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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9406452" data-attributes="member: 18">Personally my reaction to "religion in D&D" is "It'd be a good idea".I mean, that's snarky but I'm serious, because there's really only one D&D setting which actually has religion/faith in it. Eberron.There are a couple of others where it's sort of borderline - Taladas (not Anaslon) for example treats religion as religion/faith in a way that at least somewhat resembles the human experience of religion/faith.Most D&D settings? Nope. It's just confused, unimaginative nonsense. You can't have faith/religion in the same way if the gods actually do walk the earth. It's not religious faith at that point, it's more like having faith in your boss at work. Faith isn't really even the right word in English for that, more like trust, or reliance. And the religion elements feel completely lame in that context too, because why are you building churches and so on, why are you having these ceremonies and so on? It's just unimaginative fantasy authors failing to follow through on their concept. There's a reason that societies where there's an actual belief that the gods are actually around and active in the world (rather than the more distant and abstract monotheist notions) tend to be keen on sacrifices and public worship (if any) and usually strongly believe in spirits etc. (i.e. animistic beliefs) as well as bigger gods. Yet in these settings, there's always an insistence that religion basically works like modern monotheism in most ways, whilst simultaneously having priests with massive magical powers, gods turning up in person with some regularity, or being visit-able, and so on.So I think if you're creating a setting, you need to pick a lane!Like, do you want actual religious faith/devotion and religion? For religion and politics to intermix in historical-like ways? Then you can't have the gods walking the earth in like, living memory (and given so many beings in D&D live hundreds of years, that's a very long time!). You can still have Clerics etc., but the fact that all Clerics etc. get the same amount of power, and there aren't stronger and weaker gods and so on would not escape people's notice.Or do you want The Gods Walk The Earth, as it were, in which case faith becomes essentially trust or even simple "following orders". This is quite often seen in JRPGs and anime, I would note. I feel like Japan having a partially animistic approach to religion and the world even to the present makes Japanese creatives typically better able to handle these themes in a way that makes sense, compared to many Western ones. And if you do this, like, follow through. For example, holy wars are going to be exceptionally brutal and horrific if the god in question is actually directly handing orders to the people in charge.What you really don't want to do is just create another bland mish-mash of mid-century (mis)understandings of Greco-Roman(-Norse) religion, combined with weird out-takes from Christianity, and try and both have gods who definitely 100% exist and constantly interact with the world but are also "distant and mysterious", because all you do there is make a bland mess. Which is exactly what the "religion" in the FR, GH and main Dragonlance and so on is. Bland, implausible messes created by people who on the whole, lacked both the desire and ability to look seriously at how religion would work. I kind of forgive it because it was "building the plane whilst it was flying", but it's not great. It's not something to aspire to or emulate.</blockquote>

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