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[cochramd]

Not always, in seahorses the female lays her eggs in a special pouch on the male, and then he "gives birth" when the offspring hatch; so if a pregnancy god were to ever take the form of a seahorse-beastperson, they could easily and logically be male. There's probably more examples than that, but seahorses are the first thing that came to mind.

That is a very big 'if'. In fact, I'd say it would be insurmountably large if there were not a race of seahorse-beastpeople to whose pantheon he belongs. But really, I think gods with "opposing" domains should wait until we can have the game give us justifications for them, either by someone sitting down and coming up with a few justifications for every set of opposing domains or by the AI being so smart that it can come up with justifications on its own.

[TheBiggerFish]

Not always, in seahorses the female lays her eggs in a special pouch on the male, and then he "gives birth" when the offspring hatch; so if a pregnancy god were to ever take the form of a seahorse-beastperson, they could easily and logically be male. There's probably more examples than that, but seahorses are the first thing that came to mind.

That is a very big 'if'. In fact, I'd say it would be insurmountably large if there were not a race of seahorse-beastpeople to whose pantheon he belongs. But really, I think gods with "opposing" domains should wait until we can have the game give us justifications for them, either by someone sitting down and coming up with a few justifications for every set of opposing domains or by the AI being so smart that it can come up with justifications on its own.

To which one really must again wonder why we're projecting onto the civilizations that worship these gods.
Maybe they just got there first and like being contradictory.

[cochramd]

To which one really must again wonder why we're projecting onto the civilizations that worship these gods.
Maybe they just got there first and like being contradictory.

The gods, you mean? Well then, I suppose that's a valid explanation if the deity is particularly spiteful in nature, but do we even have deity personality figured out yet?

[TheBiggerFish]

To which one really must again wonder why we're projecting onto the civilizations that worship these gods.
Maybe they just got there first and like being contradictory.

The gods, you mean? Well then, I suppose that's a valid explanation if the deity is particularly spiteful in nature, but do we even have deity personality figured out yet?

Nope!
Should we really impose personalities on gods?

[cochramd]

Nope!
Should we really impose personalities on gods?

I suppose that depends on what kind of feel you're going for. You have plenty of pantheons where the gods are basically extremely powerful mortals with all the human flaws that entails (Greek/Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Aztec/Incan/Mayan I think), but then you have ones where the true nature of the gods is incomprehensible (the abrahamic religions, Hinduism); it seems to me that typical fantasy religions strongly lean towards the former, such that thinking that the gods have human personalities is like Newtonian physics: an incomplete understanding, but one that works 99.999999% of the time.

[SixOfSpades]

I would expect to encounter something strange and unique about the way a fantasy civilization would analyze the world and form its mythologies and beliefs . . . a new culture in a new world should be able to have its own connections. Sure, there will be combinations that are completely ridiculous, but I like it when something ridiculous happens in Dwarf Fortress, and I would rather put up a few mind boggling wtfs than limit DF's mythology system to something bland and predictable.

Agreed, for the most part. I'm a big fan of "random" WTF, but have a low tolerance for "stupid" WTF. But in future, when the embark window will give the particulars of the pantheon of each of the available civilizations, we will have forewarning of contradictory gods, and simply choose another civ.

I still think we should acknowledge that a lot of our mental connections are completely arbitrary . . . it comes down to whether you believe that the connections we make in western culture are absolute, or if a fantasy culture would develop new ones that seem strange and random to us.

Male vs. Female is anything but arbitrary, nor is Day/Night, Left/Right, Life/Death, Chaos/Order, Truth/Lies, Music/Silence, etc. I feel justified in saying that any culture would make these associations, and acknowledge the fundamental conflict (and cooperation, in the case of true yin/yang pairs) inherent in each one.
There are also pairs that simply don't make sense for reasons other than direct opposition. Sun/Caverns for instance, or Mountain/Ocean. Where do they meet? Would gods of such disparate domains be effectively halved in power, due to only being able to access the spheres that match their current location?

A lot of Earth's mythology is, and by extension so should DF's be, poetic or allegorical in nature.  So if, say there's a god of Fire and Water, there is meaning within that.  The Fire-Water god might represent the power that can come through balance . . .

All right, say there's a single Fire-Water god. Will the Earth and Sky gods have to team up, or even merge in order to compete with balance this deity's power?
Not that I feel that the gods all need to be balanced. If a pantheon includes deities with dominion over, say,
A) Fortresses and war,
B) Agriculture and trees,
C) Wealth and trade,
D) Fire and volcanoes,
E) Craft and thralldom, &
F) Misery and deformity,
it's pretty clear which god drew the short straw, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. There could be dozens of shrines to this god all over the sector of your fort devoted to giving your amputee veterans another shot at very slowly getting their revenge on the goblins that took their limbs.

The god could represent inner struggle, adaptability, invention, power of nature, etc, rather than Fire and Water specifically.

Then the god's domain should include those spheres specifically, and not mess around with ANY of the "fundamental building blocks" of the universe.

There's also the question of whether or not gods are "real" in DF.  If . . . the ancient dwarven ancestors beheld the world about them and concluded that there must be a persona that encompasses these powers, or is there actually a divine entity that has the power to ignite you with his right hand and drown you with his left.  If gods are real, then heck, why would any combination be impossible?

That's a good question. It would seem likely that the gods depend upon their followers for existence, because AFAIK gods vanish when their civilization goes extinct. But there's ONE god who predates even the time before time, the god of beards, alcohol, anvils . . . and blood. It is Armok who determines the logical order (or lack thereof) of each pantheon.

I cannot see why a god of pregnancy would have to end up being female, the matter is basically 50/50 I think.  Is your god a god of pregnancy because she gets pregnant herself or is he the impregnator, the god that makes it's followers pregnant; a phallic deity basically.  As women do not get pregnant all on their own and it takes both genders to create a pregnancy, a male god of pregnancy makes as much sense as a female one.

Nitpicking time: It takes both genders to create a conception, but once that's been done, the pregnancy itself is 100% female. Now, male fertility gods are perfectly OK, there's certainly been more than enough precedent on that count, whether we're talking about the fertility of people, or animals, or the land itself. But as soon as you throw the word "pregnancy" in there, that immediately throws the needle over to female (or hermaphroditic at best). Portray a male god as being pregnant if you wish, but without a vagina that's going to get real awkward real quick. (And the god would want to be called "Loretta".)

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Re: nitpicking time: specifics, specifics. Same difference. You could tell GoblinCookie meant god of "fertilization" in that specific case, that is, making pregnant vs. actually being pregnant themselves. And let us not forget how apparently Zeus gave "birth" to who was it, Athena, from his forehead?

(Also, see GoblinCookie, I don't actually hate you, I just disagree with you in the treesplosion thread, and also get a bit upset. But I really just argue with positions not people.)

[GoblinCookie]

But see, Fire and Water do not "kill" each other, that's your own arbitrary assessment.  Fire will "die" if smothered by anything, sand, wool, whatever, there's nothing especially oppositional about water, it's just readily available to us.  The idea that Fire and Water are opposed isn't even a particularly old concept, it mainly comes from video games.  The concept of the Classical Elements was that every piece of matter could be broken down into "atoms" of four types, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  Pairs might have contradictory properties, but it was understood that they still needed to coexist in order to complete more complex forms of matter.  I imagine it was not unlike our current understanding of protons and electrons; they are opposites, but nonetheless coexist harmoniously most of the time. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

You are quite right, what you are referring to is a unitery concept, the four elements of alchemy.  This however is not something that just springs up from direct observation, the fire "thing" as observed directly by dwarves is opposed to the water "thing" (along with all the other smothering things).  It takes the invention of a higher meta-concept to unify both things as something that they are both held to be, that of the elements in general in order to unify things that are observed as being in opposition; that meta-concept is yes the classical elements.  In that case we do not however end up with a god of fire and water, but a god of the elements in general; however we have no reason to believe that there even *are* any metaconcepts with metaphysical application at all at the moment. 

I suppose that depends on what kind of feel you're going for. You have plenty of pantheons where the gods are basically extremely powerful mortals with all the human flaws that entails (Greek/Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Aztec/Incan/Mayan I think), but then you have ones where the true nature of the gods is incomprehensible (the abrahamic religions, Hinduism); it seems to me that typical fantasy religions strongly lean towards the former, such that thinking that the gods have human personalities is like Newtonian physics: an incomplete understanding, but one that works 99.999999% of the time.

It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.  The reason we remember the old religions the way we do is that we remember as they ended up when they fell to the newer religions. It cannot be concluded that those religions when they were younger and stronger had the characteristics they ended up with only that we remember them as they were when they died and our memory of them is likely intended to emphasise their weaknesses. 

A religion based upon literal human-like divinities does not work unless those divinities are actually physically present and possess overwhelming power, but in that case why call it a religion at all?  That is because the presence of a divinity must be 'felt' in a non-literal sense by the believers in order for the effort expended by the worshippers in sustaining the religion to 'turn a profit' as it were.  A god of fire must be felt in the fires of the world in order to mantain it's appeal, but at the same time fire cannot 'just be fire'; this tension is what theistic religions are built on and the tendency is for every such religion to split into two warring camps.

The first camp emphasises the symbolic nature, the god becomes a mere symbol of the thing it is god of.  The second camp emphasises the literal beingness, it emphasises the divinity's human characteristics and relationships.  Any and all theistic religions in order to remain strong must mantain the balance between the opposing tendancies, if either tendancy prevails over the other the religion will become weak.  A god has to be human enough so that humans can have a relationship with it but at the same time elemental/spiritual enough that it's presence can be felt in what is not a literal human incarnation. 

Nitpicking time: It takes both genders to create a conception, but once that's been done, the pregnancy itself is 100% female. Now, male fertility gods are perfectly OK, there's certainly been more than enough precedent on that count, whether we're talking about the fertility of people, or animals, or the land itself. But as soon as you throw the word "pregnancy" in there, that immediately throws the needle over to female (or hermaphroditic at best). Portray a male god as being pregnant if you wish, but without a vagina that's going to get real awkward real quick. (And the god would want to be called "Loretta".)

In this instance however it is not the god or goddess that has the pregnancy but the mortal woman.  While women do have the ability to carry a pregnancy to term without male help, they are completely unable to become pregnant themselves.  Since it is the arrival of a male being that brings pregnancy 'into' a woman, it makes sense to represent pregnancy as a male god that enters it's female devotees *as* the pregnancy itself.  As I have pointed out, the matter is indeed 50/50 because a female god of pregnancy can get pregnant making her symbolic *of* pregnancy, nothing really connects her divine pregnancy to that of mortal women.  This gets to the matter I was mentioning to Cohramd above, the clash between the symbolic divinity and the human-like divinity.

An eternally pregnant female god of pregnancy wins the symbolic war but has less relationship to it's pregnant worshippers than the male god of pregnancy which is able to represent both her relationship to the father that impregnated the woman and the fetus inside the woman at the same time.  The religion fails in both cases when the respective divinity loses the weaker element, so the pregnancy goddess loses it's relationship to the women and becomes completely abstract or the pregnancy god loses it's symbolic connection to pregnancy and is replaced by the actual father/fetus which is more concrete.

[cochramd]

It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.

[citation needed]

[Batgirl1]

Obvious solution: Sliders at world gen.  Choose whether a world's religions will be Plausible, Strange, or Completely Random.  This way, every player can set it at the level they're most comfortable with for what they want to get out of the game, whether it's logic or a creative exercise or just a bit of hilarity.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.

[citation needed]

Quite.

And what of Imperial Rome, whose Emperors were worshiped as gods? Augustus instituted the cult of the Emperor as a means of insuring stability.

[TheBiggerFish]

Obvious solution: Sliders at world gen.  Choose whether a world's religions will be Plausible, Strange, or Completely Random.  This way, every player can set it at the level they're most comfortable with for what they want to get out of the game, whether it's logic or a creative exercise or just a bit of hilarity.

This sounds reasonable.

[cochramd]

And what of Imperial Rome, whose Emperors were worshiped as gods? Augustus instituted the cult of the Emperor as a means of insuring stability.

And let us not forget Christianity, and the Catholic saints.

[GoblinCookie]

It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.

[citation needed]

It is my opinion not a fact.

[cochramd]

(removed)

Anyhow, Toady has said:

Then the random generation can begin.  We don't want another cheap fantasy universe, we want a cheap fantasy universe generator.  A lot of fiction sounds computer generated anyway.

And while I'm not familiar with every fantasy pantheon out there, I've read up on the Greyhawk pantheon a fair bit and have read through the third edition Deities and Demigods sourcebook, so I think I can say with fair accuracy that "gods have something very close to a mortal personality but not quite" works for the average generic fantasy pantheon. Funny thing that's bugging me, though, is that we never or rarely ever see patron gods of races. I mean, yes, we have race-based pantheons, but never the equivalent of, say, Moradin. Is it just a D&D thing to have deities that consider a certain race in its entirety to be part of its domain?