User blog:EchelonMT/The Goal of Pantheon version 2.0

A hooded goddess who has the wings of a moth on her back, folded in like a cloak, and carries a lantern on a staff. That was the image I saw in a random image on Tumblr of all places. For the life of my I can't find the original artist, as far as I can tell by way of reverse image search, it only exists on a number of tumblr profiles. (If anyone knows the artist please let me know in a comment on this blog!) That idea, along with generally wanting to change the name of Prynh to be less like Krynn, was the core inspiration and the main reason I decided to revamp Prynh in its entirity, into the new vision of Viru. And so, as we continue along on that mission, the redux of the pantheon of gods was a definite point of change that I wanted to put a lot of work into.

My first goal with the new pantheon was to reduce the number of gods by quite a lot. I believe the original pantheon has 17 or 18 deities in it, which was the idea when I created it. Every good pantheon in myth and fiction have a ton of names of varying degrees of importance. Sine Prynh's creation, however, I have leaned more towards smaller more concise and 'vague' members for my homebrew pantheons. I have two primary D&D campaign worlds that I like to work with: Prynh, now Viru, and the world of Vero (with another world called Vana that is still in the beta stage of brainstorming). Vero's world only has 3 goddesses and rather than being attached to ideals or races, each is the patron goddess (all three are sisters) of one of the three major nations that make up the world. I liked the way having fewer gods meant that all of the orders and people who worship them would have vastly different reasons for worshipping them because each of them would have to mean even more to each person, more akin to modern religion than the pantheons of ages past.

That said, I didn't want to go that small. Currently I have four nailed down, each of which are already up in their starting states here on the wiki:


 * Chantheraea, the Monarch
 * Mascada, the Crystal City
 * Nilernum, the Boundless Dark
 * Tanab, the Cosmic Wyrm

I would like to get to 5 or 6, but unless I have a really interesting idea that fits in with this new sort of cosmic unknown power angle I've settled into with their designs, I'm not going to force it. If we end up with 4, then so be it!

The first god created was, of course, Chantheraea. She is the Moth Queen goddess that I was inspired to create first and she became the archetype that I followed when creating the others. That said, there were some difficulties. Tanab was something that I felt like I was shoehorning as I created it, and only liked what I saw when I took a step back when the concept was fleshed out. Tanab is essentially Drakell from the old pantheon, only sized up to a cosmic level. It's a dragon god who created the first life on Viru, the Dragons. This is a core part of Prynh's lore, the world started with Dragons, the dragons reigned, the secondary races were created at some point after them and the dragons promptly enslaved or killed them. Then these races rose up in defiance and cast the dragons out until there were no more on Viru and the planet was now theirs to mold. That core lore is so integral to the world that I knew Drakell, the god who created the dragons in his image, needed to remain in some way. But compared to a moth, a cloud and a living city, a dragon deity seemed so tame.

Now Tanab is a cosmic dragon who was birthed from the very sparks of creation, the big bang if you will, and is made of the elements themselves. Admitedly, Tanab is still my least favorite of the new gods, which is ironic because the cosmic wyrm is also the most important to Viru as a planet. But I'm still pretty happy with it, so if Tanab is the lowest point then I think the pantheon is in a pretty good place so far.

The hardest part has been making sure it's very clear that these gods are neither good nor evil, they are simply forces and as such their tenants, their domains, patronages, etc, need to be neutral. Nilernum is a dark cload of unknowable size that is covered in eyes... at first glance it is certainly evil. But shadows aren't evil, and the eyes see truth, so truth is one of its domains and that certainly isn't evil. NIlernum is probably my favorite god because of this dichotomy and I can't wait to see how players or other DM's attach themselves to these new deities.

Right now, in their current state as of writing this blog, each of the wiki entries are only about 75% complete. Each has a handful of titles, a short blurb about their lore, and about half of the "patronages" that I want to include for each. In the future I want to add double the amount of domains, and I want to add at least 4-5 orders for each god. In my opinion, the orders are the most important part of the new god entries, because they attach directly to the world and give the best idea to players and DM's how the gods are meant to be interacted with. I want every order listed to be extremely different and to have taken a much different meaning away from the god they form around. That's because with so few gods, it's important that every sort of person can find a reason to devote themselves to them. There should be utterly good and knightly sorts of paladin groups who can worship Nilernum while wearing the brightest of polished silver platemail, as well as the darkest and most sinister of cults in the most typical of dark robes. And each should be able to devote themselves and receive the blessings of Nilernum. This goes for every god.

And in the end, that is what I hope to accomplish with this new pantheon. In the future I'll probably make a new campaign setting where there are 20 gods, and its basically a soap opera of uber powerful beings, but Viru has its new gods and they are here to stay.