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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2661357" data-attributes="member: 14159">Actually, I'll have disagree with the idea that these churches pop up because of wealth.  The place I came from that had all these churches was poor, dirt poor.  These churches weren't branches of large centralized religions (well, one was, but it's branches are pretty spread out).  These churches were independent of each other, and generally only loosely affiliated with any larger group, if any.  You mentioned multiple Catholic churches, my hometown didn't have a single one, the nearest one was in the next town over.  Many of these churches were congregations founded by two or three dozen people who pooled some money, donated their time and labor to built a small sanctuary on a small parcel of land, and over a few years built a small church.  They collectively hire a pastor who shares their general sentiments on faith, and is paid a very modest salary from their donations, and all other labor is donated (it's cleaned and maintained by people volunteering to in on Saturday to sweep and polish, and the pastor does a lot of the work himself since he's the only full-time employee).  I know because I used to belong to just such a church, and few of the members were anything other than poor (or lower-middle-class), but 30 or 40 people like that can make a church happen.To put this in D&D terms, in a typical fantasy world, where people build their own houses and most everyday items are locally hand made, one lone Cleric and a few dozen followers could easily start a church in a rural area.  Plenty of labor donated by followers, a collection taken up to buy a small parcel of land, a year or two of construction and making the furniture, and you can have a very modest temple with a small congregation.  Yes, there are also the giant "stadium churches" the size of shopping malls, but one thing the modern world has also taught us is that there is a huge variety with regard to peoples tastes in religion.  Also, the "megachurches" crop up in places that are already huge themselves, and you don't notice the dozens or hundreds of more modest houses of worship in the area that plenty of other people attend but they don't get the media attention and don't have the flashy buildings.  If you want a D&D analog of this, in a major city you could have a giant cathedral of a powerful religion that is a wonder of the world, with room for thousands of worshippers and high priests, and the grounds of the place take up a significant portion of the city, while people quietly ignore the dozens of smaller shrines, prayer houses, and temples scattered around the city, sometimes in nondescript buildings only marked by a holy symbol on the door, sometimes in backrooms or upstairs rooms of other places.  The other faiths certainly exist, but a traveller passing through town might only notice the huge cathedral and marvel at how the town really only follows one religion if they weren't attentive or didn't spend long in town.So, if you really want one giant temple in town that everybody goes to, with maybe a few small shrines on the edges for special purposes you can do that, but human nature has shown us that in a town of 2,000 you can divide the population up into many distinct religious bodies.  In a society with a polytheistic faith like the typical D&D world, this seems almost inevitable.To me, trying to assume that a population that large will only have one or two temples seems weird, assuming that (in any society where there is any freedom of Religion, like is assumed in a typical D&D setting, where people are more-or-less free to follow any nonevil god) such a large body of people would be so common in beliefs that they could all get together to support one temple.  If the town was founded by one religion as a colony or something I could understand it, or if the pantheon existed in such a format that all gods could be worshipped together or they shared worship space (like the Ancient Greece example) it could make sense.  In a typical Greyhawk/Realms polytheistic model though I'd expect a significant variety of religions, with one or two popular ones (like Pelor & St. Cuthbert or Chauntea & Lathander) being most prominent, but several others having their own followings.</blockquote>

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