Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 3567507" data-attributes="member: 3649">The history of how such stuff was managed is bascially a history of how we looked at D&D.In the past I'd almost wholly ignored it. We'd had arcs and campaigns based on most other aspects of human society but almost entirely ignored how society interacts with religion. If you have a known pantheon of, say, 5 gods and your typical 1-5 dark gods then obviously any 'new' religion is false or actively evil.Not really any arguement about that since for so long a time we assumed that those big cathedrals and churches and abbeys were packed full of cleric-classed people. Clerics were, per capita, the most-represented character class by far. You get someone to 10th level or so and boom, they can talk directly to their deity. Get 'em high enough level and they can either go talk to him, or bring him down to earth for a little chat. Oh, you'd get your occassional evil priest, seduced by his station or by the dark gods. Some Detect Evil or other divination usually put that out of the picture pretty quick. But the idea that an entire religion would arise or fall or really change in much of any way was silly. If they deviated too far, they stop getting spells or the god himself would come down and put a stop to that, some members of the church would erupt in blue fire or have their heads explode and that would be that.There might have been some friendly rivalry between some religions in the same pantheon, but that was about the extent of it. When you have the threat of the dark gods and the monsterous humanoids, any difference between CG church and LG church seems to fade into the background.Then around 1985-1990, things started to change. A long time away from concentrating on D&D -- and some growing up on our parts -- showed us how other games handled such things and that we didn't have to do things so in line with the rules as written. We started to pay attention to the nature of the gods and make some notes on just what they wanted. The concepts of older groups of dieties, younger deities, rival gods from other cultures, all this began to percolate in. We paid more attention to how the gods were handled in various works of fiction, and how that interacted with basic human nature.First, we broke from the (erroneous, anyway) idea that the various divination spells were basically infallible. The ones that were became not so much so. We broke from the idea of gods that were so directly involved in their clerics lives that they'd come down and fix things if things got too out of whack.About 1995 we're getting into Eberron territory, where the gods are nebulous things that might not even really exist, or are so removed from the world that they themselves really don't much care what happens to it unless something monstrous happens that directly affects them. They empower clerics and paladins to be their eyes and ears and arms on the material world. Because those agents are human, they are subject to the full range of human foible and nobility.</blockquote>

Verification