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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BluWolf" data-source="post: 368402" data-attributes="member: 627">My campaign world is essentially Monothiestic with many religious sects interpreting and worshipping in a different way.The catalyst for this is three fold;1) Religious Dogma vd. Divine Reality. The one true god is an all powerful diey in absentia similar to an Illuvatar from the Silmarillion. Mortals do not know or interact with this being in any definable or quatifiable way. They have a belief system that they use to grasp the divine and base their faith upon that system. ANy semblance between Dogma and reality is almost always coincedental.2) Almost all spell casting ability of a divine nature is granted by ritual inclusion in a religious sect. You can cast spells because the High Council of Scrolls as given you the sacraments of the scrolls. I say almost because evil people are actually drawing power from 1 of any 1000 diabolic powers. Not gods. Just Devils/demons.3) This one is blatantly borrowed from Keith Martin and Stewart MacWilliam from the Palaetra website. (<a href="http://webpages.charter.net/wpeacock/palaestra/" target="_blank">http://webpages.charter.net/wpeacock/palaestra/</a>) and how they handle aligment. Essentially, the assorted alignment rules are geared to only work on elemental sorts of god and evil. Good and evil actions are not affected nor detected. So while detect evil will detect something like a demon or devil it will NOT detect the fact that the dear old Abbot is actually Lawful Evil and no longer Lawful Good.The last point is ESSENTIAL in my mind to pull off any kind of campaign world that deals morality issues as part of it's concept. The core rules IMHO provides to lazy a path for PCs and the DM alike.As far as differing sects and races go, I have always treated this as a cultural issue rather than a racial one. I do not by the concept that the demihuman races should be as homogenized as they are traditioanlly potrayed. Their religious beliefs are as influenced by varying cultures as humans are.I do use a "saint" system. More for presitge class purposes. These do not represent the majority of clerics in the various faiths. More like specific sects ro special functions. The demi-human gods (only the major ones) have been changed to heroes in the various races traditions and it does vary from race to race. Dwarves do tend to be more traditionalist than other races so most dwraven religous pratices will involve Moradin in there some how. To the dwarves, Moradin is a scriptual paragon of a good and moral life. The elves, genrally less religous or obessive about it, do give a nod to Oberon as an inspiration of the values they tend to exalt. I killed all the gnomes.I have had a lot of success with this approach and I think my players have enjoyed it as great change of pace from traditional divine style campaigns. Even seasoned players find them selves encountering something new in the approach.</blockquote>

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