Common to what? (I actually can't even think of a rain goddess off the top of my head)
Organic Mythology
- Thread starter slwoyach
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Common to what? (I actually can't even think of a rain goddess off the top of my head)
Ktulu
First Post
Whenever I run a game, I pick a few gods that fit the world as I see it, then start molding them with the culture.
For instance, I picked 3 basic gods out of the Core books for this campaign: Pelor, Raven Queen, Zehir.
Then, after detailing their most basic story, I also added Kord & Bane as brothers (weird that it was suggested in that Bane writeup
) who battled continuously. Furthing the story, Bane and Kord are variations of Zehir and Pelor, respectively. The Raven Queen isn't even considered an actual religion.
Of course, I then scaled back that information and only let the players know of the god their people follow. The other "gods" are false. As the game continued, they've learned more and more about the fact that these gods aren't all that different from eachother, and they're beginning to learn where they actually come from.
I always like starting with a smaller core pantheon, expanding as the world grows around the players. It also makes it easy to add in little specifics that make the world seem more fluid.
For instance, I picked 3 basic gods out of the Core books for this campaign: Pelor, Raven Queen, Zehir.
Then, after detailing their most basic story, I also added Kord & Bane as brothers (weird that it was suggested in that Bane writeup
) who battled continuously. Furthing the story, Bane and Kord are variations of Zehir and Pelor, respectively. The Raven Queen isn't even considered an actual religion.Of course, I then scaled back that information and only let the players know of the god their people follow. The other "gods" are false. As the game continued, they've learned more and more about the fact that these gods aren't all that different from eachother, and they're beginning to learn where they actually come from.
I always like starting with a smaller core pantheon, expanding as the world grows around the players. It also makes it easy to add in little specifics that make the world seem more fluid.
LoneWolf23
First Post
Go find Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous. It has a fully realized Mythology that feels Real. It has gods, explains where they came from, what their relation to one another is, and how their existance has impacted the world and it's inhabitants. It also gives the gods some personality beyond their alignments and portfolios, with all the qualities and flaws one would expect from pantheistic deities.
Some sample concepts:
-The First war of the gods occured when Terak the Lawful Good God of War and Tinel the Chaotic Good God of Knowledge couldn't agree on who was in charge.
-Zhenkeef the Chaotic Neutral Goddess of Inspiration and Madness was responsible for inventing music, dancing and most importantly alcoholic beverages.
Some sample concepts:
-The First war of the gods occured when Terak the Lawful Good God of War and Tinel the Chaotic Good God of Knowledge couldn't agree on who was in charge.
-Zhenkeef the Chaotic Neutral Goddess of Inspiration and Madness was responsible for inventing music, dancing and most importantly alcoholic beverages.
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Irda Ranger
First Post
Per the books, D&D gods aren't created by man to fulfill purposes. They simply are, like mountains or the sun. Or you. What's your purpose?
D&D Gods aren't mythological. They actually show up occasionally, and send Angels of Vengeance down to battle Primordials or enforce edicts.slwoyach said:
Wik
First Post
Yeah, I can see this problem come up in games. My current one works much like that, in fact - there are about five gods that people in the game know, and that includes myself. The rest kind of get pushed to the sideline.
And those gods really don't mean much in actual play. I really should get to work on introducing them a bit more into play.
And those gods really don't mean much in actual play. I really should get to work on introducing them a bit more into play.
Burrito Al Pastor
First Post
I think there's actually a very good, and surprisingly simple, reason for why deities tend to be two-dimensional.
There's not enough pages in the book.
The issue isn't that the deities, as imagined, are boring; it's just that none of the interesting stuff will fit in the book, because they can't justify more than a page to summarize all the deities in the setting.
This is really well illustrated by books like Faiths of Eberron and the Core Beliefs articles in Dragon, especially when you contrast them with a book like the 3.0 Deities and Demigods. Deities and Demigods was trying to incorporate summaries, nice art, stat blocks, and god mechanics for like five pantheons in a single book, so the information on any given god was minimal at best. Faiths of Eberron was devoted entirely to the gods for one pantheon, with no new mechanics, and only a handful of prestige classes and spells; the dramatic majority of the book was nothing but lore about the deities of the Eberron setting. The Core Beliefs articles took a similar tack with the gods of Greyhawk; if there had been one for every major Greyhawk god, and they'd been collected into a single book, it would have been a pretty thick book.
And what happens as a result? Eberron and Greyhawk are the two best campaign settings to play a cleric in, as far as I'm concerned. If I'd read any of the Forgotten Realms novels about the gods of that setting, I might add that to my list. Paizo has been putting Class Acts articles of their gods in some issues of Pathfinder, and that's been making significant progress on the depth of religion in their setting.
Shallow religion is never a fault of the setting itself; only of the development priorities of the setting's publisher.
Every time I read a Class Acts article, I say to myself, ", I gotta play a cleric of <name of god here> one of these days, <he/she> is totally awesome." That's what everybody in this thread is looking for, and I don't know of a better way to give that to people than to devoting enough pages and good writing to it.
There's not enough pages in the book.
The issue isn't that the deities, as imagined, are boring; it's just that none of the interesting stuff will fit in the book, because they can't justify more than a page to summarize all the deities in the setting.
This is really well illustrated by books like Faiths of Eberron and the Core Beliefs articles in Dragon, especially when you contrast them with a book like the 3.0 Deities and Demigods. Deities and Demigods was trying to incorporate summaries, nice art, stat blocks, and god mechanics for like five pantheons in a single book, so the information on any given god was minimal at best. Faiths of Eberron was devoted entirely to the gods for one pantheon, with no new mechanics, and only a handful of prestige classes and spells; the dramatic majority of the book was nothing but lore about the deities of the Eberron setting. The Core Beliefs articles took a similar tack with the gods of Greyhawk; if there had been one for every major Greyhawk god, and they'd been collected into a single book, it would have been a pretty thick book.
And what happens as a result? Eberron and Greyhawk are the two best campaign settings to play a cleric in, as far as I'm concerned. If I'd read any of the Forgotten Realms novels about the gods of that setting, I might add that to my list. Paizo has been putting Class Acts articles of their gods in some issues of Pathfinder, and that's been making significant progress on the depth of religion in their setting.
Shallow religion is never a fault of the setting itself; only of the development priorities of the setting's publisher.
Every time I read a Class Acts article, I say to myself, "
, I gotta play a cleric of <name of god here> one of these days, <he/she> is totally awesome." That's what everybody in this thread is looking for, and I don't know of a better way to give that to people than to devoting enough pages and good writing to it.
Celebrim
Legend
I'm happy with just about any setting that doesn't have as its pantheon:
The God of Rangers
The God of Paladins
The God of Druids
The God of Adventurers
The God of Fighters
The God of Theives
The God of Clerics
And so forth.
Forgotten Realms I looking right at you.
I'm not particularly fond of the Greyhawk pantheon either, although its a good step up from Forgotten Realms.
The Eberron pantheon gets points for originality, but strikes me as lacking in mythic power. It feels invented, which is quite the opposite of organic.
You can do alot worse than transporting a real world extinct (or virtually extinct) polytheistic religion to your campaign world. The Greek Olympians are suitably complex, and quite abit is known about the Egyptian or Norse pantheons as well.
By far the best invented pantheon I've encountered is that in Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous, which would certainly be my choice for any campaign I wanted to get up and running fast.
With a small amount of work, the 5 deities of Bujold's Chalion Universe would also make a suitable pantheon, as this is one of the most completely realized invented religions I've run across in literature.
I've toyed around with my own pantheon over the years, which rather unsurprisingly has many of the same basic features of The Book of the Righteous's cosmology - a fall from grace, a series of wars in heaven, a primordial tree of life, gods being born from the tree of life, a compact between the gods, and so forth. It's got some differences too, one of them being that I've always preferred to have 100's of deities so that I can 'make one to order' whenever I want to create a new cult, temple, or whatever and the 'Book of the Righteous' has a very tight Pantheon with little need and little room for new deities. I keep evolving my home brew and have never done the work to fully lay it out, but it does attempt to address with some complexity all the basic religious questions.
The God of Rangers
The God of Paladins
The God of Druids
The God of Adventurers
The God of Fighters
The God of Theives
The God of Clerics
And so forth.
Forgotten Realms I looking right at you.
I'm not particularly fond of the Greyhawk pantheon either, although its a good step up from Forgotten Realms.
The Eberron pantheon gets points for originality, but strikes me as lacking in mythic power. It feels invented, which is quite the opposite of organic.
You can do alot worse than transporting a real world extinct (or virtually extinct) polytheistic religion to your campaign world. The Greek Olympians are suitably complex, and quite abit is known about the Egyptian or Norse pantheons as well.
By far the best invented pantheon I've encountered is that in Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous, which would certainly be my choice for any campaign I wanted to get up and running fast.
With a small amount of work, the 5 deities of Bujold's Chalion Universe would also make a suitable pantheon, as this is one of the most completely realized invented religions I've run across in literature.
I've toyed around with my own pantheon over the years, which rather unsurprisingly has many of the same basic features of The Book of the Righteous's cosmology - a fall from grace, a series of wars in heaven, a primordial tree of life, gods being born from the tree of life, a compact between the gods, and so forth. It's got some differences too, one of them being that I've always preferred to have 100's of deities so that I can 'make one to order' whenever I want to create a new cult, temple, or whatever and the 'Book of the Righteous' has a very tight Pantheon with little need and little room for new deities. I keep evolving my home brew and have never done the work to fully lay it out, but it does attempt to address with some complexity all the basic religious questions.
Funny, I've never played it that way IMCs. The resurrected have no memory of any experiences while they were dead. If you die, you leave play. Raised, you come back. Nothing in between. I thought most people ran it that way?
I tend to use the Norse gods a lot - they feel familiar and 'right' in most D&D campaigns. I know how Loki relates to Thor, what Odin's role is, that Thor is a popular god, etc. The Greek gods don't work well with the D&D Alignment System IMO; whereas Norse concepts of good & evil are pretty close.
My current tt campaign uses a quasi-Christian/Zoroastrian setup, with the Lawful Good Unconquered Sun opposed by the Chaotic Evil Bafomet in a kind of Dark Ages southern France. I use Christian and Mithraic themes to get the feel I want. The Bafomites are presented as an early-medieval Christian's view of the Moors, as per Song of Roland - or Chronicles of Narnia - The Last Battle was also an inspiration, along with LotR.
My current tt campaign uses a quasi-Christian/Zoroastrian setup, with the Lawful Good Unconquered Sun opposed by the Chaotic Evil Bafomet in a kind of Dark Ages southern France. I use Christian and Mithraic themes to get the feel I want. The Bafomites are presented as an early-medieval Christian's view of the Moors, as per Song of Roland - or Chronicles of Narnia - The Last Battle was also an inspiration, along with LotR.
I tend to use the Norse gods a lot - they feel familiar and 'right' in most D&D campaigns. I know how Loki relates to Thor, what Odin's role is, that Thor is a popular god, etc. The Greek gods don't work well with the D&D Alignment System IMO; whereas Norse concepts of good & evil are pretty close.
My current tt campaign uses a quasi-Christian/Zoroastrian setup, with the Lawful Good Unconquered Sun opposed by the Chaotic Evil Bafomet in a kind of Dark Ages southern France. I use Christian and Mithraic themes to get the feel I want. The Bafomites are presented as an early-medieval Christian's view of the Moors, as per Song of Roland - or Chronicles of Narnia - The Last Battle was also an inspiration, along with LotR.
My current tt campaign uses a quasi-Christian/Zoroastrian setup, with the Lawful Good Unconquered Sun opposed by the Chaotic Evil Bafomet in a kind of Dark Ages southern France. I use Christian and Mithraic themes to get the feel I want. The Bafomites are presented as an early-medieval Christian's view of the Moors, as per Song of Roland - or Chronicles of Narnia - The Last Battle was also an inspiration, along with LotR.
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