D&D General Can There Be Non-Problematic Fertility Deities?

[Dessert Nomad]

My thing is that the general populace will want to worship fertility deities and, however many dungeons the adventurers go into, it's not quite sense that someone, at some point, wouldn't come from a Deity of Fertility. Indeed, a blighted land could be the ideal spot for one such Cleric to work in: restoring the fertility. The Fisher King is an example of this.

I hadn't considered the Life domain as such, but it does make sense.

It's not a matter of someone at some point coming up with a fertility deity, or what imaginary people in-game might want, it's a matter of whether the people publishing information about the default setting in a game primarily about adventuring decided to spend time and money including a deity specifically about not adventuring. The question in the OP presumes something like 'they must be deliberately avoiding this because its problematic', but it's probably just 'no one's interested enough to include deities that don't do things PCs are interested in.' Also like someone else pointed out, Greyhawk has a fertility deity as do some other pantheons, it's not like all D&D completely avoids the topic.

As far as 'restoring a blighted land', there's already a bunch of deities about nature, agriculture, and healing. If improving the yield of land counts as a 'fertility deity', there's already several in the FR deity lists and I don't think there's been any issues with them being considered problematic.

 

[billd91]

It's 12+ now, it says so on the PHB.

Realistically speaking, saying a product is for 12+ probably says more about them being able to avoid certain levels of product safety testing (particularly for lead and other toxic metals) than about the real level intellectual development targeted by the producer.

 

[Incenjucar]

The deities presented in the core rules are very much skewed towards adventuring clerics, so there are lots of gods of healing and smiting, but not so many for growing wheat.

There is nothing “problematic” about fertility deities, they just aren’t very interesting to adventurers.

The core rules are a tiny sliver of D&D. There are hundreds of deities in D&D and piles of spells that haven't been converted to the current editions. 2E literally had a Fertility spell.

WotC has chosen to heavily truncate the game for efficient profit, but the TSR days had a lot more simulationist experiments and multiple hundreds of deities.

 

[djotaku]

I've always wanted to include the male god of fertility, Skeet.
The ritual for his male priests to fertilize the fields is very problematic.

but accurate to summarian myths...

 

[djotaku]

I blazed through these 14 pages, so I might have missed it, but many folks mentioned substituting with nature/life deities and I didn't see someone mention that in the oldest pantheons these are one and the same. Go back and read Summarian mythology (I think Japanese or Chinese mythology has something similar) and the thoughts of what rain are and where rivers come from are very naughty to modern sensibilities.

Also, many religions, going up through the old testament bible times (and I think through Greek and Roman times) had sex rituals which were supposed to cause the gods to make the crops grow better.

What I think was covered very well in these 14 pages is questioning why the OP or anyone wants a fertility deity? Just for flavor? To provide a cleric spell list? And what does it mean to have a fertility deity in terms of what your table has to deal with? I think with family or buddies we could probably make it through more explicit content as we'd probably have similar thoughts on what we were comfy with or be able to talk about any discomfort. In a game with a bunch of strangers - no way! It would be too easy for them to go further than I wanted or vice versa and no one would be having a good time.

 

[Reynard]

I blazed through these 14 pages, so I might have missed it, but many folks mentioned substituting with nature/life deities and I didn't see someone mention that in the oldest pantheons these are one and the same. Go back and read Summarian mythology (I think Japanese or Chinese mythology has something similar) and the thoughts of what rain are and where rivers come from are very naughty to modern sensibilities.

Inanna and Dumuzi. h.a.w.t.

 

[Whisper-Kitten]

I feel like the question of whether the Greek god Priapus and his massive dong are a good fit for a campaign can only be answered by the players at the table. Problematic or not isn't really the question or assertion that needs to be made. An Egyptian fertility god, Hathor, is already cited in the 2014 Life Cleric description.

If the question is actually, "Will WOTC ever make a fertility deity?"
Um, I guess in my thoughts any agriculture or hearth deity can be extended to fertility if you want them to be, since that's often how it works in real life.

Imagine the quests you could name with a god like that though! On second thought maybe that's a bad idea.....

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I am not that familiar with the existing Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms dungeons, but it seems to me several existing gods might already cover stuff a "Fertility God" needs to cover. It's just not described in terms of a "Fertility" domain, but as Life or Nature domains, and sometimes it might fall under the purview of Druids instead of Clerics.
In 4E D&D, Moradin is the Lawful God of Family, Community and Creation - so maybe he also covers fertility.
Other candidates might be:

• Sehanine, who is also the goddess of love.
• Pelor grants access to the Life domain and is the god of sun and agriculture, so strongly tied to some kinds of growth and important ingredient of life.

There are probably a lot of techniques, spells and alchemical formulaes that might be relevant to everyday life, and some of them would include fertility - but they aren't relevant for adventuring life, and so the game rules omit them mostly.

 

[Fifinjir]

I'm curious now, what sourcebook was that from?

Looking it up, it seems like it was from Dragon magazine #330.

 

[Lanefan]

Quite frankly I don't see how a Fertility deity would be problematic unless you ran it as evil in its alignment.

In a land where overpopulation or overcrowding is a known problem, a fertility deity could very easily be (or be seen as) Evil.