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particularly because of the Cleric/Inquisitor its hard to play Pathfinder without specific deities. The deities of Golarion are really fleshed out, interesting and full of history and flavor, however When it comes to homebrew games I'm reluctant to use Golarion's deities because they seem too Golarion specific.
How do you handle deities in your homebrew settings? Do you just transplant Golarion's gods? Do you make up your own gods including new favored weapons, domains and subdomains?
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I make mine whole cloth.
Then again, I love mythology and creative writing, so it's enjoyable for me. I make up the setting, and to me the deities are an integral part of the setting.
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I make up my own gods, mostly because I find that published works such as the gods of Golarion are wildly differing in the amount of information about them and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to numerous to be useful. Some gods of Golarion are highly detailed with histories and motivations, others have a sentence or two and no real context as to why they are there.
If you're looking for more gods, check out The Gods of Porphyra. If you're willing to do a bit of conversion, try finding a copy of Deites & Demigods which should be a fairly straightforward to add to your homebrew...if you're looking for inspiration from Egyptian, Greek, or Norse pantheons.
Related question, do you change the planar cosmology as a result of making new deities?(if you make your own deities)
If you're looking for more gods, check out The Gods of Porphyra. If you're willing to do a bit of conversion, try finding a copy of Deites & Demigods which should be a fairly straightforward to add to your homebrew...if you're looking for inspiration from Egyptian, Greek, or Norse pantheons.
Is 'The Gods of Porphyra intended to be transplantable? (relatively setting neutral?)
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Related question, do you change the planar cosmology as a result of making new deities?(if you make your own deities)
Yes, the last world I ran had 7 planes. They were Chaos, Order, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and the Material plane in the form of a tesseract with the material plane in the middle.
Yes, the last world I ran had 7 planes. They were Chaos, Order, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and the Material plane in the form of a tesseract with the material plane in the middle.Related question, do you change the planar cosmology as a result of making new deities?(if you make your own deities)
Totally stealing that.
often depends on what style of game I'm running. If the Gods are the hands off sort I find it's better to detail the Religions than it is to define the Gods. This can be as simple as a list of Dos and Don'ts and then tie the Clerics and Inquisitors to that.
Has the added benefit of allowing you to have schisms where you get separate churches worshiping different aspects of the same god. Yet both have power, Clerics and Inquisitors.
Imagine two rival churches of Asmodeus. One worshiping him in his aspect of Tyranny and Slavery and the other focusing on Contracts and Pride. Both are devout servants of their god, both get power, have Clerics and Inquisitors, but they have separate dogma, religious scripts and ceremonies. The Second one might even find itself welcome in places that reject the first one simply because they follow a less offensive interpretation of their god's will.
and of course the two hate each other with a violent passion.
You just need to quickly sketch out a half dozen Dos and Don'ts for each group and use those to help understand how the Clerics and Inquisitors react to things including against each other.
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I generally run a kitchen sink kind of approach in my current personal setting "genericland, land of all fantasy tropes". If you believe in it, it exists. Though if a player want a specific type of god they either have to :
a) Design a god (and their history) from whole cloth
b) Let me choose an appropriate god from my current mix of golarion & forgotten realms.
I'm a fairly open GM, if I can convince my players to do some writing for me, I'm all for it. HOWEVER, I am fairly demanding of divine classes. For those who can fall (IE clerics & paladins) they must write a code that defines how they follow their god. I hold them to that code.
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When I've worked with a homebrew of my very own, I created gods as they were needed. When I was starting it fresh, I asked the player who was playing the cleric, was sort of deity they would have been looking to represent, and create something that they could work with, but not necessarily dictated by said player.
Related question, do you change the planar cosmology as a result of making new deities?(if you make your own deities)
I tend to de-emphasize the planes in my games. Most of my deities either live in a communal zone (think Olympus or Asgard), or in their own pocket realms. I have a preference for deities with a physical presence, so sometimes they'll reside in grand temples or prepared sanctums.
If I have to use planes, I usually use the planescape setting planes.
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I use the Golarion(ish) gods, my own gods, other gods, pantheons, old nameless gods, dead gods, godlings and demigods, powerful outsiders, ascended mortals, and principles/alignments. All available for worship.
Gods will interact with creatures of the world when the world interacts directly with their existence. They are mostly kept in check by "fear" of all the other gods.
But otherwise they just appreciate the worship and (scheme and) await the end of the multiverse when they get to fight for the remnants and the construction of the next one.
I only modify cosmology a little; as in the gods don't reside in the aligned outer planes, but has their own (unreachable by normal planar travel) "far planes" where they offer an afterlife to worshippers and others they find worthy.
These far planes are either the domain of a single deity or a pantheon, some are the graves of dead gods, and others again are long forgotten and lost. Some gods are just occupying another gods plane.
I like my sources of the divine in the anything and everything catagory.
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Umm it really depends on what you feel comfortable doing. Here are a few quick options.
1.) port over the golarion gods, they are well written and with a little effort you can easily import them over, especially those that are not directly ascended from mortals on golarion (barring say norgorber).
2.) find a copy of deities & demigods and port over some earth options, they have a literal ton in real life already written down and easy to look up and with a little work they are pretty easy to port. Also there are plenty of people who would help out and know those gods pretty well (especially if you are looking into Egyptian deities with a propensity for jackel/head of a set dog).
3.) knock out your own. This is by far the most work intensive but can be one of the most rewarding since you get to build the gods to exactly match what you feel your world needs. My best advice here is to take your time and really think about your religions, remember they are meant to be an idea so important and powerful to their followers beings that they are willing to kill over it, willing to die over it so to make them believable you have to make sure to really think them out and make them compelling and relateable for your players. Trust me if you go this route remember to take your time and think them through, they often can be the difference between making your world feel real and alive and totally nonsensical. It's usually good to get your players involved a bit so that they can get something you all enjoy.
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I'm actually doing a homebrew based on oldschool Final Fantasy, and I decided to make the gods all of the summons. It's a really rich and diverse pantheon to choose from.
Bahamut is the same as in dnd, Shiva, Ifrit, Ramuh, and the Minotaur brothers represent the elements. I even added Doomtrain(he'll double as the ghost train from six) and Fat Chochobo.
Just don't overthink it, have fun and your gods will handle themselves.
Oh, and I handle gods with sensual strength and delicacy.
Never been a fan of the way gods and religions are handled in D&D. My last few campaigns have had only three primary religions none of which have had anything to do with gods. Then again, the gods in my setting are pretty much animals or spirit beasts inspired by princess mononoke so I guess its par for course.
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I tend to just port over the gods from the CRB, though, having not run a non-Golarion PF game, I'm not sure if I would do that in this case. The gods do seem more Golarion specific (though this could just be that I never cared enough about Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or any other setting to mentally tie the gods of those settings to their settings).
Depending on how much time I wanted to devote to it, I'd either create them whole cloth, or pick another setting or real world pantheon to import. Of course, if I'm feeling completely apathetic to the gods of the world, I'll pull what I did in an older campaign, in letting the players decide, by saying that the gods don't speak much to mortals (not to say they're apathetic to them, but they just don't speak much to them). Then I'll just go off of what the players come up with, to come up with enemy and ally gods.
Particularly because of the Cleric/Inquisitor its hard to play Pathfinder without specific deities. (snip)
How do you handle deities in your homebrew settings?
In answer to the first part, cleric and inquisitor play just as well without deities at all in pathfinder. In truth, they have a very little impact on the rules; it's in the preconception of what the cleric is that deities have a huge influence. In all fairness, most of the clerics I've seen barely mention which deity is their patron; more often than not, deities are simply a selection of cleric themes packaged with domains and a favoured weapon.
Otherwise scratch the word "cleric" and write "pseudo-medieval jedi" (or whatever) and the class holds itself just fine.
2ed AD&D's Lankhmar setting (Fafhrd and Grey Mouser) had the cleric re-fluffed as a white wizard. Lankhmar has its gods. When they show-up, you run and hide like everyone else... Different conceptualization, same mechanics, same role among the party.
As for the second part, I find that deities contribute greatly to a homebrew settings. They don't have to be original (as in "new"), but much of the coulour of a setting will be defined by its religion(s). If I was creating a homebrew setting, I'd most likely create my own pantheon or re-skin an existent one with new names and new fluff.
particularly because of the Cleric/Inquisitor its hard to play Pathfinder without specific deities. The deities of Golarion are really fleshed out, interesting and full of history and flavor, however When it comes to homebrew games I'm reluctant to use Golarion's deities because they seem too Golarion specific.
How do you handle deities in your homebrew settings? Do you just transplant Golarion's gods? Do you make up your own gods including new favored weapons, domains and subdomains?
Since there are no gods in my homebrew worlds, I just let the players make them up if they want to anthropomorphize their belief. All clerics are clerics of a philosophy in my worlds, just that many of them don't realize it.
I came up with an entirely new pantheon for my homebrew campaign. Once I'm done doing write-ups for all my gods I'll have about 80 pages worth of Word documents.
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For the gods in my setting, I took a lot of inspiration from pre-Columbian gods and folklore, as well as looking at modern day folklore for inspiration for religions. One thing in particular is that generally speaking, worship of evil gods isn't prohibited, since many have portfolios that people worship. Either that, or worshipers revere them out of fear. For example, Tezcatlipoca is a LE deity in my setting, one of the night and of sacrifices. But, he is also the god of nobility and wealth, so many pray to him to keep away bad luck economically. Same with a CE goddess of murder and sin, whose church also takes money for indulgences to "clear one's sin". Whether that works or not... well, no one truly knows. :)
Well, I don't know about the rest, but I do have one god that I use in my own settings. The Artificer, a machine god of war and crafting that grants the Destruction, War, Artifice, Fire, and Earth domains. It is really only concerned in the application of mechanics and weapons in wars, and not really concerned with battles and who wins.
Though I think I spent all my "interesting god" mojo on that one, because I don't have any other really interesting ones that I cling to.
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I'm actually doing a homebrew based on oldschool Final Fantasy, and I decided to make the gods all of the summons. It's a really rich and diverse pantheon to choose from.
Bahamut is the same as in dnd, Shiva, Ifrit, Ramuh, and the Minotaur brothers represent the elements. I even added Doomtrain(he'll double as the ghost train from six) and Fat Chochobo.
Just don't overthink it, have fun and your gods will handle themselves.Oh, and I handle gods with sensual strength and delicacy.
My friend did something very similar in his homebrew campaign.
I actually take a "Less is More" approach for my gods. I reduced my pantheon down to 4 elemental gods who each represent both things good and evil. So the fire god is the god of freedom and glory, as well as destruction and vengeance. She is both the wife and often times enemy of the earth god, whose portfolio includes community and tyranny. The water goddess is healing as well as death. The air god is a bit dfferent as its portfolio is not any real good or evil domains, but heavily bent toward chaos and trickery. The closest thing to an outright evil god is the entity--not even actually a god--that represents the antithesis of creation - The Void. (No prizes for guessing its portfolio.)
Honestly, gods of evil intent always struck me as silly. Sure there will always be people who worship the devil, figuratively speaking in this case. Most often to get a rise out of other people. But there would never be enough to form a full fledged cult, let alone major world religion. Besides, having followers of a religion whose members you can almost immediately assume to be evil has a lot of unfortunate implications.
Most terrible things in history were usually visited upon members of the same or similar religions, who read the same books and had wildly different interpretations. I prefer having morally complex gods whose followers can ultimately reveal for themselves what aspect they have individually chosen to focus on.
When a PC asks "What's a pantheon?" and "Why is one mad at me?", you know you've done your job well.