Mythological pantheons in the real world are fascinating. They raise all kinds of fascinating questions about how the people who worshipped those gods thought about the world and understood their place in it. Pantheons in fantasy worlds are often a lot less interesting.
Look at those tables in Appendix B of the 2014 5E players handbook. We have gods like “Leira, goddess of illusion; CN; Trickery; Point-down triangle containing a swirl of mist” or “Rao, god of peace and reason; LG; Knowledge; White heart.” These are… easy to remember, I guess? They are tropey and linear. Not very evocative, though. Most of these gods lack implicit internal tension. Some of them have obvious roles vis-a-vis their believers, but others only make sense as a flavor hook for a possible cleric character’s desired domain selection.
What if we treat these tables as roll tables? If you count from the first entry in Appendix B, on the Forgotten Realms table, and then number it up through 100, you get most of the way through Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Eberron. Roll five d100 – once for each column, plus twice on the first column, splitting the name and honorific. I re-rolled entries that came up more than once. Here’s what I got.
Name: Gond
Honorific: Goddess of the Moon
Alignment: LG
Domain: Death, Knowledge
Symbol: Oak Leaf
I just rolled this up outta nowhere. A few details jump out right away. Note that in Appendix B, all the gods with the death domain are either neutral or evil. What does it mean to have a lawful good death goddess? How important is death to the order and well-being of the world? And what’s with the moon and the oak leaf? Are these pure symbology? Or do they mean something more? Is the moon the world of the dead? Are oak trees mystical gates to the moon?
Name: Mystra
Honorific: Goddess of Wrath and Madness
Alignment: N
Domain: Knowledge
Symbol: Feather
I love the idea that the goddess of madness also has the knowledge domain. Very evocative to think of madness as a contingent risk to seeking more knowledge.
Name: Hiddukel
Honorific: God of Meditation and Order
Alignment: NE
Domain: Knowledge
Symbol: Flame drawn on silver or molded from silver
This is what I love. Why is the god of order NE? There’s a story there. My first thought is that he is an usurper. But it could be even weirder. What if the former god of meditation and order trapped him in this role, forcing a NE deity to rule over an order-inducing pantheon? Is he meditating to gather knowledge? Perhaps his parishioners are split between those who venerate him in his captivity, versus those who want to set it free. That’s an interesting deity.
Real-world mythologies are more interesting. In fantasy creators' defense, ancient Egypt has a 5000-year head start. Colossal figures in front of the Great temple of Abu Simbel, via Old Book Illustrations
Name: Milil
Honorific: God of Fire and Change
Alignment: LN
Domain: no clerics
Symbol: Upright flaming sword
Right away we have a “god of change” who is LN. How do we even square that? Some kind of dynamic change that is part of a larger rebalancing of the world? The domain is “no clerics,” an entry specific to Dragonlance, which raises further questions. Perhaps this god considers divine magic to be an impermissible exception to the LN “change” they allow? Perhaps in this god’s view, it is clerics themselves who unbalance the world, and they seek to apply their power in ways that punish or curtail divine casters.
Name: Kelemvor
Honorific: God of Storms
Alignment: LG
Domain: Life, Light
Symbol: Blank Scroll
Again, we get more interesting results from random rolls. Storms are typically chaotic, but what if we associate them with law instead? And the domain of life? And the symbol of a blank scroll? Perhaps a world where lighting strikes spawn new demigods and monsters who serve to maintain the divine order?
Name: Lunitari
Honorific: God of Thieves
Alignment: NG
Domain: Death, Life
Symbol: Bundle of five sharpened bones
What do you even make of a NG death/life god of thieves? I’m thinking of a mythology where Lunitari steals souls from competing law and chaos factions to balance the scales.
The basic idea of all these ordinary-pantheons-turned-weird-by-roll-tables is this – the incongruities and contradictions that the rolls produce are features, not bugs. The world does not need more chaotic-weather-god-versus-good-light-god-versus-evil-death-god pantheons. Rolling forces the DM/worldbuilder to grapple with weird contradictions. That’s what produces strange, distinct, actionable worlds. Go for that energy when worldbuilding.