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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7313162" data-attributes="member: 4937">The advantage of having 'a thousand' gods is that you can always invent ones as needed.   But it's much easier to develop a small tightly organized pantheon, and in particular you can take the time you saved not inventing gods to detail the ways the deities interact with the world and how they are worshipped.The vast majority of invented pantheons are terrible.  The best test you can have is whether the deities seem to be designed with Dungeons and Dragons classes primarily in mind.  That is to say, is there a god of thieves, fighters, rangers, paladins, wizards, and so forth.  If there is, it's probably a terrible pantheon.  If you want an example of how not to do things, look at the Forgotten Realms pantheon.Another common mistake is a polytheistic pantheon that is monotheistic in the way it relates to the world.  That is to say, it thinks 'faith' is an important concept, has worshippers that 'love' the gods and gods that either love worshippers or demand their love or both, and most individuals in the society are functional monotheists with a 'patron deity'.  Real polytheism looks nothing like that.  Good examples of this are virtually any Hollywood movie with the Greek gods, particularly where Zeus is modeled basically after the Judeo-Christian God with another deity like Ares or Pluto playing the role of Satan.  Greek religion was nothing like that.There are two good examples of invented pantheons worth copying.The first example is Green Ronin's 'The Book of the Righteous' by Aaron Loeb.  It details a pantheon that is if I remember correctly 16 deities strong (12 good/neutral, and 4 evil) and spends most of its time detailing the way the deities are worshipped and in particular why anyone would actually worship them.  It's probably the only example of believable polytheism that I've seen in a gaming supplement, and it works really well with D&D because it's designed to support D&D without being simply gamist in design.The second example worth copying is Lois McMaster Bujold's 'Five Gods' pantheon from 'The Curse of Chalion' and 'Paladin of Souls'.   She ends up undermining it in later books but her initial conception is IMO really strong, and she succeeds probably better than any other author in inventing deities that you can believe someone would actually worship as divine beings worthy of receiving worship.Failing that, I'd suggest just copying the either the Greco-Roman pantheon or the Egyptian pantheon in every particular.  There is an enormous amount of information available about them, and unlike the Hindu pantheon the religion described therein doesn't have a lot of active participants to offend with your portrayal.  Just don't dumb down the pantheon by Christianizing it (which neither makes sense nor is it fair to Christians) or turning it in to a purely gamist affair.   If you want to invent your own, a good acquaintance with the above sources and real world polytheistic or animistic practices (that is, an academic acquaintance, by no means am I encouraging you to become a polytheist) should provide you plenty of inspiration and understanding for why polytheism was a very successful belief system for a very long time and why anyone would actually take it seriously.</blockquote>

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