New Design and Development: Pantheon

[delericho]

Not keen on Bane. I have in the past run several games of varying length using the core pantheon. That works fine, since they're currently all Greyhawk gods. However, if you switch out a few of the Greyhawk gods for a couple of Forgotten Realms gods, maybe an Eberron god or two, and Thor, you get a mess that I can't use for that purpose. The admixture is jarring to me, and my FR-phile player is bound to comment on it at length. In short, it is sufficient distraction from the game that I will have to homebrew.

It's not a big issue, since I was planning on homebrewing anyway, but I would have preferred something that could be used straight from the books. I wish they had either stuck with the existing pantheon, or adopt the FR gods wholesale, or created an all-new pantheon that didn't reuse names from multiple settings.

 

[Vigilance]

Wow, it's a 4e thread that's like, positive, and funny and readable.

This is almost approaching the old ENW I loved and can barely remember.

AWESOME!

 

[Charwoman Gene]

I'm just gonna finish filing the serial numbers and call Bahamut Paladine.

And Bane rocks. Best FR God ever.

 

[Wormwood]

I haven't used 'racial pantheons' in my home game since 2002.

More evidence that 4e is my house rules document re-written by smart people.

 

[RPG_Tweaker]

I really like this move to a more diversified template for a world mytholgy. I'm glad they are finally fixing the clunky slapdash method of religion-to-race of previous versions. It always struck me odd that there was all this superfluous domain coverage... and worse, a sort of divine apartheid.

—————

They are finally accepting that in D&D, were the gods actually exist, using our real-world structure—a multitude of unrelated, humanocentric, artificially created, culture-based pantheons—fails to satisfy any real scrutiny.

In the real world, the gods (assuming they actually do exist) don't commune with their preists or grant them spells, so we've been free to create them in our own image based on our various cultures. Each with a numerous number of names and domains, with worshippers subject to a vast array of conflicting dogma.

In D&D the gods aren't subjective; one doesn't really have the option to disbelieve in them or completely disregard their goals. Here, clerics' prayers are actually answered; they can summon celestials and infernals, and the very gods themselves walk the earth in avatar form.

In the real world Gaia is only a story, created by the Greeks, unrecognized by any culture beyond the Mediterranean.

In D&D Gaia IS the earth. She might be known by various names due to language, but every culture and race with a priest-class capable of communing with the gods would know her to exist. Thus her history and her philosophy would be represented in all religions. She would be worshipped (or at least acknowledged) by everything from Aboleth to Yuan-Ti.

If Corellon really exists and has taken part in the history of the cosmos, it would seem to follow that just about every intelligent creature would know of him despite what name they used or how they depicted him. It's equally possible that some dragon or even a reformed orc might even pay homage to him.


As for the printed names in the PHB... I couldn't care less. I see no reason to use a mongrelized bunch of names drawn from various designer's homebrew campaigns.

 

[Klaus]

Hey, maybe Heironeous is an old name for Bahamut in a smaller sect. And to them Tiamat was a six-armed humanoid, not a five-headed dragon.



And I SO called the elf chick fighting the death knight as holding a holy symbol of Bahamut!

 

[WayneLigon]

In D&D Gaia IS the earth. She might be known by various names due to language, but every culture and race with a priest-class capable of communing with the gods would know her to exist. Thus her history and her philosophy would be represented in all religions. She would be worshipped (or at least acknowledged) by everything from Aboleth to Yuan-Ti.

Or they could go the RuneQuest route and have seven or eight creation myths that are all contradictory and are all true at the same time

Depends on how they work it. In Eberron, the gods might exist, they might not. Clerics still get spells because they get them from the belief in the god, not the god itself. That way, things like Vol (a millenia-old lich) can have worshippers with spells when she herself is not a deity.

 

[Aristotle]

Lots of IP invested in those names. I'm guessing this makes my hope for a core pantheon that can be easily used in 3rd party adventures less likely.

I do like the direction this has gone. I've played it both ways (and down the middle) in my own campaigns: I've had campaigns with a single, non race specific, pantheon; campaigns where individual cultures that weren't easily accessible to one another had their own complete pantheons; and campaigns where individual cultures had their own pantheons but the deities in each were just aspects of one master pantheon.

 

[lukelightning]

They dumped Hextor? NooooOOOO! They can have my Hextor when they pry him out of all six of my cold dead hands!

I've had virtually no complaints about 4e until this. Bane? That's not a god, that's a word. It's like having a god called "Help." They said that it didn't make sense to include Hextor because they didn't include Heironius. Well, I don't think it makes sense to include Bane unless you include the rest of the Forgotten Realms.

 

[lukelightning]

I like racial gods. Not because I think races should be pigeonholed, but simply because it seems logical there would be a few.

Yeah, but any time they make a human god of humanness he's always an eeeeevil bigot Nazi type.

...In real life, human beings had a hard enough time agreeing on religions and reducing pantheons, so having honest-to-goodness different races have different pantheons makes much more sense to me....

I'll try to be careful with my language, but, um, that's because in real life there is no proof that any deity actually exists.

In D&D there is proof. Or at least evidence.