Polyhedral Pantheons: Pathfinder Edition

The Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design technique still has a couple difficulties, though.

First, if you use only the Revised System Reference Document (RSRD) you don’t have enough domains.  The RSRD includes 22 domains — slightly more than needed if you don’t want the gods to have personal domains, but not enough to cover the shared domains and the personal domains (32 needed).  This was mitigated at the time I wrote the original article by the volume of domains available from third party publishers, of course, but that can mean a lot of additional work to track down the additional domains and evaluate them.

Second, while it is something of a good thing that each domain is shared by multiple gods, they are shared in pairs.  That is, if three gods share the Magic domain, two of them will also share the Knowledge domain, two of them will also share the Destruction domain, and two will share the Law domain.  While some coherency and similarity is good, this starts to feel too homogeneous to me.

Pathfinder helps with the first, and both if you use the Advanced Player’s Guide.

Pathfinder Domains and Subdomains

Pathfinder helps in a couple of ways.  There are 33 domains, one more than needed to use this technique fully.  They are designed by the same team, so there is reason to think they will be comparable in quality (third-party materials have varied widely).  Also, the Advanced Player’s Guide presents subdomains — each of the main domains has two or more subdomains that change the spells and domain powers.  Some subdomains are even shared between domains (the Demon subdomain is associated with both the Chaos and Evil domains).

For the most part, though, this means that for each domain used there are at least three ‘actual domains’ that might be selected from that can change the interpretation or application of the primary domain.  This helps provide some more mechanical differentiation between clerics of different gods.

At the same time, it causes there to be greater coherence in the followers of a particular god.  It will be possible to predict with some accuracy the spells that might be known by all followers of a particular god (if they are high enough level to know them), while not strictly restricting them to these spells.  Overall I think this is a good direction.

Domain	Subdomains
Air	Cloud, Wind
Animal	Feather, Fur
Artifice	Construct, Toil
Chaos	Azata, Demon, Protean
Charm	Love, Lust
Community	Family, Home
Darkness	Loss, Night
Death	Murder, Undead
Destruction	Catastrophe, Rage
Earth	Caves, Metal
Evil	Daemon, Demon, Devil
Fire	Ash, Smoke
Glory	Heroism, Honor
Good	Angel, Archon, Azata
Healing	Restoration, Resurrection
Knowledge	Memory, Thought
Law	Archon, Devil, Inevitable
Liberation	Freedom, Revolution
Luck	Curse, Fate
Madness	Insanity, Nightmare
Magic	Arcane, Divine
Nobility	Leadership, Martyr
Plant	Decay, Growth
Protection	Defense, Purity
Repose	Ancestors, Souls
Rune	Language, Wards
Strength	Ferocity, Resolve
Sun	Day, Light
Travel	Exploration, Trade
Trickery	Deception, Thievery
War	Blood, Tactics
Water	Ice, Oceans
Weather	Seasons, Storms

Closing Comments

It’s getting late and I’ve got work to do in the morning, so I’ll stop here for now.  Tomorrow I’ll write up an example showing how this might actually be applied in practice.