Free simplified pantheon: Alignments as gods!

[Devils_Advocate]

Its a great idea. I'm not throwing shade at your pantheon. Its just very similar.

The similarity to nearly any D&D pantheon is the point! Lots of pantheons are very similar. There are well-established recurring archetypes that exist to fill equally well-established roles. Like, you've got to have a Lawful Good god of justice and honor for traditional paladins and similarly inclined heroes. You've got to have a True Neutral nature deity for druids. You've got to have a god of thieves for thief characters. If you wanna have a great big army of bad guys, you may as well have an evil war god for them, with the paladin god serving as the Athena to the war god's Ares. And of course you can't have a secret murderous evil cult that worships an evil god without having an evil god who is worshiped by a secret murderous evil cult.

Then there are the oddly specific combinations of traits that don't seem particularly necessary but keep cropping up nevertheless, probably mostly due to lack of originality. Ehlonna and Mielikki are Neutral Good forest goddesses worshiped by rangers and also Good-aligned druids, and Artemis is probably listed as NG just so as to slot her into that pre-existing role. Because we need a Neutral Good forest goddess worshiped by rangers and also Good-aligned druids, apparently? But no; other pantheons lack such a figure and she doesn't fill any obvious essential role, so this is probably just a matter of repurposing others' work with the serial numbers filed off, which D&D is of course no stranger to by any stretch of the imagination.

The Deity of Mortality and the Dead (and less so dying itself) is interesting because that doesn't correspond to any character class and isn't required by a specific setting role either. The Great Wheel cosmology had souls travel to their respective afterlives automatically without assistance from any psychopomp, and the role of gods was that souls went to deities who they worshiped, and that works just fine. But a God of Death as Part of the Natural Order fills the role of Weird Neutral Faction quite nicely, so so long as you want one of those, why fix what ain't broke? Of course, that does require fixing the Death domain, since granting the power to animate the dead is obviously inappropriate for someone adamantly opposed to doing just that. So they had to come up with a different domain for this archetype, and then they had to do it again two editions later.

So it's more like...

LG Protection God = Heironeous, Torm, Paladine, the Silver Flame, Bahamut, and all o' them just, honorable paladin gods o' justice, honor, and paladins.
TN Nature God = Obad-Hai, Silvanus, Chislev, Balinor, and all o' them wild druid gods o' druids and the wild.
LN Grave God = the Raven Queen, Kelemvor, Hades (non-vilified), kinda Wee Jas, and all o' them gods o' the dead and mortality.
LE War God= Hextor, Bane, Maglubiyet, and all o' them tyrannical conquering warrior gods o' war, conquest and tyranny.
NE Death God= Nerull, Incabulos, Vecna, Bhaal, Myrkul, Shar, Morgion, The Keeper, wow this one is popular, and all o' them secretive evil gods o' evil, secrets, and secret evil.
CE Tempest God = Talos, Umberlee, Erythnul, Zeboim, Gruumsh, and all o' them destructive barbaric ususally storm gods o' destruction plus storms and/or barbarians
CG Light Goddess = Lliira, Sune, Sharess... Huh, somehow I thought that there were at least four of these? Ah, okay, Tymora is also a CG goddess who hangs out in Brightwater but isn't really the same type. Anyway, the fun Faerunian goddesses of fun times and Ed Greenwood having a type.
CN Trickery God = the fricking Trickster Archetype that the Trickery domain is primarily for. Honestly not sure how common Pure Trickster is, but it's the one Definitely Chaotic Neutral option I can think of, so it's relevant.
NG Life Goddess = Chauntea, Arawai, Hestia, and all other generically benevolent goddesses of stuff associated with the Life domain but not covered by Light and/or Protection, which together isn't too much for one goddess so we may as well give one all of it. So this one is a conflation rather than a specific recurring combination of specific traits that I've identified. Uh... combo breaker!

Also...

?? Knowledge God = Oghma, Deneir, Aureon, Gilean, Thoth, and all of 'o them nerdy gods o' books, learning, knowledge, wizards, and great big nerds.
?? Arcana God = Mystra, Boccob, Azuth, Math Mathonwy, Hecate, Isis, and all o' them mysterious deities o' magic what're probably favored more by sorcerers because wizards tend to prefer the nerd god.
?? Forge God = Gond, Reorx, Onatar, Moradin, Hephaestus, and all o' them inventive gods o' crafting, artificers, and invention.

(A straight-up generally pro-magic god of magic encourages magic and opposes restrictions on magic, which isn't a lot to go on, but probably means Chaotic alignment just because that probably entails opposing some fairly common-sense laws. Somewhat similarly, a god who unthinkingly serves as a source of all manner of artifacts is probably Neutral in a "sells weapons to both sides" sort of way. Gods of Knowledge tend to be Neutral, but it would make sense to have an uncompromisingly honest LN deity of truth to oppose the fiction and secrecy of the CN Trickster and NE god of evil respectively, since those already cover those approaches to information management. But really these are all significantly less tied to specific alignments than the others, which is why I left them out before.)

I have given thought to doing a bit of pantheon design and fleshing one deity of each of these types out more, as you have with your gods of Law, Chaos, and Neutrality, and there was a bit of that in some of my descriptions. But mostly I was reporting on trends, and deliberately leaving original additions out so as to leave each role as a generalization.

Edit: Also, I haven't really used this forum in um, a decade? Does anybody know how to change signatures? I can't seem to edit that part of my profile. That petition is long dead by now, Rich took down the articles, so no newcomer will even know what this is about.

It's the "Edit Signature" link on the "Edit Profile" page. The "Edit Profile" link is under "Forum Actions", which...

You know what, screw good general practice, I'm just gonna go ahead and give you a fish:

https://forums.giantitp.com/profile....=editsignature

By the way, you got me to check my own signature and I found out that it was broken. It has since been repaired with a working link, thus restoring it to its former glory like a phoenix rising from its ashes.