Making a Pantheon

[Gaius94]

As a somewhat experienced DM with little experience running DnD specifically, I'm having trouble making Deities for my setting. Specifically, i want a pantheon where each deity is an ascended mortal, but i don't know what progression to give them, what classes take them from 1 to Divine, of any rank. Since they don't start as outsiders with 20HD, or fully formed Gods i can throw numbers at, i have to compensate somehow. My current end goal is a Knowledge or Magic deity that, essentially, knows every spell there is. I'm also considering some sort of "Generalist" Deity, like the god of Factotums or Change itself. Any input, help, or feedback is appreciated.

For the record, i have Deities and Demigods, and between me and my more invested friends, i can get ahold of any book i need. I just need help brainstorming.

[legomaster00156]

Why are you statting the deities at all? Do you intend for them to be interacted with directly, let alone fought? I like to avoid doing any more work than necessary when I GM, and statting out a whole pantheon when a party may only encounter one or two deities seems like a waste of time and brain power.

[GilesTheCleric]

I agree with Legomaster. There's already a ton of deities that you can draw from if you're looking for stats and a bit of backstory; there's even some pantheons in various settings that might work for you. I'll send you a PM.

[Gaius94]

It's not necessary, I'll admit, and if it ends up being too much work or too difficult to make, I'll scrap it. The reason i want to at all is to properly build a setting where divinity is achievable to anyone that seeks it with enough fervor. The idea of a select few (or even a single famous group of heroes) being the origins to the current pantheon is appealing. I plan on keeping this pantheon as a persistent element in my games if at all possible, even if they don't have a lot of direct influence early on. Since we play a couple of different tabletops and I'm not DMing the current game, this ends up being a creative exercise more than immediate necessary worldbuilding.

[TheFamilarRaven]

Just to be clear. What do you mean by "creative exercise"? The lore building, or the character creation? Because your magic deity that "knows every spell" could just be a human wizard 20/cleric 20 who spent an obscene amount of time writing every spell into their spell book(s). What about spells they can't cast? Well, wish/miracle and salient divine abilities handle those.

You don't really need to have character sheets for these guys for your players to understand that godhood is an achievable thing in your setting. (This is a different story if you expect the players to fight these guys. Even still that's more of a, "cross that bridge when you get there", sorta thing). Whats more important is the route these heroes (or villains) took to get there. As an example, Pathfinder's Golarion setting has the Test of the Starstone, in which, if you pass, you become a (demi)god.

Fleshing out these details in my opinion is a better way to go about filling your pantheon, rather than building their statblocks. Players are gonna believe that the gods are powerful without looking at their statistics.

[Gaius94]

That's a fair point, it isn't really necessary to stat them out if i can't guarantee combat, and even if i can, it's not immediate. my thinking was simply to make a kind of accelerated biography; make a character at level 1, and grow until he hits a point I'm happy with (who knows, maybe I'll just keep going until i hit lvl100). If, for example, an intermediate deity could be expected to have 60HD, a level 60 character would have quite the life story as he went along his road. If the minimum i set for divine rank 0 was, say, 21, he could slowly grow in power, skill, and ability until he hit the tipping point, at which point both level and rank would either snowball, or slow to a crawl. Either way, i would see first hand the kind of campaign my players would theoretically experience (assuming we start at Base and persevere to endgame), and it would be fun to do, anyway.