Tell me about the deities of your setting, if your setting has them. What are they like? How are they worshiped...

There's only one god, Avarat who's very keen on people doing nice things and not being dicks. He has a group of archangels to manage the world and sometimes guide clerics who have gotten in their covenant, but are otherwise very mysterious and outside of the miracles of a cleric, he doesn't actually show up much.

The one exception is to elves, where three archangels (which they call gods or sons of gods, but they know the difference) show up with a bit more frequency, at certain shrines and festivals.

Then there's the enochian-like fallen angels. While after creation the archangels had to spend the majority of time in the heavens, the Watchers were more attuned to the material world and thus could watch and guide humans. But being essentially superhumans, they ended up being worshipped as gods, and heck most of them thought that's fine, they're gonna guide the humanoids their way. Some decided to give a technological or magical edge to nations that worshipped them, or just straight up rule like kings. One even bred centaurs into existence.

Soon enough Avarat shows up because all of a sudden people that worship him are complaining about being genocided, then notices that things are kinda fucked, and does a hard reset on the world to fix the humanoids. Humans are more mundane and don't have an edge ahead on Dwarves and Elves anymore, Elves are no longer immortal (although there are still ways), and Dwarves get kicked out of nice places and have to settle by mountains, but their proper repentance allows them to know the "hollow" portions of the earth, where things are like in Jules Verne's book underground.

The Watchers, on the other hand, get railed hard. Some get obliterated to an almost complete non-existence, others get imprisioned under the earth, and some become Penitent, angels who now roam the earth without any power or pomp, being given a second chance to do what they were supposed to.

80% of them are cunts who are only playing ball because they got absolutely BTFO the last time they went too far, at massive cost to literally everyone involved.

The other 20% either just want to keep to themselves, or, very occasionally, actually give a shit about mortals as entities beyond 'things to be manipulated'.

A few of them are taking roles in the overarching plot. The party has one chained up in their basement, pinned to a throne by another god who has been AWOL for millenia.

The fallen angels still left a mark on the world, as there are some civilizations who still worship them, completely oblivious of anything that happened in the past.

And when the elves were feeling imperialistic back in the Bronze/Iron Age, their human subjects noticed their worship of three heavenly superpeople and thought "hey, we have our three gods too!" So they have a religion that mixes that with their own cultural folklore. Whether the three goddesses they worship are at all real or not is up for debate. Some scholars from other religions say the three were anthropomorphic spirits of great ancient cities from before the Watchers were doing their thing, others that they're the remains of some unknown Watchers.

Wisdom and secret knowledge, sadistic.

Eschewing the classic DND "big people in the sky" my most recent game Grimwyrd has two amorphous celestial figures
The darkness; a primordial evil chaos that taints the hearts of men
The light; a beacon of hope for the living against the forces of peril

I didn't introduce them to any player at session zero, but rather let the influences of both appear organically through the game. Sufficed to say the players are staunch resistors of the Darkness and ITs servants, with a few even tapping into the light for some extra juice.

Alongside is a bit of totemic spirit worship from the more primeval races, as well as demon worship, which is more of a feudal system than a religious one.

Eh, what the heck.
Passion and the sea.

Take your pick:

>Sun, Serpent

>Death, Motherly

>Knowledge, Imprisoned

The dwarves 'pantheon' is something I stole heavily from an old Veeky Forums post way back when; the dwarves have four big Ancestor Spirits who give their particular clan an origin story and some outlooks on living, tldr they are a practical one (iron), a merciful one (silver), a greedy one (gold), and an asshole one (steel). They're not really 'worshiped' as gods but they are revered as, like, a mix of history and parable.

It's gonna be interesting seeing how an upcoming player explores this, as he's keen on a Dwarf Avenger. My players understand the mechanics of divine power as granted by the gods, but the big secret of this setting is that it's powered by belief/faith; the Gods all became that way because they learned a Matrix-tier understanding of the world/CHIM/etc.

Should the player ever learn this, I'll be real interested in if he abandons the idea of faith, or if he transitions his beliefs from a higher being that in all honesty is probably dead (like the human gods, who all walked the land and set up the current Generic Human Empire, and who were kinda-secretly slain by the BBEG because he's the epitome of Fedora) to a belief in himself as a being capable of reaching his own divinity and throwing it around like the 'gods' before him.

It's the dawn of creation in a D&D world and the battle between the old gods and new gods is an ongoing thing.

The material and spiritual world are in a kind of feedback loop where one influences the other and vice versa. Spirits from the ephemeral spirit world have figured that by manipulating mortals and mortal events, they can effect permanent change in their own world. These spirits came over to the mortal world and are its various gods.

Most are selfish, petty, and don't really understand the mortals that they've convinced to follow them. This is new to everyone. They know a lot of magic- which they can cast/teach, they regenerate after x days when slain, and have various powers but other than that, they aren't necessarily smarter than mortals. They can't manifest anywhere at-will either. If a god wants to make an appearance somewhere, unless he knows some kind of teleportation magic, he has to trek there. Most are between CR 10 to 20.

So most gods safe at remain in their "home" which is usually a big temple, grove, or something (with a corresponding demiplane in the spirit world) around which the society that worships them congregates. Gods are essentially heads of state, but since they tend not to know too much about mortals and are just one person, they usually relegate a lot of stuff to their priesthoods and other underlings.

The main culture in my game revolves around a rather savvy sextet of deities who are sharper than most. They actually cooperate (unlike most deities who fight one another) and engage in major social engineering. They've built a society loosely patterned after proto Indo-Iranian civilization with a vedic-like caste system/Israelite tribal structure. Their society is wealthy orderly and advanced compared to others and they're expansionist. Gods of other lands get the option of joining the pantheon or being destroyed while their followers get absorbed into the greater empire.

The gods are mostly forgotten, but their influence is still felt throughout the West. There are five in total (technically six) spawned from when the first god killed itself to create reality.
In the beginning, there was ONE, and ONE was all, but ONE was alone. So to escape loneliness, it died, and in dying became the world.
Its bones became the Firmament of the World, the White God, Ramatra Singh, the Ivory Throne, who embodies the element of Bone and is known as Inscriptor.
It's ichor became the Primogenitor of the World, the Red God, Kaurvra'Sott, the Iron King, who embodies the element of Blood, and is known as Carnifex.
It's humors became the Corruption of the World, the Black God Nag Shol Lun, who embodies the element of Blood and is known as the Hierarch.
It's souls became the Radiance of the World, the Blue God Tvenasz Set, who embodies the element of Blaze and is known as the Lexicon.
It's ashes became the Finality of the World, the gray god Olakura, who embodies the element of Brume and is known as the Crematrix.
And what shadow of the first god remained floating above the world, an unmoving shadow in the sky that was held but a faint trace of divinity, that took the name of NONE, the Ungod.
And so it was.

Now, countless ages later, it's the wild wild west, NONE's influence causing the dead to spontaneously reanimate no matter their physical state, the rest of the gods squabbling in the shadows over the world via proxies and 'chosen ones', and stranger and darker things seeping up from outside while the gods are busy, the West is a pretty interesting place to live.

I post this setting too much here, but it's my baby that I've working on for years.

What's the point of posting in threads like this?

Nobody is going to read it, nobody is going to care.

...because its fun? Because you get to put out some ideas and see if people think they're interesting? Because it's a decent way to try and condense your setting and ideas you made up into a quick, easy form that helps you with making them better?

Hell, its better than a shitpost thread.

How many domains should one god cover? how many gods is too many? How many is too few? How do I justify having open worship of demons and evil gods?

The Red God.

The God of doorways, monsters, family, evil, and masculinity. He lives on a red moon that everyone is forced to give sacrifices to every year on not!Halloween, and the moon is also a mega dungeon.

This is really one of those DEPENDS ON THE SETTING questions but in the interest of discussion and shit-talking, I try and give about 3-5.

Context: it's 4e so it's more okay with combining multiple domains' feats and powers than say, 5e where a cleric is a Cleric Of ____ Domain at the class level, and there's eleventy billion domains instead of like 10 so there's more granularity between say, a god with War+Justice vs War+Tyranny, as opposed to 'War.' That being said, Im not too tight on 5e but it's be cool to see clerics emphasising diffeeent aspects of the same God, like one cleric of Stern the Fatherfigure is Protection Domain while another of his clerics is Civilisation Domain. Furthermore I try and adjust it for pantheon size so everyone can have something that interests them; smaller pantheons like my dwarves or humans get more per god, larger ones like the elves get less because there's a better chance you can find something more to your taste withing the 2-3 water gods than just the one big human one, for example.

I think it depends on what your going for. In some settings, you can get away with having a thousand minor gods with incredibly specific roles, or having just a few with large, thematic domains. I usually like to stick to either a nice core pantheon of 5-10, or go full Small Gods and have an absolute shit ton of minor, incredibly specific deities.

For the open worship thing, I think it depends on how they spin it. No god is "evil" but they all spin themselves as beneficial in some ways. Sure the god of ambition frequently has his popes assassinate each other, or the god of pain sets up a torture dungeon, but those are for important reasons, and they filled out the paperwork. Evil gods being openly evil works best I find when there's some kind of bureaucracy that prevents any of the gods from actively shutting down the other.

The Imperialist Elves of my setting have rejected their classical gods and instead believe that every mage is able to reach apotheosis. They worship the first archmage that has supposedly reached transcendence. His name is lost and he is simply called the teacher. He left the basis of the Elven philosophy/religion.

There's only really one Over god who breaks pieces of himself off and forms into lesser gods for the whims of the mortal races. It's a little bit more complex than that but it's a legit clusterfuck to explain.

Also, even lesser gods don't know the over gods intents and purpose in the world.

Sounds a bit like Sandersons Cosmere.

Never heard of it. Mind explaining?

I think I should also mention both greater and lesser gods where made by the Over god to caral the mortal races into groups and whatever. And only Humans can't make gods because technically god/The Omnimortal didn't invent humanity

The only Gods I haven’t stolen and repurposed are my death Gods Noth and Nim. Noth is the typical grim reaper, an uncaring, unfeeling death. Nim, who is typically shown and Noth’s son or brother, is depicted as a small child with pitch black eyes who carries a lantern with him. He sorta fills the role of Charon as he guides lost souls to their final destination. But he also has a trickster bend to him, contracting adventuring parties to do jobs for him. He’s generally a force for good, as he wants to prevent massive death because it just results in more work for him.

Depends on the pantheon. Generally, though, 4-6 domains per god is good for small pantheons and 3 is good for large pantheons, with 2 or less only being decent if Clerics are allowed to worship more than one god within a pantheon.
A monotheistic or dualistic or whatever religion will put a lot on the shoulders of its gods. For example, if you charged me with recreating the core christian faith as a D&D religion, I'd probably have the Father as Law, Sun, Glory, War, I'd have the Son as Good, Healing, Protection, Repose, I'd have the Holy Ghost as Creation, Magic, Oracle, Knowledge, and I'd have Satan as Trickery, Destruction, Evil, and Luck. I'd then also allow Catholic clerics to chose a patron saint, each of whom gets basically one domain. For example, a Puritan Cleric might have Healing and Repose from the Son, a Satanist Cleric takes Luck and Trickery, and a Catholic Cleric might derive Glory from the Father and Animal from St. Francis of Assisi.

sorry, just got back from a movie, writing stuff up now

Whoops, forgot the other Icons of the gods.
Nag Shol Lun is the Ebony Crown, Tvenasz Set is the Waxen Scepter, and Olakura is the Ashen Blade. Together they form this repeating "kingship" motif that shows up a lot in-setting.

Do not fall prey to His banal wisdom, for it is mute knowledge. Instead, seek those with airs just enough to recognize the presence of meaning. The uninitiated Sophomore will enter into His telescoping clocktower, unprepared for true understanding, and will exit more stupid and confused than before. In search of the source of life's angst, his pattern-lust will drive him yet more mad as he winds down the corridors of myriad dead ends and false leads. To protect yourself from this end, know that each symbol is the connective tissue of allegory and that allegory holds no answers; only more questions. Expose the Sophomore to the waters of petty patterns. Their confusion and misery, compounded by life's grand silence, is as clay in your hands. Mold them, wring them, and bring them to heel.

As a means of combating murderhoboing, I and several other forever dms of our extanded group decided to include Murder/k/ube and its folowers in almost any setting and campaign we run. It isn't really a god, but more of an entity whoes existance more often then not confuses the fuck of beings of higher planes of existance.

Bijalee and Pey.

If there is one name on Ret that is taboo to even mention, it's Bijalee. Some believe the mere mention of Bijalee's name is enough to summon a fierce sandstorm, and hence it is illegal to even say her name aloud in some tribes. Bijalee is depicted in illustrations as a partially dismembered woman with a blood-stained face. Her cruelty is well known through her storms that have razed many settlements for no reasons whatsoever. According to legend, Punav and Dekh battled Bijalee and subsequently ripped her into pieces, scattering her remains all over Ret so that she could never take a physical form again. Now her echoes roll over the sands, howling at the two siblings that destroyed her so very long ago.

Pey is a popular goddess of the oasis and rains and also symbolizes mercy, life, and peace. Many offerings are given during the hottest seasons, asking for rain to relieve the thirsty masses. The oases of Ret are seen as a holy shrines to Pey. Those with enough power to control these shrines protect them fiercely. Pey is typically described as a solemn looking female surrounded in silk ribbons. She was once married to Bijalee, and the two enjoyed a tumultuous love with one another. However, Pey could not keep Bijalee's addiction for destruction contained. She was given a choice by the sky brothers to either change her ways, or be destroyed together with her wife. Sadly, she chose to let her spouse face the retribution of Punav and Dekh, something she's still deeply remorseful about.

>Combining all three
Gonna need some Adagio in D Minor for that one

In a sleep without rest, the Dreamer lies within the sun. Her Dream is one of unsullied passions and fulfilled miseries.

It is a Dream of completion.

In the beginning, there was One. And for eternity it sang its name,
"I".
This song carried impossible distances, returning to its origin as it reverberated from surfaces of what-could-not-be and echoed in harmonic contradiction,
"0".
As the two made love and as the two did battle, they exchanged vows,
"I love you"
And it was true.

From the two then came a Third, then Fourth, then Seventh, then One-Hundred-and-Eighty-One. The Child's first words to its parents were,
"I love you"
And it was true.
Mother, Father, and Child. All was complete, all was as it should be for as long as it needed to be.
Father looked upon Mother and Child and, realizing that He would always be Second, left the two that He maybe true to thine own self. His parting words to Mother and Child were,
"I love you"
And it was true.
The Child, having grown, left its mother as well. In promise they said,
"I love you"
And it was true.
The Mother, left alone, did as She had in eons prior: She sang Her blessed name,
"I"
"I"
"I".
But there was no reply.

The Mother cried. Her tears fell into the inky blackness of Nothing, and from those tears came the stars: echo/ego fragments of an intersection of Time and Place that She could no longer reach into. In Her despair, She fell into the sun to sleep away her myriad tortures.

She became pregnant with a dream of a place where promises were kept, where husbands stayed, and where death might be the only end.
It is a Dream of the completion that She was denied.

A serpent had stole its way into Her bedchamber, coveting Her sun. Before the snake could strike, She stirred in momentary wakefulness. The snake began whispering in Her ear to lull Her to sleep. Trapped, the snake must decide between its triumph and the Dream's end.

My current setting is an attempt to emulate the mid-late 1800s, so the religions are all basically real world religion of the era with the names fudged a bit.

The Dealer is a spirit who has arisen since the return of magic to the world. He is a god of luck and of pacts, a trickster through and through. You praise him on your winning streaks and curse him on your losing streaks, but if you really need to get something done, you can always make a deal at the crossroads with him.

The Church of Luna is the Faith Victorious, and one of the four Celestial Faiths. Their goddess, Luna Selene, ebony skinned and clad in silver and ivory, is the goddess of the moon, of magic, of power. The return of magic to the world coincided with the moon passing from behind the cloud that had hidden it for almost 200 years, and so it is taken as proof that their goddess is the only true power in the heavens. The Faith Victorious is stern and ascetic, favoring utilitarian or monolithic black and white aesthetics. Their churches are squat buildings with white crescents on their steeples, their priests dress in black with white arm bands, and they're very serious about being pious and pure in both spirit and body.

The second of the Celestial Faiths is the Blazes. The central god of the Blazes is the sun, but he's mostly just a creator deity. Instead of directly acting, he lets his rays touch the earth and acts through his Saints and Angels, the titular Blazes. Each is a conduit to the creator, and through them his warmth and light is felt. The Blazes is a faith that emphasizes grandeur and opulence, favoring towering stone buildings with stained glass, so as to better celebrate the sun's light. It's a faith that believes in forgiveness, that there's nothing so dark that the sun cannot shed light on it.

The Church of Luna and the Blazes each collectively consider each other's central deities to be the Adversary, naturally. The same is broadly true of the remaining Celestial Faiths:

The third is the Golden Path. The Golden Path holds that stars are a reflection of "Justice". Justice in this instance doesn't mean punishment for crimes, but a broader sense of celestial harmony, comprising both a reverence for physical and natural law as well as what we might call karmic outcome for one's actions and desires. "Justice" also has a connection to the Golden Path itself, which is in essence a prophecy detailing how all life and thought is meant to unfold. The prophecy is a sprawling document told in hundreds of tomes, told in an allegorical form, with "If X and Y then Z" rules for how all events will unfold. It's half Elder Scroll, half I Ching, and was written by a prophet ("The Prophet", they prefer) whose name is unspeakable and thus lost to history. The Golden Path is an intensely psychedelic faith in both aesthetics (lots of gems and colorful minerals used in dizzying geometric designs) and ontology (the Prophet foresaw every instance of someone consulting the prophecy, hence the passage you randomly happen to select is the one he wrote specifically for you).

The fourth Celestial Faith is the Forgotten Children. They practice a more primordial version of the other three faiths, holding that the sun and moon are a dualistic system representing order and chaos respectively. Due to a long, peculiar history involving strife with neighbors going back millennia (and a written tradition going back just as long), the Forgotten Children have a staggeringly complex moral and ethical code and worship a great number of spirits and divine aspects. They are hermetic in aesthetic, and are married to ritual. As adherents to the written word, they also have a custom for bibliophilia that cherishes studying and long hours of reading.

The Land Spirits are easy to explain, comparatively. The tribes of the west observe animal behavior, and they know these to be reflections of a deeper, primordial form. They believe ravens are intelligent because Raven is intelligent. The bear is vicious and powerful because Bear is vicious and powerful. Eagles is opportunistic and sinister because Eagle is opportunistic and sinister. This is true of all animals, and those who study the behavior of animals can, with the aid of certain herbs and plants, commune with those ancient, primal spirits, learn their powers, and help exert their will on the world.

I'd also like to do one based on the Aztec pantheon but I know so little about the real thing, or the culture that produced it. Blood sacrifice, sure, but I know there's more to it than that. What do you call a god based on Quetzalcoatl, other than "Not-Quetzalcoatl"?

First thing about Aztec Myth to understand is that the blood sacrifice thing was done in the belief that it was literally powering the gods to prevent the end of the world. Without the near-constant sacrifice, the gods would have no power to prevent the world from falling apart and ending for the fifth time. Each individual ritual was meant to power the gods for certain things, with examples like flaying someone alive for the god of agriculture, Xipe Totec, in order for the corn of this harvest to have strong husks and resist disease and vermin.

Quetzalcoatl in particular is an interesting god, because of how weird he is within the pantheon. Most of the pantheon is split into Lords of Day and Lords of Night, with Quetzalcoatl being firmly in the Day section, as the god of the winds, the patron god of knowledge and the priesthood, and the arts and crafts. He also is a twin to the god Xolotl, who is the god of death, lightning, and illness. Both however, are personifications of the star Venus, one as the beneficial Light aspect, and another as the maleficent Dark aspect. A lot of aztec gods work on kinds of parallels like this.

bump for more godly inspiration

Eberron human gods + Dark Six evil gods.
Elven ancestors.
Dwarves worship two faces of one god. (One representing greed and survival, the other civilisation and honour).
The more niche faiths: The silver flame, worship of a holy energy found in heaven - a shard of which has been brought to the earth to end a plague.
The Path of All: Worship of existence itself, all life is holy - all actions are worship. Personal doctrine and acceptance of all.

Gods had toddler tantrum and got into a big fight which fucked with the landscape. At the end of the fight, they pissed themselves, and created two lakes where sentient seamonsters hold there image. Other gods laughed at them pissing themselves and left the plane and there creation behind.

>Wolf
>>Generic edgy war god + also lord of one of the hells and generally god of LE so honorable and shit.
>Snake
>>Goddess of sexuality and dance, also lady of one of the heavens. One of the nicest unless you piss her off.
>Eagle
>>God of the sun, easily the nicest god in the setting. Also arguably the strongest. Has never had a lover.
>Mole
>>Most inactive of the gods, has basically no clerics or temples. Spends most of his time crafting.
>Bear
>>Wants to be left the fuck alone for the most part. Goddess of snow and Northern weather.
>Rabbit
>>Goddess of the forest and of druids. Silent, speaks through telepathy. Has a trickster bent.
>Goose
>>Goddess of the rain and rivers. One of the most kindly and motherly of the gods.
>Hawk
>>Boisterous god of storms and lightning. Impulsive and aggressive.
>Monkey
>>Traditional trickster, sort of an asshole. Usually drunk. Once literally stole three millenia simply to show that he could do it.

Nothing sadder than to wake up (You)less in a thread that asks about your setting.

War, Liberation, honor
The sun
OR
Entropy, death,
decay
ty in advance user

This is why I come to Veeky Forums, awasome work m8.

Winter, discipline

In my setting there's one deity whose death caused his soul to shatter and form numerous other deities.

My gods are humans (or elves, or dwarves, or whathavya) that managed to be skillful enough to out[domain] the previous god of [domain].

Anyone able to siege and take the fortress of the god of War becomes the new god of War.

Anyone able to find who is the god of Shadows and manipulate him into doing one's will becomes the new god of Shadows.

Anyone who renders the magnum opus of the previous god of Science obsolete becomes the new god of Science.

Etc, etc...

Nobody? Come on, guys. Give'r a whirl.

Since my post got ignored and it upset me, I won't be a hypocrite and ignore yours. I really liked the day to day detail you put on your deities, that's actually something I need to flesh out more since I concerned myself more about the cosmology and history of it all until now.

I do have two questions though, are those gods universal? And what kinda language did you base those names on, if any?

I am having a hard time choosing between hard monotheism with angels and saints, vs a bigger godly family sorta Like Gwyn's clan for my main zealous cathederals-and monasteries catholic-esque religion.

>his priests tend to stand as a neutral party on the battlefield as a place for the wounded to go when they need healing.

How hasn't this been terribly exploited by one or both sides in an armed conflict?

Don't mind if I do Vyvyan:

Dominion: Fertility
Noun: Filial duty

They're all dead,
there were three that I arbitrarily made up for the secret flavour text of ancient spell scrolls, got Power Word: Kill-ed by an elite group of mortals who called themselves The Armorial.
Their deaths resulted in the sky, earth and sea being layered on top of one another.
Not much else to say really, no divine magic, there's a sorcery hierarchy of power in one or two civilisations and probably quite a few other consequences I haven't fleshed out yet.
Anyway, the lore and the gods aren't that important, I'm just having fun learning to make maps desu.