Monotheism in D&D

[Vedic Wizard]

Fascinating thread btw

 

[wingsandsword]

Yeah, there is a lot of strangeness in D&D religeon. For example a common theme is that the gods need worshippers, but no explaination is then given for the vast numbers of extremly powerful evil gods. If lack of worship weakens them then why would any being worship these entities? On the other hand if your explanation for the power of the dark gods is that any inkling of dark though feeds them, a flash of anger at the guy who cuts in front of you at the line in the market say, then why aren't the heavens rules by titanically powerful sex gods?

Well, they need belief, worshippers are the most powerful and efficient method of doing this.

Planescape explained it well, deities get at least a trickle of power from the use of their name, their tales and lore being told. If that evil deity is part of a pantheon, then the general worship of that pantheon gives them their cut of the power. Destroying a deity by destroying belief in them is incredibly hard to do, since you have to kill or convert (sincerely) every single mortal worshipper (an already established god can barely hang on to demigod status with a single mortal worshiper), and even then they take a long time to fade as they eke out power from myth, legend, lore, and the residual belief in them from the culture they came from, all the while they will be trying very hard to get even a small cult together somewhere.

As for who would worship an evil deity? Think of rebellious young folk, think of people who really like what the deity has as their portfolio, think of outcasts of society who don't care what polite society thinks of what they believe, think of people who don't care about labels of "good" and "evil" and only care about the promise of power/wealth, think about the people who worship out of fear because it's an evil deity they are afraid the God of Disease will smite them with a plague, or the God of Storms will flood their farm unless appeased.

Remember, people in a polytheistic society don't neccesarily worship only one deity. Somebody could pay some veneration to a deity they don't like to try and appease the angry gods.

Looking at it as choosing which deity to worship, only one, from a list like it's some menu isn't the way to think of it. People will have the deities they prefer to worship or like more, they will have the ones they like to worship and choose to venerate, and the ones they will pay respects to, to appease them.

Also the 'times up' rule is hard to explain. There are plenty of ways to stop ageing in D&D but only one to get past your expiration date. Who sets this date anyway and why are they such a hardass?

Well, the "time's up" thing is pretty much a 3e-ism, I think that was to prevent it being "easy" to be immortal. Why bother to become a lich or other esoteric means of immortality if it's a fairly common class feature?

 

[paradox42]

Regarding the worship of Evil deities

One thing that's frequently ignored about 'Evil' churches and deities, in D&D terms, is relative morality- that is, the Evil-aligned churches don't see themselves as "evil" unless they're deliberately adopting it for a sort of "bad boy mystique." A well-developed world that contains actual religions built around Evil deities (as opposed, say, to random cults of insane people occasionally getting together to venerate a deity or demon that most other people fear or despise) should contain carefully crafted creeds for those faiths which explain how the members of the cult see the world, and why they worship as they do. Typically, an Evil religion is based at least partly around the idea of "might makes right," since that idea is at the core of how D&D defines Evil.

As an example, take a deity that's played a prominent role in my homebrew campaigns in recent years. His name is Nexus, and he's a LE deity whose protfolios are Power, Corruption, and Disease. I actually went to some trouble, a few years ago, to figure out just how those three concepts went together, and how people might come to see those concepts as worthy of veneration as opposed to fear, hatred, or disgust (which would be the common reaction particularly in the case of Disease). Nexus is known publicly for two major behaviors: one, he offers mortals "Deals" in exchange for their souls, much like the Devil in mideval European folklore; and two, his cults offer their services to local governments as police forces. Both of these result at least partly (and naturally) from the credo I came up with.

The credo of Nexus can be summed up like this: The natural order of the cosmos is a vast power structure, wherein certain entities are stronger or smarter than others, and use that strength or intelligence to control those below. The structure is in constant flux, with powerful entities eventually using up too much of their power and becoming weaker, or spending their power on frivolous pursuits instead of maintaining or advancing their positions in the web. Their personal corruption becomes a systemic corruption which weakens and destroys their power base and thus frees up the power position for others to take. That this resembles the progression of a disease is no coincidence- disease is but this power-play carried out on a far smaller scale within the body of an individual.

It's heartless, self-serving, and could easily lead a fanatic (particularly a priest) to commit atrocities- but it's something that a lot of people would be happy to believe! I know this, because two of my actual real-life players have remarked on how logical and reasonable they find the tenets- Nexus is a favorite game-deity for both of them. Interestingly, if I had to assign D&D alignments to their real-world personalities, one of those two would almost certainly come up Evil- or at the very least Neutral with Evil tendencies. So it seems the appeal works quite well as an in-world explanation.

Do the same for other Evil deities, and the problem of why people worship them disappears. The D&D game as-is doesn't provide us with any such credoes, probably because to do so would open WotC and other publishers up to all kinds of lawsuits from concerned parents, religious fundamentalists looking to start up the anti-D&D hysteria again, and so on. Without such credoes, the Evil churches indeed make no sense- nobody in their right mind would follow them. The key, for building a world with a high level of believability, is to give people reasons for worshipping them- even beyond the usual villianous goals of power and wealth.

 

[Vedic Wizard]

The credo of Nexus can be summed up like this: The natural order of the cosmos is a vast power structure, wherein certain entities are stronger or smarter than others, and use that strength or intelligence to control those below. The structure is in constant flux, with powerful entities eventually using up too much of their power and becoming weaker, or spending their power on frivolous pursuits instead of maintaining or advancing their positions in the web. Their personal corruption becomes a systemic corruption which weakens and destroys their power base and thus frees up the power position for others to take. That this resembles the progression of a disease is no coincidence- disease is but this power-play carried out on a far smaller scale within the body of an individual.

That's the best reasoned "Evil God Theology" I think I've heard - nice .

This style of thinking is definately the way forward with the darker side of the deities. To often in games I've played (and I'll admit sometimes run ) evil has been portrayed as thoughtless, malicious, sadism. It's far more interesting when the evildoers can actually try and convince the characters that their way is the "right" way.

 

[Psion]

One thing that's frequently ignored about 'Evil' churches and deities, in D&D terms, is relative morality- that is, the Evil-aligned churches don't see themselves as "evil" unless they're deliberately adopting it for a sort of "bad boy mystique."

Yeah. I doubt I could dig this up, but there were some old threads where I related the creedo of my "Empire Building Evil Gods Worshipers." In their dialect, the detect good spell is called (roughly) "detect weakness".

My more cult-like evil priests usually follow the more typical "at the right hand of the devil or in his path" philosophy.

 

[tzor]

I’m going to nit pick for a moment here. I don’t think “monotheism” has influenced D&D but the dominant culture of European Christianity (which is monotheistic) has in fact had a strong influence on D&D since the beginnings. You can see this very clearly in the original AD&D. “Alignment languages” really have nothing to do with either monotheism or with polytheism, but with the fact that the church continued to use the language of the mother empire long after the common languages became the standard for the people.

The Arcane/Divine split was an evolved thing. In the original AD&D every spell casting class had their own spell set. The illusionist’s spell list was different from the wizard’s and the cleric’s spell list was different from the druid’s. Common spells were simply duplicated in the various lists. Over time the spell casters simplified in some ways and diversified in other ways. The notion of “white magic” was at best a minority opinion in the Medieval European mindset, and generally got pretty much dropped by the arguments of the “witch hunters” of the era. In the European mindset, all “magic” is more or less a tool of the evil one. Mind you that in general Vancian magic is simply not in the European mindset, but that is more of a nit pick.

One can argue that the polytheism in D&D is distinctly monotheistic in nature in that while there are many gods, clerics and followers are generally disposed to worship a single one of the many. In most polytheistic societies people worshiped a plethora of local and regional deities at the same time. Worship was considered a common courtesy; the early Christians were considered “atheists” by Rome because they would not worship the traditional Roman deities along with the one they did worship. But one can also argue that this evolves from the segregated nature of post reformation Europe where everyone fit into nice little “denominations” or names.

 

[Psion]

The Arcane/Divine split was an evolved thing. In the original AD&D every spell casting class had their own spell set. The illusionist’s spell list was different from the wizard’s and the cleric’s spell list was different from the druid’s. Common spells were simply duplicated in the various lists.

Druid was a "subclass" of cleric and Illusionist was a "subclass" of magic-user. So I think it came into being as soon as there were 2 magic using classes, really.

Paladins cast spells as clerics. Rangers cast spells as both druids and magic-users, oddly enough. But basically, after the first two, all subsequent classes lined after one or the other... or both.

 

[paradox42]

Druid was a "subclass" of cleric and Illusionist was a "subclass" of magic-user. So I think it came into being as soon as there were 2 magic using classes, really.

Paladins cast spells as clerics. Rangers cast spells as both druids and magic-users, oddly enough. But basically, after the first two, all subsequent classes lined after one or the other... or both.

Very interesting point- and quite true, really. The classes as they are now did not exist in the original incarnation of D&D, when races like "dwarf" and "elf" and even "halfling" were implemented in game as classes in their own right. Magic-User and Cleric were the only two classes (besides "Elf," which I won't count in future discussion since from the modern perspective it's a race and this would cause confusion) which could cast spells.

What happened was that, as future sets came out, new classes were introduced. The thing about the new classes was, you didn't start as one; you always started as one of the "basic" classes from the original Basic Set- the traditional four plus the three races. To become, for example, a Paladin, you had to be a 9th-level Fighter IIRC and be of Lawful alignment. It was sort of like Prestige Classes today, except that the new class sort of subsumed the original one and you became something new when you took it. This mechanic was largely left by the wayside when 1st-Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released, though you can still see echoes of it in the way the Thief-Acrobat was treated (for example).

The first real use of the split between Arcane and Divine came in 2nd Edition AD&D, when they forced all the classes into the four-category structure. Every class in that edition, whatever it was, had to be a subclass of the four basic archetypes- Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Priest. "Psionicist" was a fifth type that was introduced in the Complete Psionics Handbook splatbook, and never really meshed that well with the others although the designers did try. 2nd Edition is where the spell lists were consolidated, and every class that got spells got them from one of the two base spell lists- Wizard or Priest. This echoes down to us today in the form of Arcane and Divine magic. But it came from the fact that they took 2nd Edition "back to basics," as it were and forced all the classes to conform to the base archetypes.

all this leads me to ask- if Druid for example had been one of the basic classes in the very first Basic Set of the game, way back in 1974, might we today have a three-way split between Arcane, Divine, and Natural/Shamanistic magic? I think it's likely.

The Monotheistic idea of the split between Arcane and Divine magic, thus, might not be so Monotheistic at all- the game as it is now is still grounded in its deepest and earliest roots. The question that should be answered, in this context, is whether and, if so how much, Monotheistic ideas influenced the choice of the earliest basic archetypes. If you read the class list for the Basic Set, one can't help but notice a similarity to the archetypes portrayed in the Lord of the Rings, and we know Tolkien was a devoted Catholic. So did Monotheistic ideas influence the split between Arcane and Divine? Yes, they certainly did- but probably not the way the OP (or most modern players for that matter) think they did.

 

[Psion]

"Psionicist" was a fifth type that was introduced in the Complete Psionics Handbook splatbook, and never really meshed that well with the others although the designers did try.

Well, psionics appeared pre-1e in Eldritch Wizardry, and thence as an option in the PHB (with smattering of support in DMG.) The first Psionicist class appearance was in an issue of Dragon issue #78. The psionicist class was immensely popular, at least in our groups. I think that the 2e Psionics handbook came about because it was obviously popular elsewhere, too.

 

[paradox42]

That's the best reasoned "Evil God Theology" I think I've heard - nice .

This style of thinking is definately the way forward with the darker side of the deities. To often in games I've played (and I'll admit sometimes run ) evil has been portrayed as thoughtless, malicious, sadism. It's far more interesting when the evildoers can actually try and convince the characters that their way is the "right" way.

Thank you. I actually arrived at the idea of carefully-reasoned creeds for Evil deities when I was having trouble coming up with another Evil deity to fill out my homebrew's Divine hierarchy; I wanted the number of deities in each of the three factions Good, Neutral, and Evil to be the same- like Dragonlance/Krynn. Derivative, yes, but I stuck with it and came up with some very interesting ideas later as a result of it- but that's another topic.

The relevant point here is that, because I decided to base the new Evil deity on some archetype of evil in the real world, I needed a known figure to do it. And I picked Hitler- the new deity was to be treated sort of as a divine Nazi. That deity, Patrin, has a fairly simple creed- "Our race is the Chosen People, destined to rule by Divine Right!" Of course, the fact that Patrin himself belongs to no particular race, and in fact spreads this creed among many races, is always conveniently glossed over or ignored by his higher-ranking priests- but at the core, the beliefs are very much based on Nazi ideals.

And that, in turn, got me thinking- I knew from personal reading that the Nazi party as it existed in 1930s Germany had many of the trappings of a religion. In fact, I've discovered since that many of these trappings were deliberately inserted into the belief structure of the Party to encourage unity and fanaticism, as well as for certain occult and mystical reasons which I won't go into here, but we can see that Nazi-ism essentially "works" as a religion by the fact that its adherents were so powerfully devoted to it. In fact, in the modern world, the existence of groups like the World Church of the Creator demonstrate that it is in fact a religion of sorts. [To the mods- if this steps over the invisible line, I apologize and will edit the post as necessary.] Relating this back to Evil religions, I thought: if this works for one evil deity, why couldn't it work for others?

So, I sat down and started to think very seriously about what these evil cults really believed in to make them behave as they did. And what would the deities with the portfolios as I had defined them give to their worshippers, to make them give devotion to the deities instead of just lip service and fear? Why would people willingly serve these deities, even to the point of dying in their name?

Nexus was a creed I was pleased with, but the one that really convinced me the idea was sound and the experiment would work in practice was the creed I came up with for Tinnabula- the goddess of Insanity, Discord, and Noise. The goddess is herself, insane, and in fact two of the demigods associated with her church (Indifference and Paranoia) are actually seperate personalities of hers that became powerful enough to acquire divine power of their own. Tinnabula's creed is best summed up as follows: The cosmos would be a terribly boring and dreary place if everything went according to some plan all the time. There would be no Surprises, and Surprises are what fun and enjoyment are all about! Well, Goddess knows how to make surprises- nobody can do it like she can. Noises are surprises, that's what makes them noise instead of- for instance- music. And every organization and group needs to have itself shaken and stirred now and again with some internal conflict, to help make new Surprises for everybody. And what people think of as a "sane" mind really just means a mind where all the parts are working harmoniously together, the same way all the time. Well where's the fun in that? Join us and let us teach you the meaning and value of Surprises!

I was proud of myself for that one. And after I came up with it, I knew the same approach could work for any deity if I just thought long enough about the portfolios and found a way to connect them.