Religions/Pantheons for D&D

[thorswulf]

I assume that most of you are familiar with Gods, Demi Gods and Heroes. These list some basic pantheons, but are quite limited. What I am wondering is if anybody created their own religions/pantheons and what were their influences? I have often toyed around with the idea of a world without a pantheon, just random gods based loosely on various fantasy worlds. You might encounter Chu-bu and Sheemish in one town, Thassidon in another, and the ghoul priest religion in another.

Quick where did these references come from!

Ok, if you know the answer to the above question you obviously have good taste in fantasy literature!

Seriously though, something OD&D lacked was a good way of coming up with your own original gods without it looking like a rehash of Scandanavian or Greek mythology lists of gods and goddesses. Or the basic Christian cosmology of Good vs. Evil. Not that this conflict is a bad basis for a game, but I tend to think that localized small cults and strong city cults make more sense ala Runequest. Maybe this is another one of those sections to be published in an aftermarket supplement? It definately ties the Sword and Sorcery thing together a little better. What do you think?

[foster1941]

Do you have/know Unknown Gods by Judges Guild? It definitely fits the kind of feel you're describing here, with no overarching cosmology or mythology, just a bunch of random gods hanging around, stirring up trouble (btw, Chu-bu and Sheemish come from Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder; don't know the other two off-hand).

Personally, I tend to stick with OD&D's implicit Judeo-Christian cosmology: clerics may have various patron saints or belong to varying sects (and there are rivalries and conflicts between these), but they're all ultimately part of the same Universal Church of Law with crosses as holy symbol, access to the same spell list, power against the undead, and a prohibition against spilling blood. Anti-clerics worship various demons and devils (and worse) as a deliberate perversion and mockery of the Church of Law. In addition, there are various immortal godlings running around who are generally just really tough guys who don't age -- some of them may have cults of worshippers, but they don't generally grant spells (unless they're serving as a proxy for the higher or infernal powers). This is based on the fact that neither Gods, Demigods & Heroes nor Unknown Gods actually has any substative info about characters worshipping any of these figures...

[WSmith]

foster1941 said:

Personally, I tend to stick with OD&D's implicit Judeo-Christian cosmology: clerics may have various patron saints or belong to varying sects (and there are rivalries and conflicts between these), but they're all ultimately part of the same Universal Church of Law with crosses as holy symbol, access to the same spell list, power against the undead, and a prohibition against spilling blood. Anti-clerics worship various demons and devils (and worse) as a deliberate perversion and mockery of the Church of Law. In addition, there are various immortal godlings running around who are generally just really tough guys who don't age -- some of them may have cults of worshippers, but they don't generally grant spells (unless they're serving as a proxy for the higher or infernal powers).

This is a great model to follow in OD&D. In my 2e days, I created my own pantheon, but after seriously looking it over, it was essentially deities from other religions with the names changed. So, I tend to stick to mythology.

[calithena]

Thasaidon is one of Clark Ashton Smith's homeboys.

It's interesting how in Tolkien's works there isn't really much religion, even though the whole background cosmology is intensely religious. You have monotheism in Tolkien but you don't really have churches; elves are closer to the higher power and you don't really have priests running around much. I think this is actually a pretty good model, but then the cleric class is sort of scotched. (On the other hand, you could handle it by having white wizards be clerics, grey wizards be magic users, and black wizards be anti-clerics - take out the religion entirely and just focus on the spell lists. That's not a half bad idea, actually.)

[Stonegiant]

calithena said:

Thasaidon is one of Clark Ashton Smith's homeboys.

It's interesting how in Tolkien's works there isn't really much religion, even though the whole background cosmology is intensely religious. You have monotheism in Tolkien but you don't really have churches; elves are closer to the higher power and you don't really have priests running around much. I think this is actually a pretty good model, but then the cleric class is sort of scotched. (On the other hand, you could handle it by having white wizards be clerics, grey wizards be magic users, and black wizards be anti-clerics - take out the religion entirely and just focus on the spell lists. That's not a half bad idea, actually.)

I would allow the white wizard to retain the ability to turn undead.

[foster1941]

Forgot to mention above, this sort of implicitly Judeo-Christian cosmology but with the "old gods" still hanging around is also present in some of Poul Anderson's historical-fantasy fiction, such as The Broken Sword and "The Merman's Children" (novella from Lin Carter's Flashing Swords #1 anthology that was later expanded into a novel of the same name that I haven't read), so I didn't just pull it completely out of my posterior...

[thorswulf]

The Ghoul priests are also one of Clark Ashton Smith's creations from Zothique. A very cool adventure for Call of Cthulhu was based off of this by Pagan Publishing. But I digress.... I have never eally tried the whole Judeo-Christian vs Devil Worship to be honest. I tend to like Leiber's Lankhmar gods who are petty and scheming. Of course the the wooden and silver crosses would make more sense with that!

I did run a character in a friend's game who was a priest of Saint Jirel (of Joirey of course) and fought and died nobly in one too many lost causes. He had a brother who was a paladin of the same order. He dressed in black, wore the best armor he could afford, and brooked no insolence from those who were flippant about his saint!

[Deleted]

The pantheon I've created for my campaign is pretty simple; 1 goddess for law, 1 god for chaos, & 1 "force" for neutrality. Most lawful humans, dwarves, gnomes, & halflings (those who are religious, anyway) worship the goddess of law (for dwarves & gnomes, though, she's actually a he in their eyes). Most "chaotic" or "evil" beings (any race or species) worship the god of chaos (who is evil, for simplicities sake). Then, there are the neutrals. IMC, neutral clerics don't have a deity, so to speak. That role is filled by a "Life-Death-Rebirth Cycle", a "force", if you will. Druids, elves, some halflings, humans, & others are votaries of the "force". I'd had re-created the elf class for my campaign quite a few years ago, replacing their magical spells with druid spells, & a few clerical spells thrown in for good measure. To keep the whole thing simple, clerics of the goddess of law cannnot Animate Dead, or cast reversable, harmful spells, for instance. Clerics of the god of chaos can only cast the harmful reverse of spells, etc. For the neutrals, well, they have their druids. This is it in a nutshell, for the most part. Except for the cultists...

[Mordorandor]

I like having the main three coalitions of Law, Neutrality, and Chaos, each with innumerable cults that vie even against cults in the same coalition.

There's always LAW as an impersonal force that manifests in cultures as demi-gods and saints, such as Kiij, the Half-Ogre Monk, and Mariam, the Eshrimite Lady of Peace (by means of Martial Protection, of course).

There's always a core pantheon of eight Chaos Lords that I developed (Moorcock-inspired) -- Kos, Masik, Vingarian, Scurjrus, Abahorn, Loathril, Nhurhon, and Gyrdikin -- who show up in one guise or another, but there are an indefinite number of Chaos entities that also show up, like the Toad God, Khala-Vosh, the Six-Tongued Serpent Lord, Set, and so on.

My Neutrality pantheon is woefully uncreative and almost non-existent, taking wholecloth the Green Knight and the Green Man tropes, and so on.

[tkdco2]

I have created my own pantheon with their own spheres of influence, similar to the ones you find on D&D. I never got to do much with them because my campaign never materialized. I had a monotheistic religion, but that was for HERO instead of D&D, and there was no magic in that campaign.

[Porphyre]

I'd like my players to come up with their own made-up deity and core precepts. The more obscure the better: it gives an incentive for the cleric to promote their cult as they gain levels (a little like "Lean Times in Lankhmar").

[doublejig2]

Oct 25, 2022 15:35:23 GMT -6 Porphyre said:

I'd like my players to come up with their own made-up deity and core precepts. The more obscure the better: it gives an incentive for the cleric to promote their cult as they gain levels (a little like "Lean Times in Lankhmar").

And with campaign milieu implications!

[Deleted]

Supplement IV seems to strangely clash with the implied theology of 3lbb when you really sit down and think about it. Clerics in Men & Magic specifically use devices like crosses and holy water, so there's at the very least a sort of pop-culture Christianity implied in the setting of the game. Of course, it's just an implication as neither gods nor devils are explicitly mentioned anywhere in the first three booklets. The closest the original text comes to mentioning gods would be wry statements about a higher power in the Commune spell description, but with the cheeky little comment that you're asking the referee directly. I think when I run another 3lbb-only game I'll keep this in mind when crafting the setting.

Having said that, my main campaign world that started in the BECMI days and evolved through a few iterations wasn't based on any such principles. I'm pretty sure, if memory serves, that early on nobody ever played a Cleric and whenever they visited a church for healing or whatever it was just referred to as the temple or the chapel or some such. The idea of gods and demons started coming up more later, like when a player would recover some ancient tome or idol and they'd ask what deity or demon it's depicting. Sometimes they'd ask where the demons come from, so I'd say "Oh, they were spawned by the Wretched Abyss".

I just said that because it sounded cool. I had no idea what it meant at the time. Of course my brother always had to ask a million questions about stuff like that, so I had to make it up on the spot in a lot of cases, and flesh it out between sessions. With me, world-building is often that way. It doesn't exist until it does. When it becomes relevant to a player's goals or questions, sometimes I find a place for it that makes sense.

The gods came next. I guess I was a dark child with twisted players so we gravitated to the evil lore first, but then the gods started getting fleshed out more, except I thought it'd be kinda fun if maybe there was a question as to whether the gods even existed or not. I figured in my setting, sometimes you'd actually see or speak to demons but with the deities they're more of an abstract concept. Clerics get their abilities from somewhere, and people have a lot of opinions and names for that source, but it's a matter of faith. There's no concrete thing you can point to and say "Lord Corellon 100% exists as an entity." (That's a name I took from some D&D pantheon or another, but my gods go by lots of different names depending on who's talking about them.)

That kinda brings me back around to Supplement IV and why I find it so weird and fascinating. I can't imagine a situation in which players would actually fight someone like Zeus, Ptah, Thor or whoever. Those are powerful names to be muttered by the clergy when working their miracles or passing the collection plate. They're not dungeon bosses with HP and loot. The book would have worked better in the context of the game if it had given guidelines to the Clergy who worshiped those specific pantheons, perhaps with specialized spells or gear unique to their orders. As it stands, it's a monster manual full of entities I'd never personally put in a campaign physically, so while it's a fun and interesting read I just don't find it that useful for my gaming.

[geoffrey]

My standard AD&D campaign has a pretty vanilla religious set-up:

Lawful good clerics venerate St. Cuthbert.
Neutral good clerics venerate St. Carmichael.
Chaotic Good clerics venerate St. Conan.
Lawful evil clerics worship devils from the Monster Manual.
Chaotic evil clerics worship demons from the Monster Manual.
Neutral clerics are called druids.

(I don't have NPC clerics of NE, LN, or CN alignment.)

[hamurai]

One of the most interesting campaigns in regards to gods took the approach that we'd not "create" a god until it came up in play. So, the cleric of course started with the first deity, stating that it was one of the most powerful and well-known deities in the world. The other important deities soon followed, but our then-DM let us discover (once we left the local region and explored the world), that the deities were in fact minor ones, hardly known by anyone outside the realm. Other gods were worshiped in other lands, and of course, that led to conflict.

Our cleric dutifully engaged in that conflict after he found out that his gods' influence wasn't as he had expected. We wondered if he just wanted to increase the god's influence to make himself more important. We never found out in the campaign and the player never told us.

Anyway, finding new deities and religious customs in other lands was an interesting way to make us look up strange(r) real-world religious ideas and incorporate them in the game world.

[darien]

I always either use various historical pantheons (Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Japanese, Indian, etc.) or a vague pop culture version of medieval Christianity for OD&D settings, tbh. Kind of basic, but it works.

If I do include more fictional deities, they're usually either the classic standbys of Lovecraft and Howard or one time, the Chojin from the infamous "Legend of the Overfiend" anime as a Chaos-aligned entity.

[ahabicher]

Oct 25, 2022 15:35:23 GMT -6 Porphyre said:

I'd like my players to come up with their own made-up deity and core precepts. The more obscure the better: it gives an incentive for the cleric to promote their cult as they gain levels (a little like "Lean Times in Lankhmar").

I always hope for that too, but it rarely materializes. They tend to ask questions from me, and when I refuse to lay it all out like a narrator, they ask NPCs.

[ThrorII]

I use B/X, but it follows the same L-N-C alignments.

I prefer to keep 'specific' deities out of it. I use a 'Church of Law' which worships 'The Creator', and the Temple of Chaos, worshiping 'The Destroyer'. I prefer to keep it a Zorastarian duality of two forces vying for control of the world.

[talysman]

I use William Blake's pantheon, with the Church of Urizen as the dominant pseudo-Christian religion, Urthona as the god of druids, Ahania as the goddess of the western cultures in conflict with the eastern cultures, and Red Orc as the god of Chaos Druids and orcs, although those two groups are not necessarily worshipping Red Orc the same way.

Players can choose absolutely any god they want, or make one up. However, they are the only people worshipping that god, unless they gather converts. They can even worship one of the William Blake pantheon and make up their own beliefs about their god, since there are many competing sects that interpret Urizan and the others in different ways.

[doublejig2]

I'm a big fan of AD&D 1e's Deities & Demigods and use it exclusively for my game.

[tdenmark]

Nov 30, 2022 21:02:43 GMT -6 doublejig2 said:

I'm a big fan of AD&D 1e's Deities & Demigods and use it exclusively for my game.

The Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythoi are very good, as are the planar information, and the higher level ability scores, but the rest of the book is garbage. It mislead me so much about various mythologies, I've become increasingly disappointed with the poor scholarship in it as I learn more. The flaws were excusable in the original Gods Demigods & Heroes as a fanzine by guys in their basement. But the AD&D Deities & Demigods has no such excuse.

It does have some of Roslof's best art though and some of the other old school TSR artists too, I'll give it that.

I saw the original cover once at the first Gen Con I went to. That was memorable.

[tdenmark]

On my big list of projects I'd like to do one day, I'd like to rewrite the 1e Deities & Demigods with real accurate information on the mythologies, and include cosmology maps and temple maps for each of the mythos. NPC priest write-ups. More unique magic items and spells specific to them. What it really means to be a cleric for a specific god or pantheon. As well as the alphabets, runes, symbols, and glyphs for each. For example the page of hieroglyphics in the Egyptian mythos is useful. A DM can write riddles and treasure maps in those glyphs and give them to the players to figure out. Cool stuff like that.

Another thing I do like about the 1e DD&DG is that it has stats for the gods. Yeah, I know it's silly to be able to fight and possibly kill them, but there is still something to it I think. I'm weird I know.

[doublejig2]

Nov 30, 2022 22:28:14 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

Nov 30, 2022 21:02:43 GMT -6 doublejig2 said:

I'm a big fan of AD&D 1e's Deities & Demigods and use it exclusively for my game.

The Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythoi are very good, as are the planar information, and the higher level ability scores, but the rest of the book is garbage. It mislead me so much about various mythologies, I've become increasingly disappointed with the poor scholarship in it as I learn more. The flaws were excusable in the original Gods Demigods & Heroes as a fanzine by guys in their basement. But the AD&D Deities & Demigods has no such excuse.

It does have some of Roslof's best art though and some of the other old school TSR artists too, I'll give it that.

I saw the original cover once at the first Gen Con I went to. That was memorable.

Agree with what you like about it. It is what it is - not scholarship - but for many, a first encounter (however specious) to an excellent range of mythologies. Otus's cover is worth the price of the book alone ($40 on ebay). And, as you say who can forget their reaction to their first encounter with 400hp and 25's down the line for ability scores. As an aside, the premier source for example for Greek Mythology online is not wikipedia but rather theoi.com.

[Mushgnome]

Lots of great artwork in Deities & Demigods including my favorite Jeff Dee: starry-eyed Ptah.

[talysman]

Nov 30, 2022 22:34:53 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

On my big list of projects I'd like to do one day, I'd like to rewrite the 1e Deities & Demigods with real accurate information on the mythologies, and include cosmology maps and temple maps for each of the mythos

Sample temple maps is a pretty good idea, but I think accurate information on ancient mythologies would be nigh impossible goal, since they weren't uniform and static, but constantly shifting and sometimes internally inconsistent, even contradictory. Hesiod's Theogony doesn't entirely jibe with Hesiod's Works and Days, let alone with the opinions of other Greek writings on the myths. And that's not even getting into regional differences, or changes over time, or the radically different interpretations of the mystery cults (the cosmology of the Orphic Mysteries doesn't match Hesiod, for example.)

And as for ancient religious practices, our knowledge is fragmentary at best and constantly being updated with new discoveries. Most ancient religions didn't write down what they did as part of their worship, because the people already knew what to do, and the few texts that did exist are missing chunks due to the ravages of time or the deliberate destruction by later religions.

This is why I prefer letting players make up their own religions and really leaning into the idea that religions aren't uniform. It makes the world feel more alive.

[tdenmark]

Dec 1, 2022 11:00:06 GMT -6 talysman said:

And as for ancient religious practices, our knowledge is fragmentary at best and constantly being updated with new discoveries.

Yes, but we know a lot more than what was put into the D&DG, even a trip to the local library in 1980 would have provided far superior and more accurate information. Really, it is like the authors read a Thor comic book and proceeded to write the Norse Mythology section.

It is fine to "D&D ify" the mythos, but you can still be accurate in as far as we know.

Real world mythologies are a great resource for the DM (or player) to come up with their own fantasy pantheon. They are rich in texture and ideas. And I've always liked the idea of a "Mythic Earth" as a sort of base to build D&D campaigns on, even if you're going to make a wholly original fantasy world to explore.

[tdenmark]

Dec 1, 2022 11:00:06 GMT -6 talysman said:

Sample temple maps is a pretty good idea,

Sample temple maps would be useful, but I think the real gem in this proposal are Cosmology maps! Virtually every mythology has their version of an underworld and afterlife.

[tdenmark]

Dec 1, 2022 6:49:31 GMT -6 doublejig2 said:

Agree with what you like about it. It is what it is - not scholarship - but for many, a first encounter (however specious) to an excellent range of mythologies.

Nah, it was inexcusable. TSR was making enough money at that point they could have paid a little for some decent scholarship. At the very least a little more effort put into the content. There is a reason we have public libraries. I'm annoyed by the misconceptions it put in my brain that took decades of reading real mythology to correct.

And it was rushed.

But whatever, it was just a piece of pop culture in its day and we don't complain when a Saturday morning cartoon like Hong Kong Phooey inaccurately portrays martial arts. Which is an apt comparison.

Thanks for the link.

[doublejig2]

The same could be said about D&D in general (i.e., it's not Harn), but we pretend that this isn't the case. And, then we campaign!