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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1586642" data-attributes="member: 18832">This is what I wrote in the draft of a handout I intend to give my players once I've finished designing the campaign I want to run:"The campaign lacks a coherent pantheon – some clerics are servants of a single deity, some of several at once, some of philosophies which may or may not incorporate the gods and goddesses of the world into their doctrine. While no religion is monotheistic in an exclusive sense, some religious orders claim primacy for their god(s) over all others. The clerics of the World Mother, for example, claim that She is the creator of all things, including other deities, especially the natural world; there are, however, druidic philosophies which do not recognise any personification of the force(s) of Nature at all. "The gods apparently do not require doctrinal purity in return for the favour they grant their worshippers – most clerics agree that this is an accomodation born out of the gods’ conviction that mortals’ believing part of the truth is better than none, and may lead them to the whole in time, though extremists of all stripes suspect that those clerics who dissent from the truth are merely drawing their power from the elemental forces of the universe loosely associated with the god they claim to follow, as clerics of philosophies do."I have taken this approach mostly because, as a postgraduate student of religion, I want to use a more complex religious structure in my campaign world than you often find in fantasy settings with established, objective pantheons with deities you can point to.I also find it more interesting to allow for the possibility that the mortal followers of the gods might in truth serve forces attempting to corrupt the worldly institutions of the faith.Obviously, I must spend some time contemplating the question of alignment-detection magic before this could ever work, but at the present time I lean towards the idea of using some in-game resource (magic items, spells, the supernatural blessing of a deity) to make it difficult to detect such infiltration rather than the solution of banning alignment-detection magic altogether; on the other hand, since my campaign will not include the paladin class, I suppose I could do that too. I think I prefer the idea of characters believing that alignment-detection magic can fail to reliably discern the truth, however.To solve the problem of players choosing too-powerful domains for a "philosophical cleric", I will write up the campaign world's major philosophies myself, and participate in the creation of any additional causes or philosophies which players not satisfied with the ones I've written want to think up.I also like the idea of including philosophies which share extensive similarities with deity-centered faiths, differing in many cases only on whether or not the deity (or deities) really matter. As a real-world example, for instance, different sects of Buddhism differ on their approach to the Buddha and figures such as bodhisattvas. Some Buddhist traditions do genuinely treat these figures as functionally equivalent to deities - "Pure Land" Buddhism, for example, called Ching-t'u in China, approaches a real similarity to Protestant Christianity in its doctrine of salvation through personal faith in Amitabha Buddha. At the same time, though, Buddhist sects retain a sense of commonality of thought with each other, and I want to try to capture that sense of amicable disagreement on specifics.Then, of course, I will also have violent disagreements between different faiths and sects of the same faith. Hurrah!</blockquote>

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