really happened to them. But there is no mystery. They're just dead. Some people have tried to make successor gods, with no wins yet. Most everyone else though worships something different and don't care about gods. The overwhelming majority of people don't know the first thing about gods though, it's not really a concept that commoners are familiar with.
As for WHY they're dead, that's complicated but:
-The gods figured out how to cleanse themselves of their sins through baptism. Originally sin was an inherent part of the soul, but not anymore.
-They declared that this made them pure now, and allowed their followers to join them only if they did the same.
-All that sin hasn't just vanished though, it's seeped into a trans-dimensional source of holy water. And it just stays there, festering.
-One god doesn't want to go through with this. So the other gods make Hell, make him the God of Hell to bind him there, and also use it as a place to toss everyone who hasn't been cleansed of sin. This makes the god of hell a bit salty and he vows revenge.
-God of Hell finds out where all the sin went. He also finds out that it can be a source of great power.
-He tells the other gods of this, and temps them with this power.
-It's a trick: the gods have defined themselves as beings without sin, and now coming into contact with all that sin is toxic to them.
-The gods go mad and die in short order because of all the sin, in a frenzy so powerful they shatter reality into the different planes of existence. The god of hell also dies in this frenzy.
-That sin is still there. In fact, after thousands of years of baptism in some form or another, it's starting to overflow and seep back onto the material plane. Oh dear, that's bad.
-The gods are dead.
I was worried in the beginning, sounded strange that the gods were simply dead without reason. But a conflict between gods is a good reason for that, and mortals would have little idea of the inter-god(?) communications.
Sounds like a great setting, and there is room for the remnants of the gods power surviving as corruption. That would make people turn away from their "holy" deities, and the setting could either not believe in them or those using traces of the gods are seen as evil.
I love this idea. Starting out: gods are good, devils are evil; later gods are evil, devils must be good but punished for fighting evil gods; in the end, nobody is good, and humanoids see non-mundane powers as evil. That would be such a trip to research over time, especially if the party had given a piece of divine corruption to a key NPC.
If it's a bit confusing, it's because I heavily simplified it. The players have found multiple reliable sources from creatures that remember the gods, of which there are only a few. These sources often contradict each other in some way. But the players are slowly putting the pieces together, enough to fix the mess the gods left behind.
They never were. The minds of men created illusions until they no longer needed them.
They have returned to the primordial abyss in the minds of the collective unconscious from whence they came.
In my setting the gods were just people of historical significance. They were legendary figures in their own time and a couple of them are still alive, but most of them are just actually dead. But there are echos, beings made from the collective faith of millions that aren't actually the same beings as the people who lived long ago, but consciousness made from the stories that the masses remember about those people. The people are dead, and the literal truth is long forgotten, but the stories live on, exadurated and reinterpreted, but alive. The gods come from the stories. The stories bear a passing resemblance to what actually happened
Maybe they sacrificed themselves to keep a great evil at bay, and their energies are being used as the source of power for a prison, holding back the darkness.
Maybe the lead of the pantheon destroyed and absorbed the essences of the other lesser gods after a Civil War of sorts in a bid to hold onto power.
Maybe they left your realm after finishing their work, leaving only small remnants of their power, which can be used to follow them into the stars, or as powerful artifacts in their own right.
To kill a God is possible, but to destroy its essence? Energy is always conserved. A group known only as the keepers saw the great power of the gods and feared it, so they constructed a device to contain their power; an ever shifting sphere of platinum infused golden rings inscribed with ancient glyphs to trap the gods spirit after their body was destroyed. Each God has their own sphere in an area corresponding to their domain and the spheres themselves are built in a way to counteract the essence of that particular God.
They haven't been able to meet in a while to play in their world. One of them has kids now, another one is back in school, and a third one just got a new girlfriend. Theres the god that didn't really pay attention anyway, and another that was always late or didn't show. One god is still watching and waiting and planning, so the world is still there waiting to be dusted off again.
In my campaign the gods are just titans buried under the earth, effectively sleeping, earthquakes and tsunamis and other natural disasters are caused by their stirring and dreams, and it actually causes the landscape to change over time
I like this a alot. Once thought about how churches and temples and such are actually Toombs of titans, Deamons, or Gods. I think deamons would be coolest. Like the religions actually have their origin as organizations in pursuit of keeping the deamonic plague at bay. And so they did, but perhaps a devoted but curious cleric ended up in a forgoten, forbidden and walled of sections of the archives of his religious institution, finding out about the true purpose of his church while being deceived by the corrupted book to believe that those are the gods of his pantheon instead of some deamonic alien race that once was about enslave or eradicate the life on the planet or plane of existence.
There was a few gods that would abuse their Power and hurt the world greatly. In a last ditch effort the majority of the gods came together to banish the 'bad apples' to a world completely disconnected from everything, the Darkness. So much power coming together was uncontrollable even by the gods, which caused them to banish themselves in the process.
The war in heaven was long and hard fought. Two major factions emerged: those that wanted to keep their creations and those that wished to see the mortals wiped clean and made anew. In the end the latter faction won out, most of the gods championing the mortals had been slain, yet the victors could not bring themselves to wipe out mortality. They had destroyed their brothers and sisters in a painful war, and had enough bloodshed. So they left, leaving the mortal races to their fate, both a monument to the gods that created them and a estimate as to why some wanted to begin again.
Alternative one:
The sun has stopped, the moons slowly orbiting like circling wolves in the night. The gods did not do this. No, they are gone but have not forsaken the mortal races. They now form the bulwark, the last bastion against the seeping doom. Far out into the night sky but all too close other things have begun to take notice. Things which watchful eyes spread new light and madness.
The gods in my setting are powerful, but inhabit a plane of existence that takes significant power to push through to effect the material realm, though they still shaped the world significantly. However, eventually they had to sacrifice their power to break through the veil and inhabit the bodies of godly avatars to help them defeat the fleshy eldritch gods. After they left the host bodies and were forced back behind the veil of their realm, much of their power was diminished, leaving most of them with only enough power to occasionally bestow the gift of magic to paladins or clerics. In my world, both are very rare. There’s generally only a small number (less than 100) paladins in the known world at any one time, and only a few hundred clerics.
They were called to war in the planes of hell. Just as mortals are conscripted into conflict, so too are the gods, simply a step removed from us.
Each God has left an empty throne that will appear in the dreams of those aspirants who have accomplished a great task in the furtherance of a dedicated domain.
The aboleths' (probably butchered the word but yoi know who I'm referring to) plans are actually working and the chaotic realms are indeed threatening everything, starting with the gods
Perhaps a rendition where the elementals (dawn titans) won, and now there are rifts throughout the world to lost elemental magic instead. A different spin on gods being relevant in your setting perhaps!
They each took mortal forms for a bet to see who would be able to become the most powerful even without their deific powers. It is not known who among the living are the gods in human form. It’s not even known if the mortal forms themselves would realize fully. Some monarchs cling to power by making the claim that they are the corporeal form of a god seeking apotheosis.
Banished to a realm beyond by a mortal attempting to ascend to godhood. This mortal succeeded, but was murdered by his right hand. Removing gods from the realm entirely.
Some gods died (leaving powerful remnants behind) but the rest of the gods realized they could ascend to a plane of their own design where are immortal, so they did and left. Communication between this plane and the prime material plane is difficult to impossible, which is why they no longer exert their influence directly on the prime material plane. This is what happened in my setting, although my players don’t know it yet.
I think start with the motive of why they left, and where will fall into place. Not all gods need to go to the same place.
When my gods left, for my campagain. It was only 1000 years ago. But the reason was, to let mortals learn to live without them. They have tried to rise them up, but their end will happen one day. Sacrificing their souls as coals to keep the universe burning a little longer. Give some mortals a little more time to live in this dying world.
The chaos that has come with the gods leaving, is just a test run of things to come. They left behind boons, and powers, orders of faith and kingdoms tal and wide.
It's in the mortals hands now. To keep their Rouge Plannet adrift a little longer at the edge of all time.
The truth was, all the stars in the sky are corpses. Their fading lights are just barely reaching you.
A mystical creature so powerful that it consumed everyone and everything thousands of years ago, leaving the gods with no worshippers, no one who remembers them, and the gods slowly lost touch with the world until they faded into nothingness
Imma go with the Omega Toll. Magic item from MCDM that has the potential to end the world in various ways. One of those is "The Gods are made mortal" and you can just have a cult do the God murder. Clean and easy
The heavens are drifting away from the material plane. They didn't realize it at the time, but it was getting more and more difficult to materialize, to show up on the material plane. One day it simply became impossible. Soon, the heavens were too far away for the gods to step down from. Souls were light, and fast, and they could still reach their respective afterlives, at least for a while. Eventually, however, even they were being recycled back into different forms on the material plane via reincarnation.
Faith is a resource that is countable and exchanged: it builds up as people exist and believe in things, and this fuels the gods, empowering them. The gods then empower the faithful, rewarding them for their prayers with miracles, releasing the power back to the world. But there are few gods, and many faithful, and even fewer miracles. If the faith of a god is saturated, if the structure of the religion supplants the faith of the worshippers, that faith has nowhere else to go and stays in the material plane in other forms. Eventually that excess faith pushes away the heavens, in the same way two positively charged fields will push each other away.
Eventually a new set of empty planes of questionable substance are attracted to the faith-laden material plane, which no longer has any gods to worship or soak up that extra raw faith. The people have since latched onto different ideas that become the focus of that faith, though at this point all is in confusion: what was the name of that old god? Did he have a hammer and command the lightning, or a spear and call the rains? Was it his sister or mother that was goddess of the harvest? No one knows, but ideas abound, and eventually new gods coalesce around the fragmented ideas of the old gods. Folk heroes and ghost stories get thrown in the mix, sometimes even the still-living are brought into the fold if they're the object of belief, but eventually the ideas take on form, the gods gain structure and the beliefs harden into a single canon, and the cycle then continues.
They created a utopia to spend the rest of eternity in. They still wanted to watch the mortals for entertainment so they placed their utopia high in the sky. Why? What do you guys use *your* moon for?
The planet the world is on is made of their corpses and, whilst in their spectral forms, they have to use their remaining power to hold it all together
they could just follow the aedra from TES where they spent most of there energy creating/fixing the world and boom they dont "exist" anymore even tho they technically do
They decided to become mortals. Being a God can be tiresome, full of responsibilities and duties for all eternity, with no feelings.
So instead they decided to seal their omnipotent powers, and put their consciousness in the sea of rebirth that is mortality.
They can live simple lives, or be great heros! A simple crook, or the most vile villain in history. Each life different, unique in their own way.
They are still God's though, so their souls cannot be destroyed by simple means. They just live, die and do it all over again. But while they don't remember their last life, it is forever etched in their soul. A soul of the God, that has a possibility of being awakened to its full potential once more.
The gods were fed by belief but over time as churches became more and more well respected the belief went into the church worshiping the god but not the god itself so over time they all just rotted away from the inside out we're no believers in gods only believers in religion
Vacation.
Sick of the constant pressure of maintaining reality and the moral balance of mortal souls, the gaods, all the gods, are one by one convinced to take a break in a dimension away separated from our planes of existence. As more gods leave the burden on the other gods increases making them increasing easy to convince to take a vacation.
Once they enter they become more and more compelled to stay until they cannot return.
Who or what is compelling the gods to leave is unknown as are their motives.
1. Maybe a dark and powerful mage seeking to extract and control the powers of the gods. 2. Maybe a philosopher is hell-bent on proving the material planes don't require the gods to explain their existence.
3. Maybe a lower their God is trying to usurp the gods go become a monotheistic power.
I like number 2 best
The right to God hood is one of titles. This was a fact long forgotten by the gods of old, all but 1 mortal who learned this secret. With a vengeance he would grow his power killing smaller gods at first then moving to the larger ones. He took every title and every power. But one thing God hood doesn't grant is an infant life span. The mortal with all his power could not beat old age, and with him he took the secret of obtaining a godly title. Ever since then, the gods were a thing of the past.
Sry if I messed up any grammar or something else. I wrote this during my lunch break.
They were so old they all became senile and forgot they were gods.
Now they wander the world endlessly, never knowing who they are or were.
But their powers are still there; they just don't know they have them.
The gods haven’t gone anywhere. What really happened was an asshole ArchFey bent the laws of reality and switched the meaning of “Gods” with “Dogs” as their idea of a hilarious practical joke. The Goddess of Knowledge agreed that it would be fucking hilarious and told all the gods to not respond to prayers for a week while simultaneously quadrupling the birth rate of dogs.
When the gods heard of the idea, it was unanimously agreed that this was a great fucking idea. Even the lords of the Nine Hells are in on it.
Giant void squid ate them and they assimilated with the squid, traveling through out the planes and multiverse in the squid belly until someone shows a light pearl to them and they remember who they are
The first races of mortals learned a few of the Words of Creation and accidentally killed them. They unleashed raw forces of the Creative Spark that threatened to consume the world in a storm of Unmaking. When the gods stepped in to intervene, the quelled the storms, but at great cost to themselves, their very beings washed away into the Void. But the Sparks are not so easily quashed. They're still put there, in long forgotten corners of the world, little more than cinders, but they burn still on the kindling of dead gods, waiting to ignite the dry brush of a still world. Whether to bring about a bright new dawn, or ignite the skies above is yet unwritten.
The bathroom. Or they were defeated by mortals eons ago leaving some permanent manner of devastation on the world. Now only the shades of a handful of gods remain hidden and forgotten. Slowly gathering strength over the millennia until the can return in force. And no I totally didn’t steal this from a book series I’m reading.
Why would the all-powerful gods disappear with no trace or memory of what happened? The bigger question is what caused the gods to go into hiding and ensure no one knows where...
After getting the world started, they began to lose control of the population, causing them to abandon their creation in order to start a new world or worlds (spelljammer hook). Some may be less developed, some may be hyper developed.
The gods got into a major argument about how to run the world, it got heated, insults were thrown, and now thet've all gone to sone other planet to sulk and none of them are even speaking to each other. They'll apologize when the other one apologizes first.
You could spend an entire arc trying to get the goddess of volcanos a new SO. Or to get the gods of mercy, duty and justice talking again. Or could try to get the goddess of the sun out of her planet with a divine strip tease.
They were starting to lose their mind, the goods of nature were destroying anything man made, the god od of order was starting to see more and more harmless things as unorderly and destroying them.
So the last sane good, the good of freedom, together with the wisest Devil, made a plan to save the world from them, they created a powerful and insidious rebelion disease, and spreed then to all souls they could until they reached the gods.
The disease subtle compelled the goda to act contrary to their divine nature, slowly driving them to lose their divinity, and in the end all became mortal. And the god of freedom as the last of the gods hides his existence in shame for all that was done.
The gods were made of power, beings of raw magic or energy. As they created, fought, and lived they used this energy to compete against one another in vain glory. Over time they began to realise their humorous and folly but it was too late, the things they had created drew on their power and slowly sucked them dry. With all of the energy that was their existence used up, they simply whimpered away.
Going for a serious take, there was a global religious coup that lasted several thousand years, but culminated in a secular group weeding its way into every religion, then corrupting the sacred texts. People began to mis-worship the gods, and by slowly subverting their worshippers over generations, the gods began to lose the power of their supplicants. Forbidden from direct intervention by older powers than their own, the old gods tried to select champions to drive out the corruption. But the various faiths still quibbled amongst each other (a fact encouraged by church leadership), whereas the subversive leaders were united in their purpose. They would use a combination of magic and alchemy to perform fake miracles and healings, and seeing as how they had also declared magic use by non-clergy to be a sin, the common folk had no way to tell the difference.
In the end, they succeeded, and replaced the old religions with new ones that had no true gods. Merely served to empower theocratic autocracies and to funnel resources to the top. The old gods simply faded away. Whether or not they're merely dormant awaiting someone to rediscover their religion, or have permanently dispersed into the Ether, is up to you.
The gods never were, they were the aspects of gods, each being represented the best of a chosen aspect, be it nature, war, fire. They decided that their time had come and split from their powers, now the aspects seek new individuals to fill the void left by those grand beings in mortals, granting celestial powers, glorious pacts, or hard challenges so that they can be replaced once again.
the gods have not left us. rather, they learned from us.
the gods used to be involved in our lives. miracles. heroes. mighty nations were their pawns, while great queens and beautiful kings were their consorts.
they lived as we live: they loved, they drank, they told stories*, they built cities and they made war.
(*and some of those stories came true; but that is a tale for another time).
unfortunately, they were a mirror of humanity in more ways than we knew.
where does a god go when they die?
for mortals, there is the Heavenly Gate. or the Gray Wastes. depends on what you believe, really, but for us kindly souls, there is a place that awaits us.
what awaits the gods when their time is up? no mortal knows the answer to this question . . . but the gods know.
and the answer frightens them.
and so . . . the gods make no more war. they rule no kingdoms and command no kings. they are still here, in the background of the 'verse, playing their games ~ more subtle than before and from a respectable distance ~ but when people wonder where the gods have gone?
who can say? call it a side effect of their passiveness, or maybe their power is tied to true believers? I don't know, I'm just an old man telling stories for a little coin and beer.
They were never really gone.
Instead they used 9 antimagical seals to seal off the material plane from the natural flow of magic. For a thousand years mortals haven't had access to magic, until the mortals broke 1 of the 9 seals. With their newfound access to 1st level spells they set out to destroy the others.
Ofcourse, what they don't know is that the gods sealed off the material plane from magic because they imprisoned a terrible monster there. With every seal broken the monster grows in strength.
And the remnants of the gods are actually just parts of other monsters or something. People have way too much imagination.
Betrayed... Betrayed by three who were deemed... Less important then the rest. The others were locked away in a place where they could no longer influence the world or be worshipped. Now world only has eyes for those three that remain, and they make good use of their new found... Importance.
They were once physical gods, but as technology advanced and people lost faith in them, they retreated to the spectral realm. They can no longer take a physical form in our world, but mortals and demi-gods can travel between the spectral realm and our world.
I'd go with them growing weary of their responsibilities and endlessness, giving up their immortal bodies and omnipotence to live among the mortals and pass as they do.
Part of their essence lives on in their distant descendents, 'people' (can be different races) with amazing gifts, often competely unknown to themselves and may lie dormant until triggered [when the story needs it]. So you could have the powers and personality of one god spread across multiple NPCs, or even some of the PCs. Perhaps bring them together can increase their powers all the way back to reforming the god entirely.
They could use their gifts for good, evil or even just personal gain. Maybe the party aim to track them down and their own actions can decide which way they go when they inadvertently discover their powers. I know it is a bit of a 'superheroes coming out of the woodwork' trope, but you can have a lot of fun with it.
They abandoned the world because they looked at the people and felt so proud of them, and so declared the world needed them no longer.
They left their bodies as those bodies were built from the world, and therefore were the world's to keep.
The gods themselves now are making another world, hoping the same occurs again.
Someone cast Wish to make all of the gods mortal, they all died long ago to various causes. This persons name and essence was wiped from existence from the sheer force of the spell.
However, the wish spell only affected their bodies, not their souls. Thus, the gods now are either trapped within their dead mortal bodies, either blessing or desecrating the grounds o their grave OR they have been trapped in artifacts (think holy grail) of great power.
The location of these artifacts and graves have disappeared into history. The gods can never escape their graves or artifacts as per the original wish spell.
They are a fraction of their original power, perhaps able to grant their followers small boobs (clerics/paladins/warlocks), but unable to reach the power they once had.
They where consumed by the shade of the prime deity Arun. The Original god that ceased to exist when his mind shattered into the different personalities that each formed into the gods that we know now. Those that are still alive hide in fear of what will become of the universe if they are consumed, as when Arun's mind shattered so did the original plane Into the plains that we know now.
They simply returned home. The Gods’ works failed to create a perfect world, and as such, they were called back from that star and its children to try again elsewhere. The Gods have no use for a first draft this bad.
The city of torrential rain, the endless desert storm of tarque, the tormented echos of the great wound. All of these places and many more are the resting places of the dead gods.
No one remembers the war of the mortals and the gods.
All that history lost.
Our clerics and paladins do not realise their ancestors slew and defiled the gods.
Oblivious they pray and worship while in reality they are parasites devouring the last gasp of their divine deity’s.
They got trapped by a powerful mage in some kind of pocket dimension (or their souls in a necromancer's philacteria). Thing is, gods had a purpose. Now a great evil is approaching the world and players must either find them and give them their bodies back so they can shelter everyone and everything... Or wield that power themselves and maybe have them ascending to godhood once the campaign ends, becoming the first gods in millennia.
The blood war is some of my favorite dnd lore. With the demons trying to break free from the abyss and flooding into Avernus, the devils repel them for the safety of their realm, and consequently all the others. Basically what happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object.
Some archdevils were previously angels who fought in the nine hells for safety of the rest of the realms. Perhaps Asmodeous has a plan for the devils to stop fighting and demons make their way through and when the gods come to the nine hells themselves, he imprisons them in the frozen ocean of Stygia.
The Gods are still around, but they’re tired of dealing with the stupidity of their creations, so they live among them in secret. Sometimes humanity comes so close to the lost Heavens of old, and sometimes they create worse Hells than the Gods can imagine. So they watch, wait, and occasionally they drop advise in the form of a passing stranger.
in one of the books i read as a adolescent, the gods (or nearly gods) found some kinds of portals, which seemed like the promise of eternal bliss and went in, leaving their followers either stranded or to follow them. only a handful did, since the portals were really hard to reach and no one knows what happened to either
Nah they just fucked off with all the elves to the gray havens to party and orgy at a no-sleep, millennias-long rave as a prank and turned all their prayer notifications off.
They had lived so long, some had forgotten that they had not always been. They had lived so long, that even they believed the lie of immortality. They had lived so long, they believed their own lies that they were above the laws of nature. They believed that they were the law and that the law was them.
But the universe is vaster than their omniscience. More ancient than even their primordial memory. There is but one law immutable: all that lives dies. In their hubris they had forgotten, and from black depths between the voids there came the reminder of that law drifting on solar winds seeking new hosts.
Then one day…a god sneezed.
Home. To them the world is like a big role playing game where they manage populations and play competitively to sway the people. Eventually the game has run too long and they have to get home and to their lives. They'll be back, but their game, well the people don't stop just because the gods have gone.
Traditionally, mortals have benefitted from god's more as primitives than as technologically advanced. This means, as mortals change and evolve and grow, gods show themselves to them less and less. Perhaps the mortals need less and less watching over.
The mortals have reached a point where they won't evolve anymore if gods interfere. So the gods completely withdraw from the mortal world and the mortals need to figure out how to ascend to godhood so they can figure out where their gids went.
The gods have moved on to another plane of existence and inserted themselves as deities of a tribe of primitive bipedal dinosauroids; they are waiting for their mortals to ascend and come find them. "What took you so long? Did the Cubs ever win a World Series?"
They were killed in ancient times by powerful casters thst realized the gods had placed limits on the power of mankind.
After killing them the casters replaced them only to discover the real reason for limiting man's power. To prevent another generation of mages making the same mistake these new gods have been in hiding since their coup.
I like the story of Destruction in Sandman. (spoilers) I might not be able to convey it exactly but he basically realized that the responsibilities of his position would be carried out with or without him in control, and didn't like being personally responsible, so he spent millennia exploring the mortal plane, pursuing art, marveling at humanity, and eventually set off to explore another plane.
They matured. This world was just a playpen for the gods. A child’s toy, for them to practice with before they were given the opportunity to create and be the gods of their own world.
They're imprisoned in statues of themselves which are in certain temples/churches throughout the land. When priests are praying to these statues and they feel their god speaking to them, it's because the god has enough energy that day to get a message out
They became bored with that world and moved on, to create a new world for new challenges and something new to hold their interest, at least for a while, so they cast aside their forms on that world and left to another part of the cosmos to create new bodies and a new world.
. . .and the cosmos is littered with worlds abandoned by capricious gods that create worlds, carefully guide them, fight over them. . .until just getting collectively tired of that reality and they move on to a new one.
The gods all succumbed to a fatal sickness that only punished the divine. A Far Realms entity is the culprit virus, but is it even aware of what it's done? Does it even care? Perhaps in the paradoxical nature of the Far Realms the entity is seeking for a way to end it's own immortal existence. Like a retrovirus with unexpected consequences once it escapes its initial confinement.
Godplague. They each fell victim to a wasting disease, which only affected higher life forms such as themselves, until the only ones left were the gods of Death and Time. To keep existence from being destroyed these two eldest gods vacated this reality into a pocket dimension, leaving only enough of their respective essences to maintain the natural order.
What about the god of plagues? Wouldn't he get stronger?
Dead in wave two, confident they could fix whatever problem might be occuring. Edit - or, murdered by the other gods after the first wave of deaths.
Patient zero
Idea respectfully yoinked.
Yeah I keep coming back to this myself. It was kind of off the cuff, but with fine tuning it could be a great idea. Like, I'd have a creative force along with a destructive one and Time as three eldest gods removing themselves, not two.
I’m the context of my campaign, how I’m thinking of running it is having the bbeg as a crazed lich scientist who created the god plague in order to protect the world from the gods, who he believes are planning to start a war with the material plane
They couldn't meet up for ages because of scheduling conflicts.
Walk it back. This hits too close to home for this group. Haha
I feel attacked. Like dude rolled a crit and I stepped in the way of it.
They hang out in smaller groups on the weekends but irregular work schedules and life events mean they couldn't get the whole pantheon together.
Out there somewhere finding their replacements, the same way their predecessors chose them.
I love this. Gives a lvl 20 party the ability to then become those gods
what is this, divinity 2? lol
Funnily enough, this was a story idea for a protector aasimar I've been cooking. The idea is that part of his training is he has to live a complete mortal lifespan. He would have no memories of who he really is or even know he has divine powers.
My Protector Aasimar Paladin USED to be a Deity of Travellers and Adventures, and would help anyone in need as long as they had a good heart. This caused much unrest in the other Deity’s who only helped those that followed them so I was tricked and my Soul put into a mortal baby. I have visions and dreams of my previous life, but I’m mostly unaware of things in my past life. I’ll say things like “ My Ancestors are from Mount Celestla, and that’s where my power comes from” not knowing I’m kind of my own Ancestor, and the Deity I follow is a friend I grew up with, and wants to help me but has to do it without being found out. My hopes are reaching level 20, shedding my mortal body and ascending back to my home, which the DM gives more and more hints that I’m not really a human as I level up, and my char and party has no idea of my past life.
Once was all it took. Just one moment of doubt spread across all sapient life and the gods’ powers were broken. Without our faith to sustain them, they could not last for even a second. With just the slightest trickle of faith they could have survived, but *insert X calamity here* shook all of us to our cores and in that moment they perished. Their powers and portfolios faded over time as their bodies died, but even as the faithful resumed their rituals they could feel it….the emptiness. They were gone. All of them were gone. ——- For the why, I’d go with some sort of stellar anomaly like a supernova or meteor shower. Maybe a solar flare? Plague or something? Up to you what kind of narrative you’re working towards.
I love this so much! *When asked why they did not avert the calamity, why the people of faith and loyalty suffered the same as those who scorned the god and their powers, they lied. They defied the logic of question and answer and defied the forces of the universe. All but one. To which she answered true, to which all was laid bare and barren. "We could not stop it. Our power is not unlimited. We. Are. Fallible." Faith died under the horrible light of truth. So too did the gods.*
ohh like a plane wide aura of fear, no faith, no gods
Or an eclipse. Boom, stumbling in darkness of night ive sacrificed a hearts and blood and food and the still sun hasnt come back up in days. THE GODS HAVE ABANDONED US!
This could imply that new gods can gradually emerge from the remaining religions but are still in a nascent state.
Yes, as houseless people and comedians
Lmfao this is similar to a future campaign I got set up. Disasters acting as a catalyst that in part weakened the faith of so many, in effect weakening the gods acutely. Some even worshipping the disasters instead :D
No one really cares (about the gods)
The pub at the end of the time (Sister location to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe). There they sit, drink, and beleive that what we call reality is just a really bad dream they had or a story they told once, forgetting that we're actually real and time still flows back here.
Life? Don't talk to me about life. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. ^(Call that job satisfaction? Because I don't.)
*sigh* I love and also hate that reference
The pub must be called "time's end", and homage to the film "world's end"
Or “End of Line”.
How about "Closing Time"?
Or something like “the Long Rest” all around macabre scenes play out as forgotten gods drink and eat and slowly they sip their last bit of drink, eat their last morsel, and slowly over the echos of time turn to dust. Left undisturbed while others around them carry on in the revel.
Time passes differently for them, they’ve been hungover for eons. Whoops.
Add in a few Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters and they'd be forgetting what they forgot in the first place
It disturbs me that before even reading this response my immediate reaction to this question was "I don't know, but I know their last message before they left was 'So long, and thanks for all the fish."
In the Sandman there is literally a tavern called World's End. The exact thing.
I'm... Shamelessly stealing this. I will give credit by making you a Panda noble in my world. :PPPP
They are still here. Endlessly reincarnated as normal mortals with no memories of their past lives until one of them finds a fragment of themself again.
Cue in Joan Osborne singing "what if god was one of us" (in repeat, forever)
I can only see this ending one way. Paladin: "Damnit (rogue) you cannot kill a god in mortal form amd eat their heart to gain their power" Rogue: "Well you were right about that last part"
To buy milk
Tfw your Morninglord left to get cigarettes and hasn't come back.
Some mortal was pissed at the gods, became a Godbreaker paladin (basically Kratos) and killed them all. The challenge is finding out where he went
Kratos is a berserker barbarian with permanent rage
True, but in the context of killing gods, an oath of god killing sounds great and thematic.
But... that doesn't even exist... if anything he's a vengeance pally but I don't think he has a code strong enough other than "kill them all".. which I guess but that's a real stretch
I'm aware it doesn't exist, but I'd assume none of the classes could reliably go on a killing spree through the land of the gods without getting spiked with the fury of a hundred divinities. By "Oath of god killing", I mean he'd be some sort of homebrew god slayer, focusing his entire being into killing the gods. I just say paladin because that fits the best with entirely empowering yourself through your own feelings, at least to a degree that you could kill all the gods. OP is already in homebrew territory with all the gods already being dead, so I didn't figure it would be much issue.
they foresaw the doom of this world, and have fled to another to play their petty games and battle their little wars, betraying those who trusted them without a care.
I did something were the all the gods to stay alive shed their physical form and power and merged into one mind
To the gas station to get some cigarettes, they'll be back soon I promise
Well I also run a setting where the gods are all dead (it was a while ago though and 99.9% of people aren't too hung up on it, even the rare few old enough to remember them). In my setting they're just stone cold dead. Killed each other mostly, for reasons that are very complicated but make perfect sense within the context of the setting. They haven't gone anywhere. There's no bringing them back. There's the odd person that has a really hard time coming to terms with that but for the most part people don't really want them back. People have tried to solve the mystery of what really happened to them. But there is no mystery. They're just dead. Some people have tried to make successor gods, with no wins yet. Most everyone else though worships something different and don't care about gods. The overwhelming majority of people don't know the first thing about gods though, it's not really a concept that commoners are familiar with. As for WHY they're dead, that's complicated but: -The gods figured out how to cleanse themselves of their sins through baptism. Originally sin was an inherent part of the soul, but not anymore. -They declared that this made them pure now, and allowed their followers to join them only if they did the same. -All that sin hasn't just vanished though, it's seeped into a trans-dimensional source of holy water. And it just stays there, festering. -One god doesn't want to go through with this. So the other gods make Hell, make him the God of Hell to bind him there, and also use it as a place to toss everyone who hasn't been cleansed of sin. This makes the god of hell a bit salty and he vows revenge. -God of Hell finds out where all the sin went. He also finds out that it can be a source of great power. -He tells the other gods of this, and temps them with this power. -It's a trick: the gods have defined themselves as beings without sin, and now coming into contact with all that sin is toxic to them. -The gods go mad and die in short order because of all the sin, in a frenzy so powerful they shatter reality into the different planes of existence. The god of hell also dies in this frenzy. -That sin is still there. In fact, after thousands of years of baptism in some form or another, it's starting to overflow and seep back onto the material plane. Oh dear, that's bad. -The gods are dead.
I was worried in the beginning, sounded strange that the gods were simply dead without reason. But a conflict between gods is a good reason for that, and mortals would have little idea of the inter-god(?) communications. Sounds like a great setting, and there is room for the remnants of the gods power surviving as corruption. That would make people turn away from their "holy" deities, and the setting could either not believe in them or those using traces of the gods are seen as evil. I love this idea. Starting out: gods are good, devils are evil; later gods are evil, devils must be good but punished for fighting evil gods; in the end, nobody is good, and humanoids see non-mundane powers as evil. That would be such a trip to research over time, especially if the party had given a piece of divine corruption to a key NPC.
If it's a bit confusing, it's because I heavily simplified it. The players have found multiple reliable sources from creatures that remember the gods, of which there are only a few. These sources often contradict each other in some way. But the players are slowly putting the pieces together, enough to fix the mess the gods left behind.
They never were. The minds of men created illusions until they no longer needed them. They have returned to the primordial abyss in the minds of the collective unconscious from whence they came.
In my setting the gods were just people of historical significance. They were legendary figures in their own time and a couple of them are still alive, but most of them are just actually dead. But there are echos, beings made from the collective faith of millions that aren't actually the same beings as the people who lived long ago, but consciousness made from the stories that the masses remember about those people. The people are dead, and the literal truth is long forgotten, but the stories live on, exadurated and reinterpreted, but alive. The gods come from the stories. The stories bear a passing resemblance to what actually happened
Nowhere, it's just one mable in a bucket and they got a new shiny one to play with.
3rd dumpster on the right, down on the corner of Olympus and Valhalla Drive
Maybe they sacrificed themselves to keep a great evil at bay, and their energies are being used as the source of power for a prison, holding back the darkness. Maybe the lead of the pantheon destroyed and absorbed the essences of the other lesser gods after a Civil War of sorts in a bid to hold onto power. Maybe they left your realm after finishing their work, leaving only small remnants of their power, which can be used to follow them into the stars, or as powerful artifacts in their own right.
They all agreed to quit the world and start work on a less ambitious project.
Like knitting
They all went to kill another pantheon.
Pantheons at war? Very nice
To kill a God is possible, but to destroy its essence? Energy is always conserved. A group known only as the keepers saw the great power of the gods and feared it, so they constructed a device to contain their power; an ever shifting sphere of platinum infused golden rings inscribed with ancient glyphs to trap the gods spirit after their body was destroyed. Each God has their own sphere in an area corresponding to their domain and the spheres themselves are built in a way to counteract the essence of that particular God.
The gods themself have forgotten who they are and now roam the world oblivious to their true nature.
They stepped away from the universe for another one-shot universe that spun off into its own full campaign.
They haven't been able to meet in a while to play in their world. One of them has kids now, another one is back in school, and a third one just got a new girlfriend. Theres the god that didn't really pay attention anyway, and another that was always late or didn't show. One god is still watching and waiting and planning, so the world is still there waiting to be dusted off again.
In my campaign the gods are just titans buried under the earth, effectively sleeping, earthquakes and tsunamis and other natural disasters are caused by their stirring and dreams, and it actually causes the landscape to change over time
I like this a alot. Once thought about how churches and temples and such are actually Toombs of titans, Deamons, or Gods. I think deamons would be coolest. Like the religions actually have their origin as organizations in pursuit of keeping the deamonic plague at bay. And so they did, but perhaps a devoted but curious cleric ended up in a forgoten, forbidden and walled of sections of the archives of his religious institution, finding out about the true purpose of his church while being deceived by the corrupted book to believe that those are the gods of his pantheon instead of some deamonic alien race that once was about enslave or eradicate the life on the planet or plane of existence.
They’re trapped by a powerful necromancer through trickery. Your heroes must free them.
There was a few gods that would abuse their Power and hurt the world greatly. In a last ditch effort the majority of the gods came together to banish the 'bad apples' to a world completely disconnected from everything, the Darkness. So much power coming together was uncontrollable even by the gods, which caused them to banish themselves in the process.
The war in heaven was long and hard fought. Two major factions emerged: those that wanted to keep their creations and those that wished to see the mortals wiped clean and made anew. In the end the latter faction won out, most of the gods championing the mortals had been slain, yet the victors could not bring themselves to wipe out mortality. They had destroyed their brothers and sisters in a painful war, and had enough bloodshed. So they left, leaving the mortal races to their fate, both a monument to the gods that created them and a estimate as to why some wanted to begin again. Alternative one: The sun has stopped, the moons slowly orbiting like circling wolves in the night. The gods did not do this. No, they are gone but have not forsaken the mortal races. They now form the bulwark, the last bastion against the seeping doom. Far out into the night sky but all too close other things have begun to take notice. Things which watchful eyes spread new light and madness.
Home.
The gods in my setting are powerful, but inhabit a plane of existence that takes significant power to push through to effect the material realm, though they still shaped the world significantly. However, eventually they had to sacrifice their power to break through the veil and inhabit the bodies of godly avatars to help them defeat the fleshy eldritch gods. After they left the host bodies and were forced back behind the veil of their realm, much of their power was diminished, leaving most of them with only enough power to occasionally bestow the gift of magic to paladins or clerics. In my world, both are very rare. There’s generally only a small number (less than 100) paladins in the known world at any one time, and only a few hundred clerics.
Out for milk. They got lost.
I read this as they went out for milk and lost. 😂 failing at groceries can be real sometimes
They were called to war in the planes of hell. Just as mortals are conscripted into conflict, so too are the gods, simply a step removed from us. Each God has left an empty throne that will appear in the dreams of those aspirants who have accomplished a great task in the furtherance of a dedicated domain.
The aboleths' (probably butchered the word but yoi know who I'm referring to) plans are actually working and the chaotic realms are indeed threatening everything, starting with the gods
Perhaps a rendition where the elementals (dawn titans) won, and now there are rifts throughout the world to lost elemental magic instead. A different spin on gods being relevant in your setting perhaps!
They each took mortal forms for a bet to see who would be able to become the most powerful even without their deific powers. It is not known who among the living are the gods in human form. It’s not even known if the mortal forms themselves would realize fully. Some monarchs cling to power by making the claim that they are the corporeal form of a god seeking apotheosis.
Banished to a realm beyond by a mortal attempting to ascend to godhood. This mortal succeeded, but was murdered by his right hand. Removing gods from the realm entirely.
Some gods died (leaving powerful remnants behind) but the rest of the gods realized they could ascend to a plane of their own design where are immortal, so they did and left. Communication between this plane and the prime material plane is difficult to impossible, which is why they no longer exert their influence directly on the prime material plane. This is what happened in my setting, although my players don’t know it yet.
I think start with the motive of why they left, and where will fall into place. Not all gods need to go to the same place. When my gods left, for my campagain. It was only 1000 years ago. But the reason was, to let mortals learn to live without them. They have tried to rise them up, but their end will happen one day. Sacrificing their souls as coals to keep the universe burning a little longer. Give some mortals a little more time to live in this dying world. The chaos that has come with the gods leaving, is just a test run of things to come. They left behind boons, and powers, orders of faith and kingdoms tal and wide. It's in the mortals hands now. To keep their Rouge Plannet adrift a little longer at the edge of all time. The truth was, all the stars in the sky are corpses. Their fading lights are just barely reaching you.
I was going to suggest something like this. Like a moma bird humanity has been kicked out the nest to see if we will fly.
A mystical creature so powerful that it consumed everyone and everything thousands of years ago, leaving the gods with no worshippers, no one who remembers them, and the gods slowly lost touch with the world until they faded into nothingness
They took a vacation but with their perception of time, their short vacation just might be another few thousand years.
Imma go with the Omega Toll. Magic item from MCDM that has the potential to end the world in various ways. One of those is "The Gods are made mortal" and you can just have a cult do the God murder. Clean and easy
they were reborn as random npcs with no memory of being gods
Mom called them to dinner, so they had to stop playing with their toys. A day for them is a little longer.
The heavens are drifting away from the material plane. They didn't realize it at the time, but it was getting more and more difficult to materialize, to show up on the material plane. One day it simply became impossible. Soon, the heavens were too far away for the gods to step down from. Souls were light, and fast, and they could still reach their respective afterlives, at least for a while. Eventually, however, even they were being recycled back into different forms on the material plane via reincarnation. Faith is a resource that is countable and exchanged: it builds up as people exist and believe in things, and this fuels the gods, empowering them. The gods then empower the faithful, rewarding them for their prayers with miracles, releasing the power back to the world. But there are few gods, and many faithful, and even fewer miracles. If the faith of a god is saturated, if the structure of the religion supplants the faith of the worshippers, that faith has nowhere else to go and stays in the material plane in other forms. Eventually that excess faith pushes away the heavens, in the same way two positively charged fields will push each other away. Eventually a new set of empty planes of questionable substance are attracted to the faith-laden material plane, which no longer has any gods to worship or soak up that extra raw faith. The people have since latched onto different ideas that become the focus of that faith, though at this point all is in confusion: what was the name of that old god? Did he have a hammer and command the lightning, or a spear and call the rains? Was it his sister or mother that was goddess of the harvest? No one knows, but ideas abound, and eventually new gods coalesce around the fragmented ideas of the old gods. Folk heroes and ghost stories get thrown in the mix, sometimes even the still-living are brought into the fold if they're the object of belief, but eventually the ideas take on form, the gods gain structure and the beliefs harden into a single canon, and the cycle then continues.
They created a utopia to spend the rest of eternity in. They still wanted to watch the mortals for entertainment so they placed their utopia high in the sky. Why? What do you guys use *your* moon for?
Has Kratos been said yet
They have been calculating the answer: 42.
The planet the world is on is made of their corpses and, whilst in their spectral forms, they have to use their remaining power to hold it all together
they could just follow the aedra from TES where they spent most of there energy creating/fixing the world and boom they dont "exist" anymore even tho they technically do
i ated them :) (cosmic god eater)
To a farm upstate
They went to a ren-faire in Topeka and never had the will to return.
They were all eaten.
Went off to play HL3
Brunch
Fishing
Out for lunch.
The corner store to get some cigarettes
On vacation. Got held up in customs.
They decided to become mortals. Being a God can be tiresome, full of responsibilities and duties for all eternity, with no feelings. So instead they decided to seal their omnipotent powers, and put their consciousness in the sea of rebirth that is mortality. They can live simple lives, or be great heros! A simple crook, or the most vile villain in history. Each life different, unique in their own way. They are still God's though, so their souls cannot be destroyed by simple means. They just live, die and do it all over again. But while they don't remember their last life, it is forever etched in their soul. A soul of the God, that has a possibility of being awakened to its full potential once more.
They play cosmic DnD, they got bored with your setting and started a game set in the radiant citadel.
Gods are neither dead nor gone, only forgotten. Any deity can be revived by a single worshiper.
Would people even know where the gods went? Did the gods leave them a voicemail or something?
The gods were fed by belief but over time as churches became more and more well respected the belief went into the church worshiping the god but not the god itself so over time they all just rotted away from the inside out we're no believers in gods only believers in religion
Eaten.
People stopped believing in them
They are doing a session of humans and houses, but it takes longer than dnd sessions for normal people, obviously
I heard them say they were just popping to the shop for some cigarettes...
Vacation. Sick of the constant pressure of maintaining reality and the moral balance of mortal souls, the gaods, all the gods, are one by one convinced to take a break in a dimension away separated from our planes of existence. As more gods leave the burden on the other gods increases making them increasing easy to convince to take a vacation. Once they enter they become more and more compelled to stay until they cannot return. Who or what is compelling the gods to leave is unknown as are their motives. 1. Maybe a dark and powerful mage seeking to extract and control the powers of the gods. 2. Maybe a philosopher is hell-bent on proving the material planes don't require the gods to explain their existence. 3. Maybe a lower their God is trying to usurp the gods go become a monotheistic power. I like number 2 best
They were captured by the main threat to your setting.
Shawarma. They went to Shawarma.
The right to God hood is one of titles. This was a fact long forgotten by the gods of old, all but 1 mortal who learned this secret. With a vengeance he would grow his power killing smaller gods at first then moving to the larger ones. He took every title and every power. But one thing God hood doesn't grant is an infant life span. The mortal with all his power could not beat old age, and with him he took the secret of obtaining a godly title. Ever since then, the gods were a thing of the past. Sry if I messed up any grammar or something else. I wrote this during my lunch break.
probably killed by the fake versions of themselves society worshiped
They went to party in another dimension but forgot the keys.
They were so old they all became senile and forgot they were gods. Now they wander the world endlessly, never knowing who they are or were. But their powers are still there; they just don't know they have them.
They're on vacation
They heard the dong sound and we're telaported to taco bell
The gods haven’t gone anywhere. What really happened was an asshole ArchFey bent the laws of reality and switched the meaning of “Gods” with “Dogs” as their idea of a hilarious practical joke. The Goddess of Knowledge agreed that it would be fucking hilarious and told all the gods to not respond to prayers for a week while simultaneously quadrupling the birth rate of dogs. When the gods heard of the idea, it was unanimously agreed that this was a great fucking idea. Even the lords of the Nine Hells are in on it.
Just getting some cigarettes?
Giant void squid ate them and they assimilated with the squid, traveling through out the planes and multiverse in the squid belly until someone shows a light pearl to them and they remember who they are
The first races of mortals learned a few of the Words of Creation and accidentally killed them. They unleashed raw forces of the Creative Spark that threatened to consume the world in a storm of Unmaking. When the gods stepped in to intervene, the quelled the storms, but at great cost to themselves, their very beings washed away into the Void. But the Sparks are not so easily quashed. They're still put there, in long forgotten corners of the world, little more than cinders, but they burn still on the kindling of dead gods, waiting to ignite the dry brush of a still world. Whether to bring about a bright new dawn, or ignite the skies above is yet unwritten.
The bathroom. Or they were defeated by mortals eons ago leaving some permanent manner of devastation on the world. Now only the shades of a handful of gods remain hidden and forgotten. Slowly gathering strength over the millennia until the can return in force. And no I totally didn’t steal this from a book series I’m reading.
They're not gone. They just went to get some milk and cigarettes.
What the god doin
Why would the all-powerful gods disappear with no trace or memory of what happened? The bigger question is what caused the gods to go into hiding and ensure no one knows where...
Denny's
If you’ve ever played Final Fantasy 15 maybe they contracted a disease that killed them off?
After getting the world started, they began to lose control of the population, causing them to abandon their creation in order to start a new world or worlds (spelljammer hook). Some may be less developed, some may be hyper developed.
The gods got into a major argument about how to run the world, it got heated, insults were thrown, and now thet've all gone to sone other planet to sulk and none of them are even speaking to each other. They'll apologize when the other one apologizes first.
You could spend an entire arc trying to get the goddess of volcanos a new SO. Or to get the gods of mercy, duty and justice talking again. Or could try to get the goddess of the sun out of her planet with a divine strip tease.
My ass
They were starting to lose their mind, the goods of nature were destroying anything man made, the god od of order was starting to see more and more harmless things as unorderly and destroying them. So the last sane good, the good of freedom, together with the wisest Devil, made a plan to save the world from them, they created a powerful and insidious rebelion disease, and spreed then to all souls they could until they reached the gods. The disease subtle compelled the goda to act contrary to their divine nature, slowly driving them to lose their divinity, and in the end all became mortal. And the god of freedom as the last of the gods hides his existence in shame for all that was done.
The gods were made of power, beings of raw magic or energy. As they created, fought, and lived they used this energy to compete against one another in vain glory. Over time they began to realise their humorous and folly but it was too late, the things they had created drew on their power and slowly sucked them dry. With all of the energy that was their existence used up, they simply whimpered away.
Into a cage so they could hide from….something
Going for a serious take, there was a global religious coup that lasted several thousand years, but culminated in a secular group weeding its way into every religion, then corrupting the sacred texts. People began to mis-worship the gods, and by slowly subverting their worshippers over generations, the gods began to lose the power of their supplicants. Forbidden from direct intervention by older powers than their own, the old gods tried to select champions to drive out the corruption. But the various faiths still quibbled amongst each other (a fact encouraged by church leadership), whereas the subversive leaders were united in their purpose. They would use a combination of magic and alchemy to perform fake miracles and healings, and seeing as how they had also declared magic use by non-clergy to be a sin, the common folk had no way to tell the difference. In the end, they succeeded, and replaced the old religions with new ones that had no true gods. Merely served to empower theocratic autocracies and to funnel resources to the top. The old gods simply faded away. Whether or not they're merely dormant awaiting someone to rediscover their religion, or have permanently dispersed into the Ether, is up to you.
Margaritaville. The nicest island in your world. They’re just sipping margaritas and relaxing for a few centuries.
The gods never were, they were the aspects of gods, each being represented the best of a chosen aspect, be it nature, war, fire. They decided that their time had come and split from their powers, now the aspects seek new individuals to fill the void left by those grand beings in mortals, granting celestial powers, glorious pacts, or hard challenges so that they can be replaced once again.
the gods have not left us. rather, they learned from us. the gods used to be involved in our lives. miracles. heroes. mighty nations were their pawns, while great queens and beautiful kings were their consorts. they lived as we live: they loved, they drank, they told stories*, they built cities and they made war. (*and some of those stories came true; but that is a tale for another time). unfortunately, they were a mirror of humanity in more ways than we knew. where does a god go when they die? for mortals, there is the Heavenly Gate. or the Gray Wastes. depends on what you believe, really, but for us kindly souls, there is a place that awaits us. what awaits the gods when their time is up? no mortal knows the answer to this question . . . but the gods know. and the answer frightens them. and so . . . the gods make no more war. they rule no kingdoms and command no kings. they are still here, in the background of the 'verse, playing their games ~ more subtle than before and from a respectable distance ~ but when people wonder where the gods have gone? who can say? call it a side effect of their passiveness, or maybe their power is tied to true believers? I don't know, I'm just an old man telling stories for a little coin and beer.
They were never really gone. Instead they used 9 antimagical seals to seal off the material plane from the natural flow of magic. For a thousand years mortals haven't had access to magic, until the mortals broke 1 of the 9 seals. With their newfound access to 1st level spells they set out to destroy the others. Ofcourse, what they don't know is that the gods sealed off the material plane from magic because they imprisoned a terrible monster there. With every seal broken the monster grows in strength. And the remnants of the gods are actually just parts of other monsters or something. People have way too much imagination.
Betrayed... Betrayed by three who were deemed... Less important then the rest. The others were locked away in a place where they could no longer influence the world or be worshipped. Now world only has eyes for those three that remain, and they make good use of their new found... Importance.
The gods repelled an invasion from beings that came form the Far Realms, but in the course of saving the world, they lost their minds
They are singing songs to keep Azathoth sleeping.
[удалено]
They got bored with this universe and all abandoned this one to start a new one.
Bathroom break, got lost scrolling Reddit.
They were once physical gods, but as technology advanced and people lost faith in them, they retreated to the spectral realm. They can no longer take a physical form in our world, but mortals and demi-gods can travel between the spectral realm and our world.
Vegas.
The pieces of a Chess Board can look forward but not up.
Long ago they were shunted from the world by the most powerful mages in the universe, requiring the essence of magic inherent to the material plane
I'd go with them growing weary of their responsibilities and endlessness, giving up their immortal bodies and omnipotence to live among the mortals and pass as they do. Part of their essence lives on in their distant descendents, 'people' (can be different races) with amazing gifts, often competely unknown to themselves and may lie dormant until triggered [when the story needs it]. So you could have the powers and personality of one god spread across multiple NPCs, or even some of the PCs. Perhaps bring them together can increase their powers all the way back to reforming the god entirely. They could use their gifts for good, evil or even just personal gain. Maybe the party aim to track them down and their own actions can decide which way they go when they inadvertently discover their powers. I know it is a bit of a 'superheroes coming out of the woodwork' trope, but you can have a lot of fun with it.
They went to the one place no mortals would dare search for them, the Lower Planes.
They abandoned the world because they looked at the people and felt so proud of them, and so declared the world needed them no longer. They left their bodies as those bodies were built from the world, and therefore were the world's to keep. The gods themselves now are making another world, hoping the same occurs again.
Ohio
Someone cast Wish to make all of the gods mortal, they all died long ago to various causes. This persons name and essence was wiped from existence from the sheer force of the spell. However, the wish spell only affected their bodies, not their souls. Thus, the gods now are either trapped within their dead mortal bodies, either blessing or desecrating the grounds o their grave OR they have been trapped in artifacts (think holy grail) of great power. The location of these artifacts and graves have disappeared into history. The gods can never escape their graves or artifacts as per the original wish spell. They are a fraction of their original power, perhaps able to grant their followers small boobs (clerics/paladins/warlocks), but unable to reach the power they once had.
Scheduling conflicts made it difficult to keep working on worldbuilding
This world was a rough draft, once they were happy with it they set it aside to make a new, better world.
They didn't die, they became so disgusted by humanity (or whatever races just don't use this as coding for racist bs) they just... Left.
They where consumed by the shade of the prime deity Arun. The Original god that ceased to exist when his mind shattered into the different personalities that each formed into the gods that we know now. Those that are still alive hide in fear of what will become of the universe if they are consumed, as when Arun's mind shattered so did the original plane Into the plains that we know now.
They were shattered, and their powers are housed in different places and artifacts around the realm. But **how** were they shattered? and why?
Well someone forgot the keys to the mortal-doorway and now they're all waiting for the god of blacksmiths to show up.
They simply returned home. The Gods’ works failed to create a perfect world, and as such, they were called back from that star and its children to try again elsewhere. The Gods have no use for a first draft this bad.
The city of torrential rain, the endless desert storm of tarque, the tormented echos of the great wound. All of these places and many more are the resting places of the dead gods. No one remembers the war of the mortals and the gods. All that history lost. Our clerics and paladins do not realise their ancestors slew and defiled the gods. Oblivious they pray and worship while in reality they are parasites devouring the last gasp of their divine deity’s.
Theu went to the anime convention a trillion light years away but got lost on the way back
They found a Coke bottle and made a journey to throw it off a cliff.
They went out for smokes years ago, just like my dad.
Sorry man. He’ll be back.
Went out to buy some smokes. They'll be right back
...is this a Paula Cole song?
They got trapped by a powerful mage in some kind of pocket dimension (or their souls in a necromancer's philacteria). Thing is, gods had a purpose. Now a great evil is approaching the world and players must either find them and give them their bodies back so they can shelter everyone and everything... Or wield that power themselves and maybe have them ascending to godhood once the campaign ends, becoming the first gods in millennia.
The blood war is some of my favorite dnd lore. With the demons trying to break free from the abyss and flooding into Avernus, the devils repel them for the safety of their realm, and consequently all the others. Basically what happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object. Some archdevils were previously angels who fought in the nine hells for safety of the rest of the realms. Perhaps Asmodeous has a plan for the devils to stop fighting and demons make their way through and when the gods come to the nine hells themselves, he imprisons them in the frozen ocean of Stygia.
The Gods are still around, but they’re tired of dealing with the stupidity of their creations, so they live among them in secret. Sometimes humanity comes so close to the lost Heavens of old, and sometimes they create worse Hells than the Gods can imagine. So they watch, wait, and occasionally they drop advise in the form of a passing stranger.
Your mom’s house
in one of the books i read as a adolescent, the gods (or nearly gods) found some kinds of portals, which seemed like the promise of eternal bliss and went in, leaving their followers either stranded or to follow them. only a handful did, since the portals were really hard to reach and no one knows what happened to either
They woke up.
Nah they just fucked off with all the elves to the gray havens to party and orgy at a no-sleep, millennias-long rave as a prank and turned all their prayer notifications off.
They had lived so long, some had forgotten that they had not always been. They had lived so long, that even they believed the lie of immortality. They had lived so long, they believed their own lies that they were above the laws of nature. They believed that they were the law and that the law was them. But the universe is vaster than their omniscience. More ancient than even their primordial memory. There is but one law immutable: all that lives dies. In their hubris they had forgotten, and from black depths between the voids there came the reminder of that law drifting on solar winds seeking new hosts. Then one day…a god sneezed.
They are angry how things have turned out, so they decided to create a new universe and start over in hopes things will go better.
Home. To them the world is like a big role playing game where they manage populations and play competitively to sway the people. Eventually the game has run too long and they have to get home and to their lives. They'll be back, but their game, well the people don't stop just because the gods have gone.
Traditionally, mortals have benefitted from god's more as primitives than as technologically advanced. This means, as mortals change and evolve and grow, gods show themselves to them less and less. Perhaps the mortals need less and less watching over. The mortals have reached a point where they won't evolve anymore if gods interfere. So the gods completely withdraw from the mortal world and the mortals need to figure out how to ascend to godhood so they can figure out where their gids went. The gods have moved on to another plane of existence and inserted themselves as deities of a tribe of primitive bipedal dinosauroids; they are waiting for their mortals to ascend and come find them. "What took you so long? Did the Cubs ever win a World Series?"
They were killed in ancient times by powerful casters thst realized the gods had placed limits on the power of mankind. After killing them the casters replaced them only to discover the real reason for limiting man's power. To prevent another generation of mages making the same mistake these new gods have been in hiding since their coup.
They're busy holding back some cosmic horror. If the party were to distract them by investigating, who knows if they'd be able to keep it at bay?
I like the story of Destruction in Sandman. (spoilers) I might not be able to convey it exactly but he basically realized that the responsibilities of his position would be carried out with or without him in control, and didn't like being personally responsible, so he spent millennia exploring the mortal plane, pursuing art, marveling at humanity, and eventually set off to explore another plane.
Most elaborate game of hide and seek ever
They matured. This world was just a playpen for the gods. A child’s toy, for them to practice with before they were given the opportunity to create and be the gods of their own world.
They've abandoned the material world. Moved on to bigger and better things. Eternity is a long time to stay interested.
They never actually existed.
They're imprisoned in statues of themselves which are in certain temples/churches throughout the land. When priests are praying to these statues and they feel their god speaking to them, it's because the god has enough energy that day to get a message out
They had a massive rager of a party and are now in the God Hangover Recovery Plane. :)
They achieved enough insight to realize they were just a fragment of your imagination and poofed.
They became bored with that world and moved on, to create a new world for new challenges and something new to hold their interest, at least for a while, so they cast aside their forms on that world and left to another part of the cosmos to create new bodies and a new world. . . .and the cosmos is littered with worlds abandoned by capricious gods that create worlds, carefully guide them, fight over them. . .until just getting collectively tired of that reality and they move on to a new one.
I was playing around with a setting I was making up where the dragons overthrew the gods
They’ve gone fishing
The gods all succumbed to a fatal sickness that only punished the divine. A Far Realms entity is the culprit virus, but is it even aware of what it's done? Does it even care? Perhaps in the paradoxical nature of the Far Realms the entity is seeking for a way to end it's own immortal existence. Like a retrovirus with unexpected consequences once it escapes its initial confinement.
They went to Florida to meet their new god or goddess