Workshopping a Pantheon

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'm in the process of designing a character who is a dwarf-blooded half-elf. One thing I was looking for advice on in the thread here was filling out the personal pantheon he worships, primarily a blend of elf and dwarf deities.

The two deities I was dead set on are Yuelral and Torag, offering different perspectives on craftsmanship, since smithing is his big hobby. But a pantheon can't consist of just two deities!

Beyond those two, however, I'm kind of stuck. I don't want the pantheon to be too lopsided towards one ancestry or the other. Angradd feels like a natural pick, especially since he's being themed around fire, but then the other elven deities like Findeladlara or Ketephys don't quite gel with the character's themes.

Another wrinkle is that he has dark visions of the dragon god Dahak, to the point of possibly drawing divine power from him (depending on what class I finally choose for him), and I'm not sure if he needs to be included in the pantheon as a result, even though he is definitely opposed to Dahak's influence and machinations. Plus there's just the mundane concern of how many deities are in the pantheon, how many is too many?

What do you folks think? Thank you in advance for any suggestions you might have!

[breithauptclan]

I'm suspecting that you are overthinking this.

A single deity and a pantheon are mechanically equivalent. They have an Edict, an Anathema, an Alignment list, an Ability, a Font type, a Skill, a Weapon or two, a list of Domains, and a list of Spells.

The rest is just flavor. So pick whatever you want that you and your table are happy with.

I don't see anything wrong with a pantheon with two deities in it.

[Perpdepog]

You could also open up your pantheon to more crafting-centric deities since that seems to be the flavor you were going for with your first two choices. Droskar would fit as the deity of toil, or you could include Dahak as the deity of destroying crafted works.

Not all the members of a pantheon need to be necessarily positive or worshiped equally. Yog-Sothoth is a member of the Cosmic Caravan after all.

[Kaspyr2077]

That's not what a pantheon is. Gods exist outside the will of any mortal, and a pantheon is a relationship between those gods, well outside a mortal's opinion. A "personal pantheon" makes no sense.

What you're describing is a collection of gods that the character offers prayers and possibly sacrifices to, which is much more sensible. The approach you could take here is to examine the character's background, figure out their dreams, aspirations, hardships, stresses, and cultural background, compare those to the list of known gods, and find five or six who are relevant. Which gods do they naturally gravitate toward, by personality or trade? Who would you be terrified of and seek to appease? Who could really take some worry out of your life? Figure out how offering worship of these gods intersects with your life - how often do you do that? What does it look like?

There's no need to try to consolidate them into a "pantheon," unless your GM is willing to give you custom rules for it, which would be... oddly accommodating.

[graystone]

Question. Is your character a class that requires a patron deity IE, champion or cleric]? If not, you can just worship multiple gods without having to make a pantheon.

[Kaspyr2077]

graystone wrote:

Question. Is your character a class that requires a patron deity IE, champion or cleric]? If not, you can just worship multiple gods without having to make a pantheon.

You can still do that either way. Just focus on one, then give the others their due.

[Kendaan]

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

That's not what a pantheon is. Gods exist outside the will of any mortal, and a pantheon is a relationship between those gods, well outside a mortal's opinion. A "personal pantheon" makes no sense.

What you're describing is a collection of gods that the character offers prayers and possibly sacrifices to, which is much more sensible. The approach you could take here is to examine the character's background, figure out their dreams, aspirations, hardships, stresses, and cultural background, compare those to the list of known gods, and find five or six who are relevant. Which gods do they naturally gravitate toward, by personality or trade? Who would you be terrified of and seek to appease? Who could really take some worry out of your life? Figure out how offering worship of these gods intersects with your life - how often do you do that? What does it look like?

There's no need to try to consolidate them into a "pantheon," unless your GM is willing to give you custom rules for it, which would be... oddly accommodating.

I agree with that, I think taking the feat Syncretism to worship both Torag & Yuelral would be more in line, rather than having a pantheon for 1 person.

A pantheon would make sense if there is a long lasting and big enough community of Dwarf blooded half elves.

[shepsquared]

On the other hand, mixed worship of Dwarven and Elven gods could easily arise in and society of elves and dwarves that lived together long enough to produce a dwarf-blooded half-elf.

Say a group of Ilverani started building a shelter from Earthfall and ran into some dwarves that were well ahead of most of their kin. They work together to build a secret citadel that's utterly indistinguishable from a natural mountain and welcome a bunch of humans/halflings/orcs/whatever ancestry fits the location of the citadel into their walls when Earthfall actually happens.

A few centuries later they're preparing to emerge and an earthquake drops the citadel into a sinkhole, trapping them underground for a few centuries until they rejoin the world above having formed a unique society.

Yuelral, Findeladlara, Torag and Trudd would make a good core based on building the citadel to protect people, add another god to represent them taking in orcs or whatever.

No reason why you can't say something about Findeladlara respecting Torag's craft or whatever.

Domains for the Pantheon:
Creation, Earth, Protection, Duty/Family/Whatever else fits.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

breithauptclan wrote:

I'm suspecting that you are overthinking this.

I am overthinking it, yes. This character concept's been living rent-free in my head for almost 4 years now...

Quote:

A single deity and a pantheon are mechanically equivalent. They have an Edict, an Anathema, an Alignment list, an Ability, a Font type, a Skill, a Weapon or two, a list of Domains, and a list of Spells.

The rest is just flavor. So pick whatever you want that you and your table are happy with.

I don't see anything wrong with a pantheon with two deities in it.

I was looking for advice on most of these aspects too, to figure out how best to represent the idea of a character who's both dwarf and elf and venerates deities of both peoples to help him deal with his horrifying Dahak-induced nightmares. I didn't want to just pick meta domains and spells and hope a GM would let me get away with it. I wanted it to be thematically cohesive, I wanted help getting the flavor right too since I don't trust my own personal taste.

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

That's not what a pantheon is. Gods exist outside the will of any mortal, and a pantheon is a relationship between those gods, well outside a mortal's opinion. A "personal pantheon" makes no sense.

What you're describing is a collection of gods that the character offers prayers and possibly sacrifices to, which is much more sensible. The approach you could take here is to examine the character's background, figure out their dreams, aspirations, hardships, stresses, and cultural background, compare those to the list of known gods, and find five or six who are relevant. Which gods do they naturally gravitate toward, by personality or trade? Who would you be terrified of and seek to appease? Who could really take some worry out of your life? Figure out how offering worship of these gods intersects with your life - how often do you do that? What does it look like?

There's no need to try to consolidate them into a "pantheon," unless your GM is willing to give you custom rules for it, which would be... oddly accommodating.

The idea was to show this character as a product of his upbringing, honoring both his dwarven and elven heritage, giving both pantheons equal respect and blending their philosophies into something new. He has terrible nightmares of fire and destruction that started to become very real fires in the waking world, and things like smithing, herbalism and gemworking were ways to use that fire for constructive instead of destructive purposes, as well as actual spellcasting training obviously. He decides to take up the adventuring life because his visions have gotten increasingly specific, showing the destruction of a specific town, and he wants to stop them from coming true (he's written with the Age of Ashes AP in mind, specifically with the Haunting Vision background).

graystone wrote:

Question. Is your character a class that requires a patron deity IE, champion or cleric]? If not, you can just worship multiple gods without having to make a pantheon.

That was something I was discussing in the thread I linked in the first post: when I initially came up with this concept it was with the Oracle class in mind, but I wrote it before the most recent errata, so I was hesitant to commit to that class due to the original dwarf CHA penalty (since the base concept was slapping the half-elf heritage onto a dwarf instead of human), so I was debating classes like Druid as well.

I didn't want to pick Cleric because that class carries the implication that you LIKE the god you get your power from and want to emulate them, and the idea was this character's power is coming from Dahak but he's channeling it for constructive purposes in defiance of him, which screams Oracle. Champion was on the table, at least as a multiclass, though, since it's very on-brand for me given my username. I suppose in that event I would have picked Yuelral as the primary deity of choice because I find her just so flavorful.

Kendaan wrote:

I agree with that, I think taking the feat Syncretism to worship both Torag & Yuelral would be more in line, rather than having a pantheon for 1 person.

A pantheon would make sense if there is a long lasting and big enough community of Dwarf blooded half elves.

That was something else I'd considered as well, but it felt kind of tricky: going with Torag meant there was no real connection to the fire aspect of the character. Angradd was recommended for that aspect, but that feels kind of disrespectful to Torag, as he is the head of the dwarven pantheon, while the elven pantheon is more a loose coalition with no real hierarchy.

I see your point that there should be more worshipers than just a single small family of a dwarf, an elf and their three sons, though. I felt like him having siblings was already stretching it in terms of the relative rarity. Like, part of what I assumed by reading the options allowing half-elves and half-orcs to be treated as Versatile Heritages was that such characters would likely be the only ones of their kind in possibly the entire Inner Sea region if not the world (which I kind of like in terms of angst and seeking an identity storytelling).

[Kaspyr2077]

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

The idea was to show this character as a product of his upbringing, honoring both his dwarven and elven heritage, giving both pantheons equal respect and blending their philosophies into something new. He has terrible nightmares of fire and destruction that started to become very real fires in the waking world, and things like smithing, herbalism and gemworking were ways to use that fire for constructive instead of destructive purposes, as well as actual spellcasting training obviously. He decides to take up the adventuring life because his visions have gotten increasingly specific, showing the destruction of a specific town, and he wants to stop them from coming true (he's written with the Age of Ashes AP in mind, specifically with the Haunting Vision background).

That's all pretty cool, for sure. Which deities from those two pantheons speak most to you in relationship to these things? My primary point was that you were using a word incorrectly, and that was needlessly sending the discussion off into the weeds - a "pantheon" is a distinct concept from who you choose to worship personally, and what personal philosophy emerges as a result.

[Kaspyr2077]

shepsquared wrote:

On the other hand, mixed worship of Dwarven and Elven gods could easily arise in and society of elves and dwarves that lived together long enough to produce a dwarf-blooded half-elf.

Say a group of Ilverani started building a shelter from Earthfall and ran into some dwarves that were well ahead of most of their kin. They work together to build a secret citadel that's utterly indistinguishable from a natural mountain and welcome a bunch of humans/halflings/orcs/whatever ancestry fits the location of the citadel into their walls when Earthfall actually happens.

A few centuries later they're preparing to emerge and an earthquake drops the citadel into a sinkhole, trapping them underground for a few centuries until they rejoin the world above having formed a unique society.

This is an anthropological view of how a belief system might emerge in a world like ours. In a world where gods are real and distinct things with wills of their own, two pantheons don't merge just because some people were cohabitating, and worship of this group as a pantheon probably wouldn't provide any special benefits unless those gods formally made that alliance for that express purpose.

[shepsquared]

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

shepsquared wrote:

On the other hand, mixed worship of Dwarven and Elven gods could easily arise in and society of elves and dwarves that lived together long enough to produce a dwarf-blooded half-elf.

Say a group of Ilverani started building a shelter from Earthfall and ran into some dwarves that were well ahead of most of their kin. They work together to build a secret citadel that's utterly indistinguishable from a natural mountain and welcome a bunch of humans/halflings/orcs/whatever ancestry fits the location of the citadel into their walls when Earthfall actually happens.

A few centuries later they're preparing to emerge and an earthquake drops the citadel into a sinkhole, trapping them underground for a few centuries until they rejoin the world above having formed a unique society.

This is an anthropological view of how a belief system might emerge in a world like ours. In a world where gods are real and distinct things with wills of their own, two pantheons don't merge just because some people were cohabitating, and worship of this group as a pantheon probably wouldn't provide any special benefits unless those gods formally made that alliance for that express purpose.

That's not what the pantheon rules say about the setting and fails to explain one of the most notable pantheons in the setting, the Godclaw.

Quote:

A pantheon is a group of related gods worshipped either individually or together. Most pantheons are associated with a specific ancestry or geopolitical region, but rarely, a pantheon consists of deities with overlapping areas of concern. Followers work to advance the shared interests of their pantheon, directing prayers to whichever god presides over their current activity or circumstance.

Pantheons don't form because of the gods telling their followers to worship them as a group. Pantheons form because people worship those gods as a group for whatever reason.

[Dancing Wind]

Fortunately, if you are homebrewing a pantheon that isn't part of the Golarion canon, you're allowed to use either method: gods joining together to form a pantheon, or people getting together to worship some gods.

Golarion is imaginary. You get to imagine how things might happen.

[Leon Aquilla]

Re: Homebrewing

I would also suggest reading Kobold Press's Guide to Worldbuilding, where Wolfgang Baur discusses his unique take on deities and his opinions regarding having 11 forest gods (spoiler: He doesn't like deity inflation)

[Kaspyr2077]

shepsquared wrote:

That's not what the pantheon rules say about the setting and fails to explain one of the most notable pantheons in the setting, the Godclaw.

Pathfinder Fandom page wrote:

Although the God Claw venerates aspects of Abadar, Asmodeus, Iomedae, Irori, and Torag, it is unclear from which of these gods it draws its power; indeed, it is possible that its own convictions grant it divine strength. Clerical signifers and other religious members of the order have access to the Glory, Law, Protection, Strength, and War domains.

The Godclaw doesn't worship a pantheon. It worships several gods, and it's not entirely evident who grants them power, but it probably isn't all of them as a pantheon, since that's not what that word means.

shepsquared wrote:

Quote:

A pantheon is a group of related gods worshipped either individually or together. Most pantheons are associated with a specific ancestry or geopolitical region, but rarely, a pantheon consists of deities with overlapping areas of concern. Followers work to advance the shared interests of their pantheon, directing prayers to whichever god presides over their current activity or circumstance.

Pantheons don't form because of the gods telling their followers to worship them as a group. Pantheons form because people worship those gods as a group for whatever reason.

... You know, it never really occurred to me that someone could read that section proscriptively, instead of descriptively. If you read it proscriptively, and allow some generous leeway, I guess it could mean what you think it means. If you read it descriptively, it means what I'm telling you it means. For clues which might be more accurate, you might want to consider what the word "pantheon" actually means in a real-world cultural context.

Yes, the Olympian pantheon was associated with a culture and geopolitical region, but all its members also had a common origin, and were all governed by a central authority. The Norse pantheon(s) had more diverse origins, but were allied to each other, led by Odin, etc. A pantheon is a family, community, or political entity among the gods. Telling Zeus he's in some kind of union with Loki, just because your mortal community prefers it that way, seems like a great way to catch a lightning bolt to the face. All polytheistic pantheons I can think of has this sort of relationship described among their own gods. Assuming a setting where the gods are real and have their own identities, why would they abandon their original ties and start new associations with gods they don't care about, just because mortals got it into their heads? It doesn't make sense. It makes the gods highly unstable and subjective to the point of uselessness. A god, in a setting where gods have their own individual identities, don't develop new identities just because some faction of believers develops a heresy.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I think we might be talking past each other here: Kaspyr2077, you're thinking of the term "pantheon" in a more holistic, real-world sense, and it is very insightful. What I was more asking for help with was setting up the kind of Pantheons the game rules use, like the Demon Bringers or Hearth and Harvest, to best reflect this character and so I can determine which domains I can pick for things like Divine Access.

[shepsquared]

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

shepsquared wrote:

That's not what the pantheon rules say about the setting and fails to explain one of the most notable pantheons in the setting, the Godclaw.

Pathfinder Fandom page wrote:

Although the God Claw venerates aspects of Abadar, Asmodeus, Iomedae, Irori, and Torag, it is unclear from which of these gods it draws its power; indeed, it is possible that its own convictions grant it divine strength. Clerical signifers and other religious members of the order have access to the Glory, Law, Protection, Strength, and War domains.

The Godclaw doesn't worship a pantheon. It worships several gods, and it's not entirely evident who grants them power, but it probably isn't all of them as a pantheon, since that's not what that word means.

shepsquared wrote:

Quote:

A pantheon is a group of related gods worshipped either individually or together. Most pantheons are associated with a specific ancestry or geopolitical region, but rarely, a pantheon consists of deities with overlapping areas of concern. Followers work to advance the shared interests of their pantheon, directing prayers to whichever god presides over their current activity or circumstance.

Pantheons don't form because of the gods telling their followers to worship them as a group. Pantheons form because people worship those gods as a group for whatever reason.

... You know, it never really occurred to me that someone could read that section proscriptively, instead of descriptively. If you read it proscriptively, and allow some generous leeway, I guess it could mean what you think it means. If you read it descriptively, it means what I'm telling you it means. For clues which might be more accurate, you might want to consider what the word "pantheon" actually means in a real-world cultural context.

Yes, the Olympian pantheon was associated with a culture and geopolitical region, but all its members also had a common origin, and were all governed by a central authority. The Norse pantheon(s) had...

Either pantheons are mostly a creation of the people that worship them, which is backed up by how they're described in the rules, or the Black Butterfly and Yog-Sothoth are all buddy-buddy because they're in the Cosmic Caravan together.

Plus the Godclaw is a pantheon according to rules and fluff and 1e has an NPC trying to get Zon-Kuthon added to it.

I am aware of what pantheons are irl and the D&D-esque depiction of most people being henotheists because of the rules has always bugged me, but that has nothing to do with what pantheons are on Golarion.

[Kaspyr2077]

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

I think we might be talking past each other here: Kaspyr2077, you're thinking of the term "pantheon" in a more holistic, real-world sense, and it is very insightful. What I was more asking for help with was setting up the kind of Pantheons the game rules use, like the Demon Bringers or Hearth and Harvest, to best reflect this character and so I can determine which domains I can pick for things like Divine Access.

Okay, I didn't know about those, and apparently I was mistaken in the context of the system... but wow, that's... awkward. I can only conclude that there was a need for a system to worship of actual pantheons as a whole, and from there, simply expanded those to cover more vague cultural constructs, but... those aren't pantheons, they're cultures. The rules construct is fit for purpose, but the name for it is just inappropriate for the use it's being put to here.