Creating pantheons has always been an interest of mine, to the point I wrote a book about creating pantheons. I’ve got another one in the works about developing deities based on their domains. In fact, Divine Trappings has been the subject of my A-Z 2021 and A-Z 2024 blog challenges… there’s a lot of work here!
These have always assumed deities are remote, looking upon the mortal realm from another plane… if I thought of it at all. That’s kind of the D&D common assumption, in my experience.
And yet, I’ve always had a thing for small gods… the intended topic of my A-Z 2025 Blog Challenge, except I got sidetracked by finally realizing how to automate a lot of the diagrams for the Echelon Reference Series. I’ve explored the idea using Pathfinder 1e (mythic rules, slightly tweaked, can do a lot of the heavy lifting here), and patrons can do a lot for Low Fantasy Gaming. (I really do need to get back to this one…)
This new campaign probably should have deities of one form or another, or consciously decide (consciously deicide?) not to… but I have an urge to do something different.
You see, I’ve been reading Sine Nomine’s Silent Legions, by Kevin Crawford. This is an old school Lovecraft mythos-inspired rules set for the modern day… but the tools in it can be bent to my purpose. Specifically, the section on mythos creation feels made for my purpose here, devising weird gods whose agents walk the land: cults, prophets, distinct and unique new monsters. The tag and adventure template concepts also can work to my advantage here.
I don’t know that I’ll go quite as far as typical Lovecraft mythos settings. I’m not necessarily interested in the whole madness thing.
On the other hand, if we’re playing Fantasy AGE there is the Cthulhu Awakens rules set, I’m sure I could kitbash them together.
What does this mean for the setting and the player characters? I can think of a few things.
First, I want to play up ‘cults’. They are (mechanically) almost certainly a type of faction, and I want to flesh them out to make them more distinct. This is one of the drivers behind Divine Trappings, but where that concept is based mostly on a deity’s domains, I want to make them specifically more weird. Silent Legions certainly has tools for this, as does Tome of Adventure Design. Not only do mythos deities have cults, but religions in many RPGs (especially D&D) seem to be closer to cults than real world pantheistic religions are. I want to bring this out.
Second, even as alien as mythos deities are, and how hidden they are from most people, mythos deities are present in this world. They might not be present often. Cthulhu slumbers in R’lyeh most of the time, many other mythos deities and creatures are almost as hard to reach, but they are here. However, they are here. This leans into the small gods idea, and I want to explore this some more. Yes, in Pathfinder 1e the mythic rules can do a lot of the heavy lifting mechanically, but I want to weird them up some more. Mechanically the small god of a river might be a mythic water elemental and the small god of a swamp might be a mythic black dragon, but they need something to make them stand out as somehow weirder than that. Again, Silent Legions and Tome of Magic both have tools that can help.
Third, if deities are present in the world and can be dealt with at all, I need to know what that looks like. The basic mad cultist can work, but I wonder if there is another way. Can we have, in addition to the regular cultists and priests and whatnot of dedicated religions, a type of character who knows how to call upon the powers (or at least, propitiate) many deities, be they regular or mythos? I think we can. They are likely uncommon — if deities are as capricious as I feel they might be, incautious god speakers might find themselves excised from reality rather abruptly — but still they could exist. That existence might be a little precarious, is all.
Although… I am reminded of my abortive Seekers of Lore campaign, which was predicated on finding and establishing contact with lost entities. This included deities, and very specifically I envisioned PCs and other seekers of lore being connected to more than one deity each. Perhaps the god speakers are not as uncommon as I might assume. I expect they still would need to treat with deities cautiously, but it could be workable.
For that matter, I remember reading of ‘magical grimoires’ of our own world that included the names of gods and demons a practioner might all on. In our world, magical belief often didn’t follow the same arcane/divine split we see in many roleplaying games — church witch hunts and the like notwithstanding.
This bears further consideration. Another night!