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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 8729515" data-attributes="member: 22779">I get what you're saying, but, I wonder if that's a very North American modern view of things.  From a personal point of view, where I live in Japan, and I see the cultural impact of these rituals every day.  Every home has their ancestor shrine in some corner of the house, with pictures and fresh fruit or sake placed there every day.  This weekend is Obon - an ancestor festival where everyone heads out their family tomb, spends the day cleaning things up and making offerings.  And there are these sorts of things all the time. Local shrines where people make offerings, larger shrines where people make pilgrimages to on certain events - births, going to university, getting a new job, getting a new car (watching Korean priests put a dead dried fish in the trunk of a brand new car where it would stay forever was a new experience for me), that sort of thing.I think that it's so removed from how we, as Westerners, approach religion that it can be very hard to appreciate the level of, I guess the right word would be, devotion that non-Christian faiths can have in people's day to day lives.  I mean, Japan is probably the least religious country I've ever visited.  They really are.  But, the level of faith here is astonishing.   I'm phrasing that badly, but, it's really hard to explain.  They think we're bizarre for heading to church on Sundays.  Why would you go to church on a specific day when every day is church day?  You just have your church in your home.  If there's some observance to be made, then you make a special trip.It's a really different perspective. To give you an idea though, I could walk to I have no idea how many local shrines (some no bigger than a telephone booth) within a 30 minute walk of my house. --------One of the other big differences, I think, especially for North Americans, is the lack of understanding of deep history.  Nothing man made in America or Canada is more than a couple of centuries old.  You find older structures in Mexico, I suppose, but, again, that's pretty removed from people's everyday lives.  The average Torontonian can't see a building more than 200 years old unless they go somewhere else.But, D&D settings are OLD.  Very old.  Which means all this religious stuff accumulates.  I've got a shrine a short distance from my house that has been in continuous use since the 8th century AD.  There's just nothing like that in North America.  And, for most players, being from Canada or America (and most game designers as well), you can really see it.  In something like the Sword Coast, which has been continuously inhabited by intelligent, and more importantly, believers of some sort of faith, for centuries or even millennia, there should be shrines, temples and holy sites piled one on top of another.  They should be freaking EVERYWHERE.  But, you never really see that detailed in the setting material.  No little shrines/temples or whatnot.  There's "churches" in every town, sure, but, usually only one or two.  That's not very believable.  There should be a bajillion of these things everywhere.</blockquote>

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