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Anonymous01/28/26, 23:32No.97460501Gods and Goddesses
What are the gods and goddesses like in your settings, and what advice do you have for designing deities for one's own original settings? And what about other settings who you feel do a great job with their gods? I want to make my first original pantheon instead of just sticking with picrel or copying an existing one like the Olympians, and I have no clue where to begin.
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Anon01/29/26, 00:01No.97460683
Mod thread.
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Anon01/29/26, 00:22No.97460831
tell us what you worked out so far and what the world looks like?
often gods are more created by the world then the world is created by the gods.
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Anon01/29/26, 03:26No.97461659
I cheated and have
>not!Christian God and not!Allah variation
>not!Satan, the ancient antagonist
>not!Lucifer, the more relatable satan
>not!cuthulu and other mythos stuff the pagans are up to
But I'm using a wars of religion era inspired setting. Various demigods or other god like things get made up as saints or demons or otherwrodly things on the spot as needed.
Advice is to make something the players quickly and easily understand because they're not actually inhabitants of the gameworld so various religious intricacy will be lost on them. Go with the Greek pantheon if that's something you're familiar with and makes sense to them quickly.
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Anon01/29/26, 05:18No.97461987
Best god is any fantasy setting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M
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Anon01/29/26, 05:38No.97462050
There are multiple tiers of deity in my setting ranging from bizarre cosmic powers representing foundational aspects to gods borne of men, orc elf dwarf etcetera , representing cultures, people and man made concepts.
All the way down to the demiurge: the decaying, living corpses of gods that of lost their domains and for the most part, scheme quietly to regain relevanceThere are two categories that are smaller and rarer, the true gods: those born from units between the first category and humans , and the saints: gods granted divinity by the second category as a means to expand that gods portfolio
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Anon01/29/26, 13:29No.97463164
Turning things into cute uwu anime girls is the single most homosexual thing one can do
>but it's girls anon, isn't liking cute girls inherently heterosexual?
You'd think.
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Anon01/29/26, 14:07No.97463333
I want my deities to reside either in a plane of chaos and a plane of order/law, with the mortal world sandwiched between them, and thus having different sphere of influence as a result of which plane they're tied to. I don't want to take too much from Warhammer though (even if I used the image I did just because of how recognizable it is), especially the idea of one side being inherently good or evil (I know in Warhammer the Chaos gods are supposed to represent both positive 'and' negative traits, but they're typically pretty evil, so I want to actually show the good and and bad in both sides in what domains each group gets, does that make sense?), and I need some help coming up with spheres for each side. I could do Magic for Chaos and Technology for Law for instance, though I was considering that each force would have their own kind of magic, and obviously Chaos would have a Trickster archetype and Law a Justice god, what else works? Someone else suggested that I look at Elric, and a quick wiki skim shows that Flame could work for Chaos via Checkalaka, but I would still love to hear what you have in mind.
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Anon01/29/26, 19:34No.97464828
Pose art of gods and related beings please!
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Anon01/29/26, 19:36No.97464838
Is there a way to be politely disrespectful in japanese?
I would use that when talking about slaanesh.
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Anon01/29/26, 20:34No.97465156
>What are the gods and goddesses like in your settings,
My wip setting is a cyberpunkish setting were Revelation has started. God and the devil are not absolute incarnation of good and evil but rather akin to a big mycelium entity that grows on the continuum of all possible timelines. Depending on their strength, they can "steer" the universe along these timelines, although this can somewhay be counterbalanced by free will.
The catch is that their presence is directly tied to the number of raptured (for god) or still alive "chosen ones". These "chosen ones" are held through occult means by a conspiracy of powerfull individuals, who usurped the 7 headed beast's throne and abuse the system by tying the life of these chosen ones to their own success (via neutron bomb and other means of destruction), thus forcing god and the devil to steer the world toward timelines favourable to them.
I'm split on wether to also put a superior "true god" though
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Anon02/01/26, 22:18No.97483139
My setting’s pantheon is headed by a couple, a goddess of Light and a god of Darkness. Each of them has several other aspects of reality in their divine portfolios as well, like Sun/Day and Fire and Moon/Night and Water respectively, as well as several children who all take after one parent or the other, save for a god of Twilight, their first child. What other aspects go best with each side?
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Anon02/02/26, 23:29No.97489463
I like to draw inspiration from all over human cultures.
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Anon02/03/26, 14:11No.97492538
What are the pros and cons of having your deities be dependent on mortal faith in some way in your opinion? And what are some examples of this that you personally feel make sense besides Discworld?
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Anon02/04/26, 04:00No.97497184
I only have vague outlines so far.
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Anon02/04/26, 12:54No.97498396
I was never a fan of gods being constructs of mortal faith, nor did I really want to fuck with other planes of existence being a thing, so I made the gods of my setting be a bit closer to the mortal world than most iterations. Faith doesn't make them be, in fact it actually doesn't do really anything directly substantial, but it does enable active worship and ritualistic practice by mortals to pinch off a tiny portion of their own spiritual power and hand it over to the god, in turn allowing them to bank it and use it to grow and extend their power.
Gods preside in the mortal realm either incarnate in the flesh or diffuse and approximately present across their domain. While they aren't omniscient, objects blessed by them do extend their presence and awareness. In exchange for worship, they gift their followers their blessings and protections as best they are capable in such matters. While they seldom know their followers by name, they are very vested in the good health of their flock, and are often quite territorial to other gods in that regard, forming coalitions against rival groups, which wind up getting considered as pantheons by mortals.
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Anon02/07/26, 14:45No.97515265
>Microwave
>Blasting the sub with radiation
>Killing everything growing on/in the sub
Officer! That Nurglette is an imposter!
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Anon02/08/26, 18:59No.97520613
I don't know. I have established to the players that there is a currently worshipped chief god responsible for holy magic, and mysterious 'foregods' which are more pagan-themed are associated with arcane magic.
If there's going to be specific personalities it would probably be the saints of the chief god, which are entombed in shrines around the forest. Don't have names or domains for them yet either. (I told the players there'll be a mechanic for seeking out specific shrines to cure specific curses based on their domain.)
Any suggestions?
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Anon02/08/26, 22:12No.97521630
The elves, being an all-female race, worship the wise mother as the high queen of all elves and venerate their founder queen as her messiah whom created the kingdom and passed down the holy word of rulership.
That's why elves of the royal house are seen as "mouths of the goddess" and they're more likely to be listened to than those elves from houses of minor nobility.
They fear The Cat.
The Cat is an abstract cat-like form, black, with eyes like the flame that drove the elves from the north and the elves live in fear that she'll come south and finish the job. Being an abstract concept, some houses depict The Cat as cute sexy catgirls, others as large black panthers, others as a demonic human woman with a black lion's head and pelt as her helmet leading armies of women with cats painted on their shields.
Humans, being mostly tribal, worship small nature deities though many have shared worship of certain deities that vary per tribe. For example, the sun is often the king of the gods, and winter is either a demon or the sun's punishment to evil in order to cleanse the land for spring. Conquered human tribes are forced to change their beliefs through systemic violence, with elves liking to change the sun to be their own prophet given the founding queen had the sun as her symbol. It's so-so the rate of success.
However humans tend to actually like cats since they get rid of vermin.
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Anon02/09/26, 08:55No.97523971
please do not miscatalogue "chaos gods" as "divinities". Chaos gods are more like "cardinal vectors" such as north,south,est,east.
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Anon02/09/26, 09:04No.97523994
In my urban fantasy setting, there are no gods (yet) as objects of worship
but there are avatar-like beings that embody some of the four core forces, also referred to as colors
there are four colors (green is Ancestry, blue is Curiosity, red is Passion, and gray is Fear)take for example, The Merciless Lady
>what if the Lady of Pain ruled over Central Bureaucracy from Futurama
an embodiment of fear and the color gray
in my game, fear is not an entirely negative concept; it's survival at all costs, a rigid and suffocating hierarchy, authoritarian power, and a double-edged power that shackles the mind and stifles free willI plan to add the other three at some point.
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Anon02/11/26, 07:25No.97536302
Bump
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Anon02/12/26, 02:20No.97541443
I didn't knew we have worldbuilders here on /tg/
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Anon02/12/26, 06:09No.97542266
I was inspired by the Brothers from RWBY, and was thinking that the main deities of my setting would be a Lady of Creation and a Lord of Destruction, the former making things all the time and the latter destroying the things that would harm the world at large and refining what he doesn't destroy, like a writer and their editor. What other aspects make sense for them and/or their subordinate deities to have besides Art and Life for Creation and Death for Destruction (and maybe Disease, because things like diseases and monsters would be what occasionally slips by him and maybe because people pray for deliverance from said diseases)?
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Anon02/12/26, 19:05No.97545319
The "Gods" of my setting are aliens who have essentially figured out how to become higher dimensional beings but can't fully escape physicality without actually dying.As such, their true form would resemble something like the Zohar from the Xeno-series except they need it instead of getting trapped inside to be used as batteries. This allows them to exist in a portion of the Higher Dimension called the Intercision and would require artificial bodies to interact with the lower dimensions while mortals would need artificial bodies to even access the Intercision.
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Anon02/13/26, 22:02No.97551451
The less powerful ones are more prone to meddling. But the difference between a major demon, generic nature spirit and a lesser god or a Robert E. Howard-style monster is tricky to tell sometimes.Sol Invictus is a distant but benevolent deity and is mostly only contacted through prayers to Saints who in turn answer to Star Angels who in turn report to The Sun.
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Anon02/14/26, 09:23No.97553771
Happy Valentine's Day! The occasion got me thinking, what other spheres of influence make sense for a goddess of Love besides the obvious choices of War and/or Fertility? Maybe the Spring, or Flame or the Seas due to the associations Aphrodite has due to her husband and reported origins?
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Anon02/15/26, 16:35No.97560499
>one deifoid for each of the seven archetypes:
Innocent
Caregiver
Hero
Rebel
Lover
Sage
Jester
>write each and seal individually in identical envelopes
>burn all but one envelope
>character creation et al w/o sealed info
>surviving sealed envelope contains answer
>to the question of which is the 'one true winner'
>nobody knows not even you
>which one
>for like the whole campaign
>until some future event requiring conditions
>very specific conditions
>which players must play towards and achieve
>to finally open envelope at the endgame
>to the first chapter
Properly cultivated, this should produce a widely enjoyed "big pay-off" moment built for meaningfully over time.
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Anon02/15/26, 22:45No.97562349
What secondary domains make sense for a War deity after specific weapons and strategy? Death certainly works, but I want my Death god to be a distinct figure.
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Anon02/18/26, 07:44No.97576408
After Death and Fate, what spheres of influence work well for a god of Time?
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Anon02/20/26, 13:02No.97588491
The 'good' gods of my setting are essentially four sentient machines hidden away from the world, powered by engines that are running on fumes after 50,000 years without maintenance. It's why 'holy' magic is a rare and dying thing. The party have found these engines deep underground and one was already non-functional (long story invoving the paladin).There is at least one 'evil' god, but I've raised the implication that it's simply a daemon from another plane able to project himself into the minds of mortals rather than a true omniscient deity. He's currently corrupting the rogue through the power of a cursed sword.
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Anon02/21/26, 21:16No.97596235
There is one God, all others are just false idols and superstition.
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Anon02/26/26, 16:41No.97623497
Bump
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Anon02/28/26, 09:18No.97633485
So I've got the Three Sofiyas, broad vague goddesses of the earth, sea, and sky, and the Phalanx, thirteen muse-like deities with much narrower portfolios. I haven't even decided what half of their portfolios are. Once the Sofiyas created the Phalanx, they led a crusade against the Primordial Darkness, claiming territory and allowing the Sofiyas to delineate portions of the world, only stopping when one of their number was assassinated. But that assassination by the forces of Darkness so shook the Phalanx that they all retired from active duty, leaving parts of the world untamed and constantly shifting while they went into mourning and began teaching the mortal races. The thirteenth Phalanxer didn't die but was actually corrupted into a Judas/Fu Leng-like character
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Anon03/01/26, 23:13No.97641776
Your mother
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Anon03/03/26, 14:05No.97650437
>I want to make my first original pantheon instead of just sticking with picrel or copying an existing one like the Olympians, and I have no clue where to begin.
What things are important to your setting's races/ethnic groups?
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Anon03/08/26, 04:15No.97674093
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Anon03/09/26, 03:37No.97678746
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Anon03/10/26, 00:52No.97683893
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Anon03/10/26, 20:46No.97688144
What ways have you spiced things up with your divine domains besides giving war to a goddess?
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Anon03/12/26, 12:52No.97696457
What are the essential aspects of a King and/or Queen of the gods, besides having a beard for the former like Zeus and Odin, lol?
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Anon03/13/26, 21:16No.97703849
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Anon03/14/26, 19:59No.97708155
What about Malal/Malice?