I have basically two primary methods of naming deities. One is random selection, the other is thematically guided. The one I use is determined by my expectations and plans when I start. Since I often don’t know what those plans are and have no expectations, I fall back on my …
Well, one mistake at least. In King of the Gods, I looked at the new pantheon I’m building “as if it were a dwarven pantheon”. The purpose of that post was to show how it’s possible to determine relative positions in the divine hierarchy by weighting domains linked to concepts …
I made a dwarven pantheon in my last post by taking the new pantheon I’m building and assigning a weight to each domain. This let me calculate a value for each deity so I could determine the deity’s grade (demi-god, lesser, intermediate, greater). It worked out pretty well, I think, …
Deities in Dungeons & Dragons have, for decades, come in four grades: demi-god, lesser, intermediate, and greater. These are a measure of the relative power of the deities, and of their position in the pantheon. Is there a way to build this into developing a new pantheon? If the pantheon …
A little epiphany last night — Dungeons & Dragons 4e magic items and artifacts look like a very good model for these things — caused me to want to reexamine some of my assumptions or memories of other editions. In this post I do a little more rigorous examination of …
When I was a kid, one of the most exciting bits in the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide was the section on artifacts. It was some combination of “customizable magic items” and “magic items with mixed effects” and “this part of the book makes sense, the rest doesn’t”. What can …
I have always liked the Role Aids line from Mayfair Games. With the exception of a few issues of White Dwarf magazine, for quite some time they were the only non-TSR publisher of material for Dungeons & Dragons I knew of (I hadn’t heard of Judges Guild yet). The content …
When I wrote Polyhedral Pantheons I wanted to avoid gender assumptions: any particular deity of Healing might be male or female, or… maybe neither, or both. It worked out well, and I’ll apply the same technique here. The deity genders were assigned randomly. No table, but not quite a coin …
The last few posts have mentioned how a deity’s domains could interact with each other, changing the interpretation of the deity. Let’s see how that works, looking at the Destruction domain. This is unrehearsed and live, so I can’t predict how it will end up. From the worksheet in Building …
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most commonly-known bits of writing advice, for a reason. There is little point to things known only to the author (or in my case, world builder or game master). If I create something only I ever see, it’s little more than an exercise …
