> If the requirement for a Great God is
> a) aspects
> b) one of the cornerstones of a large community
>
> then Great Gods can die/go away/become reduced.
Oddly enough, Greg and I had a conversation that touches on this point over the last week. I'll try to summarize the relevant parts, but will probably get it partially wrong.
There has been lots of argument, which I won't re-parse, about whether a great god is defined by (a) and/or (b) above or by some connection to the runes. Suffice it to say that at least some of the entities that you are talking about as great gods have a connection to what we used to consider a rune. Examples: Orlanth to Storm/Air, Humakt to Death/Separation. Typically, but not necessarily universally, these gods will have a secret that, if learned, removes the character from play.
I asked Greg whether it would be true that these types of gods can never pop out of existence due to a lack of worshippers. I think Greg said yes, that is true. I'm not sure that he wholly agreed that entities that could die off are divided from those that could not by the lack of a double-rune connection (i.e., that all entities lacking a double-rune connection can die off). He agreed that at least some entities can die or dissolve, and that some cannot, but I think he may have wanted to reserve the possibility of some types of entities that are not sufficiently connected to a rune, but nonetheless cannot die off.
(Also, I should note that I am using "double-rune connection here very loosely. We used lots of different phrases for the concept and never defined it specifically. "Holder of the rune" was another phrase.)
Defiant entities might be in this hypothetical class, I suppose, as might some of the common magic types, which seem to hang around even without many worshippers. And trickster and shaman might be things that cannot die off no matter what. Anyway, I did not press him on whether that class existed or who might be in it. This is just my speculation.
I also asked him whether the double-rune connection is a "transcendant" relationship of some sort. He said definitely not. The double-rune connection is a connection to the immaterial, which is one of the non-transcendant worlds (material, immaterial, and transcendant are the three--with transcendant being all that is neither material nor immaterial).
However, the double-rune gods can be a doorway to the transcendant in some way that I don't fully understand. The example is, I think, that a Humakti could transcend the material world through Death, but would still have to transcend immaterial Death itself. And then he would have to transcend the desire to reach transcendance. One could probably achieve the same thing using "this rock right here", since one ultimately has to transcend everything anyway. Greg seemed to agree with this. My further speculation: perhaps the paths through the first part are easier with the double-rune gods for some reason--maybe because the purity of their being allows one to transcend anything other than that purity, though I would think that makes the step of transcending that purity harder.
Anyway, that's what we talked about. YGMV. Mine does.
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