D&D 5E What's your favourite pantheon?

[Voadam]

I find it striking how much love there is for the Forgotten Realms pantheon and the Dawn War pantheon given the similarity in how they were built, i.e. pull gods from various fictional and real world myths and either rename them or just use them as-is. And then create a couple new ones for the heck of it. Don't believe me?
. . .
Forgotten Realms
Tyr = Norse
Ilmater = Finnish
Mielikki = Finnish
Loviatar = Finnish
Oghma = Finnish
Shar = Hel, renamed
Silvanus = Celtic
Tempus = Ares, renamed
Sune = Aphrodite, renamed
Milil = Apollo, renamed
Chauntea = Demeter/Ceres, renamed
Tymora = Tyche, renamed

And so on. As an aside, I'm pretty sure Ed just plucked the Finnish gods straight from Deities & Demigods.

Pretty close on your list.

In Dragon 54 (I love the Dragon CD archive) Greenwood lays out how he went through the 1e DDG in working through his pantheon and his design goals and what the origins of different gods are.

Azuth is a renamed Aarth from Nehwon.
Bane is equivalent to Celtic Druaga without ruling the devils (in 4e they pushed him as Ares pretty hard).
Chauntea is Demeter.
Gond is Hephaestus
Ilmater is not Finnish but Issek of the Jug from Nehwon.
Loviatar is Finnish.
Mask is Hermes rewritten.
Mielikki is Finnish.
Millil is not Apollo (Later sources push Lathander as essentially Apollo).
Oghma is Celtic.
Shar is not Hel.
Silvanus is Celtic.
Sune is Aphrodite.
Talona is Kiputytto from the Finnish.
Talos is an amalgam of storm god features that appealed to him.
Tempus is not Ares, he is mysterious and Greenwood says the DDG war god power levels were generally too powerful for what he wanted.
Tyche is a combo of Tyche and Bes. (Later 2e sources put out a thing that Moander infected Tyche and she split into Beshaba and Tymora, though 54 has Beshaba and Tyche as separate gods).
Tyr is norse minus the war aspect.
The elemental gods are straight out of Moorcock, not even renamed yet.
He also takes the Moorcock Beast Cults but adds in some things like the Nehwon rat god, Apep from Egypt as the snake, Lolth as a spider cult figure, and four he created, Besparr, Hyyaak, Aslan (based on Narnia and some rhyme about a Lion and a Unicorn) and Lurue the Unicorn (also based on the rhyme but also The Little White Horse).

Also taking existing gods from other pantheons and either adding them in straight or modifying them along with originals has a long tradition. See Apollo being pulled in straight from Greek to Roman and Ares being renamed Mars and having different aspects particularly along the barbaric versus civilized axis (and agriculture) while Janus is a Roman only god.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well, I obviously like my homebrew a lot (had to give an actual human pantheon, and then fleshed out a racial pantheon for everyone and was working on primal spirits for druids when I finally lost steam )

But, I also love Ebberron's approach with the various different religions. Wildemount/Tal'Dorie is amazing and I've adopted more of a "titling" approach than giving them names, since that makes them feel more important to me.

But, I have also sniped a lot of singularly interesting dieties from all around. Raven Queen, Pelor as the Dawnfather. Waukeem, ect.

OH! I am also a huge fan of LudicSavant's pantheon work over on GiTP. He did some amazing work fleshing out various dieties and creating a compelling tapestry of stories and interesting takes.

 

[JohnSnow]

Just as an aside, there's a Finnish god named Ilamatar, with the same rough description as the FR god in Deities & Demigods, so Ed can claim whatever he wants, but...yeah.

 

[teitan]

Mod NOte:

Folks,

Drop the commentary on real-world religion, please and thank you.

Legit question here... does that include the actual Pagan Pantheons because they would be real world religions otherwise you're showing a bias against Pagans and non-Christians.

 

[Aldarc]

I 100% agree with this, and not just religion.

D&D is my tool kit, if they did too much, it would limit my choices.

My problem is that D&D sits an uncanny valley of trying to be a fantasy toolkit and trying to be its own brand of fantasy. It's a great thing when you want the former for the purpose of the latter, but when it's not...

I'm gonna chime in and say the Guild Wars pantheon (at least form GW1) was pretty cool.

The original five gods for GW1 (along with the forms of magic) were partially based on Magic the Gathering, which was a fairly significant influence on the game. The designers even described the process of characters assembling skills for their action bar as similar to assembling a deck for play in MtG.

• Air/Life: Dwayna
• Green/Nature: Melandru
• Blue/Mind: Lyssa
• Fire/War: Balthazar
• Black/Death: Grenth

 

[Orius]

My homebrew campaign uses a homebrew human pantheon. Non-humans use their traditional D&D gods. I dislike Dawn War because of its connection to 4e and its disruptive lore, but still used Bane and Melora. Bane was because I was using a god of tyranny that would rip off a lot of stuff from FR Bane, so I just decided to use Bane outright. Melora was originally a goddess of white magic which I made up in 2000 or 2001, but I decided to swap names with the nature goddess eventually. I don't know or care if my campaign does the same things, since I already had some material built up like sacred oak trees that I had no intention of tossing.

Of the standard D&D pantheons, I think Greyhawk's decent, though there are some pretty bizarre gods in there. The interesting thing about it is that there's I think 4 different human pantheons presented, Flan, Oeridian, Suel, and Baklunish IIRC, and there's some overlap with them. Like grodog said, it makes for a melting pot that feels more natural. Realms has this big broad pantheon that sometimes feels off, and Dragonlance feels kind of artificial in its symmetry.

I really like Greyhawk’s, but it could use a little tighter definition. I like that different deities are associated with different cultures. Plus, they have an alewife goddess, and every pantheon should have one of those.

That would be Wenta, the goddess of Oktoberfest, no?

Another question:

Do any of you keep stats for your deities?

I generally lean towards 2e's approach of no stats for the gods, but if I were to stat them up, I'd go full 3e Deities and Demigods combined with ELH to ensure they have the power they require.

 

[Li Shenron]

Another question:

Do any of you keep stats for your deities?

No.

Mainly because I never get to run games of such high level that the characters even think about going against the deities, so it would be a wasted effort to stat them out.

But then even if we did get that high level, I would rather treat deities as something beyond stats. A "deity of war" would be the personification of war, so if you want to destroy it, then you would need to remove all wars from the (at least local) universe.

 

[Aldarc]

I dislike Dawn War because of its connection to 4e...

At least you're honest.

 

[Orius]

Some of that material does not play nice with established elements of my campaign.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Oh man, I read that title and immediately thought of 1e Deities & Demigods... not 'world specific', lol! Kinda showing my age here I think!

Anyway... Egyptian, American Indian, Norse and Finnish were my faves and I found myself choosing gods from there a little more often than others when making various NPC's (or PC's).

As far as "world specific pantheons". I honestly liked Dragonlances' quite a bit. Never really played DL more than once or twice (1e DL, btw, before any of the novels other than the first three came out, iirc). After that, Greyhawk. Greyhawk is such a mish-mash of 'themes' for Gods that it was dirt simple to play up one, or play down another, or have one god start some crusade, and another one rise up to oppose, etc., that the "game of the gods" always felt like they were above the mortals, moving them around Greyhawk like chess pieces. A HECK of a lot less "in your face!" deific stuff floating about the moral plane other than in deep, Deep, DEEP dark dungeons. Not like FR where it's hard to throw a halfling without hitting some deity in disquise who is 'slumming it with the mortals' for fun.

^_^

Paul L. Ming