Real Religion in Adventure Design

[Maxperson]

Are genuine believers the target audience, or do they even play the game? I knew a few believers growing up that were not allowed to play at all, even as a paladin battling devils. It was the 80s though so things may have changed.

Things have changed. I know many true believers who play, including a group who gets dispensation from their priest to play D&D, just in case.

 

[John Dallman]

You can't put tobacco in it and you can't use it to smoke anything so the answer is no. Does Pendragon represent real religion? Of course it does. It's a very narrow representation of an idealized version of paganism and Christianity but it's still representing something real even if it's not real itself.

Be careful of that one. Pendragon uses Pelagianism - Wikipedia as its Christianity, which has been defined as heretical since 418CE. It does not make a big fuss about this, but it's there.

In broad outline, Pelagianism does not claim that Christianity is the only way to salvation. It does say that it's the best route, but it admits of others. You'll understand that there are christians today to whom that would be a major problem, and others who would have no trouble with it. I spotted this during a Pendragon campaign, and congratulated Greg Stafford on it. He was pleased that someone had noticed.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

It's hard to be sure about modern presentations - eg is John Boorman Christian? - but I think what the mediaeval and early modern authors wrote probably did bear upon real religion ie theirs.

In some cases. I'm inclined to think that early Arthurian Romance illuminates Medieval Christianity in the same way that The Omen illuminates 20th Century Christianity; the author(s) took some elements which would make for a good story and ran with it.

You mentioned above that the Grail was a "Christian" idea and I'm not sure that it is - I mean it is now, post facto - but Chrétien basically invented it for his Arthurian stories; maybe drawing on Welsh and Breton myth. But it only entered popular consciousness as a Christian artifact in the centuries after the Arthurian stories gained traction.

Malory definitely deals with religion (Knightly Piety, "lay chivalric Christianity") in a much more thoughtful and serious way, uses rich symbolism and asks important questions about the nature of holiness. But he is operating more than 200 years after the original Arthurian stories were committed to writing. His views are also rather idiosyncratic. They are also key to Pendragon, of course.

Nothing representative is real. Take a gander at the picture below, is it a pipe? You can't put tobacco in it and you can't use it to smoke anything so the answer is no. Does Pendragon represent real religion? Of course it does. It's a very narrow representation of an idealized version of paganism and Christianity but it's still representing something real even if it's not real itself.

Feel free to change doesn't represent to doesn't faithfully portray if you feel that the original gist of my words was insufficiently precise.

Pendragon uses Pelagianism

I'd never thought about that. I guess it does.

 

[MGibster]

Feel free to change doesn't represent to doesn't faithfully portray if you feel that the original gist of my words was insufficiently precise.

I wasn't trying to engage in a petty bout of pedantry here. But I'm not sure how much it really matters whether religion is being faithfully portrayed.

 

[Aldarc]

Be careful of that one. Pendragon uses Pelagianism - Wikipedia as its Christianity, which has been defined as heretical since 418CE. It does not make a big fuss about this, but it's there.

In broad outline, Pelagianism does not claim that Christianity is the only way to salvation. It does say that it's the best route, but it admits of others. You'll understand that there are christians today to whom that would be a major problem, and others who would have no trouble with it. I spotted this during a Pendragon campaign, and congratulated Greg Stafford on it. He was pleased that someone had noticed.

There's more to it than that, and that "broad outline" doesn't cover the main problem that Church Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Jerome had with it. But well-spotted, indeed.

 

[Umbran]

You mentioned above that the Grail was a "Christian" idea and I'm not sure that it is - I mean it is now, post facto - but Chrétien basically invented it for his Arthurian stories; maybe drawing on Welsh and Breton myth.

The first known appearance of the grail was in Perceval, le Conte du Graal (by Chrétien, aka The Story of the Grail, written somewhere between 1180 and 1191). In that poem, the grail itself is not portrayed as having any supernatural powers. It is merely a dish (not a cup, but more like a large, wide, flat bowl), carrying a single communion wafer. As written, if there is magic, it seems to be in the wafer, or in the piety of the one¹ who can eat the wafer and be sustained, not the grail. If there is a connection to Celtic myth in the poem, it is more strongly and directly in similarities between the Fisher King and Bran the Blessed. That invites the thought of the grail-as-cauldron, though there's not much explicit support for it in the text.

The Grail becomes a holy object when Robert de Boron writes Joseph d'Arimathie something like a decade later. This is where the Holy Grail as the cup from the Last Supper seems to originate in the Matter of Britain.

The Vulgate Cycle (aka the Lancelot-Grail) is completed by 1235, and the Post-Vulgate Cycle by 1240. And these two, more than anything else, were the basis for Morte d'Arthur, which is the most well-known version of the Arthur/Grail myth, which is published in 1485.

But it only entered popular consciousness as a Christian artifact in the centuries after the Arthurian stories gained traction.

I am not sure we can really claim it took centuries after Chreitian to become "popular consciousness", if only because claiming to know what stories were being popularly told in, say, 1290 is a bit of a bold assertion, hey what?

What we do know is that authors kept coming back to the Matter of Britain. You want to claim they came back to it, but is wasn't well known in the populace?




1. Depending on the version of the story you get, it is either the Fisher King himself, or his even-more crippled father.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I am not sure we can really claim it took centuries after Chreitian to become "popular consciousness", if only because claiming to know what stories were being popularly told in, say, 1290 is a bit of a bold assertion, hey what?

I'm not really sure of the point of this hair-splitting, but feel free to substitute during the centuries which followed for in the centuries after, if in the centuries after means centuries after to you.

What we do know is that authors kept coming back to the Matter of Britain. You want to claim they came back to it, but is wasn't well known in the populace?

If by "populace" you mean to include farmers in Shropshire as opposed to literati in late 12th century Aquitaine listening to troubadours reciting poetry in Occitan, then yes.

My point is that the Grail is a product of the Arthurian "craze" of the Middle Ages, wasn't current in Christianity before then, and took some time to percolate. It doesn't strike me as particularly controversial.

 

[pemerton]

Feel free to change doesn't represent to doesn't faithfully portray if you feel that the original gist of my words was insufficiently precise.

I'm not sure what the criterion is for faithfully portray? Does The End of the Affair faithfully portray Catholicism? Well, it does faithfully convey the convictions of at least one Catholic - it's author!

Leonard Cohen, in his song Suzanne, tells us that "Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water, and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower; and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him he said, 'All men will be sailors then, until the see shall free them'". Cohen himself was not Christian; I don't know if, when he wrote those words, he believed in God at all. But I don't think that means he was wrong to write his song, and to try to convey an idea of the relationship of Christ to humanity (both his own, and that of everyone else).

When I think of real religions in RPGing, there are a lot of ways of approaching it. One of those is a historically accurate description of what was typical of adherents in a certain past time and place; of course that is quite compatible with scepticism or atheism on the part of the game designer and game participants! Another is a presentation of religion, or religious ideas, that does the same sort of artistic work as Mallory (whom you mentioned upthread) or Greene or Cohen or the Evanescence song Tourniquet. This is consistent with unbelief also (qv Cohen) but might be seen as an attempt to "think inside" a certain religious idea or ideal. Just as in literature, or film, or the visual arts, so in RPGing we can ask whether historical authenticity helps, or even is essential, to truly understanding a particular religious ideal, but I think inevitably this is something on which opinions will differ. Star Wars's presentation of certain Daoist and Zen ideas is obviously a little bowdlerised, but I don't think that rules it out of bounds!

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not sure what the criterion is for faithfully portray? Does The End of the Affair faithfully portray Catholicism? Well, it does faithfully convey the convictions of at least one Catholic - it's author!

Leonard Cohen, in his song Suzanne, tells us that "Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water, and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower' and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him he said, 'All men will be sailors then, until the see shall free them'". Cohen himself was not Christian; I don't know if, when he wrote those words, he believed in God at all. But I don't think that means he was wrong to write his song, and to try to convey an idea of the relationship of Christ to humanity (both his own, and that of everyone else).

I was thinking about Leonard Cohen on this topic as well. He actually invokes Jesus a lot, yet he was Jewish (while also being a Zen Monk---though he maintained his religion was Judaism). I found, coming from a Christian background but with one side of the family that was Jewish, that his point of view felt incredibly refreshing the first time I heard Suzanne or in another song when he referenced the Beatitudes. And this particular line of lyrics is so beautiful. If anything I think it is important for people to step outside their shoes, outside their religion and their culture and explore others, even if it is just artistically in a song, poem, book or even a game. I can't pretend to know exactly what Cohen was thinking in Suzanne (it is a very complex song for sure in terms of lyrical content), but that is a line that resonated with me in both times of belief and doubt.

 

[Bedrockgames]

.

When I think of real religions in RPGing, there are a lot of ways of approaching it. One of those is a historically accurate description of what was typical of adherents in a certain past time and place; of course that is quite compatible with scepticism or atheism on the part of the game designer and game participants! Another is a presentation of religion, or religious ideas, that does the same sort of artistic work as Mallory (whom you mentioned upthread) or Greene or Cohen or the Evanescence song Tourniquet. This is consistent with unbelief also (qv Cohen) but might be seen as an attempt to "think inside" a certain religious idea or ideal. Just as in literature, or film, or the visual arts, so in RPGing we can ask whether historical authenticity helps, or even is essential, to truly understanding a particular religious ideal, but I think inevitably this is something on which opinions will differ. Star Wars's presentation of certain Daoist and Zen ideas is obviously a little bowdlerised, but I don't think that rules it out of bounds!

This. There are many ways to approach religion in games. You point to two that I have impulses to explore myself at different times (there are times you want to take a step back, try to be objective, their are time you want to explore something from within or even celebrate it---and there are times you may want to criticize. I think the mistake people make isn't say taking the historically accurate approach, taking the skeptical approach, or taking the celebratory approach, it is thinking that is the only way one ought to engage religion in RPGs or in art.