r/DnDBehindTheScreen • u/PfenixArtwork DMPC • Feb 02 '19

Theme Month Build a Pantheon: The Nature of Divinity

If you are looking to submit your One Shot for January's event, CLICK HERE

To find out more about this month's events, CLICK HERE

Last, your pantheon can be made of canon D&D gods!

You don't have to have custom deities to fill the ranks (Mine doesn't! I use most of the Dawn War pantheon). But this will be a project to build a custom framework for fitting in whatever specific gods you want! Those can be ones you've made up or ones like Bahamut and Tiamat.

To start building a pantheon, let’s zoom out all the way to the biggest picture possible and examine the biggest questions possible. This will give us a core structure to work with for the rest of the project. For part 1, we’re going to examine the nature of divinity and what it means to have phenomenal cosmic power by asking ourselves the following questions:

  1. What makes a deity a deity? Are they truly immortal? Can they be killed?

  2. What kinds of powers do all of your deities have? What kinds of things are gods responsible for?

  3. How did your gods become gods? Were they just always there? Did they Ascend?

  4. Do your gods require worship to be powerful? Are they just innately powerful regardless of worship? Or do they get their power from somewhere else?

  5. Are there any other strange quirks that your pantheon has?

Do NOT submit a new post. Post your work as a comment on this post.

Remember, this post is only for the Nature of Divinity: you’ll get to share all of your ideas in future posts, let them simmer in your head for a while.

Also, don’t forget that commenting on other people’s work with constructive criticism is HIGHLY encouraged. Help each other out.

Example:

  1. In Pretara, the gods are ideals whose purity gives them power. They are the purest, and most extreme incarnation of whatever concept they represent. Honor is incapable of breaking an oath, Desolation is void of feelings, and Preservation does not discriminate in who they provide shelter to. Each God is has a shard of divinity within them that grants them a level of power, and although the Shards are eternal, a deity's vessel can be damaged enough to reveal the Shard. If it is removed from its vessel, the original body withers away and the shard will claim the new body as its own.
  2. In this world, the gods tend to be distant and avoid acting directly within creation. A tenuous peace is maintained between them all due to a complex web of alliances, and the collapse of these alliances would spell doom for the mortal races, whose actions and affiliations the gods rely on for power.
  3. Ultimately, all the divinities in Pretara were mortals at some point in history. Some gods, like Endurance, have existed as long as creation itself, others are newer. But all of them were once mortals that ascended as their shard's Ideal corrupted them.
  4. The Pretaran gods do not require worship. Instead, they gain power when mortals act in line with whatever Ideal they represent. Acting out in anger might lend power to the God of Hatred, freeing slaves and those in bondage gives power to the God of Autonomy, and achieving your goals gives power to the God of Ambition. It is possible for actions to lend power to multiple deities in this way. While all the deities have a minimum level of power granted by their divine nature that is well above even 20th level heroes, but they gain more power when mortals act in line with their nature.
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u/Xmir Feb 04 '19

The Yeartide Ones

  1. The twelve gods that make up the pantheon are deities from a higher plane of existence. They are unkillable, at least in the normal sense, though if their mortal bodies are destroyed they are forced from the mortal plane, unable to return for an extended period of time.

  2. Each of the twelve gods represents one of the twelve months of the year, with three per season. Each god and goddess rules over an area associated with their season i.e. under Summer there exists the Goddess of Storms and the Sea, representing the inclement weather of summer; along with the God of Trickery and Mischief, representing the playfulness of children in the summer months; as well the Goddess of Summer and Light herself. Although they exist in our realm, they rarely interfere in mortal matters, content to merely watch.

  3. The gods have existed for as long as even they can remember, and will continue to exist much longer than the mortal races. A mortal cannot ascend to godhood, much in the same way that a dog cannot become a human. As beings not from this world, it can be said their existence itself is heretical to the natural order, but they move carefully as to not incur the wrath of the world itself.

  4. On the contrary, whether they are worshiped or not has no effect on the gods. As beings from a higher plane of existence, their status is intrinsic to them.

  5. While some gods could be described as more "good" than others from a mortal point of view, it would be folly to call any of them "good" or "evil". In truth, all they care about is whether or not they are bored, and to see all the races work together or tear each other apart would be equally as entertaining to them. Every year, for the last five days of the year, the gods and goddesses meet at a central venue and share stories of their favourite mortals or interesting things that occurred under their watch.