Organic Mythology

[knasser]

I think 4e is doing deities / religion extremely well for a number of reasons. Firstly, it has a compelling creation story filled with struggle and which still has repercussions in the "current" setting. The gods overthrew the titans uh, primordials. There's a feel of lurking chaos because of that meaning the gods aren't all-powerful super-beings. They had to fight to establish the world.

Secondly, there is a feeling of change to them, and change makes things more real. E.g. the Raven Queen was taken as a consort by the former god of death (iirc) and eventually overthrew him. Orcus has slain minor deities before and might do so again. Thus the gods aren't some static feature in the background.

Thirdly, the power-levels are more compressed. Okay, no-one is going to beat Vecna in a fight, but it's now possible to have that sinister old man you meet on the road turn out to be Vecna (or his aspect) later on to give players the feeling that the gods are present and real. Not saying that encounters with gods aren't major events in a PC's lives - the point is that they are - but it's better than the DM trying to convey some vast spiritual omnipresent being booming at them from the heavens. This to me is a very good thing.

Fourth, and this is a really big one, the deities aren't some incarnation of a particular aspect of nature. People don't pray to Bane because he is some distilled essence of battle, they pray because he is a great commander, tyrant and warlord himself and they pray to him as appropriate. There's no reason a warrior might not pray to Kord before battle instead if that suits his personality, or to Bahamut simply to enable him to achieve a glorious and honourable victory. People pray according to which deity they think will be inclined to aid them, not according to some checklist of portfolios.

Fifth, there is no nonsense about gods needing followers. The gods exist anyway and whilst some may desire followers, others care less. This enables greater flexibilty in the roles of adherents. For example, Bane may desire great temples raised to his honour. But the Raven Queen's priests may merely set up simpler shrines which they use as a basis for their minor religious duties such as funeral rites, etc. And because the deities power is not dependent on followers, this is fine and not unbalancing. You don't need an equivalent sized church of the Raven Queen to show that she is as powerful as Bane. (Though I didn't pick the perfect example as Bane likely has a couple of levels on her).

As to Melora explaining precipitation to her priests, I kind of like that. It doesn't cost her anything - she's still just as powerful and her followers know that she can still influence the rain if she wishes. And it fits, imo, that her priests should have a slightly better knowledge of the way the natural world works than others would.

Yeah, 4e - the rules are crap for role-playing, but a lot of the setting material is excellent for it.

 

[Burrito Al Pastor]

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?

In a 3rd edition campaign I was in, one of the players died so frequently that he was on a first-name basis with Kelemvor. At one point he actually got a shirt that said something like "I met Kelemvor and all I got was this lousy T-shirt". It gave him a bonus on saves against death effects.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

I agree with Knasser, above, that 4e deities are done well. The "three commandments" thing in the PHB was a simple but brilliant idea, for example - it tells you a lot about the various deities, and what their priests and followers might be doing in a very compact form. (They could have put more emphasis on how rare it is for anyone to focus completely on one deity in the PHB, but it's good WotC has mentioned it elsewhere.)

Also, I think that a world with verifiable and occasionally interventionist deities should not have religions and pantheons quite similar to the real world. The gods and goddesses of real polytheistic pantheons tend to have surprisingly broad portfolios, often involving things with no direct connection between them, because of synchretism, cultural shifts and such. Thus for example the Roman war god Mars was also a god of agriculture and fertility (his original portfolio, before the Romans conflated him with the Greek war god Ares).

It's tempting to think that this sort of a thing would be realistic in D&D, as well... but would it? Bane, for example, is a war god comparable to Ares or Mars, but with a fairly focused position and role in the pantheon. Why would he care one jot about agriculture, beyond issues of logistics and strategical resources? Leave that sort of a thing to Melora, Eradis and Pelor who might be interested.

 

[TheWyrd]

I've been thinking lately that the 'Points of Light' might fit fairly nicely with a loosely interpreteted version of the Ugaritic/Canaanite religion. You have El and Ashura (or whatever king and queen diety you want to throw in there) and then their 70 children each of whom is in charge of one of the nations of the world. With City-State you then get PCs who each worship their home town diety for the most part but all give lip service to El and Ashura. You will of course get your outliers.. evil 'wandering' dieties or monster dieties or whatever but the main accepted religion will belong to this main group.

 

[Celebrim]

The gods and goddesses of real polytheistic pantheons tend to have surprisingly broad portfolios, often involving things with no direct connection between them, because of synchretism, cultural shifts and such. Thus for example the Roman war god Mars was also a god of agriculture and fertility (his original portfolio, before the Romans conflated him with the Greek war god Ares).

It's tempting to think that this sort of a thing would be realistic in D&D, as well... but would it? Bane, for example, is a war god comparable to Ares or Mars, but with a fairly focused position and role in the pantheon. Why would he care one jot about agriculture, beyond issues of logistics and strategical resources?

I personally feel that such broad gods are the only sort that are interesting, and that further, deprived of such 'suprising' breadth the god is limited that I can't imagine many people being attracted to that gods worship. You end up with a 'god of an adventuring' class whose appeal outside of dungeoneering - that is to say the appeal outside of the game context - is nonexistant. In the case of an evil god, you end up with a diety that exists solely as a villainous foil.

Bane is a terrible god in more ways than one.

But if we wish to imagine a diety inspired by Ares to introduce into our campaign that has the portfolios of war, fertility, and agriculture then it turns out to be not only not that hard to imagine but quite interesting. It's not that hard to imagine how or why war would be associated with male fertility and virility. If this were literally true, you have the result that being soaked in your enemies blood makes you more likely to become a father. Similarly, its not that bizarre of a stretch from male fertility to agriculture fertility. If it were literally true, the result is that crops grow better when watered with the blood of your enemies. So now we have imagined a cult that practices spring rites of campaigning in order to capture enemies, so that they can bring them back and behead and plant them in their fields.

This is I think a compelling ritual practice to introduce to your campaign world. It makes for a diety that is far more compelling than Bane, and hense far more chilling and hateworthy than Bane. This is an evil diety that is believably compelling enough to warrant a large cult and large place within society, even a society which is not in every aspect depraved. In other words, because the diety is complicated, the society that worships him doesn't need to be populated by simple snarling mustachioed villains either.

Playing a cleric successfully requires having a diety which you can maintain in character a creditable and believable devotion to in. Most invented D&D gods simply don't qualify. The Forgotten Realms pantheon is a bad joke IMO.

 

[Voadam]

I'm happy with just about any setting that doesn't have as its pantheon:

The God of Rangers Uller, Artemis, I forget his name from the FR
The God of Paladins Tyr, Athena, Torm
The God of Druids Frey, Demeter, Silvanus
The God of Adventurers Odin, Zeus, Tymora
The God of Fighters Thor, Ares, Tempus
The God of Theives Loki, Hermes, Mask
The God of Clerics Odin, Zeus, Lathander

And so forth.

Forgotten Realms I looking right at you.

. . .

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.

Don't the above work? And the Egyptian pantheon is in FR, along with a few greek and norse and other transplants.

 

[Celebrim]

Don't the above work? And the Egyptian pantheon is in FR, along with a few greek and norse and other transplants.

Yes. And quite a few Finnish transplants as well. Random entries from the Deities & Demigods made to fit specific game roles.

Artemis's role as patron of hunters was part of her veneration but she was much more than that. Artemis was primarily venerated as the goddess of maidens and child birth. She was also the moon goddess. If she was just the goddess of 'hunting' she wouldn't be particularly interesting.

Athena is the patron of heroes generally, but not necessarily Paladins except perhaps as the most prudish of the gods. Many of her favorites are noted liars and tricksters. She's also the goddess of wisdom and the patron of philosophers, students, and teachers. She's also the goddess of war. She's also, conversely, the goddess of modesty. She's also the goddess of technology and invention. In other words, she's got a rather robust portfolio.

Demeter was an agricultural goddess, and not necessarily a goddess of nature generally (as Artemis would have held sway over the wild hills and forests). But, she was also the goddess of the seasons and time, and therefore, also the goddess to which ritual was entrusted. And this begins to touch into the fact that Demeter is the middle portion ('mother') of a triad goddess.

Zeus wasn't the god of adventurers, but the god of Kings and rulers, and hense also hosts, hospitality, and therefore also guests. Zues was also the God of Truth and Honesty, and hense in some ways perhaps a better Paladin god than Athena - unless of course you count the lack of faith he kept in his own oaths to his spouse Hera (go figure). And Zeus is also the sky and as a rain god, also the god of male fertility.

Anyway, the point of all this is that while we could work out which figure was the god of which D&D class, we'd do so by distilling down a pretty complex portfolio (and personality) and trying to make it fit to D&Disms. I'm inclined to think that the reverse happened (to the extent it happened at all), with the Forgotten Realms deities, where you started out with some D&Dism and a stripped down deity - merely an entry in the Deities in Demigods - was made to serve this specific purpose and this purpose only.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I rather like complex mythology in D&D. My most significant homebrew effort included a lot of that kind of thing. Among other things, I included a war between ancient progenitor gods that ended in the death of the god who created humans (which caused the creation of trolls, hags, orcs, and the goblinoids), a trade of gods between pantheons (based on the Aesir/Vanir trade) that led to elves first settling in the main campaign world, and other such things. However, I rather like 4E's take on gods, simply because it at least attempts to break out of an overly simplistic mold.

I mean, look at the four gods of the seasons in 4E. It is a set of Pelor, Sehanine, Corellan, and the Raven Queen. These gods each have their own distinguishing characteristics and primary focus, but they still get lumped together in this fairly odd set. 4E doesn't try to create a simple "god of the seasons", nor does it lump in the seasons with a general "god of nature". Instead, we get an odd system in which mostly unrelated gods become prominent at different times of the year. It doesn't make the gods as fully fleshed out as a real-world pantheon, but it is an improvement.

 

[Voadam]

Yes. And quite a few Finnish transplants as well. Random entries from the Deities & Demigods made to fit specific game roles.

. . .

Anyway, the point of all this is that while we could work out which figure was the god of which D&D class, we'd do so by distilling down a pretty complex portfolio (and personality) and trying to make it fit to D&Disms. I'm inclined to think that the reverse happened (to the extent it happened at all), with the Forgotten Realms deities, where you started out with some D&Dism and a stripped down deity - merely an entry in the Deities in Demigods - was made to serve this specific purpose and this purpose only.

I don't know, there seems a to be a ton of FR deities who this does not apply to.

What is the D&Dism of the FR goddess of Joy (Leira or Liira, I forget)? How about Eldath of the cooling waters?

Most of the FR class deities are real world ones so they don't lose their depth just because they are in a new context. Mielikki is Finnish, Silvanus is the roman name of a Celtic god, Tymora was originally Tyche from Greek but with FR development split into Tymora and Beshaba thanks to that evil plant god. Lathander is Apollo just like Sune is Aphrodite. Mystra, Mask, Tempus, and Torm (If you don't go with the Norse transplant Tyr) are what are left.

And even for those that fit D&Disms FR has done a lot of development of their deities and mythologies. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the 2e Powers and Pantheons, Faiths and Avatars, and Demihuman Deities for a large part because of these mythology aspects.


As for how it happened originally in FR there was an early Dragon Magazine article where Ed Greenwood discusses creating pantheons and goes through
how he came up with the FR pantheon. Been a couple decades since I read it though so I don't have more to offer on the actual thinking at the moment.

Criticising FR as not organic seems a wierd criticism to me, since it has had such a wide development from multiple different authors and accreted so many different things.

It seems the criticism might apply more to pantheons like those in the Scarred Lands or on Krynn where the deities are specifically organized to match and fill D&D alignment.

 

[haakon1]

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.

In my forever running Greyhawk campaign, I used Norse and Greek gods -- but it's Norse gods that fit players like. That worked out well, because the region we play in is mixed Suloise (Nordic?) and Oeridian (Southern European?) racially, and I use the Norse and Greyhawk pantheons as being from those two races, so everyone seems happy with their god choices.

For the Baklunish -- generally the enemy in the war at the heart of my campaign -- I use the Greek gods, which fit just about right -- everybody knows the main stuff (Zeus and Apollo), but they don't always recognize a shrine to Ares or a Hecate worshipper when they see them. Seems about right for the character knowledge too.