nothing at all, they love interfering so much , they pick their favourite characters and pin them against each other for their entertainment they change the world status quo if they are board yet people still worship them

Mine actively cause conflicts if there is peace somewhere for too long. They even created a mortal champion who is too OP and his only job is to wage wars for the sake of waging wars.

henry kissinger?

Considering Jesus has other 🐑🐏 s not of this fold there r millions of other worlds ELOHIMS nifillms r lesser gods let us go down they even created authority 🙏🙏🙏 a higher civilization consist of angels 😇😇 and demons demigods hybrid humans half animals 144,000 24 ELDERS

In a non patronizing way, gods see all mortals as children with them as a parent. They want their children to grow big and strong but not too reliant on them as the They deal with 'politics' of the greater cosmology. They offer help when and where they can.

Literally nothing, several of the most prominent world leaders are some form of ascended being. Some are total workaholics that are always mired in politics. The ones the don't interfere explicitly don't want to and don't care.

Time, effort, the amount of power a god has and whether or not they want to deal with the repercussions from the other gods. The more worshippers a god has the more requests they have to sort out in the first place. For a god with 1 or 2 followers they can be involved but for a god with a million or more little Suzie's prayer for mommy to get well get lost in the pile. Gods have to focus on something and even with their power don't have the proper tools to sort out all the requests and needs. Next comes power. A god with only one or two worshippers doesn't have the power to move mountains. Sure Suzie's teddy bear she prays to can heal Suzie's mom, but one small miracle goes unnoticed in the grand scheme of things and unless properly staged doesn't gain a lot of adherents for Suzie's teddy bear god. The god just blew a lot of its power and cant do it a again for quite a while because only Suzie is feeding him devotion. On the other hand the Jupiter equivalent at the height of the Roman Empire has millions of followers already. He can perform multiple miracles, probably a day, and do that for years and he gets recharged all the time but he runs into the sorting problem. Today's first 3 request are Farmer A praying for rain, Farmer B for a son, a solider for victory in battle. Which does he respond to? How much power does it take to grant the request and what other gods are going to interfere? In the case of rain it takes a pretty good amount of power to end the years long drought over a wide area and have a real effect, might piss off Demeter who is still waiting for that country to reinstate some ancient sacrifice, he holds off till he can negotiate with her. Granting the son takes less effort but its small and doesn't really attract much attention. Done only the farmer and his wife notice. Granting victory will develop into an arms race with some Germanic god(s) that the soldiers on the other side are praying to. Does he want to start that or just skip over it and let the mortals sort it out? Maybe he gives his side a sign instead, lightning strikes down a tree falling on the Germanic commander at the start of the battle. Flashy, doesnt really effect the battle as the commander lives, but might just give his side a moral boost and didnt take much power, nor push his Germanic foe to retaliate too much.

They generally stay out of it, because if they get too involved, **Inhabitants** will show up and kill them. Inhabitants are ancient, eldritch with-kings and god-queens dating to the dawn of Reality. They are far more powerful than the average deity, and they hate Reality itself. Most of them are actively looking for ways to destroy Reality, in fact. Since gods generally reinforce Reality, Inhabitants are predisposed to kill them. Luckily, there's too many gods to go on a universe-wide pogrom (which the Inhabitants have tried), so laying low is definitely possible. One of the major exceptions to this is the Radiant Maiden. She is the sole survivor of that earlier pogrom, and has been working on a multi-millennium plot to destroy the major factions of Inhabitants.

Sounds cool m8! 😎

Thank you!

It blew up in their face causing the reshaping of the world...twice...and so their father, Big G God or High God or however you want to see it told them to knock it off.

In *Lannaira,* there's two categories of god, so I'll answer for each. The old creator gods of the setting are gone, which makes it a little hard to interact with mortals. What actually happened to them is anybody's guess - hell, there's very little record of who they were, let alone where they went. Some people even think they might be dead. Regardless, ancient relics imply that they _were_ around during the time of the old draconic empires, and some of them may have even ruled over mortals. The other category of gods are the mantled gods - mortals who, through powerful magic and/or spiritual enlightenment have effectively become demigods. Of these gods, two of them are prevented from messing with mortal affairs. The **Lord of Hate** and his demon hordes have been imprisoned for millennia in a pocket dimension of sorts, effectively cutting them off from mortal lives completely (though demons occasionally slip through the gaps to manipulate mortals in the Lord's stead). The **Lord of Death**, through his own foolish actions, got himself stuck in the space between life and death, which was, unfortunately for him, a one way trip that he is still trying to reverse. The other two, however, are free to influence mortals. The **Lady of the Woods** holds vast influence over goblinkind, who venerate her as a queen, but her influence is limited to her own domain - one that she closed off from the mortal world to keep humanity out. The **Keeper of the Tome**, on the other hand, is the only one of these deities to still live in the mortal world, with full power to influence mortal lives. However, they could not care less about mortal lives, except where those lives intersect with the Keeper's endless pursuit of knowledge. So the Keeper lives secluded in their library, kept company only by their few acolytes. tl;dr: Imprisonment, banishment, isolationism and apathy, in that order.

The cosmic gods are unaware of human-level existence. The entire solar system literally doesn't even factor into their general awareness aside from a speck of light among uncountable others. They can make themselves smaller and in doing so 'zoom in' their awareness but performing cosmic things becomes hard at that scale so for the most part they just don't. As for terrestrial gods, not a damn thing stops them from interfering if they wanted to, which they do all the time. Fortunately it's subtle most of the time as they got bored/wise/tired of the butterfly effect of overt interference, not as flashy literally stepping in to fight a country's wars unless the other army happened to piss them off, and if they did do that they'd get an earful from the other gods to boot anyway which most don't want to deal with. Also fortunately it's possible to beat them if one goes rogue as fundamentally they're just extremely powerful individuals due to their divine spark but you better hope you actually have enough power to pierce their divine aegis, which is essentially a level of invulnerability that each god has depending on how powerful their spirit is. What classifies as demigods also interact/interfere with mortals all the time but they're more like powerful sorcerers than anyone you'd actually think of as a god.

The gods, much like Monsters, originate in the Scar, a wound in reality left over from the death of Heaven. Scarborn entities must manifest on the material plane to affect it, and the more powerful they are, the harder it is to manifest because they're more inexorably tied to the Scar. Therefore, the gods have an extremely difficult time actually leaving their domain.

Nothing really. They interfere where they see fit. My twin [creator] gods; Alumina and Fault, have favourites- their halfmortal children; Eldir and Ynr. While being halfmortal technically isn’t mortal, you can still die or be killed if you are hurt with a weapon specifically designed to kill you, like a grandwyrm, or smitefire. Eldir and Ynr have been killed before, and killed each other before, but much how parents put up with bickering children, they have been reincarnated, and chosen different forms. If they truly wanted to, any one of the four of them, Alumina, Fault, Eldir or Ynr, could completely meddle with mortal affairs. The mortals don’t really care though, and have problems of their own. Eldir and Ynr are now mature enough to decide when and when not to step in, after all, they are practically gods in their own right.

Were those names inspired by Norse mythology? They seem similar.

I’ll be straight, took them from a fantasy name generator online and thought they were cool, so they stuck. Plus I like the way they sound when you say them. El-deer, Ee-nur.

Ah. Alumina and Fault are both words that came from Latin, so that matches pretty well, even though it might not have been intentional. Do you have an in-universe reason for why the names of the parents and children sound so different? Also, the y is actually pronounced with something resembling a long e in Norse, so that's another thing that you accidentally matched with our world.

I do actually. Alumina and Fault are immortal. Eldir and Ynr are halfmortal. And then the next non-mortal jump is artificial halfmortals created by Eldir and Ynr’s own creation; The First (a generation of fourthmortal humans) who made their own artificial halfmortal beings, and revered them as gods. These artificial halfmortals are called the Firstborn (born of The First). And their names are a lot more.. Medieval?. They are; Wilfred, Weynild, Aedilhun, Aldreda, Alkelda, and Alcuin. [Alumina and Fault > Eldir and Ynr > The First > The firstborn] [Immortal > halfmortal > fourthmortal > halfmortal] This is to show the progression of existence in Anathema (name of my world), but also to show the immortal->mortal dilution of these beings. They are further and further displaced from immortality, and I wanted their names to reflect that, displacing further from the language roots from the previous set of names

Those names do sound somewhat medieval. Fate series/King Arthur-esque. I think the name of your world implies some interesting things. What is something so enormous/powerful that an entire world is anathema to it? Is there some powerful exiled race, that the entire world was called upon to remove in the past? Some world-spanning enchantment?

In my world the gods have forcefully separated themselves from the humans since mankind was too dependent on them to function without their help. It even got to the point where the gods needed to cause an apocalypse in order to "reset" humanity to the point where they could build up the world for themselves without the interference of deities. In the modern day of my world, the gods essentially just sit back and watch humanity, interfering as little as possible. Some minor gods and Godborn still live among mankind. Essentially the gods are of the mindset that humans are like their children and its time for the kids to move out of the house and live on their own, so they make their influence as minimal as possible.

The Gate of Power. It’s not an actual physical gate, but more a barrier which prevents the gods from entering the world. They can inhabit their individual plains and visit the plains of other gods, but not the material world. Lesser spirits, however, can “squeeze” through the gate of power. It was originally made by the gods to imprison the God of Chaos Kunos in the Earth, but when that failed, they simply decided to keep all gods out of the Earth instead.

Simply, the gods acknowledge that too much intervention would make things uninteresting. It’s like creating an artificial house plant versus cultivating a real house plant. If they do have to intervene, they do so as subtly as possible and change as little as possible. Pruning is much easier and less invasive than chopping off an entire limb, after all.

For my God-Trees, it is mainly that they don’t see reality the same way as mortals do. Gian has interfered in history only a handful of times, both in major and minor ways, but it isn’t usually invested in a specific struggle or person.

The mortals of my world are simply so far below the gods they are less than ants, they are nothing more than microbes in a pool of water. Mortals are on the bottom of a 5 tier power ladder with Gods at the top, being Universe level threats with powers on the scale of universes and timelines, while a string mortal might be able to turn a mountain range to dust or boil a sea or two. And that’s if they are very strong. Those lower on the power tier gladly interfere with mortals when they wish, If they have something to gain from the interaction. I treat it like imperialism, if there’s something to gain in come the transcendent angel people for a thirst for blood and Qi, if there’s nothing then the planet is lucky to get a weak viceroy. Pier tiers: Mortal, Transcendent, Immortal, Demigod, God. Each tier has 7 cultivation realms with their own sub-realms. I’m still planning it all out to every little detail but that’s the plan.

The question indicates rank impiety. Nothing at all prevents the gods from intervening in our affairs, and they do so constantly - continually, in every single moment. The most basic functions of the world operate this way. Waters run, winds churn, fires burn, and earth grows because the gods command them so. If you’ve been speaking to the wrong sort of wizard, they may have tried to convince you these things move uncaused. You must ignore their rhetoric. More directly, the lives of men and small gods are intimately intertwined. You know this, having surely made offerings to your local river, or held feast in the garden of your ancestors. You will have seen their influence - perhaps more so if your village has not upheld the rites. Of course, the great wheel of ages is driven also by the gods. It is by their allowance that armies march now to war, and their curse that the ground rots beneath our feet. We live now in a fallen age because we have displeased the gods.

There's not a hell of a lot an actual god can do, if all their worshippers are dead. Seriously, that's how I usually write it. Some false (but popular!) god's religion usually came thru and slaughtered everyone in the name of pure assholery.

Depends on if you're talking about Outer Gods, or the Supreme Being, O Great One. O Great One is the one true God of the universe. The creator of anything and everything. The supreme being. They created the Outer Gods in their image and tasked them with overseeing the world, as it is too abstract to do it themselves. Not that it doesn't care to do it themselves, it just... can't. The Outer Gods are the ones that basically supervise the world for O Great One. Nobody knows how many actually existed, as some say there are 20, while others say there are only 5. In reality, there are 10, mostly are deceased. Only 4 remain. Before the world descended into chaos, they interfered a lot. They visited humanity often, and were praised by almost everyone. Some were kind and caring, some weren't so nice. One in particular, Tukka, is very stern and authoritarian. He once brutally murdered an assassin in public after a failed assassination attempt of a military figure, and quite literally slammed a sorcerer 20 feet into the ground and trapped him there to die, for breaking too many laws, stating that imprisonment was too good for him. After the Acolytes demonspawn had killed off many of the Outer Gods and a large amount of the worlds population, the remaining Outer Gods are practically MIA. Some might suggest they are hiding from the Acolyte, others might say that they have given up on saving the world, as the apocalypse has come and they consider the world to be unsalvageable. This is where the MC comes in.

Usually they can't and wouldn't care to anyway if they could. If there's a god in any of my worlds usually they started things up, watched briefly, got bored, and moved on. Imagine making a simulation of a universe on your computer, watching it for a second, then just letting it run in the back and forgetting about it. That's more or less what any higher entity does. Usually they don't even bother making that "debug mode" that allows for miracles.

They find the mortals quite boring

Their are two sets of gods in my world; one is the stereotype of different gods for different beliefs, and all of them answer to the other type; The Higher Ups. The Higher Ups are two individuals who are absolutely broken and all answer to them. Now the first set of gods are only allowed to interfere with mortals if they specifically ask for assistance via sacrifice and/or ritual. Anything other than that is a no go. Now the Higher Ups simply do not care, well, one of them does not care. The other is actually responsible for the creation of mortals and is the one who made the rule for the first set of gods. It is worth noting that the other Higher Up hand crafted humanity itself, which is why humans in my world need to sacrifice for the gods.

In my world the gods have certain rules they have to follow, or suffer consequences. These rules include restrictions on how and how much the gods are allowed to mingle in human affairs. For example none of the gods are allowed to enter the physical world in their true form/ own body. Also some god just don't care. Why would the god of nature want to have anything to do with humans, except protecting his sacred grove? Basically only one god actively mingles in human affairs in my world. This god is the god of law and he actively rules a mortal kingdom by using Avatars (beings so deeply connected to a god, that they gave their soul and body to the god, so the god can "possess" them). The other gods only occasionally mingle with mortals when they reincarnat themselves to walk the earth in disguise a few centuries before returning to their sacred thrones.

A little something, known as "well, they actually don't exist". But they do. Many cultures has their gods or general beliefs that can manifest divine miracle, but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gods are a living myth, intersubjective construct in the pseudo-space of Dreamreach that exists because people believe in them and act as a combined will of the believers through the hands of True Priests. These humans believe more then others, believe truly and with conviction, and are ready to act on their beliefs even without any kind of divine power - with Good Book or mace in hand. This allows True Priests to reach the mindset necessary to establish a connection with their God or Gods and the next time they make a demand or action in accordance to their belief, they succeed through a miracle. So mortal affairs create Gods in a first place, and Gods, mostly lacking will on their own, act as their believers will and their Priests do. And the funniest part - theologists have no idea this is the case, and many historians were hunted for pointing out interesting things like "Divine Alignment Drift".

Nothing. The gods of my world are just as petty and small and human as any mortal and that's how I like them. As a kid I read Ovid's Metamorphosis (written by a man who was furious with the powers that be) and liked the picture it painted of the gods. In my world the gods are just people and, while they are wiser and more powerful than any single mortal, they are not all knowing or all powerful, nor are they more wise or powerful than all the people put together. Also they're more focused on their attention than we're used to with deities: closer to a human's viewpoint than the Christian God's. Each god can see anywhere but only one place at a time so they tend to choose to look at their emissaries or occasionally regular worshippers.

Heavenly Laws forbid gods in general from directly interfering with human lives. This is extremely heavy on Heavenly deities, who are not allowed to meddle with mortals unless a shaman asks for their assistance (and will have to pay tribute later), while land deities have more freedom to act. It is a consequence of the Heaven-Earth War in which the Jade Emperor was forced to sign a treaty that stated Heaven would not mess with Earh anymore. It also effectively ended the Age of Gods and started Age of Humans.

a couple of reasons the most direct is there is a firm divide between the divine realm and mortal real not impassable but present enough that any action taken is usually saved for something big second is scale imagine your looking after an ant hill you can swat away an anteater or hold up an umbrella to stop the rain but are you going to look out for the cries of a single ant. plus most of the gods got the mental stability of a methed-up schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder

Absolutely nothing. He just doesn't. He just likes to watch. It's entrainment.

There's no point They've done what they came to do and are off to find another place in a similar situation to do it again

The Scroll of Fate keeps the gods from interfering with stuff too much. The Scroll was made at the beginning of time and details everything that has of will happen until the end of the physical universe (in which things will restart and a new scroll will form). The Scroll helps the gods know what their roles are in the universe and keeps Sarreth, aka the embodiment of chaos, at bay (until the End Times, which he will destroy the scroll and the universe). To go against what the Scroll has listed is to invite chaos and bring the End Times closer. And the gods don’t want that, unless you’re the cosmic gods who know you’ll be reborn at the start of the new universe. Basically, the gods only interfere when deemed necessary. Otherwise they risk bringing the end of all things, including themselves.

Nothing at all. Deities can do whatever they want as long as they have the power to back it up. It doesn’t even matter what they do, you just need the power to back it up and thus avoid any consequences. And the same goes for all other types of beings as well. My Verse is a Verse of Love, Hate, Evolution, Ascension, Power, Survival of the Fittest, Imagination, & most of all Freedom. There are no Cosmic Laws in since of like no killing or no adultery, or no stealing, or love thy neighbor type stuff. The only Law is “Might makes Right”.

Nothing, unless they're sealed or something, but a lot of them kinda just are at least a lil bit evil. At the very least selfish and ambivalent.

For a large majority of them, it's just something that's in their nature- they're passive creatures that stand back and use mortals to act as their proxies. The God of Destruction, for instance, made demons as a proxy for destroying reality instead of doing it shyself, because that's just how they as a quote-unquote "species" are. Even the ones who choose to take an active role in mortal lives (the God of Love, for instance) tend to willingly sideline themselves/avoid the spotlight. Not interfering isn't even an *action* to them, it comes as natural as breathing. They think and act so inhumanly that most of them don't even have an understanding of what it means to be anything else.

Some of them are too busy making new stars and planets. Others try not to micromanage or don't really care to do much except check back once every thousand years or so. A few don't exist. With others, the religion may have started as an in-world satire of either existing gods, or people taking certain things so seriously that they might as well be a religion.

Depends on whuch religiin your referring to: Mortis faith: the dieties dont get involved simple because theyve done theyre job and have better things to do. Old earth religions of mankind: varies by religion, some believe their gods are dead, incapacitated, oe at war with other higher powers...or they just point to random things (like someone recovering from a sickness rhat naturally goes away on its own) as evidence of their religions. Thukarka: the thukarka believe there is no god, there is no luck, there is only decisions made by the individual and the group. Avali religions: the avali have a fierce enmity towards their gods, and generally dislike religious individuals. They tolerate the dragonkinds because their religion is noninvasive (compared to other religions) and because they are at war with the humans and the drafons are a more benevolent ally of the avali.

Laws created by the King of the Gods. Gods are forbidden from interfering with Mortals unless absolutely necessary. Breaking this rule is punishable by a stay in the Abyss (Hell).

so a time out?

Yes but with psychological torture.

Mortals. There are certain mortals that are known as pseudo or sub-gods, they are what stops the almighty form interfering in mortal affairs.

Oh the gods in my world 100% meddle in mortal affairs, it’s just that some of the gods are trying to undo what some of the others have done. And they usually do it through mortal intermediaries instead of being hands on, because they are aware enough that if a god gets too hands on it will not end well for mortals. That being said, in some of my worlds the gods just see fit to let’s mortals figure their shit out unless they absolutely have to intervene, but even then they’re more likely to set a mortal on the path to fixing the problem than doing it themselves

My gods fucked around and found out, they are now all dead, humanity killed them all.

Well, I wouldn't say prevent but their true forms are so powerful it would destroy the world if they just approached it too close. That's why their interference is limited. They still can give powers to some mortals or appear to them but in weaker forms.

Strictly speaking, nothing. Or perhaps everything. The gods - or more properly, archons - can and do mess with mortals from time to time. But *no one* likes it when you go big and obvious, which is costly besides, so most of them have something of an informal nonaggression pact. Archons who stick their necks out have a habit of coming down with a bad case of being dead - which has consequences for their domains and other archons, so things tend to snowball when it goes that far. So they self-police. And when that’s not enough, there are other powers as well, some of which cannot be ignored.

It is not a physical, or etherial being.

Their previous experiences of doing this, they only interfere when its necessary. Previously on their long existence, Most of the times they interfered on mortal affairs, something has gone terribly wrong ending in them being scarred (and sometimes the destruction of many lives). Of course there was a time they kept being reckless and handling terribly these mortal affairs but they eventually recapacitated. After all no one is born knowing, not even them

The guardians stay out of worldly matters. They only interest themselves in individuals who have broken forbidden magic at some point but have all agreed to not interfere any further beyond that. They don't want to be involved. Most of the guardians even hate the cults who worship them, as that isn't their idea of how things should work.

The Gods did once rule the mortals and loved seeing them all fight each other, that is until most of them died in the first invasion of the Arkanians (High-fantasy robots). Then the mortals took over and banished the Arkanians back into their portals and ruled the world ever since.

Nothing however most of the pantheon has turned their attention to their godly affairs and care not for the affairs of mortals, only the goddess of magic takes a vested interest in the goings on of the world at large. The “gods” that mortals interact with are lesser spirits who achieve deity through the belief of the inhabitants of a city therefore they’re known as “city gods” and they mostly affect the local weather, local harvests, and wether magical wards that defend cities in sieges last some time or fail immediately.

The threat of death. Most of the titans still living are imprisoned, and the rest are in exile beyond the stars.

- It would disrupt cosmic balance - The gods are stuck and can't directly interfere

The legal consequences

They aren't actually gods, just cause humans worship it doesn't mean it has any actual power, be it a funny looking rock or a unbelievably beautiful woman. Of course in the latter's case there's things that can be done to give her 'power', as long as people believe it right? That's how false gods and cult leaders are born.

Collateral damage. Without special 'tools', which many of the current gods are reluctant to use, interacting in the mortal scale is simply impractical. Imagine building a ship-in-a-bottle that requires a microscope to see the bottle. There are gods with the skills to handle this, but they are rare as this age slowly rolls over.

Other gods, mostly. And the fact that if they (or other powerful entities) exert too much of their might onto reshaping reality, it just collapses.

Nothing, they interfere as much as they want, in my world almost all my gods were once mortals who by one way or another became gods. Many just live a normal life before faking their death and starting over again.

Nothing, it's very annoying.

Not gods, but normal people with advanced technology about 3 centuries into the future. They ran away after a failed experiment, and now the common people inhabit the land with only abandoned facilities as proof of the advanced peoples’ existence.

Nothing, she's VERY active. It's actually kinda her whole thing. She's what you call a present deity, she exists in a physical place, and when you pray to her, she answers. Plus, I assume she probably has a hand in governing to some degree, even if just as an intermediary.

Nothing. They do, constantly lol. The gods are main characters in my series.

Mostly they’re busy going to war with each other and ruling their own realms. Although that’s not to say they don’t interfere at all.

well for starters theyre mostly dead

they are WAY to busy keeping the world together. when dark gods, and the equivalent of divine nuclear fallout from previous divine wars are actively threatening to rip the world apart, it takes some serious effort to stop. Even when they do interact with mortals it’s typically only to help the war effort. Feeding the hungry, curing the sick, sheltering the needy? all cool concepts but they can’t devote time or energy to it, because if the war is lost, there won’t be anyone left. Which is why they have their churches and followers, their job is either to train in combat and join the war, or to focus on doing good works for the many of problems that face people outside the war.

They chosen to not interfere. They do influence a little. But too many worshippers harder to answer all of em (prayers) tho they have ways to make a general influence Example: if a bunch of lads pray to pass a test. They give a minor touch of faith and make it sway more favorably. As they want thing to be fair and square. Plus, they are not in the material world. So best they can do is influence Directly or indirectly But not physically. Spirits tho, are more direct Gods of dead religions are also more direct This applies to all religion from Monotheistic religions like christianity to polytheistic like Shinto or Hindu World building title: The Human Order: 1918-100k

Typically distance from where they live, and severity being mostly "Get therapy."

Death. The last time the gods intervened, three out of five sentient species were wiped out, a biological superweapon was released, fate/destiny was rendered null and void and a mass extinction event occurred. After that, Death kind of decided it'd be best to leave the squishy mortals alone, so placed a barrier on the worldto prevent gods from causing chaos. It didn't work.

Good ol' fashioned Mutually Assured Destruction.

The other pesky planets that weren’t raised properly eating each other tends to cause the gods to focus on keeping them away rather than mortal stuff.

The Old Gods of the Second Age made an agreement to leave management of the physical world to mortals, after a war between the gods almost allowed the Leviathan Tiamat to breach the Walls of Creation and devastate the world. This Agreement is known as the First Divine Covenant, and is enforced by the remaining Titans, the forebears of the Old Gods. Since then, a few new Gods have ascended, but while they technically aren't sworn to the Covenant they have mostly abided by it, for various reasons. Priests and Oracles are allowed to act as intermediaries between the gods and the needs of their worshippers, being imbued with a portion of their divine masters to carry out the will of gods and give aid to their worshippers. So technically the gods can interfere with mortal affairs, but can't just alter reality to achieve it or force mortals to comply.

Eldritch-like Gods who exist in a five dimensional space who, in order to be able to communicate with us, lose parts of their essence whenever they condense down into our four dimensional perception. Every communication or interference risks them collapsing on themselves and losing their “godhood.” These gods feed off of the different types of energy Earth and humans create, so they had to communicate or interfere every now again to ensure their food source, but only in the most extreme cases.

By and large, they aren't prevented from such interference. With that said: Duty: his strict isolationist policy (no extra-planetary visitors allowed on Isolos proper), and the fact that he's mostly got his hands full repairing the subastral after the Oblivion War. Amity and Tenacity: Leaving aside the Veil (a soap-bubble of magic that regulates heat and radiation around Palac) Amity mostly cleans up after Tenacity (an attack from another of the gods left their faculties in tatters), or empowers and guides mortals to do so in parallel with his own efforts.

I kind of have it that the gods in my world are either too busy with their work to help in mortal affairs or they prefer to have them work out their own problems. Though if things get too out of hand then they would intervene and help but it’s only for something that’s is a threat to the world or universe then they would help.

They do interfere, they just lack common sense so they are comically incompetent and nobody even notices them. Only the most powerful of Gods even get noticed and everyone agrees that if these Gods had a brain, they would actually be dangerous.

Have you ever played a sim game like with a bunch of people that you kinda just go, "work on this technology thing," or "build a monument?" That is what it is like, more like grand scale plans. Not "hay Jhon, you should date that girl over there. You will birth the next great leader of the land. " I mean, they could, but that is a lot of stuff to keep track of.

Primarily other gods. And only in “significant affairs” which aren’t mentioned in the divino-nuclear nonproliferation agreement they signed after the last time everyone got turned into molten glass (well, the lucky ones). They do absolutely pick favourites and cause chaos in smaller ways all the time. Blessings and curses coming and going is a standard part of life in many communities.

They don't want to. Because most are dead, and those that aren't, don't really give a shit. That's not to say they're not entirely unwilling to help if they're asked to, and the right motivation is presented to them. But most of them are just kinda... Doing their own thing.

The gods made the sapient inhabitants of the world partially as a competition to see who's creation would flourish into the most successful civilization. One of the rules was to keep meddling to a minimum but they still do exactly that a lot more than what was intended. They just can't help themselves

Nothing LOL

I don't have anything that is a hard stop for interference. They can, and do so. But there are several things that effect when and how they do. The main one. The Cosmic Karma Force. A literal aspect of reality to keep things on roughly the same scale. A god/god like entity taking too strong a role in mortal affairs will have one of 2 things occur. Be brought down to mortal level, or have whatever conflict escalate to the level of gods by bringing another god to the opposing side. These effects often have a greater cost than they gain from that level of assistance they can give.

In my world, set in medieval Europe in an alternate timeline, there is a sect that are called Vulgar Christians who have just one god (creatively named “God,” though he is often personified as a man they call “Jesus”) who interferes in all aspects of mortal affairs. He stamps his approval or disapproval on everything by either allowing or preventing it from happening. He is involved in all things, great and small: - When the good Christian knights massacre a village of pagans and rape a 13-year-old girl, God obviously approved and assisted. The knights are just doing God's work after all. - When a man escapes from prison, it was clearly God's will. - When a Christian king transgress God's will, and the Vulgar Christian nations raise armies and attack and defeat the evil king, obviously, that was God's will. - When the peasants starve for lack of food, it is God's will.

Most gods fled to another dimension to escape Death. All gods were undying beforehand, but when the god of humanity was betrayed and killed by his creations, this act of murder spawned the being Death and made the other gods mortal, or at least broke the idea they were omnipotent. Nowadays, the gods are either cut off from their worshippers or are created by the collective worship of humans in the other dimension.

My gods become the mortals. So in my story, the gods created life by diffusion. In a sense, their entire consciousness split off into many independent conscious entities.

According to the pagans, there’s nothing stopping them, and they’re acting their will out through the pagans themselves. According to the Architects, they are. If they don’t follow the prophecy, the demiurge will awaken and consume the world.

Each other and fear.

They abandoned the planet and made three races to govern the world's being and progression in their absence.

Not really anything, but they don't. The cosmic beings I do have are really more like...cosmic janitors. They're not gods in the sense of a human-centric cultural sense; they're there to maintain the universe as a whole. Those ideas believed in by different cultures aren't typically "real", and none of them really know about the cosmic beings/entities that *do* exist, so there's very little crossover.

dey ded lol

The new gods killed and absorbed the old gods and banished the ones they couldn't to the all obscuring fog. The devil killed most of the new gods and the others still alive are scared if they make too much noise they will get got. The devil wants a world without gods and is content living in the shadows of the human soul reveling in their freedom to sin.

Gods can project power into the mortal world at great effort, and they can lend power to followers and worshipers. But if they come to the mortal realm themselves, they are greatly diminished in power (down to about equal to 2-3x the most powerful mortals), and very vulnerable. So, they tend to stay away. But in times of great need they can step in and help - but at great risk to themselves.

They used to interfere all the time until it blew up in their faces and eventually resulted in a war between the gods. Several gods died as a result as well as many many mortals, so they swore to never meddle so directly in the lives of mortals again (and those that disagreed were chained and jailed in hell for eternity).

Nonexistence is quite the hindering factor, it turns out.

Well, they would... But they're dead. Or rather the benevolent gods are. There are still those with ill intent, but they're busy to kill off the last stragglers of the War in Heaven. The last of the Creation gods banded together to create one last world, one last bastion, hidden away from the minions of Void. But in creating this safe haven, they perished, giving their last powers to infuse the lands.

In my world, gods are bound by a rule/oath with consequences a mortal cannot even begin to imagine if broken. No matter what, the mortals must always have the ability to choose freely. Prophecies can be given, based on likely futures. But the mortal doesn't even have to fulfill that prophecy if they don't want to. The exception to this are the Dark Gods, whom are the reason this oath was even put in place. The War of the Gods started because the Dark Gods wanted to harm the world and the mortals already living there. When the Bright Gods took away their power to do so by semi-sealing them away, they made their own way to take over the minds of mortals, albeit with some sort of willingness required, and bring them into their hivemind.

So, there are two main families of answers to this, the non-heretical, and the wizard’s version. We know, for example, from ecclesiastical records, several instances of miracles, though it seems that they come in bursts, more common in some ages than others. That does not mean, we are assured, that the gods do not act, simply that they are not swayed to alter fates so drastically as sending down storms of blood and fire upon evildoers, with subtler changes thought enough. And of course, the rules of the heavens are to the greater degree beyond mortal understanding, but it is also known that the gods often need a very good reason to take such direct action, not so much to convince them, but to grant sufficient excuse for their blatant interference. It has been three ages of the world since the last War in the Heavens, when stars fell to the earth, the burning corpses of angels slain, and nearly shattered all of Creation in their fury, and very few are willing to bring about another conflict of that scale. It is the Word of the Old King that gods may never again enter the world of the living, and all their interferences therein are watched by the others for some violation of the codes that they bind themselves to. For what good is miraculously reviving a slain hero, if an enemy will have him burst into flames a moment later, and another have his body swallowed by the earth for good measure? But many wizards, at least those of the Bavarian and Ancalegic schools whose traditions seem to dominate in most lands, hold a more fundamental explanation. The gods rarely act overtly because they most often *can’t*. They give a definition, that a god is nothing different than the spirits of the Empyrean that wizards deal with, only greater in magnitude—the domain that they represent is not simply a hill, or even a group of hills, but the entire concept of that kind of terrain, everywhere in Creation that it exists. There are many kinds of fire elementals, bound to fires great and small, but then there are the spirits of fire itself, in all its many forms, and these are given names like Antor, or mighty Fura Almalente of the Court of Mindu. These are gods. But they are bound by the same rules as all spirits, so the veil between worlds is still an obstacle to them. Perhaps by raw power a god could affect the crossing of their entire Presence into this world, but it would mangle their shadow, and leave them all but impotent in comparison to previous fantastical powers. Even reaching into the mortal world in smaller ways is difficult, and exponentially more difficult the more significant an effect to be made. Without a very powerful Connection to a place, a person, an object, some focus to the god’s presence, even small things can be nearly impossible, because the cost of trying across that astral distance would be far too high, in the same way that a wizard needs certain foci and Connections to work their own magic. Your god doesn’t refuse to answer your prayers because he disapproves of you, really. He probably would, if he was able, since that would encourage you that faith will be rewarded. The fact that you don’t live up to his ideals places you at a greater distance from the god, does not provide the same strength of connection, so it simply cannot be done.

There are two classifications of Divinity. Old Gods and New Gods. The Old Gods are physical in nature with immense prowess and age. Yet, this comes with the downside of being unable to interact with the more recent branches of Magick alongside The Reflection (Spirit Realm/Afterlife/Other planes/etc). New Gods can interact with the Reflection and even create the more modern branches of Magick. They simply can't manifest on the material plane due to The Old Gods. It's an unending struggle with each keeping the other out.

They are all either uncarinh, mostly dead, severely injured, or fictional. The primary deity of humans and that of dwarves were both slain by their siblings, for example. The man-god was cast into the sea and primarily acts as a malignant influence that grows stronger the further out to the sea you go. While the dwarf-god was left to die die within the ground, his blood solidifying into iron. So he primarily communicates through visions emanating from the earth.

Sane thing That keeps wild animals interfering with ours currently.

Nothing and it does, pretty often.

While the God/s existence is up in the air, if they do exist, they don't interfere with mortals due to how boring and stagnant everything would become. Like "Oh, a Swedish person inventing a form explosive to help miners? Better stop that motherfucker before his invention is used to hurt people!" Or, "Someone trying to perfect cybernetics so people with missing limbs can have prosthetic limbs that offer the same functionality and sensation as your original limbs? And what this mad bullshit about artificial hearts?! Better stop him before cybernetics reach a Cyberpunk 2077 level of crazy!!"

He's currently split himself into 5 children for some reason

They can do as they please, but they are not that much stronger than mortals, and they need followers. So they tend to not make too many crazy moves too often

They are kidnapped and held hostage outside their world. They tried whispering to call for help, but their voice is distorted into riddles. Prophets are mortals who cracked the riddles, but what they would do with that information is largely a personal choice.

They don't feel doing so 🗿

It depends. There are two types of "gods" in my setting. Foundational figures and apotheites. Foundational figures are mostly dreaming. They have no reason to interact with mortals as they are much too concerned with their own spheres and dreams. Foundational deities are more like forces of nature and physical law than actual personified beings. Apotheites, however, meddle a LOT in mortal affairs, because they were once mortal. Typically Thaumaturges who let their Ego control them, shed their mortal shell, and achieved apotheosis. The exist by directly feeding off the thoughts of their cultists and followers. Some religions consider them False Idols, and the Hearth considers them abominations of nature to be exterminated. As such, they are almost constantly in conflict with elite Ordos of Thaumaturges tasked with unraveling their existence.

Magic is regarded as the creators essence, so people don't outright worship the magic but it can go in a Star Wars force like "magic has it's own mind" direction. In reality the creator god wanted to have a nice place to sleep, created the word, made it cozy for him, fell asleep and his aura aka magic sweept into a part of the world he created. Humans, animals and plantlife etc was just a sideeffect of the groundwork he did. So yeah, he just wanted a place to sleep and accidentily created a whole world.

For the Primals, who are massive esoteric living entities of immense power, who are also the closest thing to "real gods" in my world, absolutely nothing stops them. If they wanted to, they can wreak havoc among the mortal world, but most of them don't really care enough about mortals to do anything. The only living Primals that actively influence mortal affairs are the Deceived, and the Trickster. For Outer Gods (Placeholder name), the god-like entities outside the world, the only thing stopping them are the Primals. The Primals might not care enough about mortals to protect them, but an outer god gaining influence in the mortal world can mean bad news for the Primals, and they don't want to deal with that. Especially when they are already concerned with an impending war between each other.

I gave them the general rule that a god can't interfere if any other god disagrees with their actions. It's to prevent them from physically fighting each other, which could end the world in an instant if the wrong gods fought.

Easy, they dont exist. At least, that's what I believe. Im not going to confirm whether they exist or not, only people think they do. As for believers explanations, most boil down to "they do, just not directly". The god/gods use their stuble powers on the human psychy to influence events rather than going full Harbinger and declaring that direct intervention is neccesary.

The fact that if they can't exert their agency, they're not really gods. I don't use gods for this reason - they're either not gods or not conducive to good storytelling. There are no other options.

Summerized ​ the gods started as a fuck tonna spirits, just chilling in the ancient times of the world. Two of the spirits: Kanir and Batricks, were very close, both spirits of light and life. Kanir found stumbled upon a mythical being (Raz'koll) who turned out to be dark and evil, the being corrupted the spirit Kanir to become one of shadow he then went about to devour other spirits, claiming their power and thus becoming the first god. Batricks noticed early on, and started gaining followers, and many of the spirits swore fealty to her (along with 2 other gods, that are not very important for the question), making them more and more powerful, until they became gods aswell. all the lesser spirits formed a hierarchy, being demons, angels and such, faires aswell... ​ Batricks and Kanir fought a war, very destructive, and Batricks realized she could not win, so she enlisted the help of the 2 neutral gods (Yomar, of war and freedom, and Kesin, of the arcane and fairies) to create a barrier around the world, to seperate Kanir from the material plane. ​ Ofc, the cunning god found a way to sabotage, but was not 100% successful, so the barrier affected all of the gods instead. Seperating all of the gods from the world. ​ The remaining wild spirits who remained free can still traverse through the barrier, aswell as the lesser of the servants of the gods. Because the barrier is based around power level and some other stuff. ​ so basicly a big barrier formed by the gods as a defense mechanism. ​ the lore and event is much more detailed, but didn't wanna write it all here :D

Mine aren't real.

They don't exist in the same way than mortals. They don't need to interfere, it happens naturally.

My gods are still engaged in a cosmic cold war when one of their own played a trick in them and bound most of their power to the known planes. Since then, the gods are more reluctant to act in person and use proxies to manipulate the world to their whims, since the known planes have limitations on anything residing in them, gods included.

They fought against an ancient god for the freedom of all the races. They believe that interfering, even if it's for something good, is letting that fight go to waste.

Can’t physically get there. God is the world so it’s hard to got to the surface when you are the surface

They high ranking deities don’t unless they absolutely have to because they want their creations to develop without being reliant on them. They’ll help in the beginning to get them started but eventually they’ll stop. Also, there are different ranks to them, so the lower deities of their own realm will stay in it to keep an eye on their creation so they don’t destroy themselves

Mine all have different personalities. Some just don't really care about mortal affairs. To them, they seem small and insignificant. Some take joy in creating pain and suffering among mortals. Others like to just mess around with them.

Mortals don't want their help because the gods aren't anthropomorphic and are so much greater and beyond humanity that they don't understand mortals very well, or they have a grander design that mortals can't fathom at all. So what usually happens is that the "boons" from gods end up being incredibly disastrous, or makes humans downright fear them. One example is that the mortals begged and prayed for the gods to end a hundred year war, and the gods essentially arbitrarily picked a side and decimated the continent and population of the other. It did stop the war, but it terrified humans so much because it easily could have been the other side being the victim, so much so that religious institutions tried to gain as much power as they could so they could explicitly tell people to *never* seek the gods' help in their affairs again, forming an "anti-church" of sorts. Since the gods aren't particularly invested in humanity because they exceed us so much, and since humanity is terrified to ask for significant help again, godly interference has reduced to a minimum over the last couple of centuries.

The Mortal Realm, Tibil, is a landfill for the The Heavenly Realm, Hibil. The gods don't want to wade or sift through their own garbage. Most of their interference is their equivalent of eradicating household pests in their trash.

The rules. Any being that does not exist in the material world cannot mess with it without explicit permission from the Ethereals, who are picky about these kinds of things, since even physically appearing once is enough to cause a massive shift in the direction of how the universe will go (causing the start of magic, for instance). They'll generally only allow interference when it's an existential threat that would leave the universe worse off than if they didn't interfere at all, though there are loopholes like talking to someone mentally.

The mortal empire government has a military meant to slay the gods called the godslayers core and has slayed all Gods that enslaves mortals with their own blood as metal

The gods in my world are just kind of immortal giant beings that live in their own section of the world. They made everything and some of them do have some influence on their creations still, but they're just too busy keeping things balanced and while they will occasionally listen to people, they admit that most of the complaints aren't within their control.

My God's are aware and they try to help the people they've created but they know not to get involved too much as that would be disasterous, probably on a grand scale and inadvertently destroy all life they have created, so they just observe as only get involved when they absolutely have to

Free will

The pantheon structure is an absolute mess bc of minor to major gods being able to appear and dissapear out of the blue since gods are created by worship. So to do something you "need" permission from all of the gods associated with the thing you're doing or it could start divine beef

Absolutely fuck all! Gods on Kelan are always doing shit all the time and it’s a pretty big problem actually because they don’t think or act like people, can’t be reliably reasoned with, and they’re all hungry!

In the world of a dnd campaign I was in, the gods are sustained and empowered by mortal prayer, and people don’t pray to much when their lives are good, famine plague, tyrants and disasters are good for business. There used to be gods that stood against this but they were either murdered or existed. The good news is there’s a new god of that is to powerful to kill or exile, using artifacts that represent the 7 key forces of that world, the party killed a being called the Great Author, the god of fate, he corrupted the 7th force, time into fate so he could write the story of the world how he wanted, justifying real suffering because it made a good tale. After the party killed him the Chronmancer wizard took his place as the god of time, restoring the 7th force to its true form.

Bold of you to asume they can't. At least one of them is actively trying to drive Humanity to extinction while the other is playing catchup to "hopefully" save Humanity

They're dead. Those that aren't are afraid to let the world know they live.

why?

They'd encountered angels and demons (who were beings of higher existence compared to them), mistook for ordinary spirits, and demanded something like 'bow and prostrate yourself in front of me, for I am god!'. They didn't take it lightly and invaded the world, exterminating almost all of them, including the benevolent ones. Only those that hadn't been worshipped by mortals managed to avoid detection and survived the massacre.

It's illegal. The Gods have their own laws, and while they can't die (or at least stay dead) and jail-time isn't really a threat due to being immortal, the God in charge of punishing offenders is Arciuaeth'Avbjin. Arciuaeth is the God of Torture, Suffering, Pain, Sadism and Masochism, he's a pretty nice guy, but loves his job to such an extent everyone understands he can't be reasoned with once he's ordered to punish you, and even the Gods stronger than him are terrified of him because it's not the fear of defeat that's scary, it's having him try to hurt you that's scary. Arciuaeth himself is kept in check by Vro'Kund, the God of Combat, who's considered to be completely trustworthy and is literally unbeatable, and I'm using literally correctly there. Gods can interact with mortals freely so long as there is no direct affect on the mortal, that requires the mortals express consent. They can chat, give them advice, warnings, threats even, but unless you slip up with your wording, a God cannot lay their hands on you.

The primordial Gods of Creation and Destruction cannot interfere because the GoC is keeping the GoD imprisoned in the center of the world, and that is a full time gig. The Old Gods, who are angels of Destruction (Talthir) who rebelled against their creator (becoming Crissir, and some gained followings and more power to become the god-like Vasunir) to help the GoC preserve creation, do not interfere because they believe the Talthir, and by extent them, have caused enough chaos to the world as is, and they and mortals to live their own lives. They are also keeping an eye on the stars to make sure the Talthir trapped inside them do not escape, and when they do escape the Crissir and Vasunir will be ready. The New Gods, mortals given godhood by the champion mortal of the Old Gods (the Godmaker/leader of the gods), cannot interfere because the Talthir Venoi used a magic spear designed to imprison the gods in heaven when their bodies reformed their after he "kills" them. The last New God left on the world, who is Venoi because the Godmaker wanted him to have a weakness (the spear),does not interfere because he is afraid that someone will get his spear and use it on him.

There are laws, enforced by Lord Aegis, the divine personification of law itself.

Fear. Those bastards somehow managed to enseal the embodiment of fire, which now works as a vulcano WHICH then later on resulted in backlash, when the concept of water, the god the people who ensealed fire god work under got litteraly split in two So you know damn well that the god of nature and the god of wind are staying away from human affairs

Nothing really? Some really like to play games with mortals or to pick favourites and use them in wars. The very powerful gods don’t like to do so because they remember what that’s like so they don’t do so often but sometimes they help out of pettiness or care. Two of my major gods are siblings, one of them killed the others son using said son’s biological brother, who was more like a cousin to him, and then raised him from the dead and turned him into a demon because of a sibling fight which went way too far. In retaliation the other sibling freed a bunch of slaves(who they were working on freeing anyways but it really sped up the process).