The original presentation of deities in Dungeons & Dragons is unusual. It was a short description of their combat abilities and not much more. And the book instructed you not to use them in combat, which was odd. Justin Alexander recently talked a little about it in his blog, The Alexandrian.

Later games, especially Runequest, paid a lot more attention to the deities and their followers. But Runequest, for all its detail, maps poorly to your standard D&D campaign. I find it challenging to get my head around its mythology and use it in-game when running Runequest, let alone porting it to a D&D format.

Years of examples in Dungeons & Dragons adventures give us the chief feature about deities in D&D: They have followers, and those followers provide endless opportunities for adventure!

And on occasion, those followers help you towards your goals.

Conflicts and Desires

So, what do the deities and their followers want? I’ve often seen the simple version described as “we want more followers”, assuming that more followers make a deity more powerful. This is fine as far as it goes, but it runs into trouble whenever you get to deities of Death and the like. (If everyone is dead, then where are their followers?)

You may want to come up with your own reasoning for why deities and their followers act the way they do, but it doesn’t matter to some extent. What matters is that the deities have goals which their followers attempt to enact.

And that, of course, allows for many entertaining scenarios.

Now, this may be obvious, but there are two basic ways this drives action in D&D games:

• Characters take on tasks dictated by their deities
• Characters attempt to stop plots of opposing deities

The Tasks the Deities Set Us

The tradition in Dungeons & Dragons is for a priest or an agent of a deity to come to the characters, says “please do this quest”, and the players go off and do it.

This works fine in most campaigns. The agent could be a dream-vision given to a player character (often a cleric or paladin), or an “angel” appearing before the characters, or whatever. This is the method used by a DM who wants the players to go on a significant adventure.

Something that is more unusual – and this is because it isn’t modelled in base D&D and would never appear in a published adventure, is when the characters themselves set a quest based on what their deity desires.

This obviously requires a campaign that needs to accommodate player-driven content more; something that is not true of all campaigns. And it works best with a positive feedback system; something again that Dungeons & Dragons does not do as part of its regular gameplay.

What is a positive feedback system? To my mind, it provides small rewards related to the deity when the character works towards that deity’s ends. For instance, perhaps a rogue who worships the deity of thievery, upon successfully stealing some gold, receives inspiration. Or a small boon. Giving out extra experience points, while it works, doesn’t really feel special enough, because you can get XP from so many sources. I want something unique that aids the character and makes them feel like following the deity gives them rewards that no-one else gets.

My ideal situation would be to create a list of tasks for each deity, with different rewards for each. But the problem here is that you then need to keep track of all of this. It is a great ambition, but I am not sure how well it works at the game table. Keeping track of a lot of tiny rewards is tricky for players and DM. However, if you can do it, it helps reward proactive play and helps generate player-directed adventures.

Opposing Deities

The other side of this is the traditional D&D quest where the players learn (usually through a patron) that the followers of a deity are doing something and must go on a quest to stop it.

You get a lot of big picture material this way that can shape the campaign’s course. Indeed, it might be the entire course of a campaign.

However, if you scale it back a lot and take inspiration from the “goals for characters” I described just before, then you have an idea of material that does not have to take over the entire campaign but instead gives it flavour. The followers of Rammus, the Lord of Sheep, have has led a raid to free all the sheep from the shepherd’s flocks! The sheep have been returned to the mountain pastures, where they live happy sheep lives to their fullest extent. This could be used only a rumour, or possibly as an adventure hook.

Although this doesn’t require you to define rewards for the followers (as they are NPCs), it does still require a list of goals and tasks for that deity’s followers.

Starting Small and Limiting Options

I have written before about how I prefer to restrict how many deities are active in my D&D campaigns. And, if you want to go and create goals and tasks for their followers from scratch, this is something you probably want to do at first.

And this is to keep things manageable. Work out the deities who are active – a few that the characters follow, and two or three that oppose the characters’ aims – and then start detailing them.

You can build up everything over time. You do not need to have everything set out when you begin.

By the way, if you have a lot of trouble working out what goals the followers of a deity would pursue, that is probably an indication that the deity isn’t a good fit for the campaign. You want deities that create adventure opportunities; not just sit there!

Likewise, you want smaller, more achievable tasks for the players and followers of the deities. If the only mission that grants a reward for the Deity of War is “lead an army!”, that doesn’t fit that well in a D&D campaign!