Help design a polytheistic pantheon

[yougi]

I'm trying to build a pantheon for my next campaign world, and I'm asking for your opinions regarding what deities should be included in such a pantheon. The game will be a 3.5 game, but this question is not really system dependent, hence why I posted it in the general RP forum.

Now I thought of the fact that the various portfolios represented in a religion tells you a lot about that culture, but since those gods are not culture-specific, I guess it won't really make a difference here. I also want to avoid race-specific deities, because they annoy me (in part because humans never seem to get one), and would rather have deities who are related to a race's main objective (slaughter for orcs, nature for elves, etc...) and are often seen as that race's "patron", yet can still be praised by other races.

I also want to modify the Cleric class to make their powers more closely related to their faiths, and so I'd like to keep the number of gods between 7 and 9.

Here are the portfolios I've thought of:
- Death
- Magic
- War
- Honor
- Greed
- Slaughter
- Fertility
- Nature
- Seas
- Trade
- Arts
- Wrath


Question 1- Am I missing something important?
Question 2- How would you group them to narrow down the number of deities (they each can have moer than 1 portfolio)?

I'd like to go outside the beaten path in those "groupings", and I have thought of a few things, but I want to see what the playground thinks first.

[falloutimperial]

I'd recommend arranging the gods' portfolios in a way that says something about the world and how people perceive it. A god of the seas, slaughter, and wrath implies a fear of the ocean and discouraging exploration. A god of seas, trade, and the arts says that people are more optimistic in that area.

Also, don't be afraid to have seemingly incongruous themes of your pantheon. My instinct is that a god of war, honor, and death is not as interesting as a god of war, greed, and fertility.

[Jay R]

I think you're starting from the wrong end.

Did the universe create the gods or did the gods create the universe?

Who are they, and what are they like?

What do they do? How do they feel about each other?

To understand Zeus, and use him as a god character, it's more important to know that he pursues young women, and that his wife disapproves and is actively antagonistic to his children, than to know that he's a thunder-carrier and she's a goddess of women.

Design an extended dysfunctional family first. Start a personal history for them. Then assign them domains based on their characters.

[Romanes eunt do]

On grouping deities: Look at Athena. She's the goddess of war and craftsmanship. She charges into battle one day, and the next is weaving tapestries or helping build a ship. What those two realms have in common are practical skills of the mind. She's a goddess of strategic war and practical crafts.

In terms of assigning portfolios, try coming up with a story or two and see if they can work together because of some larger theme the god has.

falloutimperial also has a good point about a society's gods reflecting a worldview. To link magic with something, you might consider where the society believes magic comes from. Greeks linked magic with the moon and crossroads, for example. If your society believes it's more of a craft, and skill, make a god(dess) of magic and the arts.

[yougi]

Thank you all for this input. While not what I expected, these will be very helpful! :)

[TheStranger]

I think you're starting from the wrong end.

Did the universe create the gods or did the gods create the universe?

Who are they, and what are they like?

What do they do? How do they feel about each other?

To understand Zeus, and use him as a god character, it's more important to know that he pursues young women, and that his wife disapproves and is actively antagonistic to his children, than to know that he's a thunder-carrier and she's a goddess of women.

Design an extended dysfunctional family first. Start a personal history for them. Then assign them domains based on their characters.

This is spot on. You could assign portfolios all day, but that's not particularly interesting and there's always going to be some niche portfolio that's missing. If you make your gods real "characters" in the story of your world, everything else will fall into place.

I'd also suggest giving some serious thought to the metaphysics of your world. Whether your gods created the world, were created by mortal belief, or are mortals elevated by some means, that's going to affect how they behave and how they're worshipped.

Finally, to address your original question about portfolios, I think you could make it so that the portfolios are not intrinsic to the gods, but rather are assigned to them by belief. Say you make a god of the sea - all the cultures of the world agree that he's the sea god. But one culture worships him as a god of trade and fishing. Another culture worships him as a god of storms and war. Clerics choose appropriate domains based on which culture they're from. This lets you limit the number of gods while still allowing them to reflect the cultures that worship them.

[Joe the Rat]

Consider adding Storms/Weather, Fire, Time/Fate, Knowledge and/or Wisdom, Crafting/Building/Invention, Subterfuge/Trickery, Home/Safety

I like to start with organizing principles, but you need to make sure you've got your bases covered. I cooked up a civilization-focused pantheon (all about humanity, crafts, interests) with lovely calendar and alignment balance... then realized I left love and art out entirely.

As you can combine domains into a portfolio, pick a number of gods that has numerical significance, and divvy up responsibilities as makes sense. 7, 8, and 9 are good numbers (9 can give you one god per alignment :smallbiggrin:).


I tend to think of world-scale deity-building in terms of three levels: Primal, Environmental, and Societal. Primal deities are the ones most closely tied to (in-setting)Cosmic Principals - Elemental, Light/Dark, Creation/Destruction, Order/Chaos, etc. These are typically the Ur-creators of reality, or the motivators behind different "sides" of divinities. Despite the name, this is a fairly philosophical approach.

Environmental Deities are most strongly identified with specific types of features (Sky God, Mountain God, Sea God, Sun God) natural things (Forest God, Deer God),or natural events (Night God, Death God, Winter God). Note that this isn't the extent of the portfolio, but the primary identifier. As TheStranger has noted, what other aspects will be tied to the cultural views of the Environmental feature.

Societal Gods are the ones that are focused on human(oid) activities. If you are discussing Deities focused on War, Wisdom, Arts, Justice, Intrigue, Love (and Lust), Wealth, Bureaucracy, etc., you're looking as social elements. If most of your gods arise through Ascension, this is probably your base.

Note that these levels are not exclusive - you can have a Sky God and a Animal God and a War God, and Wisdom and Time itself in the same pantheon. But it's a handy way to help organize things. The Greeks are a fun one to look at in this regard. The Big Three are Environmental at core (Sky, Sea, Earth - although the Death and Wealth portfolios are more of Hades' focus), with expanding circles of mostly Societal siblings and children. They even have some Primordial elements in their predecessors - the Titans.

[Lorsa]

As Jay R said you have to start at another angle. So before you mention more about the world and why there are gods and how they came to be and what they do (and even how much of a person they are) it's hard to help you.

Just looking at "portfolios" and areas of interest, I would probably create them as opposites. So there's a deity of death and a deity of life. One of war and one of peace. This doesn't necessarily make them good or evil, maybe man is meant to die as a natural order of things and the deity of life has priests that actively seek immortality? Being peaceful in all things might mean you don't stand up to fight corruption and tyranny. The most interesting gods in a roleplaying setting are those that challenge our ideas of good and evil and where one isn't necessarily more right than the other.

Long ago I had a small homebrew game where the struggle between angels and demons were very important and having enough mortal followers could change the world. But it wasn't good vs. evil, it was order vs. chaos which the players saw as oppression vs. personal freedom so naturally they sided with the demons. Both sides were "evil" though because they regarded human life (and souls) as mere tools to reach their goals and while the angels and demons could care for individual humans they for some reason grew attached to, as a general rule they didn't have much of a conscience.

[Mastikator]

Pantheons usually look something like this:

Father and mother spring into existence (don't ask how).
They give birth to a litter of kids, the father and mother are the big shots, they are the gods of big important things, their kids are gods of things their personality is close to.

Sometimes animals are gods, each animal is the aspect of something (like birds are the gods of freedom and air, snakes are the gods of assassins and foxes are the gods of thieves, etc).

Sometimes natural phenomena are the gods, the spirit of the river, the spirit of the wind, the spirit of trees, all gods.

Sometimes it's a combination of two or three. In Eberron the Soverign Host gods are all animals of various kinds.
In ancient Greece mythology the head of the gods is Zeus, who has power over the sky and lightning. In Norse mythology the lightning god is just one of the kids (Thor) and the head is the god of war. I guess ancient Scandinavia was more warlike than Sparta ;)

[Rion]

I'd recommend arranging the gods' portfolios in a way that says something about the world and how people perceive it. A god of the seas, slaughter, and wrath implies a fear of the ocean and discouraging exploration. A god of seas, trade, and the arts says that people are more optimistic in that area.

Also, don't be afraid to have seemingly incongruous themes of your pantheon. My instinct is that a god of war, honor, and death is not as interesting as a god of war, greed, and fertility.
I agree with this, though I would add that different gods can have the same portfolio/domain.

Have a number of minor domains tied to a single portfolio, and spread them out over multiple gods in a way that says something about the society.

For example, in Greek Mythology both Athena and Ares share War, but the minor domains of Athena are Strategy, Planning, Warfare and Tactics, while those of Ares are Slaughter and Battle.

In the same vein, how many gods share a portfolio and how important each them are says something about how important that aspect is to the society which worships them.

An example of that would be Germanic Mythology. A male god of War, Honour, Heroic Glory, Duels and Law (Tyr) who is relatively important and used be the ruler of the pantheon; A male god of War, Battle, Victory, Death, Wisdom, Magic, Poetry, Prophecy and Hunt (Odin), who was important in the pantheon even before he was considered it's ruler.
Add female goddess of Love, Sexuality, Beauty, Fertility, Spring, Magic, War and Death (Freyja), who is also quite important and anyone can see that War is an integral part of any society that worships the Pantheon.

[nedz]

It's all very cultural. For instance Ares v Athena can be viewed as Doric v Ionic, these being two of the main sub cultures in ancient Greece.

So you have your world, and it's various peoples. Each of these need their own gods. Each city/region will typically have it's own patron deity though others will be respected.

Creating all of this is a significant body of work, which is why most DM's borrow an existing pantheon and adapt it. Because it's cultural the gods have to mean something to the players — so you have to communicate all of this also, which is another reason for using something with which the players are familiar.

Ed: also your players will care less about this than you do. They will care that your world has verisimilitude, but not about the detail.

[TheThan]

I always ask myself several questions when I create deities for dnd campaigns.

1: what does that god do?
2: how do these gods interact with the world?
3: what benefit does that god give to mortals for worship?
4: is this god a real physical concept or a meta-physical one?
5: what sort of personality should this god have based upon the 4 previous questions?
6: based on the personality of this deity, what should his alignment be?

[GungHo]

Here are the portfolios I've thought of:
- Death
- Magic
- War
- Honor
- Greed
- Slaughter
- Fertility
- Nature
- Seas
- Trade
- Arts
- Wrath


Question 1- Am I missing something important?
Question 2- How would you group them to narrow down the number of deities (they each can have moer than 1 portfolio)?

Is this a shared, global pantheon or a localized pantheon? When I think of creating pantheons, I think about the general "sophistication" of the people that defined them and then worry about the Gods themselves. A less sophisticated society might define their gods as things they can see. Like the Sun. The Sky. The Moon. The Seas. The Mountains. The cycle of Life. Things like Trade and the Arts would only be appreciated/considered/worshiped by a more sophicated society that had time to worry about that kind of thing. Though it could be that the Gods revealed themselves as something more and they've gotten away from associating themselves with a general portfolio and have established themselves as sort of a rogues gallery with things they favor rather than things they represent.

[Jay R]

Another thing to consider is how true the legends are. I once posited that the god Zeus was a misunderstanding from somebody who knew some facts about Thor the Thunder God and Odin the chief of the gods.

[Weiser_Cain]

You could combine portfolios and have some overlap to give the gods a reason to compete for worshipers and plot against each other. That also helps to explain the war-like nature of clerics.

[Eldan]

Instead of starting with the cosmology, you may also start with "Why are people praying to those gods?" That can be separated into "Why did they pray to them historically" and "Why are they praying now?" which can give your setting a bit of history.

"We used to pray to the god of vengeance when our people were subjugated by the Bigempirians. Now that we are free, we only have small temples, where the priests keep him appeased and calling upon him to murder your enemies is considered a vile act."
There. Instant history and a good reason why you even have those evil gods.

You could also have different sides to a god by pointing out the perspective different people have on him. To one tribe, Bob is the god of valour and law, but to their enemies, he's the god of tyranny and slaughter.

[Jay R]

I've just started developing one. Here's what the PCs know or can learn:

There are two gods called together The Uncreated. Separately, they are The Lord and The Lady, and nothing is known about them.

Their first children were the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the winds. These four are either the creators of our world, or the stuff of which it was created - it's not clear which. They are, of course, the essence of the four earthly elements, the embodiment of the elemental planes, and the structure of the world. There is a fifth one, representing the quintessence, but since that cannot exist on changeable and imperfect world, he/she has no influence here.

They have an abundance of names. The Sun God, for instance, is known as Apollo, Aten, Ra, Tonatiuh, Surya, Helios and many others. Similarly, every earth goddess is know to be the true earth, born of The Lord and The Lady - even those with known other parents, or those with no parents, like Gaea. Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

The children/creations of these four are the only gods who will answer prayers or interact with the world directly. They include all the pantheons that have ever existed.

The Lord and The Lady have been identified as the embodiments of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Male and Female, or Light and Darkness, or any other opposing concepts.

Wars have been fought between those who believe they represent Good and Evil, and those who insist on Law and Chaos.

Wars have been fought between those who believe The Lord and The Lady hate each other with a hatred surpassing any passion on earth, and those who believe that they love each other with a love more true than any mortal could ever know.

Wars have been fought between those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Good and The Lady is Evil, and those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Evil and The Lady is Good.

All of the above will be available knowledge to the players. Here is what they will not know.

No arcane or divine magic will successfully find out any fact about The Lord and The Lady. I have three answers, all completely true, and mutually incompatible.

No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

Oh yes, and the fifth child of The Lord and The Lady, representing the Fifth Element? It turns out that he's not the stuff of the heavens, but of the hells. His children and descendants are all the demons, devils, and daemons. His creations are the evil spirits of the underworld. No, he's not out to conquer the world or destroy it or anything of that sort. he just likes to see war, strife, and pain.

[Lorsa]

It is obvious that the Lord and the Lady represent two people, vastly different, coming together in peace and harmony. Thus humanity should also come together in peace and harmony and I will wage war against anyone who think differently!

Awesome pantheon btw. :smallsmile:

[Jay R]

It is obvious that the Lord and the Lady represent two people, vastly different, coming together in peace and harmony. Thus humanity should also come together in peace and harmony and I will wage war against anyone who think differently!

This religious belief is going in the game. Immediately.

I even know more-or-less where I'm going to put the city based on this belief.


Awesome pantheon btw. :smallsmile:

Thank you!

[Frozen_Feet]

Like others have said, don't fret over the portofolios and instead plan them as character and think of what they might have done or do.

Then, think of what qualities mortals might associate with a god based on those actions.

So you don't really start with "god of wrath". Instead, you start with a god who is wrathful, and people come to associate that emotion with him.

For other ideas, you're welcome to take a look at my Divinity rules, the link in my sig.

[Eurus]

I've designed two different pantheons for two different settings, personally.

The first was actually a monotheistic setting. There was one goddess, a sun goddess. She represented nurturing and protecting, bountiful harvests, protection, and the like, while simultaneously embodying wrath and fire and war and undead-smashing. Aside from her, there were also countless saints, each of whom was far more specifically focused in their domain but also much more human, for anyone who cared to look further into it, because they were real people once. Saint Matthias, for example, might be known to the layperson only as the patron saint of dragon slayers, but the actual man might have been an arrogant, glory-seeking knight who didn't really understand the implications of his actions.

The second pantheon was arguably more traditional in some ways. There are seven gods worshipped by every major race, but each one has its own slant on them, and all of them are simultaneously true. So while every race has the same god of death, the dwarves call him tge Father of Bones and associate him with memories, the earth, and secrets, and have something of a disagreement on whether they should consider him male or androgynous, the humans call him the Leaden King and associate him with wealth, family (especially paternity), royalty, social stability, and inheritance. And to the elves, he's the ultimate chaos, the great equalizing darkness and bringer of disaster.

So I suppose my point is, consider interpretations! How did your gods and religions evolve over time? If they used to be mortals, what were they like, and if not, where did they come from? Are there splinter groups or cults that worship them in heretical seeming ways? Arguments of dogma within the mainstream churches?

[joe]

Another thing to consider is the deities your PCs prefer in previous campaigns. If there is a certain deity in your previous games that is popular, you may want to consider making a similar deity in your pantheon. If you have deities that appeal to your players, they will be more likely to take interest in the rest of your pantheon as well. :smallsmile:

[Thrudd]

If you want your fantasy world to be inspired by real-world history and mythology, you should first decide the primary races, tribes, and nations and assign each of them a deity or two. Then, based on how those different races relate and interact with eachother, give similar relationships to their deities. If several tribes or races of people have come together into a single civilization, then you have a pantheon with deities that are possibly related to eachother as spouses, siblings, or parents/children, depending on which race or tribes are most prominent in the civilization. Their portfolios will depend on what role and environment each of the various races and tribes occupies. If the humans of the eastern plains are the primary rulers of civilization, then their god and goddess are the major deities of the pantheon, and other deities are their children and subservients with lesser portfolios. For an unaffiliated race or tribe, their main deity could cover most of the domains. Likely, not every race agrees on who's god is really in charge. The reality of the matter may be that none of the deities are in charge. Or they are not even real. Or they are real, but are nothing like what the people that worship them think they are like. It will be a good idea to decide the cosmology up front, so you know where divine magic actually comes from and why it works, even if the inhabitants of the world mostly do not.
****
In actual history/mythology, pantheons usually came about organically over time, as different tribes and cultures merged through travel or conquer or general population growth and assimilation. Each tribe of people had one or two deities they worshipped which covered all the important things in their lives. When they encountered another tribe, sometimes the two tribes' deities would merge into a single new deity with aspects of both, and other times they just kept them both and their "portfolios" became modified somewhat. The stories of older gods, like the Titans, being replaced by the Olympian gods, or the story of the Vanhir being defeated by the Aesir, are really the story of a new tribe of people appearing or a new way of thinking becoming prevalent which gradually replaced the old people and their ways. Over time, entire pantheons arose in areas were civilization gathered, and the relationships between the different deities were established. However, those relationships were not always consistent between different groups of people within the same civilization, and evolved over the course of time.

[Vortalism]

My view is that gods and deities should be assigned based on the needs of the people and the culture that spawned it, if they live in a desert, a god of water and rain would be considered a saviour, whilst a god of heat and fire would be seen as something akin to the Grim Reaper. If the people prosper on war, then paying reverence for the war deity seems appropriate, and having him as a patriarchal figure of righteousness also conveys the people's attitudes on war through how they portray that god. This can lead to problems of interpretation of divine will as often happens in the real world and may lead to interesting roleplaying and world building quandaries, that would start real conflicts in your world.

^ This is how you should be assigning things, a portfolio on it's own doesn't say much, but how a culture may perceive that portfolio speaks a lot about the people and even more about the god himself (although if the god doesn't really act the way people think he does, then that would be a great little piece of subversion).

For example my pantheon is made up of 8-10 gods depending on the area, they all have 4-5 gods that are shared throughout the entire region, however the way they interpret the gods are vastly different, but an underlying concepts still apply.

Zithesia or Cithwe, is a goddess of beauty, women, grace, love but also a deity of the ocean and seafaring. In the seafaring regions she is regarded for her astounding beauty and grace, nobility, elegance and pray to her for good fortune at sea and the hopes of finding true love, whilst primarily land-locked areas like the western barbarians consider her a goddess of promiscuousness and attribute her to water through the rains and rivers, regarding the fertility she brings as a testament to her (supposed) favoured past-times...

Once you got the basics going everything just starts to spring from there, then adding newer and more gods just seems appropriate for the amount of bases you need to cover. Remember, the reason why polytheistic religions have many gods that interact with each other is because this is how society is reflected through the belief system, if ties between gods mean something in the divine world, then they will also mean something in the mundane world. If there is strife between two kinds of gods then it should reflect two conflicting areas of society, or places were tension is built up.

[Ashtagon]

There's a number of ways to design a pantheon. The method outlined in 3e Deities & Demigods is a way to ensure every race/class concept has an applicable deity.

The next method is what I call the myth-based approach. Build the myth-story as the culture sees it, and pick the divinities the culture considers important out from that myth-story. That is essentially how the various "real world" pantheons in 2e Deities & Demigods were built.

A third approach, most notably seen in Green Ronin's Book of Righteous Might, is to start from the beginning of all creation, make the story of creation, and note which divinities are left standing by the era of the campaign setting.