How would you create a fantasy pantheon of Nature deities?
>>47493226
God of magma (and fire and earth), representing the world when it was young and the anaerobic metabolism that existed back in the day and still does in all of us etc.
God of jungles and dinosaurs.
God of winter (and water and air), representing the great ice age. Can also relate to other things like planning and hunger.
God of agriculture, meadows, orchards, and other environments conductive to civilization.
God of urban blight, to include pestilence, vermin, rats, oozes.
God of thirst, the scorching wasteland and the sun, the lord of the world that might be if civilization destroys itself and the world around it.
>>47493226
>God of the Ocean
>God of the Forest
>God of the Mountains
>God of the Desert
These would be the core gods of the pantheon.
A pantheon of innumerable, nameless gods of the earth. There are no holy texts, no temples, and no real structure to worshipping them. It's very much a folk religion, with a lot of oral tradition and communion with fellow worshippers and being outside, taking it all in.
Of course, there is a darker side. Nature isn't always benevolent. In times of famine or some other natural disaster, worshippers will sacrifice one another in hopes of appeasing the gods. Whether or not it works is up for debate, but anecdotes can be convincing to some.
That's how it operates in my setting, anyway.
>>47493226
Gods of different Biomes, Niches, States of ecological succession, climatic factors, disturbances categories and regimes, speciation, extinction, predation, symbiosis, parasitism, and other such related nature and ecological factors.
>>47493226
Zero information about the setting, did you expect good/any answers?
God of the Green: Spring deity, life, birth and rebirth.
God of Winter: Winter deitybelieve it or not, death, storms (ice and hail), ice.
God of Autumn: Time, Change, Hope, anarchy.
Summer: Lightning, Fire, love.
God of Beasts: Animals, the earth.
depends on the setting really.
but I'd generally try to create some sort of a mythology, a set of half a dozen main players, a god of the wild hunt, a goddess of the rivers, a villain/foe/anti-hero of the flood or the storms, etc, and rough out some sort of dynamics that tell a story of those.
really depends on the setting - what would work for a mythical pseudo-european boreal landscape's going to look fucking daft in an african rift valley.
work out the characters, the names, the interrelation (and the contradictions) and how that wants to portray it, to get the setting.
>>47493619
Of course I forgot my pic
Pic related, would make for a good religious sect
How much leeway am I allowed on "nature"? I look to families and grouping of gods I guess.
The gods humans worship are split between gods of plants and earth and animals and gods of fire.
The former are gods of death and rebirth: balance in nature, a life well lived, necessary suffering and sacrifice. Acceptance and enlightenment come from your long sleep in the earth at the end of your life. You dance for the god of flowers, and you make ablutions to the fungoid gods of rot. These gods give a bounty and you occupy part of their system, which you ought not to abuse.
The latter are gods of civilization and progress. You light the fire and keep yourself safe, build in the light, smelt the bounty of nature and make tools and weapons and palaces with what you take. This is a linear faith, not a cyclical one: you're burning a path to some (literal) dawning manifest destiny where the darkness is purged forevermore. In some places this faith is integrated with the one above, in others they are in conflict. There's an old, secretive, heretical sect within this church that worships the awesome power of natural fire - volcanoes, lightning - and has its loyalties in the former camp.
The wicked gods are the gods of the sea. The sea is dark and unmapped and terrifying. It takes its toll from all those who travel on it. Invaders who are alien culturally come from across the ocean - all violence and sea-madness, they can't possibly be accepted. Invaders who are alien entirely come from within the sea, breeding in its murky depths. You find foul cults and rituals along the shoreline, and whole villages have the Innsmouth look.
>>47494363
There are gods of time - specific units of time, from the minute to the year to the century. Proper form dictates that a new god of time (or the same one, renewed) is born for each new year and departs at the end of it. This is a little abstract for most human worship - some wizards are loyal to this faith - but dwarves swear by it. Everything is accounted for here: dwarves know the precise value of time and they swear their oaths by time. When a dwarf dies he resides in a dead year and his living descendants worship his spirit by that year.
The elves worship the gods of time too, but they believe time is fully circular (heresy to dwarves, who believe time has an end). The elves are cold and superior - they dominate mundane nature rather than bow to it. They're either proudly aloof from the dirt and muck or they wallow entirely in its corruption. The main gods of nature the elves worship are of a much grander nature: gods of suns, moons, galaxies, black holes - natural phenomena beyond the scale of one meager planet.
>>47493226
Not every classifiable element of nature has an associated god, but nature gods do exist even if they're inconsistent. Mostly they're semi-mortal beings who have corporeal form, but are much more powerful than your average being with that form or size. Giant elk, massive trees, huge wolves... These beings tend to act on a mostly baseline level of their template forms, animalistic creatures mostly acting like animals, but they each hold a more human-like, or even alien, intelligence or deeper understanding/instinct behind their behavior, belied by their animalistic nature. As such, they're more capricious than most beings one would know as "gods."
These beings often travel accompanies by herds of their own template species, wolf beings taking the place of alpha in a pack, great trees the center of a sacred grove, huge moth surrounded by a swarm of regular moths, etc., but they may often take followers of other kinds. Humans who are accepted as followers or companions may be given a number of tasks, from caretaking the being to acting as representative to court mage or herd shaman to hunting companion or even a very knightly position not too dissimilar to a paladin. Some of these beings, however, shun all companionship and roam to wilds as a lone-beast, tolerating others or not as suits its needs or nature. No one behavior is understood to be the norm and many examples can be shown of creatures who both act along and counter to their natures as creatures.
How these beings come about is hard to understand, maybe they just live really long? The source of their powers may be explicable, but might just as often be inexplicable. They do grant boons to their followers, though, if one can become a vassal to the patron being in question. These might have something to do with the nature of the animal, the nature of the location, or something more anomalous.
>>47493226
Almost exclusively location-based minor spirits. Like what Exalted, and a number of irl cultures, do. There is no god of forests, but that tree has it's own individual God. A forest of Gods, but no God of forests.
>>47493226
Wind, water, earth, fire, plants, animals, predators, prey, sun, moon, grasslands, mountains, tundra, savanna, forests, plains...
Pick a few.
>>47493226
1.You select some core themes.
2.You read about those and myths humanity created around it, so you will know what the fuck are you doing.
3.You'll reach some conclusions.
4.Those should be written down so they can be considered terrible and redone later.
5.Repeat steps 3 and 4 as much as necessary or you get sick of it, whatever comes first.
>>47493591
Are you GRRM?
>>47497768
No, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't like what he's done. I was aiming for a more druidic vibe, combined with the old gods from ASoIaF.
