Building a Religious Cosmology for your Game...

[Shades of Green]

Then there are the "Greater Gods" who have lots of worshipers but don't meddle actively in the world. They still grant spells but don't intervene directly - and disturbingly, any divinations where the priest can ask the deity have a tendency to confirm the prejudices of the questioner instead of representing some "ultimate truth". Some even speculate that these deities are dead.

This is an approach similar to the one I use. Sure, there are extremely powerful spiritual beings (or forces) around (above and beyond the demon-lords and archons which still have a coherent form and a mind which could be somehow grasped by mortals), but they are quite alien in mortal terms, and usually, the more powerful such a being is, the more diffuse it is. Mortals sometimes come into mental contact with this beings; these mortals, however, are unable to fully percieve these forces/beings, and tend to interept these contact or visions according to their cultural prejudice and their world-view. "Tuning in" with these beings allows a person to recieve divine magic, and channel spiritual powers, but the specific religions, beliefs and mythologies are the products of mortals trying to explain the world around them - both the natural world, the social world, and the strange spiritual world. "Gods" (spiritual forces) do not interfere in my world - archons and demons do. But do they represent any such "god", or only their own interests? People create gods and religions to turn the unfathomable into graspable concepts.

Why am I keeping gods so diffuse, vogue (sp?) and detached from the world of mortals? First and foremost, to allow faith. If the gods themselves were easily recognizable facts of everyday life, would faith matter? Instead, you'd probably have alliegance to certain gods. Diffuse gods allow mortals to have faith, faith which could be tested, faith which has to be maintained by the faithful... Sometimes without concrete proof.

Also, this allows various cultures to have their own pantheons, their own interpretations of the spiritual world. AND, it allows religious to be sectarian - without clear answers by the gods, interpretations vary, and thus sects could form and religious wars could be fought within a single faith.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

The one time I built an all-new religious cosmology from scratch (including all-new deities that I really LIKED inventing, and covering humans, demi-humans, not-at-all-humans and outright monsters) the laptop on which I apparantly had the only copy of this information was stolen. That was 10+ years ago and haven't had the heart to do it again.