This is Petty Gods, the revised and expanded version that appeared, I believe, in 2015. There is a tangled production history that I haven’t been inclined to suss out; it seems Richard J. LeBlanc of D30 Companion fame shepherded this last version of the book into the world.

Petty Gods is a compendium of small divinities, the sort that are half forgotten, or preside over a minor domain (like bent nails) or are really more like genii loci than gods at all. There are also a host of stats for servitors, cults, spells and magic items. All of this material was crowd sourced and, in the spirit of that, the book is available for free digitally on DriveThru and at cost from Lulu (the resulting hardcover is extremely satisfying as far as print-on-demand books go).

Owing to its many authors, the tone of the book is all over the place, wobbling from serious to silly to downright juvenile from entry to entry. Many of the gods are merely elaborate jokes, or serve to explain some meta problem with fantasy roleplaying games (Jhillenneth is the petty goddess of miraculous horrors and she sustains all the monsters that wait for you in the unlikely parts of dungeons). Weighing in at nearly 400 pages, I can take the bad with the good and appreciate the mix – you’re going to find something you like, even if it takes a while. Besides, you can feel the spirit of community here and what RPG table isn’t a venue for bad jokes anyway? I also just plain like the idea of there being a god for everything – it was good enough for the Greeks, who had some sort of spirit assigned to every twig and pebble, so why not D&D?

If nothing else, it is one of the finest examples of faux-vintage D&D design I’ve come across. It feels both old and modern at once (a lot of the illustrations are a dead giveaway) and I love the fact that it slaps an orange spine on what would otherwise have been a wrap-around art cover, having its cake and eating it too.