I am Koracotl, Forgotten Toltec God of medicine and healing. One day, I shall return.

One day, I shall return. That’s the phase you will repeat over and over again as a Dead God. It gives you hope. Sometimes, a little hope is all you need to go through with your day-to-day life. Sometimes, all the hope in the world isn’t enough.

Originally, we were all real Gods. We were worshipped by Sumerians. We were worshipped in Babylonia. We were worshiped in the dark parts of Africa and South America. The early peoples of North America. The Druids of Europe. Scores of others. But since our glory days, we have been cast aside as false or just plain forgotten. With no faith left in our power, we come here through a painfully long slumber.

They call us the Dead Gods. And however depressing it is, we are Dead, in a way. Of course, it is a purely mortal concept that life stops at death. There is hope- if they begin worshiping us again in the Waking World, we’ll get a chance to return. And when cometh Ragnarok, the end of the world, we will walk the Earth again as the Gods we were. And are.

When we come to the Dreaming, we fall into a deep coma-like sleep. This sleep can last thousands of years if we have no will to come back. When we finally wake up, we are powerless husks of our old selves and the world has changed so much we doubt they’ll ever worship us again. It’s tragic, really. We’ve serve our purpose, and the Dreaming is like the waiting room before we get our power again. But that doesn’t mean we’re passive residents here, we avidly participate in the politics and drama of the Dreaming, we just don’t feel it’s our eventual cause.

We get along fairly well with the Visions, as they do a good job of taking care of us until we can return to our full power. No specific problem with the Fae either; they’ve lost their homeland too. The Lost Souls are a sad people I don’t entirely understand, but we, of all people, can sympathize with wanderers who haven’t reached their goal.

Now the trouble with us is that we’re pretty easy to kill while we’re on the Dreaming. If you cut us with either a normal weapon or a spiritual weapon, it challenges our power, decreasing our Faith. Once all our Faith is gone, we disappear from the Dreaming to float through the Void of nonexistence. Our curse is that we always come back.

Every one of us has an Altar, somewhere. It could be an elaborate temple or just a spot in the woods. It’s a good idea to hide your altar from everyone except your close allies, as if someone knows where your Altar is, they have a certain degree of power over you- they can cut you back out of the Dreaming when you materialize, they can ambush you when you are being worshipped, and they can sure-as-Ragnarok make you wish you could move the damn thing.

That’s another trouble with us all our power comes from the Faith that people have in us. In order to gain more, we need people to come to our altar and worship us for a while. It’s a good idea to create a Verse that your followers can repeat over and over again to glorify and praise of your might, wisdom, power, et cetera. Most of our powers do not serve ourselves, but our followers, creating resources, protecting them from combat, that sort of thing. But this works out because without our followers, we are nothing.

So when we wake up on the Dreaming we find that we have fallen into one of three types: War, Love, and Harvest. The Dreaming grants us abilities based on our type. War Gods can make wonderful weapons and will lead us in battle if necessary. Love Gods can incite peace and stop fights in the snap of a finger. Gods of the Harvest can create food, or call Hunts where their allies are blessed with Holy Might during the full moon or new moon.