Introducing a Fantastic Religion to the Players

[MrZJunior]

Whenever I've run a game in the past I've always used a real world religion (i.e. the Greek pantheon). I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

Am I being silly?

[MonochromeTiger]

Depends on your players, depends on the complexity of the religions you made, depends on lots of things really.

In general I'd say it's not as big of a deal as you may think. Most of the models for RPG religions are picked for how many people know about them rather than how much people know about how they actually worked. Not going much further than that because real world religions and all but put simply the average person, even the average RPG player who is a bit more likely to look into things, really doesn't have much knowledge of those religions or their practices because in quite a few cases we don't have too much concrete information that survived over the years or wasn't kept secret and obscure when it was still actively practiced; even if mystery cults weren't a thing standard modern knowledge usually begins and ends with "I know the names of the really popular ones used in media all the time and maybe one or two more obscure ones by association, but I only know one version of them from one region."

Most game religions are typically much more straightforward unless you're intentionally trying to put in some ambiguity or play to real life situations by having your gods vary in portrayal between different regions and cultures or having people focus on different aspects of their domains. Something like "here's my war god, they like fighting but also they like honor and hate my blood god who likes when his followers stomp around the countryside killing everything just because they can" is really simple and easy to follow. Giving a more "realistic" version you can end up with something like "here's my war god, they're worship him here to try keeping wars they can't avoid short and in their favor, here in the hope appeasing them will keep wars away entirely, and here because they're conquerors and think the war god is super cool and will let them win harder; also they're best friends/enemies/married to this other god but only in this one era and in the stories of this one city."

RPGs kind of cheat heavily with religion simply by having the Gods be active participants in several settings. Ambiguity is usually ironed out by the fact a Cleric of sufficient level can just call their God or Goddess up and ask for a clarification or the fact that someone claiming to be a divine representative of their God's or Goddess' will usually has actual powers to show off and a few of those previously mentioned Clerics behind them saying "it's true we checked." You get less situations of complexity and variety within a religion when there's an objective presence and directing will behind it and adventurers making occasional trips into the various afterlives and coming back to say what they're actually like. All of that makes it so even though RPG religions tend to be more "fantastical" they're actually far more straightforward and easy to just pick up and understand than most of the things they're based on.

[Unoriginal]

Whenever I've run a game in the past I've always used a real world religion (i.e. the Greek pantheon). I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

Am I being silly?

Why don't you just give them the context?

Most PCs have been part of the setting's world for decades, after all.

[GloatingSwine]

TBH unless you're all scholars of Greek history and mythology they're basically using whatever fictionalised version they've picked up from pop culture anyway.


So there's no real difference splitting up the gods different ways and calling them different things. If you really want to make it stick though figure out the sort of gods the people of your setting would believe in based on their lives and concerns, and have everyone in the setting act as if they were all as real as the ground they were standing on all the time, not picking one like a sports team as in most fantasy.

[catagent101]

This most likely shouldn't be a problem though it depends on your settings. The rule of thumb is that players will read up to 5 pages of introductory setting material maximum (or so I have read). So if your setting is just D&D trappings then you can hand them a double-sided page about the gods easily, while if you already require your players to read a tome the size of War and Peace it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. So, check in with your players.

Of course there is an overhead. With your own gods you have to explain who this Etidorhpa fellow is, while with the Greek gods you could elaborate on, say, the Greek concept of religion or Spartan Aphrodite. Like the thing you are nervous about is true on some level, but my general impression is that most people play with fictional or homebrewed gods and that seems to work out all right for them.

(I'm assuming by "decision" you mean "clerics picking their gods" or something along those lines, if you mean something different do please say so)

[Vahnavoi]

Whenever I've run a game in the past I've always used a real world religion (i.e. the Greek pantheon). I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

Am I being silly?

Depends. Are player characters coming to this religion as relative outsiders, or are they supposed to have inside perspective? The former is easier to work through than the latter.

With player characters coming to this religion as outsiders, the players' lack of context and knowledge is the same as their characters'. You can then introduce this religion to them, one important bit at a time. For example, an important holiday may be coming up. The players (and hence their characters) will observe the preparations. They will, reasonably, have questions, and, equally reasonably, there will be locals to answer them. They can then use the answers they just heard to form opinions and choose whether to participate.

If you want them to have an insider's perspective, you have to prepare a primer for it, the exact same sort of stuff real religions produce to spread awareness or gain converts. In practice, this entails making a setting book or booklet for them to read, or running a specific game scenario where they play through being initiated into this religion. How long or intense, depends on degree of devoutness you want them to display. Are your players supposed to play laity or clergy? Orthodox or heretic? How much leeway do you want to give your players for making up stuff as they go?

I've done this various ways. Often, the amount of information is too much for a player to absorb in one sitting, so there won't be much pay-off until many sessions later. But every once in a while, a player takes the ball and runs with it, becoming a memorable doomsday preacher or cult leader, or taking a principled stand against heresy, blasphemy etc. immorality that is happening in the game world.

[Unoriginal]

If you want them to have an insider's perspective, you have to prepare a primer for it

In practice, this entails making a setting book or booklet for them to read

You can just tell them what their character would know about it when it is relevant.

No need to write anything.

"You know that today is the day where worshipers of the Celestial Carp would usually be gathering and celebrating their deity in a festival open to the public. That the shrine is empty means something very wrong or very weird is going on."

Or

"Then the Duke, visibly livid, turns to his brother and says "I swear by the Sun and the Moon that if my son isn't freed by nightfall, I will storm the prison. I don't care if you're the Minister of Justice now, you don't have that right!". Steve, since your Wizard follows same the religion as the Duke, she would know that swearing by the Sun and the Moon is the most serious oath one can make in such circumstances. If the Duke doesn't do what he promised, he would be treated like an honorless oathbreaker by every member of the Sun clergy or the Moon cult in the country, and that would essentially destroy his political support."

[Vahnavoi]

@Unoriginal: you write it down for the same reason you write anything down: so the people involved (including yourself) can visit or revisit the information at will, rather than you having to speak it out loud every damn time.

Or I suppose you could record your speech. Either way, the point is about quantity of information a player has to internalize, not simply the medium. Ignoring that distinction and trying to give players the relevant info bit by bit is equivalent to what I described about giving players an outsider's perspective.

[Mechalich]

The presentation of religious concepts in a fictional setting is tricky, especially depending on what you intend to do with those concepts.

D&D, it should be noted, does pretty much everything wrong, since it produces a polytheistic world through a filter of monotheism and ends up generating a bunch of churches to various gods that don't really impact anything in the resultant settings and reduce the gods to dubious entities that provide a slightly different class of powers to their servants than the guys who just do things themselves (wizards). An actual polytheistic world wouldn't look anything like a D&D setting and in fact to some extent really only works if the setting greatly resembles the context that created the faith in the first place. For example, running a faith based on the Hellenistic deities in a 'Viking Age' scenario would be massively discordant.

Note that fictional monotheism is comparatively easy to introduce: there is some almighty being A, who has a list of rules X, Y, and Z that you need to follow to get post-life reward B and they are opposed by nasty entity C, who offers temptations D, E, and F to try and ruin everything, flavor to taste. This approach has become extremely popular, perhaps even dominant, in modern fantasy, since it has much lower barriers to entry for an English-speaking audience. The Wheel of Time, in which people worship 'the Light' and fear 'the Dark One' boils this down to archetypes pretty effectively and serves as a popular example of this approach.

If you really want to make it stick though figure out the sort of gods the people of your setting would believe in based on their lives and concerns, and have everyone in the setting act as if they were all as real as the ground they were standing on all the time, not picking one like a sports team as in most fantasy.

Speaking as someone who takes worldbuilding seriously and tries to fully integrate deities and sacred concepts into fictional settings, I believe quite strongly that in doing this is helps to keep the number of gods small when doing something like this. Even something like the Greek Pantheon, with twelve major deities (which were by no means all the important ones) is too many. if the intent is for players to care about these beings and have them play an active role in the world, I'd target six or less.

[Devils_Advocate]

Whenever I've run a game in the past I've always used a real world religion (i.e. the Greek pantheon). I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

Am I being silly?

I think so, a bit. See, religion consists of both beliefs and practices. And the average player is more likely to know about the former, but the latter is often more relevant. For example, when encountering worshipers of Dionysus, is it more important to know whether Dionysus is the god of wine, or is it more important to know whether some of his followers are known for tearing people to pieces?

Then again, particularly if the system has some sort of skill roll to determine religious knowledge, the players should only start with in-setting common knowledge. And declaring said common knowledge to equal the relevant pop culture mythology is efficient, in a way. But if those beliefs are supposed to be true in the setting, they may have implications which you might want to avoid. If there's supposed to be a grand cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, with several deities on each side... well, not every religion is gonna be a great fit for that.

A paragraph or two of common knowledge of each deity (which should be enough) doesn't seem terribly onerous for something more suited to purpose. If you don't want to make your own, store-bought is fine! A bunch of deities have been designed for D&D over the years, and many of them are part of nearly every setting, and so should be at least somewhat familiar to experienced players.

The most common are probably the major gods and goddesses of various non-human species, but those could plausibly be the only well-known deities in a sufficiently cosmopolitan area. Like, the odd halfling blacksmith just worships Moradin instead of some obscure halfling god of the forge, the local order of paladins serve Bahamut, etc. That gives you a pantheon that D&D players in particular are as likely to be familiar with as any other. And, unlike other options that may requiring jamming square pegs into round holes, D&D gods probably fit pretty well into D&D. ;)

Not that you specified a system, but I don't think that real-world religious beliefs are commonly incorporated into fictional universes outside of D&D and its knockoffs. I think that it's more typical to get religions clearly inspired by real life faiths, but adapted to the setting and not called the by the same names as the originals.

[Ionathus]

You can just tell them what their character would know about it when it is relevant.

No need to write anything.

"You know that today is the day where worshipers of the Celestial Carp would usually be gathering and celebrating their deity in a festival open to the public. That the shrine is empty means something very wrong or very weird is going on."

Or

"Then the Duke, visibly livid, turns to his brother and says "I swear by the Sun and the Moon that if my son isn't freed by nightfall, I will storm the prison. I don't care if you're the Minister of Justice now, you don't have that right!". Steve, since your Wizard follows same the religion as the Duke, she would know that swearing by the Sun and the Moon is the most serious oath one can make in such circumstances. If the Duke doesn't do what he promised, he would be treated like an honorless oathbreaker by every member of the Sun clergy or the Moon cult in the country, and that would essentially destroy his political support."

Yep, these kinds of things are crucial - and exactly what knowledge-based skills are for. Some are common knowledge, some are obscure, and some are obscure knowledge with a common-knowledge lie masking over the surface.

If you really trust your players, you can also build a dynamic where you encourage them to take ownership of inventing some of the mortal worship practices or cultural assumptions. You as the DM are in charge of the god, but if you have one Bahamut-worshipper in the party, they can improvise minor rituals and cultural beliefs that non-gods have about Bahamut. This way, it doesn't really matter if they're wrong since humanoid misunderstanding of a god's nature is quite frequent (unless gods in your world are EXTREMELY involved in mortal lives and talk to them all the time, we're talking daily conversations).

Anything they say that contradicts with a thing you need to be true, you can always retcon or say "oh, Player X, sorry actually I need it to be more [mild revision]". Depends on your table's skill with improv and willingness to play in the uncertainty, of course.

[Devils_Advocate]

Heck, you can just let players invent their own minor, obscure deities if they want. Like any other NPC introduced in a player character's backstory, it just has to fit the setting and campaign.

[KorvinStarmast]

I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

1. How well do you know your players?
2. How much on this topic have they already discussed with you?
3. You are the world builder, you are the setting builder, so your concepts are what drive it.
4. Ask for input from your players. One of my DMs did and I invented a deity for him that fit his pantheon. Five of the PCs have chosen to be disciples of this deity, over the course of two campaigns.

If you get no input, press on.

D&D, it should be noted, does pretty much everything wrong,

I overcame most of that by using Forces and Philosophies in my current version of the World of Greyhawk, since it has waaaay too many deities.

I believe quite strongly that in doing this is helps to keep the number of gods small when doing something like this.

Concur.

Empire of the Petal Throne had 10; 5 good and 5 evil. That was more than enough for me.

[Vahnavoi]

Not that you specified a system, but I don't think that real-world religious beliefs are commonly incorporated into fictional universes outside of D&D and its knockoffs. I think that it's more typical to get religions clearly inspired by real life faiths, but adapted to the setting and not called the by the same names as the originals.

Speculative fiction in general and roleplaying games in particular rip off real myths and religion about as often as not. D&D is a trend setter for games in both regards: early D&D merrily appopriated dozens of sources just like its inspiring fiction had, then some people took offense to that and TSR adopted a policy of "no real gods or religion, promise!" for a while. TSR was never good at sticking to this, so the earlier trend never really went away, we just got more "totally original god, do not steal!" from the deal. TSR and its policies are long dead, but the legacy lives on in policies of other entities.

[GloatingSwine]

Empire of the Petal Throne had 10; 5 good and 5 evil. That was more than enough for me.

Evil gods is another D&Dism that’s worth doing away with.

Polytheistic belief systems don’t tend to have evil gods, they might have ones antagonistic to a particular people, antagonistic to other gods, ones who are dangerous but you still need to keep them happy, ones that are easily offended, or ones that have domains that meant you don’t want them to notice you too much.

There are also foreign gods of course but they aren’t evil just a problem if they’re gods of a hostile people.

[Vahnavoi]

Evil gods aren't a (mere) D&Dism. They're a byproduct of the alignment system and the Great Wheel cosmology. The simplest way to make sense of it is to consider that the Great Wheel doesn't encompass one polytheistic faith or mythology - it posits several and compares them to one another. In one corner we have, say, elves with their own gods and their own religions, and in the opposite corner, orcs with theirs. Both groups, in isolation, might argue there are no good or evil gods, that all members of their pantheon deserve veneration, so on and so forth - but when they come to contact with the other group, now that other group's gods and religious practices are so foreign and distasteful to them that they can only be deemed evil.

In practice, many D&D settings sort of drop the ball on that and end up describing competing monotheisms, rather than competing polytheisms. But it's hardly unimaginable even in real life for one polytheist group to deem another polytheist group's gods forbidden or immoral to worship - if for no other reason that it causes harm to the community.

Of course, this is also related to cartoonifying of the alignment system. If you look at the two axis version as codified in 1st edition AD&D, it's quite explicit that various evil and neutral alignments don't think "good" and "evil" are useful terms. What GloatingSwine said, could come straight out the mouth of a Chaotic Neutral character, for example. The way some gods are deemed evil is essentially an outsider looking in: a dungeon master subjecting every agent in the system to a single standard of evaluation. Describing a god as evil is a statement from the dungeon master's viewpoint, not necessarily the viewpoint of that god's worshippers.

[Kane0]

Whenever I've run a game in the past I've always used a real world religion (i.e. the Greek pantheon). I worry that introducing something I made up would not give the players enough context to make reasonable decisions.

Am I being silly?

How invested are your players? If it's a more beer-and-pretzels style then there's nothing to be worried about, but if the group leans towards full immersion and following rabbit holes then its a bit more work to come up with something that will stand up to scrutiny. It's still totally achievable mind you, just extra effort.

For my gameworld I somewhat cheated, taking a handful of known D&D deities and just tweaking a few things here and there so they fit and meshed nicely. They're superficially recognizable but you realize the differences (and how they're intertwined) once you start digging.

[GloatingSwine]

The important point is that in a polytheistic religion everyone has a relationship to all of the gods all of the time, because they're real and they are intrinsic to how the world works. They are, in fact, a mechanism to affect the world by making them happy through the proper rituals and sacrifices and ask questions about the world by the proper auguries.

That leaves no room for "good and evil", nor does it leave any room for picking one like a sports team and being a worshipper of only one member of a pantheon as D&D and its children tend to assume, because they're all real and your relationship with all of them is non-optional. You can be as blackhearted a rogue as ever drew breath, but Chauntea is the one who decides whether you get to eat this winter so you make her happy. You can be the brighest paragon of virtue to ever float slightly above the unworthy ground, but if you get on a boat you better make sure Umberlee is OK with you.

All of the gods, all of the time, for everyone because they are how the world works.

They're usually also much more lay religions than relying on priestly intercession. Individual people will be the ones doing most of the rituals.

[Unoriginal]

The important point is that in a polytheistic religion everyone has a relationship to all of the gods all of the time, because they're real and they are intrinsic to how the world works.

Inaccurate. That is not because several gods exist that everyone has a relationship to them, let alone all the time.

The mountain guide is likely to have a relationship with the god(s) of mountain, snow/weather, wilderness and the like, but they likely will only have a relationship with the god(s) of the forge if they are in need for metal-working-related things, little to no relationship with the god(s) of the sea, and no relationship to the god of a specific forest on the other side of the country.

That leaves no room for "good and evil"

Inaccurate.

Several gods being real has no impact on the morality of said gods.

Some gods are good people, some gods are evil people, some gods are ambivalent people.

In Journey to the West, the pilgrims encounter an evil river god, who causes troubles like most of the pilgrims' random encounter table. As they're wondering how to deal with him, a spirit shows up and tells them *he* is the actual river god, but he took one of the the sea dragon-god's nephew as an apprentice and said apprentice decided he could just take over the job and the river with it, so he did it. Now the actual river god is too scared to petition the higher ups because the evil river god's connection to the sea dragon-god.


If your argument is that gods shouldn't be people, then that's a whole different topic, but polytheistic faiths tend to *strongly* disagree with that notion.

nor does it leave any room for picking one like a sports team and being a worshipper of only one member of a pantheon

Of course it does leave that room. It's called henotheism.

Just because there are several gods doesn't mean you can't worship one more than the others.


Calling those things "D&Dism that need to go" is incredibly dismissive when they're things people believe or believed in real life too.

[Slipjig]

It depends on what's important for the campaign. The gods are competing with all other elements of your worldbuilding for your writing time (and your players' ability to absorb and retain information).

If the campaign will prominently feature machinations between the gods (or their followers), you'll probably want a fair amount of detail, such as portfolio, relationship with other deities, noticeable characteristics of worshippers, etc.

If you don't expect the gods to be particularly relevant, you can probably get away with just name, portfolio(s), holy symbol, and (maybe) alignment.

[BRC]

Inaccurate. That is not because several gods exist that everyone has a relationship to them, let alone all the time.

The mountain guide is likely to have a relationship with the god(s) of mountain, snow/weather, wilderness and the like, but they likely will only have a relationship with the god(s) of the forge if they are in need for metal-working-related things, little to no relationship with the god(s) of the sea, and no relationship to the god of a specific forest on the other side of the country.

I think we're bumping into a difference between "Worshipping" and "Having a relationship to"

IIRC, in most pantheistic societies, most people worship the pantheon as a whole, dealing with individual deities as needed. If you're a farmer, you mostly offer sacrifice and prayer to whatever deity covers farming and harvest. If your local region has a patron deity, you probably worship them as well. If your child is conscripted and sent off to war, you find your way to the nearest temple to the War God and offer a sacrifice in the hopes that the War God will protect your child and bring them home.

90% of this farmer's religious involvement is centered on the Harvest God, because that's the one most relevant to their life. But they have a relationship with the whole pantheon, offering worship as needed/appropriate. Relationship meaning that they acknowledge that the deity in question is real, is worthy of respect, and has dominion over certain things. Even if you never intend to set foot on a boat in your life, you're probably going to be reluctant to blaspheme against the Ocean God.

Of course, this is a Fantasy Religion, if you want the system to be that everybody worships One Specific Deity in the pantheon to the exclusion of all others, you can do that just fine.


As far as giving people proper context for your deities, it's usually just a matter of giving each one a snappy elevator pitch, just like any other aspect of setting lore.

"Sava is the Goddess of THE SUN and WARFARE.
Her Virtues are Courage, Honesty, and Physical Achievement.
She hates Trickery, The Undead, and Arcane Magic. "

When making your fantasy pantheon, try not to overload the Players with too many gods. Not every aspect of the world or society needs a deity that covers it, and smaller local religions can be introduced as needed. You don't need to re-create anything in the scale of the Greek or Norse pantheons.

[Vahnavoi]

@GloatingSwine: "all gods, all the time" applies when you're talking of a single polytheist religion with a small number of gods. As the number of gods grows, chances are good some of those will not be relevant to every individual. The simplest example would be family gods: a person usually only has direct relationship to gods of their own family and paying respect to those of others becomes relevant only when they become, well, related through marriage and such.

"All gods, all the time" becomes entirely unfeasible when there are multiple polytheisms that might not even be aware of one another. In context of D&D, you can have one pantheon taking care of the world here while another takes care of a world over there, with mortals in those worlds none the wiser.

[Mechalich]

The necessity of having a relationship with all the (major) deities in a polytheistic scenario does not preclude some of those gods being good or evil. It just means that good people have to periodically perform rituals and subservience acknowledging evil deities and evil people have to do the same for good ones. The key here is that, in a polytheistic system, worship of a deity does not imply, in any way, philosophical or moral agreement with said deity's ideology.

This can lead to the scenario where a deity has an acknowledged place in a cosmology, receives regular prayers and offerings, and yet if anyone showed up and proclaimed themselves a priest of said deity, the local population would hunt them down and kill them as a threat to everything they love and cherish. Having horrible thing X exist, as a personified part of the cosmos who presence needs to be acknowledged and fury appeased is not the same as devoting oneself to that entity.

[Devils_Advocate]

Yeah, everyone having to pay taxes to the king doesn't mean that the king can't be evil, and I don't get why anyone would think any such thing. It just means that propitiating the king doesn't indicate anything special about your own morality. And, yeah, the situation is potentially compatible with the common people murdering tax collectors basically whenever they get the chance. (But they probably won't get the chance often, since the king is gonna try to keep conditions such that some people are willing to do the job.)

Anyway, I'd like to reiterate my opinion that which deities exist is probably less important in the game than what mortals do about them. The player characters are more likely to meet the gods' followers than with the gods themselves. The PCs may wish to pray and/or sacrifice to gain divine favor or avoid divine ire, but, hey, what do you know, that falls right under "what mortals do about the gods"! Fancy that.

Religion is probably more directly important to the setting than the gods, who are less "of the world".

Speculative fiction in general and roleplaying games in particular rip off real myths and religion about as often as not.

I referred to "fictional universes" specifically, not "speculative fiction in general". The likes of Dominaria, not the likes of "Earth, but there are vampires!"

A world not connected to Earth can't contain things from Earth, since there's no means of immigration, ya dig? Specific things in the real world have histories in the real world that make them what they are. Julius Caesar was an important figure in the Roman Empire, which started with the city of Rome, in Italy, in Europe, on Earth. No Earth means no Europe means no Italy means no Rome means no Roman Empire, ergo no Julius Caesar in e.g. Dominaria. You can specify that a particular character is genetically identical to Julius Caesar, if you for some reason want to be weird in that particular way, but he's not going to live the same life, and he won't be the same person as Julius Caesar any more than identical twins are the same person.

Mythological figures are often far less tied, within mythology, to specific real locations, and thus "porting" them to a fictional universe is more viable (than not viable at all). Even so, removing Greece, for example, certainly means altering ancient Greek cosmology, which very much includes Greece in the cosmos, and rules out the Olympians living on a specific mountain in Greece. Perhaps most pertinently, it cuts out tons of specific religious beliefs and practices. All of the city-states that counted particular deities as their patrons? Gone. Heck, straight-up just the Olympians being gods worshiped by the people of Greece? Undone. Eradicated. Not this time!

Yoinking the source material wholesale, without modification, requires the story to be set in "Earth, with the Greek gods!" Which I assume is the standard approach. And since instead writing a fictional universe precludes using the source material unadulterated, why not file the serial numbers off while you're at it? Which I think is the standard approach, there, too, although I'm less confident on that one.

D&D is a trend setter for games in both regards

There's a reason I said "D&D and its knockoffs". That might seem like a No True Scotsman argument, but it actually isn't. I predict, for example, that, contrary to the source material, fictional universe writing based on Greek myth will contain minotaurs and hydras rather than the Minotaur and the Hydra, as it's probably D&Dlike with such D&Disms as "monster species".

The simplest way to make sense of it is to consider that the Great Wheel doesn't encompass one polytheistic faith or mythology - it posits several and compares them to one another.

The implication seems to be that "good" means "esteemed by some human culture", whereas the objects of human antipathy (e.g. orcs and goblins) are likewise by definition "evil". One wonders what gives humans such cosmic significance. Don't think that this really fits how good and evil alignment are described in any edition, either.

I overcame most of that by using Forces and Philosophies in my current version of the World of Greyhawk, since it has waaaay too many deities.

Even given the whole "good just means esteemed" thing, I think that there are enough genuinely lawful good deities that I'd expect to see some coalitions. But I think that the source material generally doesn't mention them.

(In addition to alignment, Cleric domains are another system thing that can be given greater meaning by associating them with factions.)

That actually touches on the vagueness of the term "pantheon". Broadly speaking, it's just a term for a group of related deities; but there are a lot of different ways in which deities can be related! They could work together, they could be worshiped together, they could be relatives, they could just have a shared history. A pantheon could be any combination of those, or just one!

As an example, consider the Sovereign Host and the Dark Six from Eberron: Two related enemy coalitions of deities with a shared history, worshiped by almost entirely non-overlapping groups who share many beliefs but not the same religion. A pantheon made up of two pantheons.

[Vahnavoi]

I referred to "fictional universes" specifically, not "speculative fiction in general". The likes of Dominaria, not the likes of "Earth, but there are vampires!"

That's a weird line in the sand to draw. Nonetheless, even limited strictly to secondary world fantasy, you will see a lot of entities straight from Earth's history, mythology and religion. Yeah you can argue it makes no sense. "Making sense" has never been high on the priority list for many of these settings.

The implication seems to be that "good" means "esteemed by some human culture", whereas the objects of human antipathy (e.g. orcs and goblins) are likewise by definition "evil". One wonders what gives humans such cosmic significance. Don't think that this really fits how good and evil alignment are described in any edition, either.

1st edition AD&D is explicitly human-centered for practical reasons, explained thoroughly in its Dungeon Master's Guide. This doesn't quite mean what you think it means: every alignment covers an identifiable human philosophy. For example, Chaotic Evil espouses "might makes right". That phrase doesn't come out of nowhere. A Chaotic Evil polytheism is one where gods are acknowledged as having any worth only based on how powerful they are, and only worshipped for self-centered benefit they can provide to the worshipper. Chaotic Evil gods, meanwhile only grant such benefits based on their whim and their whim often is to make people suffer.

That's anti-humanist, but not anti-human in the sense that only non-humans would believe and act that way.

[Vogie]

One of the things I'd suggest to the OP is to keep it simple. One of the things that most settings do is that the pantheon is wildly complicated. This is partially because real-life religions tend to be that way, and partially because the longer a particular setting hangs around, the more it gets self-referential and has a need to start explaining things that are borderline plot holes.

One of the things I did with my original setting a couple years back was steal the Theros pantheon from Magic: the Gathering (and lucked out that there was a 5e setting book that came out 2 years later) - it is based on the grecoroman pantheons, but is limited to 15 gods, that are very specifically locked into defined roles. This is because those gods were originally limited by the needs of the card game (5 main gods for the 5 colors, and 10 minor gods for the 10 color pairs), locking them into really defined archetypal roles while piggybacking off of the general knowledge of Greek and Roman gods.

Another thing to do is to make them general, regional and a bit mysterious. George RR Martin's Game of Thrones has a bunch of different religions that are hanging around in the background of the book series. One of the ways he managed it is by making them all regional.

• The Seven Kingdoms of Westros largely follows the Faith of the Seven, which is a combination of the monolithic statehood of the historic Catholic church and the concept of the multifaceted divine being from religions all over. Essentially, he mixed the Mother/Maiden/Crone with the Father/Son/Spirit, then add another one for fun, and you've got the Father/Mother/Maiden/Crone/Warrior/Stranger/Smith. As you start reading the series, this is the only religion that the author sits down and explains.
• The North has a connection to the Old Gods/Children of the Forest. There's very little revealed about this at the beginning, and it seems to be a mix of superstition and nature conservation. It's only as the characters are running away from civilization that more of that is revealed.
• The Lord of Light, which is a struggle against the darkness, and Martin uses a combination of Witch trials and cult psychology to define it. There's a bunch of different interpretations of what they're going after, and there's a bunch of infighting, but it's charismatic and dramatic and they have a inclination to burn the unbelievers.

And then, as soon as he's done that, Martin also sprinkles in a bunch of other beliefs that are followed by groups of decreasing amounts of time reflected in the books

• The Great Stallion of the Dothraki, who doubles down on the worldbuilding of the horse-nomad culture that is specifically designed to be foreign to Daenerys
• The Drowned God of the Iron Isles. It's haunting and creates a visceral reaction as they drown their foes as a sacrifice
• The Valyrian god that the Targaryens reference occasionally
• The Black Goat who needs regular blood sacrifices, exactly the opposite of what the POV characters want when they run into them.
• The Many-Faced God of Death, a double mystery as it's only seen through Arya's eyes and also a sort of secret society of assassins.
• A bunch of others that will pop up for a brief chapter as a source of conflict or reference.

The way you can use this in your games is to limit the amount of gods that the players know of at first blush, then as they travel through the world, they can run into different belief system and followers of different gods. While your players aren't super into reading paragraphs of lore ahead of time, having NPCs of the new area run up to them frantically saying "Wait! No! We don't do that here!" is a great way to fold the worldbuilding of this new aspect of the religion(s) into their mind. Same when the party wanders into an area where everyone is doing things in a way the PCs find a bit off, only to find out this is due to the local belief system.

[Devils_Advocate]

That's a weird line in the sand to draw.

I don't think that fictional setting vs. real setting is a strange distinction to make, particularly in the context of fictional pantheon vs. real pantheon.

Because, to be clear... Mythological Ireland, for instance, isn't really a fictional setting. It's a real-ass place (Ireland), just with more banshees and leprechauns than one might expect. The stipulation that the myths are true doesn't really alter the geography nor the culture, it just includes some supernatural stuff alongside them. Creating a setting, with its own geography and culture and so on, is rather a bit different from real setting plus premise. In that case, saying that inhabitants' beliefs about the supernatural are all totally true, man, doesn't establish which supernatural things exist, because those beliefs are themselves something that you have to establish because they're a part of the setting that you're making up.

Now, you can easily just say that the inhabitants of your setting believe what people believed in Ireland at some point. (Although, how seriously did the majority ever buy into the local cryptids? Probably best to say that you're just working off of ideas in circulation, not necessarily conventional wisdom.) Not exactly original, but it sure saves a lot of time not having to come up with a whole supernatural ecology and then communicate it to the audience. So, with that covered, what about culture? Well, we've already decided on a bunch of historical Irish beliefs, and, presumably, related practices. And since we already decided on an approach of incorporating a collection of related stuff wholesale, why not here, too? Again, huge time saver. And since some cultural practices also relate to the land that people live in and therefore interact with, that also needs to be... at least pretty similar... Hey! Wait a minute! This is just Mythological Ireland with extra steps!

Of course, that's just an argument that that's a silly approach, which hardly proves that it's not standard practice. As mentioned, it's a lot easier to just have a barely fictional setting, and maybe the answer to "What's the point?" is "This needs to be legally distinct enough to qualify as Original Content, Do Not Steal." Maybe only banshees and leprechauns don't get renamed because those are the things that the author is relying on the audience's pre-existing familiarity with? And I don't have any statistics on how common this is, nor even broad personal familiarity with the genre, so, like... I dunno, really.

Regardless, a Fantasy Kitchen Sink generally avoids this by throwing together a lot of different folklore from a lot of different places, producing an original mix of things, except insofar as it's largely ripping off one or more existing Fantasy Kitchen Sinks, which is likely. But, um, it's less "regional", is my point. But an entire real-world pantheon is, to use the technically term, a whole bunch of content from one region. So that's, like... stylistically incongruent, if that's the phrase I'm looking for? Yeah, it lets you preserve various relationships between the gods and goddesses, but how much are you even going to use those in the story? I'd rather see how Odin interacts with Ishtar. That allows you to invoke the power of crossover fanfiction, one of the most powerful forces in the universe, or so I gather.

Nonetheless, even limited strictly to secondary world fantasy, you will see a lot of entities straight from Earth's history, mythology and religion.

Hmm. Specific entities (e.g. Athena), not just kinds of entity (e.g. satyrs)? Without even the serial numbers filed off, with all of the same distinguishing traits and even name? I'd expect that to at least be less common than not, but maybe that's just insufficient appreciation of Sturgeon's Law on my part.

Yeah you can argue it makes no sense. "Making sense" has never been high on the priority list for many of these settings.

Eh, in a setting where there is no Earth, there's also no suspicious similarity to stuff on Earth. Conflating Watsonian and Doylist perspectives causes trouble, but at that point we're wondering why there are horses and human beings! The real answer is that they're there because the author included them, and the fictional answer is that those species do not come from this strange "Earth" of which you speak.

When it actually comes down to the specifics, of course, we may find that e.g. including flora and fauna based on what's most interesting to the author and/or the audience doesn't really make for a stable ecosystem. Conservation of detail greatly increases overall plausibility in such cases: The more that's left undefined, the greater the potential for the unknown to include stuff that counteracts the known in various unknown ways.

1st edition AD&D is explicitly human-centered for practical reasons, explained thoroughly in its Dungeon Master's Guide. This doesn't quite mean what you think it means: every alignment covers an identifiable human philosophy.

You can spin them that way, but that's not really how the Player's Handbook presents them. 1st Edition Neutral Evil is concerned with "bringing maximum evilness to the world", "for pure evil is all in all". What this even means, in practice or in theory, is left unspecified. Deliberately a bad guy, like a mustache-twirling cartoon villain, is the long and the short of it. (Except that we gotta say how Neutral Evil feels about Law and Chaos, even if it's "Neutral Evil doesn't care about Law and Chaos (except insofar as they relate to the cause of ULTIMATE EVIL, mwahaha).") Chaotic characters, meanwhile, value "randomness". The charitable interpretation of that is that their priorities are in constant flux in a way that makes them come off as crazy to normal people.

And under 2nd Edition's overt cultural relativism, what makes a philosophy Evil is that it's a deviant, unpopular philosophy. In a society that values strength and valor over other things, human raiders can mercilessly pillage that village and then hang out with their warrior gods in an Upper Plane after they die in glorious battle. What makes a lone murderhobo Chaotic Evil is that those around him disagree with him. What makes orcs Evil, apparently, is that they ain't human.

[Vahnavoi]

EDIT: damn, the first half of my post got eaten. Let's put it back in:

@Devil's_Advocate:

I agree you can make a distinction between "Greece with real Hercules!", "Totally-not-Greece with Hercules!" and "Totally-not-Greece with Totally-not-Hercules!"

It's just that when counting fictional works ripping off the same source, in this case Greece and Hercules, they all make the cut. I see no point in distinctions such as "barely fictional" - they're all 100% fiction. If I wrote a story about myself going fishing yesterday, it too, would be 100% fiction, because what matters for the count isn't whether the story is about real things or real beliefs, it's about the simple fact that it didn't happen.

For a similar reason, I see very little point in fixating on authenticity. "But is this Hercules 100% like the specific, authentic Hercules?" is usually a fruitless question because there often is variance in the source material itself - you cannot narrow your search down to one Hercules to begin with. Which means that Totally-not-Hercules in Totally-not-Greece that's maybe 50% accurate to the specific versions I know of may still be 100% accurate to the fiction writer's beliefa about Hercules.

I also have no reason to give special exemption to Kitchen Sink settings. Some early Kitchen Sinks were in fact pretty much author tracts about what the fiction writer happened to think of about some very forum unfriendly topics. Even more relevantly, many famous Kitchen Sinks have explicit connection to Earth. In D&D, this is true of both classic Greyhawk and classic Forgotten Realms. Neither are closed secondary world fantasies, both are open secondary world fantasies positing influence and visitors from historical Earth.

Completely closed off secondary world fantasies that have nothing to do with Earth or their author's beliefs of Earth, are a rarity.

You can spin them that way, but that's not really how the Player's Handbook presents them. 1st Edition Neutral Evil is concerned with "bringing maximum evilness to the world", "for pure evil is all in all". What this even means, in practice or in theory, is left unspecified.

Why are you focusing on the Player's Handbook? The alignment system in general and each individual alignment in particular has extended explanation in the Dungeon Master's Guide, because the dungeon master is the one who abitrates and needs those rules. The practice AND theory are clear enough: the conflict between chaos and law is that of the individual versus large organized groups, while the conflict between good and evil is that of weal and life versus woe and death. The exact specifics are up to subjective judgement of the dungeon master. It isn't hard to adjucate: "maximum evilness" is the belief that everyone would be better off dead. Which, while contrary to most, is something real people occasionally espouse.

Chaotics, Chaotic Neutrals in particular, are described in a way that would fit an existentialist in the vein of Jean Paul Sartre ("RADICAL FREEEEDOM!") or Albert Camus ("of course, the only real question is whether to kill yourself or not"). The idea of Chaotics as LOLrandom lunatics, far from being the most generous, is a caricature that first became a meme and then later was codified in the rules.

And under 2nd Edition's overt cultural relativism, what makes a philosophy Evil is that it's a deviant, unpopular philosophy. In a society that values strength and valor over other things, human raiders can mercilessly pillage that village and then hang out with their warrior gods in an Upper Plane after they die in glorious battle. What makes a lone murderhobo Chaotic Evil is that those around him disagree with him. What makes orcs Evil, apparently, is that they ain't human.

I don't particularly like 2nd edition AD&D over-emphasis on cultural relativism either, but it's worth remembering 1st edition's take is already relativist: the entire system is based on placing different values and pantheons on a graph and seeing where they stand in relation to another. 2nd edition's take just starts (pointlessly) moving labels around, so that Chaotic Evil becomes Lawful Good if enough people think that way (also, black is really white and sun is just the moon at night). Meanwhile, in 1st edition, Chaotic Evil remains Chaotic Evil regardless of what people themselves think, because the whole thing is rated from a higher perspective.

But even if you want to go with 2nd edition's take, it doesn't take away from my original point, which was about multiple competing polytheism. To the contrary, increased cultural relativism and reality changing based on which beliefs are popular heightens it. It makes it even easier to imagine a schism between several polytheist groups with mutually incompatible practices, going to outright war over which gods ought to be worshipped and how. You can imagine that conflict between humans and non-humans, but it can just well (again) just be between two different humans. And no, the ramification isn't that everyone goes to an upper plane - following the ideas in 2nd edition, the planes (and gods!) themselves may split and change place. If Evil is Good, black is white and sun is just the moon at night, then up can be down and people with opposed practices end up in opposed points of the Great Wheel - even if everyone is confident their place is the Good place.

[KorvinStarmast]

Creating a setting, with its own geography and culture and so on, is rather a bit different from real setting plus premise.

That's what MAR Barker did with Tekumel. The setting, and the deities encountered in it, were built from the ground up. (In comparison, deities were Scotch taped onto AD&D and there was no basic setting/world).
Tekumel had a particular coherence. It helps that Barker's setting was a labor of love cultivated over many years, and that he was a scholar who was familiar with a variety of different pantheons/cultures/mythologies. His synthesis worked. His deities fit into his setting.

(FWIW, @PhoenixPhyre has put substantial effort into doing that in his setting Quartus, that I am still playing in; our third campaign is about to wrap up in a month or two).

Eh, in a setting where there is no Earth, there's also no suspicious similarity to stuff on Earth.

Huh? As an example, both Athas and Tekumel are settings where we can recognize things that are like Earth and things that are Not Like Earth. (Primary versus Secondary world). How much overlap between the mundane and the fantastic, or the proportion of fantastic mixed into the mundane, is a matter of taste.

You can spin them that way, but that's not really how the Player's Handbook presents them.

Did you bother to read the Dungeon Master's Guide? That's where EGG explained it a bit more.