For Every Three that are Visible, there is a Fourth that is Hidden

[chronoplasm]

Thanks Ajanders!

To add to that...

Terminus is more commonly known amongst mortals as The Fool of Pits. It is a blind idiot god who wears four faces:
The Mask of Harlequin
The Mask of Pierrot
The Mask of Death
The fourth face of Terminus, the true face hidden behind its masks, is unknown.

Goblins in Runa will sometimes paint or carve a clown face at the bottom of their pit traps to invoke the power of Terminus.
Terminus is also associated with the circus pits where musicians, dancers, and gladiators entertain full stadiums of people. The clowns are usually goblins dressed in outlandish costumes and thrown into gladiatorial battles without weapons. These goblin clowns symbolize Terminus and other evil gods while the other gladiators symbolize the good gods.


I like the Sampo idea. I was thinking it would make sense to make one of the gods a genderless machine god of some sort.

Okay, so right now I have...

The Dwarven Pantheon (water, fire, earth, air)
The Elven Patheon (maiden, mother, crone, death)
The Kire (Human/Halfling) Pantheon (king, queen, sampo, fool)

So now I need a fourth, hidden pantheon. This will be an inversion of the previous three; whereas the other pantheons have three visible and one hidden, the hidden pantheon will have three hidden and one visible.

Any suggestions?

 

[ajanders]

Welll, any race with three hidden gods should be tricksy and good at hiding things.
Sounds like gnomes to me! Or changelings, if you don't mind plundering Eberron...
At one point somebody tried casting gnomes as a hidden race: they lived underground in well concealed cities, only venturing out disguised as members of other races or invisibly.
Maybe the whole existence of the fourth race is a secret...which fits your theme very nicely, yes?

The other option is to have the fourth race be very intuitive and mystical, often acting at the prodding of the three hidden gods even they don't know exist.
This race has a strong predilection for warlocks/sorcerors/favored souls, as members of the race get granted powers by gods they don't know exist for reasons they never guess at.
Got no idea what that race should be though.
An interesting mechanic (though likely frustrating) would be to pick some of the spells for casters of those races as they gain levels.
One of the character's major goals might be to explain why the universe granted him arcane lock instead of flaming sphere....it's also a good way to foreshadow future events.

 

[chronoplasm]

It might be helpful to look at various groups of three and four and see what I haven't used yet.
Four:
Temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmetic)
Humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm)
Rules (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division)
Horsemen of the apocolypse
Parts of a day (night, morning, afternoon, evening)
Aristotle's Four Causes (efficient cause, matter, end, and form)
Kant's Table of Judgements (quantity, quality, relation, modality)

Theres too many things with three for me to list here at the moment.

Another idea I've just been pondering is the idea of a destructive fifth that causes chaos and must be destroyed.