The pantheons of 19 deities that arise from using the Neoplatonist method from the last post have a logical consistency to them. That logic should drive understandable behaviour by the deities. The gods are perhaps even knowable. The players and their characters can make reliable assumptions about what the gods favour and about how their followers and the organisations they sponsor will behave. They should inform the cultures they preside over. The gods of Fire and Water predictably have different interests and don’t get on. The gods of Fluidity and Solidification have different but opposite concepts of what is “the good.” Even if you allocate different big concepts to different gods they should oversee those concepts in a way that is linked to their key aspects. A Fluidity god of battles would emphasis cunning, deception, manoeuvre, individual skill and the rapid deployment of combined arms. A Solidity focused goddess of battles would emphasis personal endurance, screwing one’s courage to the sticking place and holding the line, bravery grounded in community and fellowship, the grinding out of an attritional battle with victory coming not from lightning wit but from the slow rolling thunder of will.
And this shows up in way different faces of battle are conceptualised by warfighters and the cultures that support them. See, for example, this post from the ever excellent BrettDeveraux at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.
But the Gods are Mad and the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang oft agley.
I want something that also operates at right angles to the ordered and predictable schema of the 19 Neoplatonic gods. Something that gives the players, GM included, licence to go off piste if they need. So I turn as my second stage to the Magnificent Seven of the Old and Peculiar Knowing Ones.
I like to throw in a couple of groups of Old and Peculiar Knowing Ones (not necessarily old but coming at the key questions of the universe with a different set of eyes, or being gods and goddesses of prophesy, eye).
So I include a triplex of deities concerned with fate, destiny, and the start and end of life, think Fates, Norns, Moirai or Parcae, the auditors and quality assurance of reality. Aloof from the every day, they have no agenda much beyond things unfolding as they ought to unfold. They are the gods that tell other gods “no.”
Then I add a triplex of deities based the regulation of humanities relationships with the deeper truths of the universe. Firstly a god concerned with order emerging from chaos, which I think of as the God of the Corvids (or other birds which might have a link to augury, Sparrows or Larks or if the prophesy you are expecting is that a large stupid violent whackjob will attack you, the God of the Cassowary). This is a god that examines the connections of everything and sees the emergent order underpinning the seemingly random.
A god of chaos emerging from order, which I think of as the Green Man, a god that questions the narrowness of humanity's concept of order. A god that supports the upturning of apparant order so that random chance can bring renewal.
A god of the proper ordering of the relationship between humanity and magic, the Lady of the Lake. A god that bridges, or perhaps rations, human understanding and the deep divine and deep magic of the world.
These deities exist in the spaces where the other gods abut. They are the friction in the universe, the conversion of all mass and all energy to heat but also of the self-regulation of the universe in deep time. Working up close with humanity they are the flap of the butterflies’ wings.
The last of these seven is a deity whose remit is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, The Dweller Within and Without, the Walker Between, the Desiderata. A deity whose job is not necessarily to facilitate change but to facilitate the wisdom to tell the difference between what should be met with serenity and what must be changed with courage.
The job of these gods is to use humanity as a tool to regulate the behaviour of the 19 regular gods. Their job at the gaming table is to inject a different point of view and a bit of dramatic tension and chaos to proceedings and to give the players and the player characters interesting choices about how they want to show up.
Next post I’ll talk a little about tutelary deities, the gods and goddesses of things, and perhaps I’ll be blessed by Pens Fontana, the goddess of ink-stained fingers and bloggers.
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