The gods exist. What kind of beings they are, and how they relate to dungeon minds, remains disputed—even within their own religious institutions. People can worship a god, receive its help, and disagree about what makes it divine.
Ordinary religion
Most people worship according to need and see little difficulty in approaching several gods. A farmer leaves grain at a river shrine, asks a weather saint for dry skies, and pays a funeral priest when a child dies. Soldiers collect survival charms. Merchants invoke honest scales before attempting profitable dishonesty. Few feel they must reconcile the whole pantheon before asking for help.
Colleges and synods argue over the nature of divinity. At a mine shrine, the immediate question is whether the old prayer still keeps the roof up.
Celestial gods
Celestial gods are associated with domains such as justice, war, commerce, death, love, knowledge, kingship, storms, and craft. Their reach is less tied to particular places than that of dungeon minds.
Worship and ritual strengthen these gods. So do the symbols associated with them and the continuity of the institutions that serve them. The dispute concerns how far this dependence goes. Churches teach that their gods existed before anyone worshipped them. Some explanations instead allow that worship might stabilize a divine being, or even bring one into existence. Neither possibility is conclusively settled, and both threaten established doctrine.
Chthonic gods
Chthonic gods are spirits of mountains, rivers, forests, seas, caverns, and volcanoes. Often, an ecological system has awakened into a mind, and people have come to know it through religious relationships.
Elven theology has long made room for minds of this kind. Dwarven priests object when scholars classify an honoured god as a “dungeon” and treat it as a specimen. To those priests, discovering such a mind means recognizing another kind of person.
Ascended gods
Some beings become gods. Saints, ancestral rulers, heroes, archmages, and great monsters occasionally establish divine identities that endure.
One possible explanation depends on the idea that a magical pattern, if it persists with enough continuity, can acquire agency. On that account, ascension may occur when a symbolic pattern becomes able to sustain itself across minds and mana. This is a proposed explanation, not a settled mechanism.
Divine politics
Disputes about gods also divide institutions with money and influence. Forge temples are split over dreams of dark furnaces amid reports of pain under the mountains. Commerce cults fund the industrial reading of these matters while cheaper power fills their treasuries.
Protest, repression, and border fighting bring further offerings to the war gods. A revelation reaches political life through the priesthood that publishes it; that institution is part of how the revelation enters the dispute.