Bring Out Your Gods
Knowing I’ll be moving soon has gotten me thinking of new D&D campaigns. In my next campaign, do I want to use previously created settings, such as Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Midnight, or do I want to make up my own campaign world, giving it the full breadth of originality I can?
I’m big fan of mythology, and one of my favorite parts of world-building is coming up with a pantheon. Over the years, I’ve made quite a few, drawing off of many real-world myths. I’d like to do the same, if I were to come up with my own campaign world. On the other hand, taking the gods from the D&D pantheon and slapping new names onto them is a quick and easy solution, one which easily allows players to use Channel Divinity powers without trying to remember the new names of the gods.
With Divine Power, you have the option of the different Domains. You can combine these in different ways to end up with some great new gods.
You could also use real-world pantheons, as the 3.5 Dieties & Demigods showed, as well as Order of the Stick, in which the Dwarf Cleric worships Thor.
Or take gods from various settings and combine them together. What happens when Tiamat goes up against a follower of the Seven from A Song of Ice and Fire?
What do you use for your pantheons? Do you make up your own? Do you use the core setting gods? Mix and match from multiple settings?
In my current game, the 4e gods are all reincarnations of real-world gods. (Because frankly, some of them were just way too obvious already for me to ignore it. *coughCorellonApollocough*)
I put up my list of deity conversions here in case anyone found it interesting: http://chaoticshiny.com/newoldgods.php Nearly all the good and neutral gods were no-brainers. The evil gods were mostly tricky, though a couple of them were also obvious. Once I looked at the Egyptian pantheon, the evil deities got a lot easier (and looked a lot less original).
When I create a world to play in, probably the first thing I do after coming up with the world’s concept is to start designing the pantheon for that world. A world’s pantheon can help bring flavor to a world very easily. For example, if you have a world where evil deities greatly outnumber good ones, the world is probably a very dark and miserable place because evil deities have more influence on it.
Most of the time, when I create a pantheon, it is more of a group of religions than a group of deities. I’m a fan of the concept that Eberron has, where the deities either don’t exist and are just the result of mortals creating them, or they do exist, but are so far off that they can’t affect the world. For me, this tends to let me create more interesting religions, like my Church of the All-Father (which is heavily influenced by the Catholic chuch) and the Old Gods (which are not the Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos, those have been named the Far Ones in most of my homemade campaigns since I usually have them inhabiting the Far Realm. These Old Gods tend to resemble the deities of the Tuatha de Dannan, or the celtic pantheon).
I think it is important to keep in mind that a world might have one god-system which could be a pantheon.
But it is more likely (but surprisingly much less common in fantasy fiction and games) to have multiple pantheons for multiple cultures. And to have some one off monotheistic religions. And to even have a religion not about a god but an idea. (Think Star Trek’s Vulcans’ have a form of religion centered around logic or real world Tibet, if I understand them correctly.) Furthermore, these religions may be popular in cultures that overlap. Or one culture may be dealing with the clash of two religions.
Which brings me to my final point that you can decide how the religions relate to each other. Do they even know about each other? Is there a contest for followers? Are they in combat against each other on other planes?
I discuss all that and more here: http://inkwellideas.com/worldbuilding/worldbuilding-religion-design/
.-= Joe´s last blog ..Hex Map Glossary: Scale (Part II) =-.
I tended to go the route of different pantheons (or monotheism, in some cases) for different cultures, though “race” was often substituted for “culture”. I’ve been using the core deities in recent campaigns, or doing some mixing and matching from core and published settings.
.-= Kameron´s last blog ..Forging ahead =-.
I loved the way Chris Chinn set up the gods for his campaign: Five Blades of Bahamut. Even using the stock D&D gods, by strengthening the interactions of the gods and making them more dynamic (more like Norse or Greek gods), you have a tangled soap opera. You’d be hard pressed to treat them exactly as you would in standard D&D worlds.