Need ideas: Land of a Thousand Gods

[JRRNeiklot]

Sounds like the Wilderlands. The earth is sentient and if enough people start worshipping a god or concept, the earth spontaneously creates it to serve a need.

 

[Harmon]

It seems to me that you could have three dozen Gods named then just bastardize their names from village/county to the next, so Ehlonna would be Lonna in one area while E-Honna in another area. Just an example.

Also I would start writing down all the various emotions, and such and come up with a "God" for each.

Kinda a little off here, but back a few years ago I was working on a campaign where the Gods were actually heroes from legend, and Clerics were actually just Sorcerors that had learned to tap into the possitive energy of the world around them (so healing someone would actually damage the area a little).

 

[Warren Okuma]

Small Gods (Numina)
Two domains.
Each numina "level" gives one outsider HD, two character levels oh and level zero deity. (use the xp chart divided by ten in followers to get another numina level, thus 100 followers=second level, at 4,500 followers you become a level one god and stay that way).

 

[Bryon_Soulweaver]

The only advise I could give is to make 99% of the deities DvR 0.

 

[kigmatzomat]

We're thinking most of these "gods" aren't really gods at all. At least, not by D&D standards. To someone who's never been exposed to the notion of a "true" divine being, a lich is a pretty darned powerful god. Essentially immortal (ageless and even if you kill him & burn the body, he comes back!), scary in person (cold touch, fear aura), and has great power (spells). Without special knowledge, you can't kill it. Same goes for vampires, though they are sufficiently weak to be "lesser" gods.

Fey, particularly the regional fey like nymphs, sirines, spirits of the land, and genius loci make decent quasi-gods as well. Ageless, having uncanny powers, and possessing auras of power.

Mix and match with some of the rarer used humanoid races, like Yak people, desmodu and kenku. At least, that's my idea.

 

[Aaron L]

I have something like a "land of a thousand gods" in my homebrew setting.

Before the current Prime Material Plane existed, there was a previous universe that existed for billions of years. Eventually, the beings of that previous universe grew so powerful that they literally shattered the Prime Material Plane itself with the terrible power of the technology and magic they used in the great wars they fought for dominion over the universe.

Now, out of all those millions of races, most of them became extinct, but the most powerful races each had a sole survivor who inherited the collective spiritual, arcane, and totemic power of his entire species, and they all ascended to demi- and lesser godhood. These remaining Warlords continue their struggle, battling each other for all eternity, trying to reunite the shattered shards of their universe (which now float freely as chunks within the Inner and Outer Astral Planes) but, instead of fighting each other directly and further damaging the fabric of their realities, they usually do so though proxies, attracting worshipers from among the mortal races of the current universe and using them to battle each other's churches while they live, and then continuing to exploit them after they die by using their souls as currency to pay extraplanar mercenaries (such as Night Hags, Yugoloth, Demons and Devils, and Maugs [stone construct extraplanar mercenaries from one of the Monster Manuals]) and also as batteries to power technomagical war machines and mecha.


Anyway, there are literally thousands of these Ascension Warlords, and they are worshiped by a specific barbarian culture on my home setting of Alterra (and on several other planets in my setting's universe), and any player who wants to make a character from that culture, and chooses to have a patron god, I just freely allow to create a god themselves, assign Domains and favored weapons, and create whatever holy symbol they want. I then record the information in my notebook and add it to my campaign setting manual.

These religions aren't served by Clerics, but instead by Sorcerers, Druids, Spirit Shamans, Warlocks, and Thaumaturgists (from the Book of Fiends by Green Ronin.) All Clerics and Paladins on Alterra come from the Church of VHRN, and the other religions use other classes as their priests.


Or, you could go with an animistic/Kami style approach, where every object, tree, river, house, etc, has it's own spirit attached to it (which kind of sounds like what you were describing) and use Shugenja (from Oriental Adventures or Complete Divine) and Spirit Shamans (from Complete Divine) to act as intercessors between the humanoid populace and the spirit world. I use both concepts in Alterra, and have the "thousand gods" approach in one land, elemental spirit priest Shugenja in the dwarven and certain human cultures, and Spirit Shaman intercessors in another culture's religion.

Unfortunately, I've only had one player play a character from this culture (the Northern Goths from the Cold Waste) and he just chose to worship one of the few gods I had made details for (actually based on a drawing my sister made for me, a traced drawing of Princess Allura from an old Voltron coloring book, colored green. I named her The Green Lady.)


So, after all my rambling and shameless self promotion I guess my advice to you is to just have you players help you out and create lists of gods for you to pick and chose from, if you literally want thousands of gods for the world.