Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Old Gods
What happens to old gods when people no longer worship them ? Do they die, or sleep, or change ? Human history is filled with abandoned gods and derelict temples.
Some have become nothing but museum exhibits, like the gods of Sumer and the Hittites. Others were converted into the demons of their replacements. Zeus is a great example. His name started as Zeus to the Greeks; as the father of the gods, the Romans Latinised it as Zeus Pater/Deus Pater, which became Jupiter. But then the Christians turned Deus Pater in Dispater, one of the chief demons of Hell.
Some old gods have even nearly died out and then seen modern revivals (admittedly often based on fanciful made-up rites because the old ones are no longer remembered or socially acceptable). The Norse, Greek and Egyptian gods all fall into this category.
Tell me a story of old gods from your setting ! Which new gods replaced them, how and why ? Were they bought in by conquerors, or just a change in the way people lived ? What happened to the old gods ? Are their temples just old ruins, terrifying places of dark old evil, or have they been co-opted by the new gods ? Do the common people still worship them in secret ? Is there deliberate suppression, or has their worship just naturally died out ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.