>I needed alliances and enmities among the gods, and I needed TOO MANY gods in the setting for every game player to memorize everything about them, to encourage roleplaying (and not metagaming based in what players had memorized).
Is too many gods a good idea?
No, because you'll wind up with too many for anyone to keep track of even in the long term, and absolutely none of them will feel special. Even if each has their own deep and interesting lore, motivations, and whatever else you can use to make them unique, it'll just feel like a meaningless clusterfrick of proper nouns and events. Besides players aren't going to know your behind-the-scenes lore unless it comes up in play.
I found it helpful to have a manageable number of gods, but only tell my players information that their characters would know. Not everyone is devoutly religious, and even priests don't know every single detail about every single myth, let alone the finer points of the metaphysics behind the setting. Write enough lore that your gods have depth, then filter it through what the average person would know. Th𝘢t’s what you give your players.
Yet every single polytheistic culture has a trillion gods and not "a manageable amount".
That's because every shitty village had a guardian deity. People who didn't leave their surroundings only knew handful of gods.
Not really, there were countless gods worshipped outside of local areas because Gods covered very specific areas and while you might not pray to many Gods (you prayed for something so if you aren’t a smith praying to Vulcan was pretty useless).
As an example most Romans would probably know Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Mars, Pluto, Mercury, Venus, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Vulcan, Vesta, Baachus, Sol, Luna, Janus, and Orcus, in addition to locally worshipped minor deities. Now they might not worship these deities, but they would know their names and understand the gist about them.
Just do the ol pratchett and have one god wearing different hats for different cultures.
>our god of fire is the righteous conflagration, Jeff
>well we worship the flame spirit Tony, and you are heretics
>holy war ensues
>meanwhile the only fire god, Hidalgo, gets power from all this faith so they doesn't care what the moronic apes say when they're praying and burning sacrifices
The problem with polytheism is that either the gods aren't really gods or the mono-religions of the setting are still somehow the most popular despite being objectively wrong. Quite often, gods in fantasy settings end up seeming more like demons than gods.
If the gods aren't really gods because you're attributing divinity to any powerful being, then whatever. It's a power fantasy for whatever player character worshiping the real god. But if they're all actually gods, why would I worship just one of them? If the creator of the world, the patron-saint of mankind, and the steward of the afterlife are all separate entities, what possible benefit would there be to joining a religion dedicated to just ONE of them? If it's because the objectively-true gods are at odds with eachother and DON'T want to share worshipers, then we immediately circle back to the gods actually being demons.
This resonates with the fundamental truth of why world-building a literally real pantheon of gods will always go to shit in a TTRPG game: when you bring "powerful beings who hold very real sway over the world" in the context of a *game*, players are instantly going to try to maximize the amount of power they can get.
All those 100 pages of backstory go right out of any player's mind when they hear your god can be worked like a gumball machine that outputs miracles if you kiss enough ass. The focus of the campaign veers dramatically as players come to expect a Chekov's gun resolution: you introduced the gods as real people, and now they want interaction with them. good luck getting them to care about any of the comparatively minor skirmishes between factions when you have a bunch of arch-mages capable of changing the universe with a thought. Who do you think the players are going to hope to interact with more in the back of their minds when that's an option?
Keep the church, ditch the god.
>or the mono-religions of the setting are still somehow the most popular despite being objectively wrong
I don't think I've ever seen this occur. Hell, what D&D settings even have monotheistic religions?
Eberron's Church of the Silver Flame, sort of:
>Even so, the Purified believe that although the Silver Flame was not the first god of Eberron, it will be the last. So long as evil exists, the world remains flawed and cannot become whole. By ridding the world of all evil, the Silver Flame will transform Eberron into a paradise without wickedness or sin or pain. Then will the other gods fade, for even the best of them are also impure, leaving the Silver Flame to hold dominion over heaven on earth.
The quori have il-Lashtavar, though the kalashtar side of things don't worship it so much as try to shift its course.
Then there's the godforged who believe that the souls of warforged (and possibly other beings) are all fragments of a bodiless entity. Some scholars argue that they're worshipping an exotic form of the Silver Flame, though they're not taken seriously.
In the Realms, the Church of Cyric says that Cyric is the One True God, but only his crazy worshipers actually believe it.
Big tiddy [insert player's fetish race].
And maybe I'm just not reddit enough, but the one time my character interacted with a god I had my character ask for a magic carpet. I didn't even seek it out - it's just something that happened.
In games where I played Paladins I never expected to have my character's god be their own personal Superman, to fly down from the upper planes whenever my character got in trouble.
No wonder the Forgotten Realms suck
>Cyric was some other dude's invention
No wonder he's so shit.
It worked for Mystara, although its gods weren't really gods in the sense most settings use the word, instead being ex-mortals who transcended reality to become immortal. They don't need worship specifically, but their one weakness is needing to be known by mortals to stay active and aware. The easiest way to do that is to start religions of themselves, so there are a frickload of "gods" that hand out tiny amounts of power (which is where the divine classes come in) to keep people coming back. Some immortals even play as multiple gods for multiple races, as long as the mortals are thinking of them on a metaphysical level, it doesn't matter what appearance or name they use. Most immortals don't actually care about what's going on in the mortal realm, they've got more important business upstairs.
Just the abrahamic religions have over 40 variants of God, Holy Spirit, for christianity Jesus and around 50+ variants of other prophets among the cults.
Vishnu has 22 in the main canon each with 20+ variants among the hindu cults.
Tons of regular gods that are proactive and keep their religions mostly functional if they interact with (a) church at all is far more realistic if anything.
>ed greenwood the crazy fetish dude is a leaf
I can't say I'm surprised.
t. leaf
I don't find his methodology of designing gods to be particularly believable or polytheistic. It's just basic Dndism, "god of X, god of Y, god of Z" and neglects the blurring and variation that occurred in real religions. He's doing pop culture design, nothing more.
To your question, it depends wholly on how they are incorporated in said design work.
>Is too many gods a good idea?
No but it's not a bad idea either it's a doesn't matter idea.