Bards and Barrels
Are you new to Dungeons and Dragons and TTRPGs? Then you are in the right place! Bards and Barrels is the perfect introduction to the world of DnD and TTRPGs. With engaging discussions, helpful tips, and plenty of laughs along the way. Join us as we explore the game and share our experiences as players and Dungeon Masters.
Bards and Barrels
S4 Ep. 9: Gods and Deities
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Praise the flying spaghetti monster! The guys chat gods and deities in Faerûn and across Dungeons and Dragons.
Praise the flying spaghetti monster. We're talking about deities. Oh my god, stuck in the stuff stuck. And there's an opening cracks. There are. There are the opening cracks. Uh feel here. Feel here in the saddle tonight. Oh my gosh. Feel here. Feel it here. Uh with Ross and Brett this evening. How are we doing, fellas? Yes. I'm good. How are you doing? I don't know what happened. Well, actually, I didn't. We discovered this last time. I always crack with my left hand and I should use the right. And I forgot. I know. You can remind me, Ross. How many episodes have you been this look?
SPEAKER_03I don't even look at you. It's like you should know this by now. He doesn't know how to do it. I feel like I would fumble.
SPEAKER_01I feel like I would fumble.
SPEAKER_03With your right hand? Yeah. Why? Because I've never done it.
SPEAKER_01I don't think I've ever done it.
SPEAKER_03I'm not gonna make it.
SPEAKER_01Anyway. We got something a little different on deck tonight, if you couldn't tell. Uh, we're gonna talk about deities, gods, pantheons, whatever you want to call them in DD. Uh, and pretty much interchangeable those words are across the books as we kind of look through it, aren't they?
SPEAKER_00We spent way too much time, time trying to figure out what to call all of these things. Because D D can't even decide.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Gods, deities, what does pantheon mean? That one that one was the easy one, and then we spend five minutes. What's the difference between a god and a pantheon?
SPEAKER_00Or a god and a deity.
SPEAKER_03Ah man. And even they aren't clear on what it is, which is nobody knows.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it looks different in three different books if you pick them up. So we did.
SPEAKER_03And we'll talk about this later, but then what do they do to fix the problem? They just get rid of them.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Don't even worry about it. Oh, yeah, we'll hit on that too.
SPEAKER_00No, it's it's more of a we'll talk about that later.
SPEAKER_01When you're older.
SPEAKER_03I feel like that's I feel like that's my methodology for doing anything is I don't want to deal with that. So you either put it in a closet or it goes in the trash. That's what they did. That's fair. Kind of. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, I want to know. First question of my mind for you guys, because I'm curious, is out of the characters you've either played or maybe um like NPC'd or scene played, do you have a favorite deity, god, something like that in the DD world for someone that you've played? I know you're both you were playing characters now that have deities, so I know you've at least played one, but uh I'll go first.
SPEAKER_00I would say mine is not exactly the god my main character is following, but my favorite is from the Greek pantheon, Hephaestus. I think we've talked about him before on one of these podcasts. Uh so it's the god of like tinkering and making things.
SPEAKER_03I think you brought him up on the artificer episode.
SPEAKER_01I think it was, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so like in our main DD campaign that we're playing right now, uh, my character is a follower of Gond, which is basically the the DD equivalent of Hephaestus. Yeah.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_03Uh my character's only ever had, well, one primary deity and one newish deity, and that's Tyr, the god of justice. Which, if you go back into like the 2014 handbook and look at the pantheons that are there, he's actually in there twice. He's in the Forgotten Realms Pantheon as the god of justice and war, I think it is, and then he's down in the Norse pantheon as the god of just straight justice. Symbols are different, but it's the same god, really, for the most part. So it's it's a really weird deal that he showed up in there twice.
SPEAKER_01I think you bring up an interesting point too about how like fluid some of those pantheons are, how much material gets borrowed. And obviously, you know, we see this in actual history, right? Sure. Where basically gods are just reborn or borrowed from other people.
SPEAKER_00People move, travel places, and they share ideas, beliefs.
SPEAKER_03Well, case in point, uh, Greek gods becoming Roman gods. All right, it's the the exact same gods with new names, and it's you know, the Roman Empire taking over, you know, that area of the Mediterranean. And what's the easiest way to convert those people over? You just let them keep their gods. The same thing happened with Christianity. A lot of Christian holidays fall on pagan holiday times because that was the easiest way to convert people over. That's how history goes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um, I'm jumping in on this one too. I think out of all the characters I've played, um, I had a warlock that had a patron technically that was sleep near that I really liked, which yeah, well, is it a god? And not really horse of Odin? Yes, the nine-legged horse. It has followers, so does it count?
SPEAKER_00I mean, so does it counts as a deity, but not a god.
SPEAKER_03Boom, nailed it.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say that was one of the definitions. It was god deities have followers, gods have gods, is more everybody. Deities are the higher up ones that have followers.
SPEAKER_03Brett coming in with the actual answer. I was gonna make a joke about so did Secretariat. I don't hear we whatever.
SPEAKER_01He had followers too, but but it wasn't that one, it's gotta be Garl Glittergold. Oh, yeah, definitely no Mish deity.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I believe. Yostix's deity. Absolutely. I mean, Yostix. God, I miss him so much.
SPEAKER_01He'll be back, don't you worry.
SPEAKER_03He's at a party waiting for he's at a party in the Fay Wild. He doesn't have pants on. In eternal orgy.
SPEAKER_01I'm probably not sure that Yostax owns pants. I don't know you guys ever checked. Believable. Shit.
SPEAKER_03What did I think about that?
SPEAKER_01Well, you didn't see any of that, so you're probably good actually.
SPEAKER_03Next time we see Yosticks. Oh my god. Um stare in the hole. It's like you guys seeing this, or is it just eyes are up here?
SPEAKER_01I feel like canonically he had to have pants because he has tattoos that you've never seen before. Oh, that's right. Or he has to have some sort of covering on his body.
SPEAKER_03Doesn't mean it'll be there when we find him now.
SPEAKER_01Is he like a satyr and all that? Now that we are like way off in left field here. Outside of just DD, like what are some kind of pop culture references to deities, maybe in some shows that we've seen, or like where else can we see or take inspiration for deities in our game or gods in our game?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think one that's very present right now would be if if you watched any Marvel film and Loki Thor.
SPEAKER_00Pick pick your Marvel Marvel movie.
SPEAKER_03You can find a lot of them. Right. And and Thor, what was the what was the last Thor movie? Love and Thunder. Like there was this whole like meeting of the gods, and Zeus was there, Hercules was there, although depending on if you're it's not the Disney movie, so Hercules could be a god, maybe not a god. I don't know. Well, that's that's a whole different story. Uh, but it's like there there's a video out there that I think new rock stars actually did where they like slowed down the clips of that part of the movie, and they were like trying to pick out, like they found the the Panther god that the Wakandans follow was there, and there's like they found something that they thought was maybe like an Aztec god, um, which I guess technically Namor I think follows an Aztec god or he is considered a god. I don't I don't know either, but Marvel. Marvel does it all the time. Gods come and go.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, they even bring in the Egyptian gods, right? Through uh night.
SPEAKER_03Yep, yep, yep, and then um that yeah, there's a whole thing with that. Um side.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, any other references to the Greek, the Roman ones, like any Percy Jackson movies or TV shows, um uh Egyptians we already covered, the Aztecs, the Native American um gods, you could also even use those potentially. Like pretty much anywhere that there's been people, there's some sort of inspiration for what you could use.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think even in shows like Vikings, right? Don't they talk about Norse gods and shows like that too? Yeah, just a little different than some of the others that we kind of hit on.
SPEAKER_03But yep, for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I mean there's tons out there uh inside the world of DD, right? So one of the things that was kind of interesting in our dive here as we prepped for tonight's session a little bit is that the 2024, 2025 Players' Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, um Players' Handbook specifically, doesn't really mention deities or gods by name at all. Even like there's no list of gods when you're looking at clerics, they don't give you examples of gods in the different domains.
SPEAKER_00It's a little weird. It was kind of weird. It seems like they're trying to make the player's guide more of just like a guide instead of like a setting guide or a like too much of the that level of detail.
SPEAKER_03Right. And I think I think they were trying to really lean into the sandbox thing that DD is supposed to do. So you if you make a turn toward being more agnostic or without DDs, that just allows DMs to create their own. So it's like go back, take whatever you want, but we're not gonna force this upon you and say this is the set list that you have to run with by any means.
SPEAKER_01And the DMG, so the Runner Master's Guide has a whole section on creating your own gods, right? Like setting up a pantheon, and then they do give an example, so that does exist. There is one example, I believe it's the Greyhawk, um, yeah, gods of Greyhawk that exist, which is sort of what they leaned this release into, right? As some more Greyhawk instead of just Farunian. Um, if you looked at anything, you know, 2014, those are pretty much all Feyrunian. So the players' handbook has the deities of the Forgotten Realms, it's got the non-human deities, it talks about Greek and Norse. I mean, and and they're just tables and tables and tables. So if you're looking for lists.
SPEAKER_00I like that they intentionally did not do something from from Feyrune, expand it out a little bit in a very subtle, non-direct way to show that you can do anything, but you don't have to like explicitly tell everybody you have to you can do anything.
SPEAKER_03Well, and I mean if we're if we're looking at uh newer players, like in the more current, you know, DD being reborn uh as of late and a lot of people joining the game, a lot of those people haven't played Greyhawk in the Greyhawk setting. So it's certainly new to them to see that. So to your point of going outside of Fey Rune to show that.
SPEAKER_01If you're looking working to build your own though, and you just need some examples, so the Sword Coast Adventures Guide has a bunch of good examples in it too, and leans into more of um the species-based pantheons, so it's got like the dwarven pantheon, elven, even drow separate from Elven, Halfling, Gnomish, Orc, as well. If you're looking for something like that, even in some NPCs you might be building, so that has its own, like the giants and the ordinary, like they kind of follow their own sort of pantheon as well. In the Big B's presents Gloria the Giants book.
SPEAKER_00And then there's even differences between how those pantheons are structured. You could have like a tight pantheon or a loose one, so it's like how they're related to each other and how they're connected to each other within a pantheon of gods can ma uh can manifest itself in many different ways.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great point, Brad. I think uh when I was reading the difference, right? Because as I that kind of caught me off guard today, I'm like, well, I've never really thought about the differences between a loose pantheon and a tight pantheon, right? Like, what does that even mean? Well, a loose pantheon really is what if you've ever played with the Feyroudian pantheon, right? That's kind of what that is. There's just a bunch of gods, they're each sort of over their own domain, and then there's no really overarching structure necessarily. Whereas your tight pantheon almost has like a head, either god or two gods in essence, and then they almost have like a family of gods underneath them. So everyone may follow a you know, everyone might follow Odin. Well, everyone follows Odin, but people might also follow someone else underneath Odin, sure, but everyone still follows Odin, like that's your tight pantheon, whereas the Fayrunian pantheon definitely doesn't work that way. Right. You could just follow one person.
SPEAKER_00So it's almost like Christianity would be closer to a tight pantheon, absolutely, where like God is the one above everything type of thing, and then like angels, for example, would be lower.
SPEAKER_01I think the Greek pantheon too, tight as well, right? Family kind of name.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, family, yeah, ish siblings, kids.
SPEAKER_00It would I don't think it would be fully tight because you could also just follow like Aries instead of also following Zeus. That is true.
SPEAKER_01I don't know, that's a weird one.
SPEAKER_00It's like a but it does have a little bit more of a structure, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It does, huh?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, where it doesn't seem like would you consider Norse probably tight?
SPEAKER_03Because like that one more so than Greek. Now that you say that, because it's like it's like you're right, Brad, because like you follow Ares does not mean you follow Zeus, but so it's almost like by relationship it's tight, but by like following it's loose. But Norse would be separate, because if you follow, if you follow Tyr, you also follow Odin because Odin Tyr is an Odin's son kind of thing, right? Or whoever.
SPEAKER_00Boy, that's really think about that. There's a lot of rabbit holes you can decide to go down. Yeah, no kidding.
SPEAKER_01Well, and then the be careful back to the deity versus God versus pantheon, whatever argument, right? What about lords of the nine hells or the princes of the abyss? Do they count?
SPEAKER_03I I think they have to because they have their own followers and they grant certain things to their followers potentially and subsidiaries, and there's a hierarchy, and on some of these tables, like they list Asmodeus as a god. So speaking of Lords of the Nine Hells, going back to Marvel for a second, there's a pop culture reference for that because uh the ghost rider actually gets his power from Methistopoles, who is who is in the uh who is in D D because he is the Lord of Cassia, which is the eighth level of hell. Ah. So he exists in DD too, but that just as an example, like in in the Marvel universe, he shows up and and uh Nick Cage, not not who the character, Johnny Bla Johnny Blaze signs a contract, and that's how he gets his powers.
SPEAKER_00For any of you that were able to follow what Ross just said, congratulations, you leveled up on your nerd.
SPEAKER_03That's fair. I'll take that. I'm proud of that.
SPEAKER_01If you want to further level up your nerdum, does anyone know the name of the pantheon for elven deities? What it's called? Oh, geez, no. What? The seldarine.
SPEAKER_03Ohderine?
SPEAKER_01And then like the drow deities are the dark seldarine, but they did it just to basically like make fun of the elves. So they call theirs the dark seldarine. How about the dwarven pantheon? Any guesses on this one?
SPEAKER_00It's gotta be something really fun though.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. The morningcement.
SPEAKER_00Morn Dinsaman.
SPEAKER_01Morn Dinsaman. Dwarven deities.
SPEAKER_03We need to use those more.
SPEAKER_01I agree. That's why I intentionally wrote them down. I'm like, these are great.
SPEAKER_03That's what I say when I go to a Chinese restaurant. More Dinsum.
unknownGosh.
SPEAKER_01Um, what about? So we talked a lot about kind of what's out there and where to find them. What about their impact, right? Like in the world? How do deities impact the world? Or what does that look like? I mean, uh, you guys have run a couple campaigns too, right? Or run some people through games. How do you make the gods interact, or you see the gods interacting with your campaigns?
SPEAKER_00The nice thing is you can kind of choose how much you want to involve them. Like a lot of the published adventures will have settings or temples or churches or follow like cult followers or you know, some sort of uh connection to the gods that you can just kind of leech onto. Um, it'll be probably in one of your maps. It'll be like there's a church or a setting, and there'll be a whole little chapter about that location.
SPEAKER_03I think the the the way that I have handled it is you you kind of let your players dictate that. So it's like even if you have a cleric, if the cleric is praying when they want to use their powers, that means they're gonna they want to lean into it a little heavier too. So then you you just kind of play with them, and you know, then there's some instances that can come up where you know a god can then talk to them and grant them more powers. Or, you know, there could be a campaign where somebody lights a fire and blows up a room and we gotta save everybody from the TPK. So, you know, knew where that was going in a Discord channel, you say, Hey DM, let's pray to to this god and save our ass. But because that never happens.
SPEAKER_00To all of that, I would say that if you're going to use a location that is already in a published book, give it some sort of connection that your par characters care about. If it's just like some random god that is in your world that DD is putting out there that doesn't really connect to anything you're doing, change it. Yes, totally. Yes, yes, you don't need to fixate on what they necessarily put in there. If it doesn't, if none of your characters are following it and it doesn't have anything to do with the story, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think there's a really good example of that. And I it confuses the crap out of people when they run Curse of Strahd because they use the morning lord a lot in Curse of Strahd, which a lot of people don't under it's Lithander is who it who it really is, is who they're referring to. But it's like they changed the name and it confuses the crowd. Like the first time I ran it, I'm like, who is this? And it didn't. We had a cleric in the party at that time, and it's like it didn't connect to anything, and I didn't change it, and it felt really weird and out of place at that time. So I get what you're saying. It would have been better at that time had we just said it's your God, you know. Sure, yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00In that campaign, I I was one that was not connecting those dots, and I felt like, okay, you're saying this and you keep reinforcing the morning lord. Like, why do I need to care?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sure. About that.
SPEAKER_03Well, and and and so now that I say that out loud, that I should say that Curse of Straud is probably an exemption, though, that too, because it's in a domain of dread. So the whole point is this god is supposed to exist, but it really doesn't do anything because it's been tempered in this place in a lot of ways. We uh and another thing that I didn't do, um, and I may have to change that now that I think about it, since you guys are playing it, is I I need to temper the cleric. Sorry, Brett. Oh, you a cleric? I think you're a cleric. I don't know, I don't know. We haven't played that one in so long. We'll get we gotta get back to that. Uh, but I I think I need to temper your powers somehow. There needs to be something in there to reflect what's going on in the world. Anyway.
SPEAKER_01It's the only campaign that I'm exclusively taking notes and paper for. So it felt like it felt to be like in the mood I needed to take.
SPEAKER_03Jean-Pierre. Oh, I don't remember if he's a cleric or not. Yeah, he is. You're Nova, I know who you are. Unfortunately. For now.
SPEAKER_01Um, I would say, like, for me, as far as participation in the world, right? I think this when we ran Descent into Avernus, it was super helpful for me because that has obviously that starts with a little bit of that, right? In the book, it lays out some deities, some cult activity, like that's something that you kind of work through, and that set the stage well for having impact, right? I guess on the storyline. And I think what also helped is that multiple characters, like your your guys' two characters, both are pretty devout followers as a paladin and as a cleric to the gods that you've chosen. So I think you leaning into those, you know, leaning into the prayers for divine intervention and figuring out, you know, how we can take that relationship with your god to either, you know, find a tome, right? Or something like that, I think really helped round that out for me to where you know the campaign where it's evolved to now has huge impact from deities at this point.
SPEAKER_00But you're also level 15 characters now, right? Now you're gonna be bumping up into those gods.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it definitely fits for for where we're at.
SPEAKER_00I think if you bring it back down to the lower levels, though, that's where you can really start to interact with other followers of different gods. And whether that be good for your party or maybe not good. Like if they're a some sort of counter to what you're following, and they're following an opposite type of god, there can be some butting of heads there that you could potentially leverage.
SPEAKER_01I also wonder, too, like how many of these uh followers, right, are evangelists. Like, I feel like we don't roleplay that enough of like trying to get your party to convert, you know, to their God.
SPEAKER_03So like we can do that too. We have not done very much of that.
SPEAKER_01No, no, we haven't.
SPEAKER_03It's an odd amount of respect in our party. At least between you and I. I don't know about the other two. Time will tell. I think we'll see.
SPEAKER_01I feel like evergash is coming around, so he likes power.
SPEAKER_03I'm gonna smite it into Ary one of these days. It'll happen. Just so we know. It'll be weird. We know it's gonna happen. Uh I I do think one thing that might be worth talking about though, too, is like the like how do pantheons, gods existing in DD help explain the world? Because you could certainly run a campaign where gods and deities don't exist. Uh and then to to counter that point is like, at least for me, it it helps explain some of the magic and things like that. So it's like a wizard gets his magic from from books, like he's learning that arcane magic that way. But how do you how do you explain a cleric cleric's magic if there's still going to exist but there's no gods that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01Sure. But like where's that source of it?
SPEAKER_03Where's that where's that channel from? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I do think it uh it's a little easier to follow something like that where you don't use a pantheon in a more modern setting. Like if you're doing running spell jammers or something and you're flying around in outer space on spaceships, yeah, they're a little bit more like ship-based, like sailing ships. Uh, but really the gods when we were playing in spell jammer settings didn't really matter as much as a lot of the uh more medieval type campaigns.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_03We also didn't have a cleric or a palate in that party. That would be a good one. So there was no need for it. So going back to like what we talked about, there was no need for it to exist because the party didn't have one, so we didn't lean into it at all. Correct. So I yes, I I agree with you, but it's it's yeah.
SPEAKER_01You could always do some sort of like, you know, there's a weave of magic, right? And it's just like a a pool that could be drawn from instead, and there is no divine essence to it. Sure. So your clerics would be able to practice magic, it's not divine at that point, sure, which is not necessarily a cleric, but that's if you wanted to do it without that's something that you could do. It'd be interesting though to make them like find a ley line to be able to acquire.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that'd be magic. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00But I think you could also play it where lower levels have less of a connection, and then as you level up too, you get more of a connection to those deities that you do follow. And so, like early on levels, your god's not gonna answer you. Tough luck. You gotta figure this out yourself. Later on, you maybe maybe have earned some favor, and that's excuse me, that's where your god's gonna come in and give you an assist.
SPEAKER_01That would be really fun to play out, like at those lower levels, like anytime you wanted to cast a spell to have to roll for it to see if your god actually like granted you the divine power to be able to cast your spell.
SPEAKER_00Something like a warlock or something?
SPEAKER_01I don't know how you'd balance that, but that would be really cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so like yeah, the everyday magic would be that would be really hard actually. I I was thinking like like because you kind of played it that way for like answering, because when that TPK happened, I don't know if you remember this, but it was like when Tyr answered, he said that there would be repercussions for reviving the party. I don't know what happened to that or if you just trash that. But it's one of those things where it's like it wasn't just a granted thing, whereas later in the story it became more because my storyline kind of became the chosen one of my deity, so it became more prevalent and easier to access, essentially.
SPEAKER_01What happened to Tyr?
SPEAKER_03What happened to Tyr Wit now? He died. Yes.
SPEAKER_01That'd be that's a pretty big repercussion.
SPEAKER_03That's fair, but then arguably you made me more powerful with the de with the god you gave me now.
SPEAKER_01So we all know that I make a common mistake of giving you guys too much power. And Ross doesn't ever say no to work as well as childish.
SPEAKER_03You changed my oath and gave me more cool shit. So no, I I suggested the oath change, I guess. Yes, but it fit. It made it fit based on what we were trying to. Sorry, sidetracked. And now all the guilt makes sense too, right? God damn you, now that I think about that, dude.
SPEAKER_00Phil's weaving layers here. Whew. He's playing chess and we're playing checkers. And that's how you make deities impact your world, right? That's so true. Yes. If you ever need a get out of jail free card, just blame it on a deity. That's fair.
SPEAKER_03Or stride or or Ari Avatus.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that's gonna do it for this episode of Bards and Barrels. You can listen to past episodes of the show anywhere podcasts can be found. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Boo Sky Social, TikTok, and YouTube at Bards and Barrels. We'll see you soon.
