You do realize that when you say that, you need to back it up with something, right?
You seem to think that providing details is the same thing as giving something depth or quality. You can provide alot of details but it doesn't add depth or sophistication of conception to the original ideas.
That's true, but here's the thing - if you never provide any details at all, then you'll never be able to add depth or sophistication at all. The original idea will just stay the original idea, forever unexplored.
They still remain one diminsional, shallow, and unimaginative. They are just a near random collection of deities from the original Deities and Demigods, who sometimes have been given different names.
Really? Please provide me with the original Deities and Demigods entries for Mystra, Lathander, Cyric, Ao, Mask, and others.
I don't even understand why you would defend them given there well known origin.
Because - even if I accepted your take on their origin, which I don't - I don't think something's defined by how it originally appears, but why how it subsequently grows and changes over time. Which is something the Greyhawk deities have yet to do.
Faiths and Avatars deserves some praise for recognizing that players and DM's were better served by more details about the church, worship and clerics of a deity than they were stat-blocks (a fault commonly noted in the earlier D&D books from the beginning), but that didn't make the deities themselves or the overall pantheon more interesting.
It outlined the natures of who the deities were, what their histories were, what their goals were...and knowing more about how their churches were organized did, by extension, make them more interesting.
In a word, family. One of the intrinsic parts of any decently well realized pagan pantheon is that it's going to have a meaty soap opera going on of who has married who, and who has slept with who, and who is related to who and so forth. A good pagan pantheon mimics the structure and conflicts of a small tribe of people, or sometimes several small rival tribes. Evolved polytheistic religions pick up these ideas of the deities as incarnations of abstract philosophical concepts and lay that over the top, but the core is always this tribal soap opera instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in a fairly small community. There are other things, but that's a good of a start as any.
So you think the Greyhawk gods were better developed because Heironeous and Hextor are brothers, is that it?
You do an okay job outlining the terms of things you think are interesting, but thus far you've failed to describe how those things appear among the Greyhawk pantheons. Quite simply, at this point it's more about citing references for examples of the qualities you're assigning them than it is defining those qualities.
Where do you think Ralishaz really came into his own, as a character? Which novel or sourcebook really outlined the multiple facets of Xerbo? Beyond his portfolio, who is Phyton, really?
I'm not saying ALL of the Greyhawk deities are barren of depth of character - the same way not all of the FR gods of paragons of fully-realized characters either - but beyond the handful of exceptions like Vecna or Iuz, most of the Greyhawk deities have simply gotten the same three paragraphs of information, endlessly rephrased throughout different sourcebooks and articles (save for isolated instances of better writing, like the Core Beliefs series in
Dragon).
