Pathfinder 2E Chaotic Clerics

[Farealmer3]

I have had the conception of 'what lies outside the universe' for as long as I can remember. I honestly don't remember if I've always called it the 'Far Realms' or if I had some very similar notion ('Furthest Realm'?), but I certainly call it the 'Far Realms' now. The requirement to have such a place was inherent in doing away with the infinite multiverse, because I still wanted to retain the notion of 'unnatural' in some cases. As in, "Things that were not meant to be." The inhabitants of my universe - even the gods - don't understand the 'Far Realms'. The standard model is that the 'Far Realms' are the domain of potentialities, the place where everything that could happen but didn't happen exists, at least in potential. Some believe that it is a realm of ideas that were abandoned by the unknown creator before he created the universe. Some believe that it is actually other creations of the unknown creator (which would mean it was an infinite number of multiverses).

I see, so you already had a Far Plane and 3e just gave you a label other could understand from a phrase. It's kind of interesting how many settings go with "beyond stuff" or as I call them 11's(from how people describe things beyond the 1-10 scale). To use them or not is something I continue to struggle with for my settings. 11's properly used can be great setting elements, but they can be tricky. Overused, they can make players feel like they are robbed of agency by virtue of scale. I also feel too many settings get lazy with 11's. Like how many settings with high tech or magic don't properly examine it's impact outside being a plot device. Which is why for my D&D stuff I have settled on keeping everything within a "10" even if "10" in this context is still fairly high. Still though, a properly executed 11 is a thing of beauty for a setting.

The earliest I can remember thinking about it was sometime in the 1980's when I heard of a Greyhawk deity named something like 'Celestine' which I knew nothing about, but from his name I conceived him of a god of outer space wandering far away from the world, a remote god of stars and astronomy little concerned with the world but rather with things that lay beyond it.

Yeah I thought the name sounded familiar when you mentioned it earlier. As a spelljammer fan the name is one I've heard before.

On a personal note, since you seem so interested in my thinking process, the actual deepest reason is that I'm a monotheist myself and that like Tolkien, behind everything, I have a monotheistic view of everything. If the analogue of God is not obviously within the universe, then it must be that there are things outside the universe. Fundamentally the deities of my homebrew universe are too small to be the cause of it, so it must have some external unknowable cause. While no one in my universe can learn the nature of it, I myself know the nature of my universe and what lays outside it. I know things that the gods can only guess at, such as whether the Creator actually exists.

Indeed I knew you were a monotheist. Because of your Slaadi, alignment, and play like celebrim posts I've went back a read almost all of your posts on this forum on D&D. So I know you were from Jamaica(or was it the Bahamas), that you had trouble after coming to the states, and that you have a wife, son, and daughter. And that your church is multiethnic. I hope that doesn't sound creepy, it's just things I remember from reading. Since they tended to come up in the threads when things get heated about race/gender in the hobby.

 

[Lanefan]

Not a lot of them. The Greek, Egyptian, Norse, or Hindu myths could be imported if you wanted to. They are well documented, detailed, and have plenty of depth.

I've done this for - so far - Norse, Greek and Celtic [and Roman and East Asian, not that anyone's seen them yet in game]; though very much in a Xena-Hercules who-cares-about-historical-accuracy kind of way. I've also got various other deities for Humans, some of which are just local variants on one of the above and others of which are taken from elsewhere or are completely homebrew; and each non-Human race has its own pantheon the makeup of which represents ideas stolen from all over the place.

Tolkien's Valar aren't bad, and they certainly work as a very generic Northern European pantheon, though you'd need to fill them out by detailing more of the Maiar that serve them as vassals.

What do you think of the pantheon used in Eddings' Belgariad series? There's 8 deities, one of which went renegade; and two overarching Prophecies which everyone serves one of whether they know it or not. These Prophecies interact with the protagonists on a regular basis; the deities themselves would in game terms probably be defined more like Immortals.

 

[Celebrim]

What do you think of the pantheon used in Eddings' Belgariad series? There's 8 deities, one of which went renegade; and two overarching Prophecies which everyone serves one of whether they know it or not. These Prophecies interact with the protagonists on a regular basis; the deities themselves would in game terms probably be defined more like Immortals.

I haven't read David Eddings works since high school, and I don't remember much of the details, so I don't know that I could give them a fair assessment. I remember he liked to play with fantasy tropes, to the extent that his characters were all pretty much over the top versions of a trope (not that I knew the word trope at the time), and I liked some of his twists and some of his banter was witty, but that's about it.