Dungeon Fantasy Pantheons

[vitruvian]

Exactly. DF assumes the existence of four sets of gods:
Good Gods. These are the deities that clerics and holy warriors serve, and who bless holy water. They heal and protect. They're mostly interchangeable.
Evil Gods. These are the bosses of demons. They create cursed items and places. They might have a few evil clerics and unholy warriors. They're mostly interchangeable.
Nature Gods. These are the entities that druids serve. They rule plants and animals, and remain neutral in the Good-Evil dispute. They're mostly interchangeable.
Elder Gods. These are the gods of lost civilizations, served by insane NPC cultists. They're from Outside Time and Space, and transcend the Good-Evil dispute. They're mostly interchangeable.
Further details are strictly roleplaying. For game purposes, any altar of Good will serve any good cleric well, any altar of Evil will serve any evil cleric equally well, and so on.

In Powers terms, we're talking about two Moral powers, a single Nature power, and a Cosmic power, respectively. There are no truly Divine powers; the setup is more "Moral Forces" than "The Pantheon" (Powers, p. 30), but the Moral powers are identified as "divine" by those who wield them. (And there are also Chi and Magical powers, and maybe Psi powers, but none of those have to do with gods at all.)

I get the point of the simplification here, but I also recall some of the appeal of extremely classic DF being the calling out of the name of one's favored god, the (remote) chance of divine intervention, and eventually the opportunity to actually go out, kill some gods, and take their stuff. Also, and not so fondly, I remember even the Good Gods being differentiated a little according to a more complex (two-dimensional, really) structure of Moral Forces. Oh, let's be honest, I'm talking about Deities and Demigods and the D&D Alignment structure with the Lawful-Chaotic axis added to the Good-Evil one.

There's also the point that in my personal experience I pretty quickly moved on to 1st edition Runequest, which supported standard dungeon crawls just fine even though there was a rich world background that you could use or not as you saw fit. I mean, really, you could search through underground warrens for treasure just as in classic DF, only now with the option of playing a duck. I even seem to recall one of the earliest adventures released providing more detail on the local town than usual, but in typical DF fashion providing stats for the inhabitants and quantities of treasure in each house in case you wanted to just maraude through the place as though it were a dungeon.

Both the alignment variations in D&D and the religious differences built into RQ from the start provided opportunities for intraparty conflict and occasional back-stabbing, both of which I remember being quite frequent in even the most munchkiny of campaigns. Just the number of times that some Chaotic Evil nutter we for some reason allowed into the party got everybody killed at once... strange that we didn't notice at the time that it was frequently the same player that insisted on cheating at cards in Boot Hill or insulting the daimyo in Bushido, but let's leave that aside for now.

But enough reminiscing. I guess my original point was that so far in DF proper we only really have the two Power Investiture lists of spells to go by, one for the Good Gods served by Clerics and one for the Nature Gods served by Druids. One thing that struck me was that a few items in the Druid spell lists were things that the Good Gods would be able to or want to do for their worshipers, such as Bless Plants to provide great crop yields without miserable peasants all over the place (yeah, there I go worldbuilding again) or Lightning to punish the evil (actually, a Call Lightning spell where a bolt came down from the sky after some delay might be a nice addition). Likewise, there were some things in the Cleric spell lists that seemed like they might fit just as well with Nature Gods. So, in trying to add a little more detail in terms of the gods to fit my half-remembered paradigm of swearing oaths by strange gods while in the stone tunnels, I came across quite a few cases where it seemed a god might be served by both types of priests.

But yeah, I completely understand that this sort of thing can easily be left to the players to flesh out, if and when they care. The clerics can be assumed to be worshipping the entire Crystal Dragon Jesus pantheon of Good Gods, and the druids can be assumed to be worshipping all of Nature, and it won't matter as long as you know the location of the closest Temple of Healing and how much they charge for a Great Healing, etc., or where the local Grove of Druids is and whether they will even take gold pieces to serve as wilderness guides. The PCs probably neither know nor care whether the Grove is annually the site of ceremonial castings of Bless Plants with the attendance of the local farmers, and other details of that nature.

That said, I think it could be kind of fun to parse out the customization notes or the spell lists themselves, add in the concept of patron saints or deities for each of the templates or professions, and develop a more detailed pantheon on that basis.