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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7365382" data-attributes="member: 4937">Nuati is one of mine.There is a difference between who this works in my head and how it works in practice, largely because most of the time the players don't have any interest in the religious life of the community and because religious festivals usually only serve as a circumstance or color for some more adventurous event.But my NPCs for the most part are not followers of a single deity, and each city tends to have its own religious calendar with regular religious festivities that the whole community takes part of.   Also, many deities are worshipped together with their divine familial relations, often as married partners.  For example, Jord the god of leisure activities is one of the most popular deities, but he's almost always worshipped together with his less popular spouse Sesstra the goddess of labor.  Together, they are viewed by the public very much the way moderns might view some beloved sitcom, the sort of opposites attract leading to combinations of marital bliss and marital acrimony that many find relatable.   Likewise, Aratos and Anwen are separately the divines of smithing and the hearth, but together they are the deities of marriage and domesticity.  It's normal and expected the priests of one will be married off to the priestesses of the other and their temples are generally joined.If you walk into the house of a typical NPC they have a shrine with a hierarchy of deities that they worship which are associated with their family.  This might descend from a national patron, such as Aravar in Amalteen, important family or city deities like Amaya, through the different deities that define that person professionally or historically - perhaps Sesstra if they are a tailor, Nauti if they are sailors, or Lado if they are a brickmason - all the way down to the icons of important ancestors and perhaps household spirits that the family has a relationship with.  What you will typically see is that this slice of the divine isn't necessarily allied with each other philosophically or with the worshiper, and that difference between the worshiper and the divine target of worship defines the relationship.Basically what I try to avoid is this idea that everyone has a single patron and that's who the person worships.  I do that in part by making the deities fairly narrow, so that no one deity can actually represent a significant slice of a person's life.  Champions are supposed to be the living embodiment of the deities.  They are in effect living idols, representing the deity in the world, and in religious festivals they are expected to play that role, standing in to a large extent for the deity as his personal ambassador or seneschal or even taking possession of his or her champion and speaking through their body.  Of course, it may take some time for the community to actually recognize that they have a champion in their midst, particularly if their is no cleric in the community that can identify the signs or the champion isn't yet comfortable claiming the title.</blockquote>

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