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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8584783" data-attributes="member: 5948">Yeah, I'd agree with that partially.There have been D&D settings which used Vaguely Christian-like Religions.  3e Ravenloft, for instance, leaned heavily into the church of Ezra as a Christianity substitute, I assume for the reason that they were heavily into emulating the Gothic horror genre and christianity tends to be right at the core of that.  But it was kinda skin-deep.  Ezra was the default religion in most (not all) places, and riffed off a lot of the themes, images etc of historical (mostly Renaissance and post-Renaissance) Christianity, but it didn't really inform and permeate society in the way that Christianity did in historical Europe.  Like many D&D worlds, the gods and religions existed so there was somewhere for adventuring clerics to come from, not so much to propagate a belief system that was accepted and acted on broadly across society.As for FR - I'd argue that FR society (such as it is, for such a diverse and disunited place) actually kinda makes a strange sort of sense given the number and nature of gods it has.  It's a place where there's loads of gods, no god (or even any plausible alliance of gods) is powerful enough to have its worshippers dominate and force all the others out except at a very local level, there's certain powerful non-godly individuals that could plausibly challenge some of the weaker gods and even supplant them, and the widespread availability of high-level divination magic means that a sufficiently patient and determined diviner or researcher could, after asking enough questions, learn most of the truths about the power, nature secrets etc of the gods.  It's a diverse, brawling, confused, redundant, non-hierarchical pantheon, and it leads to a society organised (or disorganised) in a similar manner.  In most places in Faerun for instance, there's no concept of the Divine Right of Kings or the sacred obligations linking royalty, nobility, and peasantry in the great chain of being - because as soon as you start talking 'divine' or 'sacred' then the first question asked is 'according to which god?'  And it might not cut much ice with your Chauntea-worshipping peasantry whether or not Tyr (or Bane, or Siamorphe, or whoever) has decreed that Family X has their divine blessing to rule.  And so you get a nobility largely founded in power and tradition rather than religiously endorsed legitimacy, which conveniently for a D&D world, means that there can be a bit more social mobility and your peasant PC can end up moving into the nobility if they earn and/or seize a place there.</blockquote>

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