Help with a homebrew pantheon

[Gray Lensman]

If there are 9 Alignments, and I am going to have only nine gods in the pantheon (1 for each AL), which alignment would YOU say that the Creator God is?

 

[Celebrim]

That's a decision that only you the GM can make, and it's a very important decision because it says something about the nature of the universe and also to a certain extent whose philosophy is right.

For example, if you make your creator god Lawful, then you are saying essentially that this particular universe was intended to be orderly and so any randomness and any disorder in it is actually a defect in the universe that probably should be removed. If your make your creator god Good, then you are saying that things like Hope, Justice, and Love are real things and that the universe was meant to be ruled by these things. If on the other hand you make your creator god Evil, then you are saying that hope, justice, and love are lies and things that don't exist and have no tangible reality - grind the universe up into its finest particle and you'll never find a single grain of love or justice. The reality of that world is the reality of horror, pain, suffering, and it's possibly - owing to its origin - not a world that is redeemable. If you make the creator god Chaos, then you are saying that all meaning is created, the only purpose that can exist is one you set for yourself, and that all truth is relative, and that the source of all wrongness is believing otherwise.

If you make your creator God true neutral, then the right answer is that there is neither good, nor evil, nor chaos, nor law, but all these things are necessary and wrong only in immoderation. Good and evil, light and dark, are just two sides of the same coin. One can't exist without the other.

For this reason, I prefer in my own homebrew setting to have the creator god mysterious and unrevealed, and to keep my opinions regarding the nature of that creator god private. In this way, the philosophical debates that arise among the lesser gods of his creation, are not ones that can easily be resolved, and mortals can disagree over what the truth is.

So I'd prefer to have 9 gods in a pantheon that did not know their creator, and even if they had created everything else after that, they still would lack complete authority. In such a situation, each probably would imagine that their creator was like themselves. The evil god would think he's justified in his evil, because his creator abandoned him. The good god would think that he's justified in his good, because clearly the creator was a creator like himself but of greater stature. The neutral god would think that clearly the creator was neutral, else he wouldn't have created a world with the possibility of both good and evil. The chaotic would think that this is all nonsense, since clearly everything happened by chance and its probably that there is no creator god. The lawful would think that clearly this all had a purpose.

If I had to pick one, I'd pick True Neutral - a good of judgment, destiny, and fate. Then I'd create a cosmology that left open the possibility of transformation, with the widely held belief that one day the TN god would settle the quarrels among the other gods, pass judgement, and set one over the others as the one whose ways had been right.

 

[Gray Lensman]

@Celebrim I think I agree with everything you said. Hmm... Okay, so now I stand at a Creator (lets just make him/her about as much a mystery to the other gods as he/she is to mortals).

If I leave True Neutral to the God/Goddess of Nature (logical), then that leaves 8:

Lawful Good = Law, Protection
Neutral Good = Healing, Fertility, Crops, Animal Husbandry
Chaotic Good = Travel, Bards
Lawful Neutral = War, Battle, Rogues
Good Neutral =
Chaotic Evil =
Neutral Evil = Death, Disease
Lawful Evil = The Destroyer

Hmm... More to ponder, TY

 

[Celebrim]

If I leave True Neutral to the God/Goddess of Nature (logical), then that leaves 8:

Lawful Good = Law, Protection
Neutral Good = Healing, Fertility, Crops, Animal Husbandry
Chaotic Good = Travel, Bards
Lawful Neutral = War, Battle, Rogues
Good Neutral =
Chaotic Evil =
Neutral Evil = Death, Disease
Lawful Evil = The Destroyer

Hmm... More to ponder, TY

If you only have 9 deities in your pantheon, your deities will need to be much broader than that.

For example, at least one lawful has to be the deity of all of the following: Submission, Tradition, Rhetoric, Solemnity, Sobriety, Reason, Cleanliness, Technology, Construction, Planning, Writing, Law, Contracts, Intuition, Lucidity, Supervision, Redaction, Regulation, Profit, Labor, Stability, Agreement, Rulership, Predictability, Durability, Logic, Justice, Retribution, Government, Honor, Oaths, Seasons, Fate, Slavery, Servitude and so on and so on.

Also, Lawful Evil more captures the idea of The Assimilator or The Enslaver, than it does the destroyer. Lawful Evil doesn't prefer that you stop existing. Lawful Evil prefers you are its slave, and it prefers slaves that are unhappy and afraid and suffering for its happiness. The needs of the many outweigh the good of anyone.

My advice is to get an old fashioned paper theasaurus and flip through the book examining the headings. For each heading, assign the idea it encapsulates to the alignment you think best relates to that idea. In the case of something very broad like 'war', you might need to split it up into to separate ideas like 'war' and 'protection'. So you'd have a war god that embodies the idea of war to protect the group from enemies - a knightly war god - and a god that embodies wars horror and conflict. War is chaos, but how people respond to it is often highly ordered. Eventually you'll end up with 50 or so words in each box. Then try to imagine what the god that embodies each box is like. The Greek Olympians is one approach to that, creating lots of stories about the gods and thus giving them very diverse spheres of influence based on the stories - Artemis is goddess of the moon, hunting, young girls, childbirth, virgins, marketplaces, trees that grow near water, untamed wildeness, untamed anything, and a bunch of other stuff. Another approach is the one you see in Hinduism, to try to draw a being that is simultaneously representing all these things by way of multiple heads and multiple arms, each performing a task related to one of its spheres of influence.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm gonna go the opposite direction, for a moment. The gods don't need to be that well defined. Also, not every aspect of a thing needs a god that cares about it.

There doesnt need to be a a god of rhetoric or sobriety at all, for instance. Maybe one guy goes to the lawful good guy for rhetoric, while another goes to the more creative chaotic good god. Both make sense.

Same deal with slavery, only look to evil deities here.

Submission is complex, and not always about order.

Instead, consider gods that don't so much have set in stone domains over which they rule as alignments they vaguely embody. The good god is good, not the divine governor of love and hope and compassion. Her clergy have domains they focus on within the vague umbrella of Good, and her champions take oaths that promote good, but there is no goddess of hope, because hope comes in so many forms and guises, as does love, and mercy, and wrath, and war.

The cleric of the Chaotic Good goddess may be a cleric of hope, and so might the cleric of Chaotic Evil, who whispers complacent thoughts into the hearts of men. See: the complexity and changing nature of the idea of Hope in Ancient Greece through the centuries. Was it left in Pandoras Box as a guard against the evils, or was it the most insidious of the evils things, or was it both?

Also as to which god created the universe, why just one of them? does the universe have only one nature? Or does it contain multitudes? Are the evil gods abominations or are they an inherent part of the cosmos just like the gods of good?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Another thought in the creation thing.

What if, in the time before time, there was endless, formless energy, hot and thick with potential, filling the void. From that primordial storm came voices. First one, and then many, and then ALL. Every voice sang the song of creation, which begins with a single word. Be.

And they were.

Stars formed, and worlds, and the greatest voices became the Nine, and others became worlds and stars, and then dragons and Giants and then the mortal races and the beasts and monsters and trees and other things we all know, and many more things besides. And so the cosmos was formed, and stuff blah blah blah.

 

[Gray Lensman]

If you only have 9 deities in your pantheon, your deities will need to be much broader than that.

I agree to a point, but for now I am looking for broad strokes, the pinstriping can come after I paint the flames.

I'm gonna go the opposite direction, for a moment. The gods don't need to be that well defined. Also, not every aspect of a thing needs a god that cares about it......Also as to which god created the universe, why just one of them? does the universe have only one nature? Or does it contain multitudes? Are the evil gods abominations or are they an inherent part of the cosmos just like the gods of good?

I agree with the first part, the second part leads into a larger pantheon (which it seems I may not be able to avoid).

Another thought in the creation thing.

What if, in the time before time, there was endless, formless energy, hot and thick with potential, filling the void. From that primordial storm came voices. First one, and then many, and then ALL. Every voice sang the song of creation, which begins with a single word. Be.

And they were.

Stars formed, and worlds, and the greatest voices became the Nine, and others became worlds and stars, and then dragons and Giants and then the mortal races and the beasts and monsters and trees and other things we all know, and many more things besides. And so the cosmos was formed, and stuff blah blah blah.

That is really good. Okay, so much for only nine gods. I am going to lock in stone part of it right now;

The [greater deities] Creator God and the Goddess of Nature (whom he also created) had many children, [lesser deities] two (male and female) for each of the humanoid races and for certain others (like dragons). There was much breeding amongst different combinations of the children, from which many [demigods]deities of different aspects came about.

I think this will let me expand the pantheon as needed to cover whichever aspects I need to get covered at the time, while keeping the initial workload down some.

Now onto the next idea for religion/faith in the campaign world. But that is for a different thread.

(damn, I think I typed this whole post three times, I have either had too much coffee this morning or just developed a bad case of fat fingers ;{).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I agree to a point, but for now I am looking for broad strokes, the pinstriping can come after I paint the flames.



I agree with the first part, the second part leads into a larger pantheon (which it seems I may not be able to avoid).



That is really good. Okay, so much for only nine gods. I am going to lock in stone part of it right now;

The [greater deities] Creator God and the Goddess of Nature (whom he also created) had many children, [lesser deities] two (male and female) for each of the humanoid races and for certain others (like dragons). There was much breeding amongst different combinations of the children, from which many [demigods]deities of different aspects came about.

I think this will let me expand the pantheon as needed to cover whichever aspects I need to get covered at the time, while keeping the initial workload down some.

Now onto the next idea for religion/faith in the campaign world. But that is for a different thread.

(damn, I think I typed this whole post three times, I have either had too much coffee this morning or just developed a bad case of fat fingers ;{).

Thanks! I'm not sure it requires more gods, though. I think you could easily, instead, just not have the 9 gods be very specific. Like I said, the cleric may have the Light Domain, but that cleric calls upon The Nine, not a singular god of light.

Another fun fun option would be to include Patron Angels, or exarchs, or semi-deified saints, etc. so, a cleric of Saint Nicholas and a cleric of Saint Michael both serve the gods of good, but have different patron saints they follow and draw inspiration from.

Either way, I really like the initial idea you had of there only being 1 god per alignment.

And D for the creation thing, again I think the fun thing might be that there isn't a creation god, specifically. Or the Chaotic good god might be A creator, but no one being is The creator. Rather, literally all beings sang creation into existence, and the gods were the greatest voices in that song of creation, and took up divine places in the cosmology as it formed.

I do do like your take to, I just wanted to clarify. ��

The main aim point is, have fun with it, and make a world you're excited about.

 

[Gray Lensman]

@doctorbadwolf 1st Time I have ever taken a backstab at creating a world from scratch. things will probably change several times before I get it all in a package I am happy with. Going to the library tomorrow to grab some mythology books...oh joy, more things to read :{. And here I thought that this would be one of the easier parts...sigh.

Still having fat finger problems, I guess ;{

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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