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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2118095" data-attributes="member: 14159">Hmm, let's look at the pantheon and faiths of the Roman Empire.  You've got the Olympian deities, which were borrowed and renamed from Greece, with a few new ones like Janus just invented.  Then there is the sub-pantheon of Emperors who are worshipped as minor deities.  You've got myriad little Mystery Cults which pop up all over the place and have their followers and secrets.  You've got Mithras, a Persian god who was worshipped in the Roman society.  Also this little strange religion called Christianity which is worshipped alongside all the others (in secret) and is regarded as a strange outcast faith.  Then you throw in the "barbaric" gods of the Celts which the Romans run across, and are worshipped only by foriegners, but known to scholars of the Romans.  One neat, well organized little pantheon may look good on paper, but it often isn't like that in real life.  Big civilizations that mix with other civilizations "cross pollinate" on religion a lot.I think settings which have one huge monolithic culture across a continent, with one neat little pantheon, one human ethnic group, one language, and every government being a copy of medieval France/England/Germany is in its own way far more unrealistic.  I think one of the reasons the Realms is so popular is that the world feels "lived in", it's not all nice and neat, it's gods are a cobbled together mass of various belief systems, which some favored more in some areas and some in others.  It has a diverse set of ethnic groups, languages, and a wide variety of cultures.  Yes, a lot of those are based on the "most interesting" parts of various Earth cultures, but that is seen by many as a perk.  If a player wants to play a character inspired from a real-world culture, most of the cultures that gamers like to play appear somewhere on Abeir-Toril, and when a group goes to one of those Kingdoms it helps the DM and the players get a quick grip on the area by describing it in familiar historic and mythic terms.Some vast, complex, totally alien culture might make a good novel, but it can make for lousy gaming.  That's why I never liked Tekumel (for example); it's an interesting academic experiment, but way too alien to immerse yourself into for good roleplaying.A monolithic culture where everyone acts the same, everyone is at the same level of tech, and there is one set of gods that everybody worships under the same name and in the same fashion is easy to learn, and quick to teach players, but it seems a little oversimplifed for my tastes.</blockquote>

Verification