I mean when you consider people think of monotheism when they create polytheism so often... Like WHY are the gods so selfish and hateful to each other and warring? Aren't they on the same side?

I mean it does make sense, dnd is western fantasy, run and owned by an American company. Most dms and worldbuilders would probably be Christian, or have more exposure to Christianity than to polytheistic faiths like Hinduism and thus assume that it works the same way. All gods are jealous and want everyone to worship them and them only. And the biggest exposure to polytheism is Greek mythology, where all the gods are a bunch of petulant, lecherous ass hats who will throw a hissy fit the moment a mortal does something remotely arrogant and they all hate each other. There is also the factors of being culturally divorced from the folkloric traditions. Europeans, especially Scandinavians, have a lot of familiarity with their myths and legends.

Thanks Nick!

​​@@esperthebardHail to thee, Esper, mightiest of bards of this age! As with all your class, you continue to Inspire. I was wondering if I could get some advice from you? I am an aspiring DM struggling with increasing the role-playing potential of my homebrew monsters. I've rounded up some rules; like say giving them a wide range of alignments, making them social creatures who live in large groups, etc .I am one of those "Tolkienian" worldbuilders who can easily come up with genealogies, languages, cultural practices, but social interactions kinda stump me. What types of lore hooks generally spark ideas in your head? Sorry if I'm being a little nosy. Here's hoping your channel grows and you have a great day!

Honestly, I think the reason we end up with so many properties having multi-verses is it’s not profitable to just have a story end. That’s why I usually like anime that are only about 2 to 4 seasons long. It tells a contained story with a beginning of middle, and an end And it doesn’t try to come up with sequels. As much as I liked bleach, I feel like there’s just too many seasons and let’s not even talk about Naruto or one piece.

The best thing about world building is that you only need to figure out whatever aspect your players will actually be engaging with. If you got Clerics, Paladins, and Warlocks, just find out what Sub Class they are taking and flesh out that Lore. Or if someone has a religious background for their PC, work with them to flesh out how that looks in your world. Only prep what's nessisary or what inspires you, or you'll burn yourself out before you finish, and 90% of it your players will never see.

I'm going with both, "natural" Gods that draw Its power from the land and the elements themselves, think the spirit world from avatar. And then another pantheon of Gods that came about with mortal races, that do draw their power from belief. After all, why would it matter to a god of Nature what mortals believe in anyway? they are manifestations of the natural world anyway. this gives me an in to make the "mortal" Gods more humanoid like, and the natural ones way more alien and weird.

My own two cents on pantheon-building: Decide how the gods work before making them, have a system for it. Worship giving gods power is completely valid, but then keep in mind that the strongest gods have to be appealing. You cannot have powerful gods who are niche or even shunned and self-destructive. In D&D as 5e wrote her, Shar cannot really be a greater deity if we're going purely with worship, and Pathfinder gods are sometimes impossibly stupid in what their 'niche' of worshippers is meant to be. Also keep in mind that if worship=power, gods will become populistic and adapt their approach to what works to convince people, or people become worship-batteries for stronger sentient beings while in the stone age. Gods being born/with unclear origin is completely valid, but then keep in mind that they don't have to care for worship and all the headaches that cause them. Creating churches and providing clerics with power becomes a charity, not a necessity, and you need to find some other reason for the gods to be around in your mundane setting. Powerful gods can simply not care or even kill those that dare bother them with prayers, and the hubris of man may make a god just retract their clerical powers for a decade or two. Gods being species-bound is completely valid, but then keep in mind that those gods are going to care for making your species more numerous and fighting other species. This is a good middle way, but doesn't really work well with D&D being a mixed species kind of game, unless you make sure it works. Also don't mix this with other divine systems, like D&D does. Then decide what the gods can actually do, why they'd do it and what their limitations are. One such limitation that I personally see no reason to enforce, is that the gods cannot enter the mortal world. That's something that we kind of just assume because other settings do it. To a lvl1-4 party, a CR23+ being might as well be a god, and we actually have statblocks for those to revamp into your deities. But a halfway situation that also works just fine, is that demigods can walk the mortal plane, and lesser gods and stronger cannot. This creates a situation where demigods suddenly become a lot more important and noteworthy, because they don't need to work through clerics. In their own territory, they are the big deal and getting people to worship them out of sheer authority, influence or awe is easy. Their clerics can only go to about lvl5 or so and literally require the demigod touching a mortal instead of doing it remotely like the greater gods do, but that's fine. In their own city, town or forest, that demigod is the big fish in a small pond. One that the party can interact with, one who's the flavour of the region, who can be exchanged by a completely different flavour of demigod in the next town over, and who cares for the now. And there's churches of the greater gods around that are common and influential, being a pantheon. You know how those work. They are part of the zeitgheist, of the culture, of the people's prayers. They're doing just fine, and they're the ones that may take over the cleric's faith once that demigod that the cleric started with grows too weak to make them go lvl6. But in between the demigods and greater gods are the lesser gods. The demigods that were popular enough to ascend, but then noticed that their church and city fell apart or immediately turned to another demigod once they were gone. Some demigods survive, but the lesser godhood is the graveyard of divinity. Many demigods know this. Some may work towards constructing a more stable basis for their worship (and aren't complete tyrannical dicks to their followers), while others cull their followers to avoid ascension. And there are a lot of lesser deities that would be grasping at straws to remain relevant, keep worshippers and become a stable god.

Quite the expansive list. Out of curiosity, why do you think mixing species-bound gods with other systems is a problem as DnD does it?

​ @user-nf6cl5mb2r The issue with mixing species pantheons and gods that rely on worship or domains, is that they inevitably have to clash or overlap. 5e has a big issue of there being too many gods, resulting in that few of them truly matter. You have Moradin for the dwarves, and Gond filling pretty much the same role for the humans. Or a war god for pretty much every species. The elves have so many gods that are supposed to be important and powerful, yet have zero bleed-over to other species to explain how a not that numerous species can sustain that many gods. Combining multiple ways of how the gods work/sustain themselves, just piles up more gods and makes them less valuable as a result. The first reason is because mixing multiple systems just doesn't quite make sense. If the gods rely on worship, how could they exist before the species that worship them? If they can create new species that remain loyal to them, why aren't the non-species gods doing that? If anyone can worship any god, why aren't the Seldarine or somesuch using elven missionaries to spread their faith to other species? If they can't, why are there gods that can be worshipped by everyone indiscriminately? I know that the D&D lore says that the rules of divinity changed between the creation of species and now, but that's just lazy writing. You can't change the rules but also still fully rely and use the previous ruleset to explain away any issues with your current ruleset. You might as well say that there's this super-god that never does anything but who can with a wave of his hand change the rules and oppose all the gods simultaneously with zero resistance, just in case you want to change your own rules again. Oh wait, they did do that. Having two different systems simply clashes, similar to how people in D&D die and end up in the blue mold wall unless the god they worships comes to pick them up (the explanation of why everyone should be religious) but also that everyone who is chaotic evil ends up becoming a demon. One soul apparently has two contradicting afterlives, and similarly the gods in D&D operate by different sets of rules simultaneously. The second but minor issue, is that this just results in a loss of potential and variety. If you scrap having species gods, then the gods that the party know have a church everywhere and even amongst completely new species that the party encounters, and this species worshipping the god in different ways and for different reasons. It could diversify the god's representation and gives the cleric surprise allies in many spots. If you scrap having domain gods, then you have a small and select group of gods for the PCs to choose from, a good reason for the party to have different gods yet stick together, and the gods and species can directly influence and shape each other. If you combine both however, you don't get either and get a situation where anyone can worship many gods yet are also supposed to have their traditional gods and everything just kind of becomes murky. I call this a minor issue however, as it is not a problem but a loss of potential, and there's no hard need to optimise a setting's world building this hard. The third reason which I do consider important, flows from the above reason. In practice, because every species has their own set species pantheon but there are also a ton of non-species gods, you end up in a setting where humans and just humans (for the most part) are sustaining a wide variety of non-species gods while every other species tends to have their own special gods to exclude them from these human gods. Every noteworthy species has to have their own pantheon of gods that have to cover what that species is about and likes, and most of these species gods end up being rather irrelevant. (I mean, who uses Glittergold f.e.?) With the way that the Forgotten Realms designed their general pantheons, there's a dissonance with two systems that don't quite work together. While the human gods can in their own lore also have other species listed as their followers, it's often in contrast with the species' lore, or even DMs ignoring the established lore by changing up the system a bit and using the domain gods instead of the segregated pantheons. And that's just indicative of a flawed system of worldbuilding. While I know that this might be a hot take, 4th edition actually did something good in this regard. They saw that there were too many gods, and tried to remove a bunch in part by merging existing gods together. And they broke up the species pantheons while doing this. For example, they said that Gruumsh was also Talos, the orc god having a human alias to get human worshippers. Not only does this make sense in multiple ways such as Gruumsh getting more worship and spies abroad, it makes it possible that the wide variety of gods that humans have are just species' gods by different names. And that all the double or too small gods, are mere aliases of each other. 5e scrapped this however, so it no longer applies. Ironically 4e fixes the whole issue, but it's a patchjob at best. There are a few more reasons, but things are already getting too longwinded. Or as you so tactfully said 'expansive'. The TL;DR is effectively, if you add multiple systems that cannot combine, then you have no system. You just have a bunch of gods that you all design however you want, and the definition of what they are and are limited to differs however you want it to. It's just bad worldbuilding. There are ways to patch it or make it work, but it's better to just choose and work with one system instead of juggling.

As a foreword, anything after this is an attempt at playing Devil's Advocate for the sake of discussion/conversation. Feel the need to point that out given how many arguments start over the most inane things on here. I can see oversaturation being a problem from a gameplay and even lore standpoint, but in fairness, actual polytheism is even more filled with gods and other actors. As for the elven deities, maybe it's a matter of not all mortals being equal? DnD seems pretty similar to WH40K in that different races have different "soul strength", often manifesting as magical affinity or lack thereof. The Seldarine may maintain relevance due to the quality over quantity seen in elves and their souls, along with perhaps their age and holding onto their power since the beginning of Toril. To address each of your points with my best guess as answer- "If the gods rely on worship, how could they exist before the species that worship them?" Q/A Some of them seem to have been created through other means. Even deities can have a variety of origins based on stories I've read in DnD and outside it, with "worshiped into existence" being only one possibility. "If they can create new species that remain loyal to them, why aren't the non-species gods doing that?" Q/A A matter of power, maybe? The gulf between Greater and Intermediate divine status is one step, yet it decides how much they can create, know, and influence in reality with pretty stark numerical differences. Hence why it seems the lower ranked are always trying to recruit new followers, often competing with the scores of similarly ranked beings to do so. "If anyone can worship any god, why aren't the Seldarine or somesuch using elven missionaries to spread their faith to other species?" Q/A Elitism or xenophobia would be my guess, considering how elves in any setting often act. That and elven souls seem to be fundamentally different with their whole reincarnation shtick, so it could be the Seldarine can't realistically accept other converts due to a "soul dissonance" issue. "If they can't, why are there gods that can be worshipped by everyone indiscriminately?" Q/A Tying back to that last answer, different rules for different deities would be the case, I'd guess. Fair point on the lazy handwaving approach. If it were up to you, how would you have written the divine rules? I kind of like it being a little contradictory, if I'm being honest. Not saying I don't see your point that it'd be nice to clear things up, at least a bit, but it reminds me of reality in that you DO often have a lot of conflicting laws for high-profile subjects or at least vague wording, i.e. the Constitution. I see what you mean by loss of potential, though again, and I know this is probably a weird defense, I like that it's reminiscent of our world. Someone raised Catholic is expected to remain so, but that doesn't stop them from becoming a Pastafarianist. You have options! Lol It's definitely more complex with the way it currently stands, which often leads to problems as you say given poor handling/writing of the material. Alas, poor Garl, expect actually not considering what he did to the Kobolds "as a joke". It's the same problem as with 40K, you have a massive cast of actors big and small with a bunch of different authors allowed to play with them as they see fit. I feel like at least one potential solution to this, without cutting cast members, would be to have one or more canon monitors making sure that if nothing else you don't have contradicting materials as you do now. Feel like there's a little bit of good in everything, even those hated by most. Maybe a bit of both then? The many irrelevant gods ARE actually aliases of other deities, but from worlds beyond Toril. Cleans up things a bit while still maintaining the uniqueness of Faerunian gods. I prefer in-depth discussions, so now worries on my part for something like this. As for the system the way it stands now, I see your points, but still think it's at least salvageable given proper handling with maybe some editing here and there. I'm still curious about further details regarding how you'd change things if you feel like sharing, though. @@haenen100

@@user-nf6cl5mb2r Thanks for the foreword, that is indeed an important thing to say when having any kind of discussion on the internet. Same here, I never argue to 'convince you that you're wrong' or 'to win', but for the debate and to share and get new ideas and insights. With oversaturation, I'm glad that you bring up 40K because that's a good example. That universe just has 4 important Chaos Gods, one human king, and Gork and Mork that just kinda also exist. While there are much more chaos demigods, primarchs and powerful entities, the divine is kept something special since the important figures are kept limited to be counted on one hand (and Gork and Mork) and almost all the important events and lore can be traced back to these five figures. (And the Old Ones and Necrons with their Star Spawn and such, I know.) I have no problem with a shit ton of demigods, those are minor beings that are meant to have just a single village or a very small niche, but the Forgotten Realms is oversaturated with intermediate and greater deities. I mostly used the Seldarine as an example, you can exchange them with the dwarven or orc pantheon as you please. Technically elves are indeed stronger, since prayer is a matter of zeal and the elves are lorewise strongly religious and can easily overfixate on something including their prayer. But most of their worship goes to Corellon, so the numerous elven gods that they had and then the additional ones that 5e just threw, in still doesn't make sense. That's not very important though, too much into the details. My point there was more that if there's a species-restricted pantheon for most species, how are there so many non-species greater gods and no history of all species trying to eradicate all others so that only their pantheons survive in the end. On 'How were the gods already gods when they need worship to exist'. While I indeed phrased it as a question, this is a rhetorical question I already answered in my own answer a few lines later. It's explicit D&D lore, but I just find it such a bad bit of lore. They literally stated that the rules of how divinity works has changed in order to explain everything away. In fact, it changed more often, but those two rule revisions are the only two pertaining the illogical creation of species by gods that rely on their species. So in the beginning gods could just become into reality somehow, don't question it. Then there was the Dawn War, and afterwards the gods could no longer come into being or just walk in and also there were no more primordials around (even though there still are) and also all outsiders including the gods are banned from the Prime Material. Even later (I forgot the specific event name) it was decided that the gods could not exist without worship or create their own species just like that. The issue with the above is, this isn't even a multi-edition event trying to explain the differences between editions. Both bits of lore are from 2e, who literally had to make their system of gods with two rules-redefining events in order to explain why they wanted multiple sets of god systems. (1e was lore-light enough that they could've still chosen any one system specifically.) I'm not even including the 5e lore and its revisions and tend to stick to 3.5e lore (despite playing 5e only), since that's a hot mess multiplied. And I'm also not including specific bits of lore that make no sense, such as the origin story of the Aboleths suggesting that gods came into existence and gained power from worship rather than just what they were, millennia before the Dawn War and the second event happened and thus contradicting and changing so many events. The Aboleths aren't the only ones with their own story that messes things up, theirs is just the only story that isn't 'their species believes that-' since they have actual memories of these events. Going back to 40K, that is a story with a hard baseline. Every event and every individual has to keep in mind a few hard facts that cannot be changed or ignored. A writer cannot make a new Chaos God and just make them as powerful as the other four and also they've been here all along or operate by a different system (unless they're Gork and Mork). Nor can they just throw in a completely new set of rules that the four Chaos Gods had to work with. There can be convoluted events, weird exceptions and the writers making a bunch of as big stuff like the good gods and powerful artefacts that just somehow exist, but no one is introducing big deal Chaos God #17 while Nurgle is getting more and more forgotten and niche. I want something at least kind of like that for D&D. Right now their gods work by multiple systems at once, because the creators don't want to choose and have all the cakes. Species gods exist, gods that rely on worship exist, gods that just kinda exist exist, gods need a divine spark so divinity can be stolen, Ao decides, gods have a specific domain for their power, gods that fill none of the above exist, etc. But they do give supplements and lore drops that dare say that there is a system, that there is any rule to their madness. Hell, in Theron they even made a completely new setting, and this entire setting was about their newly minted gods and how they worked. And even in this new universe, they made a hard system of how the gods worked and where their powers came from, and then made two exceptions to this ruleset because that was more convenient for them. My issue isn't so much with that there's some inconsistencies, but that the entire system of how gods work in D&D is so bad that your 'Dunno, elven gods might work different.' is a legitimate argument. (I made your argument sound dumber not to sleight you, but to rephrase the answer to its own argument why that's a bad thing.) And while I agree that all the issues above can be patched, my issue lies more with that the system has to be patched to begin with instead of working as is. If I would get to rewrite the divine system, then I would made a hard choice between worship, species pantheons and divinity being its own thing. Once making that choice I can then add in the others with explanations of why they work with the system, preferably keeping them in line with the previous events if that's possible. I'd go for worship, since that's the system that explains why the gods would care for mortals and make clerics. These gods do have something akin to a divine spark, to explain why not just anyone can ascend with popularity alone. (Then again, kings and popstars becoming demigods because they have a kingdom of adoring fans is the kind of fun lore that can work. Hell, the party's levelling past mortal lvl7-10 limits can even be explained by them getting ever-more popular. But that wouldn't be very compatible with the currently established lore.) These gods can have multiple names, and of course want a monopoly if they can get it. Moradin and Gond are literally the same god in different cultures and languages, pretending to be two competing deities. There are no species deities, but there are definitely gods whose worshippers are pretty limited to just one or two species. A lot of evil minor deities are strong deities elsewhere that are trying to blossom a new church, a lot of minor good deities are aliases from church schisms that happened a long time ago where two conflicting groups used different names and the god accepted that since they didn't want to lose worshippers to an interloper. etc. As you might be able to tell, I don't mind a flexible or expansive system, and much of the lore we have can just be kept as is or with a little revision. I just don't want multiple systems, or systems where there are hard events that are completely contradictory. Pick one system, adapt what you can and then cross out all the events that don't fit in it. Even if you later make a 'cool story' that completely contradicts the system you established, WotC writer! There can be a few exceptions but with an emphrasis on a few and also they have to work being an exception, such as Gork and Mork just kinda being there chilling. I think that the way that the gods work should have a hard system, since in the D&D worlds they actually exist and are bound by rules/limitations. They are not like the real world gods or man-made laws, their limitations are as real for them as the laws of physics are for us. So while a Catholic can become a pastafarianist (which I assume is an Italian worshipping pasta, no I won't google the term because I like this idea more.), their gods wouldn't have the choice to operate by different systems. Jehova and the spaghetti monster are both limited to the same ruleset of how they get their power.

I'm a bit confused. Did the video help you in some way, or are you still struggling with this issue?

Welcome Lobo!

I would add "Relationship to Other Gods" or "Opinion on the other gods" etc. to your template Just something that ties the gods to each other.

I see your point, but based on Esper’s description of the situation during the age, the name actually makes sense: An age during which deities manifest themselves on the Prime Material Plane and actively fight each other for dominion. Gods striking at other gods would need to weaken them through loss of mortal worship/faith. The best way to do that is to send catastrophic events that undermine belief in their opponent’s control of domains attributed to their portfolio. Assuming gods fight like humans IRL, those attacks would be ever escalating and eventually be more than catastrophic, becoming cataclysmic. And an age defined by having multiple cataclysmic events would only be ended the way Esper seems to be, intervention by someone or something with absolute authority similar to Ao in the Forgotten Realms or a parent breaking up a fist fight between sibling offspring.

I mean, we today use the “Iron Age” and “Bronze Age” to describe historical periods. It’s pretty fair to have a populace describe a period by the defining feature of it, such as technological advances. I wouldn’t find it far fetched that if we had an age where gods were fucking around on the planet, it’d be called the “divine age” or “age of cataclysms”

Photoshop

I've gone and swapped it to the MTG color pie after a particularly convincing video series. Each color has some defining traits, and most interestingly, two allies and two enemies, creating interesting perspectives.

@@emjakos3548 I like that, especially considering my HB is remaking the primordials into "gods" and all the gods are going the way of brandon sanderson, forcing them into aspect portfolios that forcibly guide the hands of the Gods.

so that your alignment can be mapped as larger cones

& that cone has a "sphere" at the end...the more you increase that size, at a _certain point you will exhibit _*_aura_* If you start to go against your alignment it be shifted at the smallest point of aura, your alignment is shifted but you've lost the aura point, so you have to act this out until the encounter, at which point you can return. Think of when a paladin gets his aura, that's the lowest level that that can exist.

Well, traditionally, in most polytheism, take Greko-Roman religion, the vast majority of people worship multiple gods for different things. Pray to Hestia for happy family, pray to Artemis for a good hunt. Which is how most D&D settings portray the masses. But there would also be temples to each of them with priests who dedicate themselves to each god. The cult of Hades is well known one, or the cult of Dionysus. So I think most settings technically hit it accurately, but since as an adventurer, you are interacting with a priest dedicated to a certain god in the form of a cleric, the perception of religion is skewed into thinking it’s more of a patron god approach. Which makes sense, if you have a cleric of a “pantheon”, then there wouldn’t really be any driving mentality or credo, since pantheons typically cover the spectrum of ideas and ideals. Doesn’t make for good character direction if you do that.

@@thoelle5607 I don't think that is common knowledge or that most people actually understand that, the video clearly didn't. I mean it assigns professions to deities instead of activities that are associated with those deities. And honestly, I never felt like D&D understood this, since they do the same thing, have people worship a single deity out of a pantheon instead of praying to the deity associated with the task they want to perform or need help with. I give you that clerics usually dedicated themselves to only one deity for which they acted as oracle or messenger. But the unknowingly serving a deity in the video did not made me think that those people are clerics but normal people.

Any setting with more than one deity is “polytheist” by definition. By “proper” do you mean it should contain something like parity to real world historical mythology?

@@geraldwaldrop4598 Not just historic, you know there are still polytheistic religions around. But yes, I mean like people actually would approach that, not through the lens of monotheism that gets so often used.

@@Drudenfusz Fair enough. Taking forgotten realms for instance, they don't exactly "advertise" the polytheism in the setting. Its mentioned obscurely in some books and sources that people would pray to Lathander for fertility and child birth, and that people pray to Chauntea for good harvest. But most people you interact with in their modules are singularly focused individuals such as clerics or just very mono-worship people. Most settings don't fully display the way most polytheistic cultures worshipped. However, to be entirely fair to most settings, alot of polytheistic religions blur those lines. I mean, there was an entire period in Rome where the elite "acknowledged" the other gods, but solely worshipped a singular "sun god". And in alot of other polytheistic religions, mezo-american ones come to mind, you didn't exactly "worship" every god in the pantheon, you worshipped the "high" god of the pantheon, and just gave tribute to the others to avoid their wrath. I mean, yeah, people in greece offered Hestia their scraps in the hearth, but if you asked most of them who they "worshipped", they'd likely have said Zues. Same with Norse, they payed homage to the other gods, but at the end of the day, the center of their religion was Odin. Most polytheistic cultures with one "king god" were fairly focused towards them.

There's a giant misunderstanding of 'political' going around. For me, most arguments around politics in media are generally in tone. Like there's media with Christian values like VeggieTales (which is entertainment first) and there's "Christian media" like God is not dead (which feels weird to watch). A lot of media these days feels like God is not dead, like if the media itself is self-important and self congratulatory. It doesn't feel like a friend telling a story it feels like a stranger telling you how the world should be and calls you a r_tard if you disagree

Political elements will naturally be a part of the work, as they are subordinate to higher aims such as religion and spirituality. The point I referenced is this: If we shift our aims away from the artistic, the spiritual, and the noble values, then we are reduced to aims that are merely political.

Not only a great story teller. Good at the art stuff too.

@@esperthebard if that is your intent, that is correct. And I feel your video and work has done a sufficient job at Illustrating your intent. Maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to convey with the statement in the video. Looking forward to the next installment of your videos on your setting.

To clarify I mean I think that highlighting the religious and the spiritual was adequately communicated in the video and that I misunderstood what you were trying to say with the point you were referencing.

None of this is especially original. Argus us a 100 eyed giant from Greek mythology. Mix that with Sauron and Barad Dur thrown in. That's the aesthetic and the story of Enlil rearranged a little.