I like the idea of "imperfect knowledge", where the game rolls up a pantheon and cultures obtain pieces of the puzzle as gods manifest or otherwise reveal themselves to members of that population, with falsehoods cropping up due to the passage of time . . .
Later, further appearances by this diety result in more accurate depictions, although if he doesn't appear, a dwarf conversing with a human might conclude that, hey, maybe the wooden sword is right after all...
I was going to point out the necessity of the
game having perfect knowledge of the gods, even while their worshipers might not (as opposed to the game generating the gods piecemeal, with each detail coming into being
as it's discovered by a mortal), but I also like the flavor of the gods altering themselves to best suit what their faithful expect of them. Maybe an amalgam of the two would work best, where the god of Hospitality randomly gets assigned a hoe as a tool, but later on might choose to swap that out for a spindle if he has no other spheres that would take him
outside the home.
I've been thinking about gods & demigods, and about spheres & domains. (I should point out that I want to
swap the last two terms--a "domain" sounds like something that you control, and "spheres" are the various qualities associated with that domain.
e.g., the domain of Fishing would have ties to the Water, Animal, and Food spheres, and so a deity with the Fishing domain would do well to pick secondary traits that were also associated with those same spheres. But I'm aware that I'm probably in the minority here, and I will try to stick to proper DF terminology in this respect.)
Demigods certainly aren't
essential to a good pantheon, but given the vast range of potential importance, it's almost a given that somebody's going to get short shrift, relatively speaking. (I think I once got one who was the god of muck and salt. That's it.) Those could be the "Primeval" demigods, those who were born not-great.
Another type of demigod could be a former (possibly still?) mortal. If you defile a temple, that god will curse you. But if you
hallow a once-profaned temple, that god will probably take you as a Priest. Perform
another such service, and become a High Priest. Do one
more act that's extremely pleasing to the same deity, and they might take you on as a demigod, and assign you a sphere from their own portfolio. (To prevent this from becoming commonplace in Adventure mode, the 3rd task would have to be REALLY discouraging, like "Live as a hermit for 6 years" or something.) These could be the "Transcendent" demigods, those who achieved not-greatness.
And interactions between the gods could produce a third type. If Legends mode treated each pantheon as something akin to a distant colony of its civilization, it could simulate events there--though at a noticeably slower pace than Fort mode. Gods could form and break friendships, marry, etc. Children of gods would need spheres to control, so at least 1 parent would have to surrender something. Some gods might have spheres stolen from them by other gods. Deities so impoverished could be the "Olympian" demigods, those who have not-greatness thrust upon them.
I'll have more to say about this "Godville" later on.
As for the Elemental spheres, my current thoughts are that they all preclude each other (to prevent any 1 god from grabbing too much & unbalancing the structure), and are all of equal power/importance--except for Earth. Earth is the parent sphere of Metal, which stands on a par with the other elements, and of course dwarves would favor Earth anyway. (Humans, meanwhile, place Weather at the top, elves think Wood is most important, and dwarves might not even recognize Wood as an element at all?)
But that's on the Preclude list. What seems to be called for in this thread is a cheap fantasy Preclude list
generator: During worldgen, before history starts ticking, the game runs through the Divinity section of the INIT file and comes across a snippet that looks something like this:
SPHERE_ART
SPHERE_VANDALISM[45:-40]
SPHERE_FUTURE
SPHERE_PAST[100:13]
That would mean that if a particular civilization has a god of Art, then they have a 45% chance of also having a god of Vandalism, and there's only a 10% chance (50/50 odds, minus 40%) that both spheres will belong to the same god. Meanwhile, a dwarf civ that has a god of the Future has a 100% chance of also getting a god of the Past, and these have a 63% chance (50/50 odds + 13%) of being the same god. Once that's done, the game checks two of the advanced worldgen settings mentioned earlier: the Pantheon Weirdness, and the Weirdness Deviation. Pantheon Weirdness would affect every civilization on the map, equally, and could potentially
invert the commonality between the spheres: if the PW is set to 100, then it will take each individual sphere-relationship and go 100% of the way towards
reversing the relationships, so that the Art god now has a
90% chance of controlling Vandalism as well, while Past & Future are now only 37% likely to belong to a single deity. Weirdness Deviation, on the other hand, is calculated independently for each civ, and imposes a random modifier (with the WD setting as the upper & lower limit) upon the global PW. So the Pantheon Weirdness determines how different the world's gods are from the settings described in the INIT file, and the Weirdness Deviation allows the various cultures to be different from each other. Once all
those numbers are crunched,
that creates a new Friend/Preclude list--one for each civilization, in fact, and the RNG can populate that with gods as it does currently.
I realize that my text snippet doesn't include a value for how likely Art & Vandalism are to be Friends (if they don't happen to be Precluded or identical), but you get the idea.
Back to Godville: Gods might be able to craft/discover unclaimed spheres, and either take them for themselves or trade them to other gods. Gods might even
kill each other, at which point the lost spheres might be up for grabs, or vanish. This gets
really interesting when you consider that the game might have events in Godville reflect what's happening in
your fort, so that if you wall in and focus on feeding your population & making babies, then your gods of Agriculture & Birth would be more likely to acquire additional (related) spheres, while those controlling War, Fortresses, Hospitality, & Trade would wither away, losing worshipers in the process. This would give gods a whole slew of motivations to have their respective Priests make demands of you. Also possible would be deities from other civilizations
migrating to your civ's Godville . . . perhaps filling a void, perhaps merging with (or even deposing) a native god. This seems like an interesting way to simulate a spreading religion, or at least the assimilation of certain elements of same.
That's enough blathering for now.