Faiths and Pantheons

This is a sourcebook for all things related to deities and pantheons in Faerûn.

The introduction basically provides information on the “structure” or “rules” of how pantheons work in the Forgotten Realms. I liked that throughout this sourcebook, there are references to what happened in novels and other lore. This section also explains deity statistics, and explains what are divine ranks.

The first chapter is the meat of it. It details about 30 Faerûnian deities, in a mixture of good and evil, major and minor. There are stat blocks for all of them as well as detailed information on their worship, rites, ceremonies, and priesthood.

The second chapter is probably the longest -it covers the rest of the deities is lesser detail, almost 90 of them, from various pantheons. These deities do not have stat blocks (or even divine rank) so it's kind of odd that they came up with the concept of divine rank, yet chose to only apply them to the deities in the previous chapter. The descriptions here mostly just cover their dogma, worship, and current affairs.

The next chapter provides three places of worship, for Tempus, Shar, and Malar. They are interesting enough, with Tempus being an actual structure, Shar's is a hidden place of worship with ties to novel plots, and Malar being a corrupted location that used to be place of worship for Eldath. These are rather detailed affairs, complete with stat blocks for NPCs.

The fourth chapter contains about 20 prestige classes and one template. They are all tied to a particular deity, so are rather flavourful in that sense.

Lastly, there's an appendix that explains deity abilities and feats, the Repose domain, and brief descriptions of monster deities.

Overall, it's a great sourcebook for your Forgotten Realms deity “fix”. Too bad they decided that 30 was enough. I would have much preferred expanding on deity stats and less of the adventure locations. If adventuring ideas need to be included, they should be more in the vein of how best to conduct one with active deities (this got covered in a web enhancement, to be fair).