D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[EzekielRaiden]

No. And Thinking about "analogues" for what are fundamentally completely different deities is an element of Crawfordism-Perkinsism that I hope we leave behind.

Not sure why you'd feel that way. That's how several real-world polytheistic religions worked.

Ishtar (Mesopotamian) begat Astarte (Phoenician). Astarte begat Aphrodite (Greek). And then Aphrodite was syncretized with Venus (Roman). Likewise, Hermes is probably an offshoot from Pan (as in, formerly an epithet of Pan, Pan Hermes, "Pan of the piled stones"), and Pan was an offshot of an un-spellable Proto-Indo-European deity who also spawned a Vedic pastoral deity, Pushan. Hell, even within a single religion it's quite possible to have highly divergent takes. Poseidon was originally the head of the pantheon, back in the Mycenaean days, when chthonic gods were much more prominent--which made all the myths about Zeus's ridiculous antics a lot easier to explain. Further, certain gods could be worshipped differently in different places or at different times. Zeus was Zeus Panhellenos, "Zeus of All Greeks", but he was also Zeus Xenia, "Zeus of Strangers", as he was the god of hospitality.

A relatively clean solution to the problem of having literally hundreds of gods is to instead have a relatively constrained pantheon--say, forty-ish, counting deities of all alignments--and then different cultures perceive and worship some deity or set of deities differently.

 

[Remathilis]

This idea that you can magically fix buy-in by cleaving out most of the variety and creativity of fiction, locking folks into a single box, is one of the hottest--and wrongest--takes I've ever seen on D&D anything. I'm frankly shocked you would even suggest that all of D&D could somehow be imprisoned in the confines of a single setting.

I'm frankly shocked you aren't interested because that's exactly what 4e did with Nerath. A single setting scattered throughout the core books.