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How many gods is too many gods?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7482206" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>One of the best invented Pantheon's I've seen is Bujold's 'Five Gods' pantheon for her world of Chalion, particularly as presented in the first book 'Curse of Chalion'. (Later books tend to go off the rails with the invented details being less interesting and sometimes undermining the original work.) </p><p></p><p>That said, I don't actually agree that 5 is perfect (and I disagree with many other details of the still interesting essay as well). My basic objection is that while a particular campaign would do well to cover 5 possible thematic conflicts, there are actually far more than 5 conflicts over which people disagree. A truly interesting religion is one which you can imagine real people might honestly believe in, and real people find themselves involved in many conflicts. Polytheism as an approach compartmentalizes those conflicts into bite sized chunks. If you take a number as small as 5 to represent all those conflicts, then each of your deities is going to actually embody a huge number of ideas, and will actually be harder to imagine than a larger number of more discrete entities. You now have just 5 entities to represent every aspect of peoples lives. Consider just how complex is the portfolio is of the Twelve Olympians. </p><p></p><p>Five deities might be a perfect number for a campaign, to represent the conflicts that the players and GM are interested in exploring at this time. But barring some really grand conceptions, it's too small to account for the extent of human experience. It's too small of a number to account for all the conflicts of a world unless you are really such a genius that you can divide all of life into 5 more or less equal spheres.</p><p></p><p>I also note that while he's defined a nice family of gods with a broad set of human conflicts to drive family conflict, he's not really put the conflicts in the starkest terms. We might well think that all 5 of these deities are basically "nice" and while they have disagreements with each other, none of them rise to warfare levels, and that they normally exist in balance and harmony. After all, you might - and many people do - think both stability and progress are important. For example, it would be really odd if the embodiment of pragmatism was truly wholly opposed to the idea of safety. There might be times that these two ideas would come into conflict, but normally we think of safety as something harmonious with the practical. Likewise, there may be tension between compassion and justice and between idealism and tradition, but these aren't all the time conflicts. Many people do see compassion and justice as two hands that are working toward the same end, and idealism and tradition are typically unified in ideals like honor. But where are those that champion that neither of these things are important? Where are those that want to take down the system represented by those 5 gods? Where is the guy that says "Why does my freedom have to be tied to my self-interest or really any interest at all? If I want to choose to be free and do impractical, worthless, and even destructive things, isn't that my right?"</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7482206, member: 4937"] One of the best invented Pantheon's I've seen is Bujold's 'Five Gods' pantheon for her world of Chalion, particularly as presented in the first book 'Curse of Chalion'. (Later books tend to go off the rails with the invented details being less interesting and sometimes undermining the original work.) That said, I don't actually agree that 5 is perfect (and I disagree with many other details of the still interesting essay as well). My basic objection is that while a particular campaign would do well to cover 5 possible thematic conflicts, there are actually far more than 5 conflicts over which people disagree. A truly interesting religion is one which you can imagine real people might honestly believe in, and real people find themselves involved in many conflicts. Polytheism as an approach compartmentalizes those conflicts into bite sized chunks. If you take a number as small as 5 to represent all those conflicts, then each of your deities is going to actually embody a huge number of ideas, and will actually be harder to imagine than a larger number of more discrete entities. You now have just 5 entities to represent every aspect of peoples lives. Consider just how complex is the portfolio is of the Twelve Olympians. Five deities might be a perfect number for a campaign, to represent the conflicts that the players and GM are interested in exploring at this time. But barring some really grand conceptions, it's too small to account for the extent of human experience. It's too small of a number to account for all the conflicts of a world unless you are really such a genius that you can divide all of life into 5 more or less equal spheres. I also note that while he's defined a nice family of gods with a broad set of human conflicts to drive family conflict, he's not really put the conflicts in the starkest terms. We might well think that all 5 of these deities are basically "nice" and while they have disagreements with each other, none of them rise to warfare levels, and that they normally exist in balance and harmony. After all, you might - and many people do - think both stability and progress are important. For example, it would be really odd if the embodiment of pragmatism was truly wholly opposed to the idea of safety. There might be times that these two ideas would come into conflict, but normally we think of safety as something harmonious with the practical. Likewise, there may be tension between compassion and justice and between idealism and tradition, but these aren't all the time conflicts. Many people do see compassion and justice as two hands that are working toward the same end, and idealism and tradition are typically unified in ideals like honor. But where are those that champion that neither of these things are important? Where are those that want to take down the system represented by those 5 gods? Where is the guy that says "Why does my freedom have to be tied to my self-interest or really any interest at all? If I want to choose to be free and do impractical, worthless, and even destructive things, isn't that my right?" [/QUOTE]
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