God

Religion in NetHack
priests alignment alignment record altars atheism anger gods sacrifice prayer turn undead

This article is about NetHack's deities. For the item known as “GoD”, see gauntlets of dexterity.

In NetHack, the role of the hero determines the pantheon of gods and goddesses (referred to neutrally as deities) that appear during the game. The hero's task is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor for the god of their alignment: to ascend and win the game, they must sacrifice the amulet at their god's high altar - a hero can sometimes #pray to their god in times of need, though be careful not to anger them.

The Priest is the only role without a pantheon: the game randomly selects the pantheon of another role for each Priest to use.

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Description

Each role's pantheon contains one lawful, one neutral, and one chaotic god; there is no functional difference in gameplay between the gods of different roles. The unaligned god is always Moloch, who holds dominion over prayers and altars in Gehennom. Atheist conduct tries to avoid actions directly involving any of the gods and other aspects of religion.

The divine pantheons are listed as follows:

Other gods

Of the other "unaligned" gods, Marduk is described in the introductory text as the Creator, from whom Moloch stole the Amulet of Yendor. Elbereth is an elf-goddess whose name can be engraved to frighten most monsters, but not all of them.

History

Pantheons are introduced in NetHack 3.0.0 - in previous versions of NetHack, there are no sacrifice mechanics or altars, and prayers are made to "the gods" in general. The exact mechanics vary between these versions, but do include the standard starting cooldown of 300 turns and longer wait times between prayer for a demigod character.

Origin

A god or deity is a supernatural being considered to be divine or sacred. One commonly accepted definition of a god is "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life". A pantheon is the particular set of all gods of any individual polytheistic religion, mythology, or tradition.

The NetHack pantheons and related quests for each role are derived from a mix of real-world and fictional sources:

• Archeologist: Aztec mythology
• Barbarian: Robert E. Howard's Conan mythos
• Caveman: Mesopotamian mythology
• Healer: Greek mythology
• Knight: Celtic mythology
• Monk: Chinese mythology
• Ranger: Roman mythology
• Rogue: Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser mythos
• Samurai: Japanese mythology
• Tourist: Terry Pratchett's Discworld mythos
• Valkyrie: Norse mythology
• Wizard: Egyptian mythology

Other deities

• Marduk: Babylonian mythology
• Moloch: Ammonite mythology (in the Bible in the form "Molech," q.v. 1 Kings 11:7; Moloch is the Greek form of the Hebrew מֹּֽלֶךְ found in LXX in 2 Kings 23:10)
• Elbereth: J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth mythos
• Arioch: Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné mythos

Variants

SLASH'EM

SLASH'EM introduces the following pantheons to correspond with the newly added roles:

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic	Origin
Undead Slayer	Seeker	Osiris	Seth	Egyptian mythology (Seeker is likely a misspelling of Seker)
Flame Mage	Earth	Fire	Ash	Aspects of fire
Ice Mage	Air	Frost	Smoke	Aspects of ice
Yeoman	His Majesty	His Holiness	The Commons	The English Civil War
Necromancer	Nharlotep	Zuggothobal	Gothuulbe	Invented, possibly inspired by Cthulhu Mythos

Convict patch

The Convict patch adds the Convict as a new role with its own pantheon, based on the Forgotten Realms mythology.

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Convict	Ilmater	Grumbar	Tymora

Pirate patch

The Pirate patch adds the Pirate as a new role with its own nautically-inspired pantheon

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Pirate	Davy Jones	the deep blue sea	the storm

SpliceHack

SpliceHack incorporates the Convict patch and Pirate patch. It has some original roles with their own pantheons.

Role	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic	Source
Cartomancer	Johnny	Spike	Timmy	Magic the Gathering archetypes
Dragon rider	Enki	Enlil	Ereshkigal	Sumerian

Encyclopaedia entry

Goddesses and Gods operate in ones, threesomes, or whole
pantheons of nine or more (see Religion). Most of them claim
to have made the world, and this is indeed a likely claim in
the case of threesomes or pantheons: Fantasyland does have
the air of having been made by a committee. But all Goddesses
and Gods, whether they say they made the world or not, have
very detailed short-term plans for it which they are determined
to carry out. Consequently they tend to push people into the
required actions by the use of coincidence or Prophecy, or just
by narrowing down your available choices of what to do next:
if a deity is pushing you, things will go miserably badly until
there is only one choice left to you.

[ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones ]