Create an EPIC D&D Pantheon in 6 Easy Steps!

today you're going to church and no not the spooky boring kind I'm talking about D and D Gods building a D and D Pantheon from scratch can be a daunting and overwhelming task so I've painstakingly developed a system for creating amazing D and deds for your home brew games I'm going to walk you through all six steps plus there's a free pdf template in the description that you can grab for when you create your very own Pantheon I'm the Alpine DM let's get to it so real quick what even is a Pantheon it's basically a fancy word that just means all of the Gods and you can think of it in terms of a culture's beliefs about which gods exist so for example Zeus and Poseidon are in the Greek pantheon well Rah and Osiris are in the Egyptian Pantheon but anyway step one is just to figure out how many gods you'll have in your Pantheon in the Forgotten Realms there are dozens and dozens of gods and if you're anything like me that is way too many to remember keep track of or let alone care about so that's why I recommend you start with just five Gods it's enough where your world is going to feel full but not too many where you will be just completely overwhelmed plus if you want you can always add more if you're feeling just super ambitious but in the example I'll be showing you plus in the template we are just going to stick with five Gods so for right now we'll label them a through e that is going to bring us to step two which is probably my favorite and that is figuring out out what your Gods embody and represent often times gods are used as explanations for otherwise inexplicable natural phenomenon an erupting volcano might represent a fire God's Wrath while howling wind and storms could be a goddess mourning the loss of a child you can be as creative as you want here but here's five different ways that you can come up with what gods embody and represent first you can make use of opposites like life and death Fire versus Ice the Sun and the Moon this can be pretty much anything you want as long as it has a clear polar opposite take one aspect like fire give it to God a and take the opposite aspect ice give it to God B you get the idea it's actually pretty straightforward another option is to make use of the different schools of magic now in D and D there are eight schools of magic which is not the same number as five how many gods we have but you can kind of pick and choose and just have fun with it use some of them don't use the others it doesn't matter it's all made up another method is to use geographic features or regions and these might actually end up as opposites like desert and ocean but it certainly doesn't have to you could have a river god or a god of the forests that sort of situation real quick thanks for watching the video if you're enjoying it please subscribe it really helps me pursue my dream of being a writer full-time and it helps promote the video to other people who are going to get value out of it that's all the fourth way is to associate your Gods with the different labors or jobs villagers might pray to a god of blacksmithing before forging a very important sword or when all the crops wither and die it's because a god of the Harvest was displeased with the most recent offerings the final method and then I promise I'm going to take you to step three is to base them off of monsters so these Gods might not be worshiped on a very large scale but they could could lend strength and inspiration to different creat uh Monsters of the realm so you could have a god of the Cobalts or a god of trolls all right put all that together because it is your turn now for my Pantheon I used a mixture of all of these methods and I also assigned a couple different ones to every single God and I would highly recommend that you do the same so real quick I'm going to go through my Pantheon and what I put for each of my five Gods but leave a comment tell me what you put for yours so God a is the god of blacksmithing volcanoes and Orcs God B is the god of rivers fishing and the moon God C is the god of sun order and Machinery God D is the god of thievery chaos and illusion magic and God e is the god of forests music and restoration magic as you can see even doing just this step adds so much depth to your Pantheon and it gives you a glimpse at these gods and who they were worshippers might be and of course you can extrapolate these into different traits so God a blacksmithing volcano and Orcs immediately makes me think loud strong explosive whereas God E forest's music and restoration makes me think tranquil and pure all right moving on step three is naming your Gods which I find to be one of the more intimidating steps honestly naming anything in D and D can feel impossible I would stare at a blank screen for so so many minutes and when I finally did come up with something I'd be like oh no like that sounds stupid or that's not very realistic but now I have a few different methods that I'm going to show you and these are fantastic because they can be used to name anything they do not apply just to Gods method one is to use backwards words so what you can do is take a word that relates to one of the aspects of your God from the previous step and then you're just going to flip it in reverse obviously this isn't going to work for every single word because of phonetics and spelling and stuff but you can play around with the spelling and some of the letters to change it if you need to to make it flow a little bit better okay so here's two examples let's say we have a God who Reigns Supreme Over a tropical region of islands that is filled with wondrous fruits and vegetation the most prominent of these fruits is mangoes so mango backwards is agnum Tada I don't know about you but I think agnum sounds like a pretty cool name for a God how dare you question the Great and Mighty ognum dagger so now we're going to use the same exact method to name a Lesser God of Brewing Meade so Meade comes from honey honey could be described as having an amber color amber backwards is remma but honestly I kind of hate that name so I'm going to make a few tweaks just to show you how it can work so I'm going to take the B and change it to a th and I'm going to add an r on the end of it to make rear which I'm way more happy with than RMA there's no real strategy for making these tweaks just kind of switch out words and sounds add prefix suffixes until you get something that just feels good another method for naming the Gods in your Pantheon Begins by choosing a short phrase and this can be anything really it could be related to an aspect of the god it could be a song lyric or just a sentence that you said so what you're going to do is take that phrase and say it over and over and over again back to back and kind of Squish it all together and as you're saying it or you can also write this out on paper I find that helps as well is to try to pick out different combinations of sounds that could be words and just like before you might need to mess around with some of the spelling after you pick something but that's like the next step so my example phrase is I hope it doesn't rain today which has nothing to do with any of my gods and is just a sentence that I said so here's what it looks like I hope it doesn't rain today I hope it doesn't rain today I hope it doesn't rain today so as you can see you might look a little bit crazy but just trust me it's worth it to have a cool name for your God to me one of the sound that stuck out was cint train as in doesent Rain cint train and I think spelling it exactly how it sounds like cint train as in like blasphemy Express I think that's a little bit silly so in this case I would change around the spelling a little bit I'm going to add a y and a and an e just to make it have that kind of mystical Whimsy Fay sort of feeling to it the final trick you can use to name your Gods is to use foreign languages just fire up Google translator pick a random language Ang the less you know that language like the less common it is spoken in your country I think the better and type in one of the aspects of a God that you're naming or if you want you can just put in a random word but for this I like to at least keep it a little bit related so for me God B is in charge of fishing and with just a few clicks I got the options viz Vang kastas and aransa I think these are all really cool but I'm going to go with viz Vang just cuz it's the one I like the most so now when you are naming the Gods in your Pantheon I would recommend you use a combination of all three of these methods mix and match them just play around with the words and the letters until you get something that you're happy with so here's what I got for mine chiguas is the god of blacksmithing Orcs and volcanoes viz Vang goddess of the moon rivers and fishing ano god of the sun order and Machinery skelm goddess of thievery chaos and illusion magic and cint train god of the forests restoration magic and music next next up step four is to figure out the relationships that Mortals have with your Gods this step is a little bit less formulaic than the last couple of steps because this can vary widely based on the world that you're trying to build so what I'm going to do is ask some thought-provoking questions and discuss them a little bit to prompt you so you can think about how you want your Mortals to have a relationship with your Gods so grab some pen and paper pause the video if you need to but here we go so the first question is do Mortals even have contact with the guy in some pantheons it might be completely unheard of to speak with a God and if you went around telling people that you might get looked at like you are an absolute lunatic whereas in other pantheons it could be very normal for Gods to mingle with The Mortals whether they're just overseeing and protecting their domain or actively intervening in some Divine Godly type of way if your gods do interact with Mortals then you need to figure out how often does this happen and in what form can the God be contact acted with prayer and worship by just anybody or does this only happen in very special occasions like rituals or full moons or requires a sacrifice offering that sort of thing most often gods are portrayed as humanoid in form and this is definitely the most straightforward and easy way for your Mortals to have a relationship with the gods they might have a very specific iconic look so when somebody sees them they're just like oh my God that there goes Thor or the gods might choose to take a very unassuming form and blend in they could be a random beggar on the streets or a traveling Merchant in Disguise something I like to do is give them a special animal form such as a rainbow colored fox or a elk with glass antlers and when people see these they know that they're interacting with the Divine in some way or another another big question you can ask is what symbols do people use to represent these Gods this can be super simplistic like the cross is literally just two lines and that's used pretty widely or of course it could be something a little more detailed ideally you want to use something connected to one of your God's aspects so that this symbol actually does represent them and isn't just a random tack on imagery that you put in at the end so for example three curved lines in a circle could be the symbol of viz Vang goddess of the moon and rivers the final question in this part is how are the gods worshiped or your Gods might not even be worshiped at all they could be so feared that even just uttering their name is absolutely forbidden taboo let alone worshiping them if people do worship the gods do they have a dedicated place to do that like a Temple Church or an altar generally speaking the answer is going to be yes in some form or another but think about how a church for one of your Gods how the interior the normal practices how that differs from a church for one of your other gods in the pantheon even though they're both churches they could be so so different and that's the kind of World building that we want to promote here Gods can also be woried with holidays that have really weird rituals such as a rabbit that hides eggs filled with candy like that's pretty strange finally that is going to bring us to step five which is how do the gods interact with one another and this is a step that I consider optional because chances are kind of good unless you're focusing a campaign completely on gods and the Divine and interaction between gods and Mortals there's a good chance that relationships between Gods might not even come into play but if you want to do it just for the fun of World building I highly encourage you to do so just like in the last step I'm going to ask you a set of questions just to get you thinking a little bit about this and how you want your Gods to interact if they do at all they could be their own completely separate entities existing in demiplanes far beyond the Mortal realm so firstly are your Gods related at all in a lot of mythologies the pantheon is really more of a dysfunctional family tree there's brothers sisters cousins everything in a very complex web you don't need to get quite as deep you're not going to have Zeus going around getting real busy but it is good to think about whether there's a familial relation between the gods or if they're not even family what is that relationship maybe they're friends or enemies or I don't know something other than that another question is to think about what has has happened in the past that defines the Dynamics of the relationship between these Gods you know do they get along are they at war or where do they reside so step six is if you want your Pantheon to really feel flushed out is to treat your Gods like NPCs and I have a video where I walked you through four steps to making incredible NPCs every single time you can find it here or there's also a link in the description so be sure to grab your PDF template in the description it's completely free yes you have to sign up for the email list but you can always unsubscribe immediately if you're just so upset with me and if you want tons of free content for your 5e games head on over to patreon.com thee Alpine DM and check it out

Channel: The Alpine DM

Views: 4,134

Keywords: dm tips, how to gm, d&d for beginners, dnd pantheon, d&d pantheon, dungeons & dragons, game master tips, world building, dm tips for beginners, how to be a great game master, campaign creation

Id: zeNGgDUov7Q

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024