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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6759092" data-attributes="member: 2067">Right, but Roman polytheism doesn't say that others (the Gauls or the Huns or the Celts or the Jews or whatever) are condemned to an eternity of suffering because they don't do that. The point I'm making is that "This is like Rome!" or "This is like Greece!" doesn't really apply - Roman and Greek polytheism aren't very concerned with orthodoxy. They don't punish you for believing the wrong things. FR does. Suffice it to say that the Realms source material doesn't seem to see itself the way you see it. There are canonical characters who question the rights of the deities to demand worship right in the most recent presentation of the books. They're a minority, and they're weird, and they're not even from Faerun, but they exist, and that they exist indicates that having a patron deity isn't a foundational design principle of FR, but something required by a weird bit of world-canon - a bit that I think the setting would be better off without. I'm playing a cleric in one of the HotDQ campaigns I'm in right now - it's not my characters worshiping that I have a major problem with.Maybe an analogy would help illustrate one of the issues.Imagine that you sat down to play a new character in the storied and legendary world of Bairoon. Because this is a game of fantasy adventure, you whip up a wizard, name him Belmincer. You pick your spells, assign your stats, and go on your first adventure, saved a town from goblins. You're enjoying yourself, so you read up a bit about wizards in Bairoon, so that you've got a better idea of where your wizard fits.You're reading the new Spear Coast Quester's Handbook and in a blurb about Wizards, it casually mentions that all wizards are initiated in a ceremony where they bathe in the blood of a freshly sacrificed orphan child dedicated to the goddess of magic, Bystari. This is the only way wizards in Bairoon get magical powers. The book even says that there's a group of people who once attempted to get magical powers without murdering orphans, but they failed. The gods told them to put it back. It's just the way the world works. Has worked this way since the mid-80's. Oh, Bystari is Neutral Good. She doesn't kill orphans because she likes it, it's just how magic works. So Belmincer has been bathed in the blood of an orphan sacrificed to a Good deity of magic.And you realize that this makes Belmincer kind of a monster. In fact, every heroic wizard is kind of a monster, someone who is only able to be heroic because of the sacrifice of an orphan child. You're even told of a novel where once, one of the wizards even tried to fix it, but all the gods got together and said no, it has to be this way - we have to sacrifice orphan children to make new wizards. For some reason. Bystari is still Neutral Good, and Belmincer is still lauded as a hero for slaying the goblins, and now you're just thinking....this isn't how people should be treating wizards in this setting. Wizards kill orphans! They have to! It's part of their DNA! Why would anyone call anybody like this a hero ever? How can that goddess be Neutral Good when people have to sacrifice orphans to get to her? What is this place?That's kind of how it feels to know about the Wall of the Faithless and then see Ilmater described as "he who offers succor and calming words to those who are in pain, victimized, or in great need." I guess he won't do that unless you scratch his back with some devoted worship, first. It just casts this pall over the whole setting when you realize that, by and large, everyone accepts this monstrous injustice. Saving the world from the Dragon Queen just seems kind of empty now. Okay, well, Tiamat is obviously bad, but so are the gods we currently have, even the ones who say they're good, so what am I fighting for? Hell, maybe she can have this blasted world, maybe I can escape to somewhere where, if I die, my soul won't be cosigned to a bleedin' wall just because I didn't kiss enough divine bottoms. Maybe at least on Athas, a family of halflings will be fed by my corpse.</blockquote>

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