D&D 5E Are "evil gods" necessary? [THREAD NECRO]

[prabe]

Does it fit though? I can appreciate wanting a streamlined and well thought out cosmology, like I said, I've made plenty myself (I like to think my Sertorious setting is pretty well organized cosmologically). But I also think D&D isn't even attempting to make something like that. Sometimes you want something that just draws more freely off of real world myth and legend. If you look at a lot of real world cosmologies, they often evolve organically and there are gods and creatures doing double duty with roles leftover from earlier versions. I don't play D&D very much any more, but I used to. And I always felt with D&D you just kind of wanted as many flavors of supernatural as possible so if you saw something cool in a movie or book you wanted to incorporate you could easily find something to tie it to, and ideally you would have multiple options to pick from so it fits what you want in the campaign. Which I think is one of the benefits of redundancy. But it isn't redundancy itself that makes it interesting, it is that by having overlap you are allowed to have greater variety, and not just one lord of darkness or something.

Redundancy isn't inherently interesting, but it can be. The same goes for a streamlined cosmology. The default (for lack of a better descriptor) cosmology in D&D is astonishingly messy because they wanted to incorporate as many real-world mythologies--many of which have mutually exclusive cosmologies--as possible. It's certainly possible to pare that down quite a lot, to pick (or write) one constellation of deities and one narrative to connect them, and still leave the other planar hierarchies more or less intact.

I think it's the variety that causes the overlap, not the other way around. I agree that having multiple ways to incorporate things is potentially a benefit, but I think there's also a lot to be said for having the fictional world be more coherent than the default seems to encourage.

 

[Umbran]

D&D places far more emphasis on the actual "god" part of religion, rather than the culture and traditions that grow around religion and form most of its practice.

I think this is really a practical matter. If you try to write out the culture and traditions that grow around religion... you're going to have an entire book in and of itself, for every culture. It isn't supportable for a game. And, not being scholars of the matter, most of us would do a bad job of it on our own.

Again, this is very much viewing religious practices through a modern lens (vis a vie, "having a personal relationship with god") than actually modelling how religion was practiced prior to the 19th century.

Modern? Commenting on the strict history, and leaving the religious content out - this view of things came up in Western culture with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, as the role of the strong central church began to weaken. It strengthened immensely with the rise of Deists (including many of the Founding Fathers in the US), in the 1700s.

So, not really modern.

But, honestly, if we are going to talk about D&D religious practices and relationships with the divine, by basic structure we should be thinking pre-Christian European models, which are rather different.

 

[Voadam]

D&D religion is a mix of Christianity overlayed on ancient pagan myths. The cleric is a Christian knight template who worships a pantheistic deity like Zeus or Athena. This carries over to a lot of the trappings like having christian based churches for most gods instead of temples, regular weekly worship days, church hierarchies, but the gods are Greekish in tone sometimes with a little bit of Zoroastrianism of two cosmic sides.

 

[Bedrockgames]

D&D religion is a mix of Christianity overlayed on ancient pagan myths. The cleric is a Christian knight template who worships a pantheistic deity like Zeus or Athena. This carries over to a lot of the trappings like having christian based churches for most gods instead of temples, regular weekly worship days, church hierarchies, but the gods are Greekish in tone sometimes with a little bit of Zoroastrianism of two cosmic sides.

I think this is largely just due to many people not understanding how ancient religions tended to work (at least Ancient Roman and Greek). It is also in part just an accident of the sources that inspired D&D. Not to toot my own horn again, but my Sertorius setting was based more on ancient religion with a focus on things like performing the appropriate rituals, but I still found that many of the people who ran it, would treat religious practices more like going to church on Sunday (simply because that is what they knew). Which was fine, think people bring their own experience to the game and that totally works. So I guess my point is, even if you have a game setting where the religion is specifically not modeling Christianity as much, in a society where that is the norm, people are going to fill any gaps with their own experience.

 

[Voadam]

I think it is also because clerics and D&D gods were not together. Gods started off with PCs in Gygax's games swearing by Crom and Odin as if they were Conan and then Gygax developed his pagan pantheons to have indigenous stuff. Clerics started with Arneson wanting a Van Helsing to fight the vampiric Sir Fang so they had turn undead and then they became Odo based Norman knights with curing and semi-biblical spell lists but the gods were not originally a big deal for them, it could be generic "The Gods". Once you have christianish church knights early on its going to be a starting point for more christianish church stuff to be developed.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I think the poet had "a personal relationship with" Inanna. The poem goes on - it is sort-of written from a woman's perspective, although a man undoubtedly wrote it - and is confiding in the goddess; maybe asking her for romantic advice; there is also a heavy erotic subtext. There are other tracts, thousands of years old, which bespeak other - very diverse and very complex - understandings of the notion of "deity." I think we fundamentally underestimate and misrepresent people in ancient cultures when we portray their personal religious experience and understanding - and how they construe divinity - as somehow different, inferior, less evolved, less informed than our own.

Minor point, because it has been years, but if this is the poet I think it is, then most historian's seem to agree that it was written by a woman.

I do remember from my college classes that the first fictional writing was a series of religious poems written in Mesopotamia by a Priestess. Though, names do escape my memory this many years later.

 

[Bohandas]

The two major problems that I see with how D&D handles things are these

1.) That priests in D&D seem to be expected to have a similar temperment to their deity.

2.) That, despite a few token statements to the contrary in the rulebooks, most people seem to follow one deity tonthe exclusion of others. Even though there's ample precedent for being a priest of a specific deity, there's no reason for laypeople to do this. And in any case, even a preist of one dekty would acknowledge the other deities.

Both of these issues are at odds with classical paganism and both of these issues compound the issue of evil deities

 

[Bohandas]

then they became Odo based Norman knights

You're going to have to be more specific please. Wikipedia lists seventeen different historical priests with the name Odo.

 

[Lackofname]

(Warning: I have not read the last 13 pages)

"EVIL" gods always struck me as a little...mm, too overt. I guess it's more the inevitable nature of an alignment system. But I would think, if we were looking at pantheons from RL, that gods have different aspects which are evil or good or neutral. They may be about X or Y...but they are also vengeful, or petty, or rapey. And so you would end up with a branch of a church that focuses on that element of the god.

So you might have one community dedicated to the god of harvest and fertility that practice human sacrifices. Yet that god is answering their prayers just like the community over there that doesn't.

And unless you have a pantheon with 50 or so gods, just "a god of lies" or "god of murder" seems odd. Why would the other gods let that guy exist, since you know, a God of Murder might murder the other gods. Same with lies, etc. It would make more sense if those "evil" portfolios were held by a bigger god.

But if you still want your Evil God, the way I would go is not the Official Church of the God of Betraying Your Family, Who Has A Recognized Church with a Cathedral and Everything, but rather simply demi-gods, local deities, powerful spirits, demon princes, etc. Something that isn't a true Capital G god, but can still deliver under the right circumstances. The Night Mother from Skyrim is a great example.

 

[Voadam]

You're going to have to be more specific please. Wikipedia lists seventeen different historical priests with the name Odo.

Odo of Bayeaux, half brother of William the Conqueror. Norman knight, bishop of Bayeaux, used a mace in battle so as not to violate church law on clergy spilling blood. Shown on the Bayesux tapestry. The mace thing was a common loophole for fighting clergy of the time. He was the most famous example.