A couple of weeks ago – it’s been a long, chaotic month – a couple of weeks ago, I posted this article about using dramatic, thematic conflicts to design a pantheon of major gods for your fantasy world. And man did that ever start people talking. I’ve had articles spur conversation and even argument before, but not like this. People couldn’t f$&%ing wait to start making their own pantheons. Apparently, I have once again accidentally stumbled on something that people didn’t know they desperately needed. That’s how it works, though. People never really know what they need or want until you put it in front of them. That’s why it would be crazy stupid to design an RPG completely via open playtest. Ha ha ha.

Now, normally, when an article of mine sparks a lot of conversation, I do a follow up where I yell at everyone for misunderstanding what I wrote. But, that doesn’t seem to be necessary here. Everyone got the essentials. But there is a little confusion in a few places. And because this is apparently as popular a tool as my Fighting Spirit and Time Pool bulls&$% systems, I want to make sure everyone has the best tools available. Besides, I did offer to write a follow-up article where I’d figure out some fluffy story bulls$&% about each of my gods. And people have made it clear they want that s$&%. Fine. It’s been a long month, I’m still not quite settled in the new place, and fluffy bulls$&% is easy to write compared to inventing new rule systems. So, let’s do a follow-up.

I’m going to start by addressing a few issues that came up in the comments, e-mails, and discussions in my Patron Discord. And then I’ll look at how I might build gods for my own D&D game from the dramatic conflicts I invented. Cool? Good. Let’s go.

The Magic: the Gathering Thing

I don’t get this one. Several people brought up in the comments section and via e-mail that Magic: the Gathering does the same exact thing. And a few people implied I ripped off MtG’s color pie and am passing it off as my own. Now, that seems weird because I actually f$&%ing admitted that MtG’s color pie was presented in the same pentagram-in-a-pentagon format and even said that Richard Garfield – the designer of MtG – specifically chose five colors because of the two ally/two enemy thing. Which is what made me see the benefit of five as a mystical number of conflicts. And yes, some people have discussed the lore of MtG and the dramatic conflicts it represents. Including Mark Rosewater, Magic’s current lead designer. I thought I made it clear I knew the parallels and was repurposing some ideas.

But the actual idea of the pentagonal flow of dominance has been around for a long time. It’s something I first started thinking heavily about after writing the GM Word of the Week episode Zodiac. See, the Chinese tradition of the Wu Xing includes five elements arranged in a pentagon where opposite elements dominate each other. If you don’t take the dominance as read and assume the conflicts can go either way, you have the Magic: the Gathering color pie.

What is important to note, however, is that the dramatic conflict aspects of the MtG color pie are – as near as I can determine – something of a retcon. They are something that has emerged over the years as Magic lore built up. And they seem to be a favorite subject of Mark Rosewater’s because the guy just loves all that fluffy, story bulls$&% and just keeps applying it to everything.

In case you are interested, the “official” Magic: the Gathering conflicts as stated by Mark Rosewater in SEVERAL columns and MULTIPLE episodes of his Drive to Work podcast – because he just can’t shut up about this conflict thing – are as follows:

Community vs. Individual (White vs. Black)
Free Will vs. Destiny (Black vs. Green)
Nature vs. Nurture (Green vs. Blue)
Head vs. Heart (Blue vs. Red)
Freedom vs. Security (Red vs. White)

Not quite the same list as mine.

Overlapping Conflicts and Mismatched Ideals

Lots of people seem to have run into trouble with their conflicts and ideals overlapping. And a few have questioned the fact that mine overlap a lot. And yes, some of my ideals do overlap a bit. But I’m also pretty sure that some people are talking out of their a$& when complaining about some of the overlaps. But I suspect some of the overlaps that people are seeing are coming from teaming things up with personal value judgments. For example, some people said tradition and security overlap too much to be considered different ideals. That seems weird to me. I mean, if you consider a warrior society and the sorts of coming of age traditions they might implement, those things are about self-reliance and facing danger head-on, not hiding from it behind walls. I think people see tradition as opposing freedom. But, to take a real-world example that might upset some people, consider the current American argument about gun control vs. the freedom to own weapons. The American Constitutional Second Amendment that guarantees the right to self-defense is founded on the idea of self-reliance and freedom. I mean, it was specifically supported by the Scottish, Irish, and English settlers of the Appalachian Mountains particular those from the English frontier and the Scottish highlands who were descended from traditional warrior cultures like the Scottish warrior clans. But, allowing every citizen the right to carry whatever weapon they wish does mean there are a lot of weapons floating around. Which not every American agrees leads to a safe and secure society. Thus, you have freedom and traditionalism working together against a feeling of safety and security.

I’m not arguing a point, merely using an example. Freedom can be a tradition and traditions do not guarantee security.

As for ideas that really do seem to overlap, like free-will – opposing determinism – and freedom – opposing security – the ideas only overlap if you look at the definitions of those words in isolation. Free-will and freedom don’t mean precisely the same thing in this case because they define the endpoints of specific conflicts. You can’t define the words separately from the conflict. Freedom can mean lots of things, but when you explain it in terms of its opposition to security, it becomes a particular type of freedom which means “not accepting rules merely because they keep you safe from danger.” And free-will, in this case, means “your path and place in life are not set by some external plan, law, or higher order.”

That, by the way, is why I didn’t merely list a bunch of conflicts. I actually wrote down what those conflicts mean and how the two endpoints relate to the conflict. Because words have lots of broad definitions, but the specific definitions we want to isolate are the ones that pin down the ends of a conflict.

See?

Now, some people noted that some of the ideals I paired up don’t really go together very well at all. Like, maybe, I should have matched safety and compassion to make a more traditional loving protector god. And pragmatism would have been a better match for freedom than free will.

Yeah, I could have done that. If I wanted to be boring. I admit that I tend to avoid doing the easy and obvious things sometimes. I like to challenge myself a little bit. To make myself – and other people – come up with unusual, different ideas. But, honestly, there were a few I matched up because they were particularly good matches. Like idealism and justice.

Here’s the thing: some things are going to match up well, and some aren’t. You can use whatever system you want to pair the ideals. It doesn’t matter. I like to make things difficult for myself sometimes. That’s all.

Polytheism and D&D

I had a bunch of people ask how all of this was supposed to work with regards to how the gods are worshipped and whether you could fit monotheism into this system and the place of lesser gods and angels and devils and all that sort of crap. And where good and evil could fit into this whole scheme anyway.

I think I already said this: D&D isn’t based on modern real-world religions. It very purposely avoided them, even though certain game elements – like angels, devils, and paladins – are definitely drawn from modern, western religions. That’s because D&D draws on fantasy literature. Fantasy literature draws on the western Middle Ages. And during that time, the church dominated a lot of the large-scale social and political aspects of life while pagan traditions still held sway at the local and community level. Gygax wanted to avoid bringing any sort of religion at all into D&D, even paganism or polytheism, for a variety of reasons. And when pressed on the matter – because the game included clerics for f$&%’s sake and it needed some kind of mythology – he added two gods that were designed to make fun of western religions and the players that wanted gods in the game. Kind of a dick move. After the Satanic Panic of the 80’s, when it came time to revise D&D for 2nd Edition, they purposely avoided anything that could be remotely associated with real-world religions. And thus, D&D became a medieval world with pagan mythology.

And man does that confuse players. So, let me spell it out: there is only one religion in D&D. All those gods exist and you know they exist. They aren’t directly involved the world, but they do influence it and keep all the natural forces working. And they can f$&% with the world, either to help you or screw with you. When you need something from a particular god, you pray to them and offer them sacrifices to entice them to help you. If they are impressed, they do. If you offend a particular god, you might be punished. And beyond that, you follow whatever instructions the gods have given you for the observances of particular holidays and the treatment of the dead and the care of holy sites and whatever other rules they set out. Some people are favored by specific gods for whatever crazy reasons the gods have to favor them. But that doesn’t change the person’s belief in all of the gods or their willingness to call on other gods. Even if you are a cleric of the god of the dead, if you need a storm to end, you call on the god of weather. And the god of weather might help – or not – based on how that god feels about the god of the dead.

It’s classical mythology people. Standard crap.

Now, you can fit all the other stuff wherever you want. But I find this sort of system works best if elevate the five major gods above all other elements of the mythology. Even other gods. Because you can create some lesser gods too. In fact, I will create lesser gods in a bit. Angels can be beholden to a specific god, or each god can have its own angels, or the angels can be a separate thing that live in their own realm. The devils might have been created by one of the gods to rule the punishment realm. Whatever. It’s your world; go nuts.

Let’s Make Us Some Gods

Now, let’s see if we can come with a nice mythological starting point for our new D&D setting. Not that I’m going to build you a whole new setting. Or even an entire mythology. I’m just going to create very basic descriptions for five major deities and a couple of lesser deities. We’ll see how it goes. And, just to warn you: from this point on, I’m free writing. That is, I don’t have a plan from here. I’m just going to create and babble the thought process at you. So, settle in. It’s all a mess from here.

So, I’ve got five gods: the idealistic and just god, the freedom-loving god of progress, the pragmatic god of free-will, the compassionate and traditional god, and the deterministic god of safety and security. But that’s not what we’re going to call those gods. In fact, when all is said and done, we want to avoid explicit mentions of most of those ideals. Why? Because drama is all about subtlety. Yes, we’re building thematic conflicts into the gods. But we don’t have to be obvious about it. And we also want the gods to be able to grow beyond the two words we’ve assigned them. You want your dramatic conflicts to be like lumps under the carpet, which means we have to sweep the ideals under the rug. If that makes sense.

On top of that, this is D&D. And that means there are clerics in the world. And paladins. And we have to make sure that the clerics and paladins fit into the world. And that means we’re going to have to assign a bunch of divine domains and oaths to our five gods – and their lesser godlings. In D&D 5E – just the core – we have seven domains: knowledge, life, light, nature, tempest, trickery, and war. And we have three oaths: devotion, ancients, and vengeance.

Now, those oaths and domains actually do provide some restrictions, some constraints. Because, whatever our mythology does, it has to cover those major themes. Assuming we don’t just want to ban some of them outright or make up a bunch of our own domains. And we don’t. More to the point, those domains are going to become the major identifiers for our gods. That is, we’re likely to have a war god, a god of nature, a god of knowledge, and so on. Part of me is tempted to just assign five of those domains to the five gods and call it done. But that feels like a copout. I want to think through things a little more.

That said, it’s not a bad system to simply pick five symbolic things and assign them to your five pairs of ideals to give you something to build on. For example, you could choose the five Chinese elements of fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. Or you could choose the five Hermetic elements of fire, earth, water, wind, and Milla Jovovich. Or you could choose five colors, like red, white, blue, green, and black. Or five terrains like mountains, plains, rivers, forests, and hills. Or five mythical creatures like dragons, phoenixes, centaurs, sasquatches, and dinosaurs. See, you can’t call your god “the god of ideals and justice” because of that subtlety thing, but you can call him the Fire Dragon of the Mountains.

But let’s keep things nice and simple. Let’s go with the standard sort of fantasy pantheon that consists of anthropomorphized cleric domains with gibberish names. But, let’s try to be at least a little creative about it.

Okay. First of all, looking at the god of ideals and justice, you basically have the god of all things high-minded. The god of laws. The god of rules. The god of systems. The judge. The king. And opposing him on the justice side, you have the compassionate and traditional god. The god of community. The god of banding together. The god of family. Kith and kin. Hearth. All of that crap. And that is the classical Father God/Mother Goddess dichotomy. The Father is the imposer of rules and the cold judge, “you just wait until your father gets home.” And the Mother is the source of compassion and the heart around which the family – and the community – organizes itself.

That doesn’t mean they have to be married, mind you. Or even really the Father and the Mother of anything. Those are just symbols. They help us think. And note they represent opposing forces even though they complement each other. That’s okay. The gods don’t have to be at constant war. But they will get into conflicts where they disagree. The rule of law is often at odds with compassion and mercy.

Now, the Mother Goddess is the source of Life. I hope I don’t have to explain that. So, we can give her the domain of Life and start to build a descriptive identity around her. And, if we’re going to make the Father God the source of rules, laws, order, and principle, we can also make him the source of Light. You know, ordering the day and the night kind of thing.

Now, the god of Freedom and Progress is interesting because he’s closer to Father God than Mother Goddess. Because he balks at the traditions of Mother Goddess. The home and hearth. He is an expansive figure. He’s the kid who leaves home, which robs the mother of her meaning. And he also balks at safety. He pushes outward. He expands. He grows. And he risks himself in doing so. He’s the kid who leaves home to join the army, to make himself something more. He’s War.

Now, Mother Goddess and Father God do have a joint ally. They both like the god of Determinism and Safety. After all, Father God likes the idea that the universe is ordered and that it follows rules. Determinism is what he lives for. Mother Goddess, meanwhile, appreciates the idea of safety and security. Because Mother Goddess wants all of her children to be safe. So, the god of determinism and safety is a god they both respect. Someone who brings them both together. A wise figure that can bridge the gap between the two. A seer. A priest. The crone. The wise woman. The goddess of knowledge.

And that leaves the pragmatic god of free will. He opposes laws, rules, and order. He rejects the high-minded ideals of the Father God and the idea that he might have a fate or a role to play in a greater plan. He just is. He does what he does. But, he is close to Mother Goddess. And that can’t just be because of motherly affection. Because she does not love the children equally. She doesn’t care for her soldier son. There must be something that this child understands that the other son doesn’t. Perhaps this is the god of Nature. Life and Nature are often close allies.

Meanwhile, the two children get along because they are both driven by self-determination. And because they both have a bit of a violent streak. Nature and War are both violent ideas. But the War god channels his violence to practical purpose – to expansion and growth – which is a form of evolution. A form of progress. Whereas the Nature god is wild because he rejects the rules others impose. He simply follows his own heart.

While I originally intended to drop the whole mother/father/children thing, I kind of like the way it plays out. Especially if we add another symbolic dichotomy, the dichotomy of Heaven and Earth. Father God is the god of the heavens, and Mother Goddess is the god of the world. That’s why he’s got light – the sun – and she’s got life. That also explains why she has a better relationship with the nature god than the war god. Both of those kids get along with each other, in that they are both free-willed and personally active. But the War kid is high-minded, close to his father, and the Nature kid is nature-focused and practical, close to her mother. That leaves the seer to bridge the gap between the two. Which means the seer shouldn’t be of either of the two. The seer has to represent “the plan.” The universal order that ties them all together. But the seer can’t be above the other gods. So that makes things tricky.

What if the gods didn’t create the world. What if there was an ancient Creator who created the cosmos. The Creator is gone, having moved on or gone to sleep or whatever. The Creator also created the Father God to rule over the Heavens. Meanwhile, the Mother Goddess sprang from the world itself. The Creator had a plan, of course, and laid out the plan across the sky. The Creator sets the stars on their course to lay out the grand cosmic plan. And the Creator left the Seer – whose origins are shrouded in mystery – to interpret the plan. In a sense, the Seer might be a sibling to the Father God.

Meanwhile, in the Creator’s absence, the Primordials – beings of chaos or whatever – overran the world. Maybe they are demons or elementals or whatever. Standard s$&% really for any mythology. Giants, Titans, whatever. Maybe the Father God didn’t care about the world until the Seer manipulated events to ensure Father God and Mother Goddess would get together. They sired the two kids – War and Nature – and then their relationship got tense. War followed in his father’s footsteps. Together, they led the Angelic Host – that the Creator had left under the command of the Father God – against the Primordials and drove them into the Pit. Tartarus. The Abyss. Whatever. Mother Goddess resented the loss of her son, War and also the cold judgments and ideals of Father God. She returned to the world. Nature Goddess, meanwhile, was wild in her own way. She helped her brother drive off the Primordials, but more indirectly. Because she was a bit wild and carefree herself. And the two children being a bit wild and uncontrolled – but still equal in power to their parents – counterbalances the Seer’s influences.

And that allows us to bring in the other two domains we haven’t touched: Trickery and Tempest. We need a trickster figure to function as a lesser god and a storm figure to function as a lesser god. The trickster functions in opposition to the Seer, disrupting the plan. Perhaps the Trickster is a sibling to the Seer. We can even make them aspects of the moon – light, and dark. Maybe the Trickster was imprisoned in the stars for unknown reasons – or reasons known only to the Seer. But War’s inveterate curiosity and independent, exploratory spirit led him to free her. Maybe he fell in love with her. Maybe they married. We can make Trickster the goddess of passion, then, of illicit desires and trysts. A lesser deity with more cult status.

Meanwhile, the Nature goddess’ wild nature and opposition to the rules and laws of her father might lead her – in a classic teenage way – to become enamored of the Primordials. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t really get involved in the war. And she, herself, fell for one of the Primordials and protected him when the others were driven off. Maybe she made a deal with her brother. And he – being the wild, chaotic aspect of the natural world – became the bringer of storms.

Other lesser deities might also appear in the mythology as time goes on. The Seer – as Fate – might have sway over the Keeper of the Dead. Spirits of the natural world – especially benevolent spirits – might fall under the Mother Goddess’ sway. And so on. We might also decide that paladins of Devotion and Retribution might represent the dual aspects of the Father God as a pillar of virtue and cold judge. Perhaps clerics of Light are rare, but he has more Paladins. In fact, we can start to work out where all the various divine classes sit. And we can connect particular races to the particular gods too.

We have a workable enough mythology, though. If we start doing write-ups for the greater gods – and mentioning the lesser gods – we should be able to iron out some details. This is going to be far from complete, mind you, but it’s enough to start a campaign around certainly.

The Mythology of Terragaia or Whatever

The Cosmos is one among many worlds created by the mysterious Wanderer. As the Wanderer travels through the void, worlds appear in the wake of the Wanderer’s travels. But the Wanderer does not linger over the worlds. The Wanderer must keep moving. The Wanderer alone knows why the world exists or how it fits into the Cosmic Plan. Though the Plan is written across the void in the patterns of the stars.

Barad, the King of the Heavens, was born as the Wanderer passed the world. He illuminated the sun to cast light on the fledgling world and the Celestial Host, also born as the Wanderer passed, pledged fealty to Barad. Meanwhile, in the world, Hesta, the Queen of the World, was born from the soil and the sea. From the moon, Nelaam the Seer observed all and tried to fit it into the plan written across the Heavens in the stars.

From the dark of the void, the Primordials came. And they tore at the young world. Barad paid no heed to the world itself, for his concern was for the sun, the sky, and to whatever purpose the Wanderer had for him. Nelaam foresaw that the world would be destroyed. Hesta, meanwhile, tried to hold back the Primordials. But they were too powerful for one, alone, to defeat. Nelaam called Barad’s attention to Hesta and told him that his purpose was to protect the world so that Hesta could fill it with life. And so, Barad took Hesta into the Heavens to protect her.

Hesta and Barad had two children. Joran was like his father – noble, and high minded – but also independent and inveterately curious. Gaera was like her mother – practical and grounded – but she was also wild and free-spirited. The family lived in the Heavens for a time, but Hesta yearned to return to the world. Gaera rebelled against the perfect order and unchanging nature of the Heavenly Kingdom and the host of rigid, unyielding angels. The two appealed to Barad to send the Celestial Host against the Primordials, but he would not listen.

Meanwhile, Joran, exploring the Heavens, heard a voice between the stars. It called to him, it saw that his free spirit yearned to be tested and that he wanted to explore, to discover. The voice seduced him into taking up his father’s sword and cleaving in two the star that formed the cornerstone of her prison. The mysterious Maleen, sister to Nelaam, who had been imprisoned by the Creator between the stars, was freed. And she turned Joran’s attention to the world.

Joran appealed to Barad to free the world from the Primordials, pointing out that they were chaotic and uncontrolled and were destroying the Wanderer’s creation. He appealed to Barad’s need for control, to impose order, and he succeeded. Barad would not leave the Heavenly Kingdom undefended though. Instead, he entrusted Joran with a detachment of the Celestial Host to wipe the Primordial scourge from the world.

At first, Hesta was pleased. And despite Nelaam’s warnings, Hesta supported her son’s desired to marry the mysterious Maleen. Maleen and Joran were married, their union blessed by Barad and Hesta. But then Maleen surreptitiously let slip to Hesta that Joran’s true intention was to the bring the world under Barad’s cold, harsh rule and not leave it to flourish. Hesta turned against Barad and Joran from that point on.

Meanwhile, Joran’s army swept the Primordials from the world. And, as they did so, he discovered that his sister, Gaera, had been wandering the world for years, wild and free. She knew the ways of the world and the dangerous beasts that called it home. Impressed by each other’s strength, the siblings joined forces. For a time. Joran reassured Gaera that he had no intention of letting Barad rule the world, that he merely wanted to free the world from destruction to allow it to grow and flourish as it would. To make it better. And to see what mysteries it held.

But, as the war came to an end and the Primordials were banished into the Abyss, Gaera revealed that she had fallen in love with one of the Primordials. A wild spirit, temperamental and tempestuous, named Vrad. She attacked Joran to protect Vrad, but Joran would not fight back against sister. Instead, he was willing to spare Vrad. He asked, in return, one of Gaera’s beasts of the world. One with a wild heart and an explorer’s spirit that could bear him across the world. She gave him the horse. And, to her dismay, he tamed it and domesticated it. Later, he would teach the trick of taming animals and making them servants to the peoples of the world.

After the war, Joran built a great fortress in the Southern Plains to watch for the reemergence of the Primordials from the Abyss and left a garrison of angels there. But he is rarely there himself. For he loves nothing more than to ride across the world and do battle with whatever evils he finds and, with his might, make the world a better place. Clerics of War and Paladins of Devotion serve Joran, and he is the patron of explorers, soldiers, generals, and warlords. Joran favors the expansive humans above other races, and those who have been particularly honored have been turned into centaurs.

Barad rules the Heavens from a great palace on the tallest peak of the Eastern Mountains. Each day, he commands the sun to rise. He holds himself and the Celestial Host ready for when the Wanderer returns, and he teaches other mortals to do the same, keeping themselves pure and virtuous. He sits in judgment over the world, occasionally punishing the wicked and elevating the best souls to his Celestial Host. But, he cares little for the material world and just as often ignores it. And he does not wish to offend Hesta with his meddling. Paladins of Devotion and Vengeance both swear to uphold justice in Barad’s name and is the patron of rulers, kings, lawmakers, diplomats, and philosophers. Clerics of Light also occasionally serve Barad. Dwarves favor Barad highly.

Gaera wanders the deep, ancient Western Forest. Mercurial, untamed, she follows her whims and passions, tests herself, and, above all, she survives. She is the hunter goddess and the goddess of the natural world, which she seeks to preserve in its unspoiled state. Cities and walls – and the rules they represent – offend her. Hunters and survivalists’ number among those who revere her. And those who survive by their own strength and cunning earn her respect. But there is little love for Gaera amongst the civilized peoples of the world. The wood elves do show her respect, and she respects them in return, for they never go into the wild places unprepared to protect themselves. Some druids revere Gaera, though most feel more kinship toward Hesta. A small, unusual cult of paladins swear the Oath of the Ancients to Gaera, preserving the world against unnatural threats, though.

Vrad, the Stormbringer, never stays in one place long, fearing that Barad will discover his presence or that Celestial Host will turn against him. However, he often rides the West Wind so that he can tear through the forests alongside his love, Gaera, and when the two run forth together, chaos often follows. A cult of devoted clerics sworn to the Tempest revere Vrad, but they are rare and secretive. However, many ceremonies and rites are conducted by priests in every community to stay Vrad’s temper and buy his good grace with offerings of good food and good drink.

Hesta’s great gardens lie at the Headwaters of the greatest River in the North. She is the life-giver, caretaker, and mother to the world. She is the goddess of home, hearth, and community. Healers, midwives, farmers, and community leaders count her as their patron deity, and she is invoked during most wedding ceremonies. Because she brings life to the world, she has the most clerics of any of the gods. Those clerics fall under the domain of life. Hesta favors halflings above all others because of their love of community and family.

Nelaam is a mysterious figure who dwells within the moon. She alone reads the omens in the sky, and she encourages all to understand the forces of the cosmos and the great plan before they act. She does not control fate, but she does obey it. And so, it is she that presides over the end of mortal lives, collects the souls of the dead, and ushers them to resting place, though some are elevated by Barad or Joran. She is the keeper of the universe’s secrets. Seers, oracles, and lorekeepers revere Nelaam, though not magicians. Arcane magic disrupts the cosmic forces and was only allowed into the world when Nelaam’s sister, Maleen, was freed by Joran. Thus, she dislikes arcane magic. Clerics of knowledge revere Nelaam. High elves favor Nelaam with dispassionate respect rather than devoted reverence.

Maleen is the sister of Nelaam. Imprisoned amongst the stars, she is a disruptive force that has sown chaos amongst the gods, especially between Joran and Hesta. Maleen is married to Joran, and she has shown herself to be faithful to Joran and seems to truly love him, though both she and Joran have also had numerous relationships with mortals and other beings. Maeleen is the witch goddess and the trickster. Although she is disruptive and sows discord wherever she has influence, she is neither overtly evil nor completely destructive. She was instrumental in driving the primordials from the world by helping Joran convince his father to go to war for the world. It is also through her influence that arcane magic functions. Thus, many wizards pay homage to Maleen, as do those who live by trickery and deception, such as spies and thieves. Her influence over the world is greatest when the moon is dark, for that is when Nelaam is turned away from the world and looking out at the stars. Clerics to Maleen are rare and secretive and are generally not very well liked by devotees of the other gods – except Joran. Those that do gain power through her secret cults fall under the domain of Trickery.