humble minion
Legend
So, now that orcs are proper full-blown PC races, amid many other lore changes, I got thinking a bit about the old legacy non-human pantheons.
I don't know how dar back these go in D&D history. Certainly a very long time - waaay before i got into the hobby, and I'm old enough that my bald spot turns 20 this year (it's grown so big, so fast ... sniff!). Demihuman Deities was a relative late-comer in 1998. Monster Mythology was 1992, but Bruenor Battlehammer was shouting warcries to Clangeddin and Dumathoin in Drizzt novels years before that.
Anyway, I'm sure someone knows. But the thing is, these pantheons are very much products of their time. The old AD&D monstrous compendium said elves were 'usually chaotic Good' and orcs 'usually chaotic evil' (or whatever the phrasing was), and the pantheons reflect this very limited variety. And this carries forward to now - in the 2014 DMG, Moradin is LG, Gruumsh is CE, Corellon is CG (although he gets a N backup in Rillifane for the wood elves), Garl Glittergold is LG (despite being a listed as a god of .. trickery?), Yondalla is LG, etc. This stuff is relative obscure lore and just doesn't get changed or updated very often, especially given 5e-era WotCs extreme unwillingness to seriously talk about religion in their products.
Going back a bit further to the 3e FR material which lists out the full nonhuman pantheons, we have 12 elf gods listed of who NINE are CG, with three CN gods (Shevarash, Fenmarel, and Erevan Ilesere) rounding out the roster. Rillifane, N now, is still staunchly CG here. Of course, the drow (who count as elves, I guess) have their own pantheon of all-evil-except-one gods.
All six orc gods are evil, including Luthic, possibly the only evil goddess of healing, hearth, fertility and motherhood in the history of D&D, for no other apparent reason than she's an orc. And of course, being the orc god of fertility, given the portrayal of orcs at the time, there's a sliiiightly skeezy implication of her being the goddess of 'them foreign people wot come over here and steal our stuff and breed like rabbits' which is an implication best left in the past imho.
Gnomes have one token evil god, Urdlen, who is a ... giant albino bloodlusting mole? Not a major gnomish personality trait that I'm aware of.
Halflings have no evil gods at all, but a decent smattering of neutral gods of trickery, nature, and mortality.
Dwarves have a frankly excessive number of battle or protective gods, but they do have one legitimately evil god in the recognised pantheon - Abbathor. Mostly however, a bit like the situation with elves, evil dwarfness is mostly represented by the gods of the evil subraces - the duergar gods or Diriinka of the derro. And once again, these subraces hate and are hated by their counterparts, so religious cross-pollination across subraces seems very unlikely.
This always posed some issues. The fanatic racially intolerant gold elf was a BIG trope in FR fiction for a while, especially while Elaine Cunningham was writing at her height. What god do these guys have to worship? They're CERTAINLY not going to embrace a drow god (Kiraransalee the god of vengeance, maybe? ), any more than they would any other non-elven deity, but there's not much for them in the CG pantheon. Similarly, in modern day D&D where orcs are people rather than monsters, there's not much deific support for a non-evil orc either. Does an orc have to abandon orc traditions and beliefs in order to be 'good'? Because that, as the kids would say, could be construed as being problematic...
So, looking for creative solutions, retcons, additions etc and changes you'd make to the non-human pantheons to flesh them out a bit in 2024 type of D&D milieu where any race can have any personality. NOT just 'get rid of the non-human pantheons, gods are the same for everyone', but updates, tweaks, and adaptations. People have gods who fit their cultures, or else fit their cultures to their religious beliefs. So what gods would the NEW orc/dwarf/elf/etc cultures have?
Personally, for instance, I'd just flat-out change Luthic to a neutral fertility goddess, or even neutral good. D&D has several gods of love and beauty across its various pantheons, but not specifically one of fertility or motherhood, which I think is a large gap (given the prevalence of fertility/mother deities in historical belief systems) that Luthic could fill well. I'd probably invent a couple of new dwarven gods representing the less wholesome side of dwarven culture. One of vengeance, of slights never forgotten and vendettas pursued unto destruction down the generations. And maybe one of harsh, unbending, rigid tradition and age and stasis and rule by elders and ancestors, which also embraces necromancy and undeath and the unbending tyranny of the ancient forever. But what do the gods of the evil non-drow elves look like? Or the gods of the malevolent gnomes or halflings? A god of lies and sneakiness, whose followers delights in being the single tiny grain of grit that sabotages the machine, could be an option. And what about the less-evil orcs? A god of ... endurance? Wilderness survival? The hunt?
Ideas?
I don't know how dar back these go in D&D history. Certainly a very long time - waaay before i got into the hobby, and I'm old enough that my bald spot turns 20 this year (it's grown so big, so fast ... sniff!). Demihuman Deities was a relative late-comer in 1998. Monster Mythology was 1992, but Bruenor Battlehammer was shouting warcries to Clangeddin and Dumathoin in Drizzt novels years before that.
Anyway, I'm sure someone knows. But the thing is, these pantheons are very much products of their time. The old AD&D monstrous compendium said elves were 'usually chaotic Good' and orcs 'usually chaotic evil' (or whatever the phrasing was), and the pantheons reflect this very limited variety. And this carries forward to now - in the 2014 DMG, Moradin is LG, Gruumsh is CE, Corellon is CG (although he gets a N backup in Rillifane for the wood elves), Garl Glittergold is LG (despite being a listed as a god of .. trickery?), Yondalla is LG, etc. This stuff is relative obscure lore and just doesn't get changed or updated very often, especially given 5e-era WotCs extreme unwillingness to seriously talk about religion in their products.
Going back a bit further to the 3e FR material which lists out the full nonhuman pantheons, we have 12 elf gods listed of who NINE are CG, with three CN gods (Shevarash, Fenmarel, and Erevan Ilesere) rounding out the roster. Rillifane, N now, is still staunchly CG here. Of course, the drow (who count as elves, I guess) have their own pantheon of all-evil-except-one gods.
All six orc gods are evil, including Luthic, possibly the only evil goddess of healing, hearth, fertility and motherhood in the history of D&D, for no other apparent reason than she's an orc. And of course, being the orc god of fertility, given the portrayal of orcs at the time, there's a sliiiightly skeezy implication of her being the goddess of 'them foreign people wot come over here and steal our stuff and breed like rabbits' which is an implication best left in the past imho.
Gnomes have one token evil god, Urdlen, who is a ... giant albino bloodlusting mole? Not a major gnomish personality trait that I'm aware of.
Halflings have no evil gods at all, but a decent smattering of neutral gods of trickery, nature, and mortality.
Dwarves have a frankly excessive number of battle or protective gods, but they do have one legitimately evil god in the recognised pantheon - Abbathor. Mostly however, a bit like the situation with elves, evil dwarfness is mostly represented by the gods of the evil subraces - the duergar gods or Diriinka of the derro. And once again, these subraces hate and are hated by their counterparts, so religious cross-pollination across subraces seems very unlikely.
This always posed some issues. The fanatic racially intolerant gold elf was a BIG trope in FR fiction for a while, especially while Elaine Cunningham was writing at her height. What god do these guys have to worship? They're CERTAINLY not going to embrace a drow god (Kiraransalee the god of vengeance, maybe? ), any more than they would any other non-elven deity, but there's not much for them in the CG pantheon. Similarly, in modern day D&D where orcs are people rather than monsters, there's not much deific support for a non-evil orc either. Does an orc have to abandon orc traditions and beliefs in order to be 'good'? Because that, as the kids would say, could be construed as being problematic...
So, looking for creative solutions, retcons, additions etc and changes you'd make to the non-human pantheons to flesh them out a bit in 2024 type of D&D milieu where any race can have any personality. NOT just 'get rid of the non-human pantheons, gods are the same for everyone', but updates, tweaks, and adaptations. People have gods who fit their cultures, or else fit their cultures to their religious beliefs. So what gods would the NEW orc/dwarf/elf/etc cultures have?
Personally, for instance, I'd just flat-out change Luthic to a neutral fertility goddess, or even neutral good. D&D has several gods of love and beauty across its various pantheons, but not specifically one of fertility or motherhood, which I think is a large gap (given the prevalence of fertility/mother deities in historical belief systems) that Luthic could fill well. I'd probably invent a couple of new dwarven gods representing the less wholesome side of dwarven culture. One of vengeance, of slights never forgotten and vendettas pursued unto destruction down the generations. And maybe one of harsh, unbending, rigid tradition and age and stasis and rule by elders and ancestors, which also embraces necromancy and undeath and the unbending tyranny of the ancient forever. But what do the gods of the evil non-drow elves look like? Or the gods of the malevolent gnomes or halflings? A god of lies and sneakiness, whose followers delights in being the single tiny grain of grit that sabotages the machine, could be an option. And what about the less-evil orcs? A god of ... endurance? Wilderness survival? The hunt?
Ideas?
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