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I've been kicking around some worldbuilding ideas, and one idea that I've really been avoiding for a while despite really wanting to use it is setting without the usual full spectrum of deities. When you've got an animistic world or one without any concrete divine influences (but still want to have clerics), it's a simple enough matter to just let clerics pick domains ad hoc (I always go back and forth on the matter of favoured weapons, though... Although just now I realized that assigning a weapon to each domain could probably work well enough - the cleric then choosing which one will be their favoured weapon - and I'm kicking myself). And there are ways of effectively getting a standard pantheon structure out of a single all-powerful deity by either having saints/angels or aspects/avatars to divide things up between. But what about if your setting only has one deity with a fairly narrow portfolio, comparable to those of standard deities, or just two or three deities (again, with similarly limited portfolios). I hate restricting options (especially core ones) if it's at all possible to avoid, but would this just have to be one of those situations where I'll have to bite the bullet? Or can you think of non-divine explanations/sources for domains and divine magic?
If your setting has only one diety, you need to answer from where the divine magic that is not in his portoflio comes from.
It may come from its servants and opponents: empyreal lords, archdevils, demon lords. They are no dieities, they cannot compare to the One God, yet they give an access to other domains that the One God does not.
Other option is that the divine magic comes from faith itself rather than from actual being. For example, if the cleric's faith stresses the importance of fire, he would have access to Fire Domain even if One God doesn't have it in his portfolio.
Another option is that although One God has a favored domains that he gives to most of his clerics, he is able to grant access to any domain, it's just rare for him to do it.
After deciding on the source of the magic, you should also decide how the user of uncommon divine magic are treated. Are they heretics, or chosen ones? Are they allowed to preach?
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There are many ways to handle deities, you don't have to take the standard approach of 5 domains, including those of the deity's alignment. Here are some thoughts:
You'll need 7 deities to cover all 33 domains from the Core Rulebook. (Assuming each deity gets 5 domains.) This doesn't really cover all subdomains.
You can have lesser deities with less domains. A cleric really only needs 2, so if you're going for animism a spirit can have 2 domains. The same goes gor saints and angels. You can also work with your players to develop lesser deities.
You can remove clerics entirely and replace them with shamans or oracles. This could fit the animism theme more. You might want to ask your players first though.
Can you tell us exactly what you want to do with your pantheon?
One possibility is that whatever the deity(ies) portfolios are, it's possible to use their magic to manipulate the world. They may be interested mainly in the sun and crops, say, but if you control a bit of their power you can use it as a lever on the fire domain or whichever domain you've studied.
Another is that while there may be only a few gods living there have been others in ages past. Keith Baker used this in Eberron - the Blood of Vol were tapping into some reservoir of power dating back to the days of the giants which just happened to have properties like their relatively new religion.
On the gripping hand, it might be worth asking your players what they might be interested in. If none of them want to be a cleric or other divine spellcaster this time round, no problem! If they have only one or two ideas which they might want it might be easiest to provide a bespoke solution for those one or two rather than trying to write a solution which covers everything.
I built a monotheistic campaign world with a single creator deity, but rather than clerics getting their magic straight from him, each had to pick a archangel (or demon lord if evil) and got domains based on that.
Another option would be to 'bend' your world to your players. You will most likely only have one or two players that will take domains anyway, so if you want a world where only one limited god survived the 'godwars' find and you find out that you have a player interested in the magic and travel domains, so you decide that the God that made it through is Hermes Trismegistus. Your 'world' only has a few domains available to it, but your players have all the domain options (obviously later multiclassing or replacement characters won't have all options.)
Lastly, given the usual fluff about druids (as well as clerics of philosophies) and actual divine being isn't really necessary as an intermediary to divine magic in pathfinder. Personally, I don't love that (druids should be CHR not WIS) but the idea that the domain exists even if no god is there to represent it is something you can work with. I personally would want some mechanical way to make an domain from a good feel mechanically different from a domain that wasn't and I'm not sure how I'd go about that, but I do think you could do interesting things plot wise related to beings (eventually even the PCs themselves maybe) trying to 'claim' domains and become full fledged gods.
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So to reiterate, I'm specifically avoiding the archangel/saint/daedric lords/etc. option since, mechanically, that's really just making a standard pantheon in all but name. I don't really have any specific needs in mind at the moment, and asking players is kind of irrelevant at this stage since just making settings has always been my... hobby within the hobby, basically. It's just something I enjoy doing for its own sake. I went six years without an actual group at one point, and that entire time, coming up with settings was all I really did. And this sort of thing is something that I always avoided because of how different it is from the basic mechanical assumptions of core 3.5/PF. I've done animism, I've done no gods/religions, I've done single omnipotent deities... But a setting with only one or a few deities that can't comfortably be stretched to include more than a handful of domains is something I've always very deliberately avoided.
Anyway... in order to at least provide a bit substance to the conversation, I suppose my inspiration for this is primarily older RPG video games that frequently featured a "totally not Christianity" mono-faith - sometimes without actually having any real god (as far as was apparent). Shining Force, Dragon Quest, Warcraft I*, the Tales series, basically anything that had clearly defined priest-type characters, but where religion was practically ignored by the story. Even some newer games like Dragon Age might fit this mould. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about adapting any specific examples to a Pathfinder campaign setting, but rather one inspired by them, that has the same feel.
*Strictly with regards to the first Warcraft game, and ignoring all the subsequent lore. We're just talking about inspiration and feel here. Even though proper deities remain sparse later on, there's a plethora of religions/faiths that can be worked with similarly to Eberron.
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can you think of non-divine explanations/sources for domains and divine magic?
That’s kind of a tautological impossibility:)
How about this? Your deity only has 3 or 4 core domains (magic, weather, death, and healing seem the most likely candidates) but sufficiently concentrated belief can cause other domains to manifest. So if there’s a temple with a great library, where the priests teach that learning and preserving the truth is a sacred duty, where copying scrolls is a form of meditative worship, the clerics trained there have access to the knowledge domain.
Basically, the deity is all-powerful. If you believe fervently enough that the deity should grant a particular domain, the power manifests that way to you.
You want it to be mechanically the same ("I hate restricting options").
You don't want it to be mechanically the same ("mechanically, that's really just making a standard pantheon").
I think you have to pick one, and how your world works and how the mechanics should reflect the fluff is totally subjective.
I think you could present a specific mechanics that you like and ask us to discuss possible problems or difficulties, or present specific mechanics and ask for help with fluff that would explain them, but right now your question is so vague and what you are looking for is so unclear that I don't think anyone can be of much help.
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can you think of non-divine explanations/sources for domains and divine magic?That’s kind of a tautological impossibility:)
Okay, fair. ^^;
You want it to be mechanically the same ("I hate restricting options").
You don't want it to be mechanically the same ("mechanically, that's really just making a standard pantheon").I think you have to pick one, and how your world works and how the mechanics should reflect the fluff is totally subjective.
Yeah, that's the conclusion I was coming, too. But before giving up, I figured I'd see if anyone else had ideas. I am just one person, and no one person can think all the thoughts. I do at least feel I should clarify the "hate restricting options" by saying that what I meant was completely disallowing them. Like, if my setting's only real religion is a standard, flavourless Church of Light (a la Shining Force or Dragon Quest), it puts a bad taste in my mouth to say that half of the core domains are disallowed, let alone only four or five being available.
EDIT: Hang on! What about... maybe one of your domains has to be from the religion's portfolio (say... Community, Glory, Good, Healing, and Sun), but your second domain has more flexibility? A priest from a seaside town might have the Water or Weather domain in addition to, say, Community. One from a major trade city might have Travel, and one who was in the army as a field medic might have War. This way only a handful of domains need to be disallowed (those that directly contradict the religion's portfolio like Darkness and Evil), which makes things similar to core (since a handful of domains like Evil are effectively disallowed in many campaigns with the assumptions that the players are non-evil), but still have a distinct flavour that allows the religion and its place in the setting to feel unique.
Consider the idea of stained glass or a prism, where the same God can be viewed from different angles. In Game of Thrones, for example, the Many-Faced God and the Lord of Light are often considered to be the only gods that actually exist, but different cultures have their own 7 gods here and 9 gods there etc..
Maybe this allows you to get a fairly interesting story where you don't present your universe as having a single god, but many, even dozens; but the players come to realize over time that some of the mono-theisms takes may be right. At the same time, the "Old Faiths" of many gods seem legit in that they tap into some hidden source of power; and a different one that worshiping Big God would give you.
This allows you to have your cake and eat it too. They choose a sub-god thing and think they're making an actual choice (mechanically they are) but in reality, the gods are just different aspects of the same one.
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It's worth noting that while the above is a bit of a ramble, I just have an image of a holy figure in stained glass in my head; where looking at individual pieces of glass is an entirely different experience than looking at the whole thing.
Taken magically, looking at the individual piece of blue, with portions of a ship on its edges and a bird flying; but if you look; the whole picture is really about a city and the ship at the bottom is just a small detail. That blue piece may be Weather, Air, etc.; but the whole thing may be Light, Good, Community, etc.
What about... maybe one of your domains has to be from the religion's portfolio (say... Community, Glory, Good, Healing, and Sun), but your second domain has more flexibility?
Mechanically that should work out just fine.
I'd probably limit it to only forbidding alignment domains (i.e. they can ONLY be granted by a suitable deity) since I don't think that the 'Sun' domain is necessarily any more opposed to 'Darkness' than it is to 'Water' or than 'Community' is to 'Travel.' I think it would be cleaner than to try and decide what domains are 'contradict' a portfolio.
Alternately, if you have more than one god, particularly a 'good' and 'evil' one, I could see certain domains being unavailable to worshipers of one or them because the belong to the other. So an evil god of 'chaos', 'evil', 'madness', 'water' and 'magic' would make it so that only their worshipers could take those 5 domains. I would only use this option (alongside your above method) if I was only going to have a couple of dieties. Any more than that and I think it would become too restrictive. It would be a 'less options' choice, but I think it gives a lot more mechanical teeth to the flavor whereas the pick one domain plus any domain you want (pretty much) seems to be balanced but ends up lacking flavor on its own.
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I'd probably limit it to only forbidding alignment domains (i.e. they can ONLY be granted by a suitable deity) since I don't think that the 'Sun' domain is necessarily any more opposed to 'Darkness' than it is to 'Water' or than 'Community' is to 'Travel.' I think it would be cleaner than to try and decide what domains are 'contradict' a portfolio.
Oh no, I wasn't thinking in terms of opposing domains, merely ruling out domains that absolutely would not fit into the religion's portfolio. Like if it's a stereotypical benevolent Holy Church of Light thing, doesn't matter what your background is, I can't see it granting the Trickery domain, for example (regardless as to whether or not there's an alternate deity who's keeping it for themselves). And I wouldn't really say my method is meaningfully "balanced". I mean, RAW, any cleric can pick any two domains they want. All they'll miss out on compared to a cleric who picks a deity to follow is a favoured weapon, which is an almost meaningless sacrifice, particularly in the face of being able to pair up any two options you want without restriction (aside from alignment domains, of course). The whole thing is more about getting the mechanics to reflect the setting itself rather than force the setting to comply to the mechanics, and to help it feel distinct from the plethora of others in any minor way it can.
A friend is running a campaign where below the great one are Saints, and a follower of that order must take the domain that associated with the Saint, but is free to choose their second if it doesn't conflict with the orders view, Like Healing would avoid association with Destruction, ect...
Matt Colville has version of this in his Ratcatchers books/setting.