Greyhawk being dumped as the core setting in 3.5
- Thread starter DDK
- Start date
Tyler Do'Urden
Soap Maker
Re: Re: My Trolly Sense is tingling...
No, but her high priest was Hugh Jas. At least until Hugh had a sex change and became Jennifer Lopez.
Sixchan said:
No, but her high priest was Hugh Jas. At least until Hugh had a sex change and became Jennifer Lopez.
WizarDru
Adventurer
Re: Re: My Trolly Sense is tingling...
No, a troll because he hijacks a thread to mock a campaign setting, and seems to remember some minute details, and then gets some major ones wildly wrong. It's a litle suspicious, especially for a first post.
Personally, I'm curious what Jesse would consider a good set of names for a god? If his complaint was that they weren't linguistically consistent, that's a pretty reasonable statement, and he sratches at that. However, saying that they're laugh out loud funny and makes him 'cringe in disgust' sure sounds like an attempt to get someone like DDK to react, which I guess it did.
As for names like Frederick and Wallace, well "The Peaceful Ruler" and "The Foreigner" sound like pretty good names for a god, to me. YMMV.
arnwyn said:
No, a troll because he hijacks a thread to mock a campaign setting, and seems to remember some minute details, and then gets some major ones wildly wrong. It's a litle suspicious, especially for a first post.
Personally, I'm curious what Jesse would consider a good set of names for a god? If his complaint was that they weren't linguistically consistent, that's a pretty reasonable statement, and he sratches at that. However, saying that they're laugh out loud funny and makes him 'cringe in disgust' sure sounds like an attempt to get someone like DDK to react, which I guess it did.
As for names like Frederick and Wallace, well "The Peaceful Ruler" and "The Foreigner" sound like pretty good names for a god, to me. YMMV.
Greyhawk Gods
As I've previously mentioned, there are four distinct pantheons in Greyhawk plus a host of other gods which have come from other planes or have ascended as mortals.
Within each pantheon, the naming convention, if one was ever used, is pretty consistant.
However, in the PHB, deities have been plucked from all different sources with the only rhyme or reason being to present gods for various alignments with none of the original context included.
So, of course they seem a bit mismatched, because they ARE.
Boccob, Ehlonna, Obad-Hai, Olidammara, Vecna and St. Cuthbert are all individual gods with no racial connections. How they came to Oerth is a mystery. St. Cuthbert and Vecna are both said to be mortals who have arisen to deityhood but only Vecna's history is known, and even that's heavily debated. There are several races rumoured to have existed well before even the Flan (whom the Flanaess is named after) lived there and it is to these that the above deities are usually said to have hailed from, however even that is mere speculation.
Erythnul, Nerull and Pelor are all Flan gods. The Flan were the original inhabitants of the Flanaess before the Suel and Oeridian migrations caused them to be scattered to the far corners of the Flanaess or be integrated into either race. As a people, they have several strongholds but have diverged from their original precepts and in all but one area have wholly adopted the ways of their conquerers. The areas that they are dominant in are Stonehold, Tenh, Geoff and the Rovers of the Barrens.
Kord and Wee Jas are Suel gods. The Suel were once the most powerful of races having spawned a mighty empire of vast magical power and knowledge over four thousand years ago to the far east, across the mountain range known as the Hellfurnaces. They have since been decimated by the event known as the Rain of Colorless Fire which was brought about as a retributive strike by the Baklun for the Invoked Devastation. They now dwell in isolated pockets and as a part of the whole that makes up the Flanaess much like the Flan do. They are dominant in only two areas, the Kingdom of Shar and the Thillonrian Peninsula.
Fharlanghn, Heironeous and Hextor are Oeridian gods. The Oerids were a race that dwelled under the yolk of the Suel but broke their bondage and headed westwards. In their migrations, they brought war for most of their gods were (Pholtus, Heironeous, Hextor) were savage and warlike. Due to this, and their early dominance of the Flan, before the Suel ever began evacuating their lands, they established many strongholds and were able to dominate most areas of the Flanaess. There are very few areas of the Flanaess which remain untouched or uninfluenced in some way by the Oeridians. They were responsible for the creation of the Great Kingdom which only in recent years has fallen.
Anyone who believes anything I've said to be incorrect, please feel free to correct me on as I'm only doing this from memory and I have a severe caffiene (lack of) headache.
This is one of my gripes with Greyhawk being used as the 'default' setting.WizarDru said:
As I've previously mentioned, there are four distinct pantheons in Greyhawk plus a host of other gods which have come from other planes or have ascended as mortals.
Within each pantheon, the naming convention, if one was ever used, is pretty consistant.
However, in the PHB, deities have been plucked from all different sources with the only rhyme or reason being to present gods for various alignments with none of the original context included.
So, of course they seem a bit mismatched, because they ARE.
Boccob, Ehlonna, Obad-Hai, Olidammara, Vecna and St. Cuthbert are all individual gods with no racial connections. How they came to Oerth is a mystery. St. Cuthbert and Vecna are both said to be mortals who have arisen to deityhood but only Vecna's history is known, and even that's heavily debated. There are several races rumoured to have existed well before even the Flan (whom the Flanaess is named after) lived there and it is to these that the above deities are usually said to have hailed from, however even that is mere speculation.
Erythnul, Nerull and Pelor are all Flan gods. The Flan were the original inhabitants of the Flanaess before the Suel and Oeridian migrations caused them to be scattered to the far corners of the Flanaess or be integrated into either race. As a people, they have several strongholds but have diverged from their original precepts and in all but one area have wholly adopted the ways of their conquerers. The areas that they are dominant in are Stonehold, Tenh, Geoff and the Rovers of the Barrens.
Kord and Wee Jas are Suel gods. The Suel were once the most powerful of races having spawned a mighty empire of vast magical power and knowledge over four thousand years ago to the far east, across the mountain range known as the Hellfurnaces. They have since been decimated by the event known as the Rain of Colorless Fire which was brought about as a retributive strike by the Baklun for the Invoked Devastation. They now dwell in isolated pockets and as a part of the whole that makes up the Flanaess much like the Flan do. They are dominant in only two areas, the Kingdom of Shar and the Thillonrian Peninsula.
Fharlanghn, Heironeous and Hextor are Oeridian gods. The Oerids were a race that dwelled under the yolk of the Suel but broke their bondage and headed westwards. In their migrations, they brought war for most of their gods were (Pholtus, Heironeous, Hextor) were savage and warlike. Due to this, and their early dominance of the Flan, before the Suel ever began evacuating their lands, they established many strongholds and were able to dominate most areas of the Flanaess. There are very few areas of the Flanaess which remain untouched or uninfluenced in some way by the Oeridians. They were responsible for the creation of the Great Kingdom which only in recent years has fallen.
Anyone who believes anything I've said to be incorrect, please feel free to correct me on as I'm only doing this from memory and I have a severe caffiene (lack of) headache.
buzz
Adventurer
Re: Greyhawk Gods
To include more context, more specific setting info would need to be included... by an order of magnitude. That they present merely a sampling of major gods should be no suprise, as the "flavor" of Greyhawk included in the core books is intended to be minimal.
There is also ample precendent in RL for cultures with a mish-mash of gods from diverse origins, e.g., ancient Egypt. I also must say that I have yet to hear a player complain about the "linguistic inconsistency" of the gods in the PHB.
The only failing that I can see is that there's no equivalent of the FRCS book for Greyhawk where you can get more context, ignoring for now the LGG (which itself isn't all that detailed, deity-wise, and it OOP now, iirc.). Right now, if people want context, they kind of have to hunt for it.
DDK said:
To include more context, more specific setting info would need to be included... by an order of magnitude. That they present merely a sampling of major gods should be no suprise, as the "flavor" of Greyhawk included in the core books is intended to be minimal.
There is also ample precendent in RL for cultures with a mish-mash of gods from diverse origins, e.g., ancient Egypt. I also must say that I have yet to hear a player complain about the "linguistic inconsistency" of the gods in the PHB.
The only failing that I can see is that there's no equivalent of the FRCS book for Greyhawk where you can get more context, ignoring for now the LGG (which itself isn't all that detailed, deity-wise, and it OOP now, iirc.). Right now, if people want context, they kind of have to hunt for it.
Desdichado
Hero
Who cares about the gods; all the names in Greyhawk are pretty stupid. That's one of my biggest gripes with the setting.
Celebrim
Legend
Gee... and I've always kinda liked that not all the names in Greyhawk sounded like the invention of a native English speaker, and not all of them sounded like English nicknames, and most importantly none of them sounded like the shallow inventions or word associations a junior high kid inventing the 'god of rangers' and the 'the god of paladins' and 'the god of magic-users' because he had never had any exposure to any deeper mythological references and had a pretty limited working vocabulary to boot.
I suppose everyone thinks Helm, Mystra, Bane, and a hodgepodge of dieties borrowed from the old Dieties and Demigods supplement are so much better choices for invented deities.
Sheesh.
I suppose everyone thinks Helm, Mystra, Bane, and a hodgepodge of dieties borrowed from the old Dieties and Demigods supplement are so much better choices for invented deities.
Sheesh.
Re: Re: Re: My Trolly Sense is tingling...
No, I wasn't trying to troll. On reflection, it looks like I could have been a little less scornful and loud-spoken, but I stand by what I said. My players DID laugh aloud at the names of the gods in the PHB, and I still hold my opinion that most of them range from "somewhat silly" to "inexcusably bad".
I probably shouldn't have jumped on Pelor, Erythnul, etc, so hard, however. They're not laughably bad or anything, and I could expect to do worse in designing a pantheon.
What did I get wildly wrong, out of curiousity? My post was supposed to be opinion, not fact. The 50-75% part? That was just a wild guess, but I'd be surprised if a majority of D&D players are Greyhawk vets, to the extent that they've done more than play a module or two from the setting here and there. The "Fharlanghn = Celtic-sounding" part? That, too, was a guess. That's why I put the question mark there.
The linguistic consistency is one issue, and a big one. You just don't have a St. Cuthbert, a Fharlanghn, a Kord, and a Heironeous in the same culture's pantheon.
Now, I know very little of Greyhawk (I know I'm destroying my credibility by admitting that, but I'm not really trying to win anyone over, just expressiong how I feel about it), but I seem to recall hearing/reading somewhere that these gods are from different cultures' sub-pantheons within the world. That might be fine, in a Greyhawk campaign, but they're NOT presented that way in the PHB. They're presented as one big, unified pantheon in the PHB, and it just sounds like a jumbled mishmash when you read their names back-to-back. Like a DM needed some deities for his campaign and hadn't thought about it before 3 PM on game-day, so he flipped through a World Mythology book and plunked his finger down to find a few, then cranked many of the rest out with a random syllable generator.
That's not the only problem, though. I'm not saying it's easy; fantasy names can be HARD to do well, and deity names harder still. Ideally, I think deity names should sound plausible for a fantasy world, while not being jarring to our modern ears. There should also, in a perfect world, be something that sounds divine or ancient about many of them, unless they're recently ascended mortals.
Wee Jas is the worst offender here. Regardless of what it may mean in Greyhawk language, "wee" has two meanings to us modern players. One is "small", and the other is a kiddy-euphemism for "urine". Whatever it may mean in the Greyhawk culture, to speakers of American English it sounds bad. Not to put all of the blame on the first syllable, though; "Jas" isn't too good either. As Sixchan said, it sounds like it should be short for something like "Jasper" or "Jasmine"; it just doesn't stand on its own. And, maybe worst of all, when you say it quickly, as in normal conversation, it often comes out "weej a--". No better way to totally kill the mood than by having the dark necromancer make a reference to his patron goddess in the midst of a horrific sacrifice and have the players hit the floor laughing.
Heironeous isn't so good either. Apart from the pronunciation difficulty of it (the guy who was talking about its similarity to "hairy anus" wasn't far off. My players couldn't figure it out without the pronunciation guide on page 91. "Herrow-inn-ee-uss? Hair-onny-oos?"), it looks like an mutant adjective ("Thus, the valorous and chivalrous knight raised his splendrous sword in a heironeous charge to the front of the lines), and it looks enough like the word "heroin" that one of my players remarked something to the effect of "This guy's name is Heroineus? What's his holy symbol, a needle and a cotton ball?". You could make the case that my players and I are low-brow knuckle-draggers, and you'd be partly right (we're a mix of blue-collar Midwestern rednecks and high school students), but I still think the name sucks.
Kord has the same problem as FR's Helm. He's not a god, he's something you'd expect to find on a player's equipment list. So the first letter is "K" instead of "C". Still doesn't sound like a deity, any more than Stove or Lamp or Brick or any number of mundane objects. At least Helm is usually a piece of battle equipment, which is somewhat fitting for a deity of battle. You could make the cord = muscle fiber = strength connection, I guess, but the cord won't stretch that far; it breaks before reaching.
I won't get started on Obad-Hai, Hextor, and St. Cuthbert, since I've gone on too long already and already pointed out exactly what I feel is wrong with the worst offenders.
As for examples of what I feel would be better names for deities... hmm. Most real world pantheons are much better than the rag-tag bunch in the PHB (the Norse group has a couple questionable ones, and the Egyptian deities didn't age particularly well), for starters. The FR bunch isn't consistently perfect or anything, and I'd imagine that you could hand-pick a combination that would give the Greyhawk Thirteen a run for their money in the stupidity race, but for the most part they're much better. I haven't looked at the Dragonlance deities for years now, so I won't comment on them.
As for my own homemade campaigns, I usually come up names somewhere on the Pelor-Ehlonna level of "not great, but nothing immediately, glaringly wrong with them". I'll be the first to say that coming up with good deity names is hard. I'm thinking next time I run a campaign, I'll do a monotheistic religion, with a devil-figure for the evil guys, and different pagan stuff like shamanism, elementalism, "humanity ascendant" cults, and nature worship to round it out, rather than design a big huge pantheon. (Not that I have to worry about it much. The party always ends up being something like fighter, fighter, fighter/rogue, and wizard, with only who's playing what varying much. So most clerics, etc, will be NPCs. Still, it's nice to have the background dressing not be laughed at.)
Good archetypes, anyway. Don't get me wrong, it's not like Frederick or Wallace is Wee Jas-level bad or anything. But it'd probably make for a quick "The god's name is what?" moment among most of the people I've played with. It can be taken seriously, but it does sound out of place and just... well, not what you'd expect from a god.
DDK[/i] [B] First off said:
No, I wasn't trying to troll. On reflection, it looks like I could have been a little less scornful and loud-spoken, but I stand by what I said. My players DID laugh aloud at the names of the gods in the PHB, and I still hold my opinion that most of them range from "somewhat silly" to "inexcusably bad".
I probably shouldn't have jumped on Pelor, Erythnul, etc, so hard, however. They're not laughably bad or anything, and I could expect to do worse in designing a pantheon.
What did I get wildly wrong, out of curiousity? My post was supposed to be opinion, not fact. The 50-75% part? That was just a wild guess, but I'd be surprised if a majority of D&D players are Greyhawk vets, to the extent that they've done more than play a module or two from the setting here and there. The "Fharlanghn = Celtic-sounding" part? That, too, was a guess. That's why I put the question mark there.
The linguistic consistency is one issue, and a big one. You just don't have a St. Cuthbert, a Fharlanghn, a Kord, and a Heironeous in the same culture's pantheon.
Now, I know very little of Greyhawk (I know I'm destroying my credibility by admitting that, but I'm not really trying to win anyone over, just expressiong how I feel about it), but I seem to recall hearing/reading somewhere that these gods are from different cultures' sub-pantheons within the world. That might be fine, in a Greyhawk campaign, but they're NOT presented that way in the PHB. They're presented as one big, unified pantheon in the PHB, and it just sounds like a jumbled mishmash when you read their names back-to-back. Like a DM needed some deities for his campaign and hadn't thought about it before 3 PM on game-day, so he flipped through a World Mythology book and plunked his finger down to find a few, then cranked many of the rest out with a random syllable generator.
That's not the only problem, though. I'm not saying it's easy; fantasy names can be HARD to do well, and deity names harder still. Ideally, I think deity names should sound plausible for a fantasy world, while not being jarring to our modern ears. There should also, in a perfect world, be something that sounds divine or ancient about many of them, unless they're recently ascended mortals.
Wee Jas is the worst offender here. Regardless of what it may mean in Greyhawk language, "wee" has two meanings to us modern players. One is "small", and the other is a kiddy-euphemism for "urine". Whatever it may mean in the Greyhawk culture, to speakers of American English it sounds bad. Not to put all of the blame on the first syllable, though; "Jas" isn't too good either. As Sixchan said, it sounds like it should be short for something like "Jasper" or "Jasmine"; it just doesn't stand on its own. And, maybe worst of all, when you say it quickly, as in normal conversation, it often comes out "weej a--". No better way to totally kill the mood than by having the dark necromancer make a reference to his patron goddess in the midst of a horrific sacrifice and have the players hit the floor laughing.
Heironeous isn't so good either. Apart from the pronunciation difficulty of it (the guy who was talking about its similarity to "hairy anus" wasn't far off. My players couldn't figure it out without the pronunciation guide on page 91. "Herrow-inn-ee-uss? Hair-onny-oos?"), it looks like an mutant adjective ("Thus, the valorous and chivalrous knight raised his splendrous sword in a heironeous charge to the front of the lines), and it looks enough like the word "heroin" that one of my players remarked something to the effect of "This guy's name is Heroineus? What's his holy symbol, a needle and a cotton ball?". You could make the case that my players and I are low-brow knuckle-draggers, and you'd be partly right (we're a mix of blue-collar Midwestern rednecks and high school students), but I still think the name sucks.
Kord has the same problem as FR's Helm. He's not a god, he's something you'd expect to find on a player's equipment list. So the first letter is "K" instead of "C". Still doesn't sound like a deity, any more than Stove or Lamp or Brick or any number of mundane objects. At least Helm is usually a piece of battle equipment, which is somewhat fitting for a deity of battle. You could make the cord = muscle fiber = strength connection, I guess, but the cord won't stretch that far; it breaks before reaching.
I won't get started on Obad-Hai, Hextor, and St. Cuthbert, since I've gone on too long already and already pointed out exactly what I feel is wrong with the worst offenders.
As for examples of what I feel would be better names for deities... hmm. Most real world pantheons are much better than the rag-tag bunch in the PHB (the Norse group has a couple questionable ones, and the Egyptian deities didn't age particularly well), for starters. The FR bunch isn't consistently perfect or anything, and I'd imagine that you could hand-pick a combination that would give the Greyhawk Thirteen a run for their money in the stupidity race, but for the most part they're much better. I haven't looked at the Dragonlance deities for years now, so I won't comment on them.
As for my own homemade campaigns, I usually come up names somewhere on the Pelor-Ehlonna level of "not great, but nothing immediately, glaringly wrong with them". I'll be the first to say that coming up with good deity names is hard. I'm thinking next time I run a campaign, I'll do a monotheistic religion, with a devil-figure for the evil guys, and different pagan stuff like shamanism, elementalism, "humanity ascendant" cults, and nature worship to round it out, rather than design a big huge pantheon. (Not that I have to worry about it much. The party always ends up being something like fighter, fighter, fighter/rogue, and wizard, with only who's playing what varying much. So most clerics, etc, will be NPCs. Still, it's nice to have the background dressing not be laughed at.)
Good archetypes, anyway. Don't get me wrong, it's not like Frederick or Wallace is Wee Jas-level bad or anything. But it'd probably make for a quick "The god's name is what?" moment among most of the people I've played with. It can be taken seriously, but it does sound out of place and just... well, not what you'd expect from a god.
Re: Greyhawk Gods
Sorry, I was viewing an older version of the page during my first reply, and missed your post.
At any rate, I'd agree that a large part of the problem is the ignorance of Greyhawk on the part of people like me. But the problem is that there will be people like me, and some of us won't want to spend the ranks in Knowledge: Greyhawk that it'd take to not find the deity names mismatched and bizarre. That's why I think it would be better to throw in a more generic bunch, or better yet, to do without sample deities and devote the space instead to discussing pantheon building, etc, for the individual DM.
I can understand that some people don't care, and some people wouldn't want to do all that work. But I'd assume there are some decent books of sample pantheons out there (I don't have them, since usually the religion supplements end up pretty close to the bottom of the list of gaming stuff I want) that do a much better pantheon than can be expected from 10 or so pages in the PHB. That would require those people to buy an extra book to get that information, but I'd tend to think that anyone who cared enough to buy the book would buy it anyway.
DDK said:
Sorry, I was viewing an older version of the page during my first reply, and missed your post.
At any rate, I'd agree that a large part of the problem is the ignorance of Greyhawk on the part of people like me. But the problem is that there will be people like me, and some of us won't want to spend the ranks in Knowledge: Greyhawk that it'd take to not find the deity names mismatched and bizarre. That's why I think it would be better to throw in a more generic bunch, or better yet, to do without sample deities and devote the space instead to discussing pantheon building, etc, for the individual DM.
I can understand that some people don't care, and some people wouldn't want to do all that work. But I'd assume there are some decent books of sample pantheons out there (I don't have them, since usually the religion supplements end up pretty close to the bottom of the list of gaming stuff I want) that do a much better pantheon than can be expected from 10 or so pages in the PHB. That would require those people to buy an extra book to get that information, but I'd tend to think that anyone who cared enough to buy the book would buy it anyway.
Similar Threads
