Wednesday Knights Blog

Deities and Demigods

4th edition has 4 good deities (2 lawful good, 2 good), 7 unaligned, and 8 for evil for a total of 19 deities. In earlier editions, the deities were broken into groups by rank: greater, intermediate, lesser, demi, hero-gods, racial and special cases (e.g. Quetzalcoatl). An argument could be made that there were too many deities to choose from. In first edition, it was essential to get a first edition copy of Deities and Demigods so that you could have access to the info on Cthulhu and Melniboian deities. Not that we ever created characters that used these deities or monsters, but it was a must have.

With the simplification of alignment also comes the simplification of deities. I think 19 deities is too small a list. Corellon is still around. Where are the rest of the Seldarine? There are two elven deities (Loth & Corellon) and two draconic deities (Bahamut and Tiamat). There does seem to be a bit of fondness for dragons and elves in this version of the game. Orcus is still around (foe of the Raven Queen) but is not listed as a deity.

The one saving grace of the new deity list is the Raven Queen. While the descriptions of each deity is short, this one caught my eye. I am thinking of retrofitting the Raven Queen into 3.5 (fate, reprose, destruction, protection). I have been seeing a number of paladins of the Raven Queen popping up on the internet. The intent was probably for Bahamut to be leading the paladins, but leave it up to the players to derail the gaming world.

So for deities, Iaˆ™m giving the new edition 3 stars out of 5.

As an after thought, just because I am still reading, it seems that a follower of the Raven Queen ‘might’ have some issues with epic destinies.A If death is the natural end of life than immortality could be deemed a violation of this rule.