From Candlekeep to Celestia: A Supplement for God-Touched Heroes

How does one bring life to the gods of your world? A new tome aims to answer that question with a series of quests that any DM telling stories in the Forgotten Realms can use. We sat down with the author of that supplement to talk about how to make that book exciting.

The gods of fantasy are fickle creatures. While classic settings like the Forgotten Realms provide detailed and intricate lore around who and what the gods are, it’s not always clear how players can interact with them. What can you do to please them? Or better yet, what can you when you anger them?

This is the core premise behind the Book of Divine Initiations, a new supplemental tome about how one might perform tasks to help fix one's relationship with the Forgotten Realms gods.  The book contains several quests and ideas for story arcs involving twenty Forgotten Realms gods, from the evil drow goddess Lolth to the righteous god, Tyr. 

According to author Morgan Eilish, the book came to exist after a series of complicated in-character screw-ups. A rogue in one of her campaigns decided to draw cards from the Deck of Many Things. The Deck, for those unfamiliar, is a potent magical item that can give players random blessings or curses based on what cards they draw. Two of the cards that the rogue drew ended up cursing them in a way that only the gods could fix. So the rogue had to find a god whom they could appease and ask for help. Eilish devised a set of tasks for the rogue to fulfill, which eventually became the Book's spark.

“As somebody who plays a cleric, it winds up being a background to whatever else is going on most of the time in the story,” Eilish said. “And I would like, especially when I'm playing a cleric, to have my character's religion be more involved.”

Eilish recruited nine other writers to help her out. They divided the twenty gods among themselves, with no particular focus on specific pantheons. Each author was simply told to choose their favorite of the 54 gods in the Forgotten Realms and develop story beats exploring some themes.

For Eilish, it was a chance to explore the depth of history around a lot of the gods in the Forgotten Realms setting, since that is the core setting promoted by WOTC. The lore around these gods hasn’t been updated since 3.5 with Faiths and Pantheons, a volume dedicated to the gods and their servants. The 2014 and 2024 rules do offer details on the gods, but WOTC has moved away from focusing on singular groups of deities and instead providing basic tools for DMs to use as they see fit with recent texts. The upcoming Forgotten Realms player and setting books might expand on the lore of the Forgotten Realms gods, but Eilish isn’t concerned about that contradicting the work they’ve done. If the company is inclined, she’d love to see more on the gods’ lore from WOTC.

The book contains ideas for tasks and errands one might perform to serve a deity. These could be hunting down agents of a rival god, freeing a frozen village, bringing a murderous Bhaalspawn to justice or stopping wildfires. Many are detailed enough to spark a side quest and may even intertwine with other stories.

But the one element it might help bring to life is how the gods exist in the fantasy. “And if you've got a fantasy setting where the gods are real, nobody's questioning if the gods are real. If that's the case, I feel they should have more presence than most of the books. This book helps bring them to life and show how their presence might influence everyday life.”

Thanks to Morgan Eilish for sitting down to talk about The Book of Divine Initiations. You can get a copy of the book on the DM Guild Website.

Quick Correction: we named Ilmater as one of the gods featured in the book. They are not included. Tyr, on the other hand, i