How much detail do you give to your religions?

[Tsyr]

I recently re-read the Mage Storms series of books, and loved how well religion was handled there (The entire series centered on two main characters, one of whom was a priest of a religion going through some serious change). That inspired me to start handling religion in a little more detail in my game... Previosly, for example, I never even thought of how one religion might morph over the centuries (In the book, the religion the young priest follows was originaly a religion focused on growth, self improvement, life, etc... and it got REEEEAAAAALY corrupted over the centuries, until it was a very inquisitional religion)... Or how there might be different sects of the same religion that held different views. I mean, mentaly I knew of such things, but I just never considered it.

So for the last month or so, I've been doing a lot of fleshing out of my campaigns religions... I'd examine them and find real world religions or mythologies that were similar, then look at that religion in more detail. Alot of times I've been able to make things a bit more logical. It's also let me get a bit of information I can use to flesh out religious codes for priests, daily worship rituals, what things would be celebrated, and sometimes some pretty cool speaches for priests by modifing stuff. For example, I just picked up really nice book at the used bookstore that's a translation and commentary on the Papyrus of Ani, along with the actual hyroglyphics and stuff. It's let me flesh out alot of a religion I had in my world that had a lot of similarities to the egyptian one, and by modifing some of the text in the book to insert names of my gods instead of the egyptian ones, I have some ready made speaches for the priests of that religion. And I've done similar things for other religions. Those that have no real-world counterpart, I've done my best to fudge things.

I mean, I know my players probably wont appreciate this. I'm basicly doing it out of my own desire to make my setting more... alive... and I know that I wouldn't have to do all this or anything... But once I realized how flat and two-dimensional I was treating religions, I just had an intense urge to flesh them out a bit. And I'm just wondering how many other people have an irrational desire to do the same thing?

 

[Tsyr]

Shameless self bump

 

[Crothian]

After reading through the Book of the Rightious I really wanted to sit down and defend the different churches like in that book. However, since I'm not actually running it and the next game I run might not be in that world, I soon lost interest. I have thought about it and do have a mental outline of many of the churches and how I will do them. I'm just going to wait until I'm actually going to be using them, and spend the time till then working on other projects.

 

[shadow]

Not much... In the campaign which I'm developing I have a monotheistic religion that kind of resembles a the Medieval Catholic church, an orc pantheon, and a druidic pagan/animistic belief system. However, I try to avoid spending a lot of time focusing on the details of religion. I feel that religion is a sensitive issue, so I want to avoid focusing on the dogma of individual religions. Although I've known some people actually want to role-play out actual religious ceremonies in great detail or spend a long time seriously debating the dogma of fantasy religions , I feel such topics are better left out of the game.

 

[Olive]

i think that religion is hugely important, but my polayers aren'tvery important. i have BotR, but i'm not using it. but i think i want to spend a day writing up my religions like theirs...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

In the campaigns I am actually running, I give the religions as much detail as it is neccessary at the moment. If one of the PCs - or major NPC - is a member of a certain religion, then it's time to put some more thought into it. If not, I generally don't worry too much about that religion.

As more my homebrew setting, presently I give all religions (I've written up four right now) about as much detail as in the new Forgotten Realms Campaign Set (and since I greatly admire that book, I use its general format as well...)

 

[Umbran]

I tend to only insert a moderate amount of detail on religion. While I do create some history and such, I find that if I pre-generate too much detail, fewer players will find any particular one of the campaign's religions appealing. This tends to follow the DMing maxim - do not detail more than you have to, lest you detail yourself into a corner, or leave yourself with little room to expand.

So, I tend to wait until a PC following a particular religion comes around, and partially mold the religion around the sort of thing the player wants.

Note that this does not necessarily mean that the religion is molded to be all positive for the player - if the player enjoys political conflict, for example, I'm more apt to turn the religion so that such conflicts will happen within the church.

This does leave my game worlds feeling a little less.. alive, I suppose. It's a trade off between detail and flexibility.