Gods and Goddesses

[RiBurns]

I am updating my world and working on the pantheon. Any suggestions would be appreciated, like how many god/desses I should have, etc. Thanks.

 

[ElectricDragon]

Number of gods is, I find, a personal choice. I have played in worlds with seemingly limitless number of gods (Forgotten Realms) or almost none (beginning Dragonlance or Dark Sun). As well as personal worlds that contained only 3 gods and only a dozen gods. That said, I tend to like my worlds somewhere in between, enough gods to cover the domains that you want in your world; but not so many that no one (even religious scholars) can keep up with them all.

I like to have oppositional gods (vs. the player characters) fully represented so I can throw a shaman or witch doctor (terms from earlier editions, use Adept) into a village if needed or provide specifics of religious practices should infiltration of a religious order be necessary.

Needless to say, you need to have player character gods fully represented, too. Of course add War and Healing as well as any other concept that appeals to your players.

If you have no rping merchants, you really don't need a god of commerce unless the PC's are going to campaign against said god. Same with other concepts that your players avoid rping.

 

[Tinker]

I like lots of gods, though might not fully detail them all unless killing time. But can't believe in a setting with only adventurer stuff. Good inspiration in 2e complete priest's handbook, or an encyclopedia of mythology.

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[Greenfield]

There's an obvious difference between most of the game deities and "real" pantheons, like the Greeks, Egyptian, Norse or Celtic. The focus.

Looking at the standard deities in the DMG or other source books, they are focused on the alignment far more than their main aspects or domains. The domains are almost an afterthought.

Looking at mythologies from the real world, there's a depth to them, tales and legends that highlight who and what they are and what they're known for. With them it's the alignment that's the afterthought.

So my advice would be to emulate that: Decide on a King of the gods, a god of war, a god or goddess of the harvest, a god or goddess of the sea and so forth. Write a few tales and legends about heroes and their interactions with the gods.

Doing that will give the whole thing some meat, make them more than just option packets for PC clerics.

 

[Celebrim]

The advantage of having 'a thousand' gods is that you can always invent ones as needed. But it's much easier to develop a small tightly organized pantheon, and in particular you can take the time you saved not inventing gods to detail the ways the deities interact with the world and how they are worshipped.

The vast majority of invented pantheons are terrible. The best test you can have is whether the deities seem to be designed with Dungeons and Dragons classes primarily in mind. That is to say, is there a god of thieves, fighters, rangers, paladins, wizards, and so forth. If there is, it's probably a terrible pantheon. If you want an example of how not to do things, look at the Forgotten Realms pantheon.

Another common mistake is a polytheistic pantheon that is monotheistic in the way it relates to the world. That is to say, it thinks 'faith' is an important concept, has worshippers that 'love' the gods and gods that either love worshippers or demand their love or both, and most individuals in the society are functional monotheists with a 'patron deity'. Real polytheism looks nothing like that. Good examples of this are virtually any Hollywood movie with the Greek gods, particularly where Zeus is modeled basically after the Judeo-Christian God with another deity like Ares or Pluto playing the role of Satan. Greek religion was nothing like that.

There are two good examples of invented pantheons worth copying.

The first example is Green Ronin's 'The Book of the Righteous' by Aaron Loeb. It details a pantheon that is if I remember correctly 16 deities strong (12 good/neutral, and 4 evil) and spends most of its time detailing the way the deities are worshipped and in particular why anyone would actually worship them. It's probably the only example of believable polytheism that I've seen in a gaming supplement, and it works really well with D&D because it's designed to support D&D without being simply gamist in design.

The second example worth copying is Lois McMaster Bujold's 'Five Gods' pantheon from 'The Curse of Chalion' and 'Paladin of Souls'. She ends up undermining it in later books but her initial conception is IMO really strong, and she succeeds probably better than any other author in inventing deities that you can believe someone would actually worship as divine beings worthy of receiving worship.

Failing that, I'd suggest just copying the either the Greco-Roman pantheon or the Egyptian pantheon in every particular. There is an enormous amount of information available about them, and unlike the Hindu pantheon the religion described therein doesn't have a lot of active participants to offend with your portrayal. Just don't dumb down the pantheon by Christianizing it (which neither makes sense nor is it fair to Christians) or turning it in to a purely gamist affair.

If you want to invent your own, a good acquaintance with the above sources and real world polytheistic or animistic practices (that is, an academic acquaintance, by no means am I encouraging you to become a polytheist) should provide you plenty of inspiration and understanding for why polytheism was a very successful belief system for a very long time and why anyone would actually take it seriously.

 

[Celebrim]

There's an obvious difference between most of the game deities and "real" pantheons, like the Greeks, Egyptian, Norse or Celtic. The focus.

Looking at the standard deities in the DMG or other source books, they are focused on the alignment far more than their main aspects or domains. The domains are almost an afterthought.

Well, I'd say that there are a lot of obvious differences and while the difference you highlight is an important one, I don't think you highlight well exactly why it is important.

One assumption you will find in most game source books is that worshipers worship a deity that has their moral alignment. And that assumption makes absolutely no sense in polytheism. That assumption is actually rooted in familiarity with the Judeo-Christian religion, which has a single god that demands his worshipers behave according to his moral strictures. Rarely do you actually find anything that clear cut in polytheism. Instead, in polytheism worshippers worship the gods for all sorts of reasons and not just sincere devotion and admiration. For example, you might worship a god out of pure propitiation - you don't like the boss but it doesn't make sense to make the boss angry. You might worship a god out of pure self-interest. You might not like the god, but you want success in the area the god controls. You might worship the god communally, and in fact you almost certainly do. This is that god's feast day, so today you are a worshipper of that god just like everyone else. And the thing is, in polytheism you aren't dealing with 'selfish' gods that demand exclusive service, so that's all OK. Indeed, one of the more bizarre aspects of polytheism is service to a deity out of desire to thwart the deity. It's not so much worship as we understand the word, as acts of anti-devotion intended to undermine the gods power. For example, Egyptian polytheism featured big temples to deities of destruction and woe, but not because very many people wanted to see destruction and woe, but rather because there was a priesthood devoted to what we would call prayers (but what they would call spells) of ritually thwarting that deity. So every day the priests of Apep would chant spells of defeat to the statue of Apep to ensure Apep was perpetually defeated. The priests of Apep weren't serving Apep, but his enemy Ra. That's utterly bizarre from the standpoint of how religion is normally treated in D&D source books, which features whole societies strangely devoted to destruction and woe as things 'good' in themselves. But it's far from unusual. For example, in Sparta the principle deities people actually worshipped were Apollo and Athena. They had a temple to Ares, but in that temple Ares the statue (the idol being consider both a symbol of the deity and the deity himself) was bound in chains. Why? Because symbolically this prevented Ares leaving the city and helping their enemies. Consider how weird and unexpected that is if you've been trained with the expectations of most D&D source books, which would undoubtedly portray a city like Sparta as having a war deity as its patron deity and make the cult of that war deity function pretty much like the Catholic Church as reimagined with a Ares as its focus.

Basically, I hate the entire idea of a 'church' in a polytheistic setting, and about the only fault I find with 'The Book of the Righteous' is that it has one. Polytheism doesn't have 'churches'. It has cults (or often, something more like modern fraternal orders such as the elks or the masons) and typical members of society belong to or are initiated into several of them to varying degrees.

The problem with the alignment focus is that in polytheism, you generally don't consider it an immoral act to engage in devotion of some sort to a deity whose morals don't match your own. You don't necessarily compromise your virtue as a LG member of society to engage for a day in the rites of a CN deity of wine imbibing and revelry in and of itself. If you get drunk and transgress against the social order, that's a different matter, and you might not approve of the idea of a day where most people are transgressing against the social order. But the idea of a day where you relax and have a party even in the name of a CN deity in and of itself doesn't offend you. Fundamentally, in polytheism - unlike monotheism - there is no single deity that in and of itself is worthy of exclusive worship, nor does it make much sense for anyone to engage in the exclusive worship of a deity because no deity represents all aspects of human life and is capable of nurturing all those aspects.

This is radically different from monotheism. Yet, we have innumerable D&D source books that nominally describe polytheism and yet assume overtly or by implication that the normal practice of religion with respect to those deities is monotheistic. That is, they describe 'churches' that all seem like variations on Catholicism and bodies of believers that behave as if they had chosen this deity as their monotheistic focus. I think the notion of 'a patron deity' should be actively discouraged, otherwise you get a Sparta that worshippers Ares because of course it does.

 

[Tinker]

Very interesting line of thought Celebrim. I think I can use this, so thanks very much.
One quibble - in a society where there is an institutionalised festival of chaotic revelry when normal rules are suspended, I'd sort of think that it would be perfectly lawful (in the sense of personal alignment, not just non-crime) to engage in it fully.

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[Tinker]

I think the extent to which polytheistic cults might evolve in the direction of the mediaeval church in a universe where monotheism never intervenes is a really interesting question. Particularly since I am brewing a setting with a Roman-like empire that declined and recovered. I will need to do more research on when pagan cults were like as organisations.

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[Celebrim]

Very interesting line of thought Celebrim. I think I can use this, so thanks very much.
One quibble - in a society where there is an institutionalised festival of chaotic revelry when normal rules are suspended, I'd sort of think that it would be perfectly lawful (in the sense of personal alignment, not just non-crime) to engage in it fully.

I agree with your quibble but I'm concerned regarding the details. Most such festivals relax the normal rules of social propriety, but they don't fully abridge them. For example, marriage vows are generally taken to still be in effect, and you can't get away with murder just because it's the festival of revelry. I think a lawful person's relationship to such a festival day would be characteristically complex.

 

[Tinker]

Very true - you've got to have rules, even about breaking the rules.

For example, marriage vows are generally taken to still be in effect...

Some say what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas.