Designing the Perfect Gods for Your Campaign

[Nlogue]

I love designing gods for my games. It's my favorite aspect of home-brewing, and I think, one of the most important elements of any good campaign.

How do you design your gods? What makes a god really exciting and interesting in adventures? Go with existing pantheon from the real world, make em up, or mix it up with both?

I just posted about this topic on my blog here: Designing Gods

BE WARNED: There is an illustration of Pele from Dark Vistas #1: Razor Coast up on the post that is potentially Not Safe For Work (if you consider some of the goodness from the Old School Deities and Demigods NSFW that is).

 

[WhatGravitas]

Cool stuff, thanks for putting it up!

Cheers, LT.

 

[robconley]

How do you design your gods? What makes a god really exciting and interesting in adventures? Go with existing pantheon from the real world, make em up, or mix it up with both?

I design the religion not the god as that what the players are going to be dealing with. The philosphy, hierarchy, rituals, special powers and so on.

Any mythology starts out as a paragraph and as I add the above elements I can expand the mythology to explain it.

Most people do it backwards in what I call the dieties and demigods approach. They focus on the god as a NPC as a interact with. But when you look at when they play there is very little interaction with the dieties but a lot with their flunkies (priests) and followers. Again spend your time making interesting religions not interesting deities as that what you going to be using in play.

 

[Desdichado]

Lately, I have a look at the demon lords and other archfiends, change the names up a little bit so that they're different yet transparent to folks who know their demon lords, and say those are the gods.

Then again, I'm notorious for my rather "dark" take on fantasy.

EDIT: HOLY CRAP! That WAR image of the shark guy attacking that pirate girl is really snappy. I wish he'd hurry up and update his online gallery already; he's getting better and better all the time and his most recent works are hard to find as online images nowadays.

And he doesn't sell prints of his work online either.

 

[thundershot]

Yeah, I LOVE the Shark guy vs. the pirate lady.... I'd love to have that as a lithograph...

 

[Woas]

Hmm...

I just let the players that want to have religion part of their character's field of interest make those details themselves. Saves me a lot of time as GM to focus on a better game and the player feels good about contributing.

 

[Nlogue]

I design the religion not the god as that what the players are going to be dealing with. The philosphy, hierarchy, rituals, special powers and so on.

Any mythology starts out as a paragraph and as I add the above elements I can expand the mythology to explain it.

Most people do it backwards in what I call the dieties and demigods approach. They focus on the god as a NPC as a interact with. But when you look at when they play there is very little interaction with the dieties but a lot with their flunkies (priests) and followers. Again spend your time making interesting religions not interesting deities as that what you going to be using in play.

This is a pretty cool approach and I often employ a similar bent. The Dajobas indulgence started off as just the first italicized paragraph (an origin myth) and grew from it. You can read this paragraph on the preview of the Indulgence here: Indulgences

click on the Dajobas indulgence and you should get a bigger image of the first page.

Yeah, working from the religion can often reveal more interesting bits about the god.

 

[Mallus]

First off, nice art!

Now... my friend John and I are trying a less-is-more approach when it come to religion for our groups new homebrew. Just a paragraph or two describing the mystery cults found in the campaign's base city. A little local color that the DM can expand on as needed. Such as...

The Eroded God is an enormous figure of carven stone, its features worn away long before it came staggering up out of the surf. It can't actually speak in anything other than a unintelligible mumble, but the priesthood will happily translate for a modest fee. It's worked a number of minor miracles over the years (curing the sick, calling down bolts from the blue, and such-like), but it has a difficult time staying focused on such tasks. By and large it is content to set in its temple, listening to music and watching scantily-clad women dance, making the occasional prophecy or pronouncement. Or what is assumed to be such.

The Cult of That-Which-Is-Not worships a Sphere of Annihilation, which is either a path to paradise or a one-way ticket off the wheel of existence entirely.

The Dog makes its home in an abandoned temple. An enormous hound, the size of a war-horse, it's apparently immortal (some 200 years old now) and virtually unkillable (as testified by the number of now dead folk who have tried). It wanders throughout the building, never showing any particular signs of more-than-canine intelligence, and will occasionally accept gifts of food from petitioners. Those whose offering are accepted find themselves receiving a small blessing of some sort -- luck in love, recovery from illness, a sudden windfall.

The Dog is served by a small and fanatical priesthood, who follow it about and clean up after it. They make a small living for themselves selling its droppings in the Five Fathoms Market, where buyers assume that the crap of a Dog that might be a God *has* to be worth something. If nothing else, it makes excellent fertilizer.

 

[Nlogue]

Whoa Malius...those are all intensely awesome. I love the Dog and the Eroded God especially. Great stuff! Consider them Yoinked for my home game!

Edit: The less is more approach is a great choice. I totally riffed on this in Mysteries of the Razor Sea (one of the Indulgences at Sinister). The mini-adventure in there "Tale of the Seabear" has a great rancorous thought-long-dead god as its centerpiece...literally.

 

[Desdichado]

Wow. One thing that I miss from hanging around Circvs Maximvs a lot more than ENWorld is all these cool Mallus ideas. Those are friggin' awesome.

I've been, for a number of years now, on a bit of a low magic kick, and gods interfering directly with humanity is antethetical to that vibe, so my gods are 1) not really gods in the traditional sense, although who's to say who's a god and who's not after all? and 2) very distant; PC's relate to their religions, not to the gods themselves.

So, like I said before, I've thrown up demon lords as gods before, but that's really more of an in-joke and to set the tone rather than because demon lords are actually rampaging about through my campaign settings.