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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4679944" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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