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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jesse Day" data-source="post: 714566" data-attributes="member: 10551">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.</blockquote>

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