The worst thing about TTRPG deities is the certainty of it all. The mystery and myth of a terrible, powerful, ultimately unknowable divine consciousness, boiled down to entries on a table in the cleric class description.
I understand why. As a mechanical element of a fantasy TTRPG, deities are essentially an extension of character creation. A deity needs to be immediately grokable, and it helps if it makes some kinda sense within the presumed universal vanilla fantasy milieu.
But I think there is room to make our deities more interesting without losing players. That's why I've written about how to improve pantheons quite a few times before.
So consider the following twists for fantasy deities. Assume in each case that we're talking about deities who possess three spheres, or domains, or whatever you like to call them. Death, weather, the hunt, commerce, the stars, the sea, that sort of thing. Then alter it juuust a bit from what you would see in your bog-standard fantasy setting.
Two Truths and a Lie
Each deity is well-known for three domains. What is not well-known is that two of them are real and the third is a lie.
The deity claims power over that third domain – or at least their followers do – but the deity doesn’t have cosmological influence over it. Maybe they once did, and hope to again. Maybe they can kinda fake it. Maybe their followers’ belief is patching the hole, or their followers are unknowingly drawing power from elsewhere. But it is ultimately a lie, and discovering that, or hiding it, or leveraging it, could play a major role in a campaign.
The Public and the Secret
Each deity has three domains. Two are commonly known, and what the deity is famous for. The third is secret, and is only known to a select few.
Those who know could be clerics and paladins, particularly past a certain level. Or it could be scholars and spies who have come across this information on their own. Or perhaps even the warlocks who draw power from that deity secretly.
Again, a secret can be a powerful motivation for adventure and for deity action as a front or antagonist. And it just raises intriguing questions. A god who is the deity of life and the sun… but also (secretly) the god of the underworld… is a bit more interesting, yes?
Rising and Falling
Each deity has three domains. In one domain the deity is rising, in another they are stable, and in a third they are falling.
This lends itself to change over time, particularly in a campaign on a longer time frame. Imagine that the game begins, and a dozen deities are each rising, stable, or falling in three respective domains out of a total count of 24. They overlap on many of these domains.
Whenever a god achieves a goal associated with a domain, they can improve “falling” to “stable,” or “stable” to “rising.” If they are already at rising, they can force one other god to decrement their status in an overlapping domain from “rising” to “stable,” or from “stable” to “falling.”
Regional Competition
Most modern fantasy pantheons are by implication global (pan-prime-material?) This is serviceable, but also takes away one of the most interesting sources of conflict and competition that we see amongst real-world religions, as belief systems intermingle with geopolitical and national/social forces.
Assign domains to regions of the game world. Some of these could have a symbolic relation (the sea to coastal regions, for example), but it is not required for each one. Gods have power in domains based on how much of the population within the domain-attuned area follow them. In this view, gods have quite a strong incentive to evangelize, and much of the conflict in the game world could reflect this struggle for power. Imagine that a rival army conquering your lands means not just a new ruler, but also that an entirely new god will take possession of the domain of the afterlife, and consequently the fate of everyone’s ancestors. Those are compelling stakes that can drive in-game action.
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