Monotheological game world in 3.5

[RichCsigs]

I've been playing around with a concept for a campaign world. The main factor of it would be that there is one god. The one thing I can't get around is how to handle cleric domains. How would you go about dolling out domains to clerics? If you just let them pick, I would think that everyone would pick the ones that give the best benefits (such as War with it's free Martial Weapon Prof. and Weapon Focus bonus). Can anyone offer up an alternative idea?

 

[EricNoah]

You could have factions or sects within the church that focus on a particular area of concern; then you could attach 2-4 domains to each area. (Or from your point of view, pick out all of the domains you want this deity to grant access to, then place them in to groups and name the groups according to the area of concern.)

 

[wocky]

The jewish Qaballah (a jewish mystical system), although montheist, takes into account differente "aspects" of god, each with different qualities. Clerics could choose domains based on the aspect of god they draw their powers from.

An alternative would be to make domains represent not something related to the god of your world, but rather to the structure of the church. Just like wizards choose to specialize in different magical schools, Clerics could focus their clerical abilities depending on the part of the church they belong to.

 

[Yair]

All the suggestions above sound good to me.
Personally I would go with a regular polytheistic pantheon, where the different gods are seen by the mystics as aspects and personalizations of the one god but the common man probably thinks of them as seperate. (In fact I did, in FR.) But that's just me.

 

[LizardWizard]

Most implementations of monotheism that I have seen usually fragment The One God's essence in different "saints", "servitor spirits", "orders", etc., each with a list of several domains.
Although it is somewhat blasphemous from my own perspective, it is one of the most feasible ways to handle monotheism.

 

[morbiczer]

I have plans to introduce a monotheistic religion into my new gameworld. I allways thougth that haveing a monotheistic religion would make it easier to me to build a believable world. (More similar to RL medieval times.) Other religions (and gods) would exist, but the main religion would be this monotheistic one.

It would have saints (or saint-like beings) who were originaly living persons, but did some great deeds and so became minions to the god. They could fill the roles that different gods play in polytheistic religions (for example granting different domains.) Most people would simply venerate (is this the right word?) the god, but some would dedicate themselves to these special beings directly (similar to monastic orders IRL), and even normal people could call upon them in special cases.

I think this will give me a good mix.

Or you could use the version introduced by George R R Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire series. There are seven gods (Father, Mother, Maid, Crone, Warrior, Smith, Stranger), but they are allways venerated together. No seperate churches, no real seperate priests. Some people (and priests) even think that they are only seven aspects of the same god.

 

[Shallown]

I ran a mono-theological world once. I basically had one God that had Aspects and saints. An Aspect would be an idea or concept like conflict then under that Aspect where the saints who held specific areas like A saint of negotiation, or a saint of war. Basically you would choose domains on the basis of saints. What saints did is the interceded for the cleric on their behalf to commune with the God. Sort of based on catholic structure of saints. They aren't minor Gods or anything like that they were once living people who exemplified certain ideas and because of that they cam to God's attention and therefore can help the cleric to come to his attention.

Christianity has many sects orders etc even within single religions like Catholicism. Build your domains around those sects and orders. If someone worships The God in an effort to pick choice domains let them have the spells but no powers and instead give them a generic power instead so they can't pick and choose choice domains.


I used it for several campaigns but ended up discarding it due to the lack of conflict between the inner sects. I didn't handle it the way I now know it should have been handled having studied a little more history and realizing that the sects would actually war with each other at times. I think my hang up is it wasn't flowing well the fact that in a D&D based world that Gods have physical evidence they exist so itis hard to argue/war over beliefs when there were physical proof of how was right. Why a God would encourage( by granting two sides clerical gifts/spells) or allow that level of conflict I couldn't resolve to my satisfaction. It may have just been my mind set at the time.

It may prove interesting to introduce heretical relgions brought in myoutsiders and such. Most my gaminggroups never were much interested in relgious conflicts , just are they good guys or bad guys. Moral delimnas couldn't be too ambigious.

later

 

[MDSnowman]

I've been playing around with a concept for a campaign world. The main factor of it would be that there is one god. The one thing I can't get around is how to handle cleric domains. How would you go about dolling out domains to clerics? If you just let them pick, I would think that everyone would pick the ones that give the best benefits (such as War with it's free Martial Weapon Prof. and Weapon Focus bonus). Can anyone offer up an alternative idea?

I made a monotheogical campaign world... I made all of the domains avaiable to clerics, but I broke the religion into different sects... Crazed Fire Worshippers would have a smaller choice Maybe Chaos, Fire, Destruction, and Evil. Meanwhile the religious zealots would have Law, Evil, and War. Missionarys could choose from Travel, Healing, Protection and the like. Really just use your imagination when making sects... I had filled a 10 page word documents with one paragraph descriptions of sects following Astoak [My singular Neutrally Aligned God].

I also included Demon Lords in general as a counter point, each one operated much as they did in BoVD, but no cult has the support system that the Overall Church of Astoak has, nor the fleiblity of domains.

Edit: btw I dealt with the War Domain power easily... Astoak, no matter what the sect had a prefeered weapon, the war hammer, which meant that clerics everywhere were easy to identify by their use of the war hammer.

 

[jmucchiello]

I would do it by religious training. If you've read the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz it's an easy model to understand. Each order believes the same basic tenets. Each just focuses their training with different weights on each.

Another way to deal with domains is to eliminate some of them (or toss them to the druid - druids seem more likely to take elemental aspects than monotheisitic priests). There are only 22 domains in the PHB. Eliminating the elements and the alignment domains gets you down to 14. Prune a few more away and give them to the demons. Do people worship demons in your world?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

My DM has a world with only two deities. They are not good or evil, even though alignment still remains in the game. I believe one represents nature and the other represents progress (guess who the elves usually worship), and now there's an army of "followers of the Two Gods" going around fighting the elves.

It's probably more complicated than that, but our characters have been out of the loop for 500 years, so what do we know?