Musing: Gods Pt. 2 - The Dark Details

I mentioned in the last post a bunch of bits I needed explain further in this post, so, here's this post... still with me? Good!

I mentioned that the gods were quite content to let people slaughter one another in their name, even if the two sides are actually worshiping the same god. That has a lot to do about what a god gains by getting a soul sent to him.
Like many fantasy worlds, when an intelligent creature dies in Deminar, its soul separates from the body. From there, a courier from the Goddess of Death (or the Goddess herself if its a particularly important chap or she's just in the mood) comes to escort the soul to the domain of whichever god the person worshiped most in life or, whichever god has a aspect most closely attached to how that person lived his life. Here's where our afterlife differs pretty majorly though, once the soul gets to the proper domain it's reverted into the stuff that makes up the domain and is added to the god's homeland. In essence, a worshiper becomes the building block of a god's domain.
The god uses the soul stuff to grow out the size of his domain, craft all the things that exist on the domain, erect any defenses along the border, create their versions of angels or demons to go spy and fight against the servants of the other gods, make some new lawn furniture. Whatever the deity wants. Death in the game is pretty permanent, you only have so much time to bring a person back to life (the time it takes to get a soul to the proper domain, though this can take a while, as the Goddess has to figure out the right domain to send each soul to and make sure it gets there, the queue can get long, especially during wars) and you certainly won't run into the afterlife version of an old friend on a god's domain years later. There are cases where perhaps a god will let a soul retain its mortal memories before forging it into a herald or something similar to help spread the word of that god, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Having lots of souls, which means lots of soul stuff, is important so that the gods can grow their domains, sabotage the other gods, and shore up their defenses against their rivals. The gods are constantly jockeying for power and a god is the only thing that can kill another god (though it's not easy even then), so they can be very wary of one another as well.

So why not go down and slaughter all the faithful to build up a huge domain and launch an unsuspecting attack on all the other gods? Well, it's complicated, but I'll try to explain.
Firstly, the gods made a pact a long time ago that no fully divine being was allowed down on Deminar personally anymore and when gods make pacts signed in divine blood and what not, they must be followed. Second, you want worshipers or else you can die.

I mentioned that anyone can become a god and that's because that is how the divine nature of Deminar works. Worship equals divinity, and, with enough followers, everyone has the potential to become a deity. It all depends on how many followers you have. Sure, many adventurers are damn near worshiped in the towns they save from an evil menace, but that does spell divinity. At best, they might have a little more luck then the average person, but they're certainly not passing on into the domains of the gods, you need scores of people for that to happen.
The major gods, the ones that have been around since before any species rose to power on Deminar snagged the major aspects that would guarantee lots of worship, major concepts like Good and Evil, the various Seasons, Weather patterns, things like Fire and Water, things lots of different folk would pray for, and while they may just worship one of the several aspects a god represents, that's still worship and that grants power. The lesser gods, ones that were either mortals on Deminar at one time, or an outsider that somehow got linked to a certain aspect and worshiped, have a ton of followers, but not nearly as many as the major gods. The lesser gods sometimes take over an aspect held by a major god, a person or being might be linked to warfare enough that he becomes the god of war, stripping that aspect from the major god that held it. These lesser gods don't usually have a domain of their own, but instead, live on a domain of the major god that the lesser god would get along with the most, acting as a general in the greater gods army and helping to increase the major god's domain by adding the soul stuff of the lesser god's followers.
That doesn't mean a lesser god can't go out and make his own domain, but that domain is generally very small compared to the major gods and easily taken out by a major god. In fact, many major gods will kill an unprotected lesser god and destroy his domain, then take on the role of that lesser god so that followers are funneled into his domain. So why keep lesser gods around at all? Why not invite them into your domain, then slaughter them to take over their followers? One, do that enough and the lesser gods may join together to take out a major god as a threat and two, having lesser gods around as high end cannon fodder in case your domain is attacked is always a good idea.
So the best way to weaken a god, so that you can take over his aspects and grow stronger, would be to lessen his worship on Deminar. The flip side is you can't do this by having your faithful go out and slaughter your rival's faithful, because doing so only makes the rival's domain stronger, and sometimes slaying faithful can actually make the faith stronger. So it's a delicate balance of keeping a rival's worship base low, while not building his domain through deaths, all the while keeping a good balance of living worshipers for power and dead one for domain building.

As you can no doubt tell, the realm of the gods is very political, with everyone thinking several steps ahead and using all manner of underhanded tricks, backstabs, alliances, betrayals, and backdoor deals to secure their own power and crush everyone elses.