User blog:Aaron Larsen/Periodic Table of the Deities

I love the Periodic Table. No, I wasn’t a chemistry major, but there’s just something about the orderliness the well-thought-out structure and the way that each tile on it encodes so much cool information on each element that has always caused me to think that it was one of the neatest inventions of modern science. So one day I came up with the cool idea of creating a “Periodic Table of the Deities” illustrating some of the key relationships between the all of the major (and at least most of the minor) deities in the Exandria campaign world as a way to help the whole system make more sense. Hence I created the table below:

Note that each “tile” encodes a number of key bits of information in addition to a name and symbol:

1. The inner border encodes the pantheon origin of each deity:

a. A green inner border indicates an origin in the Pathfinder campaign setting (which is basically just Saerenrae, since Matt didn’t want to make Pike change deities when they switched systems)

b. A purple inner border indicates an origin in the Dawn War Pantheon, a composite pantheon of old & new (& human and demihuman) deities put together for the 4th edition of AD&D.

c. A black border indicates an origin in some other old D&D source.

2. The outer border encodes their placement into either the “Prime Deities” (blue) or the “Betrayer Gods” (red.) These are categories internal to the Exandrian world-lore, as defined in the official Campaign Guide, and generally follow consistent alignment patterns, though with minor evil deities generally being unmentioned in the CG.

3. The placement on the table then indicates alignment, with a gold box to indicate which are the officially-approved deities within the Empire. (Note, btw, that this is basically the lawful block of deities, with the “neutral” Pelor and Ioun probably allowed because they were just too useful to exclude.)

So, anyway, here’s my “Periodic Table of the Deities.”  Each of the deities on it also has an individual tile that has been uploaded to the site as well (you can see the whole shebang, if you’re interested, on my profile after the Icon and Cartography sections.)  Not that I’ve yet come up with a terribly useful purpose for either the Tables or the Tiles, just yet, but I thought they were kind of neat so I thought I’d share them with y’all…