Creating A Pantheon

Preface: This is an exercise I did back in summer of 2022 for my “Cleric + Thief” solo game. It is an execution of KJ Davies’s Polyhedral Pantheon Design, and was really quite fun! What follows now is the original post I made in my gaming journal, with additional edits for clarity.

We’re gonna make a whole bunch of gods. Like, way too many gods.

Here are the core concepts:

1. This process is abstractly based on polyhedral geometry, namely the dodecahedron: a twelve sided die has 12 faces (the flat bits with the numbers on them), and 20 vertices (the pointy bits around the edges of each face). But you can safely ignore all that and just remember: 12 faces/majors, 20 vertices/minors.

2. Assign one DOMAIN to all 12 faces and all 20 vertices.

3. Each face touches a couple of vertices. Each vertex touches a couple of faces. These are that thing’s NEIGHBORS. Note that neighbors cross the Major/Minor boundary. This is interesting!

4. That’s kind of it. Each face and vertex now represents a god with a PORTFOLIO consisting of its own assigned domain as its primary focus, but also the domains of each of its NEIGHBORS as secondary focuses.

Here are the benefits of this system:

1. Complex, interesting, overlapping portfolios

2. Major and minor deity tables that you can roll a d12 or a d20 on.

Let’s begin!

Start by creating 12 domains, one for each face. These are gonna be our “Big Twelve” gods. Our Olympians.

1. Law
2. Magic
3. Healing
4. Chaos
5. Life
6. Death
7. Plants
8. Dreams
9. Time
10. Sun
11. Animals
12. Moon

Second, each vertex will also get a domain. These will become our “Minor Twenty” gods. Lesser gods, local gods, demigods.

1. Trickery
2. Metal
3. Fertility
4. Water
5. Change
6. Creation
7. Destruction
8. Fire
9. Madness
10. Storms
11. Courage
12. Wealth
13. Air
14. Earth
15. Weather
16. Wisdom
17. Strength
18. Protection
19. Travel
20. Pain

Note: The distinction between Major and Minor here is at this point I think merely political. Notice that Wisdom is a Minor domain and Plants are a Major domain. I think it makes good sense for these to be swapped. And I’m sure that the gods constantly vie and struggle to be promoted, and to demote their rivals. At this point though, we’ll just leave it all as is and see what happens.

Okay so each god, major and minor, gets their own domain. And each god has its neighbors: every vertex (minor god) borders 3 faces, and every face (major god) borders 5 vertices. (More polyhedral geometry!)

If that doesn’t make sense to you, go get a 12-sided die or a picture of one and stare at it real hard until it makes sense. Or don’t, and just accept it and move on.

So what we have done here is set up each god to have a primary domain (its own assigned domain) and a number of secondary domains (its neighbors’ domains). That is, each major god gets its own domain, plus 5 secondary domains. And each minor god gets its own domain, and 3 minor domains. Thus the major gods attain more power / diversity / responsibility.

The following templates mostly just tell you who the neighbors are for each face and vertex.

Major Gods Template:

Minor Gods Template:

Okay let’s fill out the templates: For each face or vertex, look up the Secondary Domains on the opposite table and fill them in!

Note: I discovered at this point that it’s best to shuffle your initial list of domains lest your domains be thematically clumped. For example, when brainstroming, I wrote out all my elemental domains at once. This resulted in a god of fire, water, earth, and water. Which both doesn’t make much sense, and also isn’t that interesting or fun. So spread your domains around thematically if you’re doing this.

By the way, in my game every god is merely an aspect of the god-above-all-gods, PATRICK.

Wanna see how it turned out?

The major gods:

AND the minor gods:

So now I have d20 minor gods, and d12 major gods. Neat!

A lot of things here just work when you look at them. The god of madness and chaos? The god of life and fertility? Others are interesting. The god of Law and Trickery? The god of Healing and Destruction? Nautrik is the god of Time and Wisdom, but also of Time and Pain.

I also really like how subdomains overlap. There are, e.g., five minor gods with a Law subdomain. This could mean that they all have fealty to Unutrik, the primary god of Law. And that they all vie and jostle for his favor. And for Unutrik, it might mean that there are 5 lesser gods all gunning for his job and trying to stab him in the back. Built in political drama!

I imagine none of these gods will use actual names in my game. Or if they do, mortals probably won’t know them. They will instead remain rather loosely conceptual, going by an epithet when it is necessary to refer to them.

I also admit that this is all a little bit over the top. Do I really need 32 gods in my little make believe game? No, I do not. But now I can have some readymade, weird, jumbled portfolios that I can draw on when I want to, all of which are random and jumbled enough that they ought to be quite interesting.

To tie theory back to practice, In Cleric + Thief, the titular heroes are (were) disciples of Martik, the vulture-headed god of Air and Death. Until Martik was murdered, that is. And now they are guardians of a newborn godling who might one day ascend to the pantheon. And in the meantime, they intend to identify the godslayer— be it man or god—and bring them to justice. And now I have a deep roster of suspects who might have done it.

Some fun resources on pantheons:

• http://www.kjd-imc.org/blog/polyhedral-pantheon-design/
• https://james-holloway.itch.io/the-pamphlet-of-pantheons
• https://swordofmassdestruction.blogspot.com/2020/01/rethinking-clerics-and-religion-part-1.html
• https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2020/06/shinto-in-cumbria.html

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