So many times I have played with the ideas in my head on a homebrew world. I didn't started this thread to talk about them, but wanted to ask wether you use the core deities from the PHB or create your own ones?
Thanks in advance.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
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I've only made one homebrew world and I created my own deities and organizations for it. My advice is to cover at least the basics and then add others as befits your setting. Assuming you have a 'normal' fantasy setting (i.e. one with wizards, swords, dragons, and elves), keep the following in mind -
You should have a God of each of the following as a bare minimum:
-Magic
-War
-Nature
-Death
-Good
-Evil
-Knowledge
Certain gods can count as more than one of these. For example, the god of Magic could also be the god of Death (see also: Wee Jas). I would advise against having a god take up more than 2 of these roles at the same time, though. For example, having the god of Nature also be the god of Knowledge and the god of Good might cause some issues, especially if there are no other Nature deities for evil druids to revere.
In my homebrew, I ended up with some 20+ gods covering all sorts of topics but then again, I might prefer my pantheons to be a bit more complicated than most (I'm a big fan of the Forgotten Realms deities). In the end, whatever you feel will work best is the right choice. Honestly, if you want to steal the PHB deities for your homebrew and just change the names (or not), that would work too.
I have my own pantheon of greater and lesser gods, and a number of diety-like beings that do thier willl or have thier own motivations. But rarely does that come across to my players, because I want them to feel like they are the center of the game world, not the dieties.
I have used the core gods traditionally and will likely do so for at least the next few years. They're just a nice anchoring point that players can latch onto. However, I am also engaged in my own God Project, to create a custom pantheon. I've got quite a few of the major ideas and even deities pinned down. However, I'm in no rush to try and complete it and have it feel forced.
They say try not to have more than two dozen gods, at least major ones that the party should know about. However, I find that I'll probably have 40-50 when I'm done, and in order to keep from constantly popping a new god that the party hasn't heard of before into the game, I will most likely create at least a small blurb for each one. It may be a lot, especially with all the other homebrew stuff, but I plan on eventually compiling a whole Player's Guide, more or less, and just let the people come to grips with it at their own pace. That's no more to ask than if one suddenly switched to FR or Eberron. I also don't plan on abandoning my homebrew, ever, so it's a pretty safe bet, provided I find a consistent and long-term group, that they'll get to know it in due time.
As far as your case goes, developing your own gods can bring out a lot of culture and style in a world. Some of the core gods just may not seem to fit, or not as well as you'd like. Or perhaps you just have the urge to design your own deities. Go for it. But, there's nothing that says running a homebrew requires making up a new pantheon (you could even meld the core gods in with the new ones you make!).
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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I stick with core dieties and leave my pantheon relatively undefined so I can insert additional gods as needed. My experience is that players don't give a damn about the pantheon except insofar as they play clerics (and even then they mostly just care about their god and his/her enemies). Some DM's enjoy setting the history of the world in stone, including the role of the gods, and impose an ordered structure on their cosmos (e.g., there must be one god of each alignment, there must be 1 greater god, 3 lesser gods that are servants, etc, etc). It's not my bag (I don't enjoy it and my players don't care), but your mileage may vary.
I'm kinda like Sebatsian on this one,in that I don't think it's a big deal either way.
For my current HB I made up 6 major gods/goddesses that cross cultures - they just look different and have different levels of importance to different peoples. I've got a mother/nature goddess, a goddess of magic, a father/thunder god, a heroic sun god, a god of merchants, thieves and luck, and a goddess of passion, love madness and intoxication.
I find it doesn't affect the game much at all, except for NPCs. I also say that there are millions of local nature and ancestral spirits and minor demons, devils and ghosts that grant spells to whoever asks them. So basically if a player wants to be a cleric (which they never have) they can invent their own minor god or go with one of the big ones.
When making a homebrew, I generally write up a list of about a dozen major Hellenistic-like gods with short blurbs about each. I also assume that there are uncounted lesser deities and divine proxies.
I'm a canon junkie. For me, I try to do with a setting what the D&D guys do with their settings--the idea being that really all of D&D is ultimately part of some greater connected reality so it should remain fairly seamless. Usually that means I transfer over some core gods that seem to always be around (The elven gods, dwarf gods, drow gods, most of the archdemons and archdevils) though sometimes I will switch this up.
From there I try to come up with at least a god or two for each race, then a couple to correspond to certain non-cleric classes (magic, nature, travel, song, sneakiness...y'know). Try to have some evil gods to balance out the good gods, but try not to make them too much of a twirly-mustache stereotype--evil, but understandable.
I really try not to use real life gods and mythology if I can help it. It kinda' breaks verisimilitude. If they do show up, I try to keep the name but blur everything else so it feels really fictional. The idea of Aztecland and Romanland feels kinda' fake and cheesy to me, so I avoid it as much as I can.
Gods and religion are one of my favorite aspects of D&D, so I really kinda' go crazy with it in my homebrew settings. It's a lot of fun.
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In the years when I didn't have a game going, I tortured myself by creating homebrew worlds. I'd always create my own pantheon, but would sometimes use deites from elsewhere, much the same way FR has Tyr and Silvanus. I'd also create different religions for different regions. The European/Mediterranean pantheon, the Egyptian/Persian style, etc. In the last couple of years (ever since the Book of Vile Darkness), I've also worked the Demon Princes and Archdevils into various pantheons.
I also created some themed pantheons: an After Ragnarok pantheon, a Law vs Chaos pantheon, a Sins vs Virtues pantheon, to name a couple.
So many times I have played with the ideas in my head on a homebrew world. I didn't started this thread to talk about them, but wanted to ask wether you use the core deities from the PHB or create your own ones?
Thanks in advance.
In my homebrew world which has been on a long term hiatus for the moment!
I created my own gods, by race, region and portfolio, not sure how many I created and how original some of them are, but I have close to 60-70 gods, plus over a hundred saints and minor spirits of divineness!
I have my own pantheon of Gods that I created specifically for my Homebrew campaign. I just find it to be more enjoyable for me to run a campaign using all my own ish. I gave them a Greek gods sort of flavor(real petty and vengeful, at least as how I perceive them). As a D.M. I just prefer to do things this way.
In my homebrew, I have my own deities, most of which are personifications of various forces.
However, some of these have taken more active role in the world than others, and typically the ones which are most involved in the world also show the most "human" (or goblin or elven or whatever) characteristics, likes and dislikes and so forth. There are also gods which have no specific clergy but which are addressed for specific needs (gods of Time or Death have specific functions but no dedicated followers...at least any which receive any special divine attention).
There is also one established religion which serves no god but a philosophical concept (life-death-rebirth cycle) and one established religion which serves superior creature which however is not a god and grant no divine powers (Dragon. There is exactly one).
Actually, it might be interesting development to make all clerics worship whole pantheons, keeping track on their relationship with different gods of the pantheon and if for example your relationship with god of Nature is bad you can't get that Goodberry spell (because that effect is governed by god of Nature) but since your relationship with god of Goodness is very close your Bless comes automatically extended or something...
The other DM in our group runs Toril and Greyhawk, so I CAN'T use the core deities. I use Middle Earth as a setting, so I have a mix of the deities created by Tolkein (For the purists... yes, I know they aren't really deities. But for all intents and purposes, they really ARE deities.) in addition to pantheons stolen from elsewhere.
Another thing I've been toying with is altering some of the inter-deity relationships and histories for my homebrew. There are several major cultural regions, and in my God Project, each has their own small pantheon, but ones that easily intermix with the others (kind of "subpantheons"). I really like the work I've developed so far, and I want to start using that framework to help define my world, but again, am not ready to completely abandon the core gods. However, I find that entities such as Pelor and Erythnul and Tharizdun fit well into what I've already done, so I may just plug them in fairly unchanged. That's something you could try experimenting with, as well.
In the homebrew that I am working on now I am using the gods that I like (Illesine, Olidimmara, Wee Jas, Boccob, Obad-hai and St. Cuthbert and the racial dieties) as well as creating some of my own gods. This might be a good way to do it so as to give your players something to ground them to the normal D&D world.
So many times I have played with the ideas in my head on a homebrew world. I didn't started this thread to talk about them, but wanted to ask wether you use the core deities from the PHB or create your own ones?
Either approach can work. Creating your own pantheon can add a lot of flavor to your world, though.
Things to consider when creating deities for a setting:
1) Alignment; there should be enough deities of varying alignments that a cleric can be any alignment.
2) Classes; there should be patrons for arcane, martial, and trickster type characters; also decide if you want a nature diety for druids and rangers (or if you want nature to grant spells as a concept/force).
3) Mortal ascension; is it possible for a mortal to ascend to deity status, and if so, how? If it is possible, then there should be more dieties in the pantheon (probably of demi- or lesser deity status).
4) Goals and interaction; what are the dieties' primary goals and how do they interact with mortals?
Deities and Demigods covers this in much greater detail and provides additional guidance on atypical pantheons (monotheism, dualism, and spirits).
For beginning players definitely go with the core deities, they're easy to understand and easy to find. If you are playing with a more experienced group I usually use the forgotten realms pantheon as it's very detailed and well fleshed out, saving me time for actual world-building.
I have my homebrew world set to a judges guild map wheras I have sectioned out areas as controlled by various cultures and dieties represented in the old Dieties and Demigods book. So, if you just watched 300 and are all hot to play a Spartan, you could generate that character from my Greek/Roman area that is steeped in the myths and legends of that period set to high fantasy.
Gradually, my world is moving to having 3 basic dieties, each representing all alignments; they are just light, dark, and murky shadow middle ground, but this is still quite a ways off.