Hello! I was working on a small pantheon of deities that I could use for homebrew stuff. While doing do, I have been debating with myself on the pantheon's size, and figured I would ask here.
These deities don't have alignment restrictions, and go solely off Edicts and Anathema. Thus I'm not worried about representing various alignments.
If you were a player going into a homebrew setting, how many deities would feel like a good number? What kinds of options would you be looking for?
I am currently in a similar process and would guess that 20, like the pf2 core deities, might be a good number
But I think you should mostly try to build a stable base from wehre you can easily work with if you want to expand
(for example if we go with the ancient greek pantheon a good base would be Zeus + his immediate family (wife, brothers, some of the children))
I really loved the Arcanis setting on divinities. There were 12 of them and that's all. They had no alignment and as such you could find very opposing faiths of the same divinity.
If I create a pantheon, instead of creating an endless number of divinity like in Pathfinder, I'll certainly create a few of them like in Arcanis, tie them to strong concepts (death, war, love) and not restrict them by alignment allowing everyone to have his own vision of their concepts.
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Depends on what you're aiming for and how many pantheons in your setting.
If this is the only pantheon, you probably need at least 9 to 12 deities, but anywhere up to 20 is likely fine. Fewer than that and you wind up without full coverage, more and it becomes unwieldy.
Since you say you want a 'small' pantheon, I'd say pick a number like 9, or 12, or 13, that you want to be mystically significant in your setting and go with that.
I agree with deadmanwalking, 9-13 is a good starting point for coverage and manageability. In my homebrew world each continent has it’s regional gods that can only effect their continental region. That works for my two player groups of which I tend not to recommend right out of the get go.
The question is rather broad and depends much more on campaign elements we cannot discern than on any general rules of thumb.
Typically a homebrew campaign will cover all the major aspects of society, while a published pantheon might spread to minor aspects and include many pantheons across many societies. And yet still there might be holes.
Since you want a small pantheon, you could go as low as you want, even to one deity w/ many competing even contradictory aspects.
(see Earth's religions for examples)
Then players could choose the Edicts & Anathemas that suit their PCs. Adopting those might even be what powers PCs (much like Barbarians, hardly divine, gain Instinct abilities).
Or even zero deities, with divine power tied to Domains (& meditation/cosmic balance/etc.), so that each Domain has its own set of Edicts & Anathemas irregardless of deities.
Probably the easiest would be a Yin/Yang duality. (see Earth's again)
A male and female deity (and their various facets & phases) could cover pretty much everything. There could be other 'living concepts' as well, like Chaos.
Ancestor worship is another facet to consider as well as Animism (which is reflected in tons of PF creatures).
Personally, I'd tie in the amount of personal (unpublished) complexity to the amount of relevance to the story line. If simply background, I'd freely steal from other sources with only some name changes. Or if it's something like Forgotten Realms (tons of relevant gods!) or Dragonlance (few major gods) where the gods are active, then you need to know what you'll want them doing.
My homebrew setting only has 6 deities that players can worship, plus 4 more powerful gods that don't grant power to mortals. Of those 6 deities, they do have a "default" alignment, edicts, and anathema, but cultures around the world worship them in very different ways. For instance, the god of the afterlife is also the god of war, and different cultures will focus on different aspects of that.
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If you don't need to support the alignment table, 5 is the perfect number of deities you should aim for. It lets you set up 5 sets of thematic conflicts and 5 sets of common ground, while being a small enough number that your players can keep them in mind (Think Magic's colour wheel. It wouldn't work nearly as well if there were more or fewer colours).
If you need more deities, you can branch off your core 5 with servitors or, my preferred approach, use epithets to explore different aspects of your core pantheon (e.g. Zeus Agoraeus might have the Cities and Wealth domains, Zeus Horkios might have Truth and Vigil, yet both are Zeus)
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Dragon Magazine #283
Do-It Yourself Deities
One of my favorite articles about pantheon design! It includes several historic pantheon examples and a homebrew pantheon example of about 15 deities.
Also, another great read is the Realistic Religions article is in the same issue.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! :)
The other thing you can do, and which I tend to recommend generally when it comes to designing homebrew worlds, is to start out with a relatively small number of deities and throw in a line along the lines of "These are the primary deities of Homebrewvia however they are not the only deities."
This a) gives you room to add more as the campaign goes on -- especially useful if you need an evil cult or a big time baddie, and b) tosses the ball into your players' court should they not like what you have laid out. If a player says "Hey, I'm thinking of playing a cleric, but I'm really leaning toward a deity that does something like blah, blah, blah instead of what you have listed. Can we maybe work something out together along those lines?" This has the advantage of really allowing your players to become invested in the world as well while also taking a lot of the work off of your shoulders. When making a homebrew setting, its real easy to get yourself completely lost in all the minutiae and over designing stuff that may never be of interest to your players or may never come up.
I tend to favor having more deities - to allow for opportunities of drama/etc between them all on a thematic side and options to choose from on the player side. (The fact I'm currently pruning my pantheon of 153 deities (including regional, racial, etc) might indicate how I can go a bit overboard.) Personally, I'd consider Golarion's base of 20 core deities to be a good number to have a decent number of options without being potentially overwhelming (& alignment-wise allows at least 2 option per alignment, though that isn't a worry for you).
Regarding options for deities, I personally started by looking at some categories of deities common to various real-world myth and then expanded based on wanting to include tutelary deities for all major ancestries within the setting and add more nuance to magic-related deities based on how Pathfinder separates it's magic into traditions & schools.
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I have 22 actual deities in my setting - one for each of the Major arcana cards in a typical tarot deck, though many of them are known by different names in different cultures. Anything outside of those 22 are demigods.
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For my home game setting I have 9 deities that make up the main pantheon, 8 demon lords, and a dozen minor deities.
Most people worship the pantheon, but there are regional differences, and they are not the same 9 deities that are worshiped everywhere. What is considered a minor deity in one country might replace one of the main deities in another, some of the deities that most religions label demon lords are part of the main elven patheon, etc.
/rant: I dislike Pathfinder's strangely monotheistic approach to gods. In a world with literally hundreds of deities, religions would be polytheistic. Different deities hold domain over different aspects of life and any normal individual would pray to many of them. In Golarion one would pray to Pharasma that their child is born healthy, they would pray to Erastil that they have a good harvest, to Gozreh for rain, etc.
the pantheon just didn't make sense. I've written about this in the past, so won't repeat myself.
At least link to it, bro.
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One of the big problems with Golarion's gods (and, honestly, every set of pantheons ever created for D&D before Pathfinder existed) is that the pantheon just didn't make sense. I've written about this in the past, so won't repeat myself.
This is because the 'Core 20' Gods in the Inner Sea region are not actually a pantheon in the conventional sense, they're a 'these 20 deities, from multiple pantheons, are the most popular in the Inner Sea region', being surprised they don't relate to each other better is like being surprised that Hinduism and Islam don't have more in common when they're the two most common religions in a specific part of the world.
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The problem is that Golarion is a world where the gods actually, irrefutably exist. It's just plain stupid for there to be multiple gods of the same aspect from different pantheons across the world. It's nonsensical, confusing, and personally I think it only happens because Paizo needs stuff to put in new books.
This perspective assumes a lot of things about the Gods that aren't true in Golarion's universe. It assumes that Gods create the natural forces of the world rather than epitomizing and reflecting them, something very not true in Golarion.
I mean, in Golarion, the Gods didn't even make the universe nor do they really rule it exactly, it just sort of happened and they're vaguely in charge due to being more powerful than non-Gods.
In a world where Gods just reflect the world rather than creating it, then a dozen different interpretations of what God rules the sun can all be true to some degree, which is fine, and a fine way to do the world.
Let's look at an alternative that would make a significantly greater degree of sense with a larger amount of internal logic. Imagine that there is an actual trickster god here in the real world. In Native American areas, he's worshiped as Coyote. In Nordic lands, he's known as Loki. In the Mediterranean area, he's know as either Hermes or Mercury. In China he's known as Sun Wukong. In Polynesia, he's known as Kaulu. (There are a bunch of examples.) But, ultimately, he's the same, single, individual divine being who is just known by different names in different cultures due to variations in language and local experience.
Interestingly, speaking as a hard polytheist pagan, this is more or less how I actually believe real gods and the real world work. But that doesn't inherently make it a better way to set up a game world.
Paizo, however, has over 70 deities with the Trickery domain. It's poor design. It creates bloat with no benefit. It creates a world with no fundamental internal logic for the gods since the vast majority of those gods have no real explanation for why they exist in the world and how they relate to the other divinities.
You're confusing what you want out of a game world with what's objectively best.
IMO, in a world where Gods are verifiably real and approachable, it's more interesting if you can have several different perspectives on trickery among them. Where the CE god of malicious and sadistic trickery, the Coyote-style CN god of trickery who flies by the seat of his pants and often tricks himself and then laughs at his own misfortune, the likewise CN careful and calculating con-man who always has a plan ten steps ahead of everyone else, and the CG benevolent trickster who uses those tricks only to teach life lessons, can, and perhaps should, easily be separate beings with conflicting agendas and motives.
If all sun gods are one, then two priests of the Sun with access to Commune cannot have a meaningful conflict where one says their God demands human sacrifice and the other suggests that they instead want only to heal and provide life...and yet both the terrible Sun God demanding human sacrifice and the benevolent solar deity granting life are good archetypes to have in-world of you have enough space for both.
Now, if you're having a single pantheon, obviously you avoid this kind of duplication, and that can be fun, and in a world like Eberron people can't just ask the Gods what they want and so theological arguments like the one above become a thing, but for a world like Golarion I think the giant pile of Gods works well to enable the sort of stories that are fun to play.
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If you're trying to make a pantheon that makes sense in the world, then keep in mind when creating gods is that they are reflected by, or are a reflection of, the culture that worships them. So a culture that emphasizes battle has warlike gods (look at the vikings for instance). A culture with an emphasis on death and the afterlife has very different gods (ancient egypt).
Environment has a huge impact on gods as well. A religion around the equator might have a very important sun god, while a northern religion has none.
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My advice:
1) Come up with a list of gods that will actually come up in for the story you want to tell. "Coming up in" can include everything from having a a shrine as window dressing in the town to the cult of this god being the primary villains of the story.
2) Bring this list of gods to your players and see if it suits their purposes. This is especially important if they will include a cleric or champion: they should be able to pick a god they actually like.
3) Add gods based on the needs of the players, and consider ways for these new gods to come up in the story.
4) Examine the final pantheon and see if it feels right. Add or drop to taste.
I think shooting for a target number is less important than these considerations. It means you're doing exactly as much work as you need to do. If there was a number that spoke to you as feeling right you wouldn't have made this thread. So instead lay out your story and see what gods you'll actually use.
And leave yourself room to add more gods if you need them later. Lots of ways to do that: minor gods no one talks about, forgotten gods, recently ascended gods, etc.