 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I have a complicated relationship with God. I grew up Catholic, so being gay was always hard for me to hide since I would walk through the front door of the church and immediately burst into flames. I remember the priest would walk over and say, Now son, that only happens to vampires and queers, so which are ya? And I'd say, well I sure do like to suck, and the priest was very happy with that answer. So when it comes to where does religion fit into my life? It's always a bit of a tight squeeze, because I don't really think about it that much. But the one time it always does come up is during games of Dungeons and Dragons, where the gods simultaneously are real and make up the entirety of existence, and are also completely ineffectual and can't be bothered to handle any crisis big or small, so they have to send their missionaries out to get things done for them. Most games don't bother touching too far along the pant leg of the godly pantheon, but sometimes DMs just want to have the whole package in there, ready for players to go on a magical quest for and alongside the gods of their realm, such as the realm of the newly released Mythic Odyssey of Theros. Go check out that video. So today I'm going to be teaching you how to construct your own legendary pantheon, from gods to heroes and monsters and all the lore in between. As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I put the whole in glory, feel free to run your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So the first thing you're going to want to work out is how involved you want your gods to be in normal everyday life. You can have them omnipresent and constantly watching you from the outside of your bathroom window. They could be myths and fables that technically might not even exist, but clerics have magic, so who knows? The world could literally not even have any gods and everything is just based off of matter, constantly forming and reforming into new shapes that sometimes trick themselves into having consciousness, but then that would be stupid, so let's stick with gods existing, even if they go completely unseen. Once you know what purpose your gods fill within the setting, the next question is how numerous they are. You could have a single all-knowing god, you could have a pantheon of bickering old ones, you can have a quartet of four people with cosmic power that have no idea how to run the multiverse and certainly didn't ask for it. The point is that there's no sense in just making gods for the hell of it, unless that's specifically what you're into, so you'll want to know exactly how many deities you're working with. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of crossover with gods and you'll get entire pantheons for a single race, but also some of those racial gods crossover with other gods, and pretty soon you're hit with a bloated mess of different pantheons that no one should have to memorize, but you get that one player who pulls out an obscure god out of their ass, who the fuck is Kellenvor Lyonsbane? But I digress. The point is, without these two structural questions, how many gods do you have and what is their presence in the world, you can't answer the overarching question, what is the ultimate goal of your pantheon? And I mean that from a meta perspective. If you want gods just to have gods, then congratulations, you can stop there. Make a god a smoothies, make a god of not doing your laundry, you can do whatever you want, go have fun. But if you want them to have a presence in the story structure of your campaign, they need to understand how they operate both with each other and with the rest of the world. Otherwise, once the players reach the point where they start to learn about your pantheon for themselves, all the questions that they ask will either be quickly slapped together because he didn't have an answer beforehand, or you'll have to answer with, I don't know, I didn't think that hard. To bring this thought process in, think about what element you want your gods to serve in your story. Do you want them to be an antagonistic force, a boon to your players, a largely indifferent faction that your players will have to convince to help them? Are they just a MacGuffin that's trapped for some reason and the quest is getting them freed? Are they a twist villain in that when they are freed, they were secretly evil the whole time and their pacifism was all aroused just to get released? Does the primary conflict revolve around them? Are they essentially just a side character for your cleric who can help them out with magical problems the same way a rogue might have a criminal friend from mundane problems? This is the golden question where once answered, you can then go back and reverse engineer what it is that actually makes your gods act this way. Honestly, you can work out the point, the structural story point of your gods before you even answer the two questions that come before it, but I just say that you should know how many gods you want and what their purpose on the world is first just because, come on, let's be honest, people like making gods for things and a lot of you will skip right to those questions anyway. Okay, so, you've got your gods. You've got the number of them and their level of interaction with the world. You've got a goal set in mind for how to use those gods to affect the story. The next question is, who are they? While not necessarily an important story question, this question is probably the most important from a satisfaction point of view because let's be perfectly honest, you look at Norse, Greek, Egyptian mythology, they all impress upon the world in very similar ways but what sets them apart and makes them so mythic are their stories, the tales of who they are, how they're related to each other, and what feats they've accomplished that define their personality, the who, how, and why are really all you need to flesh out your godly characters. If you want my advice, which you're in my video so of course you do, the best thing that you can do if you have a huge assortment of gods and you feel completely intimidated about where to even start is to take each god, put them in a row in no particular order and go from left to right giving them each one at a time an identity of what their name is, what their domain is, the scope of their power, you know, the easy stuff and then you choose one other god on the list. It can be at random and you tell a story between the two. A small one and very anecdotal in the sense that it shows off their personalities as more than just basic beings of time or light. Freakin' roll a die and choose another god that way if you want. If you're having trouble, don't worry about it, just make the shittiest stories that you can and then after you do it a little while, you do it a few times, the natural personalities of your characters will start to flesh out and you can go back and retell these stories with your new perspective in mind. The goal is just to get a feel for these characters down. So you can make the dumbest tales that you want about them as long as you make something. Trust me, once your players get greeted to the personalities of your godly pantheon, even the worst stories will grant a ping of, oh, I understand now, within the context. And the best part is that these stories can potentially spawn new ideas for monsters that your pantheon has struggled against, demigods that have come to save humanity and spread the word of their godly heritage, heroes who through nothing but the power of god and anime have managed to push the boundaries of self-sacrifice and save the world forevermore. Hell, by doing this, you're practically making up the entire D&D setting and that's great if you want your gods to feel important. Finally, after all of the legwork is done, you've just got one question left to answer and it's both a pretty significant and totally superfluous question at the same time. How do you want to roleplay them? Of course, most people think of gods and they think of giant people with booming voices that speak slowly and want you to show them what you've got. But honestly, that's lame. That's lame as hell. Don't do that. You can do it if you want, but don't be surprised if it comes across as boring. If you look at Norse mythology, the gods there behave like total bros. Greek mythology, very sexual partygoers. Egyptians, let's not talk about them. They walk around with their fur suit helmets always on. They clearly have social quirks that I'm not equipped to talk about. The point is that most characters in these pantheons don't behave like the god from Christian mythology and that's why they're more interesting to watch. Maybe if Yahweh smoked some of that burning bush once in a while. But that's everything you need to know to get started on making your own pantheon of gods, heroes, and monsters. I know I didn't do a lot of the thinking for you today, but honestly, making squads of uber-powered cosmic entities is not my cup of tea. And if you really want a sheet, you can literally just take your D&D party, assign them a godly purview, and then there you go, that's your gods. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to check out my social media in the description below. I stream on Twitch every Tuesday and Saturday so you can talk to me about the most recent video and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford the legal fees for restraining order against chatter the chipmunk. That's a reference only some of you will get. But yeah, Dabby out.