New Design and Development: Pantheon

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Because it was the good guy religion in Conan?
And, like the snake-cult of Set, had nothing to do with the real Mithraism. Howard wanted cool and evocative names he could build his worlds around, not realism or historical accuracy. :)

As for Tiamat, making her a CE opposite of Bahamut and a patron goddess of rapacious greed, vanity and destruction sounds good to me.
 

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I think a little language theory is enough to hand wave a lot of these complaints.

Bahamut is "Bahamut" in more than one culture because he is a real, proven to exist, deity. He has told people his name and continues to do so. There isn't necessarily a murky past where his name was translated from one language to another several times over without any definitive source to clarify the pronunciation.

If we assume common = english (which is a little arrogant, but is the connection most American gamers make in my experience) then we could also assume that Bahamut's name is not in common. It's a name from some other, possible dead, root language that has merely been integrated into common. One again the presence of a proven, and active, deity saying "this is my name, respect me and get it right if you want my aid" is more than enough to keep it from becoming garbled by translation.

All imho of course. I've run games where gods were known by different names in different cultures, but the gods were significantly less active in day-to-day life than the bar set by the typical D&D setting.
 


Well, at this point I'm pretty sure I won't be using the default Pantheon when I DM. Still, I want to point out how awesome it is they chose Bane as a Core deity. He's pretty much the best thing ever created for FR and unlike most of the setting, got just more awesome through time.
 

hong said:
Exactly. What have the Romans ever done for us?

Other than the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, very darned little!

Pemerton said:
There's a reason right there to avoid some of the baggage that real-world religions bring with them.
I've never minded if real-world past and present religions were in my table games, but for a published rules setting, I've always been a bit more skittish, because at the table I know what to expect from my regular gaming group, and we're able to solve differences in a mature fashion.
 

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