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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 369724" data-attributes="member: 7240">Greg Stafford's Runequest is based on the most solid principles for polytheism I have ever encountered. My advice pales in comparison to Stafford's example but here it is anyway:(1) People make the mistake of writing the story from an absolute reference frame. Polytheistic traditions are not supposed to be logically internally consistent. To create effective polytheism, send your rational mind on holiday and write the same story 2-4 mutually exclusive different ways, reflecting the different Gods' and peoples' points of view. (2) Further to the point about rationality, another hallmark of authenticity for a myth system is to make sure that even within the 2+ mutually exclusive viewpoints, things can still be inconsistent or unclear. My current world, Kazuria, is much like the world of the Old Testament: gods create all the people and all the land (the Kazurians, Kazuria); this, however, does not stop allusions to lands outside of Kazuria and people who are not Kazurian. Thus is the nature of myth -- after all, who married Seth, Abel and Cain?(3) Gods do not need to mutually recognize eachother's existence. Often, the insertion of a monotheistic religion which claims all the other gods are false gods or a new cult worshipping a young god that the other religions do not recognize can be helpful.(4) I believe in designing all the Gods -- not just the ones people will play clerics for. The four agricultural goddesses of Kazuria are never going to be worshipped by the characters but are the absolute backbone of the peasant class and female society.(5) In Stafford's Glorantha, Nysalor/Gbaji and the Crimson Bat are examples of gods who show two different faces to the world. In my campaign, I have a goddess named Mizithra (I'd forgotten it was a kind of cheese when I made the Gods table) who is worshipped as an elven goddess and a human goddess -- she may or may not be two gods with the same name or two aspects of the same god. It's useful to have at least one two-faced god.In short, polytheistic religion is not just about plurality of gods, it is about plurality of thought. If people are interested, I can post my cosmology somewhere so you can see how I've done this, or I can e-mail it along to you (obviously, I don't want to clutter this thread with 8 pages of data on my homebrew world and i don't knwo enough about the protocol here to know where or if I should). My theology is usually the only part of my campaigns I feel 100% happy with.</blockquote>

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