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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreatLemur" data-source="post: 3153893" data-attributes="member: 28553">For information on the Indian and Slavic mythology, I think your best bets are probably the <a href="http://www.pantheon.org/" target="_blank">Encyclopedia Mythica</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank">good old Wikipedia</a>.Yeah, that's an interesting element of real-world religion that isn't often addressed in fiction: Gods would often have several unrelated (or very weirdly, tangentially related) portfolios.  Apollo is often thought of as a sun god, but he was also the god of medicine and, conversely, a bringer of disease.  Then, for some reason, he was also the god of music and poetry.  Another interesting phenomenon is the tendency of gods to have different identities--either just titles or whole new names and appearances--which worshippers would address for different purposes.  There's that "Zeus-who-drives-away-flies" shrine, of course, and then characters like Dazbog--the Slavic sun god--who had a dark and evil aspect called Chernobog.  Things get especially interesting and complicated in Hinduism, where you've got Shiva, who is benevolent, but who is also Rudra, the destroyer.  Also, he's part of a trinity of gods that are are really one God.  And, on top of that, he's got five different avatars.  And then there are the hugely-interesting syncretic religions, like Vodoo and Santeria . . . or, now that I think about it, Christianity.  (In the real world, this kind of thing happened two cultures met and decided that two of their similar gods were really the same guy, or when new philosophies changed existing religion.  Just what this would mean in a world where the gods are real, who the hell knows.  Could be a fun idea to explore in a deity-focused campaign.)Egyptian mythology gets even more bizarre.  Not only did they do a lot of adopting and adapting from every culture they encountered, but they even conceived combined forms of multiple deities (who still had normal, separate identities) under which the whole group could be addressed at once, and perform some function appropriate to their united power.  This wasn't like the Hindu and Christian trinities (in which three beings are seen to truly and continuously be one formless supreme being), but more like some kind of Japanese giant robot cartoon: separate entities joined together for a specific purpose.</blockquote>

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