Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9406460" data-attributes="member: 4937">Religion in my game is heavily based on historical reality in antiquity.  Although I don't explicitly reference any real world belief my game is strongly influenced by Greek myth, Hinduism, and east African religious practice.   There are over 1000 gods and I've never documented them all and I make up many of them as a go.  I often describe the world as what if Etruscan rather than Roman world views came to dominate the culture.Generally this is occurring as a backdrop as unless the player is playing a Cleric or a Paladin (or to lesser extent a Shaman) they tend not to engage heavily with religious practice, and when then they do they aren't engaging with religious practice in the way a typical member of the community is since their duties tend to give them a henotheistic outlook rather than the polytheistic outlook that most NPCs have - most NPCs have absolutely no problem offering up homage to a god that doesn't represent their own beliefs closely or at all which is an outlook super foreign to the modern world.  Gods in my campaign are active and pervasive and carnal and their cults are active and pervasive and heavily entwined with government power and are pervasive in the life and rituals of a community.  You will probably meet at least one god in the course of my campaigns and they are basically just another NPC occasionally working a minor miracle but generally preoccupied with their own complex affairs.  Their machinations are always sort of bubbling behind the scenes as their cults via for power and influence over the cultural affairs of the community.In my opinion, by far the best book on religion in D&D is Aaron Loeb's "Book of the Righteous", and it helped crystalize for me what I wanted from my vaguer ideas from early play.  I even stole a few deities, albeit not his excellent cosmology because I didn't want to go down to a dozen deities having already established dozens of them.  In literature, one of the few well down polytheistic settings IMO are the five gods from Bujold's Curse of Chalion, albeit IMO only as presented in the first two books before Bujold undermines her own setting.  One of the things that I absolutely insist on is that your pantheon should look like deities that average people would actually want to worship, a standard that pretty much every official D&D setting hard fails.  The worst of these is FR which is composed of very generic deities to serve the gamism of adventuring party henotheism against the evil cults - god of fighters, god of rangers, god of thieves, etc. versus the gods of baby killing, wanton destruction, and puppy kicking.One thing that absolutely goes away in my version of the game is this dual mishmash of polytheistic gods and also another layer of angels and demons.  The gods may have divine servants and messengers, but there aren't two hierarchies in the outer planes in my game.  The gods of my campaign world have semi-divine spiritual vassals and not a competing hierarchy of other spiritual beings.</blockquote>

Verification