Revisiting a topic I’ve written about previously gives me an opportunity to reread older posts. In this case, I’ve written a fair bit of material that’s worth revisiting. The posts from the 2021 A-Z blog challenge show a lot of my thinking, a fair bit of how I thought things would work, but not so much actually doing it.
Time to fix that. I’ll be reviewing and integrating content from the first try, and then applying the ideas and processes applied.
In the process, I expect there will be some changes. Some will be refinements, there may be complete reframing and rebuilding.
This is okay. As GreyKnight pointed out years ago, things don’t always go as expected… and most of the time when that happens, I’m either okay with or pleased by it.
To make my life easier, and for those interested in the 2021 material, the list below contains all 24 posts from the first run.
| Original Post | Description |
| A-Z 2021: Divine Trappings | Introduction to the post series. I don’t see much to change here. |
| Divine Trappings: Anatomy of a God | Elements I would include when writing up a deity. Starts with my Entity Template, but goes into other elements I’ll want to include in my Domain Trappings template. |
| Divine Trappings: Aspects of a Domain | … naturally, the next post expands on the previous one to show how it all fits together. I’ll review and possibly post an updated version. |
| Divine Trappings: Building a Pantheon | I started creating a new pantheon, to give myself something to build toward or use as examples. I ended up not using this very much. |
| Divine Trappings: Covenants | Mining Classic Play: Book of Immortals for ‘covenants’: CPBoI described covenants, agreements relating to each domain, that are a great fit and source material for dogma and tenets for this work. |
| Divine Trappings: Domain Tables | Presents of table of cleric domains from the Pathfinder RPG 1e (33 from the CRB, 2 more from later books), and both 1pp and 3pp subdomains. Includes also a table of third-party domains, and a table of druid domains. |
| Divine Trappings: Exposing the Truth | First draft of trappings for the Air domain. |
| Divine Trappings: Flirting with Disaster | In Building a Pantheon I identified 32 deities, 6 of which have the Destruction domain. Here, I explore how that interacts with their other domains to see what the deities might look like. |
| Divine Trappings: God, Goddess, or Something Else? | In Polyhedral Pantheons I randomized deity gender. 7/16 were male, 7/16 were female, 1/8 were… not as simple. Here, I describe the 9 non-binary deities. |
| Divine Trappings: Heralds, Allies, and Summons | The base lists for summoning and calling spells are okay, but I’ve always liked casters having distinct list. This post talks about what that might look like for different deities. |
| Divine Trappings: Inventing Artifacts | Deities are some of the primary causes of artifacts, and I’ll want to reflect that in this work. In this post I look at how different sources have approached the idea. |
| Divine Trappings: Jumping Back | A quick survey of how deities were described, and to a lesser degree their mechanical elements, in various editions of D&D (including Pathfinder 1e). |
| Divine Trappings: King of the Gods | This is where I had the idea to calculate a deity’s rank within the pantheon, based on how well the deity’s domains reflect the interests of the pantheon. Definitely need to bring this in. |
| Divine Trappings: Look Again! Elves! | The previous post (King of the Gods) assigned weights to a ‘dwarven pantheon’, this post does the same with an ‘elven pantheon’… process seems to still work. |
| Divine Trappings: Mistakes Were Made | Somehow, despite giving Law domain extra weight in the ‘dwarven pantheon’, I completely forgot to assign that domain… and yet, it still works. |
| Divine Trappings: Naming Deities | A brief discussion of how I name deities (a mix of random tables and thematic google-assisted translation). |
| Divine Trappings: Obediences | Worship and rituals are pretty abstracted in most games, but since the entire point of this work is to give flavor, this post talks about how this could look. |
| Divine Trappings: Polyhedral Pantheon Workbook Update | Some refinements I made to the Polyhedral Pantheons workbook: data validation, alignment ‘calculation’, and weight calculation (per King of the Gods). |
| Divine Trappings: Quests and Trials | A deity may require their followers to do things, but what those things are and why can vary quite a bit. |
| Divine Trappings: Rites and Rituals | Religions have many rituals, and rituals in D&D/Pathfinder can be like very specific-purpose spells castable by non-casters. What’s not to love? |
| Divine Trappings: SMART Goals vs Weak Purpose | Goals are achievable, but a deity’s purpose might not be… and yet, the deity is undeterred. |
| Divine Trappings: Temples and Holy Places | A deity’s nature likely influences the places a deity holds holy. |
| Divine Trappings: Unexpected Oversight | Despite how much time I’ve spent gathering content for the Echelon Reference Series, I sometimes forget about specific books that will help. |
| Divine Trappings: Visions and Portents | Even when not omniscient, deities often should know more about their portfolios and areas of interest than would otherwise be expected. |
Worth remembering basically everything linked in the Polyhedral Pantheons page in my Hall of Fame. A fair bit is specifically about the processes and whatnot, but there are other pages in there that show how it was applied.
Also, the Patrons of Low Fantasy work… it’s got a lot more examples of patrons (not quite the same as deities) but some of the thematic elements (Hungers of a Patron, Gaining Favor of Patrons, Missions from Grod, etc.) are aligned with this work.