DF Khoramandu Sea - campaign cosmology

My players have recently been discussing gods and religion in our DF game, as well as in RPGs more generally (due in part to my recent post). My replies are copied and expanded here.

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 While that article I linked on polytheism can help to inform us on roleplaying more nuanced polytheistic characters, when it comes to the game we shouldn't overanalyse it too much. The default assumptions of both D&D and DF while nominally polytheistic, are heavily informed by monotheism and dualism. 

 Were I creating a GURPS fantasy campaign from scratch, with the intent to have an accurate approach to representing polytheism, then I wouldn't use metaphysics that draws a hard distinction between clerics, druids, and wizards. But I'm not doing that, I'm using DF for simplicity. So (as with D&D) we'll have to overlook the cosmological inconsistencies for the purpose of gaming, and assume we're playing characters in a believable polytheistic world :-)

 For our purposes, this game has a hybrid cosmology. The published setting (Jordoba - previously covered here) has a polytheistic pantheon broadly split based into Order/Balance/Ruin (synonyms for Law/Neutral/Chaos - I presume this was to avoid confusion with the actual D&D alignment system). These gods are listed with their "approximate" D&D alignments, which we can largely ignore for the purposes of DF. 

 As with other aspects of the setting, I have tweaked the list of Jordoba gods slightly. My personal preference is not to use names of real-world historical/mythological gods in my non-real-world fantasy setting, but that may just be me. As with other instances of real-world names (places, cultures, etc), I "file off the serial numbers" where I find them, as I find it distracting. The list of gods in the setting appears to be somewhat adventurer-centric. This is no bad thing in itself (the Jordoba setting is written as a "player's guide"), but I will likely add to the list as I go. Ordinary people often have more day-to-day concerns, and those may be the purview of more "boring" gods. 

 As for the game system we are using, DF assumes multiple Good gods, One (or more) Evil god(s), multiple Nature gods (or a single personification for Nature), and possibly also Elder Gods. None of these are detailed, obviously so that GMs can fit this to their own campaigns. The DF metaphysics more or less fits with the published setting above, except that the Jordoba book doesn't address Elder Things (broadly what D&D would term Aberrations) and how they fit in with the cosmology.

 For our campaign, while the Elder Things (and their Gods) are definitely a threat, they are separate from the (Evil) gods of Ruination (and their demons). Both groups are likely to mess up the world one way or another, if they are allowed to get away with it. Even though Elder Gods may be outside the Good-Neutral-Evil balance, their Things often functionally detect as Evil (at least as far as Good is concerned). Neutral can also be assumed to be against the world being destroyed (after all it's where Nature lives), regardless of who is behind the destruction...