How detailed are your in-game religions?

[tjoneslo]

Thom's poll of the week. DM campaign design question this time. Clerics are one of the core classes of D&D. The one thing that should most influence their power, both from a roleplaying perspective and in terms of spell power, is the god or gods they worship and follow. So how much description and detail do you put into what should arguably be one of the core elements of a game world.

 

[Sfounder]

We use the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, which has some pretty lengthy write-ups. Since we play in the world of Greyhawk, it makes sense.

 

[Trickstergod]

At the moment, I'm running a Scarred Lands campaign, so the religion is fleshed out to the extreme.

However, whenever I've run a homebrew, generally the first thing I start with is the religion. That, or a map of the continent the characters are on.

Gods or clerics may not necessarily even exist, but I don't find a world without a religion to be overly believable, in my opinion. There should be some form of creation myth or the like, and that's the sort of stuff I start with fairly quickly when making my own setting.

 

[takyris]

Religion was big in my last big campaign. I had a lot of detailed information about the gods, and various facets of the moral and ethical stances affected the game in a lot of ways. Just coming up with an alignment metaphor, the Worldrose, did a lot. (The Worldrose was conceived as a giant flower. Lawful Good was the bud, Chaotic Good was the petals, Lawful Neutral was the stem and thorns, Chaotic Neutral was the leaves, Lawful Evil was the Root, and Chaotic Evil was the ground surrounding the rose itself.)

So I had this metaphor show up a bunch in literature, and societies made use of the terms. The Scattered Petals were a group of Chaotic Good individuals, while the Order of Thorns was a Lawful Neutral monastic sect.

Also, making up hymn lyrics for a Lawful Evil deity? Lotsa fun.

 

[Wombat]

My current campaign is based around my groups love affair with The Book of the Righteous by Green Ronin, so, yeah, religion is very, VERY important

 

[iwatt]

For homebrews, I tend to focus an inordinate amount of time and energy into creation myths and the relationships between pantheons. But I don't generate huge stat blocks for either the gods or the temples. Those i just wing.

 

[Torque]

This poll really needs an "other" option. In my world, Shattered Skies, the gods existed (In the rare cases that it matters, I use the names from BotR), but a cataclysm 500 years ago sealed them away from mortals. Only a few people still follow the old gods, and clerics pay a substantial personal price whenever they cast spells in order to punch through the barrier and allow the god's power to get through. However, religion is very important, as with the disappearance of the gods, several new religions sprang up. The population is divided between ancestor worship, animism, and a sort of elementalism worshipping 9 materials that are considered to embody the great virtues. There is plenty of strife between these religions, and each has their own type of practitioner (shamans, greenbonds, and witches, respectively).

 

[Nightfall]

Since I don't homebrew, it's all Scarred Lands baby. And we got some pretty sweet details about our gods. Right Trick?

 

[Zappo]

Other: each deity is detailed as much as it's needed. I play Planescape. Hundreds of deities, including many that are from real life historical pantheons and therefore have much more background than anyone will ever need. So, if a deity comes into play, either because it's involved in the plot, or because a PC decides to make a cleric of it, then it gets detailed. Otherwise, it stays somewhere in the background.

 

[dren]

A moderate amount of detail; one page per deity. Not including basic divine rules or prestige classes, maybe 25 pages in total.