Pantheon maker: the family tree of your gods

How a pantheon works here

A god is a person in the tree: parents, partners in the order of their unions, and children, with birth, adopted and fostered lines. Four fields are made for gods and come first in the editor: Domains (free text, shown under the name in every box, so “the sea, storms” reads at a glance), Epithets, Symbol and Born of. Each is saved only when you fill it in.

Born of is for a being with one parent or none. A god with one parent in the tree normally hangs from a small ‘?’ box for the unknown other parent; with Born of set, that box reads “born of the drowned bell” instead, and two children of the same god born of the same thing share one box. A god with no parents at all shows it on the top line of their own box, unless they have a title.

Named generations: type a name in Name of this generation and it is drawn at the left of that god's row, and printed and exported with the tree. The rule: the name is pinned to the god you were editing, not to a row number. Add parents above the first gods and every row moves down; each name moves down with its god. Delete that god and the name passes to the next god in the same row. One row has one name: naming it again from another god in that row replaces it.

The example, the Lantern Court, has 14 gods in four named generations. Ommaru, born of the silence before the first word, and Teskavel, born of the first spark, are the First Ones; Kestrimm is Vathra's child alone, born of the drowned bell; Fennick is Seliandre's, born of a dream of the moon. All of them were made up for this page. Character sheet, in a god's editor, prints one page about them with their domains, epithets, symbol and what they were born of above the family read off the tree.

Generate a pantheon

One tap makes 10 to 20 gods over 3 or 4 generations, from one or two first beings. Each later generation is the children of the couples and lone gods of the one before; one to three of each generation go on to found the next, alone or with a partner who marries in. Every god gets one domain from this fixed list of 20, and some get a second, but no domain is used twice in one pantheon: sea, sky, storms, harvest, the hearth, the hunt, war, craft, death, dreams, the moon, the sun, love, wisdom, trickery, the forge, rivers, the dead, beasts, travel. A 20-god pantheon therefore has exactly one domain each.

The names are made-up syllables glued together, from the same tables the site's calendar and family generators use. They mean nothing: they were not picked for a sense in any language, and the site's tests check the names of hundreds of generated pantheons against a list of well-known gods from real mythologies. The first beings, the lone gods' children and the partners who marry in are each born of one of 12 things (the first storm, the deep water, the long night, a falling star…), and the rows are named The First Ones, The Elder Gods, The Young Gods and The Youngest. Every field and link can be changed after.

Under the chart, the seed is shown. Type it in Seed and tap Use this seed to get the same pantheon again: seed K3Q9ZD always gives the 15 gods of the Pantheon of Yeliri in 3 generations. Replacing a tree you already have asks first, and Undo brings yours back.

What it cannot do

• Share links: a link never carries pictures, so a shared tree shows its boxes without them (send the saved file to share pictures). Anyone who has the link can open and read the whole tree, notes too unless you tick Leave out notes: it is not secret, so pass it on as you would the file. A link is a copy of the tree as it was when you made it, and later changes need a new link. Above 2,000 characters some chat apps, forums and forms cut a link short and it no longer opens; the 23-person example family makes about 2,100 characters, or about 1,500 with notes left out, and the panel warns you and offers the file instead. A link always opens on the main family tree page, so a royal line's regnal names and heir numbers, and a pantheon's domains in the boxes, are not drawn there, though the link keeps them. A copy saved from a link is listed under Your trees on the main page only, and only clearing this site's data removes it.
• No worship: no temples, priests, followers, holy days or cults. Holy days can go on the fantasy calendar maker, which keeps its own file.
• A god is one box. A god with two forms is two boxes (link them as partners, or say so in the notes) or one box with both forms in the epithets; there is no “same being as” link.
• A god has at most two parents in the tree. A being born of more than that, or of a god and the sea, keeps the rest in the Born of text. Born of is drawn only in place of the ‘?’ box (one parent) or on the top line of the box (no parents); a god with two parents in the tree has it only in the editor and on the sheet.
• The generator writes names, domains, what the first beings were born of, and the links. It writes no myths, epithets, symbols, dates or houses, and no AI is involved. Its names are syllables, not meanings.
• A box shows the first 27 or so letters of the domains; the editor and the character sheet show all of them. Find looks at names and titles, not domains.
• GEDCOM has no field for gods: each god's domains, epithets, symbol and born-of go into one note (“Domains: the sea, storms”), which another program shows as a note and this page reads back into the fields. The names of the generations are not in a GEDCOM file, and a spreadsheet (CSV) leaves out all of these. Use Save file to keep everything.
• A file saved here opens on the plain family tree page, which keeps the god fields and the generation names when it saves and draws the born-of boxes and the names, but shows dates under the names instead of domains. An older copy of these pages, from before the god fields, would open the file but drop them if it saved it.
• If gods from two named rows end up on one row (a marriage across generations pulls a partner into their spouse's row), only the first name in the file is drawn for that row.
• No account and no upload: nothing you type is sent anywhere. This browser keeps about 5 MB for the site; when your trees fill most of it, the page says so.