D&D 5E What D&D should learn from a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones)

[GMMichael]

What about a setting where the gods really were watching over people, really were helping them where they could? Really were pushing agendas? I don't think any setting really has much of that, and it might be cool to see one not where the gods were dead/banished, but where they were more present.

Wasn't that setting called Exalted?

Or...legendary Greece?

Anyway, I'm on book 4 of SoIaF, and there have been almost zero divine interventions. Almost zero magic use too, but it's starting to grow.

What if the gods had a direct hand in things? It might look like the old testament: plagues, lightning bolts, and floods would be pretty commonplace wherever you found sinners.

 

[Hussar]

Scarred Lands looks a lot like this.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Wasn't that setting called Exalted?

Er, no, not at all. Exalted's gods are all obsessively playing what is effectively a celestial MMO. They're the opposite of involved, and particularly don't generally care about morality.

Or...legendary Greece?

Caring about morality, having agendas that are in any way "agendas", rather than y'know, sexy urges, emotional outbursts, and general childishness? Not really my memory of the Greek myths. At all. I'm talking about gods that actually care about the stuff they're god of and actually interact with the setting.

What if the gods had a direct hand in things? It might look like the old testament: plagues, lightning bolts, and floods would be pretty commonplace wherever you found sinners.

That rather presumes that there is a universal definition of "sinner", which is a very Christian viewpoint, and not what I meant, and that the gods are all capable of inflicting these things and not holding each other back or the like. I think it would be a hell of a lot more complex than that, especially as I doubt most god would be quite as, well, extreme/aggressive as some of the stuff in the OT.

 

[Bluenose]

Er, no, not at all. Exalted's gods are all obsessively playing what is effectively a celestial MMO. They're the opposite of involved, and particularly don't generally care about morality.

If you consider the Exalted themselves to be divine (and I think they're at least semi-divine) then you could justifiably say they're heavily involved in the world, but then the Exalted are part of the world rather than separate from it.

Caring about morality, having agendas that are in any way "agendas", rather than y'know, sexy urges, emotional outbursts, and general childishness? Not really my memory of the Greek myths. At all. I'm talking about gods that actually care about the stuff they're god of and actually interact with the setting.

Sounds like FR.

Glorantha perhaps comes close, though direct involvement is rather frowned upon since it risks the Great Compromise and the return of Chaos. The return of Chaos would probably be bad, in a end-of-the-world sense of bad. They certainly push agendas, involve themselves in their worshippers' lives, pay attention to their areas of interest, although interaction between God and Worshipper usually involved the worshipper going to the god's place rather than the god manifesting in the world.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If you consider the Exalted themselves to be divine (and I think they're at least semi-divine) then you could justifiably say they're heavily involved in the world, but then the Exalted are part of the world rather than separate from it.

Sure, but they're explicitly not gods (even though they can certainly hit "old testament" levels of power at the high end), and there are "actual" gods, so...

Sounds like FR.

Glorantha perhaps comes close, though direct involvement is rather frowned upon since it risks the Great Compromise and the return of Chaos. The return of Chaos would probably be bad, in a end-of-the-world sense of bad. They certainly push agendas, involve themselves in their worshippers' lives, pay attention to their areas of interest, although interaction between God and Worshipper usually involved the worshipper going to the god's place rather than the god manifesting in the world.

Glorantha is a setting I really need to actually read about. I have HeroQuest somewhere, but have never really read it, like, properly.

 

[DMZ2112]

Caring about morality, having agendas that are in any way "agendas", rather than y'know, sexy urges, emotional outbursts, and general childishness? Not really my memory of the Greek myths. At all. I'm talking about gods that actually care about the stuff they're god of and actually interact with the setting.

I've always found D&D's peculiar combination of effective godhead and open pantheism fascinating, because it's pretty unique.

Moorcock's characters have the sort of conflicts you mention with the divine beings in his settings. They are certainly concerned with morality and pursue at least one major agenda. In the same vein the chaos gods of Warhammer are definitely agenda driven, although those agendas are not particularly complex. They are also all very selfish, however.

Fritz Leiber's Nehwon has thousands of gods, and you get the impression that worshipping several of them or blaspheming one or more of them carries little penalty, but by the same token they are not for the most part particularly powerful or relevant.

I don't think gods in fantasy fiction are particularly popular right now. We went from a pantheon being a setting staple (and obviously having a dramatic effect on the development of D&D) in the 70s to settings in the 80s and 90s where gods were being banished, exiled, and killed, and now they're just kind of passe.

Although baseline D&D has always suggested an open pantheism, you can see this progression in the specific D&D settings. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms are traditional high fantasy worlds with gods like those you'd find on Nehwon or in Sanctuary. Then Dragonlance comes along and proposes a world where those gods had left for a time, by their own volition.

Then the Time of Troubles occurs in Forgotten Realms and the gods are banished from the heavens and made mortal -- some of them die. Then Dark Sun kills all its gods, Planescape opens a sort of "See the Houses of the Stars" tour of the outer planes, based in a city completely impervious to divine presence, Birthright kills all of its gods, and Dragonlance sends all of its gods into self-imposed exile.

And finally, in Eberron, we have the first D&D setting where there are gods, but they never contact the world directly, relying exclusively on the granting of divine magic to make their presence known. Pretty sterile.

Golarion is, of course, a counterpoint, harkening back to the Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms design.

I suspect it is related to the secularization of society, but that's just an educated guess. You can definitely find the sort of gods you are talking about in fiction if you're willing to go back forty or fifty years, but it never quite looks like D&D. The need to accommodate players left its mark on D&D religion in a way that just isn't reflected in extant fiction.

 

[Umbran]

Caring about morality, having agendas that are in any way "agendas", rather than y'know, sexy urges, emotional outbursts, and general childishness? Not really my memory of the Greek myths. At all. I'm talking about gods that actually care about the stuff they're god of and actually interact with the setting.

Greek gods interact with the setting pretty frequently. You know, creating heroes, making wars happen, and all that?

The disconnect may be in terms of "caring about the stuff they're god of". That, I suggest, is a modern invention, based on an incomplete, naive grasp of the pantheons and religions in question. We have taken the idea of "god of the X", but not taken the context with it, leaving the impression that these were gods of abstracts, and that it was the abstracts that were the important bit. But the gods also serve the purpose of educating us about life - so they're also *people*. The stories we have of them are people-stories, about people-rivalries, hurt feelings, and all that jazz, rather than about some deific conflict of abstracts.

Poseidon is god of the sea. It is his realm and seat of power. Sure, folks worship and make sacrifice so that he won't be cheesed off, to gain his blessing on endeavors - but that's workaday mortal stuff. When the ruler of a mortal kingdom insults his ladies, he sends a sea monster to go ravage the kingdom. So, Andromeda gets chained to a rock, and all.

Is this about the agenda of the sea? No. It is about how people don't like to be insulted.

 

[Mallus]

What should D&D learn from GoT?

If you're going to do something, do it well. While also being terribly lucky (this applies more to the show than the books).

Aside from that, I can't think of anything useful/not facile. Westeros removes too much of the standard D&D fantasy palette to be useful for most campaigns, while also demanding players interested in complex politicking coupled with low-level realism, ie it's Harn, meaning D&D isn't going to go chasing the audience of a niche setting/setting with more admirers than players.

As for lethality - people die in Westeros when their story is over/it serves the big messy plot. That's considered anathema to most gamers, ie the ahem, simulationist tendencies of GoT have been greatly exaggerated... actually, they don't exist at all.

 

[pemerton]

We went from a pantheon being a setting staple (and obviously having a dramatic effect on the development of D&D) in the 70s to settings in the 80s and 90s where gods were being banished, exiled, and killed, and now they're just kind of passe.

WotC's most recent setting is the default 4e world and cosmology. Gods (and other quasi-divine beings) are fundamental to that setting, and figure prominently in background material and epic-tier monster catalogues.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Greek gods interact with the setting pretty frequently. You know, creating heroes, making wars happen, and all that?

The disconnect may be in terms of "caring about the stuff they're god of". That, I suggest, is a modern invention, based on an incomplete, naive grasp of the pantheons and religions in question. We have taken the idea of "god of the X", but not taken the context with it, leaving the impression that these were gods of abstracts, and that it was the abstracts that were the important bit. But the gods also serve the purpose of educating us about life - so they're also *people*. The stories we have of them are people-stories, about people-rivalries, hurt feelings, and all that jazz, rather than about some deific conflict of abstracts.

Poseidon is god of the sea. It is his realm and seat of power. Sure, folks worship and make sacrifice so that he won't be cheesed off, to gain his blessing on endeavors - but that's workaday mortal stuff. When the ruler of a mortal kingdom insults his ladies, he sends a sea monster to go ravage the kingdom. So, Andromeda gets chained to a rock, and all.

Is this about the agenda of the sea? No. It is about how people don't like to be insulted.

I guess that's true, depending on which myths one looks at. The Iliad certainly has them behaving in rather territorial, side-taking ways. I guess they're more "gangster" and less "activist", though, perhaps that's the distinction I'm looking.