Hey guys, I've decided to re work my campaign world, and in doing so I’m replacing the gods with creations of my own, I had been using the 3.5 ones. So far I have a couple of ideas:
Vulcanius NG - God of the sun, healing, glory, strength
Favourite Weapon: Greathammer
Azrael NE- Angel of Death, Destruction, Madness
Favourite Weapon: Greatsword
I have a few other idea's kicking around on notes and what not, but I was wondering what you guys got to help me out.
What I did when creating my pantheon was to lay out a grid of the nine alignments and create two gods for each alignment, to give a classic D&Dish feel to divinity. I made sure all domains were present, even if a few were represented by only one god.
i am still working on some of my own but i made an evil goddess, she is the snake goddess, she is the goddess of trickery, lies but thats all i got so far.
One thing I like to do is to give some real-world flavor to my deities by giving each of them multiple churches, faiths, or sects. This way you can have multiple people who worship the same deity but in different ways, for different reasons, and with different theologies. To use a real-world example (and please, this is just a factual example, no judgments are made or implied, please don't turn this into a religious debate), Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all worship the exact same deity, but they each believe slightly different things about the deity and have different practices, rituals, and so on. On a smaller scale, Christianity itself is fractured into dozens of different churches, all of whom again worship the same deity but in different ways.
That may sound like a lot of work, but in my experience it's actually not really much more, because you can reduce the number of deities and use the different faiths to cover the same ground. It adds a lot of verisimilitude to the world, as well, IMO.
A specific example from one of my campaign worlds:
There are four primary deities. Each one of them is diametrically opposed to each of the others on exactly one theological point and allied or at least neutral on the other points. Each deity has three main theological points: alignment (always neutral on one axis and an extreme alignment on the other, so LN, NG, NE, CN), season (spring, summer, autumn, winter), and element (the classic four).
That gives us the following four deities...
Sedexus, The Ice Queen, Lady of Order, Matron of the Veil
LN
Portfolio: Winter, Earth, Law, the Dead
Gedhris, Breath-stealer, Dream-walker
NE
Portfolio: Autumn, Air, Evil, Dreams
Orogara, Torch-bearer, Flame of Hope, Inspiration's Spark
NG
Portfolio: Summer, Fire, Good, Self-fulfillment, Protection
Anwyr, The Wanderer, Spring's Herald
CN
Portfolio: Spring, Water, Chaos, Travel, Growth
Notice how the different aspects of each deity interlock with the aspects of the others.
Now, each of those deities has several different sects who worship them. For example, Sedexus has the Pillars of Justice, who worship Sedexus in Her aspect of Law-giver, having the portfolio of enforcing the law and the pursuit of justice; the Shepherds of the Dead, who worship Her in her aspect of the Matron of the Veil (the Veil being what separates the world of the living from the world of the dead), having the portfolio of hunting undead and guiding lost souls; the Returners, a secret sect considered heretical by the Shepherds, who worship Her as the mistress of the undead, having the portfolio of raising undead and spreading undeath; and the Winter's Heralds, who worship Her as the Ice Queen, having the portfolio of the onset of winter and protection from the elements.
Each of the other three deities have similar sects, often times with intra-faith conflict. A player would (usually) worship through one of these faiths, rather than worship the deity directly in all of its aspects. This gives players ready-made religious focus and can also supply ready-made antagonists in opposing religious orders. The beauty is that the opposing orders are usually not evil on either side, so there's all kinds of room to play with various disputes without there being an obvious "kick down the door and slaughter all the priests" answer.
In my world, while there are different religions, there is still one predominant church; that of Iocus (ee-OAK-us). An almost christ-like figure shrouded in more legendry than historical records, he purportedly defeated/drove out the last of the dragons that subjugated the world for untold millenia. He is revered as a deity himself, and his church is the source of many knight/paladin orders including order of the Dragon and Silver Star, which are LN and NG respectively. Even in a single church there are sects, orders, and the beliefs differ widely on basic topics much like here on earth.
Hey guys, I've decided to re work my campaign world, and in doing so I’m replacing the gods with creations of my own, I had been using the 3.5 ones. So far I have a couple of ideas:
I've been toying with the idea of gods as personification of concepts, and thus each god/concept will have an 'aspect' that fits each alignment category, as well as probably its own clergy, though probably there will be some cross-worship across a few alignment bands. For example, a god of war:
LG = Marshal of Holy Warriors
NG = Protector of the Oppressed
CG = Liberator of the Enslaved
CN = King of Berserkers
CE = Lord of Slaughterers
NE = Chieftain of Raiders
LE = Emperor of Steel Legions
LN = Master of Discipline
N = Captain of Mercenaries
In one kingdom, the LN, LE and N aspects might be venerated, while in another, LG, LN, NG might hold sway. Orcs might worship the CE and NE aspects exclusively.
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Hey guys, I've decided to re work my campaign world, and in doing so I’m replacing the gods with creations of my own, I had been using the 3.5 ones. So far I have a couple of ideas:
Vulcanius NG - God of the sun, healing, glory, strength
Favourite Weapon: GreathammerAzrael NE- Angel of Death, Destruction, Madness
Favourite Weapon: GreatswordI have a few other idea's kicking around on notes and what not, but I was wondering what you guys got to help me out.
One thing I like to do when homebrewing dieties is to think up non-traditional options.
Certain Domains, such as Artifice, Community, Glory, Healing, Nobility, Protection and Sun are almost always exclusive to good dieties, while Death, Darkness, Madness, Scalykind, etc. are almost always evil. This gets a bit stale.
You could work up an evil god of Glory and Nobility, Law and War, who is all about divine right to impose your will on others, while the setting has a good goddess of Darkness (perhaps opposed to an evil Sun god) or a good god of Madness (perhaps, like Dionysus, being a god of wine and freedom and artistic inspiration and animalistic passions, but not a specifically evil god).
There's already precedent for allowing a Domain spell to function differently than a standard spell, such as 'Clerics of X can use Animal Domain spells on Vermin' or 'Only to assume snake forms' or whatever, so it would be equally feasible to have a setting with a good-aligned Death god who allows their clerics to cast the spells in the Death domain without it counting as an evil act.
For my homebrew, I created Bennu and Apsis
Bennu - Greater Goddess (NG)
Symbol: Silver Phoenix
Portfolios: Life, Death, Rebirth, Fire
Domains: Healing, Death, Repose, Fire
Apsis - Intermediate God (LN)
Symbol: Snake entwined with a wand
Portfolios: Magic, Knowledge, Prophecy
Domains: Knowledge, Luck, Magic, Rune
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Happy to share my pantheon as well, though I'm not exactly much of an artist. Hope text descriptions help! =P
Marchwall (LG god of valor, justice, and warriors)
Domains: Glory, Good, Law, Strength, War
Favored Weapon: Longsword
Appearance: A young brown-haired human man wearing blue and white armor.
Holy Symbol: An upraised longsword, its hilt painted white and blue.
Paladin Rites: The Night Vigil, forge a longsword to be tempered in holy water
Saint Amelia (LG goddess of healing, life, and medicine)
Domains: Good, Healing, Law, Nobility, Protection
Favored Weapon: Quarterstaff
Appearance: A red-haired, blue-eyed human woman, wearing a simple yellow dress.
Holy Symbol: Twin bandages wrapped around a staff.
Paladin Rites: Heal a man's illness, heal a man's wounds, heal a man's soul- all without expectation of a reward.
Rumiss (LN goddess of civilization, family, farming)
Domains: Community, Earth, Law, Protection, Weather
Favored Weapon: Sickle
Appearance: A tan-skinned, brown-haired human woman in peasant garb.
Holy Symbol: A bundle of wheat with a sickle bound within, similar to a fasces.
Paladin Rites: Establish a homestead for a family that has a non-bloodline tie to the prospective paladin (family of a friend, family of a loved one, or best yet in Rumiss's eyes, family of an enemy.)
Nihilus (LE god of revenge and conquest)
Domains: Death, Evil, Law, Strength, War
Favored Weapon: Scythe
Appearance: A dark-haired human man clad in heavy black robes.
Holy Symbol: A bloodied scythe.
Blirante (NG god of the sun)
Domains: Fire, Good, Healing, Nobility, Sun
Favored Weapon: Shortsword
Appearance: A blonde human man wearing a radiant suit of chain mail.
Holy Symbol: An eight-pointed star, upon which a circle has been engraved.
Paladin Rites: Forge a shortsword (using a fire lit by focused sunlight), as well as swearing an oath to destroy the undead
Bald Rick Beerbaron (NG god of alcohol, dwarves, and the forge)
Domains: Artifice, Community, Fire, Good, Strength
Favored Weapon: Warhammer
Appearance: A brown-haired dwarf, his beard braided in the shape of an anvil, wearing battered plate mail and a sooted apron.
Holy Symbol: A warhammer, its head shaped like an anvil.
Paladin Rites: Temper a warhammer in alcohol, which is then consumed. Spend three days with your three closest friends on a drunken pub crawl, winning games of chance (Bounder, Gem Snatcher, Keystone, &c.) and skill (arm wrestling, brawling, darts, &c.) at each tavern.
Ageha (N goddess of death, dreams, the moon, and love)
Domains: Charm, Death, Liberation, Luck, Repose
Favored Weapon: Rapier
Appearance: A silver-haired, blue-eyed half-elf woman, wearing a black silk dress and ruby red lipstick.
Holy Symbol: A silver crescent moon.
Odjn (N god of knowledge, skill, and magic)
Domains: Artifice, Knowledge, Magic, Nobility, Rune
Favored Weapon: Crossbow
Appearance: An older human man, wearing spectacles and gray robes.
Holy Symbol: A scroll bound with a gray ribbon.
Tyma (N goddess of nature and elves)
Domains: Animal, Charm, Earth, Magic, Plant
Favored Weapon: Longbow
Appearance: A black-haired elven woman, wearing green and brown explorer's clothing.
Holy Symbol: Holly and mistletoe (as a druid's holy symbol).
Melethor (NE god of the undead and poison)
Domains: Death, Evil, Madness, Rune, Trickery
Favored Weapon: Greatclub
Appearance: A menacing tiefling man, his horns curled upward.
Holy Symbol: A serrated, crude club.
Fuu (CG goddess of freedom, luck, travel, and wind)
Domains: Air, Chaos, Good, Luck, Travel
Favored Weapon: Shortbow
Appearance: A blonde, green-eyed human woman wearing a green dress.
Holy Symbol: A green stylized representation of a tornado.
Kepbrand (CG god of halflings, rogues, schemers, and thieves)
Domains: Chaos, Charm, Good, Protection, Trickery
Favored Weapon: Starknife
Appearance: A black-haired halfling man, semi-reeking of booze, dressed in shabby, hastily patched together clothing.
Holy Symbol: A patch of many colors.
Michiru (CN goddess of the sea and storms)
Domains: Chaos, Healing, Travel, Water, Weather
Favored Weapon: Trident
Appearance: A teal-haired aasimar woman wearing a revealing teal dress and aquamarine tiara.
Holy Symbol: A teal trident, filled with sea water. (A challenge for my world's glassblowers!)
Ulroos Malroos (CE god of darkness and destruction)
Domains: Chaos, Darkness, Destruction, Evil, Madness
Favored Weapon: Spiked Chain
Appearance: A hideously ugly, indescribably mutated and deformed tumorous mass of flesh, bone, mouths, eyes, and tentacles.
Holy Symbol: A stylized rune in Elven script- the Aklo word for "all shalt be consumed."
One thing I did for my homebrew was take some of the minor gods from Norse mythology, and gave them larger roles in my own world's mythos.
For example, Narvi was mentioned just as Loki's son, and that when the other gods got tired of Loki's antics, they bound him in Narvi's entrails.
In my homebrew, I made Narvi the god of binding, and has good-sized churches among the humans and dwarves. If you need something bound or sealed, or you need demons dispated to the nether worlds, or if you need to close the gates to Hell, the Narvites should be at the top of your call list.
(Alignment, Lawful good. Domains: binding, war, rune. Et cetera.)
The Norse have a lot of other deities that are only mentioned once or a couple of times.
I also gave the gods some children not mentioned in the myths. I needed a goddess of taverns, so I gave Njord and Skade a daughter named Inyr, who has domains War, Travel, Protection, and Alchoholic Beverages.
Ideas for gods can come from anywhere.
One thing I like to do is to give some real-world flavor to my deities by giving each of them multiple churches, faiths, or sects. This way you can have multiple people who worship the same deity but in different ways, for different reasons, and with different theologies. To use a real-world example (and please, this is just a factual example, no judgments are made or implied, please don't turn this into a religious debate), Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all worship the exact same deity, but they each believe slightly different things about the deity and have different practices, rituals, and so on. On a smaller scale, Christianity itself is fractured into dozens of different churches, all of whom again worship the same deity but in different ways.
That may sound like a lot of work, but in my experience it's actually not really much more, because you can reduce the number of deities and use the different faiths to cover the same ground. It adds a lot of verisimilitude to the world, as well, IMO.
A specific example from one of my campaign worlds:
There are four primary deities. Each one of them is diametrically opposed to each of the others on exactly one theological point and allied or at least neutral on the other points. Each deity has three main theological points: alignment (always neutral on one axis and an extreme alignment on the other, so LN, NG, NE, CN), season (spring, summer, autumn, winter), and element (the classic four).
That gives us the following four deities...
Sedexus, The Ice Queen, Lady of Order, Matron of the Veil
LN
Portfolio: Winter, Earth, Law, the DeadGedhris, Breath-stealer, Dream-walker
NE
Portfolio: Autumn, Air, Evil, DreamsOrogara, Torch-bearer, Flame of Hope, Inspiration's Spark
NG
Portfolio: Summer, Fire, Good, Self-fulfillment, ProtectionAnwyr, The Wanderer, Spring's Herald
CN
Portfolio: Spring, Water, Chaos, Travel, GrowthNotice how the different aspects of each deity interlock with the aspects of the others.
...
Interesting, I did something similar except I made it a distant monotheistic deity that changed personality throughout the year's cycle, I didnt actually apply alignment to her throughout the different seasons though.
Aside from that I had demons to intrude upon her dominion and steal her power and worship away, some of them equal to demi-gods.
What I did when creating my pantheon was to lay out a grid of the nine alignments and create two gods for each alignment, to give a classic D&Dish feel to divinity. I made sure all domains were present, even if a few were represented by only one god.
I started much the same way, I wanted to make sure I had all 9 alignments covered. Then I started by stealing the deities from 3.5 and Pathfinder that I liked, then stole a few ideas from the Greco-Roman Pantheon and then a few other ideas floating in my head.
I also took the idea of multiple churches for some of the major deities within my campaign world.
In the end I came up with:
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1VmeXujio94u7BHvz1NofaxSxf0QeBpGrG BEvO53dHts&hl=en&authkey=CJbU5tEE
What I did when creating my pantheon was to lay out a grid of the nine alignments and create two gods for each alignment, to give a classic D&Dish feel to divinity. I made sure all domains were present, even if a few were represented by only one god.I started much the same way, I wanted to make sure I had all 9 alignments covered. Then I started by stealing the deities from 3.5 and Pathfinder that I liked, then stole a few ideas from the Greco-Roman Pantheon and then a few other ideas floating in my head.
I also took the idea of multiple churches for some of the major deities within my campaign world.
In the end I came up with:
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1VmeXujio94u7BHvz1NofaxSxf0QeBpGrG BEvO53dHts&hl=en&authkey=CJbU5tEE
I did that initially for my homebrew of Audor: started out by listing the alignments of the Norse gods and the gods from other sources that I wanted to include, then looked for more deities to fill in the gaps.
This is one of the things that led to the promotion of minor deities to major importance: I needed deities of certain alignments and portfolios. I also combed through the 1st Edition Deities and Demigods to fill out the pantheon for the Kosaka, since this was before I had the inspiration to make the Sun God and Wind Goddess the primary feature of their religion. (Even after the inspiration, I still would have needed gods like Hiisi to fill out the alignments.)
These are my gods. I use Gruumsh and Lolth, but have been seriously considering renaming them for my campaign world.
DEITIES OF THE STONEHELM CAMPAIGN SETTING
Jors Guardarm (LG) God of honor, nobility, protection, battle
Orin Stoneforger (LG) God of metallurgy, earth, creation, artisans
Seker (LG) God of light, truth, righteous virtue, purity
Shi’ar (NG) God of knowledge, magic, artifice, skill
Sosa (NG) Goddess of healing, miracles, prophecy, rebirth
Ambra Quickfoot (CG) God of change, trade, travel, freedom
Elan Valdarin (CG) God of the Feywild, fey magic, music, dance
Zeelan (CG) Goddess of the seas, stars, sky
Arbiter (LN) God of laws, justice, civilization, wisdom
Varu Hammerhaft (LN) God of war, victory, strength
A-llän (N) Goddess of nature, forests, beauty
Drakor (N) God of dragonkind, lost treasures, wealth, time
Macabress (N) Goddess of death, fate
Éna (CN) Goddess of stealth, thievery, luck, moon
Roth (CN) Goddess of storms, wrath, fiery retribution
Kerr (LE) God of darkness, evil, domination
Arcana (NE) God of necromancy, undead, disease
Nightshade (NE) Goddess of the shadowfell, murder, poison, dark secrets
Gruumsh (CE) God of turmoil, destruction
Lolth (CE) Goddess of spiders, shadows, lies
Scion (CE) God of annihilation, desolation, ruin
I don't have domains. Sound weird? Wait to you see the pantheon.
Arkadiou, god of the dwarves
Elam, a religion born amongst humans and half-humans
The Elven Religion
Gnome Agnosticism
Animism
Dragon worship
So why no pantheons? Simple - each religion could easily fit almost any domain. I let the player choose their domains and tell me how it fits their religious beliefs. Does your cleric of Arkadiou heal and bring stability to others and try to teach them the dwarven ways, or does he rain the maledictions from Him of Lava on their enemies? The elven priest of death and evil sacrifices his victims in a bloody and ornate ceremony, while the elven priest of charm and trickery instead fools them and gifts himself with the blessing of the Trickster.
Furthermore, I don't use greek style gods; religion is a matter of faith, and certainly while priests of certain gods get divine magic, they also certainly disagree with each other. I go Eberron/real world style - the gods don't regularly come down and brofist their followers, it's very much an unknown. Lastly, it's not truly a pantheon - each religion firmly believes that the other does not exist. There is no Arkadiou to a cleric of Elam. To the elves, the other gods do exist, but they're either only minor gods, or evil devils. The gnomes don't believe in any of it, merely that divine energy exists purely to be harnessed and used.