Categories
The deities are grouped into five categories:
- Core powers - Deities presented in the Player's Handbook 3.5th edition or substantially introduced in the other two core books (Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual). Most of these deities are worshipped by humans. There is a subset within this category called Additional Deities which has deities not mentioned in the core rulebooks but instead in supplements and as such considered additions to the core category.
- Alternate human pantheons - This lists the pantheons and the deities within them that are presented in the supplement book Deities & Demigods. Most are based upon real-life mythology.
- Demihuman powers - This refers to deities worshipped by core races besides humans (such as elves and dwarves).
- Monster powers - This refers to the deities of the monstrous races intended as enemies of the players rather than player races. Whether they should be considered true deities or not is debated.
- Non-deity powers - These beings would fit into the previous category, but are not actually deities, plus most of them aren't the patron of a specific monstrous race. This includes the demon princes and archdevils as well as some other godlike beings.
Note that there is some overlap between the categories. Most of the head deities of the demihuman pantheons, such as Corellon Larethian and Moradin, for example, are both obviously demihuman powers but are also mentioned in the Player's Handbook and as such core powers as well. Hence they appear on both lists.
Before third edition, there was no Core Setting, so the distinctions above are not as clear-cut. For the most part, materials which did not specify a setting were assumed to be at least compatible with the World of Greyhawk if not outright parts of the canon. As such, those prior materials are covered in the setting-specific lists of deities.
The book Monster Mythology, however, was considered to be canon for core materials for the gods of non-human races in second edition.
Read more about this topic: List Of Dungeons & Dragons Deities
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of “trashy,” sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the “cliché” in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)