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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tzor" data-source="post: 3224639" data-attributes="member: 12826">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.</blockquote>

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