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So, the only somewhat good forum I could find via Google for an all DnD purpose was the one from Wizards. But, they ask me for some pretty personal information and I just don't do that on a first date.

Which leads me back here. Got two questions for you people on Dakka playing DnD (not necessarily 3.5 I guess):
- What's a good forum form DnD? Similar to Dakka: not official but fan-based and just awesome.
- I'm toying around with building my own campaign (currently I'm a player, but the DM will get bored eventually he said and I'm willing to step in). Now, I have the Deities and Demigods book, which is kool. I'd like to create my own pantheon but there's something that's not quite clear to me. That is: how many Deities do you have to have at a minimum in a polytheistic pantheon? There's this bit where they explain that you have to make sure that every class character has to have the option of having at least the possibility of choosing one deity that has one part of the alignment in common with character and none that is completely opposed. Which leaves me at: wuh?

On the forum bit, I dunno really. We have semi-active regulars on this board, hopefully someone will point you somewhere nice

On the deities thing, I wouldn't worry about the rules. Make whatever deities fit your setting and feel free to add deities as you may need them. I'd have a look at various polytheistic religions past and present for inspiration. The Norse and Egyptian pantheons are popular general starting points. The basic D'n'D pantheon is quite good too if you adapt it and make it your own. Post your ideas, I'd be interested in hearing about your world. I tried running a world of my own creation once, and it was going alright, but I was so tired at the time I couldn't keep it up. On the whole I like setting books more, to give me easy adventure seeds and an imaginative springboard.

As far as forums go, enworld.org has a pretty active one. Though I don't really frequent it myself.

On the question of deities. A good starting point to work from is creating a deity to fill every slot of the alignment chart. That way it won't matter if a player is lawful good, chaotic evil, or anything in Between. They will be able to find a deity for their character to worship.

Thanks for the replies guys. 's Helpfull.

I'll see if I get around to writing anything down. If I do I'll post.

The main question you have to ask yourself is what you want the gods to mean to your players. Do they reperesent forces of nature (including magic and such), ideologies, concepts, or emotional complexes? You can even go into a more mysterious direction where the gods are just confusing ( much like real life religion where most theology just implies that there is something powerufl beyond imagination that has some sort of plan for us).

So just examples from different games

Natiure - Mystra, Goddesss of Magic (Forgotten Realms).

Concepts - Ares, God of War (Greek Mythology)

Ideology - Tyr, God of Justice (Forgotten Realms)

Emotional Complexes - Tzeentch (40k/Warhammer Fantasy) God of Ambition and Hope.

Mystery Gods - "God" (Monotheism) Cthulu (HP Lovercraft)

rpg.net and wizards.com are decent RPG sites.

On deities, you really only need as many as you want. I play in a semi-irregular game where the "real" deities of the land were cut off from the people, and so powerful quasi-deity "forces of nature" that inhabited the land started granting spells on their behalf. Most normal people didn't know about it. There was a Lawful Neutral one, a Chaotic Neutral, and a Lawful Good one. There were probably others (and the Chaotic Neutral was slipping down a dark road very quickly), but those were what I was personally aware of.

My advice is not to build one for each alignment. Decide how you want your deities to work, and what would make for good deities, and then make the system fit them, not the other way around. Don't have anything for Neutral Good? Have the Lawful Good deity also cover the Neutral Good one. Only have three deities total? No problem, just have them operate on only the moral or ethical axis. Maybe that stuff just works differently in your world. You could maybe even go so far as to make the axis that the deities don't represent be undetectable through magic, similar to Ravenloft. You should never compromise story for mechanics.

Cheesecat wrote:rpg.net and wizards.com are decent RPG sites.

I don't think wizards.com actively supports D&D 3.5 anymore. RPG.net and enworld.org are two very well established and quality sites that cater to all RPGs but have lots of D&D 3.5 specific stuff.

Thom wrote: I'm toying around with building my own campaign (currently I'm a player, but the DM will get bored eventually he said and I'm willing to step in). Now, I have the Deities and Demigods book, which is kool. I'd like to create my own pantheon but there's something that's not quite clear to me. That is: how many Deities do you have to have at a minimum in a polytheistic pantheon? There's this bit where they explain that you have to make sure that every class character has to have the option of having at least the possibility of choosing one deity that has one part of the alignment in common with character and none that is completely opposed. Which leaves me at: wuh?

Creating your own pantheon can be one of the most frustrating and one of the most rewarding aspects of creating a campaign world. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the rules say, do what you want. The rules are merely suggesting that you make sure that every class has a deity they can pick that matches at least part of their alignment, but isn't opposed. So a chaotic good fighter and a chaotic evil barbarian could both follow a deity that is chaotic neutral, but neither would follow a deity that is lawful in anyway nor would they follow a deity that is Evil or Good respectively. You really do have the sky as the limit, though. You can be as thorough or as limited as you like. I've played and run campaigns that cover ther gamut, some had Gods literally for *everything*, while others were similar to today where you had some major religions and each worshipped a single deity thought to really be the one true God of all.

First decision is: do you want monotheistic societies or pantheistic or a mixture of both? The greeks, romans and egyptians were all worshipping their many gods while the hebrews and christians were only worshipping their single God, so they are not mutually exclusive. Many pantheistic faiths have a lot of good and neutral deities, but only a handful or even one major evil deity. Some campaign worlds, like Dragonlance look more towards balance and have an equal number of deities for good, evil and neutrality.

Literally the sky is the limit on such an undertaking. You can go as crazy or as simple as you want. I say make everyone worship Banjo the Clown or they are persecuted unto death.

Skriker

Also consider if the gods are going to be passive observers, constant power sources for antagonists, or direct opposition.. And what your players are expecting.

Balance wrote:Also consider if the gods are going to be passive observers, constant power sources for antagonists, or direct opposition.. And what your players are expecting.

Very good point balance. Everyone does have different expectations from deities in games...

Skriker

I promised to get back to this topic and, while I work slow, hut here are the results of my initial brainfarts:

The idea is to have all the gods have at least one neutral part in their alignment. I actually wanted to do away with good and evil alignments, but I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics of the game to know whether or not that would break the system completely.

The campaign, if it is ever started, will start at a time of (civil)war. The clergy (or part of the clergy) tells the people and those in power it's the time of the completion of Viruch's birth or emergence or whatever that's called when it concerns a god. Time to pick sides. The prophesized battle between Sol and Viruch is somewhat of a war between magic and technology - divine rule and raw, mechanical power... But I have yet to figure out the specifics.

As a, somewhat, nice image (I think). Imagine a big tree on a court in front of a temple, where sea and land meet. It's the classic "tree of life" thing, symbol of Sol. Over the years, centuries, or eons, a climbing vineplant has started to grow in coils around the stem of this tree - slowly suffocating it by stealing the tree's life force.

Blah, as I said: initial brainfarts.

creation myth thing
When this world was still young it was surrounded by darkness. For the Sun – Sol, who was the world's soul, was barred from looking upon its body, Zaedeche, directly with his burning gaze. Instead, Sol could only see the body by taking upon himself the reflective guise of Maena and, so, mitigate the intensity of the soul's eye.

In the darkness of night these gods, restless children still, whispered the conversations that produced our world, with the plants and the animals, our people and our enemies. But Sol longed for more than the dimmed perspective of the Moon and a voice talking to him behind his back. He wished to witness the body that produced the voice of Zeideche. He wished to touch it and feel the warmth of true affection that is the intimacy of love.

Thus came the moment that Sol threw off the veils that made him Maena, to turn around and embrace his body with a smile. It was the first dawn.

Sol's burning gaze enlightened the body Zaedeche and the light tore it asunder in that very instant. Thus the Sea and the Ground came to be separated; within the regular disturbance of Zaed's waves Time emerged; the trembling solidity of Eche's earth founded Being henceforth.

In the interstice of these two newly emerging bodies Aerios was born out of divine blood and mucus, that mingled with breaker waves and rocky shores. She brought Love and Strife with her into the world.

Aerios' touch instilled into her parents the yearning of love – a longing to be united. Water and land mingled into mud – the seed of Zead's sea impregnated Eche's fertile ground.

Enraged at the sight of the coupling of his object of desire, Sol strove to keep the lovers separated. As Maena, the Moon, he cast the reflection of Eche. In this form he seduced Zaed and every night, from that that moment on, the Sea is lead astray from its significant other, the Earth. Each day, as the Moon gives way to the Sun, Eche beckons Zaed to come closer. And each day, just before dust sets in, the couple is united for a few precious moments.

Aerios, having denied him his heart's desire, was ravaged by Sol's revenge. She bore him a daughter, Peaerol, who came into the world and brought with her Laughter – for she had Knowledge of both the darkest corner of the soul and the body's most well kept secrets.

Peaerol, witnessing the Triangle's eternal dance of love and jealousy, smiled and prophesied the birth of her uncle, Viruch, to her father: conceived slowly and discretely under the light of day, he will one day strangle the need for a Soul in our world.


Sol and Maena
Sol
Alignment: Neutral Good
Portfolio: air, art, creation, commerce, crafts, day, distance, drama, envy, fire, good, hate, life, light, merchants, nobility, plant, rage, retribution, sight, sky, soul, spring, sun, trees, vice, wealth, wines
Worshipers:
Domain: Air, Fire, Good, Plant, Sun

Maena
Alignment: Neutral
Portfolio: air, balance, cold, darkness, discord, distance, grief, illusion, intrigue, lies, magic, mirrors, moon, nature, night, seasons, sleep, spies, thunder, trickery, undead, vanity, weather, wind, zeal
Worshipers:
Domain: Air, Magic, Trickery

Zaed and Eche
Eche
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Portfolio: abundance, agriculture, being, body, childbirth, earth, endurance, fertility, flora and fauna, ground, harvest, hearth, home, honor, law, mining, mountains, nature, stone, strength, territory, trust, wilderness, woodlands
Worshipers:
Domain: Animal, Earth, Law, Plant, Strength

Zaed
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Portfolio: adventure, body, chaos, courage, daring, destruction, earthquakes, exploration, freedom, gambling, grief, horizons, journeys, loyalty, mercy, nature, protection, rain, rivers, roads, sea, storms, swiftness, weather, wetlands, travel, water
Worshipers:
Domain: Chaos, Destruction, Protection, Travel, Water


Aerios[i]
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Portfolio: beauty, birth, conflict, conquest, evil, destruction, healing, killing, life, love, madness, medicine, passion, protection, strife, valor, war
Worshipers:
Domain: Evil, Destruction, Healing, Protection, War

[i]Peaerol
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Portfolio: arcane knowledge, chaos, communication, dance, foresight, hearing, honesty, illusion, knowledge, laughter, lies, luck, music, poetry, secrets, theater, trickery, wisdom, wit, victory, writing
Worshipers:
Domain: Chaos, Knowledge, Luck, Trickery

Viruch
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Portfolio:arts and crafts, common sense, death, discipline, disease, engineering, fate, fitness, insects, judgment, knowledge, law, learning, murder, nature, planning, rebirth, truth, tyranny, vengeance, vines,
Worshipers:
Domain: Animal, Death, Knowledge, Law, Plant

3.5 has a few spells and powers that key off Good and Evil. Paladins would suck without Evil to detect and Smite, for example.

You'd need to house-rule that, unless you're flat-out banning Paladins.

As Balance said, there are a lot of spells and a fair number of special abilities and magical effects which key off of alignment in 3rd edition D&D.

Even if removing alignment, Paladins can still work if you tweak them a little. For example, you can make Smite Evil work against any creature attacking the Paladin or an innocent person. This is more broadly-applicable but it's a limited ability anyway. I've seen a lot of campaigns which altered Detect Evil to instead be Detect Evil Intent, so it wasn't just a "bad guy detector". So it only works on someone who's actively engaged in a harmful/evil action, or some supernatural evil force.

Lawful
Neutral
Chaotic
Evil
Neutral
Good

A simple formula would be 9 dieties one covering each combination of alignment possible. Then comes the issue of races and natural forces. For instance do you want a CE diety that all of CE ilk serve or do you want a separate Goblin and/or Ork diety? Do you want a CG diety that all serve or a separate one for Elves? Do you want a nature diety or have a NN diety of the elements that just so happens is the diety of all druids?

@Thom, you have a very interesting and powerful cosmology there. Good job. I've been DMing for more than 25 years and I always start my campaign worlds with the pantheon.

I like that your creation story reads like a . . . well an actual creation story. Great job and I think you have enough deities to start and enough flexibility to add more later if your need it.

Good Luck!