There’s a tendency in a lot of Dungeons & Dragons settings to have a vast number of deities. The World of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms are typical examples of such, with over fifty deities (not including non-human deities) described for each. Back in the day, I thought the Dragonlance setting had a small list of deities with a “mere” twenty-one!
As I get older, I see more of a benefit for, like NPCs, keeping the number of deities in a setting small.
Even when I’m using Greyhawk, I tend to only have a few deities active. The reason for this is to focus the campaign, and to better engage the players with their deities. It avoids the situation when a deity is mentioned and no-one knows who they are.
In addition, if you have only one or two temples (and accompanying priests) in the home town of the players, then you can build campaigns around a shared faith, and go deeper into providing the personalities and goals of the priests of those faiths.
My current Greyhawk campaign focuses on three faiths. The faith of the majority of the land the party are in (Veluna) is that of St Cuthbert of the Cudgel. St Cuthbert is a good deity to use, as he is easily believable as the chief deity of the nation. Good work, industriousness, zeal, and a hatred of evil – those are great attributes to have in a nation’s god.
The second deity is Boccob, the god of magic. This choice is driven by the players. Two of the players worship this deity, who we’ve used many times before over the past two decades. They’re comfortable with him, and they (rather than my NPCs) drive most of the deity’s engagement in the game. One of the unusual traits of the god is in is epithet: “the Uncaring”. Boccob doesn’t interfere in the material world much, which is very different to how St Cuthbert acts. St Cuthbert has been known to manifest to protect his followers and fight evil directly – it hasn’t happened in this campaign (yet!)
The influence of Boccob is seen more in the settings and encounters used for the game, which are often magical in nature, rather than NPCs directly acting for the deity (although the recent matter with the shrine of the Wind Dukes of Aaqa does tie into that more).
The third deity is Xan-Yae, the goddess of monks (and mental and physical perfection). This is the “foreign” deity in the game, and the chief deity of the main opposition – the nation of Ket. Originally, she was also the deity of one of the player characters, but that player had to leave the campaign so those plot threads are abandoned at present, but her priestesses are very active in the campaign as opponents of the characters.
Now, around those three deities, I can centre a host of plot threads and characters, enough to give the players something to interact with and – equally as important – parts of the world they can understand and that, due to a concentration on those elements, become much well defined than Evil Deity #45.
Servants of Xan Yae spy for the enemy, and send agents into the demiplane of Shadow to treat with the Shadow Fey. The worshippers of St Cuthbert keep up the spirits of the townsfolk, provide healing for the party, and prepare for the coming war. And worshippers of Boccob visit the town the heroes are based in more often, as they’re drawn to an place where other worshippers of their god are active.
In truth, there is a fourth deity lurking – Iuz the Old, the half-demon ruler of a nearby land. Deity or ruler? Hard to say, and his minions have chased the characters from Greyhawk, and pop up every so often. However, the campaign at present is concentrating on just three – and I think it’s stronger thereby.
So, while your setting might have lots of gods, you don’t have to use all of them. They’re often an important part of the setting, so choose the active ones carefully, and build the actions of their followers into the plotlines if you’re interested in making them feel more “real” to your players!
Excellent post! In my homebrew setting there are 29 deities (12 general deities, 5 Elvish, 4 Dwarvish, 4 Gnomish, and 4 Halfling Deities) – that sounds like a ton! And it IS a ton! However, it makes it so that a player with a non-human PC can choose a race-specific deity of they want. Each of the deities has a symbol and a basic belief that can be summarized in one sentence and is easily transmittable to the players.
Like you I tend to limit the influence of the pantheon down to 2 or 3 deities in a campaign. One that influences the largest cult activity in the homeland of the PCs, One that influences the party directly via whichever PC has any divine ability, and One that the majority of commoners believe in and look to as a generally accepted main influence in their lives. This hews very closely with what you have laid out here and I am not surprised that it does.
Good points raised here. In my homebrew setting, which was the first setting I ever made (still going strong four years in!), there are eight deities, one for each PHB cleric domain and Death. However, they have three sets of names – what they are known by to humans/halflings, the various elves, and dwarves/gnomes. The idea is that the deity looks like a member of the worshipper’s race if they appear to them, and so they are regarded as different entities but they’re really the same.
Meanwhile, in my Forgotten Realms game, deities haven’t come up much yet, surprisingly, but there’s a cleric of Lathander, a paladin of Torm, and a druid of Ubtao. I do see your point about how many deities there are – one of my main beefs with the FR pantheon is how many semi-overlapping death gods there are: Bhaal, Jergal, Kelemvor, Loviatar, Myrkul, Shar, Talona… but in practice it’s not so bad because players only really interact with either deities they are worhsippers of or who the bad guys worship – currently they’ve made an enemy of Zotzilaha, a Maztican vampire god of the underworld!