Designing a Pantheon: Just Do It, Already!

Title chosen a little facetiously, because I was having trouble coming up with a relevant title starting with ‘J’…

… and yet not totally so, because I’ve spent more than a week on laying groundwork without actually describing any of the deities. Time to knock that off and get to work.

Faction 4: Hamark Heroes

I’m going to start with the deities of faction 4, for the simple reason that it’s a small faction. After I started digging into it, it became very clear to me why this is a small faction.

  • Leaders
    • Deity 2: Liberation, Magic, Chaos, Darkness.
    • Deity L: Darkness, Liberation, Artifice, Nobility, Travel, Rune
  • Members
    • Deity 9: Madness, Evil, Law, Air

The core of this faction is a mixed. The leaders both have Liberation and Darkness domains, but the sole non-leader member has Madness, Evil, and Law.

I’m going to write these up as their ‘paragon followers’, their mortal ideals. I can come back to make them ‘more divine’, but right now my brain insists on how they interact in the real world.

This is because we are off to a weird start. I’m not even going to try to hide my inspiration here. We’re headed to Bat Country.

Lady Wainbruce inherited the wealth of her industrialist forebears. Entranced by the freedom of the night and to atone for the sins of her ancestors, she works to relieve the oppression of the masses. For reasons to be determined, she cannot do so openly, she has to work in secrecy… perhaps the industries she inherited are critical to society, perhaps she reasons she can reduce or mitigate the harm they do. I’m thinking the religion has hidden shrines, underground railroads, the whole deal.

Her closest follower actually is the more visible one. Where Lady Wainbruce works from the shadows, Ash Rickson strives in the night as Moonsilver, an arcane anarchist whose activities disrupt the industry of those who would inflict their will on others. Even more than he frees their bodies from oppression, he breaks the shackles on their minds so they can see the world they live in and join the revolution.

Their ally is Jerem Valske, jester of the king’s court. Wainbruce and Rickson are driven by their ideals for a better world, Valske is a consummate schemer and actor who is driven to use the hypocrisy of the court to lead to its self-destruction. While they may not be comfortable with how he works, Wainbruce and Rickson recognize that Valske is a sincere, if not entirely reliable, ally in the greater struggle.

Closing Comments

I honestly had no idea when I started writing this post that I would end up here. I’m somewhere between startled and shocked.

But yet, not dismayed. Part of the power of the techniques I’m using is that it takes me places I didn’t plan to go.

If this ends up with a pantheon built around a superhero world, that’s okay by me. Let’s see where this goes.

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