Faerun - Trimming down the diety list

[ruleslawyer]

Evil deities serve a need just as much as good ones.

Er, really, Nightfall? I find that a bit hard to believe. People don't really have to worship a god of tyranny, or a god of murder, or a god of loss and bitterness. Nature, farming, trade, the elements, the sun and moon (or day and night) and other common elements of people's lives, OTOH, must have patron deities if we're at all bothering with any sort of pantheist or polytheist representation in the first place (unless you want to assign one deity per alignment, or one Ahura Mazda and one Ahriman, or some such). Historical pantheons aren't exactly heavy on evil deities (the Norse and Egyptian pantheons have one or maybe two each, and the Greeks don't really have any, at least if you go by Homer or The Metamorphoses).

 

[Mystery Man]

My trimdown:

1) Eliminate the racial pantheons. If you want 20-30 gods, there's no reason for the elves to have their dozen, the dwarves theirs, etc. I see no reason why goblins couldn't worship Bane as easily as Maglubiyet (they could even *call* him Maglubiyet, and have him look like a gigantic (hob)goblin).

2) Eliminate the Mulhorandi and Untheric pantheons. Well, not eliminate per se; just make the "god-kings" incredibly powerful (im)mortal beings rather than true gods.

3) Then the deities. I'd go with the following:

-Azuth (magic, arcane spellcasters)
-Bane (general LE)
-Bhaal (assassins, necromancers, gibbering death priests)
-Chauntea (farmers, common folk)
-Gond (craft, invention, artisans, tinkers)
-Lathander (sun, light, athletics, general NG)
-Malar (hunters, evil rangers & druids, barbarians)
-Mask (thieves, liars, shadows)
-Mielikki (good rangers & druids, guides, trackers, borderfolk)
-Oghma (knowledge, scribes, bards)
-Selune (moon, general CG)
-Shar (illusion, deception, darkness, liars, plotters, Underdark folk, general NE)
-Silvanus (nature, neutral druids, general N)
-Sune (love, beauty, art)
-Talos (violent aspects of nature, storms, general CE)
-Tempus (war)
-Tyche (luck, general CN)
-Tyr (justice, paladins, rulership, general LG/LN)
-Waukeen (trade)

For a death god, I'd say it depends on your choice of flavor. Either an uncaring, distant, cold deity (Jergal), an evil Grim Reaper-necromancer type (Myrkul), or a just-but-distant, solemn god (Kelemvor).

I suggest this lineup because it provides a balance of aligned deities, reasonably preserves the flavor of the Realms, and gives all character classes and standard archetypes a patron deity of sorts. I left out Mystra, though I think she's actually pretty central to FR, because Azuth seems a bit more of a traditional wizard patron.

I certainly don't think you need many evil deities. In a small pantheon, it's unlikely that there would be many evil deities... certainly not worshiped, anyway. To be honest, it surprises me that the Realms has as many evil deities as it is.

Kudos! That is a great pared down list.

 

[Ciaran]

Er, really, Nightfall? I find that a bit hard to believe. People don't really have to worship a god of tyranny, or a god of murder, or a god of loss and bitterness. Nature, farming, trade, the elements, the sun and moon (or day and night) and other common elements of people's lives, OTOH, must have patron deities if we're at all bothering with any sort of pantheist or polytheist representation in the first place (unless you want to assign one deity per alignment, or one Ahura Mazda and one Ahriman, or some such). Historical pantheons aren't exactly heavy on evil deities (the Norse and Egyptian pantheons have one or maybe two each, and the Greeks don't really have any, at least if you go by Homer or The Metamorphoses).

Feel free to create an artificial distinction between "gods" and "evil supernatural entities" if you like, but most polytheistic worldviews were chock full of godlike supernatural evil. Jotuns, raksha, demons and devils. Sure, some of them are generic minor evils, but those are matched by generic minor sub-deities (look at the various orders of nymphs in Greek mythology, all of which were technically gods.) But there's a bunch of potent named evils, and you can classify them as archfiends or whatever in the D&D cosmology, but they're still "evil gods" with regard to how they're viewed.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Feel free to create an artificial distinction between "gods" and "evil supernatural entities" if you like, but most polytheistic worldviews were chock full of godlike supernatural evil. Jotuns, raksha, demons and devils.

All of which can exist in an FR campaign as monsters... which they are in D&D.

Sure, some of them are generic minor evils, but those are matched by generic minor sub-deities (look at the various orders of nymphs in Greek mythology, all of which were technically gods.) But there's a bunch of potent named evils, and you can classify them as archfiends or whatever in the D&D cosmology, but they're still "evil gods" with regard to how they're viewed.

Actually, they may exist, but there aren't large numbers of them in the big-name polytheist religions. The closest parallel to gods like Bane, Shar, Talos, etc. are RW gods like Set (only one of him in the Egyptian pantheon, or maybe two if you count Apep as a god), Loki (who, plus Hel, make two gods), or Kali (one). If you start throwing beings like Ravana, Kumbhakarna, and Bali into the mix (and, actually, I'd argue that Bali isn't evil), you'll have to throw the gandharvas, yakshas, and all the devas into the mix, and you're back up to hundreds of gods.

I'm not saying that evil gods can't be a part of religious life, but merely that enough RW polytheist religions dispense with having anything more than a "black sheep" or two that I have a hard time believing that you "need them as much as good ones," as Nightfall proposed.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Kudos! That is a great pared down list.

Hey, thanks!

 

[prosfilaes]

Historical pantheons aren't exactly heavy on evil deities (the Norse and Egyptian pantheons have one or maybe two each, and the Greeks don't really have any, at least if you go by Homer or The Metamorphoses).

But then again, the Greek gods weren't really good deities, either. Most of them were pretty vindictive and cruel and needed appeasement. The actions of the gods in and immediately before the Illiad was not good in D&D terms.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Ah, but "flawed and sometimes cruel to human understanding" is a bit different from the eeevil presented in our good ol' aligned deities, IMHO. Even the Homeric Olympians are embodiments of conceptions that we consider either "good" (Apollo, Athena, Hermes) or exigencies (Ares, Poseidon); it's their character as individuals that can be selfish and petty. This is a far cry from deities who actually represent evil ideals. Far be it for me to divert this thread into a discussion on mythopoeics (which I'll cease from now on), Campbell's term for the latter are "demons" or "monsters," of which there are plenty in D&D already.

I do get where you're coming from; having "evil" gods that exist to be placated is just as valid as having "good" gods that exist to be venerated. The problem is when you have a choice between the two, at which point the raison d'etre for the evil gods is rendered slightly more problematic. Again, my issue was with the idea of evil gods "serv[ing] a need." If it's an exogenous issue where the gods just exist, well sure; nothing's preventing you from having an ALL-evil pantheon, or a 13 evil-1 good pantheon, etc. If, OTOH, we're talking about paring an existing pantheon down to a small one and keeping only the deities to cover necessary aspects of mortal life, then I think that the only reason to have all those evil gods with evil portfolios in stock is to have more different flavors of enemy. Since this is easily accomplished by varying mortal foes, I don't think it's necessary.

 

[BOZ]

Boz,

Really? Huh. I'd think GH is fine with it's gods. Most of them don't interfere that much anyway.

hey, it wasn't my idea. the idea was, our PCs had slept for 1000 years, and much had changed in the future... the demon lords fought a long, and successful war against the gods and eliminated most of them.

the campaign idea, after being inherited by myself and then another person as DM, was that we can go back in time to stop the key event that we were originally supposed to have stopped from happening in the first place.