If you had to create an evil pantheon, what would your primary divisions of aspects be? For example:

If you had to create an evil pantheon, what would your primary divisions of aspects be? For example:

>Fire
>Ice
>Lightning
>Disease
>Pain
>Darkness

Do you have overlap between deities, or do you try to separate them completely?

I wouldn't have elements as separate dieties. That leaves them as a bit one-note and pidgeonholes things. If anything, it'd be better to allocate thoee to other gods in the pantheon to help round them out instead.

Shouldn't they represent sins?

Destruction
Chaos
Terror
Death

One for each of the deadly sins.

I generally feel that the 'evil' pantheon should be relatively unified in theme and not be associated too much with entirely specific stuff. Also, they should be ancient and mysterious, and not wholly understood, and having very precise domains for each one sort of mitigates that.

My go-to evil pantheon are the monstrous children of the original monster. They're associated with hunger, madness, mutation, and ruin. Their servants have a reptilian/amphibian feel generally and they themselves are numerous and often conflated erroneously by theologians who don't fully understand the setting's cosmology, viewing it from the ground up as they do. They have personalities of a sort but they're not human in the least and all they really want is to have dominion over the Earth again. They're not the type of gods you can really talk to.

>fire
This is anything but evil. Fire ascended us from beasts into civilization.
>ice
Keeps you cool when Sun-Jerk is going crazy. Plus ice cream is fucking delicious.
>lightning
You mean the best element, and foundation of our nervous system? Sounds pretty boss.
>disease
That thing that taught us how to cook our food, opening our minds to an endless universe of flavor? That taught us to bathe and create perfume so we could more easily get some?
>pain
Literally the most useful sense available to us, even more than vision. Not being able to determine if an action is bad or good would be pretty fucking awful. It'd be like spending millions on a high-tech facility and not hiring any security guards.
>darkness
That thing that lets us sleep, helps plants grow, and keeps Sun-Jerk from blasting our cities into nothingness? Again, a boss dudebro.

Sounds like you made a good pantheon to me, user.

>Hope
The vice of the hopeless.
>Freedom
The illusion of the enslaved.
>Love
The reason there are monsters.

>evil pantheon
Hatred
Greed
Excess
Death

Greed focuses on accumulating material belongings. Excess focuses on pushing experiences to dangerous and addictive levels. Hatred is all about channeling negative feelings into destructive and sadistic acts. Death is about both destroying life and existing without passion or love.

My current main eveil gods that I've worked out the details of are one of the abyss, shadows, and ocean serving as a sort of trickster, and a more typical archfiend with a legion of war demons who is all about fire and betrayal.

I dont mind,overlap, but Im also not too focused on filling out some sort of grid with them.

>Pain
>Lust
>Hunger
>Light
>Madness
>Deception

And then make a goddess of fertility that pretends to be some other kind goddess, and thus creates armies of fast multiplying cultists....or you know make some guys magical realm into horror

I would make it like any fucking pantheon
- God of rulership
- God of craftsmen
- Trickster god
- God of Paternity
- Goddess of Maternity
- God/ess of Death
- God/ess of Fertility and Farming
- God/ess of the Hunt
- Divinities representing the cycle of seasons

But evil because for some reason I'm now a retarded DM who makes "eeeeeevil" an inherent cultural trait

It's all up to you. Make a malevolent pantheon however you'd prefer. I'm interested in seeing how people think with this.

Those are just examples, not anything I'm actually using.

>But evil because for some reason I'm now a retarded DM who makes "eeeeeevil" an inherent cultural trait

Are you okay? Seems a bit excessive.

Interesting. Which kind of chaos are you going for? Classical, where it just means an abyss, or modern, where it's mayhem? How would you separate that from Destruction and Terror, for instance?

I'd make a good an an evil one.
The good would be:
God of Hope and Truth
God of Kindness and Charity
God of Virtue and Justice
And so naturally the evil would oppose this, as:
God of Hopelessness and Deception
God of Selfishness and Cruelty
God of Injustice and Weakness.
The Gods don't represent elements, as each one is capable of anything any of the rest are. Instead, they are distinguished by what they advocate for.

That wasn't really my point, though. Any seemingly evil thing can also be a good thing, and any seemingly good thing can also be an evil thing. Construct your deities to simply be deities, and let the mortals form their own churches based on their own baggage.

Making an "evil pantheon" is kinda silly.

So more of a focus on human behaviour (possibly fuelling the deity?). I'm guessing you can just take other immoral actions (like paedophilia) and fit it into something like Excess?

>Making an "evil pantheon" is kinda silly.

Not if you're going for a dichotomy setting. Or a "grim dark" like 40k.

Come on, flex some creativity. You don't need to stick to your established beliefs on this.

Sort of like a deep-sea Loki (or like Dagon?), and a straight up Devil. I like that they both just oppose one another.

Hangover monstrosities from pre-history sort of vibe? I think the Buffyverse went with something along those lines, but yours has more of a Lovecraft touch to it.

If he's the god of justice, why would he care about anything other than justice? If capital-g Good was his deal, wouldn't he be the God of Good?

All of the real-life pantheons are endlessly messy. Gods ally with each other as convenient, betray each other endlessly, and generally act like a superpowered family. Forcing everyone into "no goods allowed" or "no bads allowed" camps dramatically reduces what you can do with them. It's the opposite of being uncreative.

Even if you really want a dichotomy in your setting, it's better to have one with fuzzy edges rather than hard ones.

Dem trips tho.

Mirroring pantheons are interesting. It sort of carries the suggestion that maybe their opposites are connected to them in some way.

You're literally free to make an evil pantheon however you like, fuzzy edges or no. Go for it!

Well, in the games I'm cribbing this from, mainly "mayhem". Sowing paranoia and discord to disrupt social order, and making people go crazy.

Really the most distinct of the four, actually. Destruction and Terror actually have a lot more in common in their MO. Death would be similar to those two as well, conceptually, but has her own unique twist unrelated to the domain itself.

Ooooh, more on Death, please. I like a deity that stands out from its peers for an unexpected reason.

Now that I think about it, they sort of have a Four Horsemen feel to them, since a couple of those often shared some similarities (I think some variations have both Conquest and War, which never really made much sense to me, though).

God of Change and Chance

Yeah, that's the idea. I much prefer that to traditional evil gods, mostly because few mythologies had evil pantheons. Most had big antagonistic monsters and maybe one evil god with lots of evil children. Evil pantheons in the "bad dodekatheon" or "spooky ennead" vein don't feel quite right. Not!Typhon and his progeny feels far less contrived IMO.

IIRC Buffy actually did chuck a bit of Lovecraft in, though maybe in a more Howardesque way. Or maybe I just associate that automatically with this sort of thing.

Shameless shill ahead.

The only "god" that's in the setting I use for the homebrew D&D campaign I run is benign and cosmic. All aspects of life and death (positive, negative energies, life, death, elements, light, and dark) all come from the same place.

There are no divine spells or magics, instead using a system where one's beliefs and convictions manifest in reality, rather than channeling the power of creation that only some can access.

I use the seven deadly sins

Chaos.
Deep Darkness
Night
Day
Evening
Aether
Sleep
Death
Deceit
Destruction
Dreams
Blame
Pain
Distress
Nemesis
Retribution
Friendship
Old Age
Strife
River of souls
Ferryman
Fates
Doom

Lord of Lies and Deceit
Lady of Bad Luck and Misfortune
Sea Lord of the Hungering Abyss (Greed and Selfishness, Pirate Lord)
War Lord of Ashen Fury (Fire and Blood, sacrifices made in wanton slaughter and scorching pillage)
King of Tyrants (Pride and Vanity made manifest into the ruling class, where the commoners are but stepping stones to greater glory)
The Withering Manifest (Necromancy and the restless dead, foul spirits that seek to devour life wholesale to sate a terrible hunger that will never be satisfied)

>because few mythologies had evil pantheons

I suppose it's difficult to get people to worship you if you're constantly horrible to them. I don't know how Zeus ever managed to keep a foothold.

>Not!Typhon and his progeny feels far less contrived IMO.

Yeah, Tiamat's like that as well. Come to think of it, she only made monsters to fight her own god offspring.

That's a hell of a lot of primaries. Looks like a mix of Titans and a few lower level Olympians. I can't help but look at the last one and think he's busy mowing down his own constantly regenerating demonic horde with a BFG.

Smells like Adonai. Are you a sneaky Christian, by any chance?

An evil god of dreams sounds super fucking interesting, like some eldritch thing from beyond.

>The Withering Manifest

I like that. Has a hint of Dark Souls meets The Night Land to it.

Apathy
Hopelessness
Shame
Hatred
Vanity
Misfortune
Ruthlessness
Solitude
Madness
Bloodlust
Greed
Carelessness
Cowardice
Weakness

How about those?

>Sleep
>Dreams

One knocks you out and then watches while the other fucks your brain.

Well, Zeus had positive aspects as well as negative. He was considered a paragon of law and dispenser of justice, and overall the keeper of cosmic order in the universe. There are stories of his benevolence, people just tend to forget about them and play up the saucier stuff, because that material is more fun to work with. Same goes for Hera, Hades, Athena, Dionysus etc. Ares and Poseidon are probably the only unmitigated assholes in the pantheon, and that's only because so much of our Hellenistic sources are Athenian, and those deities were the patrons of rival states.

>Yeah, Tiamat's like that as well. Come to think of it, she only made monsters to fight her own god offspring.

Indeed, there's rarely an antagonistic force - even among the 'supermonster' type - in these sorts of mythologies that is truly elementally evil in the sense we understand it based on our Judeo-Christian values. That's where my take probably differs the most from ancient mythology; these ancient gods will bring all life that isn't them or their spawn to ruin if awoken. Also I do tend to have an ultimate 'good' force that opposes them and makes them evil by juxtaposition, which I guess is muh Catholic heritage peeking through.

Not even Zeus can question Doom (Moros) for questioning him would be to re-introduce Chaos to the world. It is one of the reasons why once Zeus has made a decree or a promise, he cannot change it or break it.

I'm Quaker, but I'm incredibly adverse to inserting one's own religious beliefs into the things they write. That's why this entity acts more as a "cosmic architect" than a God.

But I suppose any idea that exists in world-building is inspired by something irl.

>Tzeentch
>Nurgle
>Slaanesh

I try to picture what the deity might look like:

Apathy - a hooded, faceless entity
Hopelessness - something that whispers to people and only ever appears as a bloody pair of hands passing a blade to a suicidal person
Shame - its face is always hidden, or it is obscured by a fog/aura
Hatred - not!Khorne
Vanity - not!Slaanesh
Misfortune - not sure
Ruthlessness - not sure
Solitude - always seen from a distance, or from the corner of the eye, but can never be approached
Madness - a jester
Bloodlust - like a beefy vampire
Greed - a bloated banker-type
Carelessness - not sure
Cowardice - not sure (maybe they've never been seen, but the only evidence they exist is the remnants of their actions?)
Weakness - a frail old woman on her death bed

So 3 or 4 of those I can't picture, but somebody else might have an interesting twist on it.

Solitude doesn't really seem like an evil dude, though. Maybe he's more benign and neutral than the others.

Void. The god himself would be the one god of the pantheon who wasn't gifted with the power to create life. Or create anything, really. Someone had to look after all of the empty space that was going to be left over after creation and he was the unlucky one who ended up with that. While the other gods are off creating beautiful races, plants, planets, nebulas and whatever else pops into their minds, he's just sitting there in his great big nothing, bitter about his role in the grand scheme of things. Even though he's the most powerful god due to his role, all he really wanted was to make something himself.

So, he undermines his pantheon in whatever ways he can, because he's got nothing better to do and he wants to get back at them for dumping this role on him. The other gods don't do anything because he's a necessary part of creation and disposing of him would mean someone else would have to take his place, even as he sends maddening whispers to their creations and has destroyed entire civilisations with his schemes.

Pretty much. They were allies at one point, but part of the setting is that their power grabs lead to greed and distrust, so there was a lot of backstabbing before things ended up the way they were.

Deities in my setting were universally good until the introduction of a single, corruptive primal evil.

An example would be the Serene Maiden, who was once a goddess of dreams and prophecy, one of the rare deities who actually didn't manifest directly in Creation, was corrupted and transformed into a goddess of night terrors and tragedy, turning her powers towards manipulating people in positions of power into madness and paranoia by showing them partial visions of a future they themselves unwittingly bring about.

Her influence is spread by cultists who spread idols and scripture depicting the Maiden, which act as beacons for her attention. A king famously had one such idol placed under his pillow by a servant, causing him to go mad for fear that his neighbors would invade and burn his country to the ground. The resulting assassination and intrigue plunged his country into a war on three fronts that saw the nation destroyed from within.

>The other gods don't do anything because he's a necessary part of creation and disposing of him would mean someone else would have to take his place

Ha, a nice way of putting in an indirectly necessary evil.

Interesting. Would it be possible in that scenario for the other deities to promote a lesser spirit to fill the now vacant role of dream god? Or does it just get carried over and stays with the new nightmare god?

I imagined solitude as clingy but displeasing. Maybe a giant spider made of rotten corpses. It's horrible appearance, smell, voice and attitude fog the mind (by causing deafness, blindess and muteness) and can "stick" to whoever interacts with it.
I also thought about Bloodlust as a mechanical construct made of rusty steel, stained with dry blood, made and commanded by Hatred. Nonetheless, I believe that Bloodlust could use Hatred as a tool and not vice versa.

Deities in my setting are regularly alone in their aspects, but remain unique in their purpose by having multiple aspects. There are several other dream deities, but their secondary aspects involve Memory or Communion, rather than Prophecy.

The primal evil (hereby referred to as The Bitter Star) specifically targeted the Maiden because of her potential to do the greatest harm if corrupted.

>Regularly

Fuck me I meant to say Rarely. The are RARELY alone in their aspects. Multiple fire gods, multiple magic gods, etc.

> Conquest, tyranny, egotism, injustice
> Vice, sin, temptation, the breaking of social taboos
> Death, inevitability, cruel fate, apathy, crimes against nature
> Violence, chaos, destruction, anarchy, societal collapse

I based them off of the three evils in Orthodox Christianity: death, sin and the devil (which can be taken to mean bad fate or the faults of human nature)

>Ooooh, more on Death, please. I like a deity that stands out from its peers for an unexpected reason.
Well, she has a tendency to go undercover as a helper to the Hero -- and in all instances but the very first, it's as his love interest, so deep undercover that she seals away the knowledge of her true identity until the time is ripe to cut loose.

Also, I guess one thing that *is* pertinent to her domain that sets her apart is that she can resurrect the other gods if (when) they're killed. Including herself, from beyond the grave; she's basically the key to their immortality.

Meant for

Base it on the 5 senses.

Sight: Ignorance, Fear, Darkness AND Light (It's the most powerful because it's Sight, the dominant sense).
Sound: Deceit, Corruption, and Lightning
Touch: Lust, Pain, and Fire
Smell: Envy, Temptation, and Air
Taste: Greed, Knowledge, and Water

>The Bitter Star

I'm loving all these names. I don't even know a word to describe these styles of nomenclature, so I'm just going to go with "comfy".

>more of a focus on human behaviour (possibly fuelling the deity?)
Pretty much. I figure that most evil as we understand it requires people behind it. One could put most non-human bad things (like natural disasters, disease, or famine) under wrath or death, but the focus should be on people and their actions.

>pedophiles classified as excess
Excess would serve as a kind of umbrella for stuff like addiction, sex-crime (which would have some overlap with hate and death), extreme and dangerous partying, murderous thrill-seeking, gorging, and most forms of decadence.

For some reason, I'm picturing Death as the girlfriend in Dead Space 2, and I'm loving it.

>she's basically the key to their immortality.

Nice.

How did you come to the decision to turn the three into four? For example, tyranny and injustice feels like it could fit Death, while egotism can fit Vice, and Conquest is straight up Violence. Was it to balance something else out?

>I suppose it's difficult to get people to worship you if you're constantly horrible to them.
You'd be surprised. While not too common among the more organized pantheons, a lot of more animistic religions venerated gods they would fully acknowledge as being nasty cunts. Basically offering worship as a way to appease the evil nasty god so he doesn't fuck up your shit.

Would being born with one sense missing result in that person being "immune" to that particular deity? Maybe a deaf person can become a hunter against the agents of sound, for example.

My challenge to you, make an evil deity whose sphere of influence is life.
Bonus points if you don't pull a Nurgle.

There's always demons and gods, like Pazuzu, who protect you against even more evil gods (like her wife).

Can a god monsters count? Like a deity that can only produce malicious creatures?

>Basically offering worship as a way to appease the evil nasty god so he doesn't fuck up your shit

Good idea as to why devil worship could be prominent in an otherwise neutral society.

>her.

His wife.

>(like her wife)

I like where this is goi-

>His wife.

Dang it.

Yup. But the only way to truly escape evil is to strip yourself of all your senses.

There is a mad prophet of the essence that cut his tongue and eyes out, gouged out his ears and nose, and lacked entirely the tactile sense from birth.

He's irrevocably insane now, but sometimes he stand up as if possessed by some radiant being and perform miracles to those that meditate in his presence.

Nasty gods and pantheons are often related to capricious environments and elements.

>evil god of dreams
>like some eldritch thing from within
FTFY

Dreams come from the dreamer. I think the evil god of dreams would use the evil inside of people; their ambitions, frustrated hopes, fear, and so on.

>as if possessed by some radiant being

I like that. A potentially benevolent being that exists outside of senses entirely and can only be accessed through complete disconnect with this reality.

Nope, straight life. I'll be lenient though and say LE would be fine.

>Olympians

There are no Olympians. All these guys are sons and daughters of Nyx and Erebus.

What's LE?

How about a god of immortality? No matter how much you are hurt, or tortured, or mutilated, you can never die.

Or a god of mutation? Servants are covered in cancerous growths and swell up from constant over-healing, until they're just huge masses of flesh, that spread to others through contact.

Ah, I mistook Charon as a lesser Olympian.

The reasoning is that the Gods don't have names, at least not names that mortals can understand, and the vast majority of them actually physically exist in Creation.

Trying to give a name, a proper Name, to something like that is taking far more liberties than you deserve. Descriptive titles are slightly inaccurate, and often different cultures have different titles for the same deity, but as long as you know which God you're talking about, whatever title you use will be enough to commune with them.

This leads to deities with names like Horned God on the Mountain, Lady of the Lake, Glass Walker, Flesh Ascendant, etc.

Then there's the Elven gods, Morning Star, Evening Star, Day Star and Evening Star and The Bitter Star, who pretty much Atlantis'd their whole civilization when it showed up.

...

>Flipper is a cosmic entity

You gotta explain this.

Day Star and MIDNIGHT STAR. Goddamnit I am not functioning today. I need a nap.

>Flesh Ascendant

Nice.

The Keres are missing. They were female spirits of violent or cruel death, including death in battle, by accident, murder or ravaging disease. Another of the Fates and Doom minions. Thanatos was the god of non-violent death.

Japan.

Formerly God of Bountiful Harvest and Celebration, the Bitter Star turned it towards a taste for a...different crop.

Note that the Lord of Nightmares is neither evil or good. All the universe of Slayers exist within her/his/its dream.

A god of life who created everything, but hates it like an artist hates his own art. The god hates his creation and his only goal is to "wipe the slate clean" to start anew.

LE
NE
CE

Then all th flavors inbetween.

>Day

How do you make an evil god of day? Or is she/he the black sheep of the Pantheon?

>god of conflict
>actually pretty chill because people start shit all the time without his help and he gets to kick back and relax every day

Excess would be the absolute supreme god in that case I believe.
Almost (and I have trouble finding a counter example) everything that goes wrong does because of excess.

A long time ago there was a god that sought to own all that was on the earth, to step anywhere and know that the dirt beneath his feet was his and his alone. Many gods realized this, and in a great war managed to cut of his legs.

Without his legs he floated up into the sky where he entered the sun. Now he lives there, forever forced to watch the earth but never able to touch it. He plots even to this day to one day return and claim what is his, but for now he bides his time. Sometimes when he gets really pissy or angry though he turns up the heat.

The great desert happens to be the land he passes over when he is almost never asleep (he tends to be drowsy most of the time because it's hard to sleep in a sun), and people always travel under beautiful parasols or cover themselves in elaborate clothing bear his symbols... Lest they incur his wrath.

Madness
Sadness
Badness
Radness

>disease
Are you autistic? Yeah, thanks to murder rapist I'll keep my doors shut and but guns to defend myself, doesn't mean I'll praise them for it

>pain
Yes, pain is an importante feeling for survival, but the god of pain in most cosmologies is associated with torture, when pain stop being a sign of can ver tô because just suffering

>darkness
Gods of darkness are often associated with fear of the unknown. Also it doesn't "stop" the sun, it's directly related to it and it's position, same thing applies to cold, but I don't like good as evil

And this is the best idea of an evil pantheon. Evil is easy, evil is empting. And some evil is needed, even.

Ruled with an iron fist by the striding god of Chadness

I think they should generally follow some kind of theme, for example:
>the four elements in their destructive aspects:
Fire = Conflagration, the Scorched One
Water = Flood, the Drowned One
Air = Tempest, the Strangled One
Earth = Earthquake, the Buried One
>5 senses
Sight = The Blind, God of illusions and delusions
Hearing = The Deaf, God of whispers and the cold-hearted
Touch = The Deprived, God of emptiness and misery
Taste = The Decadent, God of hunger and excess
Smell = The Foul, God of the obscene and disgusting

>loss
>pain
>fear
>corruption
I think these suffice.

God of Ghosts. Undead are bad. Death should be death. Watch out for those ghosts trying to get you! That wraith chasing you around? God of Ghosts is to blame! That fiend! He threw a monkey wrench in the natural order of life and death and for this he will never be forgiven.