Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5813208" data-attributes="member: 4937">Religions of Rome by Mary Beard is an excellent place to start if you want to divorse your sense of what it means to be religious by a world view almost entirely shaped by monotheism.   If that's relatively inaccessible, Wikipedia is a fountain of easily minable information.  The important thing to remember is that you shouldn't be equating the generic notion of 'god' with the monotheistic notion of a supreme being who is solely worthy of worship and adoration, or even with the notion that the relationship of the worshiper to the god is one of love, admiration and respect.  Or for that matter that what gods want is sincere worship and faith.  All of these are aspects especially taken together are fairly unique to one religious system, and while they can show up to various elsewhere, too much of that view taints a polytheistic approach.  One thing that I think you can get hung up on as a DM is the notion that everything that is different needs different mechanics.  I've been there.  But quite often you can take something like bugbear, change the description however you like (tentacled horror, 16 legged clawed worm, scaled humanoid with six eyes), and the mechanical description is still good enough for the purpose.   In this way you can get a lot of milage out of your monsters, and you can save your creativity for things that matter more.</blockquote>