Overdeity Portfolios by Divine Rank

[lbuttitta]

My friend once told me that there were certain overdeity "portfolios" by divine rank: for instance, I seem to remember his saying that overdeities of alignments had divine rank 24-25.
Is there a source on this, or am either I or my friend misremembering?

[Keral]

I never ever found any of this on any book on 3.5. And i looked quite carefully for all the deity related stuff.
It's entirely possible i missed it.

[Telonius]

It's possible this is the case in other editions, but not in 3.5. Once you get to Divine Rank 21+, you're basically no longer really concerned with the material plane. From the SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/divine/divineRanksAndPowers.htm#divineRanks):


Rank 21+
These entities are beyond the ken of mortals and care nothing for worshipers. They do not grant spells, do not answer prayers, and do not respond to queries. If they are known at all, it is to a handful of scholars on the Material Plane. They are called overdeities. In some pantheistic systems, the consent of an overdeity is required to become a god.

I don't think any of the overdeities have actually been officially statted out (though it's possible Ao may have been, and I know dandwiki has a bunch of homebrew overdeities).

[gkathellar]

Overdeities don't have portfolios. They're not even Powers (gods), at least not in the conventional sense, and their influence is mostly confined to the Prime Material.

Each known Overdeity is the supervisor for a single Crystal Sphere (the Spelljammer term for the space a setting occupies), and has functionally absolute authority within that sphere. Note that they also have authority over any Power that solicits worship within their sphere - hence why Ao could drag around gods like Lolth, who have influence on countless spheres beyond Toril, during the Time of Troubles.

Only Krynn and Toril are known to have Overdeities, Highfather and Ao, respectively. It would be reasonable to speculate that every sphere has one, especially if Highfather is representative, as he is virtually unknown to his sphere (like, Takhisis makes an oath on his name this one time she has a Dragonlance buried in her chest - that's pretty much it).

In general, if an entity is beyond the level of the mightiest powers, no numerical metric is adequate to describe what it's capable of. Ao yoinked like a hundred Powers out of the planes, forced them into mortal form, and made Toril into Battle Royale: Deity Edition. When Aoskar crossed the Lady of Pain, his temples exploded and he ended up as an astral corpse with no explanation (Vecna avoided such a fate only because she didn't want to break the multiverse in the process of killing him). Jazirian and Ahriman, if they're even real, may or may not be the source of all magic. You can't really "who would win in a fight?" with them, because the question is invalid in their context.

[GilesTheCleric]

I don't remember seeing anything about this, either. It might be true if one were to check all the deities, but I don't have a source where I could easily sort by divine rank. It might also only be true for a particular setting, and as such your friend might have remembered it from a novel or some other content.