Dungeon Fantasy Pantheons

[LoneWolf23k]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Because I own Green Ronin's "The Book of the Righteous", I'll be happily using the pantheon and general history and cosmology presented therin for my campaign. It's 300+ pages of fluff, with very little D20 material in it, and I bought it for just such a purpose ;)

I'm curious why you've decided to rename and rework the greco-roman gods, rather than mostly stealing them whole-cloth... but I'm a bit lazy when it comes to my game-worlds religions.

That's what I was thinking as well. 'Book of the Righteous' has one of the best, fully fleshed-out fantasy pantheons I've ever seen. It's definetly GURPS-worthy. The standard Cleric and Holy Warrior templates could cover the basics, with the addition of lenses for specific deities. After all, while an Officer of Maal, a Hero of Darmon and a Mage Guard of Tinel are all Holy Warriors and share some basic abilities, they each have different specific traits.

It deserves a bit of thinking.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Kromm

• nonhuman races (37 of them, if I counted right, with notes on how to afford them if you're using character templates, as well as asides on wings, scaled-down gear, and legitimizing reaction penalties as racial disads in a game with little social context*)

...

* Yes, I kept social disads in the end. As I was trashing them, I thought, "What would dungeon fantasy be if you couldn't use Charisma as a dump stat? What would dungeon fantasy be if it didn't then race to invent dumb way to make Charisma useful after all?" Those who hate it are welcome to charge an extra 20 points or so for "monster races."

I've noticed all the way through DF 2 the reminder that you CAN negotiate or bribe your way past dungeon encounters... this of course is very hard to do when one or more party members has a -8 to -12 reaction penalty :D

Having played a "monster race" PC for a long time (admitedly in a rather odd D&D game), it's definitely an inconvenience. Not as much as it would be in a "straight" game, but it's still there.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Given that I'm doing the final edit, I don't think that anything will be dropped, so I can rattle it off:

• nonhuman races (37 of them

Hm, at first "glance" 37 nonhuman races seems a lot, maybe even too many... I hope there will be space in the scarce 31-32 pages of the PDF for other cool and varied stuff.

[vitruvian]

I'm curious why you've decided to rename and rework the greco-roman gods, rather than mostly stealing them whole-cloth... but I'm a bit lazy when it comes to my game-worlds religions.

Well, I suppose that I could have gone the Deities and Demigods route of using various real pantheons in a mish-mash sort of way, but I was figuring on changing certain aspects of them and wanted different names so that it wouldn't stand out to anybody who knew, say, Norse and Greek mythology. So, I had a little bit of fun looking up alternate names and epithets for the Olympians, changing some aspects, conflating others, changing the myths around a little bit (so that, for example, Eulothereia - Liberty - is known by that name because she entered the Underworld to rescue her brother Aethon out of darkness).

I could have gone another way, I suppose, looking more to practical campaign roles. One could split the gods into a Pantheon of Light, granting clerical spells, and a Pantheon of Nature Gods, granting druidic spells.

In the first case, one could posit a deity of either gender for each of the following portfolios - Healing, Light, Knowledge, War (including most buffs and protections), and perhaps Justice or Boundaries (to deal with the non-light spiritual warfare spells). In the second, you could have deity of the Forest, of Beasts, of Fertility, of each of the Elements, and either corresponding to Air or separately, of Storm. This would not only correspond to the spell lists, but also suggest temples of healing, of learning, of training in knightly arts, and of justice and law; groves in veneration to the forest god(s), granges devoted to bringing in the crop, wells where fertility is prayed for, and hills and mountaintops where the storm gods are appeased.

One could also posit a patron god for each template; so there would be a god of barbarians (just don't call him Crom), of bards and music, a primary god of light honored by clerics, a singular god of nature (Pan?) honored by the druids, a patron saint of holy warriors, a war god or saint followed by knights, a god or bodhisvatti that is patron to all the monasteries and schools of martial artists, a god of archery and the woods that is patron to scouts, a saint of the sword for swashbucklers, a god of thieves, and a god of magic. Some of these could be joined; there's no reason that the god or saint of holy warriors couldn't be the same one followed by simpler knights, or that druids and scouts couldn't reference the same wood god. You'd probably also want other patron gods for professions that don't translate into adventuring templates as well, so a god of merchants and a god of smiths, and many gods for farmers.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by demonsbane

Hm, at first "glance" 37 nonhuman races seems a lot, maybe even too many... I hope there will be space in the scarce 31-32 pages of the PDF for other cool and varied stuff.

My bet is that they do double duty as 20-30 monsters ;)

My second bet is that they won't have long racial descriptions, a la Fantasy Folk. Instead they probably get a (short) paragraph, suitable for a GM to spin a description and culture off of, but basically having very few "cannonical" details.

Like the AD&D monster manual, really.

[Darkness]

Originally Posted by demonsbane

Hm, at first "glance" 37 nonhuman races seems a lot, maybe even too many... I hope there will be space in the scarce 31-32 pages of the PDF for other cool and varied stuff.

Well, races don't necessarily have to take up much space. For example, the Basic Set manages to fit 3 races on slightly less than half of page 261.

[quarkstomper]

I once tried coming up with an original pantheon for a fantasy campaign I ran with my wife. I decided I wanted twelve deities and I divided them into four for the four elements, (earth, air, fire & water); four for the four main races, (humans, elves, dwarves and "monsters"; I felt it important that the orcs and kobolds and dragons have a god as well); and four representing some important abstract concepts; (love, death, justice... and I forget the fourth). Then there was also a thirteenth god of Magic, who had been expelled from the pantheon in the remote past. Gotta have a bad guy in there someplace!

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Bruno

My bet is that they do double duty as 20-30 monsters ;)

Let's just say some of them wouldn't be good dinner guests. Unless you're actually having the elves over for dinner. "Og like elf. Good with mint. Must be green elf."

Originally Posted by Bruno

My second bet is that they won't have long racial descriptions, a la Fantasy Folk.

Good bet. The descriptions are there to set the tone, not to tell you how to play your character. They're about as detailed as the ones with the sample monsters in DF 2.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by demonsbane

Hm, at first "glance" 37 nonhuman races seems a lot, maybe even too many... I hope there will be space in the scarce 31-32 pages of the PDF for other cool and varied stuff.

Well, you've seen the list: 110 lenses for character templates, various new advantages, advancement options, etc. It's purely about characters -- not items or traps or dungeon design -- but it's lots of different sides of characters. Not to put down my own work, but it's basically all the crud that the GM would need to take weeks out to prepare so that his players could each use 4% of it.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

(...) Then there was also a thirteenth god of Magic, who had been expelled from the pantheon in the remote past. Gotta have a bad guy in there someplace!

If Kromm is going to address the issue of "multi-templating" regarding characters in DF 3, the way of handling the relation between Magery and Power Investiture/Holy Might both in a single character may be... interesting, involving the possible distinction(?) between the magical and the divine.

I prefer to think mortals do play approximately with the same power (Magery & Power Investiture), but wizards perspective and method is different than the way of clerics. Their relationships with the source/s of power aren't the same.