D&D 5E Forgotten Realms deities in 5E: Who the hell is Marthammor Duin?

[I'm A Banana]

That said, is nobody else annoyed by or uncomfortable with racial deities? "Sorry, you're a dwarf, so you have to worship this dwarf travel-god; we don't serve your kind in the elven pantheon."

Depends on what mood I'm in.

On the one side, it's realistic. Different civilizations have slightly different gods that serve various bits of life. The Incan deity of corn, the Mayan deity of corn, and the Aztec deity of corn are all a little different. And they're all different (but similar) to harvest deities like Hestia or Gaia. Dwarves who have their own society would of course have their own gods for these things. The dwarven concept of travel is different from the ancient Greek, after all.

On the other side, it's fiddly and kind of unncessary in a fantasy world, plus it makes gods really really narrow. Like, what would a dwarf that worshiped Hermes look like? Maybe it'd be cool and new and interesting. Plus, since it's a fantasy setting, Hermes could just BE the god of travel for the whole world. And it's easier to remember.

But FR has a history of multiple racial pantheons, and for FR, a dwarven travel god makes more sense than one true travel god for everyone. Depending on my mood, though, it might be worth tweaking that.

 

[Alzrius]

That said, is nobody else annoyed by or uncomfortable with racial deities?

Nope!

(I like to give concise answers with no elaboration beyond the actual question that was asked.)

 

[am181d]

Nope!

(I like to give concise answers with no elaboration beyond the actual question that was asked.)

So to clarify, you are disagreeing with the proposition that "nobody else" is annoyed? Meaning that you think somebody else is annoyed? Is it you? Oh crap, is it ME???

I CAN'T TELL BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T ELABORATE BEYOND THE ACTUAL QUESTION!!!

 

[GravyFingerz]

Applecore.
Marthammor.
Whose your friend?
*points to holy symbol* Him.

 

[Shiroiken]

That said, is nobody else annoyed by or uncomfortable with racial deities? "Sorry, you're a dwarf, so you have to worship this dwarf travel-god; we don't serve your kind in the elven pantheon."

Greyhawk used to not have racial deities, until they realized that they had added several for humanoids and monsters, while forcing humans and demi-humans to share. Adding in the standard racial pantheons helped, IMO.

In homebrew, I've done the one pantheon and multiple pantheons, depending on what my feel for the campaign was. The best I did was have racial "pantheons" that were the same gods, but given different racial names. It took a while for anyone to realize the Elf and Human clerics worshiped the same god

 

[tuxgeo]

Yesterday WotC revealed the cleric pregen from the 5E Starter Set. On the second page, it notes that this character is a cleric of "Morthammor Duin, the dwarf god of wanderers, travelers, and outcasts--those who move among strange lands and foreign peoples." Who is this deity?

. . .

I'm not advocating pruning the FR pantheon, but is there way for me to run FR with a simplified, "For-Dummies'-style pantheon? Acknowledging that the Starter Set is still out of our hands for the next few days, is it worth keeping Morthammor Duin as the cleric pregen's deity?

The best advice so far in this thread was that posted by DEFCON1 (in post #10 of this thread): Adjust your deities list to suit your game.

According to my recollection of 3E (I have a text file of the cleric Domains), Marthammor's Domains are Dwarf, Good, Protection, and Travel.
Leaving off the racial Domain, he shares the rest of them (Good, Protection, and Travel) with Tymora; so you could just use Tymora for that.

[Could anyone XP DEFCON1's cited post for me? I have given XP for him too recently to do it myself. (Thanks in advance.)]

 

[doctorhook]

[sblock="sblock full of awesome"]Looking at the FR Greater Deities list... it seems like everything is actually pretty well condensed to a potential 4E-ish number.

There are 21 deities listed under 'Greater' for humans... however 4 of them are the four elemental deities, another 6 are evil deities (and thus wouldn't ordinarily appear in a regular deity list) and the last one is primarily a Chultan god (Ubtao) The remaining 10 greater deities are as follows:

Chauntea - goddess of agriculture
Kelemvor - god of death
Lathander - god of birth and spring
Mystra - goddess of magic
Oghma - god of knowledge
Selune - goddess of the moon and stars
Silvanus - god of nature
Sune - goddess of love
Tempus - god of war and battle
Torm - god of duty and loyalty

So that gives you an easy list to use as your primary functionality for gods in the Realms. You really needn't go much further than that if you didn't want.

However, if you did want to add a few more, you have another couple of steps. First off, you can add in the four Greater Deities of the demihuman races:

Moradin - dwarven god of creation and smithing
Corellon - elven god of music and arts
Garl - gnome god of humor and trickery
Yondalla - halfling god of bounty and family

And then you could also add in the remaining 6 non-evil Intermediate deities:

Bahamut - god of wisdom and justice
Gond - god of artifice and craft
Ilmater - god of endurance and suffering
Mielikki - goddess of forests and autumn
Tymora - goddess of fortune and skill
Waukeen - goddess of trade and money

So for a baseline game... you could stick with the 10 Greater Deities and use them. Or if you wanted more variation... add in the other 10 and give yourself 20. Or mix and match as you feel is needed... like using the 10 Greater human deities plus Moradin and Corellon (getting you closer to what 4E's setting went with in terms of domain and gods.)

Speaking personally... I'm probably going to end up looking at the actual domains the PH gives us and then determine off of that which and how many of the FR gods I'm going to make available for cleric selection. So for instance... if there's only five domains as were mentioned in the last playtest packet (Knowledge, Light, Life, Nature, and War)... then I'll probably just offer up to my players the five greater deities that align to them that they can select from:

Oghma - knowledge
Lathander - light
Chauntea - life
Silvanus - nature
Tempus - war

But we'll have to see. I'm actually hoping we might get up to about 8 domains because I'd love to see Magic, Protection/Justice, and Trickery available as well.[/sblock]

XP'd you. This was exactly the kind of take on FR that I was looking for! I'll probably borrow from your suggestion and mostly limit deity selection to ones for whom I've got domains or whose followers play a role in the plot.

Depends on what mood I'm in.

On the one side, it's realistic. Different civilizations have slightly different gods that serve various bits of life. The Incan deity of corn, the Mayan deity of corn, and the Aztec deity of corn are all a little different. And they're all different (but similar) to harvest deities like Hestia or Gaia. Dwarves who have their own society would of course have their own gods for these things. The dwarven concept of travel is different from the ancient Greek, after all.

On the other side, it's fiddly and kind of unncessary in a fantasy world, plus it makes gods really really narrow. Like, what would a dwarf that worshiped Hermes look like? Maybe it'd be cool and new and interesting. Plus, since it's a fantasy setting, Hermes could just BE the god of travel for the whole world. And it's easier to remember.

But FR has a history of multiple racial pantheons, and for FR, a dwarven travel god makes more sense than one true travel god for everyone. Depending on my mood, though, it might be worth tweaking that.

There's no doubt that pantheons are part-and-parcel of the Forgotten Realms. As for realistic, well... the Forgotten Realms are culturally diverse, which is realistic, but the belief systems across cultures are essentially all of the same polytheistic structure. Then again, I suppose it's also internally consistent: in a world where deities can regularly interfere and where mortals have numerous times either assumed or usurped divinity, there wouldn't be much variation among religions. Atheism and agnosticism become untenable positions when the gods can literally walk down the street and talk to you.

I'm a big Eberron fan, and I think of all published D&D settings, Eberron treats religion most realistically, on account of its diversity. In Eberron, faith is a lot fuzzier, as clerics aren't bound by alignment to receive their spells and various religions of wildly different structures compete (peacefully or otherwise) for followers even within the same culture.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Who the hell is Marthammor Duin?

I heard he's with the hot bar wench at the Purple Flumpfh Tavern...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That said, is nobody else annoyed by or uncomfortable with racial deities? "Sorry, you're a dwarf, so you have to worship this dwarf travel-god; we don't serve your kind in the elven pantheon."

I have to ask, where in 5th is it written that dwarves HAVE to worship Dwarven deities? Or elves the elvish gods?

(I have always played it that it was COMMONPLACE, but not universal.)

 

[thalmin]

Stealing from the wonderful Iron Druid novels by Kevin Hearne, the gods take on the forms their worshippers give them. Thus the dwarven dieties look like dwarves, elven like elves, etc. And the same god would appear differently to different worshippers, maybe by different names. And mutliple gods of the same name can coexist if there are differences attributed to them by their worshippers.