Building a Pantheon

Of all the aspects of Terafa I'm inclined to redo with my proposed "Ultimates Version", the pantheon of gods is the most tricky. There are two reasons for this: there are some bits I'm very unhappy with, but also some bits that I'm very pleased with; but... the changes I'd like to make to the bits I'm unhappy with would inevitably have a knock-on effect on the bits that I am happy with (or, more accurately, would complete rewrite them). So that's been difficult to resolve.

Where I've come to is a belief that there are three key mistakes that RPGs tend to make when constructing pantheons (though the number is questionable - these are all bound very much together...):

1. Too many deities, and too many poorly defined deities. I mentioned this in my review of "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes" - an awful lot of settings have massive pantheons that mostly consist of a big list of names coupled with absolutely minimal detail.
   
2. Individual pantheons for each race. This feeds into the above, but also opens up a big dilemma - what happens if a human PC wants to be a Cleric of an elven deity? You can allow it without restriction, and thus lose some of the flavour of your pantheons; you can ban it, and have an unhappy player; or you can allow it but make it a big thing in the campaign that this PC is very much an exception (which may or may not be desirable). But, really, what you have is actually one set of deities, some of whom take a particular, and perhaps exclusive, interest in only one of the races.
   
3. Too often, RPG pantheons look to real-world polytheistic religions for the model of how it should be done. Now, that seems like a strange thing to say, but here's the thing: real-world polytheistic religions did not come into existence to serve the needs of a game. (It's also important to note that I'm not saying we shouldn't look to real-world pantheons for inspiration; I'm just saying we shouldn't seek to simply ape them.)

The problem I had was that I had individual pantheons for several of the non-human races, and I was actually very happy with these, while I felt that my human pantheon was particularly poor - in fact, that was where I ran out of steam and just waved my hand and said, "oh, they're just monotheistic I guess".

After quite a lot of thought, I think I've now come up with the core of a pantheon that works. I still have quite a few details to work out, so can't present it here yet, but I'm looking at five main deities (plus the inevitable exiled god), a dozen or so lesser powers, and then a small number of quasi-deities and demigods (though most of these will be detailed as adventures need them - such deities tend to be very local). Plus three divine philosophies not associated with the gods (ancestor worship, mostly practiced by the dwarves; nature worship, mostly practiced by druids and their followers; and The Way - a philosophy dedicated to the notion of the divinity of man).

As a consequence of this reorganisation, the individual racial pantheons I had established will be removed. However, most of the aspects of those that I liked will be retained and brought into the new unified structure. For instance, the elven gods will have started as one of the Greater Gods (specifically, the god of the Sun) but due to the schism in their nature it will have split into the Two. This division led to the demotion of these gods to become Lesser Gods, the Sun itself was split into two, and a new Greater God, The Twins, has adopted that portfolio (amongst others).

Anyway, I still have quite a lot of thought to give to the subject, so I'll stop there while I tie things down.