Thaemin's Guide to Gods and Miracles

Thaemin’s Guide to Gods and Miracles is the ultimate guide to the divine in D&D, whether as a faithful acolyte of the gods or figuring out how to actually use gods in your campaign. Learn the secrets that only spirits know and summon powerful outsiders to fight beside you with the new Summoner class, or transform from aasimar, Divine Soul, or similarly divinely aligned being into a full-on celestial yourself with the new angel transformation, giving you a radiant aura, resilience against radiant and lightning damage, flight, and the ability to tell instantly when a creature is lying to you.

As a GM, you’ve probably found that making players care about even one god is difficult, and that getting them to care about an entire pantheon is a fool’s errand unless you’re importing something they already know, probably Greek or Norse mythology. But we’re not ancient Greeks, so why does Greek mythology stick to our brains so much better than fantasy pantheons do? The secret lies in the stories and character relationships that bind these ancient pantheons together, and Thaemin’s Guide to Gods and Outsiders is packed with advice on how to make a pantheon your players will actually care about, whether that’s presenting an existing pantheon in a more interesting way than just listing them all in alphabetical order, or creating your very own pantheon from scratch.

As a player, have you ever found yourself playing a Cleric, a Paladin, or any sort of character with the Acolyte background, and your religion just doesn’t come up at all? You might say “by the power of Crystal Dragon Jesus!” before casting a spell, and you might say that you’re setting out on this quest because Crystal Dragon Jesus commands it, but if you didn’t say that and just set out on the quest because you personally believe it’s the right thing to do, it wouldn’t really make any difference, would it? At best, you might mention that your character is attending religious services as regularly as they’re able, but that’s something they do alone, which is therefore very quickly glossed over. Thaemin’s Guide tells you how to incorporate religious ritual into actual play with prayers you can use in game to reinforce your character’s faith through actual roleplay. When your ship is sinking, you pray to the god of the sea to get you out of this alive, and that’s a character moment, something they wouldn’t do if they weren’t religious that’s directly relevant to the plot, rather than a brief mention that you are ignoring the plot to go do something else for two hours.

And if you’ve ever wanted the celestial stat blocks to actually be used for anything, Thaemin’s Guide has dark angels, including not only new stat blocks for a variety of new celestials, but also the promotion of evil gods to their proper place as gods, served by their very own angels of fire, pestilence, and darkness, never again to feed on whatever fiendish leftovers Hell and the Abyss leave for them, nor to be represented by a single citadel or library on a plane ruled over by an archdevil. The evil gods are gods, their servants are angels, and when the god of fire sends one of their servants to burn down something you’d prefer remained intact, you are going to fight a deva.