Do You Use A Default Pantheon Or A Custom Pantheon?

[Malimar]

At the moment, my homebrew setting's pantheon of deities is kind of a mess. Some base Greyhawk deities, some from splatbooks like Stormwrack and Sandstorm, some completely custom, some who are just two or more Greyhawk deities merged into one. So I've been considering the merits of a completely new, custom pantheon, and I've been considering the merits of using the base pantheon.

Merits of the Default Pantheon:
Most experienced players are likely to be familiar with it
The main ones are in the Player's Handbook, so new players should't need much input or help figuring them out
The pantheon is, in theory, professionally edited so as to make some modicum of sense, making DM fallibility less of a problem (Not that most other DMs are necessarily as fallible as I am)
Creating a whole new pantheon is a lot of extra work
Variety: if you can think of a concept, there's probably a deity in some WotC-published work that fits it pretty closely. It's like Rule 34, but for deities!
Merits of a custom pantheon:
You can craft them specifically to evoke the mood you want them to evoke, to exemplify the world you want to run, to tell the story you want to tell
The pantheons for most settings, including Greyhawk, are not Open Game Content, so you have to be careful if anything ever expands to media beyond just you and your players
You never wind up with the kind of confusing, muddled, multi-sourced mess that you do if you use the Greyhawk pantheon and then add or subtract some
Creating a whole new pantheon is a lot of extra fun
You can keep the numbers down and less confusing (if you allow every WotC-published deity, archdemon and archdevil, and Lovecraftian horror from beyond time and space, you'll swiftly wind up with an unwieldy mess of scores or hundreds of deities)


These are just off the top of my head, not at all a comprehensive list.

How about you?
Do you use the Greyhawk pantheon/the Pathfinder pantheon/the default pantheon for whatever setting you're running in, or do you use a custom pantheon, or do you use a combination?
What's your reasoning for whichever choice you make?

[Tvtyrant]

I usually use my own, because I find large chunks of the generic cosmology irritating. If there was a universe before the gods filled with warring outsiders, then does that mean that a god is just an outsider that collects souls? Is there any legitimate reason Primus is a god and Demogorgon isn't?

So I make my own pantheons. If I am leaning towards generic I will simply rip out the traditional gods and replace them with Elder and Younger gods. The Elder gods are the gods of the Planes. Each one lives on a plane that they own (say, the Abyss) and rule according to their tastes. The Younger gods are racial gods that concentrate on collecting the souls of that particular species.

But that is for a fairly generic game; usually I make extremely specific worlds that do not have the D&D cosmology involved.

[Morithias]

All deities are custom in my homebrew setting...and they are also constantly changing. It's not uncommon for say the goddess of trade to just say "okay this has gotten boring, I quit" and then get replaced by a new deity of trade.

Basically what happens is the gods are chosen from the best of the best of the best in the heavens. If you're one of the best merchants you might get offered the god of trade, the most powerful elves get elvish gods, and the most powerful wizard to have ever existed is Cania the goddess of magic. While the most powerful warrior to have ever existed Kenshin is the goddess of combat and sport.

However there are rumors that Kenshin is debating about leaving the heavens and going to the earth realm to find someone who can teach her something new....she's very interested in these "maneuvers" people are developing.

[Darcand]

I use a custom pantheon of custom pantheons such as a stern (LN) sun goddess and her mischievious, but good hearted (CG) moon goddess sister. Worshipped as a pantheon they offer about 9 domains beween them. Likewise I use a pantheon of titans which offer every domain except Law.

[Alefiend]

If it's a premade setting, I'll use the default deities for the setting. Left to my own devices, I will always make my own—usually based on a single real-world culture, or multiple ones if the game spans enough ground and a culture clash would seem like fun.

To be honest, I am pretty humanocentric when it comes to this stuff, so my gods for the other player races are some or all of the typical published ones from previous editions. It's a bonus when the human mythology can support other races, which is one of the reasons I prefer to use Norse gods.

[Hylas]

When our group did 3.5 we used the default gods pretty exclusively. When we moved to Pathfinder the rules-focused players, including me, didn't care enough to learn the new pantheon, and our games rarely have divine casters and even when they do they're never a central theme. This year it's gotten pretty bad as to we effectively make up whatever god if we play a divine casting class. Though personally I think the god of atheism is going too far.

I'm currently working on a 4 god system (each god controls an element and has 2-3 other domains, and as you go to a corner of the world that element gets more and more dominance over the terrain) and a custom magic system for clerics to go with it, and it's going okay.

I've seen a bunch of different deity systems over a bunch of different systems so I'll give what little advice I have:

Keep it small. If you make up 50 gods, that'll be too many for players to keep track of. The most number of gods I've seen a DM throw at a group before they stop caring (learning names, domains, etc) is 9 (though lower is better). The default 3.5 gods are the only exception, but even then it's overwhelming for just about anyone.
Keep it simple. Unless your campaign is specifically deity-focused and everyone is a cleric, then simple is better. Have some good divisions as to what gods/churches work together and what gods/churches hate each other.
The players have to care. If the players love the 3.5 gods then just keep the vanilla ones. If you have a great idea for a world's theology, then do that and make a good pitch to the players.

[Golden Ladybug]

Normally, I make do with default Deities. My players know them (or at least the Greyhawk Pantheon), I know them, no further work needed. They hardly ever come up anyway, since my Players seem to stay away from Divine Characters.

I also stick to the defaults because I never make sensible and serious gods of my own; they always end up being unbearably silly. For example, my players are currently on a boat, sailing away from the Artic Regions that were once their home, accompanied by a NPC Cleric of Oobadoo, the Greater Deity of Mountaintops, Bananas and Judgemental Old Women.

[Yorrin]

My group plays with the default deities, but with the addition of three of my characters who ascended during gameplay.

I tried a full custom pantheon once, and my players just never got behind it. One of them ALWAYS worships Asmodeous (we dont exactly end up with many LG parties, much less Paladins), and the others (besides myself) generally roll impious characters.

[Darth Stabber]

I have two setting that I use. One uses a modified default pantheon, modified because due to some epic level play there have been some PCs that joined them (including my own corlan god of bards (lesser deity attendant of olidamara)).

The other setting has no deities (and no clerics), the outsiders were left in charge of maintaining the balance of good and evil, and are incapable of revealing any details of creation. The leaders of the outsiders (archangels and archfiends) are seen as leaders and rolemodels, but are not worshiped as deities.

[bloodtide]

I have always used the Forgotten Realms pantheon, plus all of the other deities. My list of deities is beyond huge.

And it does not matter much what the 'books' say, as I have made them my own.

[Jodah]

I started with generic, and then - in the same campaign - shifted to a custom one (much to the chagrin of my player, though I had clear analogs for the gods that were relevant). The generic was easier because the domains were known - custom was more fun because they were gods like I imagined gods would be. My current project is starting with an entirely custom pantheon, but I am not using clerics or other domain classes so that issue is not present.

More or less, I see the value of using custom deities to the fact that I am not using Greyhawk, I am using the D&D system to create my own world. When I play Call of Chthulu, I use a Lovecraftian mythos because it is plot central. When I play in Eberron, I use its pantheon because it is part of the setting. When I play homebrew settings, I homebrew the entire setting (steal a race here, modify a class there, create most non-mechanical things entirely on my own).


I'm currently working on a 4 god system (each god controls an element and has 2-3 other domains, and as you go to a corner of the world that element gets more and more dominance over the terrain) and a custom magic system for clerics to go with it, and it's going okay.

Please post this when you complete it, I am very interested to see how it turns out.

[LikeAD6]

I allow almost any deity ever worshiped in any fantasy game in my campaign, yet I may change up the names a bit here and there. One time when one of my players was making his character for a campaign and said he wanted to go dancing/partying a lot and have a harem but was unsure on his religion, I just grabbed his sheet and wrote that Slaanesh was his deity. I will even allow players to make deities as long as they are not too ridiculous. Real-life religions are banned in-character, however.

[Elemental]

I usually ceate my own.

If you do it right, all you'll need is a list of deities and their associated domains and alignments. I only bother with further details when I can be bothered.

The most recent one I did was a rather large pantheon of about forty or so Gods.
Four primordials with nigh infinite power, five gods of evil, five gods of good and the rest were neutral. The setting basically revolved around a war between the gods of evil and most of the lesser neutral gods rebelling against a particular fundamental law of the cosmos that prevented them from increasing their own power.
Long story short... They were imprisonned when the primordials sided with the faction that wanted everything to remain the same and imprisonned the dissenting deities beyond the edges of the Astral Plane.

Surprisingly, not very much work.

[Phase]

I use the default pantheon as a base, then shift it around a bit to my liking. From there, for my current campaign setting for example, used different pantheons for different regions of the world. The Eastern continents and islands, for example, prefer the pantheon of gods from Bastion, etc.

[GoatBoy]

Pantheons are one of those things which have very little direct impact on the mechanics, so you can just go with what works for you.

I dislike the Forgotten Realms style of "divine soap opera" because it requires detailed knowledge of every deity's history, allies, enemies, likes, dislikes, turn-ons, turn-offs, and favourite My Little Pony. If your players work directly with the deity then this is fine, but such details in a game should be reserved for the players themselves or the characters with whom they interact regularly.

It's pretty easy to pick an existing or otherwise generic pantheon and run with that, and if your player wants to serve a particular deity whom you didn't include, you could simply interpret the new deity to be a different persona or aspect of an existing god as they are known to a distant group of worshippers. Eberron's pantheon works like this, with each deity being so ambiguous that you could fit almost any conceivable god from another mythology into the setting as an "interpretation" of one of the existing members of the Sovereign Host or the Dark Six.

Were I creating my own setting, I'd follow the default setting as far as "major" gods and just work in new deities as they come, like the new deities introduced in the splatbooks. If I were set on a detailed mythology, I'd either find a way to work my players into it and advise them as to what I had in mind, or I'd just use the game as inspiration for my own fiction and make sure the players don't have to bother with it.

[GoatBoy]

Though personally I think the god of atheism is going too far.

Maybe a god of apostasy? Perhaps some divine being is trying to free mortals from the influence of the gods, but accepts that it will have to grant divine power to certain chosen ones to accomplish them.

Did one of your players seriously ask about a god of atheism?

[Morithias]

Maybe a god of apostasy? Perhaps some divine being is trying to free mortals from the influence of the gods, but accepts that it will have to grant divine power to certain chosen ones to accomplish them.

Did one of your players seriously ask about a god of atheism?

Ironically the bloody Creator in my setting is a god of atheism. The gods have to do a lot of work supporting the mortals with spells and such, they see them as their children and want them to grow independent. "The day when the world no longer needs divine magic will be a great day for humanity, because it will mean there is no more evil for us to fight."

[Heatwizard]

Maybe a god of apostasy? Perhaps some divine being is trying to free mortals from the influence of the gods, but accepts that it will have to grant divine power to certain chosen ones to accomplish them.

Did one of your players seriously ask about a god of atheism?

It's a Discworld joke.


I tinker with the primordial soup of a custom campaign setting sometimes, and I started with the deities. I shamelessly stole the 'god of two opposing things' idea that Bastion used, and ended up with one Overgod with disassociative identity turned up to eleven who is both sun and moon; during the day he's an obnoxious-paladin fire and brimstone sort of god, and at night he flips to a more relaxed, let-the-mortals-do-their-thing trickster-lite god with a sense of humor. The pantheon underneath him started out as all deities built by sun-god artificially, and the things that sun-god doesn't like tend to be underrepresented. Moon-god, on the other hand, is concerned that sun-god is setting everything up with yes men, so he tends to help particularly plucky mortals kill one of the artificial pantheon and ascend to take its place. Sun-god hates that but has trouble stopping him, and doesn't want to be at war with himself, so his solution is to enforce opposing portfolios on all the deities, including the ones he makes. He already did this to his gods, but mainly it's an excuse to stick the ascended mortals with particularly harsh opposites to try and weaken them so that they'll fail at their duties and give him an excuse to execute them and replace them with a new one of his guys. So the pantheon sort of shifts around, with power balances shifting between more human-like gods with really weird combinations and really weird abstract gods with softer combinations.

I dunno. I thought it might be interesting.