What are the gods and goddesses like in your settings, and what advice do you have for designing deities for one's own original settings? And what about other settings who you feel do a great job with their gods? I want to make my first original pantheon instead of just sticking with picrel or copying an existing one like the Olympians, and I have no clue where to begin.
Mod thread.
>>97460501tell us what you worked out so far and what the world looks like?often gods are more created by the world then the world is created by the gods.
>>97460831>often gods are more created by the world then the world is created by the gods.How is that? I was going to make my gods first and then extrapolate my setting from there. Again, this would be my first real project.
>>97460501I cheated and have >not!Christian God and not!Allah variation>not!Satan, the ancient antagonist >not!Lucifer, the more relatable satan>not!cuthulu and other mythos stuff the pagans are up to But I'm using a wars of religion era inspired setting. Various demigods or other god like things get made up as saints or demons or otherwrodly things on the spot as needed. Advice is to make something the players quickly and easily understand because they're not actually inhabitants of the gameworld so various religious intricacy will be lost on them. Go with the Greek pantheon if that's something you're familiar with and makes sense to them quickly. >>97460683>he thinks the mods give a shit
>>97461174>why is there a active vulcano in the middile of nowhere?>becouse the dwarfen god of smithing need its fire for the blade of heros.or>what is the dwarfen god of smithing doing?>working over the flames of a random vulcano on his swort of blade of heros.as a creator is good to have a goal in mind. if you need unique ideas start up dwarf fortress worldgeneration and read up on its gods and demons.Had ones a demon that could vomit scorpions or a male monkey demon that claimed to be the female god of creation. Fun stuff
Best god is any fantasy settinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M
>>97461659I do like that formula. Angels vs demons vs what the fuck is always fun. I agree that not having anything too esoteric as a necessity is good. Watched a talk by some orthodox monk about Christian beliefs surrounding the pagan deities and it added a lot to my campaign.
There are multiple tiers of deity in my setting ranging from bizarre cosmic powers representing foundational aspects to gods borne of men, orc elf dwarf etcetera , representing cultures, people and man made concepts.All the way down to the demiurge: the decaying, living corpses of gods that of lost their domains and for the most part, scheme quietly to regain relevanceThere are two categories that are smaller and rarer, the true gods: those born from units between the first category and humans , and the saints: gods granted divinity by the second category as a means to expand that gods portfolio
Turning things into cute uwu anime girls is the single most homosexual thing one can do>but it's girls anon, isn't liking cute girls inherently heterosexual?You'd think.
>>97460501I want my deities to reside either in a plane of chaos and a plane of order/law, with the mortal world sandwiched between them, and thus having different sphere of influence as a result of which plane they're tied to. I don't want to take too much from Warhammer though (even if I used the image I did just because of how recognizable it is), especially the idea of one side being inherently good or evil (I know in Warhammer the Chaos gods are supposed to represent both positive 'and' negative traits, but they're typically pretty evil, so I want to actually show the good and and bad in both sides in what domains each group gets, does that make sense?), and I need some help coming up with spheres for each side. I could do Magic for Chaos and Technology for Law for instance, though I was considering that each force would have their own kind of magic, and obviously Chaos would have a Trickster archetype and Law a Justice god, what else works? Someone else suggested that I look at Elric, and a quick wiki skim shows that Flame could work for Chaos via Checkalaka, but I would still love to hear what you have in mind.
>>97460501Pose art of gods and related beings please!
>>97460501Is there a way to be politely disrespectful in japanese?I would use that when talking about slaanesh.
>>97463333I think Fire for Law is better, kind of a Promethus thing where fire illuminates the darkness. While on the flip side I'd give water and it's unknown depths to chaos.Then to fit the other two, I'd give Earth to law as it's unmoving and slow to change and Air to chaos as a representation of freedom.Civilization would fall under law and so you could attach Gods of Harvest which usually double as Death gods while Nature gods such as fertility gods would fall under chaos.
>>97460501>What are the gods and goddesses like in your settings,My wip setting is a cyberpunkish setting were Revelation has started. God and the devil are not absolute incarnation of good and evil but rather akin to a big mycelium entity that grows on the continuum of all possible timelines. Depending on their strength, they can "steer" the universe along these timelines, although this can somewhay be counterbalanced by free will. The catch is that their presence is directly tied to the number of raptured (for god) or still alive "chosen ones". These "chosen ones" are held through occult means by a conspiracy of powerfull individuals, who usurped the 7 headed beast's throne and abuse the system by tying the life of these chosen ones to their own success (via neutron bomb and other means of destruction), thus forcing god and the devil to steer the world toward timelines favourable to them.I'm split on wether to also put a superior "true god" though
>>97465004>I think Fire for Law is better, kind of a Promethus thing where fire illuminates the darkness.Huh, that could work, I was thinking of Fire more in the terms of a chemical creation, breaking apart flammable material and releasing energy in swirls and bursts, thanks for the ideas! Yeah, Death being Law makes sense and I was considering it already, though I didn't think of making them Harvest gods as well. If you have any other ideas please let me know!
>>97464838Probably, Japanese culture is all about politeness from what I understand.
>>97465156I've been wanting to run a cyber punk campaign where the alignment chart gods are just different parts of a larger machine that created the universe. CE = Exhaust Port, LG = Processor, True N = Motherboard connecting everything. Steal it or not, whatever.
>>97472644Sounds based, please tell us more!
1/2>>97477471Oh I wouldn't know where to start, it's just an idea, but I'll post my thoughts:The idea is that there is a society advanced to the point that they have broken away from the concept of "magical gods" and focus more on an advanced past civilization as the creators of the universe. Their machine, built before even the concept of time or the universe, was a large, omnipotent engine. It is said to be the embodiment of all things good, evil, lawful, chaotic, and everything in between.The Motherboard connects everything, and is Neutral. Those that worship the motherboard often care little for emotion, focusing more on building the most efficient society possible.The processor (LG) works to determine things, such as what good actually is and how to make more of a system than the sum of its parts. People who worship the Processor will often act on the behalf of others who are less capable.The Output (NG) just focuses on producing as much good as possible. People who worship this part are often more concerned with overall good as opposed to sheer statistics, but they don't like to impose their own rules.The Failsafe (CG) just stays on the fringes of the machine, catching any errors that could destroy the system. Those that worship this will often save the day and are always available in a moments notice.The Belt Drive (LN) is focused on keeping the machine going at any cost whatsoever. Those that worship this part will often ignore others while performing tasks, often causing more damage than good, so long as it is their assigned task, although they don't desire to hurt others.The Speaker/Light systems (CN) will often display things they notice such as drawing attention to outputs whether good or evil, often doing so in creative, spontaneous ways. People who worship this system will often be very flashy, adding little in the way of actual work to help the system.
>>97477648>>974774712/2The Electrical System (LE) will often pump energy to different systems depending on how much they are producing. This often hurts the whole machine, but is needed for intense tasks. People who worship this system are often elites, not afraid to enslave their workers.The Oil Circulatory System (NE) simply wishes to keep all friction to a minimum. The whine of gears is painful to it, thus it will often spread its oil throughout the system with little regard for if it helps or hurts. People who worship this system will often appease the evildoers in charge in order to stay out of the slave trade themselves.The Exhaust (CE) is all things bad made from the system as it is shot out into the ether. However, this system has been twisted from its proximity to pure universal Chaos, leading it to try to destroy itself and the system in every way possible. Those that worship this entity are evil scientists, bent on destroying the universe for no clear reasons.Basically, the gods are all part of one machine, each with its own scifi name, although I haven't thought of those yet.
>>97477672Well, if you do think of more to this, please let us know!
>>97480602Why did you come back? Nobody wants you here.
>>97460501My setting’s pantheon is headed by a couple, a goddess of Light and a god of Darkness. Each of them has several other aspects of reality in their divine portfolios as well, like Sun/Day and Fire and Moon/Night and Water respectively, as well as several children who all take after one parent or the other, save for a god of Twilight, their first child. What other aspects go best with each side?
I like to draw inspiration from all over human cultures.
>>97460501What are the pros and cons of having your deities be dependent on mortal faith in some way in your opinion? And what are some examples of this that you personally feel make sense besides Discworld?
I only have vague outlines so far.
>>97463164Absolutely. It's the worst sort of aesthetic. Those pics of nip maids doing tacticool whatever make me irrationally angry.
I was never a fan of gods being constructs of mortal faith, nor did I really want to fuck with other planes of existence being a thing, so I made the gods of my setting be a bit closer to the mortal world than most iterations. Faith doesn't make them be, in fact it actually doesn't do really anything directly substantial, but it does enable active worship and ritualistic practice by mortals to pinch off a tiny portion of their own spiritual power and hand it over to the god, in turn allowing them to bank it and use it to grow and extend their power.Gods preside in the mortal realm either incarnate in the flesh or diffuse and approximately present across their domain. While they aren't omniscient, objects blessed by them do extend their presence and awareness. In exchange for worship, they gift their followers their blessings and protections as best they are capable in such matters. While they seldom know their followers by name, they are very vested in the good health of their flock, and are often quite territorial to other gods in that regard, forming coalitions against rival groups, which wind up getting considered as pantheons by mortals.
>>97498396I'm with you on that. Worshiping something because it's worshiped never made sense to me. It kinda feels like slop when settings do that.
>>97498396>>97498403I took it to be that the gods aren't guaranteed to be real in my world. You see evidence in Clerics and whatnot, but you never know for sure.
>>97497198>>97463164lol, you guys are redditors and faggots.
>>97492538this never made sense
>>97503259Interesting theory, let's test this out. Me:>I like actual gender roles and honest representation of the differences between sexesYou:>0w0 qt dresses make me squee~~Don't forget to dial8, m8
>>97501044I kinda took the opposite approach where the gods are known to be 100% factually real and straight, but they tend to keep a mystique to them because no one's quite sure how gods actually think and work. Even the god of a small village who regularly interacts with the locals and has a good public face can have behaviors or values that are alien (or at least difficult to reconcile and understand) to mortals. A cornerstone of this is that the divine get to bend the otherwise fairly inflexible rules about what is and isn't possible in the setting, especially where magic and adjacent phenomena are concerned.
>>97503265>this never made senseWhat didn’t make sense?
>>97506570>A cornerstone of this is that the divine get to bend the otherwise fairly inflexible rules about what is and isn't possible in the setting, especially where magic and adjacent phenomena are concerned.Interesting, do tell please!
>>97483139Growth would be an excellent one for light. Might be kinda cool if blindness was featured in either or both for different reasons.
>>97460501I have made a few settings but one that was pretty god focus had a few pantheons based on different types of things likeSeasonsElementsStages of LifeTerrainAlignmentType of craftsWeatherETC.Want to say half of the pantheon was bare due to them not being anything but X of X in the X pantheon to fill out said pantheon but was fun to make and now I feel like finding the notes and filling it out a bit for the next time I might need them.
>>97460501>Microwave>Blasting the sub with radiation>Killing everything growing on/in the subOfficer! That Nurglette is an imposter!
>>97515265I think that heating it up would just make the things on it replicate faster.
>>97518625NOT WHEN THE PROCESS OF HEATING INVOLVES BLASTING THOSE ORGANISMS WITH MICROWAVE RADIATION!I don't even fucking like Nurgle, why do I understand his whole deal better than his simps?
>>97460501I don't know. I have established to the players that there is a currently worshipped chief god responsible for holy magic, and mysterious 'foregods' which are more pagan-themed are associated with arcane magic.If there's going to be specific personalities it would probably be the saints of the chief god, which are entombed in shrines around the forest. Don't have names or domains for them yet either. (I told the players there'll be a mechanic for seeking out specific shrines to cure specific curses based on their domain.)Any suggestions?
>>97460501The elves, being an all-female race, worship the wise mother as the high queen of all elves and venerate their founder queen as her messiah whom created the kingdom and passed down the holy word of rulership.That's why elves of the royal house are seen as "mouths of the goddess" and they're more likely to be listened to than those elves from houses of minor nobility. They fear The Cat. The Cat is an abstract cat-like form, black, with eyes like the flame that drove the elves from the north and the elves live in fear that she'll come south and finish the job. Being an abstract concept, some houses depict The Cat as cute sexy catgirls, others as large black panthers, others as a demonic human woman with a black lion's head and pelt as her helmet leading armies of women with cats painted on their shields.Humans, being mostly tribal, worship small nature deities though many have shared worship of certain deities that vary per tribe. For example, the sun is often the king of the gods, and winter is either a demon or the sun's punishment to evil in order to cleanse the land for spring. Conquered human tribes are forced to change their beliefs through systemic violence, with elves liking to change the sun to be their own prophet given the founding queen had the sun as her symbol. It's so-so the rate of success.However humans tend to actually like cats since they get rid of vermin.
>>97520177It's a Chaos microwave, it probably has more radiation than Chernobyl, lol.
>>97460501please do not miscatalogue "chaos gods" as "divinities". Chaos gods are more like "cardinal vectors" such as north,south,est,east.
>>97460501In my urban fantasy setting, there are no gods (yet) as objects of worshipbut there are avatar-like beings that embody some of the four core forces, also referred to as colorsthere are four colors (green is Ancestry, blue is Curiosity, red is Passion, and gray is Fear)take for example, The Merciless Lady>what if the Lady of Pain ruled over Central Bureaucracy from Futuramaan embodiment of fear and the color grayin my game, fear is not an entirely negative concept; it's survival at all costs, a rigid and suffocating hierarchy, authoritarian power, and a double-edged power that shackles the mind and stifles free willI plan to add the other three at some point.
>>97523994I thought about this concept a little bit moreI've come up with the following characters, distinguished by their epithets>The Merciless Lady — Authority without empathy (Fear)>The Green Man — Continuity without consent (Ancestry)>Bacchus in Exile — Passion without restraint (Passion)>The Man Behind the Curtain — Knowledge without comfort (Curiosity)
>>97512112I forgot this thread existed, my bad. To word it as cleanly and concisely as I may, the magic system is very limited in specific ways: the two main halves of magic are elemental magic (which is what most people in-setting think of when they hear the word), which more or less directs ambiently present elemental essences from point A to B, and sorcery, which influences the spiritual side of things and can block magic, but tends to not do so well against the mundane. While sorcery can compound to do complex tasks, these are isolated to the spiritual, and don't easily translate to mundane utility. Magic can be very powerful and destructive, but can't do things at scale like change a weather system or create darkness or the like. Gods, depending on their domain, can do both examples easily. As well, using the arcane generates arcane strength, which will begin ravaging the body over a safe limit. Trying to use proxies to cast doesn't usually work because the caster is the (electrical) fuse of each spell, so stress is always centered on them. Gods bypass this, allowing their followers to invoke them, be used as a casting point, and take none of the stress of the endeavor with the god taking it instead. It can also do things that are directly out of reach of magic altogether such as creating new locales nested in the space of existing locales, or most iconically, smite something. The latter is a golden bolt from the emission point, unique in that it directly bypasses solid matter to dump its full fury directly into a living target. Only layered wards of sorcery can impede it.
>>97527069>I forgot this thread existed, my bad.Been there, does that. What system does this all use?
Bump
>>97524589>man behind the curtainReminds me of Oz.
I didn't knew we have worldbuilders here on /tg/
>>97460501I was inspired by the Brothers from RWBY, and was thinking that the main deities of my setting would be a Lady of Creation and a Lord of Destruction, the former making things all the time and the latter destroying the things that would harm the world at large and refining what he doesn't destroy, like a writer and their editor. What other aspects make sense for them and/or their subordinate deities to have besides Art and Life for Creation and Death for Destruction (and maybe Disease, because things like diseases and monsters would be what occasionally slips by him and maybe because people pray for deliverance from said diseases)?
>>97540505>Reminds me of Oz.yes
>>97460501The "Gods" of my setting are aliens who have essentially figured out how to become higher dimensional beings but can't fully escape physicality without actually dying.As such, their true form would resemble something like the Zohar from the Xeno-series except they need it instead of getting trapped inside to be used as batteries. This allows them to exist in a portion of the Higher Dimension called the Intercision and would require artificial bodies to interact with the lower dimensions while mortals would need artificial bodies to even access the Intercision.
>>97545319>but can't fully escape physicality without actually dying.Why not, and I presume that they're working on figuring out a solution to that issue?
>>97547864They were working on a solution to the situation. Having gone all in on the aspect of transcending to a higher dimension, they figure out too late that they couldn't stay int their artificial bodies forever but were beyond being able to go back to real bodies.Over time, they would have to wind up sharing their artificial bodies to help slow their mind/souls from degrading as quickly.This would lead to the Created who were made as part of various attempts to creating bodies they could reinhabit.As of current, many of them are so degraded they are mindless or insane and as much a threat to each other as anyone else.
>>97460501The less powerful ones are more prone to meddling. But the difference between a major demon, generic nature spirit and a lesser god or a Robert E. Howard-style monster is tricky to tell sometimes.Sol Invictus is a distant but benevolent deity and is mostly only contacted through prayers to Saints who in turn answer to Star Angels who in turn report to The Sun.
>>97460501Happy Valentine's Day! The occasion got me thinking, what other spheres of influence make sense for a goddess of Love besides the obvious choices of War and/or Fertility? Maybe the Spring, or Flame or the Seas due to the associations Aphrodite has due to her husband and reported origins?
>>97553771Love+Home would be a pretty natural fit.Love+Travel could be a neat combo.Love+Secrets sounds dramatic.
>>97554160These are great ideas, thanks!
>>97553771Undeath is an interesting one, if niche. Connections that last beyond death, being together for eternity.
>>97530708N/A, I just think it up while I'm bored at work and I haven't found an RPG system that I would deem satisfactory at portraying the setting as-is, but that's probably because I tend to think of things more in terms of vidya than tabletop. Like porting TF2 to the latter, it'd be far from impossible, but also requires more experience to do so than I have. I'll figure it out someday when I have time.
>>97460501>one deifoid for each of the seven archetypes:InnocentCaregiverHeroRebelLoverSageJester>write each and seal individually in identical envelopes>burn all but one envelope>character creation et al w/o sealed info>surviving sealed envelope contains answer>to the question of which is the 'one true winner'>nobody knows not even you>which one>for like the whole campaign>until some future event requiring conditions>very specific conditions>which players must play towards and achieve>to finally open envelope at the endgame>to the first chapterProperly cultivated, this should produce a widely enjoyed "big pay-off" moment built for meaningfully over time.
>>97558132>Undeath is an interesting oneindeed
>>97460501What secondary domains make sense for a War deity after specific weapons and strategy? Death certainly works, but I want my Death god to be a distinct figure.
