The war was not over one simple thing. It was not good versus evil, or one side or one being wanting to rule all things. This war was more complicated than that and there are many conflicting stories about exactly what happened as the different factions have pushed their own versions (just like the origin stories). It seems the threads that run thru most of the versions are as follows:
Some long centuries after the Repository of Souls had been separated into the place of Serenity – the heavens, and the place of punishment – the Hell, one of the Gods of Malice (some say god of justice), a god that no longer lives, brought a case before the heavenly host outlining his and his brethren’s complaints about the structure and function of the Divine Plane. Here are some of those complaints:
- I and my kin, the gods of ‘malice’, that arose from mortal belief, did not ask to be the jailers or governors of damned souls in the Hell – we were assigned these roles, and thus ourselves are somewhat prisoners in this ghastly place. ‘Tis true we are allowed to walk the mortal world, for certain amounts of times, and must always return to this terrible place of endless torment while other gods call the Paradises their homes. I think those of us that arose from the belief of mortals are being punished. We did not ask to come into being, or to be worshiped for the things we are and must do.
- Why should I and my brethren have to be the jailers for those damned by other gods? If the followers of other gods broke those gods’ rules, and those gods, so called gods of Benevolence, want their followers jailed, then let those gods be the jailers.
- Some of the rules of some of the “Benevolent” gods are unreasonable. To punish a mortal the same way for a slight infraction, say imbibing alcoholic beverages, as they would be punished for murder and rape is madness. So is sentencing a man to death who worked on a holy day because he needed to bring in firewood so his family would not freeze. This man did no harm, no mal-intent. And let us say he never committed malicious harm. Yet when he dies his soul will not be welcomed into the paradise of his god. No. This man’s soul will be shunted off to Hell. How is this reasonable?
- There is no consistency amongst the laws of the gods, benevolent or otherwise. A sin in the eyes of one benevolent god – imbibing alcoholic beverages, is seen as acceptable by another god. That is unreasonable and unjust. The laws should be the same for all, but the gods, some gods, are jealous and vain and petty. They wish to differentiate themselves from the rest of the heavenly host to try and win more followers and thus more power, and it is enough for them that a mortal is punished. Not because the mortal did harm to themselves or anyone or anything, but because their god simply decreed something to be a sin and the mortal committed that sin. The god wanted their particular view to be expounded more than they wanted reason and justice to be had. And who suffered because of the vanity and jealousy of some gods? Mortals. Now that is true malice.
- What of cases where harm was done and one could argue there were extenuating circumstances? A woman has been abused by her husband for years. He comes in from the fields to eat, and as he is eating at the table his wife strikes him in the head with a hammer, killing him. Clearly she has committed murder – her husband was not attacking her at the moment. Yet, should she be punished the same as a mortal that enjoys committing murder? Did she kill her husband just for revenge, or did she kill him out of fear that he would beat and rape her again that night? Some of both? What to do? We must think and weigh such cases carefully as intent and circumstance is just as important as outcome.
- Eternal damnation and eternal reward do not actually make sense nor are they just. You have a mortal that lived for forty years and was a thief. They end up being damned eternally. What if they had lived another forty years, or perhaps forty centuries? What would they have done with that time? How would they have changed? Perhaps due to circumstances the first forty years were filled with mis or dark deeds, but that does not mean the next forty years, or next forty centuries would have. Conversely, what if we have a mortal of forty years that lived an exemplary life. Should they be rewarded with forty years of bliss, or forty centuries of bliss simply because the first forty years of their existence were good? What if they had lived another forty years, or forty centuries? What mis or dark deeds might they have committed? Forty years, forty centuries, to the gods is nothing. It seems unreasonable to punish or reward a few decades of life, even a few centuries of life, with tens, or hundreds of thousands of years, to millions to billion of years of either pain or bliss. There should be other more reasonable options.
These of course were not the only complaints and not only from this god. These and other issues had been argued over for thousands of years – such as the issue of divine intervention. It was said that this god of Malice was an expert manipulator and that his main goal was to tear the Divine Plane apart. That he was chaos incarnate. There may have been some truth to this. What was also true was that many of the gods across the spectrum thought he had made a few good points, points many gods of benevolence themselves had made since the beginning. Some gods summarily dismissed what he was saying. This was in part because they did not trust him or like him. Others because he had said things that attacked their nature, their own conduct, and who was he to criticize them? He was not an original god of creation. How dare he speak in such a way.
Why now after centuries of disagreements did many long-standing arguments escalate into war? It was a good question. Perhaps it was the way he said things. Perhaps he had timed things just right, reading what was going on in both the Mortal and Divine Planes, seeing that it would only take a little push to get a serious conflict going. That just enough of the gods had dug into their positions so deep that compromise or reasoned discourse could no longer be had. He had gotten under enough of the gods’ skins so that they stayed primed, wound up for longer than usual. Wound up and ready to bite anyone’s head off. Maybe it was because he was not an original god of creation and as such, seen as a lesser god. Maybe he was seen as threat. That he was trying to rally the other lesser gods, gods that were birthed by belief and he and they should be put in their place quickly and once and for all. It could have been any of these things and more.
There was truth to that line about some, a good many of the gods, wanting to differentiate themselves. They had to compete. Maybe that line about vanity got under their skins and made some of their fellow divine interlocutors feel vindicated.
The war was not as simple as the gods of Malice versus the gods of Benevolence. No. It was a war of many factions and shifting alliances. Some of the gods of Malice enjoyed torturing the souls of sinners. These gods wished to remain the jailers of Hell. A fair number of the gods of Benevolence were not authoritarian and did not want mortals, their followers or any other mortals, to be unreasonably punished for minor wrongs. Gods of Benevolence fought both other gods of Benevolence and gods of Malice. Usually the stricter gods of Benevolence fought the more merciful gods of Benevolence. Gods of Malice versus gods of Malice and gods of Benevolence and neutrals and etc, etc, etc. Gods of justice and law warred with one another over the definitions of ideas and how best to carry out those ideas. It was a grand mess that happened over some number of centuries.
It was not constant war with one, large, pitched battle. There were lulls, coming back to the table, discussions, arguments, battles, one-on-one fights, etc. The War of the Gods was really a series of ongoing arguments and battles.
At about the outset of this conflict in the Divine Plane some small number of gods went into the Mortal Plane and destroyed thousands of followers of their ideological opponents. It was said that these god had done damage in the Mortal Plane prior to the War. Upon seeing this, the rest of the host of gods obliterated these few, and for the sake of creation sealed off the Mortal Plane from their kind and their divine assistants (these are beings created by the various gods from divine energy itself). The gods knew that mortals would probably continue to make new gods thru belief and so this closing off of the Mortal Plane from any divine beings included a mechanism so that any new birthed gods would automatically be “born” in the Divine Plane.
It did not take long for mortals to follow the example set by their gods and holy wars began in the Mortal Plane. The holy wars were not simply or always about religion – “my god is better than your god”, although there was enough of that in it’s purest form, and some of the bloodiest and more terrible acts of destruction because of this. Politics, economics, personal grudges, etc were also mixed into many of the battles and wars and in some fair number of cases, the War of the Gods was simply an excuse to war for these other reasons. There were mortal factions of every kind amongst the races. Civil wars, clans and families were divided.
Mortal conflicts due to religion had of course also existed before the War of the Gods and this too was a point of conflict amongst the gods, although not quite to the level during this era, and was mainly the followers of the gods of Benevolence versus the followers of the gods of Malice. Now, just as the factions in the Divine Plane shifted, so did the factions in the Mortal Plane.
Some of the mortals warred as way for them to show, in their minds, devotion to their gods. Some death cults sprung up at this time. And of course, some number of mortals turned away from the gods all together as they thought the gods had abandoned them and/or caused or let happen this terrible time in the world with so much bloodshed and strife. Not long after the War when the gods were re-establishing their connection to mortals the welcome they received by some was quite cold: “It has been generations since there were gods and now they send us their prophets with their honeyed messages. Where were these gods and their chosen whilst our ancestors starved, or froze, or slaughtered one another in the name of the gods? It has been generations that we have lived without the gods and still here we stand. We needed not the gods to survive the trying times and we need not the gods and their chosen and their graced now. Turn them away and turn them out. Let us leave the gods that created the Great Ruin in the dusts of time where they belong.”
Those mortals that felt abandoned were not wrong. As the War went on the gods spent less time with the affairs of mortals and less contact with them. Early on in the War some mortals were told by their gods thru dreams and their gods’ mortal representatives (clerics and/or paladins) not to war with other mortals based on differences amongst the gods. Some. Some mortals, as time went on, did not heed their gods or their gods’ representatives and began to fight with the followers of other gods for the various above- mentioned reasons and others.
The longer the War went on, and the less the presence of the divine was felt, as the warring gods had surmised, new gods came into being as some mortals tried to fill the void. This mostly happened at the tribal/local to regional level. Most of this worship resulted in nothing, some did lead to some new gods being birthed in the Divine Plane, only to have some of these gods quickly killed. The gods that came to be and seemed to survive the War of the Gods are the ones that were birthed at the end of the War or soon thereafter.
Up Next: Treaty of the Divine Plane
