OSSR: Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia
Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2012 11:05 pm
The year is 1980.
This was a more innocent time in gaming. How innocent? Well, this is what the frontispiece of my second-hand copy looks like:
Moving on.
There is an actual useful, well-laid-out, and clear table of contents. I think I might cry.
After Gygax' Foreword, James Ward gives a Preface. After the Preface is the Editor's Introduction, which contains this gem:
There are a lot of rules then about DMing gods, clerics, omens, and then my favorite - rules for divine ascension. I used these once to make a dwarf centaur (he had the lower torso of a dwarf warpony) the ancestral spirit of beer...good times, good times. Mostly, though, they're batshit insane difficult. For example:
As far as cultural insensitivity goes, this is pretty par for the course in the early 80s. The gods/spirits are drawn from a number of different North American Native American cultures all sort of glommed together, as if they were a single monoculture that shat in the woods from Maine to Vancouver - Central American Mythos gets their own section, presumably because the school library had an actual separate book on those during the research phase. A rather disconcerting trend I noticed is that nearly every one of the gods and heroes is a double-digit level ranger on top of everything else.
I should add at this point that on top of including stat blocks for gods, the entries also include brief notes on worship, magic/sacred items peculiar to a pantheon or mythos, and even some stat blocks on affiliated heroes and monsters - the Native Americans for example get the Thunder Bird. Presumably the White Buffalo was cut for space.
The next section is Arthurian Heroes, which is at first glance bullshit and cheating, since none of them are gods. However things are cleared up by this little note:
Celtic Mythos seems nicely complementary, since AD&D already has druids. However:
My favorite in the Celtic pantheon has to be Goishnie, blacksmith of the gods, and the only one really useful for any damned thing. Where the rest of the Celtic gods are powerful and shit, Goishnie makes stuff that player characters can use and DMs set up as treasure or key artifacts in a campaign. In particular, Goishnie can make amulets that "nullify any one specific spell" and weapons that never miss:
Also included are the Wild Hunt and the Tathlum, a Celtic-specific weapon that began with cutting off your enemy's head.
Central American Mythos. NIPPLE! Specifically, we get a sideboob shot of Tlazolteotl, goddess of vice, with her lumpy, misshapen ass covered by a see-through veil. Also, for whatever reason, this Aztec goddess is blonde...but I don't care.
Also features Camazotz, god of bats, who is the only god that can be summoned and appeased by insect plagues. Om nom nom.
Chinese Mythos starts out with a bunch of magic items, which is kind of weird, and then gets into the gods themselves, which is even weirder. I know nothing about the Chinese mythos behind a few tidbits concerning the Celestial Bureaucracy, but I think many liberties were taken. Case in point:
Then we get to the Cthulhu Mythos, which caused a ruckus and was excised from reprints of the book after a dispute with Chaosium over who had the rights to Lovecraft's stuff. Reading the entries, the writers were clearly attempting to be as faithful as possible while not knowing how the fuck to stat these guys out. For example, both Cthulhu and Azathoth have 400 hit points. Also for some reason they have mixed up Shub-Niggurath with Ubbo-Sathla.
Errol Otis does overtimes with some of the bizarre critters, but in general they are all as faithful depictions as you're like to see, even if Yog-Sothoth is depicted as a sucker-footed giant worm-thin with more than vaguely-phallic tentacles molesting a princess. Sort of Lovecraft-meets-Alice in Wonderland.
Also included are a couple paragraphs on the Necronomicon, though the stats are sadly lacking.
The Egyptian Mythos. P.50 and finally TITS! Specifically, we have the cat-headed, bare-breasted goddess Bast in some sort of onesie that closes around her ankles, so either she teleports into the damned thing or squeezes in backwards. All of the gods and goddesses for the Egyptians are topless, ripped, and striking superhero poses. I have to say though, the thing I most remember about this chapter now is the parody of it from Hackmaster, where Bast and another goddess formed a lesbian powercouple that took over the entire damn pantheon.
Included at the end, for no conceivable reason, are a selection of hieroglyhs and their meaning, covering a page and a half. I suspect this might be the inspiration for Ed Greenwood's random magical alphabets in Pages from the Mages.
The Finnish Mythos...sucks. Seriously, WTF? One of the magic items is magic wool. Not even kidding:
The problem with the Finnish mythos is that it is neither as popular as the Celtic Mythos nor as awesome as the Norse Mythos, so it's a poor man's Thor and Lugh kind of thing that your DM can pass it off as their own homebrew shit. I'm going to get Finnish hatemail for that.
P.60 - Loviatar, goddess of hurt, Maiden of Pain, bare-breasted. Yep, Greenwood got a lot of inspiration from this book.
Greek Mythos! Surprisingly badass, stats-wise. Seriously, Pan has 359 hit points and a better armor class than Cthulhu.
Indian Mythos! Introduced the concept of avatars to AD&D. Before this, the gods would just personally teleport or plane shift in to deliver their beatdowns. Again, I sense the influence of this on a young Ed Greenwood.
p.80 - Wait...we can spare the space for Yama's Water Buffalo (XP value: 11,500), but not the White Buffalo? Even the other Indians get more respect than Americna Indians.
Japanese Mythos!...looks amazingly like they ripped off a bunch of actual Japanese prints for some of these illustrations.
Melnibonean Mythos - the other bit that got nixed, because they were ripping off Michael Moorcock, though I think MM had actually given permission but there was a snafu with Chaosium...anyway, naturally enough they start out with Elric. Which is suitably badass and evil. Stormbringer has its own entry which makes Excalibur a fucking pigsticker by comparison, or as the writers put it:
Some of the Melnibonean gods were fluffled out a bit. So we have Nuru-Ah, master of cattle, and Roofdrak, master of all dogs. Winner of "Most Bitching Headpiece" goes to "Theleb K'aarna (evil wizard)" another Otus creation that could double as a Steve Ditko-designed villain for Dr. Strange.
The Nehwon Mythos is actually Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser. If you haven't read the stories, do so. If you haven't read the graphic adaptation by Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola, do so as well. For those not fans of Leiber, highlights of this section include a skeleton with transparent tits.
Nonhuman Deities is actually amazingly interestingly, because this is where D&D still goes to get 50-70% of its monster gods to this day. Granted, most people neglect Skerrit, god of Centaurs - possibly because he sounds like the god of squirrels - but Lolth has a much expanded entryand we get out first view of Blibdoolpoolp, the naked prawn-goddess of Kua-Toa...
...actually, I have a vague suspicion that Blibdoolpoolp, who "appears as a large nude human female with a lobster's head and clawed forearms" is based on an obscure story by William Hope Hodgson, "The Island of the Ud," but I cannot prove it.
...also, Gruumsh has magnificent cheekbones.
Norse Mythos! Finally! Thor and Odin and shit! Hell yeah! Influences are mainly from mythology, but here and there a little bit of the Marvel comic book imagery seems to shine through. Mjolnir is suitably badass:
Sumerian Mythos! Like the Babylonian Mythos, but less crazyfun, a point which the authors point out.
This is followed by appendices on the various planes of D&D - which represents the first really elaborate treatment of them, and lays the groundwork for pretty much everything that came later. Including shit like the paraelemental planes, but not the quasielemental planes. This is followed for rules of astral combat, a vast table of gods, a list of references and an index!
A quick look at the reference list actually reveals something funny: the vast majority of these 1980s retarded gods were based on works of white-washed Mythology from the 1960s.
Thank you, E, Gary Gygax.When work first commenced on ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS(TM) Fantasy Adventure Game, one aspect of fantasy role playing was foremost in my mind: there was either a general neglect of deities or else an even worse us by abuse. That is, game masters tended to ignore deities which were supposedly served and worshiped by characters in the campaign, or else they had gods popping up at the slightest whim of player characters in order to rescue them from perilous situations, grant wishes, and generally step-and-fetch. Obviously, there is a broad ground between these two extremes, and that is squarely where I desired AD&D to go. As the various manuscripts were being written, I informed both James Ward and Rob Kuntz of the direction which the overall work was to take and then followed up with draft copies of the manuscripts. Thus, both authors were well-appraised of the form and content of AD&D. Their work, the DEITIES & DEMIGODS(TM) cyclopedia, reflect the fact that they were kept abreast of the game as it developed, but that they also adhered to the concepts which were instrumental in making AD&D what it is. DEITIES & DEMIGODS is an indispensable part of the whole of AD&D. Do not fall into the error of regarding it as a supplement. It is integral to Dungeon Mastering a true AD&D campaign. Experienced players will immediately concur with this evaluation, for they already know how important alignment is, how necessary the deity is to the cleric, and how interaction of the various alignments depends upon the entities which lead them. Those readers not well-grounded in ongoing campaigns must take my word for all this, although they will soon discover for themselves how crucial the deities of the campaign milieu are.
This was a more innocent time in gaming. How innocent? Well, this is what the frontispiece of my second-hand copy looks like:
Moving on.
There is an actual useful, well-laid-out, and clear table of contents. I think I might cry.
After Gygax' Foreword, James Ward gives a Preface. After the Preface is the Editor's Introduction, which contains this gem:
As I said, it was a more innocent time, and they were making this shit up as they went along. What follows after that is a bunch of prefatory rules copied almost verbatim from the 1e Monster Manual, adapted for giving the hit points, saving throws, etc. of gods...and, handily, expanded attribute bonuses and effects for scores from 19-25. Etc. Which was all super-important shit back in the day when you seriously had to worry about stuff like level caps and hard attribute maximums.Well, here it is, DEITIES & DEMIGODS, the latest addition to the series of ADVANCED D&D volumes. But what exactly is it? Let's see, it has a nice cover - open it up, inside there are lots of pictures next to sets of stacked statistics...it must be just like the MONSTER MANUAL! There, that was easy. Now that we know what it is, we know what to do with it, right?
Wrong.
There are a lot of rules then about DMing gods, clerics, omens, and then my favorite - rules for divine ascension. I used these once to make a dwarf centaur (he had the lower torso of a dwarf warpony) the ancestral spirit of beer...good times, good times. Mostly, though, they're batshit insane difficult. For example:
Then you turn the page to the American Indian Mythos.Second, his or her ability scores must have been raised through some mighty world-shaking magic to be on par with the lesser demigods. (Should such an act be lightly considers, remember that a wish spell is the most powerful magic that mankind can control, and such an average increase in abilities would literally take the power of dozens of wishes! Each use of that spell weakens the caster and ages him 3 years into the bargain, so they are not easy to come by.)
As far as cultural insensitivity goes, this is pretty par for the course in the early 80s. The gods/spirits are drawn from a number of different North American Native American cultures all sort of glommed together, as if they were a single monoculture that shat in the woods from Maine to Vancouver - Central American Mythos gets their own section, presumably because the school library had an actual separate book on those during the research phase. A rather disconcerting trend I noticed is that nearly every one of the gods and heroes is a double-digit level ranger on top of everything else.
I should add at this point that on top of including stat blocks for gods, the entries also include brief notes on worship, magic/sacred items peculiar to a pantheon or mythos, and even some stat blocks on affiliated heroes and monsters - the Native Americans for example get the Thunder Bird. Presumably the White Buffalo was cut for space.
The next section is Arthurian Heroes, which is at first glance bullshit and cheating, since none of them are gods. However things are cleared up by this little note:
Intra-company shilling aside, this also means you get stats for Excalibur (+5 lawful good sword of sharpness), and a picture of King Arthur taking a swipe at a troll. Also, as a prequel for things to come, the authors show they're not about to pull any punches on backstory:The knights of the Round Table may not fit into some AD&D worlds, but DMs may find it interesting to spice up their campaign with a trip to Arthur's Britain. ore useful information can be found in TSR's KNIGHTS OF CAMELOT(TM) Fantasy Boardgame.
The Babylonian Mythos is what I like to think of as the first "proper" pantheon, because this is where stats get bugfuck insane. Not just a little overpowered like with the Native Americans and Arthurians, but insta-kills and shit. Example!The son of a sorceress and an incubus (a succubus shape-changed into male form), Merlin has a combination of powers and abilities far beyond those of mortals.
Raise your hand if you want to kill that guy and take his stuff. What a bitchin' mace.His mace does 35 hit poitns of damage ever time it hits and turns all beings it hits into devils (random type) under his command if they do not make their magic saving throw.
Celtic Mythos seems nicely complementary, since AD&D already has druids. However:
Man, and you thought the Catholics and Jews had it bad. "I'm sorry bodacious elf-chick, I know you're offering to reward me with your body but I can't bone unless you convert to worshiping trees and shit." Although on second thought, elves would probably be down with that.Druids consider themselves an eleite group,s eparate from all other humans. They do not mingle with others, and are only allowed to mate with worshipers within their sect.
My favorite in the Celtic pantheon has to be Goishnie, blacksmith of the gods, and the only one really useful for any damned thing. Where the rest of the Celtic gods are powerful and shit, Goishnie makes stuff that player characters can use and DMs set up as treasure or key artifacts in a campaign. In particular, Goishnie can make amulets that "nullify any one specific spell" and weapons that never miss:
Seriously, I built campaigns based around the amulet idea. There was an amulet that nullified wish and when somebody used a wish to alter the timeline, only the character with the amulet was unchanged and remembered the "real" history. But I digress.If Goibhnie's weapons are used to attempt an impossible hit (like a sword strike from 200 yards away), the weapon will hit, but will then shatter and bring on the wielder the instant wrath of the god in the form of a thunder bolt (doing 50 points of damage, no saving throw).
Also included are the Wild Hunt and the Tathlum, a Celtic-specific weapon that began with cutting off your enemy's head.
Central American Mythos. NIPPLE! Specifically, we get a sideboob shot of Tlazolteotl, goddess of vice, with her lumpy, misshapen ass covered by a see-through veil. Also, for whatever reason, this Aztec goddess is blonde...but I don't care.
Also features Camazotz, god of bats, who is the only god that can be summoned and appeased by insect plagues. Om nom nom.
Chinese Mythos starts out with a bunch of magic items, which is kind of weird, and then gets into the gods themselves, which is even weirder. I know nothing about the Chinese mythos behind a few tidbits concerning the Celestial Bureaucracy, but I think many liberties were taken. Case in point:
Really, my inner 8-year old is sold on this guy already.This monster has 3 eyes in his tyrannosaurus-shaped head, and has 4 large humanoid arms.
Then we get to the Cthulhu Mythos, which caused a ruckus and was excised from reprints of the book after a dispute with Chaosium over who had the rights to Lovecraft's stuff. Reading the entries, the writers were clearly attempting to be as faithful as possible while not knowing how the fuck to stat these guys out. For example, both Cthulhu and Azathoth have 400 hit points. Also for some reason they have mixed up Shub-Niggurath with Ubbo-Sathla.
Errol Otis does overtimes with some of the bizarre critters, but in general they are all as faithful depictions as you're like to see, even if Yog-Sothoth is depicted as a sucker-footed giant worm-thin with more than vaguely-phallic tentacles molesting a princess. Sort of Lovecraft-meets-Alice in Wonderland.
Also included are a couple paragraphs on the Necronomicon, though the stats are sadly lacking.
The Egyptian Mythos. P.50 and finally TITS! Specifically, we have the cat-headed, bare-breasted goddess Bast in some sort of onesie that closes around her ankles, so either she teleports into the damned thing or squeezes in backwards. All of the gods and goddesses for the Egyptians are topless, ripped, and striking superhero poses. I have to say though, the thing I most remember about this chapter now is the parody of it from Hackmaster, where Bast and another goddess formed a lesbian powercouple that took over the entire damn pantheon.
Included at the end, for no conceivable reason, are a selection of hieroglyhs and their meaning, covering a page and a half. I suspect this might be the inspiration for Ed Greenwood's random magical alphabets in Pages from the Mages.
The Finnish Mythos...sucks. Seriously, WTF? One of the magic items is magic wool. Not even kidding:
Great. Shepherd-gods wanking it with hand-knit socks and ejaculating sheep. THAT IS NOT AN IMAGE I NEED IN MY BRAIN.Magic Wool
Certain might persons of Pohgola have some of this material which, when rubbed against the flesh, produces a flock of 30 sheep a month.
The problem with the Finnish mythos is that it is neither as popular as the Celtic Mythos nor as awesome as the Norse Mythos, so it's a poor man's Thor and Lugh kind of thing that your DM can pass it off as their own homebrew shit. I'm going to get Finnish hatemail for that.
P.60 - Loviatar, goddess of hurt, Maiden of Pain, bare-breasted. Yep, Greenwood got a lot of inspiration from this book.
Greek Mythos! Surprisingly badass, stats-wise. Seriously, Pan has 359 hit points and a better armor class than Cthulhu.
Indian Mythos! Introduced the concept of avatars to AD&D. Before this, the gods would just personally teleport or plane shift in to deliver their beatdowns. Again, I sense the influence of this on a young Ed Greenwood.
p.80 - Wait...we can spare the space for Yama's Water Buffalo (XP value: 11,500), but not the White Buffalo? Even the other Indians get more respect than Americna Indians.
Japanese Mythos!...looks amazingly like they ripped off a bunch of actual Japanese prints for some of these illustrations.
Melnibonean Mythos - the other bit that got nixed, because they were ripping off Michael Moorcock, though I think MM had actually given permission but there was a snafu with Chaosium...anyway, naturally enough they start out with Elric. Which is suitably badass and evil. Stormbringer has its own entry which makes Excalibur a fucking pigsticker by comparison, or as the writers put it:
Consider this: there are gods in this book wandering around with no frills +3 magic weapons, and Stormbringer starts out at +5 and starts adding shit from there.Stormbringer is possibly the most powerful magic weapon possessed by a mortal anywhere.
Some of the Melnibonean gods were fluffled out a bit. So we have Nuru-Ah, master of cattle, and Roofdrak, master of all dogs. Winner of "Most Bitching Headpiece" goes to "Theleb K'aarna (evil wizard)" another Otus creation that could double as a Steve Ditko-designed villain for Dr. Strange.
The Nehwon Mythos is actually Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser. If you haven't read the stories, do so. If you haven't read the graphic adaptation by Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola, do so as well. For those not fans of Leiber, highlights of this section include a skeleton with transparent tits.
Nonhuman Deities is actually amazingly interestingly, because this is where D&D still goes to get 50-70% of its monster gods to this day. Granted, most people neglect Skerrit, god of Centaurs - possibly because he sounds like the god of squirrels - but Lolth has a much expanded entryand we get out first view of Blibdoolpoolp, the naked prawn-goddess of Kua-Toa...
...actually, I have a vague suspicion that Blibdoolpoolp, who "appears as a large nude human female with a lobster's head and clawed forearms" is based on an obscure story by William Hope Hodgson, "The Island of the Ud," but I cannot prove it.
...also, Gruumsh has magnificent cheekbones.
Norse Mythos! Finally! Thor and Odin and shit! Hell yeah! Influences are mainly from mythology, but here and there a little bit of the Marvel comic book imagery seems to shine through. Mjolnir is suitably badass:
Keep in mind, 25 is the max for attributes. To get more than 25 Strength, you need to go beyond the impossible.Mjolnir, THor's +5 magic hammer, has the following abilities:
It does 10-100 points of damage.
It can be thrown up to 200 yards, and it never misses when thrown. It returns to Thor's hand automatically. (If Thor throws Mjolnir, that is his only attack in that round.)
It can cast lightning bolts at any target within sight, up to a total of 100 dice of lightning bolts per day. This base 100 dice can be broken up into lightning bolts of any size Thor desires, i.e., 25 4 dice bolts, or 10 3 dice bolts and 1 70 dice bolt, etc.
It is so heavy that only beings with a strength of 25 can even lift it, and it requires more than a 25 strength to wield it as a weapon.
When Thor throws Mjolnir, it trails a lightning bolt behind it, and when it hits, there is a large clap of thunder which affects all beings within 30' as a power word, stun (save vs. magic negates).
Sumerian Mythos! Like the Babylonian Mythos, but less crazyfun, a point which the authors point out.
This is followed by appendices on the various planes of D&D - which represents the first really elaborate treatment of them, and lays the groundwork for pretty much everything that came later. Including shit like the paraelemental planes, but not the quasielemental planes. This is followed for rules of astral combat, a vast table of gods, a list of references and an index!
A quick look at the reference list actually reveals something funny: the vast majority of these 1980s retarded gods were based on works of white-washed Mythology from the 1960s.
