arguskos
2011-04-01, 04:32 PM
I'm statting up some gods for a campaign setting I'm making, and I've hit a snag. how many domains should a god have?
Depends, mostly on how much is in that god's portfolio. Probably the base minimum is around 3 or 4, and that's for pretty small gods. The god of evil amphibians is not going to have as many domains as, say, the god of war and fighting, just cause the first guy doesn't DO as much as the second guy.
HunterOfJello
2011-04-01, 04:38 PM
Good question and debate topic.
In the PHB, the greyhawk gods each started off with between 3 and 6 domains. Most had 3 or 4 except for Obad-hai who had 4 element domains along with plant and animal.
Later on, most of those deities had their lists increased significantly. With the Dragon Magazine's domains included, both Garl Glittergold and Heironeous have 10 domains. It seems that each deity starts off with 3 or 4 domains in the book they're originally listed in and that others were added later.
At the very least, a minor deity should have 3 or 4 domains related to their Portfolio. At the very most, a deity could have up to 13 domains, but that number is really pushing it.
I would suggest giving 3 or 4 domains to lesser deities or deities who have a limited portfolio and between 6 and 9 domains to greater deities who have varied portfolios. However, all of these factors are heavily influenced by how you set up your pantheon and the number of gods available to worship in that world.
~
Oh, another factor to remember is that not all domains are created equally. Boccob started off with 3 domains and has up to 5 if you include Dragon Magazine, even though he's a Greater Deity. However, the 5 domains that he does have (Knowledge, Magic, Mind, Oracle,and Trickery) are all excellent domains to choose from. In contrast, some other gods might have a long list of less optimized domains. Obad-hai is again a good example since he has Air, Animal, Balance, Earth, Fire, Hunt, Plant, Water, and Weather. That's more domains than Boccob has, but most people consider the element domains as less powerful and useful (excluding DMM shanigans, of course).
I'm statting up some gods for a campaign setting I'm making, and I've hit a snag. how many domains should a god have?
Depends entirely on how many dieties you are using and how many Domains you are using.
There are 22 Domains in the PHB, 13 more OGL domains here (http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/divineMinionsDomainsSpells.htm) and the Mind domain here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/spells/overview.htm#mindDomain), and that's not counting the *plethora* of Domains scattered through the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, Eberron Campaign Setting, Spell Compendium, Sandstorm, Frostburn, Stormwrack, Races of X, etc. books. There's even a few up on the WotC site, like the Kobold domain. (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060420a)
You'd need a ridonkulously huge pantheon of gods to proliferate all of those options, and, obviously, you might want to limit the number of Domains available sharply, skipping racial-specific domains (like elf, dwarf, drow, etc.) or whatever specifically doesn't float your boat (and there are several that pretty much end up stomping all over each other, like Cold/Frost/Winter or Ooze/Slime).
If you've got a ton of 'small gods,' then it's totally cool to have two or three Domains each. The big heads-of-pantheons might break whatever limit you set for the rank-and-file. If everyone else in the Norse pantheon is limited to five domains, you might give Odin six, just to showcase that he's the big cheese and scoffs at puny rules.
Bear in mind that dieties of extreme alignments, LG, CG, LE, CE are going to have less non-alignment choices, and end up looking very similar, if they only have four Domain choices. (Demon Lords, in Golarion, can empower clerics, but since every single one of them has four domains, and two of them are Chaos and Evil, they end up effectively only having two unique choices, or even less, for 'common' demon lord domains like Destruction and Trickery.)
N gods, on the other hand, are going to be very popular, by comparison, since they aren't saddled with the unpopular alignment domains, all of which are just cookie-cutters of each other anyway (and some of which are pretty useless. How often does an evil adventurer have any use at all for spells that protect against / smite only good targets? Nine out of ten evil adventurers are going to be fighting other evil rivals...).
If you notice that some Domains, like Luck and Trickery, seem unusually popular with your players, you might want to 'balance' the popularity of those specific domains by not partnering too many of them up on a single diety, or by also giving that diety a hot and exciting favored weapon.
Spread the love and avoid 'Tymora syndrome,' where fifty percept of PC clerics end up picking the same god because she's got all the hot Domain action.
For actual pantheon design, the Scarred Lands did a neat job with only one main diety for each alignment type (and some demigods, that, IMO, only detracted from the elegance of the initial design).
Look at real world pantheons of gods, such as the Greek, Norse or Egyptian pantheons, and how they were laid out with relations and interactions, and how they generally covered different bases. Most fantasy pantheons (Greyhawk, Realms, Golarion) seem to have little or no connection with each other, like a dozen little monotheisms all clumped together, although there are sometimes groupings (Suel vs. Bakluni vs. Oeridian gods, the various little god-collectives that started appearing later in the Realms, etc.).
Building it from the ground up allows you to have an actual family, like the Olympians or Ennead, where lineage may not always be 100% agreed upon, but at least such things exist. Similarly, the Asgardians go a step further and represent the merging of two sub-pantheons, the original Asgardians and the Vanir, which allows for some interesting interactions.
A favorite thing of mine is to mess with expectations. Every standard pantheon has a sky-father or sun-god alpha-male leader. Except for the Japanese, with Amateresu, the sun-goddess, as 'alpha female.' Since big male gods are the rule, a big female god (perhaps an earth-goddess, the mother of the rest, a fertility goddess who needed no male god to conceive?) could make for a fun difference. She might be less active, and not really rule over the other gods, her children, with the same sort of dictatorial vigor that Zeus exhibited, but she'd still be the All-Mother, and there might be a story about one of her children getting full of themself and attempting to usurp her position, only to be swallowed up by a crack in the eaerth and never seen again, 'un-birthed' by the Mother who gave them life in the first place...
Domains are very strongly associated with alignments, which is another thing I like to mess with.
Normal associations;
Chaos - Charm, Destruction, Glory, Liberation, Luck, Trickery, War
Law - Artifice, Community, Glory, Nobility, Protection, Rune
Good - Community, Glory, Healing, Liberation, Protection, Sun
Evil - Darkness, Death, Destruction, Madness, Trickery,
Neutral - Animal, Plant, Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Knowledge
Tweaking some of those, perhaps by having a cruel evil sun-god who strikes people down dispassionately, and a nurturing darkness-god, who protects the people from the harsh rays of the desert sun, can be fun.
The sun-god could have Death, Destruction, Evil, Law and Sun domaiins, while the night-god has some combination of Chaos, Good, Community, Healing, Protection and Darkness.
A lawful god of Luck and Strength could be focused around fate and predestination, instead of random chance and fickle fortune, and around self-discipline, physical conditioning and self-determination, instead of brute force and savagery.
A chaotic god of Artifice could be a mad gnomish tinker and trickster, always getting into trouble, and sometimes just as whimsically finding his way out of trouble, instead of the more stodgy lawful dwarven gods of artifice.
A kindly god of death, peace and the beyond, a guide and protector of the dead to their rightful places in the afterlife, free finally of the burden of flesh and suffering, could be both good and chaotic, being less grim and fatalistic and rules-centric than the 'average' death god.
An evil god of Community could be a racist / nationalist diety, drawing his followers into huddled fearful masses, always quick to blame the outsider and the unwelcome stranger for anything that goes wrong. The 'good' of the community comes first, and if there is plague, it must have been brought in by those swarthy foreign merchants. Perhaps the plague will abate if we drive them from the city, and burn a few of them to 'cleanse the taint' and make a fragrant offering to our god.
A lawful god whose purview includes obedience and heirarchy might grant the Charm domain, not for frivolous uses, but to respect that his clergy are more rightly deserving of respect and admiration.
A chaotic neutral god of Nobility might represent not the virtue of 'nobility,' but the self-entitled and wicked brats of the noble families, who hold themselves as better than the 'lesser folk.' Wild debauches would be held in honor of the god of those of noble blood.
Personally, I favor 3 or 4. 5 for major deities with a broad portfolio.
But I'm also someone who likes to play the game with only 8 to 12 character classes, 5 PC races, and only a very small handful of Prestige Classes, so having small numbers of domains for the gods is one more way in how I like to keep my campaigns neat and tidy.
Archpaladin Zousha
2011-04-01, 05:56 PM
Pathfinder seems to do it like this:
Each god has 6 domains, and one or two of those domains are ones related to their alignment (All Lawful Good gods Law and Good, leaving room for four other domains, while all Lawful Neutral gods have just Law, and five other domains. Neutral Gods thus get six domains of choice, without the need for alignment ones).
Xuc Xac
2011-04-02, 11:36 AM
Look at real world pantheons of gods, such as the Greek, Norse or Egyptian pantheons, and how they were laid out with relations and interactions, and how they generally covered different bases. Most fantasy pantheons (Greyhawk, Realms, Golarion) seem to have little or no connection with each other, like a dozen little monotheisms all clumped together, although there are sometimes groupings (Suel vs. Bakluni vs. Oeridian gods, the various little god-collectives that started appearing later in the Realms, etc.).
Many real world pantheons featured gods that covered radically different bases. One of the things that makes many fantasy pantheons seem so "fake" to me is the way their gods are all so tightly focused. The Sea God just has sea related stuff and the War God only has battle related stuff. But look at the Olympians: Ares was a god of war and farming. Poseidon was a god of the sea and earthquakes and horses and epilepsy. Apollo was the god of the sun and music and prophecy and medicine and plague (he covered both curing it and spreading it) and light and scholarship and archery. Hermes is famous for being the messenger of the gods but he was also the god of boundaries (and crossing them), herding, thieves (and the guards who watch out for them), public speakers, writers and poets, sports, weights and measures, invention, and business. On top of all that, he's also credited with alchemy and magic (all that stuff about earth, air, fire, water? Hermes...). Many real world gods had varied interests but fantasy gods are always laser focused on one narrow theme.
Mixing up the domains instead of putting them into tight little groupings really adds a lot of depth to the religion of a campaign world.
MarkusWolfe
2011-04-02, 11:57 AM
*snip*
I was once talking with a guy who was setting up his own pantheon. He had set up the storm god to be a LN guardian of the heavens. Now, this struck me as just wrong. Storms are some of the most chaotic naturally occurring events, and it didn't seem that the god of storms wasn't chaotically aligned. His rebuttal to this was that, for all the chaos there is in a storm, it is somewhat predictable. "Red in the morning, sailors take warning" and all that.
I think we agreed that he would be better off as a TN god, which represented an internal struggle between his lawful duty and his chaotic nature, a pair of gods, a LN sky god who served as a guardian of the heavens and a CN storm god, or that he be a 2 faced god.
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