@dunsany/pantheon v0.0.0

Dunsany

A procedural pantheon generator.

Generate a list of deities with archetypes, powers, characteristics, and relationships.

This is built as the basis for a procedural high fantasy, soft magic system, online strategy game.

In-Game Information

Pantheons

A pantheon is a list of deities with a chief (when the pantheon is > 2), a collective disposition toward humans, and an age.

interface Pantheon {
  disposition: typeof dispositions[number];
  age: typeof ages[number];
  chief?: string; // deity.id
  deities: Array<Deity>;
}

Deities

Deities each have a single archetype (god of war, goddess of storms, etc). This archetype helps define their backstory, a short snippet designed to open up stories of these deities' mighty feats.

Like the gods of old, these deities are gendered, being one of four: male, female, hermaphrodite, and none. This will affect their relationships with other gods and goddesses of the pantheon.

Each deity starts with a pre-defined list of relationships which will likely connect all deities in a smaller pantheon and most in a larger one.

Those relationships will ebb and flow, reaching points of deep love and other times deep hatred. These are indicated by the eris, eros, philo, and agape indicators on the relationship edge.

interface Deity {
  name: string;
  archetype: Archetype;
  relationships?: Array<Relationship>;
  backstory: string;
  id: string;
  gender: typeof genders[number];
  characteristics: {
    real: boolean;
    reliability: number; // 0-1
    dead: boolean;
    // TODO: add more characteristics. Things like jovialness (?), drunkeness, etc.
  };
}

Relationship

interface Relationship {
  type: RelationshipTypes;
  eris: number; // 0-1
  eros: number; // 0-1
  philo: number; // 0-1
  agape: number; // 0-1
  deityId: string;
}

Todo

• Add weights to genders (less nones and fewer hermaphrodites)
• Add backstory generation
• Add better linguistic rules to name generation
• Add more characteristics that weight a deity's personality, effectiveness, and worship
• Add weighting system for random die rolls. For instance, pantheons should trend toward the smaller side (12-20) with larger (30-50) or smaller (1-10) pantheons should be outliers

Notes

We had discussed monotheism/dualism systems. Since these would technically be self-contained "pantheons" and we've discussed the idea of competing pantheons, I think it better to allow the chance for a 1-2 deity pantheon, expecting that a culture will pick up on this fact and consider all other competing pantheons false.