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Backstory

I'm playing a Bard in my current campaign of D&D 5e and I'm just taking a level in cleric with Lathander as my god (after being inspired/trained by a Paladin of that same deity). Obviously as Bard/Cleric my character has a passionate interest in stories/songs/lore of Lathander, but as a player I know almost nothing about him.

The Problem

The problem that I am encountering is that I've dug through all the information in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide but found only a tiny amount of information about Lathander. But I really really want more information so I can roleplay my character better.

I feel like I don't understand my deity at all and that makes it hard to act according to Lathander's will, or spread the word, or convert people as a cleric should.

It's worth noting that I am very very new to the D&D lore and settings. So I'm trying very hard to make my character feel a part of this world which they are native to, but which I know basically nothing about.

Where can I find out anything more about Lathander?

I recently stumbled on this podcast which relays a story about Lathander and Amauntaur which was pretty good!

I would love if I could learn some stories like this or really any snippets of information no matter how small.

I'm surprised given how long D&D has been around that there isn't more readily available.

I'll take suggestions from sourcebooks/material (from 5e or previous), fiction, multimedia, or any other D&D source.

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Print sources

There are lots of Forgotten Realms materials regarding deities, published over almost all editions of the game. For example, a lot of details are available in AD&D 2e sourcebook Faiths and Avatars (F&A), a 192-page tome dedicated only to the Faerunian pantheon. A tome of similar length is Faiths and Pantheons (F&P), this time for the 3e of the game. It is worth mentioning that the two books have somewhat different strengths though: F&A spends more space on clergy (day-to-day activities, holy days, ceremonies, priestly vestments - a color picture is given, adventuring garb), while F&P gives more details about the past mythology of the deities and their relationships with each other.

If you want to stick to 5e material, of course you also have the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, but the information will be relatively limited as deities are covered only as a chapter.

Novels

Lathander is a deity that is mentioned/featured in many FR novels. If you want to read about how their clergy or associated orders behave, you can try to have a look at this old list from candlekeep. (For example, it mentions that The Year of Rogue Dragon trilogy features Pavel Shemov, a cleric of Lathander.)

As mentioned in a comment by @Baergren, a more recent novel is The Reaver from the Sundering series, which discusses the "reemerging" of Lathander after a century-old disappearance.

Online sources

Regarding the Lathander/Amaunator issue, you can have a look at this post.

You can also read some information in the Forgotten Realms wikia.

Finally, another excellent website for finding all kinds of FR-related information is Candlekeep.com. It even gets posts from Ed Greenwood, the creator of the setting. If you use your favorite web search engine with the string "site:candlekeep.com lathander", you will find plenty of interesting things.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Should be noted that the Wikia has links to a variety of sources to help lead you to primary materials for research. Also the Novel The Reaver from the Sundering series has some information that is quite relevant to 5e \$\endgroup\$
    – Baergren
    Dec 8, 2017 at 19:49
  • \$\begingroup\$ Sword Coast Adventurer Guide has a quarter-to-half page entry on the various deities. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nick Brown
    Dec 8, 2017 at 19:52
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    \$\begingroup\$ You can also look for "fan-made" material on Dungeon Masters Guild (dmsguild.com). A quick search yields at least one 23-page document. \$\endgroup\$
    – ZwiQ
    Dec 9, 2017 at 18:51
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Lathander is a deity from the Forgotten Realms (FR) campaign setting - which is one of many published settings in D&D's history, though it happens to have been used as the default setting in 5th Edition's sourcebooks. As such, you should search for materials specific to the Forgotten Realms if you want more information about him or other deities in the setting. The most recent and relevant material you can probably find is the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, which contains some extra character options and a lot more FR-specific lore - including a section about deities in which Lathander is described in a bit more detail on pg 32.

You can of course refer to older material, but FR is a complicated setting which tends to see really major changes - both outright retcons and due to in-universe events - every time D&D undergoes a major edition change. So, to a much greater degree than other settings, material from previous editions of the game will be rather out of date. Lathander probably is not described in detail in the 4th edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide since my understanding is that the 4e revision to the realms killed him off to replace him with Amaunator (before resurrecting him as a separate deity again in the 5e revision), but the 3rd edition Faiths and Pantheons sourcebook was an entire book devoted to detailing the gods of the FR setting - at which point in time Lathander was an active greater deity and thus received a fairly detailed writeup.

As ZwiQ/Baergren noted, the http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Lathander page exists and is a reasonable starting point if you'd like to track down further published sources that may help you understand the deity.

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