"divided not by nationality but by ideology and their vision for the new world"
As I grind my teeth through the inordinate grind of Icewind Dale 2's last chapters (damn thing even has a Groundhog Day mission) I ready myself for another attempt at a King of Dragon Pass long-mode playthrough, meaning among other things choosing which deities to favor.
So I says to myself: does this game really need both an ox god and a cow goddess? Or an earth goddess and a clay goddess? It brings to mind Icewind Dale 2's failure to make me give a crap about the ice goddess Auril for the second campaign in a row. Alright, so obviously the big ice temple is dedicated to her... but beyond that, what exactly are our interactions together? Is there anything to this mythical figure other than justifying some ice sculpture decor? Why should I care about Auril? Why are fantasy world gods so boring?
More to the point, why do gods which would seem interesting enough in a passive medium of storytelling fall completely flat in an interactive medium?
KoDP can springboard this article because it banks on immersion in the mentality of a Bronze Age tribe, people who were most often born and died in the same narrow valley and whose minds were occupied by the changing of the seasons, bear maulings and worrying where their next meal would come from... and not much else to flesh out an entire cosmology. As you advance and discover more of their legends, KoDP's gods do acquire some character traits like loyalty or pugnacity, but these had to be tacked on to primitivist concerns like grain, cattle, horses and occasionally bartering with your neighbours for same. Let's face it, our ancestors were boring people with sheepish mentalities:
"Our monster-slaying demigod killed a bull."
"So did ours."
"Ours has magic sandals."
"So does ours."
"Well our bull was in a forest."
"Ours was in a field, which is obviously better."
"Nuh-uh!"
"Yuh-huh!"
Cue several centuries of warfare and slavery. Ugh, this fuckin' species... but I digress.
If KoDP's narrow thematic focus justified its gimped godly gamut, I could not make the same excuse while playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The setting's myriad made-to-fit deities leave little room for conflicts of interest. Pathfinder inherited this flaw directly from the grand-daddy of roleplaying, Dungeons and Dragons, whose list of gods and godlings managed to be both redundant and useless. Seriously, count the gods of death. Count 'em! And, once again, DnD like KoDP fell into this by trying to hold true to real-world fake worlds, to mythology. I can certainly forgive old TSR for this, as back in the '70s and '80s their niche American audience would've had little clue about any mythology aside from Christian (easily demonstrated by the repeated moral panics when parents discovered their children were playing the role of pagan worshippers) and thus Wizards of the Coast was nevertheless providing novel entertainment.
Still, worshipping the god of three-footed rabbits and crossbow bolts or whatnot emphasizes the main problem with creating a game's pantheon by the same rules as real-world religions. Mythical gods were fabricated by primitive, pre-scientific minds to explain the world and are based on physical phenomena. A game, in contrast, is about player actions. If you want players to give a shit about what deity their characters worship, match gods first and foremost to human tendencies, interests and failings. This is, in fact, why DnD's alignment wheel and the Great Wheel of the multiverse make so much more powerful an idea than the divinities who supposedly rule and define and gatekeep those realms. Chaotic Neutral Lycaon-thrope that I am, I can't say I've ever been moved much by Malar but as soon as I read the description of Pandemonium I could not imagine a better fit for my chaotic nature, a non-stop chase nightmare in a world of cacophony.
Give players divine incarnations of what they do (a.k.a. play) not what they are.
Take the Elder Scrolls as another bad example. Morrowind focused on relatively few gods of its pantheon, and the cults of Vivec and Tiber Septim were different enough from each other to allow some identification. Generally though, the series' multitudinous Aedra, Daedra and whatevera fail to sync up with either the player's actions or the greater world. The Shivering Isles expansion was welcomed after the largely mediocre Oblivion partly for defining the possible attitudes (Mania / Dementia) by which players could relate to one of the setting's divinities.
For a better take on supernatural influences, Dragon Age: Origins, while superficially centering on a monotheistic religion, introduced demons matching human drives (rage / sloth / desire / pride) which fleshed out some villains' motivations. Similarly (and almost as prototypical as Dungeons and Dragons) Warhammer 40,000's chaos gods (Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeench and Slaanesh) are more memorable because their nature translates into action. They're not just the gods of badgers or slugs or rabbits. They're gods of doing. Unto others. Without permission.
If you truly want to create a memorable pantheon, however, you have to provide enough thematic overlap for ambiguity and conflict, and the two best examples I can think of hail from two different genres. The first, in fact, doesn't deal with gods at all.
Consider why Alpha Centauri's original seven factions remained more valid even after the expansion pack's introduction of seven new ones. The expansion factions were one-trick-ponies: mind worms, probing, naval, production. The original leaders' personalities, on the other hand, provided decisive counterpoints (e.g. University vs. Believers (guess which side I was always on)) and overlapped just enough to let you experiment. Deirdre might be the logical choice for mind worms but Zakharov could rush the right techs for the same effect. Morgan could buy his way to technological supremacy, Yang could leverage his industrial capacity into same and the Believers could zerg at least as well as the Human Hive. All this also translated into a lack of alignment pigeonholing. Sister Miriam Godwinson got some nice jabs in on the topic of technological progress, Yang was an authority on both causing and mitigating personal misery, and the Spartans and the Peacekeepers made surprisingly frequent political bedfellows, seeking the same pax by different means.
When it comes to designing an actual pantheon however, the first Pillars of Eternity got it very, very right, and its designers made it quite clear in various in-universe asides that they forged their divinities consciously and purposefully.
For one thing, there are no good or evil gods, but merely incarnations of behavior in both good and bad aspects. Hylea and Eothas, likely the nicest of the lot, gods respectively of flying creatures and general ebulience or of light and hope and rebirth, seem a lot less cuddly when you realize "pretty flitting things" can easily be argued to include marauding dragons, or that light can burn and requires fuel to be harvested. Conversely, even the nastiest gods like Skaen, Ondra and Rymrgand show their value in extremis, providing redress or palliation when nothing else can.
For another, the various facets of role-playing are given multiple routes for players to identify with.
Instead of a single god of war, bellicosity can instead be embodied by fire, rebellion, or pyrrhic light and hope.
Creativity is not limited to the god of the forge but also to the vitality of nature or decorative prettiness.
Death might mean the finality of entropy or a door from one existence to another or the ultimate truth of the struggle for survival.
Secrets might exist to be hoarded, forgotten or perpetuated.
Disease might be natural, entropic, a secretive subterfuge, a trial to be overcome, a door into the endless cycle, etc.
Basically, Pillars of Eternity's gods allow characters to bullshit their way into half a dozen different personal interpretations for everything they do... and that's the point of the activity. An RPG should focus on choices, a middle ground between "everything goes" or an illogical infinity of right answers on one hand or a constricting single right answer leaving no choice at all on the other. If you're designing a role-playing setting, your very cosmology, your plot-driving forces, should reflect this partial ambiguity: give us just enough rope to hang ourselves with. Gods should be philosophies players follow, actions and choices embodied and not merely colorful animal-headed figures to fill a booklet of flavor text.
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P.S.: From the little I've seen in Shadowrun: Hong Kong and the better Dragonfall, Shadowrun's shamanistic totems might qualify better than DnD's deities if they focus on personalities rather than merely identities.
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