Greyhawk Deities - Greyhawk Deities and The Folio Edition

Greyhawk Deities and The Folio Edition

In 1980, TSR published Gygax’s home campaign world as a 32-page folio, World of Greyhawk (known as the “folio edition” to differentiate it from later versions). However, Gygax did not include any details of the deities he used in his home campaign at this time.

Several adventure modules were quickly published to support the folio edition, and one of them, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, featured the first deities designed specifically for a setting in the World of Greyhawk. The adventures was designed to introduce players to the Aztec-like Olman humans of the Amedio Jungle, a subject not covered in the folio edition. The Olman deities—largely drawn from Aztec culture—were Mictlantecuhtli, god of death, darkness, murder and the underworld; Tezcatlipoca, god of sun, moon, night, scheming, betrayals and lightning; and Quetzalcoatl, god of air, birds and snakes. However, Gygax did not acknowledge these deities in any of his work on Greyhawk, and TSR did not publish any further references or adventures using this setting, effectively “orphaning” the Olman culture. The Olman deities were not included in any versions of the Greyhawk campaign setting until they reappeared in 1999 in The Scarlet Brotherhood by Sean K. Reynolds and in 2005 in the extensive list of deities published for the Living Greyhawk campaign.

Lacking any Greyhawk-specific deities in the folio edition, many Dungeon Masters using the World of Greyhawk setting borrowed generic deities from the just-published rulebook Deities and Demigods for their Greyhawk campaigns. However, relief was in sight. In the August 1982 issue of Dragon (Issue 64), Gygax gave advice on how to adapt the 23 non-human deities from Deities and Demigods to the Greyhawk world, and he included a description of the first non-human deity designed specifically for Greyhawk, Raxivort (god of the goblin-like xvarts). A few months later, Gygax then published a long and very detailed five-part article in the November 1982 to March 1983 issues (Issues 67-71) of Dragon that outlined a pantheon of deities custom-made for worship by humans in the world of Greyhawk. In addition to his original Greyhawk deities, St. Cuthbert and Pholtus, Gygax added 17 more deities:

Gygax also used the hierarchy of deities as set out in the just-published Deities and Demigods rule book: greater god, lesser god, demi-god. (Later, he would add two ranks below demi-god: quasi-deity, and hero-deity.) Although later versions of the campaign setting would assign most of these deities to worship by specific races of humans, at this time they were generally worshipped by all humans of the Flanaess.