I'm presently working on the setting for a 3.5 campaign I'm going to be running irregularly for who knows how long, and probably the setting I'm going to be using for a majority of my 3.5 campaigns. One of the things I'm trying to do is get away from the 'universal pantheon' that standard D&D settings go for (I realize the thread title seems anachronistic at the moment), so instead I'm creating different cultural and religious groups that all have their own religious traditions, pantheons, and so forth, with all the associated sharing of religious and cultural tradition that tends to happen between neighbours in the real world. There ARE actually Gods in this setting, but with a single major exception, they refuse to interact with the human world except in times of extreme need and instead leave them to speculate. This divine non-interference dogma is what allows culture to continue to question the nature of the divine, if you will.

But what I'm asking isn't directly tied in to my setting. I'm asking about universal TYPES of deities - the sorts you should see cropping up in most pantheons in some form or another unless there are other circumstances (like, say, a monotheism). What do you think these universal portfolios are?

The ones I've got so far are:

Farming/the Harvest/specific important crops (Maize, Wheat, Rice, etc.)
Solar deities (Sun and Moon, Night and Day, etc.)
Seasonal deities (perhaps less universal and could be a subset of the above, but)

I'd also argue that family and fertility are probably also common spheres, but I dunno that they're actually universal.

What do you think? What else should show up unless there's an explanation to the contrary?