Divine Trappings: Building a Pantheon

One of the more visited topics on my site has to do with Polyhedral Pantheons, a book I wrote a few years ago that provides a simple process for building a pantheon… at least as far as the “assign domains, alignments, and favored weapons to deities” stage.

Divine Trappings is something of a sequel to that book, and is more about how to flesh out the deities in more detail. I’ve described the Anatomy of a God and the Aspects of a Domain yesterday, here I start building a new pantheon to demonstrate the rest of the process.

Polyhedral Pantheon

Often when people devise a pantheon for their campaign, they have some idea of what sorts of deities they way.

I don’t, except that I want to use almost all the core domains from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. There are 34 in total, and an icosahedron has 32 faces and points, so that’s a pretty good fit.

After that, let’s start with a more or less random domain assignment. I shuffled the cards (literally; I made a deck of cards to help with this) and after a couple of tweaks (described below) ended up with the following assignments.

Node	Deity Name	Alignment	Primary	Secondary Domains (and Subdomains)
1		Chaotic Neutral	Sun	Chaos, Weather, Repose
2			War	Community, Luck, Knowledge
3		Chaotic Neutral	Magic	Chaos, Trickery, Water
4			Plant	Artifice, Liberation, Knowledge
5			Travel	Weather, Artifice, Community
6		Neutral Good	Darkness	Trickery, Liberation, Good
7		Chaotic Evil	Evil	Chaos, Weather, Destruction
8		Neutral Good	Protection	Water, Luck, Good
9			Madness	Repose, Trickery, Liberation
10			Death	Destruction, Water, Luck
11			Healing	Repose, Artifice, Liberation
12			Strength	Destruction, Community, Luck
13			Void	Weather, Repose, Artifice
14		Neutral Good	Nobility	Liberation, Good, Knowledge
15			Rune	Weather, Destruction, Community
16		Neutral Good	Animal	Trickery, Water, Good
17		Chaotic Neutral	Earth	Chaos, Destruction, Water
18			Glory	Artifice, Community, Knowledge
19		Chaotic Neutral	Fire	Chaos, Repose, Trickery
20		Neutral Good	Air	Luck, Good, Knowledge
A		Chaotic Evil	Chaos	Sun, Magic, Evil, Earth, Fire
B		Neutral Evil	Weather	Sun, Travel, Evil, Void, Rune
C			Repose	Sun, Madness, Healing, Void, Fire
D		Neutral Evil	Destruction	Evil, Death, Strength, Rune, Earth
E			Trickery	Magic, Darkness, Madness, Animal, Fire
F			Water	Magic, Protection, Death, Animal, Earth
G			Artifice	Plant, Travel, Healing, Void, Glory
H			Community	War, Travel, Strength, Rune, Glory
I			Liberation	Plant, Darkness, Madness, Healing, Nobility
J			Luck	War, Protection, Death, Strength, Air
K	Cestelline	Neutral Good	Good	Darkness (Moon), Protection, Nobility, Animal, Air
L			Knowledge	War, Plant, Nobility, Glory, Air

I made two adjustments to the assignments.

• Air and Law were not present. While I like the idea of a Lawless pantheon (having Chaos but not Law suggests a wilder society), I wanted to make sure I had all the elements. I swapped out Charm for Air.
• I wanted to make sure I had a place for Cestelline, so I swapped a couple of domains to make sure I had Good, Darkness, and Protection together. This means Cestelline has also Nobility, Animal, and Air, and I don’t see why that can’t work.

There are some funky combinations above, and they’re combinations I never would have thought of.

That is totally okay. I can see some shape to them…

• (Nobility, Liberation, Good, Knowledge) says something about heroic vigilante students… so romantic!
• (Trickery, Magic, Darkness, Madness, Animal, Fire)… I don’t know exactly what it means, but I have images of skin-clad followers performing wild ceremonies around bonfires. I can work with this.
• (Destruction, Evil, Death, Strength, Rune, Earth) is, at least for the first three or four, a cliché. It might help ground people who find the rest are a bit out there, though, so I’ll leave it for now.
• (Air, Luck, Good, Knowledge) feels like something that should be workable.

And so on. In almost every set I see above, there are usually two or three domains that fit well together, and even if the rest don’t exactly fit, they are not so contradictory that they can’t be lesser aspects of the deity.

Speaking of aspects, I expect to find that as I build my library of domain aspects that I’ll be able to put together something that works.

Closing Comments

With the sole exception of Cestelline, I had no specific plans for the pantheon, and even with Cesteilline I know only that I wanted her to have Darkness (for the Moon subdomain), Protection, and probably Good.

Only twelve of the thirty-two deities are aligned, or at least have alignment domains: Six NG, two NE, two CE, two CN. This could get interesting.

As for the other domain assignments, they mostly look like something I can make sense of… and I’m interested and excited to see what I come up with for the ones that I don’t yet have ideas for.

Later posts will update the information in the table as I flesh things out