Origin Stories: Lady Celestial
This month we asked our Quest Givers which character deserved a backstory. Would it be the harrowing tale of how Miss Gestalt contracted lycanthro-vampirism? Perhaps the beginning of Gunslinger’s ongoing quest for companionship? Maybe we would finally find out how Druid wound up with Allie the Allosaurus as an animal companion? But no. It was to be none of the above. Because Handbook-World wanted to know the origin of the gods, and one goddess in particular. I therefore hope you will all join me in welcoming our big blue Lady Celestial to the winner’s circle!
So then where do the gods come from? The glib answer is, “The sides of bitchin’ 70s conversion vans, of course!” But less glibly, I think they come from human imagination. This is slightly different from “where do PCs come from” or “how do you make up your worlds?” though. When it comes to carving out a pantheon, it’s all about deciding what’s important to your setting.
Are you telling a story about elves vs. orcs? Then the racial gods of you warring people will be important. Are you instead doing the classic dark fantasy, with lots of good vs. evil themes? Then Heaven vs. Hell (let’s rock!) may be more your jam. Weird stories of jabberwockies vs. the rise of technology? Then you’ve got your powerful fey entities lined up against your machine gods. But in all cases, it’s the theme of your story that comes through most strongly.
This is also why we construct large pantheons filled with many different deities. It’s hard to say which way the players will turn. That means it’s equally hard to figure out how to work in the higher powers. With a wide array of divinities, you keep your bases covered. But for a simple zero-plot joke-a-day style webcomic like ours, it’s enough to have a single major deity. Even if she does happen to live on a van down by the river.
What do the rest of you guys think though? When you’re creating the Powers of your setting, do you pull from IRL mythology? Simply use the out-of-the-box gods from sourcebooks? Or do you like to make up your own? Tell us all about the origins of your own divinities down in today’s comments!
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Shamelessly ripping of both Finnish or Scandic mythology, the former ment that they were family units with each member carrying a aspect of the theme and latter, well each and every one while having their own aspects like anybother pantheon also had an aspect of war assinged to them. it wasn’t a 1:1 conversion but close enough thta any one with basic knowledge would have picked it up, and with the people I play, it was more obvious than the inspiration behind 40K Ultramarines.
It would be fun to use the finnish pantheon in a game with foreigners with zero or very little idea about finnish folk lore and mythology and see their reactions.
And here’s the question: Did these existing deities wind up influencing the theme of your campaign, or did the aspects of the gods most important to your players come to center stage?
Influencing with the finnish folklore if say some one was gathering food from the forest and not thanking the appropriate spirit(“king” of forest for hunt and “gueen” for gathering) for haul, ypur next faray into the woods might have been less pleasant. But mostly it was on the side like most DnD campaing, the “gods” are there, they affect things, but aside for few they don’t directly affect. The family of death(Tuonela father Tuoni, mother Tuonetar and their children) has Kiputyttö, Paingirl, who if memory serves is the one responsible for diseases. We did have to improvise alot as there is little that survived chistianisation of Finland. Imagine everyone being this Druid/Warlock combination with hint of Cleric or Paladin for their approach to deities. But dressed in normal DnD otherwise… I wonder if I can find my drcade old notes or have I used those to light up the sauna?
lol sauna. If you were anymore Finnish you’d be raiding Serkland up and down the Volga.
But yeah, I’d love to see you notes.
The majority of my pantheons came from Bulfinch’s Mythology. Since my world is Earth in the far future, then it only makes sense that when the gods came back they were the ones worshipped in previous times. They aren’t “all powerful” this time around and have some serious limitations, but hey, you do what you can with the hand you were dealt.
As to which pantheons are available to the characters, all depends where on the world they are based. Everything from Babylonian to Greek is there somewhere.
Babylonian? Get some good Marduk v. Tiamat fights?
That’s a bad-ass van…
As to the question, a bit of a mix. Some are original — or at least, not consciously based on any particular mythological or literary being. Others are more intentionally drawn from real and fictional myth, though never from a single source… they’re a blend of traits.
For example, Tragedy — the lord of unhappy endings — is basically Orpheus, if Orpheus had overthrown Hades, taken over the underworld, and still not gotten Eurydice back. He’s also partially inspired by both Hood and Dessembrae from the Malazan novels (which I suspect were themselves inspired by the same).
I loved Malazan so much until I didn’t.
I really need to give them a second read with a wiki open in front of me. All the names kicked my ass by the end, and I’m convinced I missed half of the story because I couldn’t remember who the F anyone was.
I can’t disagree on that… like most grand fantasy epochs, the scope does get a bit out of hand as the series goes on, and the first few Erikson novels are my favourites of his. I’m more partial to the Esslemont books in that respect… they’re more loosely coupled than Erikson’s ten-book saga, and I think that allows each book to be more tightly focused.
One thing I do appreciate about their shared universe in general is that there’s a certain inconsistency that lends itself to the mythic nature of the setting… the same events are referenced more than once, and they often contradict, not just between authors, but between different works by the same author. And it works because they’re all unreliable narrators… characters with reasons to be secretive, reasons to portray things in a particular way, or just remembering old history very differently from each other.
I mention that here, because when it comes to divine origin stories, that kind of inconsistency is fitting. Gods are generally ancient, the details of their birth corrupted by the passage of time, and the constant revision of history — and even for one recently ascended to divinity, it’s unlikely that the event was accurately documented, or that all the witnesses (if any) agree on what happened. Look at the Marvel universe, where Hela / Hel is the daughter of Odin instead of Loki… there’s room for both versions in a good mythology, even when they obviously can’t both be true.
Oh, and contradictions are good in another sense… a dichotomy between aspects of a character. Thor is a god of war, of destruction — but also god of fertility, of life.
Much the same dichotomy exists in one of my own gods I’ve mentioned here before… the Mistress of Storms (or less formally, the elder goddess of meteorology). One one hand, she’s the typhoon that wreck ships, and the blizzard that buries settlements… a goddess to be feared and placated. But at the same time, she’s also the rain that brings life, and the the wind that speed ships to their destinations. Different people see different facets… maybe even worshipping them under different guises.
For my current campaign, everyone worships the Sun, although different sects have different takes on it, worshiping different aspects and with different fundamental ideas about the nature of the divinity. The Orthodox First Church of the Sun sees the Sun as an active intelligent force for example, that responds to petitions and oversees the development of the world, while the heretical cult of the Golden Dawn believes the Sun is an inanimate source of power, that can be manipulated and controlled by anybody with the right training and rituals. Etc.
I’m deliberately leaving it ambiguous whether the god is actually sentient or not, and actively participatory or not – I think it’s more interesting that way, encouraging players to come up with their religious beliefs by themselves, and to show the different ways people in the world react to the same set of facts. I haven’t decided what the actual truth is, and I don’t intend to; I don’t think it really matters. The question is more interesting than any one answer.
Have you seen the eldritch god theory of the sun?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs86av02455r01.jpg
I mostly make my own, though I do draw inspiration from various sources.
Certain archetypes are just part of human culture, after all.
In any case, I’ve no shortage of deities and fiends to draw on for my projects…!
Some of them quite silly.
How do you decide which ones are important for a given campaign?
I do try to select at least one to suit every alignment and class, not to mention some default concepts like farming, magic, theft, battle and the like. Throw in a couple of oddballs for fun.
If possible, tailor a pantheon to the setting and set up a few family relationships, conflicts and rivalries. For instance, the god of weakness and the goddess of slaves are in a twisted relationship where she keeps saying he is her destined mate, and he can’t stand the sight nor sound of her. The goddess of magic is in long-standing conflict with the various gods of magic-users, who stole parts of her portfolio because she was getting way too powerful and way too big for her pointy hat.
Do you find that the nature of the gods gets refined through play, or do they remain pretty consistent throughout a campaign?
By that I mean, “Do the players change the gods?”
Well… one time the players kept calling on the goddess of peace so much that I gave her an answering service, just so they’d quit calling for divine intervention every five minutes.
One clever player who played a cleric of Ulla the Grey, goddess of theft, industry, assassination and economics came up with the concept that prayers to her took the form of legalese and contracts, with referral to her holy writ not as dogma, but as corporate guidelines. I really loved that and kept it in.
Mostly, they remain pretty consistent, though. ^_^
Can’t speak for Rock, but I’d say absolutely yes… if the players have a fun idea and it doesn’t greatly contradict anything known or planned, it’s always good to try to incorporate it. And even if it does contradict things… well, see my comment on the importance of inconsistency in mythology.
It varies for me from game to game. In my homebrew setting I invented my own gods, inspired by the sorts of things people historically worshiped; in particular solar and lunar worship, and the memento mori themes of the renaissance. So I have the Twins, who created the world; and Nazmi, who ensures that all which comes into being also passes away, in the great cycle.
Then things get interesting; because the story is really about resisting that natural decay, so you have the Elven gods and their immortal offspring. And to add a bit of that medieval fear of the wild, you have the dark gods and their corrupt creations lurking in the untamed places of the world.
This is the closest I’ve seen to bearing out my theory: Gods informing the conflicts you have in the setting.
Thanks! It seemed like a good way to really cement that conflict in the setting.
Heh. As a player, I’m kind of the opposite. If you give me a well thought out list of deities, I’ll happily play along and pick a side in the cosmic fight of Good vs. Evil, Law vs. Chaos, Bacon vs. Necktie, or whatever.
Often, however, my DMs have only a vague cosmology planned or just default to “Whatever’s in the Player’s Handbook,” with the idea that it doesn’t really matter to their campaign, other than flavor text for whoever plays the cleric.
If that somebody is me, though, the DM should learn to watch out. “Hey, Bill, I’ve got an idea for a Cleric of Hercules. Can I play him?” —12 levels later and there are now temples to the Olympian pantheon in the game world and Orphic & Eleusinian Mysteries playing out between sessions.
In a later campaign where we began as level 0 Commoners and determined our character classes through our first adventures, my feisty baker’s-daughter made a profanity-laden oath and prayer as she swung a rolling pin at a bandit and defended herself with a pot-lid. “What’s the prayer?” the DM asked. I named St. Cuthbert (of the Cudgel), guessing full well that my choice of bludgeoning weapon would make me the Cleric. I guessed right, that got my foot in the door. Since the DM hadn’t gotten around to mentioning the official religions for his new campaign (again) and Cuthbert is both a D&D deity and an IRL saint, my blonde baker became the craziest Catholic since Father Brown grabbed a submachine gun and screamed “Wanna get nuts?! Let’s go, m___er f___er!!!” Every session began with more random saints’ trivia. Even her road-name (so as not to embarrass her family if we failed our quest miserably) was an aptonym + St. Honore (patron of bakers) = Honey (Honoria) Baker.
As a DM, I let folks pick things from the PH (since that’s what they know), but I keep my mythology books handy for weird temples they’ve never heard of. (Temple of the Frog was modded to involve a monastery to the Egyptian goddess Heq.) For our samurai campaign, I keep the internet handy and dip into Lafcadio Hearn for scary ghost stories whenever necessary.
One GM I know, when planning a campaign, wrote a set of domains/portfolios (War/Peace, Earth/Air/Fire/Water, Knowledge, Travel, etc) on scraps of paper and divided them randomly amongst the players who then played a few hands of poker with their domains as stakes. Then we had to come up with a theme/outlook/doctrine for a deity based on the domains we had ended up with.
In the end we had:
* psychopomp god of death and travel
* clockwork-nerd god of artifice and knowledge
* Earth-Mother classic
* two-faced god of community and hate
* distinctly unhinged goddess of what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger
In another (less serious) campaign the same GM allowed the players to choose their own pantheon in an entirely unstructured way.
The most sensible inclusions were 2 deities imported wholesale from Faerun (Helm and Tymora).
On the less sensible side of things we had Barney, god of Dinosaurs, and Princess Celestia, goddess of Ponies.
Mix of many things. Mythological gods are specific, you can’t have peace loving Odin, but also archetypal, you can have peace loving odin-like. So in our setting i use and mix many things while making new ones. Gods may follow an archetype as to have the Odin, The Loki or the Hades but they may not follow an archetype. I take some terms too. Ymir, or YMIR on our setting, is the name of a [SPOILER] being related to the past of the setting and some events of it. Ginnungagap is the void between the true multiverses and Götterdämmerung is an event that gods considered mythological but still wanted to prevent. Then other things like the Feast of Gods is something i made 🙂
Back in the 1970s, Richard Feynman and his wife used to drive around Los Angeles in a van painted with Feynman diagrams. (Their daughter says that when she turned 16 and got the keys to the van, “it was kind of embarrassing, but if you want to drive at that age, you’ll drive anything.”)
So if gods are born from the side panels of vans, maybe somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a pantheon ruled by the patheons of quantum field theory. Instead of Law vs Chaos or Good vs Evil, the big philosophical divisions are neutral vs. charged, gluon-bound vs colorless, or the sociable, conformist followers of boson gods against the prickly fermionic individualists. The Higgs modrons lend some deities an extraordinary power to bend and shape spacetime…but only over a short distances, while those that eschew the temptations of mass pack less punch, but can show up anywhere. And scholars whisper of the gods’ supersymmetric counterparts, lost to mortal knowledge but perhaps still shaping creation in ways that the Standard Theological Model cannot account for…
That does sound very fun.
“Positive vs Negative” is the unexplored Z-axis of the alignment chart.
I generally just use canon Pathfinder deities, but I do have a setting with several different types of pantheons stacked on top of each other, each of which seems to have some truth to them (as they provide magic in various ways).
– Elven religion is a Hindu-like/animist theology where everything has a named spirit, but they are also often subsets of larger and larger beings until you zoom out far enough and see that the whole universe is one big organism. Most of these spirits tend to be named natural cycle sorts of things (for example, spirits of evaporation, condensation and precipitation each have specific names while also being subsections of the named “rain spirit”) and are not very anthropomorphized, so it ends up looking like basic nature worship. Elven religion is notoriously difficult for outsiders to get into, with thousands of spirit names and stories that are traditionally learned over hundreds of years of an elven monk’s career.
– Dwarven religion revolves around evil spirits called demonae (which represent bad things like famine, aging, decay and fear) and former mortals (mostly, but not exclusively dwarves) called the Ascended who battled them by inventing or mastering various crafts (farming, smithing, woodworking, law, medicine, writing, etc). The world was originally a miserable place thanks to the demonae, but the Ascended developed the tools to build civilization and overcome suffering. They function like Catholic or Orthodox Christian saints, with a patron saint for pretty much any occupation. Most dwarven households keep a shrine or two to relevant Ascended, leaving offerings and prayers for guidance in doing good work. The Ascended are also popular in other lands, with many followers of other religions keeping a portrait of their occupation’s Ascended (sometimes de-dwarfed) around for luck.
– Orc religion focuses on a handful of more traditional gods – a sun goddess, a god of animals and hunting, their daughter Hadora (embodiment of the great plains the orcs live on) and a god of strength and war. Hadora is essentially an earth mother, having birthed many things, including terrible monsters and wonderful livestock, but it is the orcs, fathered by the god of strength to defend the plains against foreign settlers, that are her greatest legacy. At least according to them.
– Humans follow what are known as civic deities, anthropomorphizations of their city or country. (Basically if Uncle Sam was a god.) While many cite traditions provided by their gods, in practice the civic deities shift over time based on their homeland’s culture. The main exception is the god Nexessa, whose followers implemented a theocracy that restructured the entire economy and culture in supposed accord with the god’s will. This has led to speculation that Nexessa is not a true civic deity, but something else entirely. For whatever reason, only human-dominated polities seem to generate civic deities.
I built only four gods/goddess for my world alongside their avatar, with each based on one of the alignments. Pelegor the Penguin, the neutral good god of winter, the mountains, and the North. Darlantha the Duck, the lawful neutral goddess of the spring, the oceans, and the East. Swilstine the Swan, the neutral evil goddess of summer, the invisible horror lands and the depths, and the South. And finally, Grayitous the Goose, the chaotic neutral god of autumn, the sky, and the West. His avatar loves bells.
‘When you’re creating the Powers of your setting, do you pull from IRL mythology?”
Always pull from real life mythologies. I file off the serial numbers, round a few corner and build up a few lumps elsewhere, and vi-oh-la, new gods just for a me.
Now, where do I pull from? Depends on what I need. Extraordinarily complicated vaguely human like gods with deep sometimes counter-intuitive relationships within in the pantheon? Hinduism or Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy. Very human like petty gods who act like spoiled children? Greco-Roman. Human like but slightly less child-like with their tantrums? Norse. Weird and individualized but within a naturalistic them? African or native american shamanism. Human like gods mixed with starkly terrifying lovecraftian things? Slavik mythos. Alien beings who interact with humans more on a “whim and whimsy” setting? Celtic myths (see also “fairy myths”).
Etc. Humans have been inventing gods since we started trying to figure out “how it all works”, we have a rich and deep history of myth and lore to draw from. Even if you make something up whole cloth, I bet some religion “already did it” (like the Simpsons).
I generally like to have my gods be somewhat Out There. Something I have been rather fond of in recent years is pull from Animist beliefs, that places, plants and animals possesses spiritual qualities. I have especially been fond of every village having a guardian of some sort, be it an old tree or an animal god.
This have mostly been influenced by the works of Hayao Miyazaki, such as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke.
Another part I have let me be inspired in recent years is Brian Murphy, of “Not another D&D podcast” and “Dimension 20” fame. Who noted that he just thinks having 3 gods feels like a good number, that covers most of the archetypes. Which I kinda agree with, as I realized that whenever I spent time making a pantheon for a world, 90% of the Gods are never really relevant. And I sometimes forget them myself. But 3 gods are kinda manageable. Through I still like to give them animistic qualities, just far more eldritch. Like a hundred eyed tree whose followers gains powers by plucking its eyes and exchanging them with their own, or the god of death being a snowy wolf, whose packs causes diseases and age in people when they hunt them. If you kill the pack hunting you, then you will never age or be sick again.
I often combine this with the first part, splitting my world into having Greater Gods and Small Gods. A concept which was inspired both by various real mythologies, but also by Terry Pratchetts books. Which allows me to both have a tight trinity of greater Gods, that are known across the world and cover the most important function, and a wide variety of local Small Gods, that are mostly relevant for individual villages or nations.
I like to have 2 “levels” of gods: Big Gods, who handle the major concepts of the universe, like Life, Death, Time, and so on. They are bigger than petty mortal concerns and don’t really answer prayers and the like, they’re just *there*. Though of course, that’s not to say they don’t act, but when they do, all mortals can really do about it is get out of the way.
Then there are Small gods, creators and patrons of the mortal races. Generally 1 per race (or a group of races if they’re closely linked, like kobolds, dragonborn, and of course, dragons). And since man was made in god’s image (if it’s good enough for the Abraham, it’s good enough for my players), I extrapolate the design theme of the race to create a god who would create that race. Specifically, I look for what’s wrong with the god, since, in my setting, the small gods are all fundamentally damaged in various ways as a result of the great war to seal away the Big Gods of Life and Death into what are now the twin suns of the world.
For example, the elves have a deep affinity for the natural world and it’s magic, to the point where they absorb ambient magic from their surroundings to adapt themselves to the environment they find themselves in (and that’s where elf subraces come from, they can even change subrace by living somewhere else for a while). So, I would say that their god died in the war, and as it’s final act to protect it’s creations, transferred it’s essence into the world itself, to strengthen nature against the destruction wrought in the war, and essentially, becoming nature itself.
Or another example, humans are the jack of all trades (specialisation is for insects and all that). So it stands to reason they would have been created by a god who is also unwilling (or unable) to settle on a specific theme. And so I made them a god who, during the war, tried to fight the Big Gods by throwing out so many different attacks and strategies, in order to overwhelm their defences. However, splitting it’s power so many different ways damaged it’s essence, shattering it into a pseudo-pantheon of less powerful demigods (based off of the celtic pantheon, because those guys get so little rep compared to the norse or greco-roman pantheons).
I like your take on elven adaptability.
“Two elves walk into a bar. So now there’s a Bar Elf subrace.”
The adaptation takes about 1 year of continuous exposure (so a long weekend in elf years). It does make for interesting family portraits.
That being said, I am totally making a Bar Elf subrace now. I’m thinking a bonus to Con so they can hold their booze.
I have created the Bar Elves, it’s on the Discord.
+1 to Con and Cha, -1 to Dex
proficiency in brewers supplies
instinctively know the direction and distance to the nearest bar relative to you on your current plane of existence.
Depends on the campaign setting, but in worlds without preset pantheons, I’ve crafted my favored religion, loosely based off real-life Animistic beliefs. In this religion, there are three tiers of spirits(I prefer this to Gods) which regulate reality.
First are the Shaydronrari, the foundations of the world and greatest spirits. These are the spirits that guide all of existence. The Shaydronrari are Waveilar, spirit of Chaos and Water; Cryselar, spirit of Earth and Law; Irene, spirit of Cold Passion, the Stars, and Air; Lotro, the spirit of the Sun, Fire, and fiery passion; Lotrovar, sprit of Strength, Light, and the Day; Lunaramar, spirit of Fear, Dark, and the Night; and Asmodeous, Shayin, and Mikale, spirits of Destruction, Transformation, and Creation respectively. This first tier of deities is divided between the Faces of Creation(Shayin, Asmodeous, and Mikale), which are often thought to be a single spirit with three masks, and the Elders, who are the remaining Shaydronrari.
Second are the Origias, a group of twenty-six spirits that created the various forms of life and supernatural creatures.
Third are the Soul-Spirits, innumerable spirits that are the animating forces behind all living things, as well as manifestations as ideas, such as celestials, fey, fiends, and elementals.
The Shaydronrari are spirits without any sentience or will of their own any longer, only gaining consciousness and desires when called to manifest by their followers. The Origias, on the other hand, are creatures of superhuman intelligence that have their own agendas. They are known for inspiring crusades and and sending agents to manipulate the world.
The Sou-Spirits are creatures, and by far the most varied of spirits, representing actual physical things, like rocks, trees, people, animals, or buildings, as well as ideals, like elementals, demons, and angels.
As for origin stories, Here’s the Shaydronrari’s:
In the beginning, all was nought, and the nothing had a name. It was Shayin, That Which Endures, Spirit of the Grey Void. Shayin endured for countless eons, and the ages wore upon his mind. Reality was not meant to remain unchanged, but there was no catalyst. Finally, in desperation, Shayin happened upon an idea. To begin the transformation of existence, he carved the spirits Asmodeous and Mikale from his own soul, setting reality into motion. Shayin settled into rest, and through the works of Asmodeous and Mikale, the Elders were formed and the world was prepared. As Asmodeous and Mikale retired, the Elders began to populate the world, creating the Origias.