D&D General Which Gods/Pantheons do you use in your D&D setting?

[Crimson Longinus]

Personally, I just find it disinteresting. The gods are real, so there’s no mystery to it, no room for beliefs outside the mainstream to be valid, no room for crises of faith. But then they don’t do anything, so there’s no direct interaction, no answered prayers, no “oh s$@%, we pissed off Poseidon, now he’s going to come sink our ship.” The gods are acting like objects of faith, without providing the thematic benefits of faith vs. doubt. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Ah, I see. I don't propose quite that level of non-interference. The gods do things, but they do not think and act like people. They're personifications of cosmic principles, not just "super people" with powers vaguely associated with certain domains. And they will answer prayers, and send visions and blessing to the worshippers, and even do occasional direct miracles. But what I don't wan that the gods that basically work like super powerful people. Partly the reason is aesthetic, but also practical. I really dislike settings where there are bunch of really powerful NPCs that by all logic should interfere when there is a big crisis to sort it out. I want the PCs to have to do it on their own, and I don't even want them to be deputised as pawns of Elminster or Zeus.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ah, I see. I don't propose quite that level of non-interference. The gods do things, but they do not think and act like people. They're personifications of cosmic principles, not just "super people" with powers vaguely associated with certain domains. And they will answer prayers, and send visions and blessing to the worshippers, and even do occasional direct miracles. But what I don't wan that the gods that basically work like super powerful people. Partly the reason is aesthetic, but also practical. I really dislike settings where there are bunch of really powerful NPCs that by all logic should interfere when there is a big crisis to sort it out. I want the PCs to have to do it on their own, and I don't even want them to be deputised as pawns of Elminster or Zeus.

Ah, ok. Yeah, I have no objections to that. I don’t mind gods having “human” motivations, but I also don’t mind them having alien motivations. If anything, I think maybe a mix of both would be good.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ah, ok. Yeah, I have no objections to that. I don’t mind gods having “human” motivations, but I also don’t mind them having alien motivations. If anything, I think maybe a mix of both would be good.

Not gods, but my "noble" genies, have fit this pretty well. The party has met, interacted with, and even been manipulated ("benevolently"--they were pawns, but never in any real danger, and the end result was useful to them) by these genies. They got very comfortable with the idea that these were just like regular human nobility, but with fancy powers.

And then they actually befriended one of them--and they got to see more than just the superficial social behavior.

I could hear it in their voices when they had that dawning realization of, "Oh. Oh. These people aren't human and they have values and modes of thinking that...aren't like ours. At all. Ohhhhh boy." It was extremely satisfying.

 

[Zeromaru X]

Ah, I see. I don't propose quite that level of non-interference. The gods do things, but they do not think and act like people. They're personifications of cosmic principles, not just "super people" with powers vaguely associated with certain domains. And they will answer prayers, and send visions and blessing to the worshippers, and even do occasional direct miracles. But what I don't wan that the gods that basically work like super powerful people. Partly the reason is aesthetic, but also practical. I really dislike settings where there are bunch of really powerful NPCs that by all logic should interfere when there is a big crisis to sort it out. I want the PCs to have to do it on their own, and I don't even want them to be deputised as pawns of Elminster or Zeus.

This is another reason the Dawn War pantheon is so perfect for me. The Dawn War mythos have this element that allows you to have mythologically accurate gods (what you call "super people") without making them Big Name NPCs: the Primal Ban enacted by the Primal Spirits after the Dawn War.

So, the gods are actually real gods, they act like real gods (super people with their own virtues and follies, like Greek gods), but they cannot exert much influence into the World because of the magical barrier that makes almost impossible for the gods to enter into the real world. So, the cults and sects are mostly on their own, as their high priests can commune with their gods, but this is so difficult that they don't do it every day. The Primal Ban can be surpassed and the gods can be allowed to send an avatar into the mortal world, but this requires an active participation of the mortals/players (they need to actively summon their god with rituals and that stuff).

The consequences of this is that mortals are usually on their own, which makes every cult and sect unique, with their own inner politics and stuff. Yeah, the followers of Bahamut in Fallcrest maybe good guys who follow Bahamut's precepts as best as they can, but we also have those crazy Bahamutians of Harkenwold that have interpreted Bahamut's creed as if it were the Spanish Inquisition. And Bahamut can do nothing about it unless it is properly summoned by someone interested in changing things.

So, you can have actual gods that can be used as objects of faith (because there is a lore reason for that) or as super people, allowing you to either makine religion a passive (or even irrelevant) element of your world, an element drived by the individual politics of each cult rather than by their gods, or have a game were gods actually walk the land depending on the necessities of your game. Best of both worlds.

 

[schmeaux]

I have been thinking about a campaign in which the gods are present on the material plane and take the form of massive kaiju.

Though, I am not quite sure how to do that without giving players the impression that they can be attacked and defeated like any other monster. I am not that experienced at running a D&D game.

 

[Umbran]

At the moment, none.

I'm running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, in which the characters are off in a corner of the Feywild, and none of them are Divine casters or even people of notable faith. I don't need to decide what gods exist, so I haven't.

 

[Li Shenron]

When I started my 5E campaigns in 2019/20, I decided to not set them in my old homebrew. I had already gone through a lot of work to tweak 3E to fit the world I started at the advent of 2E, and while I had no plans to run 3E ever again, converting to 5E just felt like too much. Rather than a traditional top-down homebrew world, I went for more of a coalescing points of light approach using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a basis to start from. As such, I adopted a very open and loosey-goosey approach to gods. Basically, any god a player wanted to introduce was fine as long as they understood two things about gods in the new homebrew setting:

1. Clerics of any god could be of any alignment. Could a CE cleric of a healing god be going around using healing to manipulate people to evil ends? Yes. Could a cleric of the evil god of the dead be NG and trying to keep people from dying? Yes. The gods are aloof and mortals are free to interpret any signs or scripture or events anyway they want.

2. Many gods were actually just different names for other gods. Ancestor worship exists along side polytheism as distant past relatives can become kind of like patron saints depending on what they did in life, and that in time could come to be seen as representations of specific gods with something related in their portfolio. Thus the great aunt who was known for rescuing cats and respected in the community for her wealth and kindness, could start off as part of a family pantheon of sorts, but later be considered a manifestation of Bast in mortal form once a few generations have passed.

An unforeseen consequence of this approach was that religion in general became no where near as important to the setting (at least from a player perspective) as it had been in the previous homebrew setting where there were set pantheons in each region and a general limit to the number of gods, and they all were what they seemed, as were their followings. Though, I wonder if it might just be that my current in-person group is just not that into gods and religion as a game theme.

I use the same approach you did, but did not have such negative consequence.

Perhaps an important difference might be, that just because I let the players pick any deity from the book, it doesn't mean all the other deities that they didn't pick will be part of the game. Probably, if they pick a deity from pantheon X, I am also going to incorporate the whole pantheon X, but I won't necessary make pantheon Y into the game just because it was a possible choice. IOW, I allow you to pick your cleric's deity from a list of 1000, but the 999 you don't choose will not necessarily exist.

The same thing happens more or less for all other game stuff: say that for instance we start at higher level and I tell you to pick any magic item within a certain range to start the game with, it doesn't mean everything you didn't pick at that point will exist in the game later.

 

[Tonguez]

I have been thinking about a campaign in which the gods are present on the material plane and take the form of massive kaiju.

Though, I am not quite sure how to do that without giving players the impression that they can be attacked and defeated like any other monster. I am not that experienced at running a D&D game.

I like that idea, though I've only done Divine Dinosaurs in 'caveman' settings. I'd advise making the Kaiju both gargantuan and Ethereal, then give it Ethereal Jaunt. Making them Ethereal lets you keep them primarily incorporeal (untouchable) and unseen until you want them to be solid, and gives them a tactical retreat option should PCs want to attack.

 

[ichabod]

I have been thinking about a campaign in which the gods are present on the material plane and take the form of massive kaiju.

Though, I am not quite sure how to do that without giving players the impression that they can be attacked and defeated like any other monster. I am not that experienced at running a D&D game.

You could just make them immortal (always stabilizes when brought to 0 hp, can choose to succeed on any save that would instantly kill it) and give them a high regeneration (like 50 hp a round). Then they would be things that could be taken down temporarily, but that would eventually get back up and come after you.

 

[Voadam]

So my question here (which is open ended, so thus no poll), how do you handle which gods are available in your game? Esp. if you are a homebrewer. Do you pick a single pantheon? Do you pick a pantheon for each kind of people (elves, humans, dwarves)? Do you pick pantheons for regions? Do you use real-world pantheons, D&D setting ones, or totally homebrewed ones? Does this only matter if there are cleric PCs? Anything else you think is relavant?

I do a homebrew mashup campaign with elements from a bunch of settings that I like.

I go for a bit of a Conan feel in the world, lots of areas with multiple cultures and religions, some will involve overlap and local variations, so 4e warrior Bane in one place is different from FR tyrant Bane in another area and Greek Ares has similarities and differences from Roman Mars. I use a lot of Golarion mixed with Ptolus for geographic and cultural stuff plus others, with a bunch of settings mixed in as aspects from different time periods. So there is a lot of individual nations with some being adapted as provinces of the big Lothian Empire and covering a bunch of cultural areas with a Mediterranean and European focus with a bunch of fantasy Africa and middle east as well plus fantasy stuff like Orcish badlands and such.

I use a lot of existing pantheons (both D&D and real world) for different areas but a big Henotheistic official state religion of an ascended paladin for a big part of the setting, the Holy Lothian Empire from Ptolus, covering about two thirds of my northern continent. This allows a fantasy medieval catholic church type of setup for all the typical medieval religious tropes to be used particularly for cleric and paladin types and a familiar western base to build off of with churches and church relationships and saints and such. This also allows a single point of easy to grasp relevant religious stuff to learn for the campaign if players don't want to dive into a lot of religious lore stuff.

The henotheism aspect and stuff outside of the empire means the typical ancient world/Norse/fantasy polytheism can come in and players who want to be different can do so alongside the fantasy medieval church and make their fantasy polytheism and religions in whatever form is comfortable for them, mini themed fantasy churches or more polytheistic or other models.

I use a lot of existing pantheons and do a lot of syncretism in my world building. Ptolus, Golarion, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Elric, Warhammer, Spiros Blaak, Airdhe, Scarred Lands, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Cthulhu Mythos, Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Babylonian, and others have been used. I have also run with stuff players have proposed or wanted to bring in.

For non humans I like to have multiple cultures and multiple pantheons and religion similar to humanity.

So for elves there are the typical D&D Seldarine pantheon of Correlon and such, a different pantheon from Troll Lords Games' Airdhe setting, Lothianism for an elvish imperial province with some syncretism from the Airdhe Lothian elven demigod, and so on. For Dwarves there are different versions of Moradin and his pantheon, a homebrew pantheon one of my players found on the web in the early 2000s, ancestor hero worship, Norse pantheon like in Order of the Stick or Midgard, some aspects of Spiros Blaak mixed into Lothianism, and so on. For orcs there are the Gruumsh stuff, Klingon mythology, Golarion stuff, Warhammer stuff, and for a while in one campaign I ran different groups of orcs the PCs encountered kept worshiping different one-eyed gods, Balor of the Evil Eye, Talos, Vecna, Odin.

I have a cosmology where divine spellcasters tap divine power so while church dogma and a lot of people may believe the gods grant divine caster magic, divine casters are just different traditions of spellcasting that tap divine power. So there are divine spellcasting traditions of animists and shamans and philosophies and secret occult societies and cults in addition to theistic churches or temple priests.

Druids for example can be worshipers of nature, worshipers of nature gods, a secret society, weather mages, Ars Magica bjornaer style order mages, animists, shamen, old one cultists, witches, and other framings.

Gods might be divine beings, non-divine beings, or not real at all. Spellcasters get powers from practicing their divine magic tradition regardless.

I even have some in game Lothian theology theories about possible euhemeristic origins of certain pantheons such as Zeus being a storm giant, Hephaestus a fire giant, etc.

So I also have cults devoted to dragons and giants and outsiders. In my current group I DM two are members of a dragon cult and it is not clear whether the dragon Aasterinian is an actual divine being dragon god, or a specific copper dragon who lives someplace in the world.

I have had direct interactions in my campaigns with beings who might or might not be gods, Garl Glittergold, Hel, Erastil/Stag, and an AI monster truck with a cult stand out and the ambiguity of their actual nature has been fun.