D&D General A Gruumsh Of A Different Type

[Tonguez]

Exactly.

If there are 15 war gods, why would one decide to be a racial diety. One can think deities don't think like humanoids but it doesn;t take more that a few brain cells to go convert more than one race.

Why wouldn't Gruumsh want to convert dwarves? He'd want to convert them or actively attempt to absorb their war god.
So Gruumsh would attempt to broaden him to snatch up people of all races. With Punk Rock and Sports!!

Does Gruumsh get to make the choice? Gruumsh might command his priest to attempt to convert Dwarfs but in the end it is the Dwarfs who must give the beleif and in beleiving the diety becomes Dwarfish and changes to fit the Dwarven view of their gods.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It encourages divine war.

You'll have racial pantheons fighting each other and within each other.

How? And why would I want racial pantheons fighting eachother?

There's no reason you can't have Mystra, and Corellon, as gods of arcane magic, but Correlon is an elf god who has gained strong followings outside the elves, and Azuth as the human god of wizardry specifically who has come to serve Mystra and is ally and friend to Corellon.

Maybe Corellon and his "civilized" friends have beef with Melora and Gruumsh and Kord, maybe not. Maybe that beef gets bad enough sometimes that they send their followers against eachother, or maybe they solve it in some other god way.

To be fair the Mesopatamians had about 5 sun gods, albeit Utu was the main one, plus they recognised a number of ‘foreign’ sun gods too

Exactly. There is no actual reason there can't be any number of gods with a given domain, or other points of overlap.

Does Gruumsh get to make the choice? Gruumsh might command his priest to attempt to convert Dwarfs but in the end it is the Dwarfs who must give the beleif and in beleiving the diety becomes Dwarfish and changes to fit the Dwarven view of their gods.

FR and Theros are the only settings I can think of where that would make sense.

If Gruumsh converts some dwarfs, it's more likely that those dwarfs will adopt cultural values closer to those of Gruumsh.

 

[Charlaquin]

Exactly. There is no actual reason there can't be any number of gods with a given domain, or other points of overlap.

Personally I think the most compelling reason is simply to make it easier on the players to remember. But that’s mostly a reason to keep the total number of gods small. Overlap between the gods’ domains isn’t really a problem so long as there’s a manageable total number of them.

 

[Bohandas]

Exactly.

If there are 15 war gods, why would one decide to be a racial diety.

Racial deities seem to have wider powerbases and hold sway on multiple worlds, rather than just possibly just a single continent

 

[Bohandas]

To be fair the Mesopatamians had about 5 sun gods, albeit Utu was the main one, plus they recognised a number of ‘foreign’ sun gods too

The egyptians had even more but they were all either aspects of Ra or part of his entourage (or at least interpreted/rationalized as aspects of Ra or part of his entourage)

In Toril and Oreth there's just a bunch of random people messing with the thermostat

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Personally I think the most compelling reason is simply to make it easier on the players to remember. But that’s mostly a reason to keep the total number of gods small. Overlap between the gods’ domains isn’t really a problem so long as there’s a manageable total number of them.

I supposed I get that idea, I just disagree with it. I don't think the player needs to remember any gods other than the directly relavant or really major gods. A player of an orc character doesn't need to ever know anything about the gnomish gods.

The egyptians had even more but they were all either aspects of Ra or part of his entourage (or at least interpreted/rationalized as aspects of Ra or part of his entourage)

In Toril and Oreth there's just a bunch of random people messing with the thermostat

And that reflects the real world in a way that feels more real and immersive for a lot of people.

For many of us, you can do whatever you want to the physics and such, but when you make people, culture, and religion difficult to believe, you make the entire setting difficult to believe.

That's as much feel as it is anything else.

 

[Charlaquin]

I supposed I get that idea, I just disagree with it. I don't think the player needs to remember any gods other than the directly relavant or really major gods. A player of an orc character doesn't need to ever know anything about the gnomish gods.

Maybe not if your world’s cultures are totally siloed off from one another. But an orc who had any cultural exchange with gnomes would have reason to know about gnomish gods and might even pay homage to some of them, if she found them to her liking. And a player would have an easier time deciding if they want to play such a character if they have at least a basic understanding of the basic faiths of the world.

Maybe we’re ultimately saying the same thing with different emphasis, though. You say the player doesn’t need to know about other peoples’ gods “other than the directly relevant major gods,” where I would say the players need a manageable number of gods to keep track of, but wouldn’t count minor deities specific to various cultural faiths among that total. Like, dwarves in my world probably offer prayers to any number of spiritual figures beyond Moradin, but Moradin and Torog are the only ones I really count among The Pantheon(tm)

 

[Minigiant]

Racial deities seem to have wider powerbases and hold sway on multiple worlds, rather than just possibly just a single continent

But wouldn't a storm god who kills every other storm god have a larger powerbase?

Isn't half the divine problems gods fighting over portfolios and followers?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The objective here seems ambiguous to me. Is it to rethink Gruumsh specifically? Or is the question more like what could a chief deity of the orcs look like besides Ol' One-Eye?

 

[Kurotowa]

But wouldn't a storm god who kills every other storm god have a larger powerbase?

Isn't half the divine problems gods fighting over portfolios and followers?

Really, a lot of this turns on cosmological questions like "What is the nature of gods?" The answer has a huge impact and varies a lot between both settings and DMs.

Do gods arise from the beliefs of their followers and gain greater power the more faith flows into them? Or are they ascended immortals that rose from the ranks of the once-mortal? Then it makes total sense that each culture will have its own set of gods, and that rival gods of similar portfolio would feud for prominence. Are the gods a collaborative pantheon of creators that pre-date the Prime Material? Then duplication of roles makes far less sense, nor do gods that are worshiped only by a single race or culture.

So it's hard to make blanket statements about this without confronting the fact that you're doing some fairly specific setting design and codifying a specific set of assumptions.