Been meaning to post this question for some time.

Basically:

I suck at designing pantheons.  Multiple deities in the old-school D&D style.

Help?

First of all, keep it small, at least at first. 1-5 dieties.  As things progress, you might think of more.  But players usually have trouble keeping track of more than 2-3 anyway.

Then look at the culture that created the gods.  What's important to them will be reflected in the gods.  If most legal disputes are settled by thumb wrestling, then the there should be a god with yard long thumbs who grabs evil and thumps it on head.  The create gods that are foils of a couple of the gods.  Maybe the evil Nothumbs who preaches to steal and avoid fights.

Then pick weapons, spells, and special abilities of the priests.  You don't need any stats for the gods.

This a very basic life vs death pantheon i was working with a little while ago for a faux ancient greek game. It'll need some work.

Kraal, the Grim Herald, Bringer of the Secret Flame (magic)
   Hyssh, the Many Handed, Keeper of Eternity (immortality)
   Lorn, the Whisperer, Mistress of the Mount (knowledge)
   Misha, the Eye of Truth, Guardian of the Gates of Destiny (destiny)
   Lira, the Irresistible Call, Giver of Bounty (bounty)
   Auros, the Ox, Consumer of the Void (stalker of evil)
   Toltara, the Feline Grace, Stalker of the Primordial Garden (protection)
   Arastar, the Quite Voice, Delver of the Infinite Deeps (exploration)
   Nostar, the Mercurial, Custodian of the Sands of Time (time)
   Farg, the Farstrider, Warden of the Flame of Life (life)
Koss, the Irresistible Scourge, Bearer of the Pillars of Creation (creation)
   Irg, the All-Seeing, Watcher of the Cerenisian Arch (watchfulness)
   Diadora, the Beguiler, Queen of the Golden Court (fun)

Pantheon of Cerenesia (death) - incomplete
   Maleg-Nor, the Serpent, Keeper of the Dead (death)
   Murnius, the Maleficent, Font of the Dreadlands (fear)
   Dag-Gaden, the Billowing Shroud, Bringer of the End Days (apocolypse)
   Phynitious, the Crawling Doom, Keeper of the Insect Hordes (famine)
   Kalem-Dar, the Destructor, Bearer of the Hammer of Unmaking (destruction)
   Hoggar, the Loper, Hunter of the Elodian Plains (Stalking)
   Desiria, the Venomous Kiss, Lady of the Poisoned Pit (poison)
   Tethis, the Insidious Death, Lord of Corruption (disease)

Hey Doc,

There's two methods I use, depending on the campaign.


Serial Numbers Method

Grab a pantheon you think looks neat (Egyptian, Greek, and Norse are all easy), rename the gods within. So instead of Zeus you have Tung-Tung, who is all tongue, and spits his fury at the earth with electric saliva. You can mix and match too - most pantheons are better when you include Thor.


Method II

Decide what's important in your world, important enough to have gods attached to it. It is only physical concepts? You need gods for the sword, the river, the harvest, the woods, and the sea. Is it all concepts - where the gods represent goals to strive for? You need gods for justice, mercy, compassion, courage, and zen basketweaving.

People worship the primal elements, grab gods for the earth, air, fire, water, and some fifth element of your choosing - could be metal, wood, void, or somesuch.

A god of magic fits in pretty well with most fantasy worlds, or in worlds where magic is very important, gods for all the different aspects of magic: elementalism/nature, fire magic, death magic, etc.

Can mortals ascend to godhood in your game? If so, then that's probably already happened at some point, so make a couple gods that were once pesky adventurer types.

Speaking of which, are the gods an incarnation of "perfection" in various activities? If so, you might have gods of archery, swordsmanship, chess, ditch digging, painting & artistry.

Is every god equal, or is there a hierarchy? Tag one god as "biggest badass", and work from there.

Need conflict? There's always room for naughty gods - ones espousing evil, demons, undead, lycanthropy, mutation, multiculturalism, and the underworld.

If you're using a D&D-alignment matrix, try and have one deity that (roughly) corresponds with each space on the tic-tac-toe board; make sure Paladin-types have someone cool to worship, create a cool nature or woodsy god for ranger/druid types, and so on.

Got demihumans? Gotta remember them in the scheme as well. At least one big archetypical god for each race (and for the love o' Pete, try not to have the halfling god represent "eating contests" ), unless the demis worship the same gods as the humans.

Want gods to be an unknowable, frightening force? Think Lankhmar and Cthulhu. Maybe add one or two bizarre, awful gods anyway that don't get along with any other deity, good or evil.

I've personally gamed in worlds with the entire Deities & Demigods available, only just the 3rd-ED PHB Greyhawk gods, one god only, and custom-created gods. The custom ones were always the most fun, and seemed to be a good mix at 15 or so gods for old-school feel - enough for every PC to find a patron and be happy with, but not so many that there's gods for doorknobs and burned-out torches.

Sorry this is kinda disjointed, it was stream of consciousness stuff. Which, as anyone who knows me can say, is a dangerous place.

AN

from this thread

QuoteThis was written for a one-shot I'm running this weekend.

Just in case you need something cosmic to hang your hat on.

I'm going to base the Gods of this world on the alignments, making it easy to just peg a God into each alignment. There are other religions, totems, ancestor worship, self-proclaimed Demi-Gods, etc. but most of the western world worships the Nine. This is all very much a simplification of Jim's pantheon when I was a wee teenage lad and he ran a campaign called The Nine blended with George RR Martin's pentad religion in A Song of Ice and Fire. There are priesthoods and such dedicated to each of the Nine but there are also priests who worship the entire Pantheon as a whole, seeing it as a symbol of cosmic balance.

LG - The Paladin's Son - Took the Paladin's place when he died defeating The Liche.

LN - The Judge - Blind law and justice. Many Wizards worship the Judge because he is said to adjucate over the laws of nature and magic also.

LE - The Conqueror - The Paladin's angry, imperialist twin brother.

NG - The Saint - Some say she Paladin's mother. Her statues weeped blood when he died.

N - The Sea - The oldest of the Gods and hasn't ever been attempted to be overthrown in recorded history, though some say the Sea took the Continent's place when they broke apart...or it was their battle that broke them asunder and the flood was a cosmic power-play.

NE - The Witch-Hunter - Aided the Paladin in the Liche's defeat but is pure bitch evil. Sees magic as evil and views alignment (and hence the structure of this pantheon) as a conspiracy of Wizards to hide true evil.

CG - The People's Champion - Think Robin Hood with a priesthood.

CN - The Jester - None know what the Jester's relation is with the rest of the pantheon but he gained alot of fearful respect since defeating Primordial Chaos, the holder of this position before the Jester. This God has been aspected as both men and women and some say this is a new incarnation of Primordial Chaos and not a new God(dess) at all.

CE - Since the defeat of the Liche no one knows who sits on the seat of CE. This isn't going to be the subject of our one-shot but just a mysterious thingie, floating out there.

There were some other cool ideas in the thread too.

Doctor,

On the creation of pantheons, I reckon you can't go too wrong if you just think of 'em as cosmic dysfunctional families with temples at their beck and call.  Just think of them as NPC's in any game but scale 'em up.

Hope that helps.

Quote from: NicephorusIf most legal disputes are settled by thumb wrestling, then the there should be a god with yard long thumbs who grabs evil and thumps it on head.  The create gods that are foils of a couple of the gods.  Maybe the evil Nothumbs who preaches to steal and avoid fights.

I wish I could press a button on this keyboard and make the internet give you candy.

Let me disagree with most other posters.
How to design a pantheon? Don't.

Gods with "portfolios" and non-overlapping specialties will be rather artificial. Take a look at the Greek gods. Accumulated from all kinds of sources, forged into arbitrary formations, changing rather often.
So go for an evolutionary approach, designing gods for old tribes and bringing them together, changing names. Humans might re-organize them, and the gods might even listen, but in the end they know their roots.

Greyhawk had some of those elements and not that many sources, that's why it feels much better than the Forgotten Realms travesty. "Ao", feh!

Sosthenes is right on the money. For anthropomorphic gods, start off with some ideas for cool heroes then make them godlike in power and related, then give them various areas of interest without worrying if they overlap. You'll probably end up with just about every male god being interested in war, which isn't too far off from the way things went historically.

The next pantheon I need will be snatched whole cloth from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Basically it's a bastardization of several animal centered pantheons with Spider, Bird, Tiger, etc. It's the personalities he gives that make them stand out.

And I think that's the point with most pantheon creation. It's the personalities that matter. Hotep, the Hungry God's thoughts on grain don't matter all that much to a typical group of players, but whether or not he parties with Samarank, God of Groove does.

And finally, be prepared to have whatever amazing pantheon you come up with mostly ignored by everyone but the guy playing the cleric, who will focus only on his personal deity. Unless background flavor text like Gods, Kings, etc. take an active roll in the party's destiny, they're almost certainly going to be put on the back burner somewhere behind "don't get eaten" and "where do I eat next?"

Also, for more inspiration:

http://www.godchecker.com/

Enjoy!

AN

Wikipedia: Family Tree of the Greek gods

Or this monstrosity (in German, but it's mostly names of gods and heroes, so this should be pretty obvious. Yes, somebody had way, way too much spare time)

I'm making this up on the spot.  Hope it helps....

What might work for an easy pantheon is to use a pseudo-Catholic model.  Make it so there's basically a Good God (or two - male and female or whatever) and an Evil God (or two).

After that, each of the Gods grants spells through various saints and heroes.  These can match up to Domains pretty well.

So, for the Good God, he might offer all followers the domains of Good and Law (or Chaos if your world is oddly structured).  Maybe Sun or something, too, if it's appropriate.  The Evil god would have Evil, Chaos (or Law), and maybe Fire or Death or something.

Then, you have a bunch of saints.  Each saint is linked to one of the other domains.  Say, St. Rythallas, the Healer, St. Jude of the Hammer (War), St Azuriel of the Flame, and so on.

So, a cleric would pick the good god or the evil god, pick one of their domains, and then pick a saint in whose footsteps they're following for their second domain.

If you really wanted to make things easy on yourself, there could theoretically be a large number of saints and you could put the burden of work on the cleric's player.


Damn.  Now I need to use this in a game...

-O

Quote from: SosthenesGods with "portfolios" and non-overlapping specialties will be rather artificial.

I was just going to say that, if there's any particular role in a pantheon that seems really, really cool to you, make sure that you have at least two gods vying for control over that slot.  Maybe they're going at it head-to-head over control, maybe they share control but get testy when they feel their toes have been stepped upon, but never make architecturally sound spheres of influence.

Also, I usually start sort of from the bottom-up.  Who's in control over death? Why, and who wants to take his job away from him?  Once you get death on sound footing, the rest of it begins to write itself.

!i!

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!Been meaning to post this question for some time.

Basically:

I suck at designing pantheons.  Multiple deities in the old-school D&D style.

Help?

I have a short list here. It evolved from a fusion of the deities of Harn and my own ideas.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wilderlands/gods.html

Real world names were picked to make it easy for player to make a initial impression of what a diety is about.

The deities are catholic in nature the entities behind the names manifest in different cultures differently. The core ideals they teach remain constant but the details differ. Some cultures are the chosen people of a deity.

Hamakhis is an example.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wilderlands/hamakhis.html

This has some of my creation myth.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wilderlands/cselves.html

Enjoy

Rob Conley