Creating a Divine Pantheon

I was working on a home brew setting idea and kinda want to make a couple of gods. Then I started to think about the logistics of a pantheon.

I'm asking the more experienced DMs and Creators,

Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for this? How many gods should I make? Should I make gods that won't even affect the story or just the ones that influence the characters? 

Any help or ideas is appreciated! 

The first thing is that almost any way you do it will be just fine. The gods and their interactions are not important in most games, and you can also just put a skeleton in place and fill more detail in if you need it.

You can also take a look at real-world pantheons to see how they're put together, and understand that you'd have to put in a fair amount of work to construct something that makes less sense. 

What I have sometimes done is make up the gods that need to exist for setting reasons, and then let the players make up gods if they want.

But even if you don't want to do that, all you really need to do is cover the major points of life: war, farming, birth, death, storms/weather, trickster, sun, moon, the sea if applicable, probably magic, etc. If you think about the culture(s) you're constructing, there will likely be other obvious domains. Other stuff can and should be assigned to gods, but you can combine portfolios, even if they don't make obvious sense. (For instance, Apollo was the god of, among other things, the sun, music, and disease. I've got a god in my current game who's in charge of law, justice, and architecture.)

The other main thing you probably want if the gods are going to be important motive forces is a list of relationships and petty grudges. And relationships don't have to make sense, much less be restricted to our norms. (There's a lot of close relatives marrying and/or having kids in some pantheons, and nothing stops you from having a god be their own parent, say.)

One peeve of mine  in worldbuilding is when there are multiple pantheons for the humans, and then "the gods of the elves", "the gods of the orcs", etc. (Or even worse, one god who covers all things dwarven.) There's no good reason why gods can't be universally worshipped, and if there are species-specific pantheons, humans should have one too.

Make 'em all! Heck, why not? 

To figure out what the gods to make, we would need to know much more about your setting and the societies that are worshipping those gods. But there are some nearly-universal aspects that all pantheons will share. Remember, deities first came about as a primitive society's attempt to explain big fundamental world processes that they didn't understand or that terrified them. So pretty much every pantheon will have deities for life, death, the harvest, weather, animals, war, fire, the Moon (night) and the Sun (light). That's the basic set. 

Life is usually portrayed as female, often heavy-set, with prominent chestular topography. In pantheons of just a few deities, she may also cover the harvest and maybe animals. Death is usually portrayed as an elderly man. Now remember, many societies distinguish between a god of Death and a god of The Dead. Many also equate Life with goodness and Death with Evil. Please don't fall into that trope. Death is not evil. Death is a natural process just like birth. Death greets you and guides you through a doorway toward your next world and your next adventure. A psychopomp is basically just a midwife. The harvest is a communal event, and most societies in our history have been patriarchal (for better or worse, not judging, just saying), so Harvest is usually portrayed as male - Dagon, Dagda, Ninurta, etc. I think that's because Harvest is so closely associated with Weather, which comes from the Sky, and Sky gods are usually male. The sexual dimorphism of our silly little species makes us want to see complimentary pairs in everything. Earth is female so Sky is male. The Moon (night) is female so the Sun (day) is male. So one deity could cover Harvest and Weather. When they are separate deities, it's usually to make a deity for a specific kind of weather, like Thor for thunder, Mariammam for rain, or any of the plethora of storm gods. And again, Storm and Harvest are a complimentary pair, as Harvest depends on good constructive weather and storms are bad or destructive weather. Animals gets complicated, because there is a distinction between a deity of all animals and the various deities of specific animals. A deity of all Animals is usually female, as animals are Life, and they roam the wild spaces of the Earth that Man does not control. Artemis is my favorite depiction of this, though Medeina and Inara are very similar. Fire has several aspects. It sometimes symbolically refers to knowledge and wisdom, and is stolen from the gods by a god and given to mankind, as in the story of Prometheus. But it can also refer to the fire we use to cook our food, which could fall under the Harvest god. Or fire could refer to the destructive wildfires that destroy, and could be paired with War. But whereas War leaves only death in its wake, a wildfire destroys in order to provide new space or new life. So you could have two deities of Fire, one male who also covers War, and one female who also covers Life. 

That covers the basic set. Of course, each society will also incorporate their own deities specific to their region. So be sure to include a few minor deities of things like dreams, or writing, or music, or mining, or that brief moment as summer turns to autumn and the first night of cool breezes fells the first leaf from a tree. A god of lost spaces is always fun, like a god of secrets but more outdoorsy. And of course, besides the gods, there are all the myriad swarms of minor spirits that inhabit the invisible world all around us, like the Lares and Penates of Roman culture or the Lwa of Voodoo. That's a whole 'nother box of worms to open.

Well, I hope this helped. Have fun.

Sorry. Me again. Here's another way to build a pantheon. Since we're doing this for a specific game and to provide a sense of immersion to our players, another method is to make deities that may appeal to each of the character classes. 

Barbarian could be a storm god, or maybe a god of a certain big scary animal like a bear or a lion. Bard could be a god of music, or love, or knowledge, or drunkenness. For Cleric, just look at the subclasses, each one could have its own god, Life, Light, Trickery, and War. Druid would be nature, weather, and animals. Fighter could be War, but could also be more defensive, like protection, or sacrifice. Monk could be wisdom, self-fulfillment, tradition, or a specific animal form like in Kung Fu. Paladins would have scary gods that blur the lines between Fighter and Cleric. These can be problematic gods like Crusade or Inquisition or Purification or Vengeance, gods that have often led people of our world to do really extreme and distasteful things. I'm not a big fan of paladins. Ranger could be nature and animals like the Druid, but maybe combined with Lost Spaces or Night to account for their stealthiness. Rogues could have a god of money (Mammon, Lakshmi, etc), or it could be more about the games of Trickery. It's not always the item they seek but the fun challenge of acquiring it. Sorcerer could be literally anything. Whatever the source of their magic is, maybe it's a dragon god, or time, or just pure unadulterated Chaos. Warlocks also could be anything. They serve a Patron, so whatever the Patron is, just give it at least minor deity status. And finally Wizards are easy, knowledge, power, and control of the elements. 

So maybe make two deities that fit each character class, both to give players options and to cover the different aspects of how each class can be played. Okay, I'm done now. Honest. Sorry.

No need to apologize! This is all great! Thank you!

I was asking this same question a little bit ago... I agree with AnzioFaro, it's definitely good to fill in the main gods. Sun/Life and Moon/Death are very good starters. Additionally, to make a pantheon, you don't need a ton of them. I personally made a pantheon with just four gods, and it turned out fine for me. The gods I used were Sun/Life, Moon/Death, Order/Justice, and Chaos/Mercy.