el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
When I started my 5E campaigns in 2019/20, I decided to not set them in my old homebrew. I had already gone through a lot of work to tweak 3E to fit the world I started at the advent of 2E, and while I had no plans to run 3E ever again, converting to 5E just felt like too much. Rather than a traditional top-down homebrew world, I went for more of a coalescing points of light approach using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a basis to start from. As such, I adopted a very open and loosey-goosey approach to gods. Basically, any god a player wanted to introduce was fine as long as they understood two things about gods in the new homebrew setting:
1. Clerics of any god could be of any alignment. Could a CE cleric of a healing god be going around using healing to manipulate people to evil ends? Yes. Could a cleric of the evil god of the dead be NG and trying to keep people from dying? Yes. The gods are aloof and mortals are free to interpret any signs or scripture or events anyway they want.
2. Many gods were actually just different names for other gods. Ancestor worship exists along side polytheism as distant past relatives can become kind of like patron saints depending on what they did in life, and that in time could come to be seen as representations of specific gods with something related in their portfolio. Thus the great aunt who was known for rescuing cats and respected in the community for her wealth and kindness, could start off as part of a family pantheon of sorts, but later be considered a manifestation of Bast in mortal form once a few generations have passed.
An unforeseen consequence of this approach was that religion in general became no where near as important to the setting (at least from a player perspective) as it had been in the previous homebrew setting where there were set pantheons in each region and a general limit to the number of gods, and they all were what they seemed, as were their followings. Though, I wonder if it might just be that my current in-person group is just not that into gods and religion as a game theme.
I kind of regret this approach and wish I had instead gone the other direction and introduced a single focused pantheon of about 12 gods (which could have different name or avatars in different places). It would have been easier to create factions around them and figure out their agendas and approaches, I think.
So my question here (which is open ended, so thus no poll), how do you handle which gods are available in your game? Esp. if you are a homebrewer. Do you pick a single pantheon? Do you pick a pantheon for each kind of people (elves, humans, dwarves)? Do you pick pantheons for regions? Do you use real-world pantheons, D&D setting ones, or totally homebrewed ones? Does this only matter if there are cleric PCs? Anything else you think is relavant?
I have a set of 12 gods (might make it 13) I plan to use as the only gods when I start a new campaign - even if it is in the same setting. I will just ret-con or something.
1. Clerics of any god could be of any alignment. Could a CE cleric of a healing god be going around using healing to manipulate people to evil ends? Yes. Could a cleric of the evil god of the dead be NG and trying to keep people from dying? Yes. The gods are aloof and mortals are free to interpret any signs or scripture or events anyway they want.
2. Many gods were actually just different names for other gods. Ancestor worship exists along side polytheism as distant past relatives can become kind of like patron saints depending on what they did in life, and that in time could come to be seen as representations of specific gods with something related in their portfolio. Thus the great aunt who was known for rescuing cats and respected in the community for her wealth and kindness, could start off as part of a family pantheon of sorts, but later be considered a manifestation of Bast in mortal form once a few generations have passed.
An unforeseen consequence of this approach was that religion in general became no where near as important to the setting (at least from a player perspective) as it had been in the previous homebrew setting where there were set pantheons in each region and a general limit to the number of gods, and they all were what they seemed, as were their followings. Though, I wonder if it might just be that my current in-person group is just not that into gods and religion as a game theme.
I kind of regret this approach and wish I had instead gone the other direction and introduced a single focused pantheon of about 12 gods (which could have different name or avatars in different places). It would have been easier to create factions around them and figure out their agendas and approaches, I think.
So my question here (which is open ended, so thus no poll), how do you handle which gods are available in your game? Esp. if you are a homebrewer. Do you pick a single pantheon? Do you pick a pantheon for each kind of people (elves, humans, dwarves)? Do you pick pantheons for regions? Do you use real-world pantheons, D&D setting ones, or totally homebrewed ones? Does this only matter if there are cleric PCs? Anything else you think is relavant?
I have a set of 12 gods (might make it 13) I plan to use as the only gods when I start a new campaign - even if it is in the same setting. I will just ret-con or something.