Greyhawk Deities - Greyhawk Deities in The Boxed Set: Four Human Pantheons

Greyhawk Deities in The Boxed Set: Four Human Pantheons

In 1983, the folio edition was replaced by the greatly expanded World of Greyhawk boxed set. Gygax was not only able to include the nineteen new gods from his previously published Dragon articles, he also included 31 new gods, for a total of 50 deities. However, although the material regarding the 19 original deities was reprinted in full, only three of the "new" deities were also given a full description: Raxivort (whose full description had been published in Dragon the previous year), Ulaa and Xan Yae. The remainder of the new deities were simply listed by name and sphere of influence.

All but one of these deities—Raxivort being the exception—was primarily a human deity. By his own admission, Gygax’s vision of Greyhawk (and of D&D) was of a human-centred world. In Gygax's original Dragon articles, he had made no mention of racial preferences for any of the gods; now the boxed set introduced four main human races: Suel, Oeridian, Bakluni and Flannae, and assigned most of the deities to be primarily worshipped by one or other of these races. The twelve deities of the Suel pantheon had been created by Len Lakofka, and he would subsequently publish a detailed five-part article on them in the July–November 1984 issues (#87–92) of Dragon. Most of the other gods were assigned to one of the three remaining pantheons, while a few were either declared common to all humans or of unknown origin: