Do You Use the Core Pantheon?

[cybertalus]

I used the core pantheon in a short-term game once. It didn't really matter because no one played a cleric and the adventure itself didn't involve any NPC clerics.

I don't really care for the core pantheon though, and keep meaning to make myself up a default pantheon to use, probably based on the Forgotten Realms gods. Of all the published pantheons I've seen, the Realms one is far and away my favorite.

 

[Campbell]

In my incredibly divergent homebrews I don't use the GH pantheon, preferring less alignment dependent dieties. However, I'd really like to get a Greyhawk game going in the next year, having never had the chance to play in a more standard Greyhawk game. That being said, I prefer the treatments given to the core gods in D&Dg. Mainly, what I'd like to see is a Grayhawk setting supplement designed for the uninitiated. Greyhawk has an appeal that speaks to this homebrewer more than any other prefab setting, with the exception of Dawnforge.

 

[Sargon the Kassadian]

We only use them as a kind of last resort, but we generally don't pay much attention to gods (which is bad). Most of the core gods are too general and stereotypical to be interesting flavor-wise. A few good ones are: Obad-Hai, St. Cuthbert, Wee Jas and Olidammara. An even more in depth look at the history and flavor of them and their religions would be awesome (not another Deities & Demigods).

 

[Shade]

Only the monstrous deities. FR has more than enough deities to cover the rest of my campaign's needs.

 

[Scarbonac]

Let's call this market research.

Do you use the core pantheon? If so, which gods from it feature prominently in your campaigns?

Thanks,

Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

Not as such; I do use many of the nonhuman and "monster" deities (basically in their forms from 1e and 2e, though), incl. the Demon Lords, Devil Princes, Bahamat, Tiamat, the Lovecraftian "gods" and some Newhonian Powers in conjunction with my own homebrew "Human" pantheon.

My wife does something similar, but she runs a customized Greyhawk game that blends our homebrew Gawds with the (1e & 2e) Greyhawk "pantheon".

 

[jokamachi]

I like to include weird little wayward temples in my campaigns, so I'm always pulling out obscure deities with which to populate the landscape.

I enjoy building the congregations from the ground up, so it's good to have a healthy back-log of gods to choose from.

I especially liked the inclusion of the hero gods in the latest issue of Dungeon, the one that had a write-up of Sterich.

 

[Corinth]

The pantheon is of Greyhawk, so--save for those co-existing in the Realms--they stay there.

 

[Li Shenron]

Let's call this market research.

Do you use the core pantheon? If so, which gods from it feature prominently in your campaigns?

Thanks,

Another response from the "market"

I have used the core pantheon in early 3ed games, mostly because I didn't have alternative pantheons. I found the deities of the core pantheon very fine in concepts, but they ended up too few in number after a while.
Furthermore, every time I saw a pantheon expansion (I mean, one or more extra deities in Dragon magazine or WotC book), it was always in the form of (1) another tiny & insignificant extremely-evil-god-of-destruction or (2) another monster deity. We found that giving each monster race its own god which cares about them and nothing else in the universe is extremely boring.

About the most popular deities... since the choices are few, basically every member of a race has had to worship (or be a cleric of) the racial god. Otherwise, there's usually 1 only choice per alignment. Since we play mostly good humans, the winner gods had to be Heironeous, Pelor and Kord.

After we have found the FR book Faith & Pantheons we switched to its pantheon even without switching to a FR campaign. Even if it has its own little things that may not fit with our stories, it offers a much larger range of options, and having racial sub-pantheons instead of single deities (and for the major races only) is definitely an improvement.

So much for my contribution to the market research...

 

[Ron]

Let's call this market research.

Do you use the core pantheon? If so, which gods from it feature prominently in your campaigns?

Thanks,

Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

Only when playing in Greyhawk. Regarding their prominence, none at all. In my games, gods are far removed from the world of men. Obviously, the players are free to be devotes or worship any deity they want, but, as a GM, they appear only indirectly, through faithful NPCs.

That said, I used the cult of Vecna as my main villain in the last D&D campaign I run.

 

[Davelozzi]

Like Henry, Ron, and others, I don't use them now, though I would if I was running Greyhawk. But like Psion, I do use the core dieties for nonhumans (old pantheons, not the new stuff in Races of Stone).

However, I think using them as placeholder dieties in Dungeon is a good idea and hope that you'll keep doing that. Unless an adventure really needs a unique god, I'd rather see a familiar one. Just in case that's why you're asking.