Dynamic Domains: Four Options for Proactive Pantheons

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.

Pantheon Prompts: Questions for Fantasy Deities

Deities are too dull in too many RPGs. We can do better by randomizing inputs, but sometimes we need to study use other solutions. 

Browse these two Wikipedia entries: Janus, the ancient Roman god and a typical RPG fantasy god, like Azuth from the Forgotten Realms. They are radically different. And I mean beyond the obvious difference, in the sense that one article is summarizing mythology while the other was created as gameable content. The differences prompt a number of questions that can make fantasy deities more interesting.

What are the deity’s spheres of influence, and which of those have nothing to do with dungeons? At least half of a deity’s spheres of influence or domains should have no direct connection to adventuring. A good worldbuilding tool is to consider how much the supernatural and divine is applied to mundane, real-world problems, as I discussed when writing about trade magic.

What is named in this deity’s honor? The real world is flush with honorary words. Months, days of the week, cities, and people are easy ones, but the influence can be less direct. Think about how morphine comes from Morpheus, or how the atlas is literally named after Atlas.

What rituals do their followers observe? This is a big one that TTRPGs tend to ignore. But rituals are central to religions both historical and contemporary, and it is a missed opportunity to leave them out of worldbuilding.

What are the aesthetics and purposes of their temples? Places of worship should not be abstracted or generic. Structures and civilizations are integral to the worship of the gods. The god of lightning’s shrine is atop the tallest tower in the city, covered in a tangle of conductive copper aerials. The god of disease’s temple is within a decommissioned sewage treatment plant. You get the idea.

In what secret places are they worshipped? Public worship and cult worship should tell us something about both the religion in question and the society surrounding it. Remember that cults are a function of how society understands that religion, not just an internal moral quality associated with the deity itself.

What are their relationships with other gods? I don’t mean the usual “the life god and the death god hate each other” RPG stuff. That’s fine, for what it is, but it is not going to make these deities seem alive. Classical pantheons often featured siblings, spouses, and children among the gods. The Greek and Norse pantheons keep reappearing in new fiction because those remain compelling relationships, even as more complex (but also abstracted) fantasy pantheons blur into the background. 

What is their priesthood like? Do they even have one? If yes, are the practitioners locals? Do they choose to become priests when they reach adulthood, or were they raised expecting this to be their purpose? Are they assigned by some distant authority, or elevated by the local community? You don’t have to answer every question, but answering at least a few will make them much more real.

Where does the deity reside? Again, think through this. “The fire god lives on the fire plane” is intuitive, and we don’t want to subvert expectations just for the sake of doing it. But “the fire god lives in the Slagmouth, the fourth incarnation in this world of the ever-erupting world-heart, born astride the corpse of the titan Jokulos, who legends say claimed the first burning fire from deep within the earth…” OK, that’s a little purple, but the players are probably awake and looking at you with curious/worried expressions, right?

What beliefs about this deity are contested? This is a big one. TTRPG rulebooks give players the impression that every god is a known quantity to everyone in that world, with their purpose and ethos conveniently compressed in table format. Even in a world where gods are demonstrably real, there would still be a great deal of ambiguity and disagreement about a particular god’s priorities, desires, and goals. Most fantasy worlds presume that deities still must communicate their liturgy through priests, and even spellcasting clerics only have the broadest and loosest ways to divine the divine’s will, at least at low levels. As I’ve said before, D&D’s cleric spell list actually does a great job of illustrating how cleric’s very gradually get more and more insight into their deity as they level up, from a crude thumbs up / thumbs down for Augury, all the way up through the ability to Gate to the deity’s plane of existence and ask them questions directly. This ambiguity about divine intent should be expressed in the books and come through in-session more often. 

What is the etymology of their name? Not every game needs this, but it can be fun. Consistent use of language is going to show that a lot of thought went into the worldbuilding. You don’t need to create an entire constructed language or etymological tree. Use shortcuts, like using Latin-derived words for all the lawful religions, and German-derived words for all the chaotic religions.  

The Tombs of Atuan and What Belief Means for Clerics

“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”

-The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

I had read Ursula Le Guin before (The Left Hand of Darkness and Lathe of Heaven), but not the Earthsea books. I recently began to rectify that, and some elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, made it in to several blog posts. Tombs of Atuan is the second book in the series.

Belief Is Not Either/Or 

In the background of the first third or so of Tombs of Atuan is a society where a (relatively) young theocracy built around a putative godking is co-opting and gradually replacing the old religion. But this is all understood and filtered through the perspective of a child who has basically never left the ritual shrine. The story does an excellent job of establishing this information organically; there are no lore dumps. Tenar, the protagonist, is instructed in part by servants of the godking who have their own motives. The godking doesn’t take an active role in the plot and isn’t an antagonist per se, but the worldbuilding really makes Tenar’s precarious position much more compelling. 

RPG settings sometimes explore this space, but usually with a more direct, head-on confrontation, like organized Christianity-style religion versus folkloric paganism. Or a pantheon of clear and unambiguous domains, where the life god is opposed to the death god, and it has always been thus. Tombs of Atuan is a reminder that it can be useful to focus more on the role of religion in people’s lives, how they navigate change, and what rituals are important to them.

Belief Is Ritual 

The wizard Ged, the protagonist of the first Earthsea book, appears in Tombs of Atuan as well. Ged’s magic (producing light, changing form, altering the weather) is recognizable as D&D magic, but Tenar doesn’t cast any spells. Her entire power is the ability to enact rituals, to interpret the will of suprahuman entities, to be protected from them, and to petition them. 

This makes them "feel" a lot different than wizards and clerics in modern-style RPGs, who have different spell lists but otherwise "work" largely the same. Whereas Ged's magic is proactive and transformative, Tenar's magic is reactive and divinatory. 

Belief Is the Attention of Ancient Things

For good or for ill, Tenar has the ear of… something that lives in the titular tombs. Whether these are gods or ghosts or genius loci or something else is not conclusively stated, and doesn’t need to be. Modern D&D draws a hard line between clerics and warlocks, but its easy to imagine that as a matter of public image. Ultimately, everyone who entreats the aid of the supernatural and the supernormal is taking chances with beings who are not and cannot be understood, and that should suggest a gravity and seriousness to the relationship that RPGs don't always deliver on. Belief is less about faith versus atheism, as in the modern world. Belief is more a matter of being willing to expose oneself to the dangerous and largely unknowable attentions of entities beyond mortal ken.

Treat Lists of Deities Like Roll Tables to Create a Scrambled Pantheon

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. 

High Level PCs Are an Affront to God

Why are there angels in the D&D monster manual? 

In modern D&D – 5E and its third-party cousins – Great Wheel Cosmology necessitates a mirror to fiends, so angels appear for taxonomic thoroughness. Mechanically, I presume the game's designers view the angels in the 5E.14 Monster Manual as summoning spell targets and NPC allies for the (presumably good) PCs.

Fashioning a combat encounter between these holy dudes and those putatively good PCs requires some contortions. D&D 5E makes its angels fluent in all languages, and telepathic as well, edging out the possibility of even a misunderstanding when these creatures descend from the heavens. A footnote in the manual indicates that fallen angels exist, but they don’t get any interesting mechanical implementation (for that, try the Chained Angel from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts).

D&D in its earliest forms didn’t have them, and many throwback systems still eschew them. The Old School Essentials bestiary, for example, lacks an entry for angels. 

When angels do appear in like-minded products, like Skerples’ beautiful new book The Monster Overhaul, they are decidedly old testament, plausibly dangerous, or decidedly unknowable. In keeping with the book’s focus on table-readiness and applicability to adventures, Skerples’ angels are loaded with danger, friction, and implicit conflict.

This Far You May Come and No Farther 

So imagine an angel confronting the PCs. Clearly it can happen because of something they have done in the game. Some action that made sense to them or solved a material plane-concern, but angered those on high. I’ve done that one myself.

But what else? What if the angels confront high-level PCs because they are high level?

It may not feel like an obvious conflict, but it’s firmly rooted in myth. From Prometheus to Babel, gods have punished mortals for attempting to rival them in power and glory. And PCs get harder and harder to distinguish from gods as they reach high levels.

Applying this mechanically can be quite simple. In a leveling system that goes from level 1 to 20, adventurers might begin to attract the attention of gods around 10th level (5E clerics gain the divine intervention ability around this time; a convenient demarcation point).

The gods might be merely watchful when PCs hit 10th level. I assume tier 3 adventurers are quite rare, unless a setting specifically says otherwise; and many adventurers who do reach that level retire or die before getting much further. But for every additional level the PCs attain, the gods become more wary, suspicious, jealous, and eventually angry.

By the time characters reach level 20, some sort of confrontation – violent or otherwise – is inevitable.

O Come At Me Bro, All Ye Faithful

All well and good for the wizards, thieves, and fighters out there. But what about clerics, paladins, and warlocks? Their adventuring life has been defined by the divine.

Warlock is easiest. Unlike most of 5E’s classes, Warlock has tension built in it at the ground level. A 20th level warlock is strong enough to directly confront the compromising nature of the pact with their patron. Even if they simply want their freedom, the patron may see them as too powerful and dangerous to just let loose. And the PC may even decide to take the patron’s place and begin issuing their own pacts.

For paladins and clerics, there’s always the option to say that at the end of the day, their arrangements with their gods were just warlock pacts with better optics. Maybe the conflict plays out in a similar fashion to warlocks. But it can go other ways.

A good-aligned god might stand aside for a worthy paladin or cleric to replace them – that actually happened in the 5E game I ran past level 20. But even if the god in question is fine with ceding the stage to their protégé, there’s no guarantee other gods will be OK with it. Most mythological gods in the real world do not tend to their portfolios in cool isolation, but instead are highly social creatures, fostering alliance and rivalries within a contentious pantheon. And there could be many reasons for those rivals to see the PC’s ascension as an affront to the gods.

Seven Very Boring Cultist Hooks

Cultists are among the most common enemies in low-level D&D. As the modern style of D&D pivots further away from orcs and goblins as “default” enemies, cultists (like bandits) increasingly populate low-level adventures from Wizards of the Coast and third party publishers. 

In the real world, we can easily understand cults as those dabbling in dark, mysterious, or sinister arts; and that their interest stands in clear opposition to monotheistic religious norms among the broader population. A cult in a Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies game makes sense.

But in a world where a multi-polar pantheon is factually known, what is a cultist? Presumably someone worshiping an evil deity or a fiend. But relying on the Great Wheel and the good-evil alignment spectrum makes for static, uninteresting gameplay.

What if we define cults and cultists not by good and evil but by their social functions? How do they support or undermine the norms of the society they exist within, and how does their existence activate factions and create interesting roleplay scenarios?

It’s a secret society. Like the ancient Greek and Roman mystery cults, it is complementary to mainstream religion, but highly secret and prestigious. It may even allow for social power and advancement among marginalized outgroups like women and the poor.

It’s a schism from a mainstream religion. The “cultists” are in their own view the correct and true practitioners of the faith. It’s the majority of worshippers who are in the wrong. All the better if the same god seems to be granting spells or other divine favors to both groups…

It’s a back-to-basics movement. The cult legitimately wants to reform either the current predominant religion, or wants to return society to an earlier, purer, or better religion (possibly prior to foreign influence or conquest).

It’s funded by a rival power, whether spiritual or temporal. Another church, state, or entity is secretly supporting the cult’s efforts, hoping to sow unrest. 

It’s an elaborate scam to cheat a gullible rich person or persons. The lead cultist is officiating rituals as part of a long con targeting bored, wealthy citizens.

It’s just an excuse to throw parties. No legitimate religious purpose, just purely bacchanal. All the better when it actually does create a connection to the divine.

It’s just an excuse to kill people. Well, not every cult has to have some deep and complex motivation. Sometimes it is simply a charismatic sociopath draping themself in the legitimacy of the divine, or a cold killer using cultic trappings to throw off investigations into their (ultimately kind of secular) murder spree.

Next week: 20 Extremely Boring Bandit Hooks

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.