help I have to make a whole new religion

Sigh... I'm back here again with my homebrew campaign that continues to make problems for me, but I love it too much to stop. Basically, I need a religion, and it can't be one of the usual ones, so, uh, if any of you have any spare religions stored away somewhere, I would give you 20 bucks and a tub of rocky road to be able to use it. I am entirely willing to give credit if you want it. Hell, if you guys even know any websites that might have religions I could use, I would be so grateful.

Oof homebrew worlds are tough. I’m running a campaign with one right now, and I’m STILL editing the lore. You didn’t specify what kind of religion so I’ll give a couple evil and good ones

1. The Order of Eversleep

Worships whatever demon or Archdevil you have with sloth (if you don’t have one, mine is Zeeriaz). They use magic powder that puts people into an eternal coma, pushing their souls into the Dream Realm where (insert Archdevil) reigns supreme, keeping them there with their worst nightmares and best dreams. They are silent, moving town to town, knocking out bystanders and sending them to their master. This one can either be a side quest or a campaign, depending on the usage.

2. The Poet’s Followers

Worships either Apollo or some other musical/poetry god/goddess and creates hymns and other such arts to worship their god. Typically composed of bards and clerics. They have no overarching goal other than to spread worship.

3. The Order of Vigilance

An order of heroic paladins and other such fighters whose goal is to kill demons and ask questions later. They also fight other evils, but main goal is to keep demons in the underworld. They typically have outposts near portals to wherever you have demons live in, and temples/compounds within large cities; containing a small militia of them. They mostly worship war gods (Bahamut for me).

I’ll try and think of some more soon

Sorry, I should have specified, but I'm looking more for a pantheon? I'm not sure if you have one of those ready lmao, I expect most people don't. This world (it's called Solstara, just for future reference on this thread) already has a main religion, but it wasn't the original religion and isn't true. It's called the Pythium Orchaia, and it's run by a singular corrupt leader whose held the city for probably several hundred years. There was a religion before this, but I'm not quite sure what to make it. There are no current worshippers of the original religion.

If you're looking for a pantheon, you could just take a look at some of the officially published settings and their pantheons and just repurpose for your own uses. Forgotten Realms has MASSIVE amounts of lore related to the deities. The Exandrian deities also have a decent amount of lore, and there's far fewer of them than FR. Or take an actual polytheistic religion from the real world, like the Ancient Greek or Roman deities, or the old Celtic gods, and rename/repurpose them for your world.

If you really want to create your own, start with the major domains and go from there: Sun, Moon, Life, Death, Law, Chaos/Trickery, Nature, Magic, etc. And some evil domains for Undeath, Tyranny, Murder. Come up with names and short bits of lore, and why they are no worshippers of this original religion anymore. If there's no active worshippers, you don't need a lot of lore about it, unless the old religion is a major part of your campaign. 

The easy way is to just take a real-world religion like the Greek pantheon, change the names and other identifying details, and call it done.

A not much harder way is to just take the major domains of any real-world pantheon (storm, trickster, mother, father, farming, death, love, music, cheese, etc.), divide them up fairly arbitrarily among a bunch of names, make up some connections (X and Y are the original creators of the world, A, B, C, D, and Q are their kids. Z, the trickster god, is X's brother, and never gets invited to parties anymore, etc. etc.)

But the real question is: how much detail do you actually need? It's really very unlikely that the players will be getting into the deep theology. Depending on their role in the campaign, you may need as little as "there are old gods". Even if you do need more detail, you can probably make it up on the fly.

Honestly, if the original religion is functionally dead, its exact details probably don't matter very much unless you plan to make it a plot point, and if you do plan to make it a plot point, you want to design it around the needs of your plot, so people on the internet who don't know what you're trying to do won't be terribly helpful.

Most fantasy religions are nonsensical anyway, real religions tend to be complicated, often contradictory, and contain a wide variety of elements that are thoroughly irrelevant to your average D&D campaign. There's some advice in the 2014 DMG about creating pantheons, though it's pretty limited.

As someone who has created my own pantheon for a multi-year campaign, the best piece of advice I can give… use an official D&D pantheon. While using something abnormal or completely new helps your world feel more unique, it also reduces some of the core D&D element of your game.  Those recognizable names have power, and “you enter a shrine to Vecna” is going to have a larger visceral impact on your players than “you enter a shrine to this obscure god you might not have internalized.”  Having done both, I strongly feel that recognition brings more to the game than the mystery of something new.

My personal recommendation would be 4e’s Dawn War pantheon.  This pantheon was explicitly designed to be manageable to players and DMs, while still retaining a classic feel.  It kept some of the important players - Lloth, Vecna, Bahamut, etc. but also cut out a bunch of the countless gods Forgotten Realms and others developed over the years, and consolidated similar gods down to singular ones.  There’s something like 20 gods total, which is easy enough to remember and internalize.

Notably, 4e went out of their way to divorce the gods a bit from their alignment, and focus more on their individual spheres of influence.  This is seen in their origin myth, where good and evil gods alike worked together to beat a common foe.  Supplemental 4e lore also actively encouraged DMs to mess with expectations - Bahamut followers who take things a little too far; Vecna supporting good conspirators in his role of god of secrets or the good-aligned cult dedicated to him that used Vecna as a repository for knowledge too dangerous for other cultists to have.

While I’ve long been a convert of the Dawn War pantheon, it has the added advantage of seeing some resurgence due to its use by the first three Critical Role campaigns.

So, for the foregoing reasons, that would be my recommendation to you.

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr>>

As someone who has created my own pantheon for a multi-year campaign, the best piece of advice I can give… use an official D&D pantheon. While using something abnormal or completely new helps your world feel more unique, it also reduces some of the core D&D element of your game.  Those recognizable names have power, and “you enter a shrine to Vecna” is going to have a larger visceral impact on your players than “you enter a shrine to this obscure god you might not have internalized.”  Having done both, I strongly feel that recognition brings more to the game than the mystery of something new.

My personal recommendation would be 4e’s Dawn War pantheon.  This pantheon was explicitly designed to be manageable to players and DMs, while still retaining a classic feel.  It kept some of the important players - Lloth, Vecna, Bahamut, etc. but also cut out a bunch of the countless gods Forgotten Realms and others developed over the years, and consolidated similar gods down to singular ones.  There’s something like 20 gods total, which is easy enough to remember and internalize.

To follow on with the above.  Google: Mesoamerican religion

There are basically two popular ones AZTEC/MAYAN.  There are pictures of writings etc. to use. so you have artwork.  There is plenty of information on them.  They are basically a dead religion(s) that is more in the history books then in active modern places of worship.  In spite of all of the writings about this type, chances are your players do not know much like they would with greek gods, so they would appear to be more "original".

One thing worth bearing in mind is that people hear pantheon and often go straight to Greek or Norse with dozens of very specific gods and huge amounts of lore but you don't have to be that ambitious. The ancient Canaanites had a pantheon that only had about 4 or 5 gods, basically an all powerful father god, his wife, their constantly angry son, and a couple more. They got added to as time passed but it started that simply (and eventually became even more simple as gods got removed again and it went down to one god)

The other end of the historical spectrum gives you the Star Wars god pantheon, three gods representing the Light Side, the Dark Side, and balance in the middle, very simply named Father, Daughter and Son.

What I'm saying is you don't have to be particularly complex, you can totally have a pantheon of three people you didn't even bother to name and it will work fine   

I'd kind of jump off from one of jl8e's earlier comments, and say, don't bother making one at all. Have the idea in your head that there is one, but leave it blank. Then, you can fill in details as necessary to make the plot work as it evolves. Like, if it turns out you need one of those original gods to be a god of storms and hidden passages, then you just say, OK, poof, done. And she needs a twin brother who she hates, then there you go. It's really kind of a gift you gave yourself by there not being any current worshippers. You can just fill them in however you need, whenever you need and as you need. And then, maybe by the end of the campaign, you'll have a nicely fleshed out pantheon, ready to go for the next campaign.

As the above have suggested, steal the religion from somewhere else. There are hundreds of real-life pantheons to borrow from and you don't need to include all of it. Norse and Greek are the most well known but there's many many others - mayan, cree, navajaho, mongolian, hindu, etc... etc.... You can also borrow from other fiction. Game of Thrones has a simple 7-god pantheon you could use. The Wheel of Time has a classic binary religion with multiple interpretations. Or you could use a religion from Pathfinder or an old edition of D&D.

For a D&D game all you really need is to be able to answer a the following:

• How many deities are there, and how are they different from each other? - e.g. it might be monotheistic with different "aspects" of the same god worshiped by different people, or polytheistic with different gods affecting different parts of the world.
• What things are / were made to worship them? - e.g. nature gods might have trees, rocks, etc.. carved to look like them and small idols, whereas civilization gods usually have large temples/churches, others used small altars in holy places, other times jewelry, clothing and art was the primary way gods were worshipped. 
• What can the gods do within the world? - e.g. are they distant creator gods with no direct interactions with the people, or do they directly empower their followers, or do they primarily control the after life and refuse to interfere with the living world.
• What do the gods need / want from their followers? - e.g. is their power drawn from the faith of their followers, do the gods use mortals to battle or play games with each other, or do the gods care about their personal creations.

I agree with everyone above me, but I am willing to share my pantheon with you if you need one really quickly. If there's a deadline that's super close than I can send my pantheon, but if you have like a week or two I'd recommend creating your own using other pantheons as a template.

Pantheons are HARD. Like suggested above, it would work to use one of the many, many other options online, made by people paid enough or zealous enough to know what they're doing. 

I'm halfway through with mine, which is something of a cross between Tolkien's Valar, the Greek Pantheon, and the cosmology of Daggerheart. 

Something to be noted is that a religion without worshippers, in most worlds, causes the worshipped beings to die. I'd suggest flavoring them somewhat as aberrations or false gods who were fueled but not created by faith. Of course, if that's not how your world works, then this section is not relevant. 

Y'all are so helpful, thank you! I think I'll be making the pantheon rather small, probably just a handful of gods. Thank you again!

Quote from WolfeCriedPup >>

Something to be noted is that a religion without worshippers, in most worlds, causes the worshipped beings to die. I'd suggest flavoring them somewhat as aberrations or false gods who were fueled but not created by faith. Of course, if that's not how your world works, then this section is not relevant. 

 That's a modern constructed-world fantasy trope, I believe, and isn't common in real-world religions.

It's much more common for the relationship to be the other way -- the worshippers need/want things from the gods (rain, a good harvest, a safe voyage, etc.), and make offerings in order to get them to intercede in the mortal world. 

However, it's not a bad trope for the OP's needs -- the old gods being weak due to lack of worshippers could explain why they are not active in the world. (Though it's not the only option. Disinterested gods, banished gods, ....)

Of course! Homebrew is difficult. Hope you're proud of what you make and that your players like them. Have fun!

There are no current worshippers of the original religion.

If there are no worshippers then why do you need any details about it? You could just call it "the Old Gods" and be done. Unless / until the party go and investigate the religion you really don't need anything more than that. Even if the party do go investigating it, you can just throw random hints to them, e.g. the destroyed ruins of an old temple, some antique jewelry with strange symbols they have never seen before, a few scraps of burned poetry / prayers treated as a family heirloom the significance of which has long been forgotten. If the symbols & prayers have no meaning to anyone anymore then you don't need to bother figuring out exactly what they look like of what they say. Make up a handful of names for the ancient gods that the party might encounter on ancient objects or in ancient dungeons that predate the current religion, and that's all you really need.

Quote from jl8e >>

 That's a modern constructed-world fantasy trope, I believe, and isn't common in real-world religions.

Of course, real-world religions are not known for granting the ability to cast spells. Which is actually a kind of important thing when dealing with fantasy religions: what are gods in your setting?

Quote from Agilemind >>

There are no current worshippers of the original religion.

If there are no worshippers then why do you need any details about it? You could just call it "the Old Gods" and be done. Unless / until the party go and investigate the religion you really don't need anything more than that. Even if the party do go investigating it, you can just throw random hints to them, e.g. the destroyed ruins of an old temple, some antique jewelry with strange symbols they have never seen before, a few scraps of burned poetry / prayers treated as a family heirloom the significance of which has long been forgotten. If the symbols & prayers have no meaning to anyone anymore then you don't need to bother figuring out exactly what they look like of what they say. Make up a handful of names for the ancient gods that the party might encounter on ancient objects or in ancient dungeons that predate the current religion, and that's all you really need.

 My campaign is very, very storyline based, and this original religion has some of the answers to the big questions Solstara presents. For example, there are no dragonborns within the city, despite it being the capital of a country and have a wide variety of species/races within its walls. Additionally, they're actively digging into the origins of the religion and there may even be a prophecy involved. I'm very much in over my head, but I love this campaign to bits, and I want it to be as realistic as possible for my players. Not to mention, these gods are real whereas the current religion's goddess isn't. I hope this explains!