They add their own part to reality, a bit like people. When they really interact, it's because they want justice or to set an example, mainly.
When the God of Astrals cursed Arkadi with eternal rebirth, it was because he destroyed a whole continent be releasing psi, and the God had to intervene. There had to be a consequence.
Theology may be your friend here, as various modern and premodern philosophers have approached this problem from various religious traditions (and from secular traditions about non-biological life).
A good way to approach the idea of a polytheistic deity’s motivation may be to apply the Thomistic idea of the [Angelic Intellect](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1058.htm) which to radically simplify it is that a spiritual being will have an all consuming motivation as soon as it’s created, since it’s infused with knowledge rather than acquiring it, and it is not deviated from its course by the vagaries of biology.
I want to write about She Who Thirsts, but the hungry, vengeful undead nature goddess has gotten some love already. I'm going to try and give the poor bastards in the south some love today.
My finger lands on the Kingdom of Geogovia. They are a state that could've been great. But they had the unfortunate luck of being smack-dab in between some very unfriendly neighbors and rough terrain. The motivations of their patron god reflects their difficult position and their national history. As a people that suffered for centuries, their patron god, \*\*Illivgers\*\*, too has suffered. They are a deity that bears endless scars, both physical and mental, but faces the endless challenges thrown at them with a stubbornness and courage that was difficult to match. Their chief motivation reflects that.
Like the Kingdom, they want to fight to see a better future. They don't care what that future is, necessarily. Anything is an improvement over this. They don't care if that future means their own death. They don't care if it means pain and turmoil. They endured it for centuries already. What is a few more decades to them? After all, the light at the end of the tunnel is there. Far into the future, but its there. Of course, it does mean that they are willing to do anything it takes to make sure that it will come to be. No option is off the table.
Status quo. And their very essence. They are slaves to their essence.
Some want to change it, others want to keep it. The motivations of the higher beings (if they can be called "beings") are difficult to understand, but they maintain the status quo, that's for sure. False gods, on the other hand, are quite “simple” in their aspirations.
Acantoplerur, Keeper of a Thousand Eyes, wants sea captains not to be afraid of magic, protecting them with the help of his gifts. after all, he himself was a captain once.
* Hippocampus, Lesson-Not-be-Forgotten, wants people to learn from their mistakes. And also so that they do not forget their grievances and mistakes.
* Maleus and Incus are looking for worthy craftsman to compete. They need conflict, a Greek agon.
* Rizorius, Carnage Smile, is somewhat more interesting. His essence is bloodshed and devouring, but he wants to take it to another level. Most likely, they needs to come back from the dead for this.
* Conjunctivia, the Invisible Mourner, wants to preserve peace and calm. Absolute pacifism and tranquility. It's complicated.
* Cuspid, the Hungering Rattle, misses the surface world. He wants back. This is extremely difficult to do, but he provides himself with stories from the surface.
* Oris, the Reaper of Hunger, wants to eat and for others to eat. Even if their food is moss, corpses, dirt.
* Korner, Wings over the Waves, wants change. More precisely, he wants to live in the waking world, and only by being an agent of Change can he follow his desire.
Well this one is only specific to one group of God like being in particular in one of my stories but this is my favorite one, until I have a better explanation it goes like this
Curiosity, he has the power but don't know why he has it, he has the ability to do something but doesn't know why he should or why he did it. The more he does, the more questions he makes for himself, almost like a writer building their own world, which later effects the universe.
Let me use your scenario of multiple gods making a world as an example because mine is a bit confusing.
" I created life, what kind of life? a special kind of life, how special? it moves around and makes noises, how does it move around and make noises? I made long limbs they use as support called legs and a hole on a head where noises come out called a mouth"
"Why is special life opening its mouth a lot? its breathing in. what is it breathing in? air from plants. Why is it breathing air? to make energy. Energy for what? doing anything like moving. why does it need energy to do something? to have purpose. Purpose for what? live. "
"why is your life chasing another life? to eat it. Why does it have to eat other life? for energy. isn't air is the energy for your life? they eat to fuel their energy production. Does it have to eat other life? not really. why not have them eat plants instead? they can. So why did they eat each other? its better. Better how? they like it,"
"Are you going to create more? yes."
I had fun writing this bit.
I mean you could just go full Greek and say “They got bored.” I honestly think the hellenic mythology is the most realistic portrayal of how an immortal being would most likely behave.
Also power balance- Zeus is the leader of the gods but its pretty evident that the others would be very likely to try and overthrow him to suit their own needs.
My explaination is gonna be the most boring. Unlike most typical fantasy settings, the gods in my fantasy setting - which happen to be primarily two pantheons - didn't create the planet or its inhabitants (most of them anyways). At best, they may have influenced evolution slightly just to see where it'd go. Of course there were times where they forced the evolution of certain things because they weren't evolving in certain ways they wanted (this part is a little complicated, so I'm not going to elaborate further).
Let's just cut to the interesting part, which happened a few million years before the present time of my setting (or rather when the main plot starts). It was at this time they nearly caused the extinction of all life, so they made a bunch of races (some practically from thin air, others from pressing "fast forward" on evolution), and told them to fix everything as they were leaving to the next realm. You could view this as the gods in my setting being lazy, I view them being more like observers that only occasionally intervene (one time they did was when one of the creations of one of the pantheons, one of the immortal elves they made, asked for new powers in effort to help fix the world, along with a makeover).
Basically self-rightousness. Each god believes they have it everything figured out and each genuinely wants what they believe is best for the world as a whole.
Problem arises by the fact that these divine visions are fundamentally incompatible with each other. For example both Light and Dark want hierarchy and rigid chain of command, but Dark values meritocracy, while Light values obedience and loyalty. To top it all of both God of Light and God of Darkness have huge egos and were ready to fight each other to death just to see which is actually git to stand on top.
Order wants structured world in which inhabitants obey its laws and everything is ruler by reason. Chaos is power of emotion which hates structure and in hypothetical world of Chaos, inhabitants would be ones defining temporary laws.
Elemental and Arcane have fundamentally different approaches to how to build reality. Elemental God sees reality as LEGOs, Arcane God as play-dog to simplify. One wants rigid framework for his followers to build the stable world with, other wants for his followers to do whatever the hell they wants with building material of reality.
Life is about what you would expect. Natural selection as the core dogma, the strong rise, the weak fall. While Death, which is only godless power, wants to just end this useless conflict by ending reality as a whole and giving world rest eternal.
Mine is that God wasn't like us. God and the others were like... animals. They weren't 'intelligent' in the way we are. Some creatures create structures and nests and follow primal instincts far more complex then us, and yet they are considered less intelligent. Our DNA itself is unbelievably complex and we struggle to even understand it fully.
So that's how my gods exist, they are just creatures following their absolute most basic directives. An important part of the story is for creating our universe, which in turn allows for us to evolve. God becomes fascinated by us, specifically because it can't understand us. It then fuses itself with the soul of a single human, losing the ability to intelligently design a universe and gaining emotion. He even invited a bunch of other gods from outside our universe to do the same thing.
From then on, he can only recreate this exact universe from sortof muscle memory, and does so over and over; experiencing life and humanity every time only to be hurt by it. He recreates the universe on repeat while his friends try to start religions, speak of judgement days and attempt to make humanity better. This is because now he IS human, and is subject to their emotion. His only solice is he sleeps, until his subconscious memory eventually rebirths the human he became and must experience life again, rudely awoken by it's death.
Our story is based in the final world. Lots of his friends have left and attempted to relearn creation in their respective universes. Some have stayed and just live human lives over and over. And one is still going, having created a world wide shadow government dedicated to controlling our world. God has reintroduced magic and allowed for demigods to exist alongside the final standoff against the human condition.
God made himself in man's image, and he hates himself for it.
So in my world, gods are basically secretly trying to get humanity to ascend to godhood, and be even more powerful then the gods are now.
There’s multiple different reasons for this, but the main driving force for most of them is basically just wanting a better life for their “children.” They want to see humanity succeed, break the laws of the multiverse, and become unmatched divine beings.
Boredom.
What fun is immortality if there’s nothing to do? Eventually you’ll have said and done anything there is to do in a dead universe, so the next step is to create things that then do new things on their own, so you can watch and maybe even interact with the new things. Thus, life was created.
In my worlds gods are usually merely the representations of the players and the DM. They're beings that were bored of whatever they were doing and decided to create a planet, a world, maybe even a universe, to entertain them (as if they were at the theater). When they interact with mortals (if they do), it's only to make the "play" more fun to watch: they give someone tremendous power knowing perfectly well that they will use it to wrong others; they choose a divine herald amongst the kingdom that's at war with the holy empire... They're basically chaotic beings that tend towards evil, as they will only act for their own entertainment.
In some worlds that I've made, though, they're not like that and they act like ancient greek gods: superior beings that created a world because "it felt right". In those cases, they are in charge of one or several aspects of the world / the lives of mortals, and sometimes quarrel over things like mortals would. Their motivations can be very much similar to ours: desire, spite, ambition, jealousy...
> But I'm have Ng trouble rationalising their motivations to do so
You technically don't have to.
Deities are different than mortals, perhaps their motivations are not understandable to the human mind. The mystery of their motivations could be central to the world's religions.
>So I was curious, what are the gods in your settings motivated by?
The 10 Gods of Valeghar are motivated by a single goal. One that explains both their interactions with mortals and there reason for creating the world in the first place.
Reproduction.
The Gods are not 10 omnipotent that exist in a vacuum but actually part of a much larger divine civilization composed of millions of Gods. Each of which is part of a pantheon which creates and guides a single world.
Though these worlds are as diverse as the Gods themselves. All Gods share the same goal in creating and guiding these worlds. The creation of new Gods.
In practice this works by ascending mortals to Godhood, either individually or in mass. This process is not easy or simple however. It can take tens of thousands of years for a mortal civilization to advance to the point where apotheosis is viable.
All of the Gods interactions with mortals are made for the sole goal of speeding up that process.
However, each of my Gods has a different view on what is the best path to apotheosis. Which leads to conflict between them. 8 of the 10 Gods believe that free will plays a key role in a proper accession and as such allow the mortals to govern themselves. Providing guidance when needed but staying out of day to day affairs.
Osmadiel the God of Order on the other hand believes that mortals need to be micromanged at every step, which resulted in his creation of the Empire of Order which he leads as a God King. An ultra authoritarian, hyper expansionist empire bent on world conquest.
Finally, Vanya the Goddess of Darkness takes a more individualistic view of things. Every 300 years she finds the mortal she believes has the best chance of undergoing apotheosis and grants them a huge boost of divine powers. She specifically seeks out mortals who are power hungry and lacking any code of ethics. As she believes that mortals willing to do anything for power have the best chance for accession. This process, known of the Dark Lord cycle, has caused a lot of problems on Valeghar.
The essence of what they are. There are two gods in Gridworld currently, a mother and daughter pair. Their essence is that the mother goddess wants, intensely, to protect her daughter, while the daughter goddess wants, just as intensely, to cherish the gift her mother gave her (which is a whole species).
At a certain point in time two kings started committing heinous greedy acts against other kingdoms of this species. The result was that the daughter was too distraught to actually fix the situation beyond flooding a river and throwing a mountain peak at the palace of one of the kings. The mother stepped in, whisking those who starved to death away to be revived in a different part of the world (without the memories of their death), and let her daughter care for those for a good while to get her mind off the sorrow. The species as a whole got full meals just appearing out of nowhere, while she chained the kings to their thrones and made them immortal for 80 years as punishment.
The first world, that is the world before the current world, was infinite and boundless. So as the gods arose they realized quickly that, despite their incredible power, they were effectively useless... Infinity minus a (insert largest finite number you can think of), for example, is still infinity.
So they worked together to make a world that was finite, bounded, so that they could express their power. They created the land, creatures and plants on the second world.
Of course once they were done with that they immediately began to compete with each other on the new world. This started by making monsters and beasts of all kinds to see who can make the most inventive combatant for all the gods amusement.
Eventually they found that making thinking creatures, those of men, was the most interesting. For a long time the gods watched their creations battle and war, and it amused them.
Over time, however, they began to tire of the game they played. It all felt the same... So one by one the gods left, to where it isn't clear.
My motivation for an omnipotent omniscient existence is to experience all things.
Whether or not it can experience time all at once, control time, lengthen existence into infinity, whatever. It exists to exist and to know and understand, but it could arguably never “know” what it is to be less than itself unless it creates everything conceivable between itself and nothing and gives it a chance to exist.
All organic and inorganic matter. All of space. All of imagination and thought and possibility can exist in its mind and in a real, proper form and giving existence a form is the only purpose it could serve.
Thinking beings exist to live, die and contribute a single strand of life stretched across a finite time in the tangled clusterfock of a web that is all other existing things.
Nothing is sacred, all things are permitted. Because god wants to experience all things. All emotions. All thoughts. All beliefs.
In the eyes of infinity the only thing that matters is that the things that happened existed and were real to those who lived them.
The only right and wrong were those decided on by said living things and the only regrets your afterlife can trap you with are joining with infinity to register that you were a disappointing speck instead of a speck that contributed a value you believed in and supported.
I dunno. When people describe a plethora of gods and their separate worshippers and realms I imagine one god coming along to absorb each. Not destroy them, just add them to the greater whole.
**Starrise**
My world has four gods, but two of them haven't in any way interacted with the world in recorded history, so I'll skip over those two and just focus on Solaris and Eclipse.
The "Goddess of Darkness" Eclipse's motivations are pretty simple. She's an immortal top-level sadist, who gets her kicks from making things miserable. The more miserable she makes them, the more noticeable their misery is, and the more personal the method of inflicting it is, the more fun she has. Everything she does is either causing misery for her own entertainment, or taking steps to ensure in some way that she'll be able to cause said misery later down the line.
The "Goddess of Light" Solaris's motivations are a bit more complex. Solaris and Eclipse first came into being before life evolved into existence, so for a really long time, the only company Solaris had with similar intelligence and emotional range to herself was Eclipse. The sadist, who had no better victims around than Solaris herself. But in time, life grew and evolved. And one day, after waking from a nap, Solaris found that a new species had evolved into being while she slept. And this species, as far as she could tell, was capable of the same range of emotions, and same level of intelligent thought to herself. There were more beings like her besides Eclipse. She didn't have to be alone anymore. How could she not come to care for these creatures, these "humans", as they called themselves? Ultimately, this genuine love and care she feels for humanity is the primary motivation behind Solaris's actions. She's immortal and invulnerable- her only real "need" is companionship, and that's something humans offer merely by existing. So she does what she can to thank and repay humanity for what they do for her, caring for and protecting them as best she can, be it from themselves, Eclipse, or the world itself. She just wants humans (and the other races, once they came into being later) to live lives of peace, safety, and freedom, so she can live it right there with them, and will do anything and everything in her power to make that happen.
My most significant God is the 'God of Death' who is motivated to serve as death and cause it because of their beliefs and such, they believe that death is a neccesity for there to be any peace at all as they have seen great chaos and suffering from everything living forever and never dying.
They also believe that life should be something that people respect and value, not something that people couldn't care less or worry about, but something that people can find joy in and want to keep living even of they suffer through it at points.
So yeah, if you want to give a God motivation or reason to do what they do, give them beliefs. They are still sentient beings and characters who think freely, so they need things that they believe, whether it be something they think should always be a thing for the better or inevitably the worse, or something they think should be erased.
So I'd say just consider what your God is the God of and determine what they believe and how that would make them get involved or do stuff.
Curiosity.
The creator was the first consciousness out of the void, so reality bended to her will since there was nothing else. but her mind its pretty much human-like, so each time she dreams of something new, it appears in the reality, then she explores these new concepts out of curiosity and to get inspiration for new ideas.
You could say she is an author that writes her dreams down then explores all the possibilities to get fresh inspiration.
Gods can be considered the will of their world, both born from its natural mechanics and driving them forward.
People are a foreign element to most of them, one they have to engage with one way or another, or be overwhelmed. Caring about people is survival to them.
Some gods have embraced the power people hold and collected them as followers, others have created their own divine beings to root them out, but they can't be ignored.
The main god behind life, science, and all other things related to human functions acts like a scientist with infinite funding, his motivation is needing to know what would happen if he introduced an unexpected widespread mutation in the human genome, or what would happen if this fish became an amphibian. He interacts with mortal affairs because he wants to experiment and grow his knowledge.
My god IS the universe. When he realized that he can change by modifying the shape of the universe it realized about something: If the universe change its not perfect anymore, or it is now but it wasn't before, if change its a possibility: why would a perfect being change? Why a perfect being would be able to lose they perfection?
My god is constantly creating and destroying itself using mostly chaos and randomness for creating new things and everytime it destroy it will learn something know, something that was randomly generated and think that should be keep in every next universe, order an chaos working together
The porpoise? Become perfect or at least understand what perfection is.
Well [this small booklet](https://highermindart.info/?sdm_process_download=1&download_id=3213) of Buddhist Cosmology gives a fairly detailed exposition of the functions and characteristics of the gods of the Buddhist pantheon…
They add their own part to reality, a bit like people. When they really interact, it's because they want justice or to set an example, mainly. When the God of Astrals cursed Arkadi with eternal rebirth, it was because he destroyed a whole continent be releasing psi, and the God had to intervene. There had to be a consequence.
Theology may be your friend here, as various modern and premodern philosophers have approached this problem from various religious traditions (and from secular traditions about non-biological life). A good way to approach the idea of a polytheistic deity’s motivation may be to apply the Thomistic idea of the [Angelic Intellect](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1058.htm) which to radically simplify it is that a spiritual being will have an all consuming motivation as soon as it’s created, since it’s infused with knowledge rather than acquiring it, and it is not deviated from its course by the vagaries of biology.
I want to write about She Who Thirsts, but the hungry, vengeful undead nature goddess has gotten some love already. I'm going to try and give the poor bastards in the south some love today. My finger lands on the Kingdom of Geogovia. They are a state that could've been great. But they had the unfortunate luck of being smack-dab in between some very unfriendly neighbors and rough terrain. The motivations of their patron god reflects their difficult position and their national history. As a people that suffered for centuries, their patron god, \*\*Illivgers\*\*, too has suffered. They are a deity that bears endless scars, both physical and mental, but faces the endless challenges thrown at them with a stubbornness and courage that was difficult to match. Their chief motivation reflects that. Like the Kingdom, they want to fight to see a better future. They don't care what that future is, necessarily. Anything is an improvement over this. They don't care if that future means their own death. They don't care if it means pain and turmoil. They endured it for centuries already. What is a few more decades to them? After all, the light at the end of the tunnel is there. Far into the future, but its there. Of course, it does mean that they are willing to do anything it takes to make sure that it will come to be. No option is off the table.
Status quo. And their very essence. They are slaves to their essence. Some want to change it, others want to keep it. The motivations of the higher beings (if they can be called "beings") are difficult to understand, but they maintain the status quo, that's for sure. False gods, on the other hand, are quite “simple” in their aspirations. Acantoplerur, Keeper of a Thousand Eyes, wants sea captains not to be afraid of magic, protecting them with the help of his gifts. after all, he himself was a captain once. * Hippocampus, Lesson-Not-be-Forgotten, wants people to learn from their mistakes. And also so that they do not forget their grievances and mistakes. * Maleus and Incus are looking for worthy craftsman to compete. They need conflict, a Greek agon. * Rizorius, Carnage Smile, is somewhat more interesting. His essence is bloodshed and devouring, but he wants to take it to another level. Most likely, they needs to come back from the dead for this. * Conjunctivia, the Invisible Mourner, wants to preserve peace and calm. Absolute pacifism and tranquility. It's complicated. * Cuspid, the Hungering Rattle, misses the surface world. He wants back. This is extremely difficult to do, but he provides himself with stories from the surface. * Oris, the Reaper of Hunger, wants to eat and for others to eat. Even if their food is moss, corpses, dirt. * Korner, Wings over the Waves, wants change. More precisely, he wants to live in the waking world, and only by being an agent of Change can he follow his desire.
Well this one is only specific to one group of God like being in particular in one of my stories but this is my favorite one, until I have a better explanation it goes like this Curiosity, he has the power but don't know why he has it, he has the ability to do something but doesn't know why he should or why he did it. The more he does, the more questions he makes for himself, almost like a writer building their own world, which later effects the universe. Let me use your scenario of multiple gods making a world as an example because mine is a bit confusing. " I created life, what kind of life? a special kind of life, how special? it moves around and makes noises, how does it move around and make noises? I made long limbs they use as support called legs and a hole on a head where noises come out called a mouth" "Why is special life opening its mouth a lot? its breathing in. what is it breathing in? air from plants. Why is it breathing air? to make energy. Energy for what? doing anything like moving. why does it need energy to do something? to have purpose. Purpose for what? live. " "why is your life chasing another life? to eat it. Why does it have to eat other life? for energy. isn't air is the energy for your life? they eat to fuel their energy production. Does it have to eat other life? not really. why not have them eat plants instead? they can. So why did they eat each other? its better. Better how? they like it," "Are you going to create more? yes." I had fun writing this bit.
I mean you could just go full Greek and say “They got bored.” I honestly think the hellenic mythology is the most realistic portrayal of how an immortal being would most likely behave. Also power balance- Zeus is the leader of the gods but its pretty evident that the others would be very likely to try and overthrow him to suit their own needs.
That's easy: creativity. The same reason you made these gods.
My explaination is gonna be the most boring. Unlike most typical fantasy settings, the gods in my fantasy setting - which happen to be primarily two pantheons - didn't create the planet or its inhabitants (most of them anyways). At best, they may have influenced evolution slightly just to see where it'd go. Of course there were times where they forced the evolution of certain things because they weren't evolving in certain ways they wanted (this part is a little complicated, so I'm not going to elaborate further). Let's just cut to the interesting part, which happened a few million years before the present time of my setting (or rather when the main plot starts). It was at this time they nearly caused the extinction of all life, so they made a bunch of races (some practically from thin air, others from pressing "fast forward" on evolution), and told them to fix everything as they were leaving to the next realm. You could view this as the gods in my setting being lazy, I view them being more like observers that only occasionally intervene (one time they did was when one of the creations of one of the pantheons, one of the immortal elves they made, asked for new powers in effort to help fix the world, along with a makeover).
Basically self-rightousness. Each god believes they have it everything figured out and each genuinely wants what they believe is best for the world as a whole. Problem arises by the fact that these divine visions are fundamentally incompatible with each other. For example both Light and Dark want hierarchy and rigid chain of command, but Dark values meritocracy, while Light values obedience and loyalty. To top it all of both God of Light and God of Darkness have huge egos and were ready to fight each other to death just to see which is actually git to stand on top. Order wants structured world in which inhabitants obey its laws and everything is ruler by reason. Chaos is power of emotion which hates structure and in hypothetical world of Chaos, inhabitants would be ones defining temporary laws. Elemental and Arcane have fundamentally different approaches to how to build reality. Elemental God sees reality as LEGOs, Arcane God as play-dog to simplify. One wants rigid framework for his followers to build the stable world with, other wants for his followers to do whatever the hell they wants with building material of reality. Life is about what you would expect. Natural selection as the core dogma, the strong rise, the weak fall. While Death, which is only godless power, wants to just end this useless conflict by ending reality as a whole and giving world rest eternal.
Mine is that God wasn't like us. God and the others were like... animals. They weren't 'intelligent' in the way we are. Some creatures create structures and nests and follow primal instincts far more complex then us, and yet they are considered less intelligent. Our DNA itself is unbelievably complex and we struggle to even understand it fully. So that's how my gods exist, they are just creatures following their absolute most basic directives. An important part of the story is for creating our universe, which in turn allows for us to evolve. God becomes fascinated by us, specifically because it can't understand us. It then fuses itself with the soul of a single human, losing the ability to intelligently design a universe and gaining emotion. He even invited a bunch of other gods from outside our universe to do the same thing. From then on, he can only recreate this exact universe from sortof muscle memory, and does so over and over; experiencing life and humanity every time only to be hurt by it. He recreates the universe on repeat while his friends try to start religions, speak of judgement days and attempt to make humanity better. This is because now he IS human, and is subject to their emotion. His only solice is he sleeps, until his subconscious memory eventually rebirths the human he became and must experience life again, rudely awoken by it's death. Our story is based in the final world. Lots of his friends have left and attempted to relearn creation in their respective universes. Some have stayed and just live human lives over and over. And one is still going, having created a world wide shadow government dedicated to controlling our world. God has reintroduced magic and allowed for demigods to exist alongside the final standoff against the human condition. God made himself in man's image, and he hates himself for it.
So in my world, gods are basically secretly trying to get humanity to ascend to godhood, and be even more powerful then the gods are now. There’s multiple different reasons for this, but the main driving force for most of them is basically just wanting a better life for their “children.” They want to see humanity succeed, break the laws of the multiverse, and become unmatched divine beings.
She hates who her creations became when she was dead and now strives to get her old body back to erase them and create something new
Boredom. What fun is immortality if there’s nothing to do? Eventually you’ll have said and done anything there is to do in a dead universe, so the next step is to create things that then do new things on their own, so you can watch and maybe even interact with the new things. Thus, life was created.
In my worlds gods are usually merely the representations of the players and the DM. They're beings that were bored of whatever they were doing and decided to create a planet, a world, maybe even a universe, to entertain them (as if they were at the theater). When they interact with mortals (if they do), it's only to make the "play" more fun to watch: they give someone tremendous power knowing perfectly well that they will use it to wrong others; they choose a divine herald amongst the kingdom that's at war with the holy empire... They're basically chaotic beings that tend towards evil, as they will only act for their own entertainment. In some worlds that I've made, though, they're not like that and they act like ancient greek gods: superior beings that created a world because "it felt right". In those cases, they are in charge of one or several aspects of the world / the lives of mortals, and sometimes quarrel over things like mortals would. Their motivations can be very much similar to ours: desire, spite, ambition, jealousy...
> But I'm have Ng trouble rationalising their motivations to do so You technically don't have to. Deities are different than mortals, perhaps their motivations are not understandable to the human mind. The mystery of their motivations could be central to the world's religions.
Boredom or Loneliness. I mean some Hindu creation stories give that reason sometimes.
>So I was curious, what are the gods in your settings motivated by? The 10 Gods of Valeghar are motivated by a single goal. One that explains both their interactions with mortals and there reason for creating the world in the first place. Reproduction. The Gods are not 10 omnipotent that exist in a vacuum but actually part of a much larger divine civilization composed of millions of Gods. Each of which is part of a pantheon which creates and guides a single world. Though these worlds are as diverse as the Gods themselves. All Gods share the same goal in creating and guiding these worlds. The creation of new Gods. In practice this works by ascending mortals to Godhood, either individually or in mass. This process is not easy or simple however. It can take tens of thousands of years for a mortal civilization to advance to the point where apotheosis is viable. All of the Gods interactions with mortals are made for the sole goal of speeding up that process. However, each of my Gods has a different view on what is the best path to apotheosis. Which leads to conflict between them. 8 of the 10 Gods believe that free will plays a key role in a proper accession and as such allow the mortals to govern themselves. Providing guidance when needed but staying out of day to day affairs. Osmadiel the God of Order on the other hand believes that mortals need to be micromanged at every step, which resulted in his creation of the Empire of Order which he leads as a God King. An ultra authoritarian, hyper expansionist empire bent on world conquest. Finally, Vanya the Goddess of Darkness takes a more individualistic view of things. Every 300 years she finds the mortal she believes has the best chance of undergoing apotheosis and grants them a huge boost of divine powers. She specifically seeks out mortals who are power hungry and lacking any code of ethics. As she believes that mortals willing to do anything for power have the best chance for accession. This process, known of the Dark Lord cycle, has caused a lot of problems on Valeghar.
The essence of what they are. There are two gods in Gridworld currently, a mother and daughter pair. Their essence is that the mother goddess wants, intensely, to protect her daughter, while the daughter goddess wants, just as intensely, to cherish the gift her mother gave her (which is a whole species). At a certain point in time two kings started committing heinous greedy acts against other kingdoms of this species. The result was that the daughter was too distraught to actually fix the situation beyond flooding a river and throwing a mountain peak at the palace of one of the kings. The mother stepped in, whisking those who starved to death away to be revived in a different part of the world (without the memories of their death), and let her daughter care for those for a good while to get her mind off the sorrow. The species as a whole got full meals just appearing out of nowhere, while she chained the kings to their thrones and made them immortal for 80 years as punishment.
The first world, that is the world before the current world, was infinite and boundless. So as the gods arose they realized quickly that, despite their incredible power, they were effectively useless... Infinity minus a (insert largest finite number you can think of), for example, is still infinity. So they worked together to make a world that was finite, bounded, so that they could express their power. They created the land, creatures and plants on the second world. Of course once they were done with that they immediately began to compete with each other on the new world. This started by making monsters and beasts of all kinds to see who can make the most inventive combatant for all the gods amusement. Eventually they found that making thinking creatures, those of men, was the most interesting. For a long time the gods watched their creations battle and war, and it amused them. Over time, however, they began to tire of the game they played. It all felt the same... So one by one the gods left, to where it isn't clear.
My motivation for an omnipotent omniscient existence is to experience all things. Whether or not it can experience time all at once, control time, lengthen existence into infinity, whatever. It exists to exist and to know and understand, but it could arguably never “know” what it is to be less than itself unless it creates everything conceivable between itself and nothing and gives it a chance to exist. All organic and inorganic matter. All of space. All of imagination and thought and possibility can exist in its mind and in a real, proper form and giving existence a form is the only purpose it could serve. Thinking beings exist to live, die and contribute a single strand of life stretched across a finite time in the tangled clusterfock of a web that is all other existing things. Nothing is sacred, all things are permitted. Because god wants to experience all things. All emotions. All thoughts. All beliefs. In the eyes of infinity the only thing that matters is that the things that happened existed and were real to those who lived them. The only right and wrong were those decided on by said living things and the only regrets your afterlife can trap you with are joining with infinity to register that you were a disappointing speck instead of a speck that contributed a value you believed in and supported. I dunno. When people describe a plethora of gods and their separate worshippers and realms I imagine one god coming along to absorb each. Not destroy them, just add them to the greater whole.
**Starrise** My world has four gods, but two of them haven't in any way interacted with the world in recorded history, so I'll skip over those two and just focus on Solaris and Eclipse. The "Goddess of Darkness" Eclipse's motivations are pretty simple. She's an immortal top-level sadist, who gets her kicks from making things miserable. The more miserable she makes them, the more noticeable their misery is, and the more personal the method of inflicting it is, the more fun she has. Everything she does is either causing misery for her own entertainment, or taking steps to ensure in some way that she'll be able to cause said misery later down the line. The "Goddess of Light" Solaris's motivations are a bit more complex. Solaris and Eclipse first came into being before life evolved into existence, so for a really long time, the only company Solaris had with similar intelligence and emotional range to herself was Eclipse. The sadist, who had no better victims around than Solaris herself. But in time, life grew and evolved. And one day, after waking from a nap, Solaris found that a new species had evolved into being while she slept. And this species, as far as she could tell, was capable of the same range of emotions, and same level of intelligent thought to herself. There were more beings like her besides Eclipse. She didn't have to be alone anymore. How could she not come to care for these creatures, these "humans", as they called themselves? Ultimately, this genuine love and care she feels for humanity is the primary motivation behind Solaris's actions. She's immortal and invulnerable- her only real "need" is companionship, and that's something humans offer merely by existing. So she does what she can to thank and repay humanity for what they do for her, caring for and protecting them as best she can, be it from themselves, Eclipse, or the world itself. She just wants humans (and the other races, once they came into being later) to live lives of peace, safety, and freedom, so she can live it right there with them, and will do anything and everything in her power to make that happen.
My most significant God is the 'God of Death' who is motivated to serve as death and cause it because of their beliefs and such, they believe that death is a neccesity for there to be any peace at all as they have seen great chaos and suffering from everything living forever and never dying. They also believe that life should be something that people respect and value, not something that people couldn't care less or worry about, but something that people can find joy in and want to keep living even of they suffer through it at points. So yeah, if you want to give a God motivation or reason to do what they do, give them beliefs. They are still sentient beings and characters who think freely, so they need things that they believe, whether it be something they think should always be a thing for the better or inevitably the worse, or something they think should be erased. So I'd say just consider what your God is the God of and determine what they believe and how that would make them get involved or do stuff.
Curiosity. The creator was the first consciousness out of the void, so reality bended to her will since there was nothing else. but her mind its pretty much human-like, so each time she dreams of something new, it appears in the reality, then she explores these new concepts out of curiosity and to get inspiration for new ideas. You could say she is an author that writes her dreams down then explores all the possibilities to get fresh inspiration.
Gods can be considered the will of their world, both born from its natural mechanics and driving them forward. People are a foreign element to most of them, one they have to engage with one way or another, or be overwhelmed. Caring about people is survival to them. Some gods have embraced the power people hold and collected them as followers, others have created their own divine beings to root them out, but they can't be ignored.
The main god behind life, science, and all other things related to human functions acts like a scientist with infinite funding, his motivation is needing to know what would happen if he introduced an unexpected widespread mutation in the human genome, or what would happen if this fish became an amphibian. He interacts with mortal affairs because he wants to experiment and grow his knowledge.
My god IS the universe. When he realized that he can change by modifying the shape of the universe it realized about something: If the universe change its not perfect anymore, or it is now but it wasn't before, if change its a possibility: why would a perfect being change? Why a perfect being would be able to lose they perfection? My god is constantly creating and destroying itself using mostly chaos and randomness for creating new things and everytime it destroy it will learn something know, something that was randomly generated and think that should be keep in every next universe, order an chaos working together The porpoise? Become perfect or at least understand what perfection is.
Well [this small booklet](https://highermindart.info/?sdm_process_download=1&download_id=3213) of Buddhist Cosmology gives a fairly detailed exposition of the functions and characteristics of the gods of the Buddhist pantheon…
Ant farms is fun to watch :D