Where do the gods of your setting come from? Were they always

>>51110721
The gods in my setting are immortal high level PCs [of the 'doesn't die of old age' variety], many of whom serve as thearchs of the various nations of the setting.

They are all either the descendants of pre-existing [and possibly deceased] gods, or the result of contact with a magical mineral that is also responsible for sentience among the civilized races.

Essentially the magic gemstones fell among various animals, and the first uplifted became the first gods [apes became men, bulls minotaurs, etc]. The descendants of these gods became the later generations of gods or the sentient races.

Some gods find more of the mineral [or exploit it later] and thus originate from mortals, making them akin to the first generation of gods [there is no practical difference in power between a god born of a god, and a mortal who uses the gemstones to ascend]

>>51110721
Sentient Thought that interacted with the Astral plane when it formed from the fission-stuffs of Old ones passing through, resulting in sentient energy forms were chaotic, cruel and evil at first, but then mellowed out with the the usual story.

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Some were created by the creators of whatever power formed the plane they inhabit.
Others arose naturally as manifestations of aether and the collective unconscious of mortals filtered mana into something resembling sentience. With time, this sentience-enriched mana and raw aether combined into something resembling a deity. This deity absorbed its less able peers, and interfered with mortal lives in a way which led them to worship it. this worship imbued the nascent god with more sentience-infused, emotively aligned mana. After time, this feedback loop caused the amorphous mass of sentience and emotion and power to coalesce into something almost alive - a god.
Of course, many planes don't have the aetheric bleedthrough necessary for the primitive deities to form. Instead, minor nature elementals and spirits will crop up, fed by the ambient mana. Sometimes these minor spirits will become the focus of a cult, but even then , the worship they receive isn't enough for them to ascend.

>>51110721
Long story short, Divinities spring from ideas and concepts that are conceived by mortals. They then perpetuate those thoughts in a hope that it will somehow make the Creator wake up from an eternal trance and destroy everything because they hate it all.

>>51110721

Sort of a long story.
To make it short, Gods are ascended, not created.
What existed before them, is primordial chaos and various avatars of existence.
While it might sound like it downplays the gods a lot, it actually doesn't: this is because existence keeps crumbling and reshaping itself into greater forms, and gods can survive to the crumble of existence, with the result that to each new creation they improve more and more their powers and skill. It's the role of gods, to shape reality, and maintain it from crumbling.
To point in a quick succession, first of all was only chaos. Then, came an 1-dimensional dimension that crumbled almost immediatedly. Then came a 2-dimensional existence that lasted the span of some years, but eventually crumbled and showed the first forms of non-complex life. This phase kept going for an unknown amount of times, until a sentient existence came out of it, and became the first god. It allowed to create an existence in 3 dimensions. This existence lasted a very long time, but was devoid of magic. More gods came around, and created a very weak version of it in the next existence. After an overload of magic done by one of the Avatars that brought the existence to an early end, came around this existence, with much greater powers and complexity with the introduction of several material planes.
The world thanks to the gods has been lasting for billions of years so far.

>>51110721
>Where do the gods of your setting come from?
They reside in the outer layer of reality (if you imagine the world like a bubble, people live inside it, gods live in the liquid film, this is the best analogy I could come up with) which is also the dream world
>Were they always around, or did something make them?
It's complicated, when they arrived they created order out of primordial chaos, as such time memory exists of before them as time wasn't a thing until they made it a thing
>What allows them to do divine magic and other such godly things?
Existing on the outer layer of reality means they are directly in-between the material world and the primordial chaos (outside the 'bubble' mentioned earlier), they can take this aether and make just about anything out of it and then put that anything into the material world

The gods of each world are he high level pcs and BBEG from the last world, it's a never ending cycle