Patchwork Pantheon
A collaborative, improvisational worldbuilding game for creating complex and chaotic religions!
This game is designed to imitate the ways real belief systems develop - there's nobody sitting down and designing perfectly balanced gods. There are people making up stories to explain the world, people making up different stories, people explaining the discrepancies between the stories, politics, history, economics, random chance... so you end up with complex, imbalanced, intricate and contradictory mythologies.
Patchwork Pantheon can be played with any amount of people you like, or even solo, though it can get a bit unruly with over ten players.
It's currently available as a room setup for playingcards.io - download this file, unzip, create a custom room on playingcards.io, go to "Room Settings", and import the .pcio file. (More forms of Patchwork Pantheon may come soon...)
How to play
Ensure the deck is shuffled before starting.
Start by placing cards face-down at the top of the board. Each of these will represent a god. Depending on player number and time, I recommend playing with a minimum of six gods, a maximum of ten.
All players draw seven cards to their hand.
There are five types of card:
Red cards are a god's physical or personality traits
Orange cards are myths and stories about past and future actions
Green cards describe how society interacts with the god
Blue cards describe the practical effect this god has on the world
Purple cards are symbols associated with the god
Once all players have drawn, turn over each gods' starting card. Since it can be hard to keep track of turns later on when you're all discussing stuff, I recommend basing turn order on your display order however you're communicating!
On their turn, a player places a card into a deity's column of cards, and explains how it connects. Other players can then contribute their own elaborations and ideas.
At the end of the turn, the player may discard as many cards as they want into the discard pile, and draw back up to seven. If another player sees a discarded card and wants to take it, they can swap one of their own cards for it. This represents a community's interests, resources and priorities changing over time... and it also means nobody gets stuck with irrelevant cards all game.
When a god has at least one card of every colour, add the star-card to their column to mark them as fully-formed. New cards can still be added to their column, and it's okay for a god to have multiple cards of the same colour.
When all gods have been completed, you have a full pantheon! Congratulations!
Complete the game by picking a title for each god.
You can watch an example game here, played by me, MadelineJamesWrites, Jake Penny, Biblaridion, RedQuillsMapMaking and David Peterson. Our final board:
These are the gods Flatfoot, Snakeswan of the Silent Tower, The Rainbow that Covers the Sky with its Wings, Many-Face, the Long Wanderer, and the Worldweaver.
Reality itself was created by the Worldweaver, who spins the raw wool of time into yarn - and can always unmake it, if they wish. Into reality came the Long Wanderer, in the form of a tortoise, who wandered the cosmos, having encounters with the unformed fabric of chaos and eventually birthing all life. Later, Many-Face, a shapeshifting child god who often takes the form of an axolotl or armadillo, painted the Long Wanderer's shell, creating the world.
The duck god Flatfoot once lost something precious at the bottom of the ocean, and drank the whole ocean to try and find it again. His twin, the Rainbow, caused the rain to fall and refill the oceans. Snakeswan, possibly a sibling of the other two bird gods, continually showed off their knowledge, but was given a riddle they couldn't solve, and their tongue was cut out as forfeit.
If you lived in this society, you might pray to Flatfoot before eating, asking him not to poison your food - or you might call upon Flatfoot to seek vengeance on your enemies. Just don't be too public about it. Flatfoot once caused a plague that killed thousands - including the child god Many-Face. He's a bad guy. And aggressively male.
The Snakeswan might speak through you, since it cannot speak itself - if you often find yourself excitedly sharing information, that may be a deity living vicariously through you. And every time you write, you are embodying the Snakeswan, who invented every form of written language.
The Rainbow is a god of uncertainty and change, in the form of a goose. People often look to the sky to interpret messages from the Rainbow about when to plant crops or embark on journeys. After rain, you might interpret patterns of rust as signs from the Rainbow. This god was once a plain white goose, but then Many-Face painted them, creating the first peacock. Transgender people adopted this as a symbol, and transitioning is casually known as "painting the goose".
Many-Face the child god is a joyful shapeshifter, who manifests in a roar of colours and a jangling of beads. Orphaned children are given to the temple, which is built into the city walls, and there is a yearly festival where worshippers wear masks and playfully mock the world. In this world, bread rising is associated with childcare - and the crusts of bread are given the same name as city walls.
If you are a widow, or elderly, you may be particularly attached to the Long Wanderer, who gifted infertility to the elderly so they could enjoy sex without consequences. In this culture, monogamy is encouraged - but after a spouse's death, promiscuity is totally okay!
And people with physical disabilities are often fond of the Worldweaver. For people with difficulty moving, weaving is a common way to earn money. Plus, the movement of loomweights can be used to predict the future, or to find lost things, so weavers are often sought out to help tell the future.
Thank you to MadelineJamesWrites, Jake Penny, Biblaridion, RedQuillsMapMaking, and David Peterson! Thank you also to everyone in my Discord server who played Patchwork Pantheon and gave so many useful suggestions!
