Dire Bare
Legend
While there are white supremacist groups worshiping the Norse deities, there are also plenty of modern pagans who abhor racism but also honor the old Norse gods. Odinism =/ White Supremacy . . . but is certainly tarred with it.
-
NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Dungeons & Discourse: Atheism (and related)
- Thread starter I'm A Banana
- Start date
While there are white supremacist groups worshiping the Norse deities, there are also plenty of modern pagans who abhor racism but also honor the old Norse gods. Odinism =/ White Supremacy . . . but is certainly tarred with it.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Corathon said:
lulzapalooza said:
So, I wonder a bit why these threads of negativity run through it. D&D has had a few ways of dealing with "atheism" (or atheism-like) belief systems throughout the many characters done there. Why not include such a character? Why have them only be insane?
To counter it, what are some heroic "atheist" characters you guys can think of? What kinds of heroes deny and defy the gods? Are they godslayers, like a few have posted? Are they just ambivalent? Do they think Pelor is a racket? What do they do to help people, who, after all, might be following a fairly benevolent deity?
Of course, there's the other side: what are some villainous "atheist" characters? What kinds of evil would kill the goddess of love, or the god of the harvest, or the god of protection and healing...and why? What kinds of pain motivate these individuals to do horrible things?
A lot of the ideas seem to share the "gods are just creatures like everything else," but they're certainly among the most powerful! What kinds of people might want to challenge that power? And why?
Crazy Jerome
First Post
I like a mix of gods in my fantasy, and for it to be obvious. So there isn't much call for a straight-forward atheist. OTOH, I also like mystery in my game religions, and that is sometimes hard to get if you don't roll your own campaign gods. (And then once I use something, I can't use it with the same players again, at least not for mystery purposes.)
My first 3E campaign had as a central conceit that the gods were a pack of liars. Oh, they had good, supernatural, "salvation of the world hinges in the balance", reasons for being this way. And other than that, they had all kinds of good and bad qualities, depending upon the deity. But mortals had very stylized and skewed views of their actual nature. This was reinforced with an opening campaign document that explained what typical characters believed about the gods. It was all pretty much lies.
The interesting aspect of it was that as characters got higher in the hierarchies of the church, they became aware of some of the real truth. But by that time, they were embroiled in those larger world-saving goals, and geased not to reveal this knowledge. It wasn't atypical for each such character to go through a mildly atheistic period at some point in that rise.
My first 3E campaign had as a central conceit that the gods were a pack of liars. Oh, they had good, supernatural, "salvation of the world hinges in the balance", reasons for being this way. And other than that, they had all kinds of good and bad qualities, depending upon the deity. But mortals had very stylized and skewed views of their actual nature. This was reinforced with an opening campaign document that explained what typical characters believed about the gods. It was all pretty much lies.
The interesting aspect of it was that as characters got higher in the hierarchies of the church, they became aware of some of the real truth. But by that time, they were embroiled in those larger world-saving goals, and geased not to reveal this knowledge. It wasn't atypical for each such character to go through a mildly atheistic period at some point in that rise.
tuxgeo
Adventurer
Now you've done it -- thirteen question marks ("?") in one post!
As I'm sure you already know, the number thirteen ("13") is sacred to the wiccans, and to witches of other stripes. Some of the wiccans might take umbrage at your action. (I'm not a wiccan, so I won't.)
Aside from that, I don't want to try to answer any of your inciteful (spelling intended) questions specifically, because I know so little about atheism; but I do want to say:
Many gods live in or around the Astral Sea. We don't. That might signify something.
The gods can compete for portfolios. If there is no god of Undeath, then there can be a demon prince of Undeath; but otherwise, Orcus dies before the adventurers get there, because the god of Undeath is so jealous.
The Raven Queen can usurp the portfolio of Nerull; but Nerull dies in the process.
Non-gods don't have "portfolios" in the same sense; so "atheism" needs to account for that, too.
Well, as far as actual RPG play, I gave an example upthread: PCs who repduiate the celestial agreements that the heavens and hells have entered into, in order to take action here and now that will make things better both for mortals generally, and for particular individuals who are the wronged victims of those celestial agreements.
The issue is complicated by questions about the rationale for worship. If worship is understood on a more-or-less contractual rationale (and this is one way of making sense of the classical pagan religions) then heroic atheists might debunk or overturn the contracts - for example, by showing that there are ways to make the crops flourish without paying 10% of your income to Pelor and his church.
Once worship takes on a more strongly emotional dimension (eg via ideas of a loving and nurturing creator) then heroic debunking becomes trickier, perhaps. Maybe, as in your 4e example upthread, the heroic atheist reveals that the gods are not really loving creators at all. Or, less drastically, reveals that creation is not all its cracked up to be, and thus that the gods, although sincere, are nevertheless not worthy of worship.
This "creation scepticism" model of heroic atheism can also be pushed in a Conan-esque direction - whether or not the gods are genuinely there, and genuinely creators, they do nothing but meddle needlessly in the affairs of humanity, and we're better off without them! This has a somewhat Neitzschean flavour, and fits well with a more generally nihilistic or at least modernist conception. (The campaign I actually played probably counts as a variant on this model.)
Historically, one reason for hostility to atheists (eg why Locke didn't extend his account of toleration to them, and why critics of Hobbes thought that his work pushed in an atheist direction, although it is at least notionally theistic) is that they have no sense of duty. This lack of a sense of duty manifests in a few ways - first, they repudiate tradition and the calls that it makes upon us (because they do not follow the received patterns of worship); second, they repudiate the duties that they owe to god as their father/creator (and this implies a more general hostiilty to authority, which is what critics of Hobbes as an atheist find in his work); third, being unable to sincerely swear oaths, they are incapable of binding themselves in their social dealings.
I think a campaign that explores the modernist/Neitzschean/Conan-esque approach to atheism is fertile ground for bringing up this broader question about duty. Certainly, it was something in the forefront of the "against the will of the heavens" campaign that I ran (and some of my ideas for that campaign were derived from Wagner's treatment of some of these issues in the Ring Cycle).
Celebrim
Legend
The BBEG of my current campaign is simultaneously the most heroic and most villainous character I've created (at least IME).
PCs KEEP OUT!!!
Keeropus is the first archmage on the coast of the sea of storms to be born in more than a century. He's from a somewhat oppressed minority in the region, the Tumesi, and he became fascinated with the heritage of his own people and became convinced that it was the Drestrian invaders and not his the native Tumesi who were the true bad guys - unlike the way the accepted histories portrayed it. In studying the Tumesi heritage, he became obsessed with one of their obsessions, and that was achieving true immortality without dependence upon the gods. (It may help to know that the old Tumesi empires were ruled by lich kings.) In the process, he uncovered a large body of forgotten necromantic lore, and one of the things that the Tumesi lore masters were studying was the problem of why it was much easier for mortals to master control over negative elemental energy than positive elemental energy. Obviously, control over positive elemental energy - that is to say life - is more desirable than mastery over death (however useful that be) because with control of life you could actually create rather than only mock and destroy. What a true loremaster therefore aspired to was not necromancy, but vivamancy! One of the more convincing conjectures of the Tumesi lore masters, at least to Keeropus, was that the Gods were blocking access to positive elemental energy, since spells that should have worked mysteriously didn't. The Tumesi conjectured that the gods were doing so to ensure dependence upon them for acts of healing. This outraged Keeropus, who threw in his lot with a radical sect of heretics called Kelternists, that believed that mankind would be better off without the gods and that, and that the gods could be slain if people could be convinced to stop believing in them. Keeropus successful convinced that cultists that the key to this last trick would be to raise up men into the position of gods, able to provide healing and resurrection at will. The people would then see how they had been tricked into accepting poor wages and poor scraps from the table and would abandon the gods. Keeropus's plan is both elegant and complex. Since he can't get access to the positive elemental plane directly (its blocked by some sort of magical barrier), he'll bring a portion of the positive elemental plane directly into the world. This is something that the gods have done before, when they made the sun following the God's war. Keeropus proposes therefore to make a new artificial sun, the strongest available source of positive elemental energy, under the control of man, and thereby ushering in a new age of perfect light, eternal life, free of disease and able to heal all injuries. Making the sun is relatively trivial, albiet enormously expensive. The real trick is igniting it. How do you fill a sun with positive elemental energy when you can't control it in the first place? The answer is that Keeropus knows that positive elemental energy is attracted to negative, and Keeropus has designed a negative energy accumulator of massive capacity. When fully charged, it will rip through the viel to the astral plane where it will create an artificial stark - a lightning bolt between the negative and positive elemental planes. The positive stark will be able ignite the new artificial sun, freeing mankind from the tyranny of the gods. At least, that's the theory. Keeropus has it all worked out, and nothing can go wrong... except possibly those meddlesome heroes that Keeropus knows the gods will raise up to thwart him. But Keeropus is clever; far more clever than the simpletons chasing him, and he's confident he'll can win the race. Keeropus is actually, in my mind, a rather tragically noble character with good intentions. The world sucks, he knows it, and he wants to make a better one. And, as a monotheist myself, I sympathize with his distaste for my pantheon of quarelsome petty Greek inspired dieties, who, as far as I'm concerned really aren't worth worshiping. The problem is that he's willing to burn the world down to try to save it, and probably will. He's also not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, as he has neglected to consider that he might not be the only one who wants to burn the world or that not everyone who says 'don't touch' is motivated by selfish reasons.
A little bit. In my email campaign (role-playing intensive), the party leader is an atheist fighter. His best friend is a cleric (party member), in a relationship of opposites. The fighter believes in clerical magic -- I've never seen a D&D character who did believe in magic (!) -- but he thinks the gods are hooey.
The easiest way to explain it is that he's like Han Solo -- just because his pals manifest magical powers and he's impressed by their achievements doesn't mean he won't say, "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side."
Most characters in my campaigns are devoted to a single deity.
But I have a wizard/sorcerer who is "broadminded". He reveres Fharlanghn, but he also respects his father's god (Rao), his mother's god (Pelor), the god of the party cleric (St. Cuthbert), and he has a working interest in Dalt (the god of gates, keys, etc.) given the subject matter of the later god.
We also had a character who was agnostic. He was raised in the faith of the Pelor (the largest religion in my campaign), but he never really had much opinion or interest in religion.
I enjoy all this diversity, as it seems realistic to me.
In real life, I've known deeply religious folks of a single faith, lots of agnostic/not that interested types, moderately religious folks, religious people whose faith makes them virulently conservative (they say), religious people whose faith makes them virulently leftist (they say), a guy who's essentially a pagan but interested in lots of religions, several atheists ranging from quiet about it to evangelistic about it, and a few folks who have an eclectic approach to religion.
The eclectic approach is common in Asia. My wife (from Singapore) calls herself a free-thinker. Her parents would say they are Buddhist. But it's nothing like "Buddhism" as Westerners typically think about it (as monolithic, organized religion with a particular set of beliefs and rules, like Christianity, yet more hip and open). Instead it's the traditional Chinese version -- a little bit of Buddhism, respect for Buddhist monks and temples, but also some fortunetelling (by monks), lots of traditional superstitions, a family altar at grandma's place to the founder of the family (ancestor worship), Chinese folks religion/tradition like burning joss paper and telling stories about the mother goddess, the monkey god, etc. Oh yeah, and they also go to Christian churches of various denominations with their friends, and her uncle is a devout Catholic.
That to me, is "how D&D world should be" -- lots of different faiths coexisting, sometimes in the same person, sometimes in different people in the same community. And in that milieu, fitting in an atheist or agnostic is not a big deal -- there's so much diversity of faith, another approach isn't surprising or threatening to most people.
Last edited:
Agreed 100%.
Mishihari Lord
First Post
Whether of not atheism can work in D&D is entirely dependent on the setting details. I'll just speak from the point of view of my longest-running campaign.
IMC not believing in the gods is pretty nuts. There's overwhelming evidence. You can find a few people with such beliefs but they're generally considered cranks, kind of like modern-day conspiracy theorists.
Not following a particular god, several, or even religiosity in general is totally doable, and not a big deal in most culture.
I did have one culture though that believed in gods that weren't real. Their "priests" were all magic users. They weren't hypocrites though. They honestly believed that applying what everyone else considered the scientific principles of magic was actually invoking the power of their gods.
IMC not believing in the gods is pretty nuts. There's overwhelming evidence. You can find a few people with such beliefs but they're generally considered cranks, kind of like modern-day conspiracy theorists.
Not following a particular god, several, or even religiosity in general is totally doable, and not a big deal in most culture.
I did have one culture though that believed in gods that weren't real. Their "priests" were all magic users. They weren't hypocrites though. They honestly believed that applying what everyone else considered the scientific principles of magic was actually invoking the power of their gods.
Last edited:
jonesy
A Wicked Kendragon
Perhaps the best description of Atheism that I've seen anywhere comes from, of all places, TvTropes:
Atheism - Television Tropes & Idioms
There is a D&D setting where atheism makes perfect sense. Mystara. "The Immortals are us."
On that note, Unknown Armies.
Atheism - Television Tropes & Idioms
There is a D&D setting where atheism makes perfect sense. Mystara. "The Immortals are us."
On that note, Unknown Armies.
Last edited:
