How to write gods for your fantasy world

A Green dragon lies in waiting for its prey, its eyes shining out from the darkness, his breath melting the quartz below his mouth as acid leaks out. His prey, the Giant king, Dar.

Writing gods is really hard, balancing law that your player can make sense of with the sort of crazy family relations that we expect (thanks Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, and Celts) is difficult. Today I have a template I have been using to write my pantheons this week. I hope it is useful.

• Culture

• Myth

• Apprence

• Followers

• Symbol

Culture

I always start with culture first, this is an idea from this Matt Coville video

I started using this when I wrote the gods of the city Neola, I found it useful then as it helped me develop the people in the city as well as the gods.

The idea is, to start with what the people feel like, which informs what gods are like. In my world, the Dragons care about, order, knowledge art, and magic. This is a useful baseline, while world-building lore often implies the gods came first, as in many cultures, but gods are a manifestation of what the people believe.

Next, I write a small amount about what that means, for instance for Draconic culture they live so long that their main enemy is time and entropy, this means they value art that lasts a long time, writing will decay when written on paper and the language will change. What they value is things in Stone.

The Myth

Next, I ask myself, why is this thing a god? What did they do? This tends to be something big enough to grab another god's attention. For this god of art, I decided that he had been a great artist in life but had gone insane, he attempted to turn the world into his own ultimate canvas by bringing winter with him to the whole world. He was defeated and died, after death his soul was tried and he was made into the titan of art, and winter.

Appearance

What do they look like? What do they look like in the stories? Is there something in our world that is attributed to this god? For this god, I wrote the following

Kunst is a White Silver dragon who is depicted in stories of bringing almost part of a winter storm, where ever he went ice and snow followed. He has red eyes that shine in the night. Some say the Howells you here in high wind are his screams

If you know where I got Kunst from I know its a little blatant

When writing this part I try to think of what is both dramatic and easy to reference. If a player wanted to worship this god it would be easy to write a dream sequence with them in, snow plus red eyes. Done, it's easy to imagine and remember, this is important for players who might be getting bombarded with information during a session.

Followers

Most gods are worshipped by some group or another, is it a church? or an order of knights? or a cult? For Kunst, it's a cult, a group who believes that they must work to help him bring endless winter to get to the afterlife. I always give them a dress code or a type of something to make them notable if they know where to look. For this cult, the higher-ups are gifted weapons made of ice and the cult focuses on ice magic.

Symbol

Finally, what is the god's symbol, what is the crest that a paladin or cleric of the church would have on their shield? I think you get this one, for Kunst, it's an icicle.

I hope that was useful, this is a new type of content I am trying out. If you want advice on any gods you are writing for your world leave a comment below.