D&D General Is there an increase in "godless" campaign settings?

[doctorbadwolf]

Bane is a member of the Faerunian Pantheon, right? Right.

So Worshippers of Bane revere and make offerings to the entire Faerunian Pantheon, right? Wrong.

So Worshippers of Bane go to the same afterlife as other members of the faith of the Faerunian Pantheon, right? Wrong.

Hang on a minute...

Maybe not "General Rules" as you would imagine them. But they're reflected in the polytheistic religions which survived long enough for us to know about them.

I have never seen evidence of the Celts doing those things, nor the Norse or other Germanic peoples, nor the indigenous Basque people, nor the ancient Persians (who explicitly let people keep their gods and kings, so long as they paid taxes, levied troops, and followed the rules), etc.

 

[Umbran]

The whole point of the current subthread of this discussion is that the way D&D traditionally does religion is extremely unrealistic to the point of breaking verisimilitude and immersion. How do we discuss fixing that and making D&D polytheism more realistic without discussing real-world religion to use as a reference point?

Mod Note:
Next time, if you have a question about moderation, take it out of the thread, please.

The basic answer is that the rules of the place may mean some discussions are difficult to have.

 

[Thunder Brother]

It's also important to remember that while some folks exaggerate and others downplay how animist Indo-European polytheists were, that was an aspect of how they saw the world, and in nearly every IE faith, ancestor and place spirits are revered and given offerings, in addition to the bigger gods. The river has a will and a spirit, and also there is a being with a name that lives in the river and is god of it, and that being and the will of the river and the physical river are all the same thing.

As well, Thor isn't just a being who fights giants and argues with his dad and threatens Loki until the scoundrel fixes whatever he broke this time, and he also isn't just the animist soul/will/spirit of storms, thunder, etc. He is both. When lightning strikes and thunder rolls, Thor is here. When you call upon him to bless your fields and give offering to him, Thor is here. But he is also in Asgard, or traveling to Jotunheim to beat up animist personifications of destructive nature and chaos.

The primary defining difference between gods and other types of beings in my own TTRPG is that gods can be several things, in several times and places, simultaneously. When Odin is explaining to a character how the worlds really work, that it's not just vampires or ogres or whatever they encountered that are real but all of it, etc, he is also traveling elsewhere, asking strangers for help as a vagrant to see how generous they are, sitting on his throne, and embodying heroic death, victory, the passion of poetic inspiration and battlerage, sex, secrets, and in my world because I love extrapolating, kink. He is physical present as a creature many places and times, and also exists pan-dimensionally as a concept and a cosmic Will.

I find the use of pluripresence as you described it to be really compelling in fantasy, as it really sells to me that you're interacting with a power beyond yourself. That dryad you're speaking to is not just the humanoid form before, but the also the grove itself. It makes even simple interactions inherently otherworldly, in a way that DnD doesn't often convey very well (I feel it too often mundanifies the fantastic, compared to other works).

Expanding from this idea, I like playing with the idea of also presenting the fundamental elements of the world as different from our own reality. So matter is made of the four primary elements, but in addition to that everything else is fundamentally a spirit of some sort. A disease is not caused by a bacteria or virus, but a disease spirit, and a spell like Lesser or Greater Restoration works through momentarily harnessing a healing spirit. It's all fluff and flavor, but I think there's something important in demonstrating that "this world is not our own, and many preconceptions don't apply".

You fall not because of gravity, but because the Earth goddess loves you.

 

[Steampunkette]

You fall not because of gravity, but because the Earth goddess loves you.

And depending on how far you fall, she will love you SO HARD when you get close enough to hug!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I find the use of pluripresence as you described it to be really compelling in fantasy, as it really sells to me that you're interacting with a power beyond yourself. That dryad you're speaking to is not just the humanoid form before, but the also the grove itself. It makes even simple interactions inherently otherworldly, in a way that DnD doesn't often convey very well (I feel it too often mundanifies the fantastic, compared to other works).

I 1000% agree.

Expanding from this idea, I like playing with the idea of also presenting the fundamental elements of the world as different from our own reality. So matter is made of the four primary elements, but in addition to that everything else is fundamentally a spirit of some sort. A disease is not caused by a bacteria or virus, but a disease spirit, and a spell like Lesser or Greater Restoration works through momentarily harnessing a healing spirit. It's all fluff and flavor, but I think there's something important in demonstrating that "this world is not our own, and many preconceptions don't apply".

You fall not because of gravity, but because the Earth goddess loves you.

Can I make a persuasion check to reduce falling damage?

But seriously, I love that.

It reminds me of something I've been building toward in my Eberron game. When people summon things, especially if it's a critter like Summon Beast or Conjure Woodland Beings, I have started describing those things forming from the landscape itself, rather than appearing from nothing, forming wolves of vine and stone and root, rather than tooth and fur. Likewise, places of magical power have distinct spirit beings who take the form of animals, and embody things like the change from winter to spring and fall to winter, and the bard/cleric is discovering the Will of what seems to be the world itself, which she will eventually learn is Eberron the primordial dragon, and so is the world itself, but also a cosmic draconic being beyond time, and a composite of all the lesser spirits that makes up the world, and the drive of a world to find equilibrium without stagnation, to heal wounds like the Mournland, to keep out foreign infections like the Delkyr, and to contain what lies within (Khyber).

Meanwhile, her husbard the Bard/Paladin is becoming a champion of the land, tied to a tree-being known as The Nemeton, he is becoming more than mortal, eventually he will have the choice to either become one of these Primal Spirits, in order to hallow a new land for his people, or find/foster such a spirit instead.

 

[Voadam]

I like thinking of demons as possibly all being one fractured CE evil being, the Abyss. It fractured into multiple different layers and into various different demon lords and from demon lords into lesser demons. So all Nalfeshnee fat boar demons are actually fat Orcus and all bird demon Vrocks are Pazuzu (or Tzeentch) so you can get involved fighting a demon lord directly as an adversary at much lower levels.

Planar elemental Chaos is divided and diverse and crazy so it fights everyone including itself and is both aware and unaware of its nature at multiple levels so there is not a hive mind but also a vast deep alienness to even the smallest demon and uncertainty as to whether all is one, or all based on the demon lord level, or if they are actually all individuals who are mostly insane in weird ways.

It works too for Baator/Asmodeus and all devils with their convoluted hierarchy and structure and complex internal machinations, and lies. It appears diverse, but it is all one.

 

[ART!]

As a culture - or the more powerful chunks of it - becomes less overtly religious (less infused with religious thought), then fewer people will grow up with religion as a part of their lives. With less exposure to those notions, it would be harder (or less pleasant) for those people to imagine worlds in which religion and gods are a major - and at least a partially positive - factor.

I've noticed this trend in the games I play in, and that's what I attribute it to: our culture simply understands religion less than it did, is less exposed to those ideas, has too narrow an exposure to the diversity fo religious thought, or some combination thereof.

 

[Yora]

Gods. What are they good for?

 

[hopeless]

How do the various faiths react to a new religion popping up?
Are they immediately hostile or curious enough to check before deciding whether they need to do something about it?

 

[Voadam]

I find the useful term for this is Faith.

I find it obscures a lot. Faith as in belief and as being faithful to the teachings of the religion is a big deal if you want a fantasy-medieval church religion based off of a medieval Christian church model where belief is a big deal theologically while what we know of say Roman religious practices is that it is much more about performing the right rituals and honoring the gods and providing the appropriate sacrifices.

So as a term faith in the sense of being faithful to the gods can sort of apply for fantasy polytheism based on ancient Greece or Conan, but faith as in put your faith in this belief is more appropriate for a fantasy medieval church tone, and the conflation of the two can obscure the more polytheistic elements of a fantasy religion that can be there in D&D.

Of course classic D&D is generally a syncretism of Conan type polytheism and medieval churches with polytheistic medieval knight clerics and it is natural for D&D writers to lean more on the more familiar church end of things in fleshing things out and using them. Forgotten Realms leans hard into this very medieval churchy end of the spectrum for their polytheistic cosmology and religion, as did a bunch of Greyhawk and Golarion with defined churches and such in the 2e and 3e/Pathfinder eras.