How many gods is too many gods?

Afrodactyl

First Post
I would say worry about your main gods (ie life, death, peace, war, nature, elemental gods, etc), then fill in the slightly more "niche" ones as you need them. A dozen or so 'generic catch-all' gods, a handful of racial ones, and a few specific/silly ones.

I'd say you have too many when you start overlapping (not too much of an issue with racial gods, like a human god of war and an orc god of war), or find yourself making gods for things that are absurdly specific (god of showtunes sung in the key of A minor in candlelit bars on Thursday evenings).
 

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MPA2000

Explorer
Sooo, I've been working on my world, and I've been stuck on the gods for a looong while now. I've plundered and pilfered from past editions and other fantasy settings, and now I have (ranked by divinity level)

8 Overdeities- First beings ever created, absolutely untouchable and incredibly powerful (one per base divine domain in PHB)

32 Greater deities- created by the Overdeities, oversee different aspects of their domains (4x OD)

About 20 racial deities, who are basically saints that were helped by the gods at some point and gained divinity status among their people.

Now, all these cover basically any aspect of life possible and give ample choice to any type of player a character may want to make. The problem is, will they be too much to handle?
Obviously only a couple of gods will have actual churches/organisations, the rest will be worshipped mostly on a personal basis, but I'm afraid that their presence won't be felt at all in the world.
But at the same time, if I reduce the gods I have to make the portfolios massively bigger, leading to some people only worshipping one part of what the god oversees, leading me to having to name those parts, leading me back to the beginning basically.

What can I do about this? :(


IMHO, if Marvel and DC have been able to allow all of the mythological gods to co-exist, there is no reason a DM cannot.
 

77IM

Explorer!!!
Supporter
I would just like to point out that Barovia (Curse of Strahd) recognizes two deities, the good Morninglord and the evil Mother Night. All the temples and clerics who heal you when you're cursed or whatever are to the Morninglord, all the holy relics are his, etc. Many of the wicked monsters pay some sort of favor to Mother Night. This dual deity setup works just fine. You really don't need dozens of deities for a D&D setting.
 


delericho

Legend
Now, all these cover basically any aspect of life possible and give ample choice to any type of player a character may want to make. The problem is, will they be too much to handle?

Yes.

Most people can handle between 5 and 9 options (with 7 being the sweet spot). So once you get to 10 deities, you've got too many.

The Angry DM has actually addressed this recently - his argument is that 5 is the perfect number of deities. (Skip down to "Five is the Perfect Number" for his explanation of that particular claim.)
 

I think you can have as many gods in your setting as you want. The question is, how many will actually be of importance? And do the players really need to remember them all?

My homebrew setting features quite an elaborate pantheon, but only a few gods are prominently featured, and the others are only occasionally mentioned. It adds flavor and believability to the setting I think. But I don't think you should be piling up gods for each and every thing, just because you feel obligated to do so. More lore is not better lore. See how gods and religions fit into your world, and create them accordingly.
 

Aldarc

Legend
Now, all these cover basically any aspect of life possible and give ample choice to any type of player a character may want to make. The problem is, will they be too much to handle?
Yes.

What can I do about this? :(
Uncomfortable Fact: The overwhelming majority of players will not care about your homebrew pantheon. The actual number of deities you create does not matter. But the more deities you create, the more likely your players will gloss them all. So I would focus on a smaller subset. What usually works best? None to twelve, possibly thirteen if you opt for using a Baker's Dozen concept.

You said that only a couple of deities will have churches/organizations. And that right there tells me that most of those 60 deities don't matter. If only a couple of deities have a cultus, why is that the case? Does the nation only sponsor or approve worship of a small subset? Again, why is that the case? And why not focus on just those?

I prefer having players walk away with a good, overarching everday life impression of religions rather than a specific list of deities. In a polytheistic context, most people will follow a pantheon rather than a deity. This is captured well, for example, in Eberron where most people are simply followers of the Sovereign Host rather than a particular one of the eight deities. So it is more important to establish what being a follower of the Sovereign Host means for your average person.

IMHO, the "Slice-of-Life" of your religion(s) does matter. I would recommend putting more effort into that. IME, it is more important to use religion for impressing the prevailing worldview and ethics of a people on the players. You want to show this and not tell. Nevertheless, your "deities" should reflect the sort of stories you want to communicate through play.

For one brief campaign setting I created (for Fate RPG), I wanted a fantastic Pseudo-Renaissance Venice since I knew that one player new to the game we invited would find that comfortably familiar. But the Italian Renaissance is immeasurably influenced by the presence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which I did not want to replicate accurately.

Instead, I opted for a religious "Church" based around Seven Spirits of Virtue.* There is a spirit world, and the spirits there embody different concepts. People often variously regard these spirits as angels, demons, devils, or "pagan" deities, etc. depending on perspective and church teachings. The details really didn't matter, and I did not expend much effort into it than I needed. I devised a basic framework for the religion, its episcopal church hierarchy, and basic tenants. Most people attempt to follow these Seven Spirits of Virtue, who are regarded as the closest in being to the One. Churches attempt to teach people to exemplify these virtues. Monasteries may exist for monks to live acsetic lifestyles in accordance with these virtues. I wanted to breed a familiarity of aesthetic and ethics, but not necessarily being identical. For example, there is a "pope" but that figure happens to be female. The Church of Virtue does not condemn sodomy or gays, but it does condemn sexual excess no matter the sexuality, as that fails to uphold the virtue of Temperance.

I explained the basic ideas and then moved on to focus on how religion is practiced, but that was something shown through gameplay. Why? Because really the players only need to know the bare minimum: "people in this area, our characters included, follow or pay lip-service to a religion based around Seven Spirits of Virtue" and "the religion follows virtue ethics embodied in actual spirits."

But "the Church" kept coming up in play. People menion the Seven Virtues in blessings. People may curse using the Seven Sins. The clergy are people who have their own agendas and family connections that are not entirely abandoned. The "archbishop" to the city belonged to a family with close ties to the rival family of that the PCs were variously attached to. Different cathedrals and monasteries had different associated church orders that may not see eye to eye. The PCs dealt with a monastery abandoned on an island that was now plagued with spirits of terror still attracted by the horrific deaths of the monks who died in a sea siege by a rival city decades before. The Seven matter. The Church matters. Ethics matters. Piety matters. The PC remembering the names of the Virtues and the intracacies of the religion does not.

* I did not opt for the Seven Virtues that are a counterpart for the Seven Deadly Sins, but instead a mix loosely based on Aristotle's Four Cardinal Ethics (i.e., Prudence, Temperance, Courage, Justice) and the Three Theological Virtues (i.e., Faith, Hope, Charity/Love).
 

Mallus

Legend
I think there are roughly two ways to approach this.

1) Your setting is like the real world: many cultures with many religious beliefs. Too many to know, or even count properly, except possibly for the most knowledgeable experts. So don't sweat it. Invent a small, manageable number of commonly-known gods, add more as needed.

2) Your setting isn't like the real world. There is a manageable set of real, known deities -- give or take a forgotten dark lord or hidden divinity that pops up at dramatically appropriate moments. In this case, I'd say 20 or less is a decent number. I randomly chose 17 for an old 2e home-brew. Mainly because I liked how 'The Seventeen' sounded.
 

Celebrim

Legend
I think there are roughly two ways to approach this.

1) Your setting is like the real world: many cultures with many religious beliefs. Too many to know, or even count properly, except possibly for the most knowledgeable experts. So don't sweat it. Invent a small, manageable number of commonly-known gods, add more as needed.

2) Your setting isn't like the real world. There is a manageable set of real, known deities -- give or take a forgotten dark lord or hidden divinity that pops up at dramatically appropriate moments. In this case, I'd say 20 or less is a decent number. I randomly chose 17 for an old 2e home-brew. Mainly because I liked how 'The Seventeen' sounded.

I dropped into write this post, but I see you've beaten me to it.

I will say that for my own game I've long opted for #1. There are 'a thousand gods' where 'a thousand' represents a basically uncountable number over which even experts disagree. Enumerating the gods is made difficult because some are dead, some are no longer worshipped, many appear to be known by multiple names depending on the culture, and most appear to believe that the private lives of deities aren't really a matter of mortal concern and generally ignore or get annoyed by attempts to interrogate them as to particulars.

The reason for doing this is that while I want to exercise my own creativity and not just import Greek, Hindu, or someone else's homebrew pantheon, top down creation of a realistic polytheistic religion is extremely complex and difficult, and you could spend a lifetime doing it and not get any gaming done. But opting for this model, I can introduce new deities as game need for a deity came up. I also could resolve issues with my own sparse knowledge as the sparse knowledge of the setting. If the inhabitants of my setting cannot give a full accounting of basic religious questions, then I as GM am removed from the obligation to do so.

I do have a long standing desire to actually go write up the religion in a sort of homebrew 'deities and demigods' but the utility of this project relative to the work involved has kept me from doing so.
 
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Celebrim

Legend
Yes.

Most people can handle between 5 and 9 options (with 7 being the sweet spot). So once you get to 10 deities, you've got too many.

The Angry DM has actually addressed this recently - his argument is that 5 is the perfect number of deities. (Skip down to "Five is the Perfect Number" for his explanation of that particular claim.)

One of the best invented Pantheon's I've seen is Bujold's 'Five Gods' pantheon for her world of Chalion, particularly as presented in the first book 'Curse of Chalion'. (Later books tend to go off the rails with the invented details being less interesting and sometimes undermining the original work.)

That said, I don't actually agree that 5 is perfect (and I disagree with many other details of the still interesting essay as well). My basic objection is that while a particular campaign would do well to cover 5 possible thematic conflicts, there are actually far more than 5 conflicts over which people disagree. A truly interesting religion is one which you can imagine real people might honestly believe in, and real people find themselves involved in many conflicts. Polytheism as an approach compartmentalizes those conflicts into bite sized chunks. If you take a number as small as 5 to represent all those conflicts, then each of your deities is going to actually embody a huge number of ideas, and will actually be harder to imagine than a larger number of more discrete entities. You now have just 5 entities to represent every aspect of peoples lives. Consider just how complex is the portfolio is of the Twelve Olympians.

Five deities might be a perfect number for a campaign, to represent the conflicts that the players and GM are interested in exploring at this time. But barring some really grand conceptions, it's too small to account for the extent of human experience. It's too small of a number to account for all the conflicts of a world unless you are really such a genius that you can divide all of life into 5 more or less equal spheres.

I also note that while he's defined a nice family of gods with a broad set of human conflicts to drive family conflict, he's not really put the conflicts in the starkest terms. We might well think that all 5 of these deities are basically "nice" and while they have disagreements with each other, none of them rise to warfare levels, and that they normally exist in balance and harmony. After all, you might - and many people do - think both stability and progress are important. For example, it would be really odd if the embodiment of pragmatism was truly wholly opposed to the idea of safety. There might be times that these two ideas would come into conflict, but normally we think of safety as something harmonious with the practical. Likewise, there may be tension between compassion and justice and between idealism and tradition, but these aren't all the time conflicts. Many people do see compassion and justice as two hands that are working toward the same end, and idealism and tradition are typically unified in ideals like honor. But where are those that champion that neither of these things are important? Where are those that want to take down the system represented by those 5 gods? Where is the guy that says "Why does my freedom have to be tied to my self-interest or really any interest at all? If I want to choose to be free and do impractical, worthless, and even destructive things, isn't that my right?"
 
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