Deities & Demigods

Heironeous: now that's a picture
of a deity!!! (Art: Jim Holloway)

One of the things that has always bothered me, no matter what edition of the game were talking about, is the format for deities.The format for deities in AD&D 1E was just plain silly because they included stats. I think deities should be beyond mortal reach as combat opponents (though not necessarily beyond as roleplaying opponents...). 

I loved the extremely detailed formats of the deities in both early and late AD&D 2E. Monster Mythology was a huge resource and the format was simple, clean and, best of all a treasure trove of great divine fluff. Then along came Faiths & Avatars, Powers & Pantheons and best of all Demihuman Deities. These too were excellent books, the only trouble with them being that only a major geek or someone working for TSR at the time could produce a deity in that format. The format was rich and highly detailed. These books too were a treasure, even though they were designated for use with the Forgotten Realms, a campaign setting which I've always loathed. I'm still proud to have them on my shelf even though the format is just too much.

I never really used any of the resources from D&D beyond the defaults in the players handbook. By the time I moved essentially from AD&D 2E to D&D 3.5, I'd become fed up with the design waffling inherent in deity creation. I've still never found a good resource for Greyhawk deities, on or offline. Up until just a few days ago, I've avoided entering the deities for the World of Greyhawk into Hero Lab because I know we'll eventually switch to another campaign world. However, I can no longer avoid it because the gods are fast becoming more involved in the plot of my Crimson Tombs campaign (namely Boccob and Vecna).

The old Living Greyhawk Gazetteer has a lot of great fluff and information, but the domain information is of course out of date. I've found some online resources to mitigate this but none of them seem to match each other. Eventually I decided to use the Official Living Greyhawk Listing (version 2.0, which seems to be the only version, actually) available from the Wizards of the Coast website. It seems the most brief yet complete. I've simply made up my mind to pick and chose additional domains wherever I think necessary and negotiate with my players if they think something is missing. Still, what a horrible state of affairs for the gods to remain eternally in. Boo! Hiss! :)

The Hero Lab data file will also contain no fluff because there just isn't a satisfactory cutty-pasty resource available (and I have no intention of distributing the file beyond my group). Wizards of the Coast also saw fit to SECURE the PDF. <soapbox>All hail the mighty  H.M.S. Intellectual Property</soapbox>.

I've looked at the deities from other campaign worlds and I find most of them to be dull and milk toast; I've decided not to name any names because I don't want to hurt anyone's product line(s). However, many of these simply have the domains, a favored weapon, a scant amount of stereotypical fluff and maybe a (usually pretty cool) picture of a holy symbol. That sort of sucks because it's hard to roleplay or visualize a cleric if you don't even know what color raiment (yes, raiment) they wear or even what they believe beyond evil is baaaaad. I'm used to the awesome pictures of deities from the heady days of Dragon Magazine, not just enough "pure data" to put together some combat stats for a medic (ahem, I mean cleric).

I suppose I'll plod along as I always have, though in the past I actually made up my own deities using some amalgam of formats. Still, it really would be nice if we had even one quarter of the resources for deities as we do for monsters. One of my daughters wants me to run a Greek campaign, but I just can't see going to the effort of redesigning the Greek gods into Hero Lab, especially when I know my kids are somewhat flighty.