Broken Wheel Cosmology: Dull Gods and Static Pantheons

The typical fantasy pantheon vaguely follows the mythological models of antiquity, but removes a lot of the visceral personality. The Greek pantheon was like a squabbling family, with each god struggling to gain the upper hand or advance their interests, driven by complex relationships of marriage and heredity, thick with plots, schemes, and betrayals. But D&D’s pantheons feel static and lifeless. How could we present the gods in more interesting ways within our Broken Wheel cosmology?

Demiurges

Broken Wheel gods are not world-creators nor saviors. They once were adventurers, just like the rest of us. A 20th D&D level character borders on godlike-power. The 5E DMG’s epic boons, even moreso. Godhood is simply the next step on that path, entailing rulership of a plane that the god can bend to their will, and the capability to extend their power back to the material world through their followers. They are ageless, but not deathless; and the spheres and domains they claim are subject to fierce competition from their rivals.

Pauper Gods

Attaining godhood is monstrously difficult. Losing it is a lot easier. Whether they were violently deposed in a matter of hours, or watched as their worship fell out of favor slowly over generations, these lingering spirits survive on the psychic residue of praise to other deities; the occasional misguided prayer; and the rare warlock pact, forged with some obsessive who dug their name out of an ancient tome. Dead gods are good for creating dynamic worlds, but deposed gods are better.

Small and Petty Gods

There is a lot of competition to become the god of death or the god of war. Who wants to experience immortality with a target on their back? Why not set your sights a bit lower? Perhaps a couple altars in the dungeons of the mortal world would be enough to secure the worship of a few foolhardy ratcatchers? Or perhaps a comically narrow sphere of influence will win the faith of a handful of passionate weirdos?

Genius Loci

What if a druid doesn’t represent some vague, ambient sense of “nature,” but represents that particular river or this particular mountain? What if a god embodies and is worshiped solely by a particular city-state? These choices ground the gods in the material world; even if they are not literally present, they are acting upon the geography, and can be indirectly encountered.

Immanent Gods

Most of the ideas above bring the gods down closer to the world of mortals, with recognizable, human-like desires and motivations. What if we go in the other direction? What if the gods are more like physics concepts, universal laws, or equally abstract ideas? Such gods are, I think, harder to introduce as game objects, because they are distant and unknowable. But they present an interesting challenge and a compelling worldbuilding exercise for the right game. 

The key to implementing any change is to evaluate how much it percolates at the table. Rumor and prophecy, not lore and legend. Problems and opportunities, not backstories. Setting things on fire, not set dressing.