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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Turjan" data-source="post: 1347820" data-attributes="member: 3477">Right, I can understand that. Sometimes it's just the illustrations in a setting book which destroy the mood for me, too, so it's a similar problem for me. Therefore, those elves I spoke of don't neither look like if they came from Matrix nor like taken from a WW I movie, but quite strange (add some brightly colored chador and a hat with a very broad brim to the strange large gemstone glasses <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />). This assumption is definitely wrong. Many, if not most, fantasy settings do not assume that the gods of the pantheon actually created the world. Of your RL examples, Zeus/Jupiter (according to myth) was not thought to have created the world, either. FR religion goes the clever way to take aspects of the RL East Indian mythos as exemplar and lays the creation of the world in the hands of an "Overgod", who does not interfere with everyday "world running" any more and is not venerated by the people. This tones down the role and might of deities and leaves enough room for different pantheons with limited powers and confined tasks in the world.I subscribe to your second point though with the pantheons that don't make sense. Actually, there is no such thing similar to D&D pantheons in RL religions. Even the archetype, the Greek/Roman pantheon existed only in some idealized collections of mythology but had not much to do with RL religion in these countries. In Greece, e.g., most city states had only one or a few of those gods on their "worshipping list", and it was rarely Zeus who played a major role in those lists, while many other important gods from mythology were missing completely. Other gods that were considered to be very powerful and had followers all over Greece, like the 7 Gods from Samothrake, never made it to the pantheon at all, because they had no popular myths. But, actually, this is not that important for fantasy at all <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />. Just make your deities look alive <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.</blockquote>

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