A religious system or pantheon for a setting

[Celebrim]

So I think what I want is a cluster of gods or followers of gods (ie demons/devils) who are pleased with the current situation and enjoy meddling with it, and another cluster of gods or their followers (ie angels) who are despairing of the current situation and are working to try to find ways to mitigate it. And there could be a third group who are neutral/indifferent.

Well, this certainly does map easily to D&D's default three divisions on the spectrum of good.

Alright, so the gods are divided. However, the reign of meteors did occur and its impact is ongoing and producing a world which in your assessment "is all about war and power and the insane grasping after it to the point of madness and beyond." So I think it is safe to say that at some point in the past, the chaos and disaster loving faction of the gods got the upper hand and has been relishing in that victory ever sense. Life in the world has been rendered down to a meaningless grasping after power, with the whole world teetering on the brink of madness - and some of it apparently already well over that line. This doesn't sound like a healthy universe. This doesn't even sound like a particularly contested universe. Evil - and particularly in D&D terms we might say Chaotic Evil - has the mastery here.

So if you personally are in this setting, what do you personally do? Who do you empathize with? The universe is meaningless. Do you join the power grabbing throng, and try to claw your way to the top to enjoy what you can of life because that's actually what it is all about? Do you join the forces of Good who, despite getting trounced at some point, are presumably doing what they can to keep this universe from going over the brink? Or do you damn the whole bunch of pestilent meddling beings, who so far as we can tell so far have never done a lick of good for anyone and don't seem to be really troubled over the mess that they've made?

Extending yourself out through the setting, how do you see the little copies of you responding? Can you sympathize with all sides of what is going on here? It's precisely this perspective you have to dwell on. All those little you's roaming around in your setting - the NPCs - what sort of stories about their relationship to the divine do you want them to have? Do you want to empathize with the heretics that curse the gods, or do want them revolt you and represent only the worst things you can image? Can you imagine their priests living quiet yet attractive lives of dignity, wisdom, and contemplation? Or does the whole idea of that sort of thing make you want to puke? Make the gods of your world accordingly, the way you want them to be, and the way you want religion to play out. You want a good deity - make it the sort of god you think you could worship if it were real, whatever that means to your personally. Can you believe that people would legitimately want to serve this deities and would actively worship them because in some way they are providing something they need, or does the whole setting just make you wonder why anyone would want to worship any of these bozos?

Incidentally, I feel that way about the FR pantheon. By and large, I feel its completely bereft of mythic power. I can't imagine anyone getting up the energy to pray to or to curse the FR deities, much less engage in daily pieties or devote their life even unto death on their behalf. I think part of that is because the roles that the gods have are too pragmatically gamist. You've got the God of Fighters, the God of Thieves, the God of Magic Users, the God of Paladins, the God of Rangers, and heck, you even have a generic God of Good Aligned Clerics. Don't make that mistake. If these gods get worshiped at all, they meet ordinary peoples practical concerns and fears in some way - even the horrific evil ones. And that's just one of a ton of things that bugs me about it - like its hyper-polytheistic, but everyone seems to be expected to relate to it in a monotheistic way, as if you know, most polytheists don't actually worship multiple gods.

Not that it isn't possible to have gods without having widespread religion. The Lovecraft pantheon is a good example of a pantheon built around the notion of almost anti-gods. They have divine power. But worshiping them seems bizarre, both because its not really clear that they care enough to really notice much, and in any event even if they notice it's not like they remotely meet any human needs. You have to be basically insane to worship one, and maybe even you actually have to be insane before you can communicate to them in a way that isn't sufficiently alien to them that they can understand you. If you go with the idea of the pantheon of Ur-Monsters, this might be one way to approach things. They are so remote and alien and perhaps so concerned with a different corner of creation, that even the more benevolent ones might be (paraphrased from the Celestial) "Err.. what's this about meteors? Why do you people keep going on about meteors? What sort of meteors? One moment mortal, I'm losing you.. To much [untranslatable] static from [untranslatable].... and oh look, it's a 4th hyperbolic translation from the semi-annual migration of [untranslatable]. I got to go. I'll get back to you in a standard era... you do live that long right? If not, just arrange your soul to transmigrate through...message ends".

Or as I said, you might not have gods but if you have hosts of active intermediaries, you could still have an extremely baroque Etruscan sort of ritualism as the standard religious practice, based around worshiping every 'small god' you think you could get an advantage from. Just because you basically only have three gods, wouldn't prevent there being 5 different religious parades a day and thousands of temples in a big city, each dedicated to a different aspect of the deity and a different channel of communicating with them. Or conversely, every city might just have one huge temple devoted to all three gods and there is a standard and assumed pantheism in the world - you worship the creator and destroyer both. Everyone does, right? No?!?? Heretic!!!

Of course, each of those choices changes the sort of story options you have. I can't really pick for you. It's your story.

 

[Samloyal23]

Maybe all of the gods are just aspects of a power that is so far removed from humanity that prayers cannot reach it. Contacting this power would require a special quest, like looking for a holy grail, that would permit only the most spiritual and noble person to reach the One and plead for help.

 

[Gilladian]

As far as "mini me's" running around doing things - I'm a very non-power person myself, so I would probably be just hiding and clinging to the chance to lead some minimal life without being trampled on. However, if I were a PC, who had the sense that I could "DO" something, I'd join the forces of good. I'd turn my back on the evil power stones (once I knew what they did to people's minds) and try to found a secret place of safety and shelter, hoping that someday there would be a way to break the cycle of evil.

I can sort of empathize with those who would "damn" the gods and turn their back on them, if the gods are indifferent and far removed; having a city or groups within several cities that are a-religious and actively denounce the worship of the gods could be interesting politically and socially.

Okay, I think I'll work things up this way: there are six beast-type gods, each representing some themes/domains/elements and will be a force of either law or chaos. For example the dragon might represent air, strength and fate, and is lawful; the sphinx might represent earth, cunning and birth and also be lawful; the phoenix could be fire, charisma and the spirit or soul and be chaotic, and so on... there might even be multiple names/faces for each of these gods, and only the most philosophic or most wise would perceive that they are the same being...

Only ONE of these gods would be truly insane (by human standards), chaotic, and attempting, for whatever reason of his/her own, to destroy the world. I need to give the world a name....

Each god would have a mass of followers - some would be good, some evil, but always either lawful or chaotic. So the dragon who is lawful would have both "angels" and "devils" who followed him and are lawful in their methods. But the phoenix, who is chaotic, would have good and evil followers who are all acting in chaos, without any seeming structure or pattern. And one of the chaotic gods is the "true bad guy". I will have to play around with this, and it may all change still, but I'm starting to get comfortable with what I'm seeing.

 

[Celebrim]

As far as "mini me's" running around doing things - I'm a very non-power person myself, so I would probably be just hiding and clinging to the chance to lead some minimal life without being trampled on.

So, most people in your universe are probably worshiping all six gods while saying some variation of, "Have a cookie. Please don't trample on me. I'll give you more cookies."

However, if I were a PC, who had the sense that I could "DO" something, I'd join the forces of good. I'd turn my back on the evil power stones (once I knew what they did to people's minds) and try to found a secret place of safety and shelter, hoping that someday there would be a way to break the cycle of evil.

I think this might be a good setting for having a number of secret societies for good. Most of your communities at best have leadership that leans neutral. Most rulers are these power mad tyrants of various sorts - many of them alien: dragons, djinn, undead, sphinxes(?), mind-flayers(?), etc. Working against them are these secret mystic orders for good which the PCs might stumble on. It might be nice to have a world where most of the strange cults were actually the good guys.

I can sort of empathize with those who would "damn" the gods and turn their back on them, if the gods are indifferent and far removed; having a city or groups within several cities that are a-religious and actively denounce the worship of the gods could be interesting politically and socially.

In a society with real and active deities, this really only works if either the gods tend to be more destructive than benevolent, or the city can find some power source that can thwart or replace even the gods. In the later case, it also helps if the gods really are so distant that they don't really care what mortals do. But atheism or its equivalent is generally non-functional if you are forgoing divine power. Over time, societies that actively worship the gods would have evolutionary advantage over those that don't. The first time your town has the plague, the fact that you don't have scores of individuals with a relationship to the divine and the power to work miracles means your town loses to the one that does. If the gods are active, the fact that your neighboring town can propitiate a wrathful god stomping around smashing things and steer it away, and yours doesn't know the rituals to appease or distract it, means you get wrecked and they don't. It's ok to have heretics but if you want them to be persistent in the environment, they need some way to function in it. And remember. Don't get Judeo-Christian focused. Most religions don't assert that the gods love people or that people should love the gods. When Socrates discusses piety, he explores whether the pious are loved by the gods, but he doesn't even think to explore the notion of whether the pious love the gods. The Greek gods pretty much didn't care what you thought of them, just so long as you feared them enough to not disrespect their authority and performed the rituals in their honor. So you could potentially have a society were many people worship things that they hate, in the same way that many people grudgingly pay taxes.

there might even be multiple names/faces for each of these gods, and only the most philosophic or most wise would perceive that they are the same being...

This is a trope in my own cosmology, but one way mine differs from what you have been envisioning is mine is "the 1000 gods", where 1000 in a very archaic way simply means "a very large, possibly uncountable number". If you have a very small and countable number of gods, its highly unlikely that the problem of identifying who is who is a big problem. To the extent that it is, it will probably be edge philosophies such as monotheism (all six gods are actually one being) that won't be widely accepted but can't be easily disproved. Monotheism might be a serious heresy in your setting, as might the claim that the six gods are actually avatars of 2 or 3. Of course, some nations might persist in these heresies. If you have questions like this, resist the temptation to give them definitive answers. If you want the truth to be something mortals (and perhaps even gods) argue about, it certainly can't be something the PC's know the answer to.

Each god would have a mass of followers - some would be good, some evil, but always either lawful or chaotic. So the dragon who is lawful would have both "angels" and "devils" who followed him and are lawful in their methods.

Good. There are several good reasons for breaking away from unconsciously thinking of your fantasy universe in Judeo-Christian terms. For one thing, it's more thoughtful. If you don't have a single creator god, there is no reason to have a universe that reflects peoples beliefs about a single creator god. It drives me nuts when people have a polytheistic universe with pagan deities having spell using clerics engaged in ritual magic and then they talk about clerics having 'faith' or deriving power from their 'faith'. For another, it's more respectful to religious views to not make your fantasy religion a shallow pastiche of what people really believe.

Along those lines, your setting might not have angels or devils. The divide between them might not exist. You deities have servitors of some sort, and some of them are fearsome and frightful and some of them are beautiful and benevolent, but as far as people are concerned, they are ultimately the same class of being. After all, the two might well be rubbing shoulders in the court of some god, each loyally serving the god in their own way - there is no division here between loyal and disloyal servants that lies behind the angle/devil divide. Of course, they may well be rivals and stabbing each other in the back as courtiers are wont to do, but that is familiar and understandable behavior to the mortals worshipping them or seeking intercession from the servitors. Offering a bribe to the Sub-Chancellor of the Inner Court of the Rose to get your petition presented to the High Rector of the Court of the Fountains so that your beer doesn't sour this year, or so that your romantic rival breaks out in boils, is well something people can understand. If the Sub-Chancellor has beet red skin, the face of an ogre, and the lower body of a boar, lion's claw, and breath the smells of rotten eggs, well.... it wouldn't be the first time you had to deal with an odious bureaucrat.

I will have to play around with this, and it may all change still, but I'm starting to get comfortable with what I'm seeing.

Cool. What you have reminds me of Chinese Astrology and native Chinese polytheism, so you might want to do some research along those lines to get inspiration. Dividing the sky into six divisions or constellations, each ruled over by one of the deities and having six seasons to your year might be a good start to your mythology.

 

[gamerprinter]

Not that it will help the OP, but when I developed the religions of the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG), the closest thing to gods are kami spirits which may or may not be able to grant spells since they vary in power. Kami are localized spirits in that they are fixed to a specific physical location (waterfall, lake, river, mountain, section of forest, swamp, etc.) Perhaps they truly exist on another plane, but have a portal connected to their specific physical locale. Yokinto, Kaidan's version of Shinto involves the worship of kami spirits, which also include ancestral spirits. Most kami are too weak to grant divine spells. Those kami spirits that are able to grant spells, being localized can only provide spell power to worshippers/priests close to the same physical locale. If a priest ventures miles away from the shrine or local source spells are no longer granted. Some priests are able to commune with different local spirits found as they travel across the nation. When they find a new kami locale, they commune with the spirit and gain that spirits portfolio of spell powers, and are required to do this in order to continue access to divine spells whereever they go.

The other major religion of Kaidan is Zaoism, which is a loosely constructed combination of Tao and Zen, essentially Buddhism as practiced in Kaidan. Unlike the Indian/Chinese version of Buddhism there are no gods associated. Zaoism is essentially a philosophy introduced to Kaidan via several charismatic priests introducing several versions of Buddhism. Zaoism is tied to the social caste system as well as the reincarnation wheel and has more to do with the afterlife, than the granting of spells, though spells are granted through the Great Wheel construct of Zaoism.

One of the two other religions of Kaidan Shugendo, a syncretic combination of Zaoism, Tao and Yokinto connected through nature and mountains, and worshipped by yamabushi priests and shugenja followers. The other religion involves the ascension of powerful ghosts or yurei spririts of nobleman called Goryo Shinko, which in Kaidan essentially is the worship of local undead daimyo rulers, whose priests serve the living/unliving local Daimyo.

Thus Kaidan features Buddhism (Zaoism), Shinto (Yokinto), Shugendo and Goryo Shinko, which are all non-traditional religions of ancient Japan, none of which truly include deities at all. Essentially in Kaidan, there are no deities, thus no pantheons. Divine spells are granted through other means of the local religions.

 

[Samloyal23]

Is there any room in this system for Neutral powers? A grey area in the spectrum of powers?

 

[Herobizkit]

In a world where magic is used to pursue all goals, might it make sense to deify the elements themselves and by extension the power which they wield?

I Chinese mythology, fr'ex, four sacred animals are attributed to the four cardinal directions - the dragon, the phoenix/red bird, the unicorn/kirin/white tiger and the turtle/tortoise/serpent. These animals/beings also rule over one of the 5 elements in Chinese mysticism: earth, fire, water, wood, and metal.

In the 3.x Oriental Handbook, these elements were changed to the traditional Western elements and the fifth was Void, as in, a literal absence of matter. Following this design, you could add a fifth beast dedicated entirely to destruction.

Religion doesn't have to be all church and ceremonial, but thinking up ways that your campaign's people pay respect to the divine, or if they do at all, can help solidify the setting in your own and your player's minds.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that, in your campaign, there are no Clerics or Druids or even Divine Magic. Perhaps Elemental-themed Sorcerers now take on that role. The only thing to watch for is the loss of Healing magic - but Bards can do it, so why not Sorcerers? :3

 

[Celebrim]

Is there any room in this system for Neutral powers? A grey area in the spectrum of powers?

There is room in any pastiche of ancient paganism for gray areas. In fact, one of the biggest problems you might run into is that there is only room for gray areas. After all, the attraction of that sort of cosmology is that the gods are all basically super-humans, with all the same feelings and failings that you are familiar with - just bigger. It's the same thing that makes super-hero comic books or vampire 'capes' stories like Twilight so attractive to many people. You are making the mundane seem meaningful by amping up the scale, and you are making the universe seem relatable. The king and queen of the gods? The fight like an old married couple and don't even share a bed anymore. Kind of makes your marriage seem alright, eh? And the king of the universe is an old proud lecher with a quarrelsome family filled with political drama. Pop some popcorn.

My gods - at least the 'good' ones - are meant to be a bit more righteous in their best selves than the Greek, more humble, more charitable, etc. but the same basic outlook is intentional in my own cosmology. Performing the same mental games I recommend above, I came to the conclusion that the gods themselves, being NPCs, were just fragments of my person and could not be better than the best angels of my nature. Thus, my desire to keep a focus on relatively 'small gods' that anyone with wisdom would not expect to see infinite or perfected attributes in. Since I can't be perfect in my wisdom and knowledge, neither can the gods of the world that exists in my imagination. `Since I can't be perfectly righteous, neither can be the gods of my shared imaginary space. This is sort of a half-campaign level secret, since the gods don't really advertise: "We're not really gods. We're just uber-powerful beings with some small power over reality." and so many people in the imaginary world attribute to the gods attributes that they don't really have - Metis is assumed by many of her worshippers to not merely be the Goddess of Wisdom, but to be Wisdom embodied - a perfect incarnation of Wisdom. Metis doesn't necessarily make it her first priority to disabuse every believer of this, but certainly Metis - being wise if not Wise - doesn't believe this of herself, and would disabuse her high priestess of this sort of hubris since she desires her high priestess to be wise. Players, for their part, are generally steeped in Judeo-Christian religious traditions to degrees that they don't even realize (even the atheists), so they tend to assume a basically monotheistic outlook with deities that think Faith and Charity are really important - and are sometimes shocked to realize this arrangement never existed in the first place.

If you have a bunch of imperfect deities, then you have all sorts of room for gray areas. You potentially could have nothing but neutral aligned deities in either of the systems Gilladian is toying with. It's quite possible to have a setting where mortals are more good (or evil) than the gods, and the gods think that mortal goodness is something of a strange aberration, or at least, something only valued as a tool and in that sense no different that evil. And it's quite possible to conceive of the gods as infinite and perfect and still have all sorts of room for gray areas. A belief system centered on balance for example doesn't really believe 'good' is a quality in and of itself, and can't exist without contrast with evil. From this perspective, the notion of doing away with evil seems ridiculous. Analogies like, "If there was no darkness, how would you know it was light" will be made, and so forth.

 

[Janx]

I know you guys got a lot figured out, but one thing I do when world-building is check to see how this maps out to PCs and NPCs. What's available to either. What contradictions or undesired conflicts arise?

As with Races, I figure out where the Elves are from, and how an elf would be able to join the PC party starting in human lands

And with Classes, I figure out what classes are available and where they come from, are trained up from etc. Monks for instance are stereotypically "asian" and if I don't account for an Asian culture, then I have a design problem. I need to make them "not Asian" or make an Asian culture nearby, so a PC can be from there and join the party.

The same goes for Religions. Is everybody worshipping the same batch of gods, or effectively the same gods with different names? Or do I have regional pastiches of greek, roman and Norse gods? Based on that, am I going to have unexpected in-party fighting because of conflicting pantheons worshipped by the players even though everybody is Lawful Good?

This matters because we can't have Lawful Good zealots committing evil acts and still getting spells from their Lawful Good god with some serious explaining.

Or do I want to enable a terrorist division of the religion that still qualifies for getting spells from the deity. By that measure, does it make sense to not organize the deities by Alignment, but by some other facet, so that there's not a breach of Alignment issue?

I have no doubt Celebrim's solutions solve these kind of things, his stuff always strikes me as well thought out. Hopefully these considerations jog some ideas for your project, and help improve any plot-holes that might come up.

 

[Samloyal23]

Neutral gods and servitor races get overlooked, they are not as exciting as Good and Evil, but they create options for more levels of conflict and can be great manipulators and foils for both Good and Evil characters...