At our last game night, we played Follow by Ben Robbins using “the Gods” quest. We explored how deities from an up and coming pantheon tried to convince the mortals to worship them. This proved rather difficult as the mortals resented the gods (quite justifiably) and the mortals could not see the gods.
The main gods we encountered were the crafter god of poison, the powerful god of destruction, the goddess of temptation, the god of beauty and the god of revelry.
At first the gods tried to create a new people that would worship them. This new people was created by the god of poison who combined the bones of human remains with body parts of living people (stolen by Philip the Wrongdoer, a half-mortal from the Underworld hired for this particularly dirty deed) and vegetation. This effort backfired, as this new creation was not quite human, it ended up being called the ‘plant people’ who became a scourge in the mortal world as they were full of thorns and poison. If the mortals resented the gods in the beginning, they resented them even more now for bringing this curse into the world.
The gods then tried to rectify this issue by going on an epic war campaign with the goal of eradicating the plant people from the mortal world. Unfortunately, this campaign was led by the god of revelry and the god of beauty who spent more time worrying about the epic songs to be written to commemorate this event than on actually ensuring that Baden, the half-mortal knight tasked with the destruction of the plant people, had the right tools and support to destroy the plant people. The plan failed, bringing more destruction to the mortal realm without eradicating the plague.
Lastly, in a last-ditch effort, the gods wanted to convince the mortals to raise temples to the gods. As the gods could not contact the mortals directly, they used Philip the Wrongdoer and Baden as prophets… so the humans ended up building temples to Philip and Baden of course, with minor shrines to the gods. Interestingly enough, we also learned that Philip and Baden were related, as Baden was the offspring of the goddess of temptation, who had met Philip in the Underworld during the creation of the plant people. The gods ended up being acknowledged by the mortals… but upstaged by their half-mortal underlings.
Story Games Club 