Different deities rule the various aspects of the cosmos and mortal life, sometimes cooperating with each other, sometimes competing. People gather in public shrines to worship gods of life and wisdom or meet in hidden places to venerate gods of deception or destruction.
The divine beings of the multiverse are often categorized according to their relative cosmic power. Some gods who are worshiped on multiple worlds have a different rank on each world, depending on their influence there.
Greater deities are generally the oldest gods of a pantheon, responsible (at least in myth) for creating or parenting the other gods. Their provinces are major areas of nature and mortal life, such as agriculture, the sun, and death. Greater deities are ultimately beyond mortal understanding, and they’re often known by different names across regions, cultures, and worlds. Having no fixed appearance or gender, they can assume whatever forms they like. Occasionally these deities manifest and perform mythic deeds among mortals.
Lesser deities are typically described in myth as the creations, children, or servitors of the greater deities. They govern narrower provinces, such as the activities of mortal life or limited aspects of the natural world. They share the fundamentally ineffable nature of greater gods, but they are more likely to manifest in mortal realms.
Quasi-deities have a divine origin, but they don’t receive or answer prayers. They are still immensely powerful beings, and in theory, they could ascend to godhood if they amass enough worshipers. Quasi-deities fall into the following subcategories:
Demigods are divine beings with mortal origin. Some were born mortal and attained godhood, while others were born from the union of a deity and a mortal. Their mortal parentage makes demigods the weakest quasi-deities.
Titans are the creations of deities. They might be manufactured on a divine forge, born from the blood spilled by a god, or otherwise brought about through divine will or substance. Some titans, including krakens and the tarrasque, appear in the Monster Manual.
Vestiges are deities who have lost nearly all their worshipers and are considered dead from a mortal perspective. Esoteric rituals can sometimes contact vestiges and draw on their latent power.
Build Your Own Pantheon
Most of the published D&D settings described in chapter 5 have their own pantheons of gods. If you’re creating your own setting, you can use the list of Greyhawk gods in chapter 5 or build your own pantheon.
A simple way to build a basic pantheon is to create one god for each of the Outer Planes described in chapter 6, except for the Nine Hells (ruled by the archdevil Asmodeus) and the Abyss (the domain of demons). So Arborea might be the domain of a god who is patron of the arts, celebrated at great feasts, while Gehenna’s deity might be a greedy, vengeful god worshiped by people of the same bent. If you prefer, you can also put multiple deities on the same plane, so Arcadia might be home to twin gods who are patrons of merchants and smiths.
Alternatively, you might decide that your world has only one god (who might be viewed differently by various sects or religions) or one good god and one evil god. Or your world might be alive with spirits great and small, from lesser river spirits to the godlike spirits who inhabit great mountains. Impersonal forces and philosophies can also fill the role of gods in a campaign.
Gods aren’t defined by mortal conceptions of alignment, and different mortal worshipers might interpret a god’s behavior and teachings through the lens of different alignments. That said, gods tend to live on the Outer Planes that most closely match their general alignment tendencies, so it’s safe to assume that the teachings of a god who resides in Pandemonium (a plane of rampant chaos and evil), encourage behavior that is Chaotic Evil, while a god who resides in Elysium (the plane of pure good) encourages Neutral Good behavior.
People can worship a god without obeying that god’s tenets or conforming to the god’s presumed alignment. People from all walks of life might participate in the annual festival of innocent mischief associated with a trickster god—even people whose alignment is generally lawful and opposed to the trickster’s teachings. To stave off disease, good-hearted people might make offerings to appease the wrath of a god associated with plague. Even Cleric characters don’t need to have any particular alignment to serve their gods.
Divine magic—which includes the spells cast by Clerics, Druids, Paladins, and Rangers—is mediated through beings and forces that are categorized as divine. These can include gods but also include the primal forces of nature, the beneficent power of ancestral spirits, the sacred weight of a Paladin’s oath, and impersonal principles or entities such as Fate or the order of the universe. These beings and forces grant characters the power to wield the magic of their planar domains.
For game purposes, wielding divine power isn’t dependent on the gods’ ongoing approval or the strength of a character’s devotion. The power is a gift offered to a select few; once given, it can’t be rescinded.
That said, characters’ relationships with the divine forces they access to wield their magic, much like Warlocks’ relationships with their patrons, are ripe for exploration. A Cleric might accompany every casting of a spell with a litany of complaints directed at the gods. The Paladin class description in the Player’s Handbook offers some suggestions for how a player might roleplay a situation where their Paladin has broken their oath. You can also decide how NPCs react to a character whose behavior doesn’t square with the ideals implied by the Holy Symbol the character wears.
The Commune spell allows its caster to ask a deity (or an agent of the god) yes-or-no questions and receive correct information, and other spells of the Divination school have similar effects. As the Commune spell description states, gods aren’t necessarily omniscient. But they are tremendously knowledgeable, particularly with regard to their particular areas of influence. A sea god can be reasonably expected to know anything that has happened in or on a sea, for example, and a martial god knows details about wars. Gods can reliably predict the future, at least in the short term (hence their ability to answer spells such as Augury and Divination). And some gods might be unwilling to reveal their ignorance, choosing to give an unclear answer rather than admit that they don’t know the truth.
In some campaigns, gods are fond of meddling in mortal affairs, and heroes sometimes call on the gods for aid beyond what divine magic ordinarily provides. The gods sometimes also send dreams, omens, or emissaries to direct mortals along a certain path. Keep these two principles in mind to guide your use of divine intervention in your campaign:
Don’t Eliminate Character Choice. The gods can tell characters to do things and even threaten to punish them if they don’t do things, but the gods can’t control mortal actions.
Don’t Eliminate Risk and Danger. The intervention of a god should never guarantee success or victory, nor should a god’s interference portend immediate defeat. Gods can act to change the balance of an encounter or offer an avenue of escape, but they count on mortal heroes to act like heroes.
With those principles in mind, you might have gods intervene in dire situations in one of these ways:
Blessings. A god might bestow a Blessing (see “Supernatural Gifts” in this chapter) to help a character in need.
Emissaries. A god might send a Celestial, a Fiend, or some other kind of emissary to aid a character with information, guidance, or combat.
Miracles. As the simplest form of miracle, a god can produce the effect of any spell that devotees of that god might cast (typically Cleric or Druid spells). But a god’s direct intervention can take any form you choose, often reflecting the god’s nature.
A list of gods is a good starting point, and it can be sufficient to get a campaign started. But you can add more depth to your campaign world by fleshing out more details of religious belief and practice.
Stories about the gods explore their relationships with each other, with the natural world, and with the realm of mortals. Myths might describe familial relationships among the gods, deeds of creation, past interactions with mortals, or battles between gods and other cosmic forces. Given the incomprehensible nature of the gods, these myths might not actually reveal anything about the gods, but they certainly describe people’s understanding of their own place in relation to the gods.
People honor multiple gods of a pantheon in different circumstances. A person might burn incense to a hearth or family deity at a kitchen altar in the morning, pray to a deity of the hunt while hunting in the afternoon, and join a communal harvest feast at the temple of an agricultural deity in the evening.
Cities and large towns can host numerous temples dedicated to individual gods important to the community, while smaller settlements might have a single shrine devoted to any gods the locals revere. Temples and shrines outside settlements often mark places where a god (or the manifestation of a god) appeared or caused a miracle. These sites can become the focus of pilgrims who travel long distances to partake in the holy power assumed to linger there.