Hello all! As promised I am going to suggest how to get into more detailed and complex information about your home brew campaign world. Tuesday I put up the different categories of deities from my home brew continent of Atlazan. As you can see I am still having trouble copying and pasting from google docs without getting formatting errors. Hopefully I can figure that out soon, and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Anyway, you have had an idea or inspiration to make a campaign world. Hopefully you have begun asking yourself questions about the world, and upon answering them found more questions. Eventually the basic concepts and over-arching ideas lead you to have some more complex or specific questions about your world.
One that always came up for me in the past was the question of the pantheon. It's a common question, especially in systems like D&D where there are clerics and paladins. The answer for me and for many of the DMs I have played with, has been to use the deities of the rules system. Each edition of D&D comes with a set it describes and lays out for the players and dungeons master. Fifth edition gives you a little more freedom for a home brew campaign allowing you to pick a list of deities from various settings, and who is to say that campaign doesn't take place in one of those worlds?
With Atlazan, and with your much more in depth and self made home brew worlds, the idea of a pantheon is an important one to consider. But before we get into the steps for making the pantheon lets get to the consideration presented by the previous paragraph. Who says your campaign doesn't take place in one of the already made worlds? Before you commit yourself to making a pantheon consider using other pantheons. If you want to make your own, go for it, skip this part.
But, do you really need to? Does your setting suffer from not having a unique pantheon? In many instances it probably does not. There are a lot of things to cover in a full pantheon, and once you start making your own gods of this or that, then its hard to avoid going for full home grown, 100% gmo free pantheon. Consider using the system's pantheon, it matches the mechanics and is built into all the source books. Definitely the easiest thing to do. Also consider basing your pantheon off of existing, real-world pantheons. There is plenty of domain coverage, inter-deity drama, and stories about the Roman, Egyptian, and Norse gods just to name a couple. There is no reason not to use one or all of these. One of the major problems you may run into is if you plan on publishing. While I haven't done any myself, I have begun to look into it and the more one uses from the source game the more complicated publishing can be. Hell, try making an important NPC beholder integral to the setting and publishing it. Doesn't matter what system. WotC has intellectual rights to beholders, better get permission or make a knock-off beholder.
If you have decided to make your own pantheon from scratch, good for you! The following is what I went through, well what I am in the process of going through. All in all, the process for pantheons is the same as anything else in your campaign. As I just mentioned first consider your need and whether publishing may be a future problem and whether or not someone else's material fills that need already.
If you still need or want to make your own stuff, then you have to get into the nuts and bolts. Start looking at other examples. I have been pulling apart world mythology books. From demons to angels to anansi the trickster spider to obscure Egyptian goddesses, I have torn apart mythology. I have also used the mechanics of many D&D editions and settings as guides as well. Look at creating something like the pantheon as trying to build a forest. I know, strange, but bare with me. It should work as an analogy.
So, don't start by trying to say what animals live in the forest specifically. None needs to know theres one orange bird that lays its eggs in this one plant, if they don't know if the forest is made up of pine trees or jungle trees or what-have-you. Someone might but what will you tell them then. And what if that other lizard you make up contradicts that orange bird somehow later. No, start from the beginning. What kind of forest is it? Look to examples first. Is it full of unique birds, like New Zealand? Is it an arboreal forest? Is it mixed? Redwood? Petrified?
Overwhelming? Nah, keep with it. Decide what kind of gods (or whatever your looking to develop) your campaign world dictates or needs. For me, I needed the old gods worshiped before the coming of the Kai-rella. But then I also had heroes that may or may not have been gods by now. Liege wyrms too. The beast men worshipped demon lords, so some of those are probably important. Continuing on, I ended up making the categories you saw in the last post. If you're wondering why Elder Gods, well why not Cthulhu? It's a theme for my settings.
Broad categories are a great way to start. Cover what you want and what you've found you need. Are you leaving out anything that can't be covered by one of those categories? Is it immediately important? Will creating a new category later breakdown everything you have? If the answer is no, then you can continue! Work out what you need to make from each category. I am working on what each god represents. There are gods of love, war, beauty, thunder, sailors, and basically everything. I'll be putting the higher, base concepts in the realm of the old gods: death, life, sun, night, etc. New gods will be unique. The demon lords I have developed are specific to each race of beast men. Look back to the forests. Are there reptiles? Birds, mammals? Does winter happen? Forest fires? Lock in some of those categories and also make a list of what isn't, that can be important too.
Let's go back to needs again. You have a topic you're developing. You have made some broad categories based on your wants and needs for the world. Ideas for what are included are beginning to form and might even be made. Before you dive into the process of paragraphs and pages on each deity and making a deity for everything you can think of, go back to your examples. Do you have mammals in your forest? Ok, sure. Canines? Felines? Marsupials? Apes? Don't start describing each individual species of rat, tell me if there are even rats there first. Same with the gods. Make sure you cover the needs. Is the god of art unique? Do you need more that a name and symbol for him?
Can you see a pattern in this? Can you see a pattern in my previous articles? Look at things from a needs and have-time-for perspective. Use your time building things wisely, unless you have unlimited free time. Start vague (what kind of pantheon do you have) and move into specifics (tell me more about the demon lord of pestilence worshipped by the surikesh - that's mine don't take it!). Then move back out from specific (tell me about the church of the goddess of light and healing and her husband the god of war) to vague (name the rivals of these gods, a worshiping race, and a goal).
Maybe you have a mythical story about the betrayal of one god to another, and how a trickster was involved, and how that impacted mortals. Great! Write it down! These are in all myths, but you don't need that story for the game do you? Probably not. Remember that. For the world you need broad strokes working down to important details. On the campaign side you need detail working out to vague possibilities. The game is where you begin exploring everything in between. Time will fill it out. Ideas will come. Follow these basic principles for everything you do and you will have a rich world ready to be explored and continually developed for a long time to come.
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