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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1084112" data-attributes="member: 3146">I share this distaste for most game-world religions. IMO, most made-up game-world religions seem like either shallow, kludgy distortions of what secular western culture either wishes religion was like (Pelor in the Greyhawk mythos), fears religion is like (Pholtus and Wastri in the Greyhawk mythos), or inverted forms of those (Erythnul and/or Hextor, Nerull). In all of the cases, they seem to take the shallow, vague cultural misunderstandings of Christianity ("they say salvation a lot, it must be important to religion; our religion should talk about "salvation" too"; they generally meet once a week in churches, we should do that too; they collect tithes, we should do that too, etc.) as the basis for religion--as if all "religion" were about or dealt with the same things in similar ways.Unfortunately, I can't claim that I've done a dramatically better job in my campaign world (although I do think I made an improvement). Rather than use real-world religions (which might well work in Testament or in a CoC game (well, as long as you figured out who was right--I think a game centered around a secret Catholic order and including quite a bit of D&D cleric and paladin powers might be interesting although it would no longer be CoC once you removed the despair of the setting), I tried to imagine what changes I thought would need to be made to some real-world religions in order to fit into the more magical world of the standard D&D campaign (including the arcane magic=science=morally neutral component), then tossed in a few other thinly disguised real-world religions, and then put another one in that developed other parts of my cosmology. (The general idea was that I got to present competing incompatible explanations of the world, all of which could be explained by the actions and inactions of the major spiritual players).</blockquote>

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