Gods: DM Fluff or Player Crunch?

[Oryan77]

There are lots of gods listed in various 3e books that have no listing for their home plane. This is mostly the case in the Races of (Stone, the Wild, Destiny) and the environmental books (Sandstorm, Stormwrack, Frostburn) but there are plenty of them in many other 3e books.

This is pretty annoying to me since I run a planar campaign. If a player wants his PC to worship one of these deities, I'd really like to have more information other than just what will give the PC all of his character enhancements. Where is the fluff?!?! I'd like to know where these guys keep their realms!

Are these gods only in the books to give players more domain options? Or do these guys exist in more detail in other sources? I've looked in all of my books, on wikipedia, planewalker.com, and wherever else I could think of. So I'm assuming these gods only exist for the sole purpose to cater to players spell lists. Am I wrong? I hope so.

 

[Nagol]

My guess is that WotC had already tired of the Great Wheel by the time those supplements came out.

In my fevered imagination, since they didn't like it, didn't use it, and saw no value in it, it became fodder for the editing knife to keep page count down.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Well I can't answer your actual question: don't know which specific gods you're referring to as I don't have any of my source books here at work with me. And doubt I'd know the answers (if they exist) in any case.

But I can answer your implied question. OK, not so much implied as stated outright in your post title.

Gods should have fluff! Mountains of monumental, godly belly button fluff. Of course not every source book has time to go deep into the fluff of some deity even if it is the first place this god is mentioned. But fluff is needed. Myths and sagas are essential. Personality. Goals. Pantheon/place in cosmology. And not just god fluff. In fact considerably less of that. I personally don't care where some god is supposed to live. None of my games are going to go there anyway. (Clearly your games differ.) I want loads of worshipper fluff. Holy days; cultic practice (esp. if it involves human sacrifice); church structure; unusual strictures; church goals/attitudes; traditional enemies. maybe even some basic theology to make running a church based game more interesting.

But they should also have crunch. Domains, preferred weapons, etc. Players will want to know.

Slight tangent: I like the old 2e idea of different spell lists for Clerics based on the gods they worship. If I ever run DnD again then I think I will import this idea into the game. Add it to the crunch.

cheers.

 

[Haltherrion]

You can get the players to do some of this legwork for the less defined deities. It is not unreasonable for them to put some effort into defining their patrons; a lot of refs seem to do this.

Require them to flesh out their god(s). In return give them flexibility (i.e., don't nix things they come up with because it doesn't meet your aesthetic sense; if you have them do the work you have to allow them creative license) and maybe offer them a carrot or two for doing this. For instance, if they do a good job, as a cleric in good standing at their temple have them sometimes get potions, scrolls and maybe even a hand me down magic item. Show the players this part of the campaign matters and they will put some work into it.

Alternately, you can do the work yourself. One downside is you may need to define 10x as many gods as the players actually end up using (thus many people's preference to having the players do it: you get a very good god definition for the gods the players care about rather than a lot of weak ones you knocked out just to fill in the ranks.)

Myself, I find gods and sources of divine power to be a key part of a setting and usually put a lot of work into it but I recognize that that is a personal preference and that I just enjoy world building.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Lazy DM answer - take from those that have fluff and use it.

The not so lazy DM answer - be prepare to do some work, as many gods there are in the books, myth and legends have more, you just have to do the reseach. Look at the planes and domains and build or at least have your players do it. I think is the DM's job to setup the planes and gods in their games and how they interact with them. Players should not be able to bring in their own gods (or classes) without working with the DM to check them for fit.

 

[tuxgeo]

There are lots of gods listed in various 3e books that have no listing for their home plane. < snip >

This is pretty annoying to me since I run a planar campaign. If a player wants his PC to worship one of these deities, I'd really like to have more information other than just what will give the PC all of his character enhancements. Where is the fluff?!?! I'd like to know where these guys keep their realms!

Are these gods only in the books to give players more domain options? Or do these guys exist in more detail in other sources? I've looked in all of my books, on wikipedia, planewalker.com, and wherever else I could think of. So I'm assuming these gods only exist for the sole purpose to cater to players spell lists. Am I wrong? I hope so.

You might be able to import the fluff (and crunch) from the 2E Forgotten Realms books for the purpose, titled: "Faiths & Avatars" (1996), "Powers & Pantheons" (1997), and "Demihuman Deities" (1998).
Content: F&A contains all of the greater, intermediate, and lesser human deities of the Faerunian pantheon; P&P contains the rest of them, including demigods; and "DD" contains the non-human pantheons.
They're written by Eric L. Boyd (with Julia Martin on F&A; with Kate Grubb and Skip Williams on P&P); and each book is 192 pages of stuff.

You could do a lot worse. I got my copies on eBay, but Amazon has them all, both New and Used.

 

[The 1 and the Prime]

Check out the List of Dungeons and Dragons deities in wikipedia. They have canonical home plane listing for most deities.

 

[doctorhook]

One of the things I most like about the default world of 4E is that it tightened up the pantheon very neatly, rather than continue with the sprawling list of minor deities bastardised from Greyhawk. There's 20 deities, and pretty much any concept fits underneath one of them; however, if you want to worship someone else, there's still countless exarchs -- mostly minor deities in their own right -- serving each primary deity. It's very modular this way; you can have as many different deities as you like, without running the risk of having a campaign where every NPC worships a different obscure deity.

Since it doesn't sound like you're already playing 4E, and if you're not especially interested in doing a bunch of homework for each new deity, I recommend you use the 4E approach: assign each new deity to the core deity it's most closely associated with, and then just assume it has all the same characteristics of that deity, except for whatever differences are already written. For example, a new LG dwarven deity would likely fit alongside Moradin, and so most of what applies to Moradin would apply to her; alternatively, a LE dwarven deity of tyranny would probably follow Hextor, but with a dwarven flair.

 

[nasrat]

You might be able to import the fluff (and crunch) from the 2E Forgotten Realms books for the purpose, titled: "Faiths & Avatars" (1996), "Powers & Pantheons" (1997), and "Demihuman Deities" (1998).
Content: F&A contains all of the greater, intermediate, and lesser human deities of the Faerunian pantheon; P&P contains the rest of them, including demigods; and "DD" contains the non-human pantheons.

One of my favourite fluff supplements for this is On Hallowed Ground (1996) by Colin McComb - a 2E Planescape Supplement has a lot of information on pantheons and gods. It covers both historical, monstrous, demi-human and D&D multiverse pantheons (Krynn, Oerth, Faerun, Cerilian). Rumours/chant are scattered amongst the entries which might provide inspiriation for machinations of the gods you are chosing to focus on.

 

[Thanael]

In general look to 2E (and to a degree 1E) for great fluff. 3E was dumbed down on the fluff a whole lot.

You might be able to import the fluff (and crunch) from the 2E Forgotten Realms books for the purpose, titled: "Faiths & Avatars" (1996), "Powers & Pantheons" (1997), and "Demihuman Deities" (1998).
Content: F&A contains all of the greater, intermediate, and lesser human deities of the Faerunian pantheon; P&P contains the rest of them, including demigods; and "DD" contains the non-human pantheons.
They're written by Eric L. Boyd (with Julia Martin on F&A; with Kate Grubb and Skip Williams on P&P); and each book is 192 pages of stuff.

You could do a lot worse. I got my copies on eBay, but Amazon has them all, both New and Used.

These three books plus On Hallowed Ground and Monster Mythology cover almost all deities. Often there are other sources, Dragon magazine had some Greyhawk gods articles as does the Slavers supplement for example. Bastion of Faith has a Faiths & Avatars style entry for Heironeous and Hextor. Many gods did get F&A style writeups on the forums and mailing lists.

Of course there's the Living Greyhawk deities pdf too.

Dicefreaks Deities subboards often have milked these oldschool sources for fluff and inspiration on crunch. Even if you don't need the crunch i think it's a great resource...

Which pantheon do you need?