Pantheon Building

[vgmaster831]

Okay, I'm building a Pantheon for a Pathfinder Campaign Setting. I'm new to all this, so I thought I would seek advice before screwing myself over royally. I am basically seeking information on the best method to build a pantheon. Should I go for Gods assigned to specific alignments? Should the alignments be secondary to some other domain? Should there be greater and lesser gods?

The setting they are in is pretty much as basic as you can get. Oh, and it's worth mentioning I would like to keep Asmodeus as the God of Hell and Cayden Cailean as a god. I wanted to create my own pantheon so I could implement a few ideas like Blue, the goddess of True Desires (stolen from a wonderful story that I can't link to because it's NSFW) and an unnamed god of Weakness among others. Although since gods work with a few important mechanics, I wanted to make sure I went about this the right way.

[Kenneth]

While the gods of the 9 alighments seem easy enough, the problem you get into with that are two fold, first off each of those gods/goddesses have an extremely broad area of control. teh 2nd and muhc (much) bigger problem you get inot is the whole ' X alignment means Y not Z" situations, To back up my stance on this, look at the numerous threads abouts aligment and such here on GiTP.

FOr me it is always a lot easier to just do the typical pantheon thing. I.E a god or goddess of a certain theme. To back up my stance on this just take a look at any of the real world pantheons, Including but not limited to the norse, greek/roman, and egyptian.

Each diety there had control over a certain aspect of daily life. Be it storms, death, war, or the ocean.

For me when I built my pantheons alignment came as secondary to what they were actually the diety of. Now I am not syaing that alingment was not important. its just I felt that getting exactly what teh particular diety was the god/goddess of was my first priority.

AT times its nice to toss in a few cliches and some twists.

FOr example one of my dieties is teh god of the cycle of life, playing a roll more similar to Anubis, he is neutral and though he does have good clerics. he gets a sort of a bad reputation owing to his evil clerics. Though everyone of his followers abhor undead as they disrupt the cycle their diety is involved with.

I have a moon goddess who is completely evil, which flies in the face of convention (mostly due to selune being good).

and then of course I have a chaotic neutral god of war. why? becuase war has no alingment and if you have ever actually BEEN in a war the plan only survives untill the first contact.

[Dirt_Kami]

I would just go with gods for the civilizations the campaign is set in and whatever cool stories you are using. If you felt like it you could tell players with characters that have lots of ranks in Knowledge (religion) that there are other gods of other civilizations, including forgotten ancient ones whose worshipers are long gone.

If you have players that like making character backgrounds, if one makes a cleric and picks two random domains ask them to describe the god. And whatever they come up with could be a lesser god from the distant <insert random compass direction>. I've ended up with some bizarre ones that way, a beaver god of creation, a dead crow god of travel

Maybe have the main ones you come up with be greater gods and others, unnamed at the start, be lesser gods.

Perhaps their status fluctuates from lesser to greater to demi-god based on the number of worshipers or sacrifices.

Maybe its based on proximity to their largest temples, the farther away the weaker. For a demi-god king of a city maybe 10 miles outside its walls they become mortal. And they risk it all when questing or they never leave and have others go when its time to save the city from the zombie plague.

Maybe its all of the above, with some of each type.

If you have a creation myth that might be a place to start.

[Yora]

I think in a well designed pantheon, people chose their gods because that deity adresses things that concern the person. People don't want to worship the god of Chaotic Good or Lawful Neutral, they care much more for the god of craftsmen or the good of vigilance. I would assign alignments only as the very last step. Start with the domains a deity rules over first.

Unless the gods are powerful magical people who rule mortals like kings, I would approach creating deities by not starting at the mythological level, that is the deities as people, but at the level of temples and faiths. Most people will not interact directly with a deity, but they will interact with the priests and temples. In that regard one could start with thinking about what type of temples a deities has and what services the priests offer to the people, and so on. And later on, you start creating the person that represents all those things the faith stands for.

Another thing that makes deities and religion more interesting is to have different gods worshiped in different regions and cultures. In a fantasy world, the gods are usually actual beings who rule over one specific part of human life and the world, so what works best is to have a large number of deities, but have the people in each culture worship a different set of deities. And in large parts of Europe and Asia, the pagan religions were all closely related to each other, which created a great number of overlapps. The Romans commonly interpreted this as all people worshipping the same gods, but each people having their own names and their own ways of how the deity is represented in a temple.
For example, make 20 or so deities, and have each culture worship 6 to 12 of those. In one city, the god of craftsmen and the goddess of duty are the primary gods, with the gods of trade, medicine, agriculture, and death having many smaller shrines. The barbarians living some distance away from the city also worship the gods of craft, medicine, and death, but their main deity is the god of warriors, and the gods of duty and trade are not worshipped at all.
That way each culture can have its own unique religion, but you don't have to create more than a small handful of deities.

[Strormer]

Well, I'm actually working on my pantheon at the moment as well. I agree with most of the others, the gods should focus more on what they are all about, not how they go about it. If a god is the god of the harvest, then he/she/it should focus on harvest related aspects of creation, maybe going so far as to lead followers to destroy natural space in favor of more farmlands, thus coming into conflict with the god(dess) of the wilderness. Both could be neutral nature deities and yet bitter enemies.
In essence, when working with alignments remember the words of Captain Barbossa, "they're more like guidelines than actual rules."
Although, I'll toss a question into the group. I'm having a hell of a time naming my deities. I have a central creator, two servants to her (the sun and moon), and 13 deities representing her children (similar to the greeks in nature), and then a hand full of invader deities from beyond this cosmology called the "new gods." I want the names of the invaders to be distinctive from the others, but I just can't come up with good sounding names. I also refuse to use existing gods like Ares or Artemis, so I feel stuck. I'm not looking for name suggestions as I am suggestions for how to come up with good names. (That's always been one of the hardest parts for me when writing/character building.)

[Stubbazubba]

Look up names in other languages; Welsch, Gaelic, Hebrew, not Latin. I've recently become enamored of Bengali. These usually sound sufficiently fantastic, and alter them to your tastes. They need not be related to their elements by definition, just something that suits their personality. For instance;

Sun God - Dina (Bengali; Day), Surya (Bengali; Sun), Suraja (Hindi; Sun)
Moon God - Candra (Bengali; Moon), Menulis (Lithuanian; Moon), Naktis or Vakaras (Lithuanian; night), etc.

Choose non-romance languages to make them as distinct as possible, unless your setting tends to use latin-esque names already.

[Strormer]

Look up names in other languages; Welsch, Gaelic, Hebrew, not Latin. I've recently become enamored of Bengali. These usually sound sufficiently fantastic, and alter them to your tastes. They need not be related to their elements by definition, just something that suits their personality. For instance;

Sun God - Dina (Bengali; Day), Surya (Bengali; Sun), Suraja (Hindi; Sun)
Moon God - Candra (Bengali; Moon), Menulis (Lithuanian; Moon), Naktis or Vakaras (Lithuanian; night), etc.

Choose non-romance languages to make them as distinct as possible, unless your setting tends to use latin-esque names already.

Hey thanks. I'll give it a shot. I'm sure there's tons of websites for looking up that kind of thing. I was using gaelic, but some of those other languages sound even more alien. Thanks! ^_^

[Rogue Shadows]

Hey thanks. I'll give it a shot. I'm sure there's tons of websites for looking up that kind of thing. I was using gaelic, but some of those other languages sound even more alien. Thanks! ^_^

Gaelic...ugh. I do not like the way that language looks on paper. Nothing spelled Sláin should be pronounced sloyn. Do not get me started on names like Niamh or Ceallachán.

My mother and father are both Irish, too, so I grew up with a lot of peppered Gaelic terms floating around the house. Starting with my mother, Mairéad, and our coasters which read sláinte.

I usually go for something Greek or Hindi flavored for deities, though I've become somewhat fond of using short, one-syllable names for major gods, something like, I dunno, "Cos."

I also just flat-out make up names - "Kysira."