So I just finished reading M.A.R Barker's article on religion in fastasy roleplaying. The article hit a lot of points that I have been thinking about without particularly articulating for a while now. Anyone else feel that something as important as religion, particularly in a setting where the default assumption is that the gods really do exist, ought to get a more thorough treatment?

I was thinking about this for most of last night and it seems to me that like most other things in gaming a great deal of this will come down to your given play style. That is fine of course as many, if not most, players simply will not care about such things. However here latley I have been getting the itch do something a bit more low fantasy and "realistic", whatever that means exactly, with my gaming.

One of the larger hurdles I think with a more grounded apporach to fantasy religion is that it is going to require a great deal more thought as to how religion effect society at large. Also I think that just how much magic, what exactly it does and why it does it would have to be rather carefully thought out.

Anyone else played around with this train of thought much? Any comments or thoughts?

I understand that there really is not a particular question in this post, it is more just something that I have been kicking around.

Quote from: Arkansan;702536Anyone else feel that something as important as religion, particularly in a setting where the default assumption is that the gods really do exist, ought to get a more thorough treatment?

More thorough than what?

I haven't kicked it around much but I like to brainstorm. As in "what kinds of things (the religion) does", do you mean as a function of the religion (ex. give alms to the poor), a result of the religion (spread a common language), or something like the rituals of the religion, which in some cases (praying to mecca) would be salient in the world?

I've had some campaigns with a fairly detailed mythology/religion. I doled out info on the religion very slowly to the players throughout the campaign and let them discover the true nature of the cosmos as we went along.

Quote from: Arduin;702539More thorough than what?

Well that is one of the things I am having a hard time defining, I just feel like a lot of religions I see in fantasy gaming are very flat. Its like here is God A, he is god of chili cookoffs and porn, here is his pseudo-medieval order of clerics and that is kind of it. I don't know it just never manages to grab my attention, I think that may be part of the reason I have never played a cleric. On top of that they just never provide, to my mind, a halfway decent emulation of polytheism.

I would like to see a bit more history, a bit about how the gods relate, have they moved up or down the social scale? How do they actually affect the world? This sort of thing I guess. I suppose I may just be a bit of a stickler for this sort of thing.

shawnhartnell, as to what you were asking, yes all of those things. How did this relgion develop, how has the conception diety changed over time, are the gods moralistic, what sort of divisions are there within the faith, how does this faith inform world outlooks, what happens to the dead, how does one interact with the gods if at all, how does this inform overall view of the supernatural? All of these sorts of things.

I think with fantsy though it raises an even cooler set of questions with a lot of gameplay potential. Things like how does worship effect the gods? How do they directly interact with people, just how powerful are they? I could go on here but I am sure you get what I am on about.

Here latley I have just been thinking that there is a lot of potential in fantasy gaming that is being missed out on by not really exploring what a "fantastical" world could be like. Instead we just sort of tread the same ground playing on the same old tropes. Not to say this is a bad thing, as long as people are enjoying their gaming and what not, just something I personally am interested in.

Now of course I am sure most gamers just aren't into this sort of thing, I am not expecting to see any publisher start going into this level of detail. This is more brainstorming for a personal project, I figure if I want to see this sort of thing than I might as well drum it up myself.

More thorough than the pathetic single-paragraph treatment religion gets in most settings, which -- to quote myself -- comes out to about this:

Quote"Naseer is the God of Goatscrewing, and his priests all wear green and silver and have a goat brand on the right wrist, and their symbol is a green X, and they're Chaotic Evil, and their temples are always made of basalt."

Somewhat ironically, my most recent blog post is about just this subject.

Now yes, doing this right takes a bit of work.  The shortest writeup I have for any of my world's religions is six pages, and they average nine ... the precis for each one I hand out for quick reference in character creation is a page apiece, and I shrink down to 11-pt type to keep it on a page.  Obviously one solution to that is not to have thirty gods kicking around your settings.[/COLOR]

Quote from: Arkansan;702551On top of that they just never provide, to my mind, a halfway decent emulation of polytheism.

A fellow on a MMORPG board a bunch of years ago made a killer point that applies to most fantasy settings with multiple gods: that we don't run polytheistic settings, but henotheistic settings, where people will worship one god but ignore the rest, something people on Earth generally didn't do in polytheistic cultures.

Truth be told, if you want a very comprehensive gaming treatment of the questions you're asking, and you don't mind spending a little money, hop onto Amazon and find a copy of GURPS Religion.  Not much of it is system specific, and it goes into heavy detail into the questions you're asking and others you haven't.  Amazon will sell it to you for as little as $5 plus S&H.

Quote from: Arkansan;702551Well that is one of the things I am having a hard time defining, I just feel like a lot of religions I see in fantasy gaming are very flat. Its like here is God A, he is god of chili cookoffs and porn, here is his pseudo-medieval order of clerics and that is kind of it. I don't know it just never manages to grab my attention, I think that may be part of the reason I have never played a cleric. On top of that they just never provide, to my mind, a halfway decent emulation of polytheism.

You just need a GM that knows how to build a half way thought out world.  There is plenty of polytheistic, real world data for a GM to draw on to make a good religious setting.

Few GMs from monotheistic cultures have any idea how polytheism or pantheism works. Even real neo-pagans from those cultures tend to construct "Christianity with pagan gods at the altar". I think getting away from this would require a completely different approach; eg for Americans the way they might think about the American flag and the Constitution, or even their football team's mascot, is probably closer to pagan thinking about gods than would a Christian American's thinking about Jesus. Maybe those examples are poor or archaic, but every culture does have sacralised and taboo entities, sacred and profane spaces, and rituals of propitiation.

GURPS Religion is indeed a good discussion of Religions and the impact/role religion can play in society, as was said above.  Another suggestion to investigate regarding religion in fantasy settings is the setting of Glorantha, which was developed from its creator's exploration of Myth, in the same way as Middle Earth grew out of Tolkien's exploration of Language.

Others can probably explain it's value more eloquently than I, so I just say, have a look.  Link.

For my first IP related RPG I had to work with a setting where there were gods and they were fairly active and fractious.

For my own setting afterwards I wanted to work with a world where there are not only gods, but several pretty active hands-on type gods and how that affects a world and culture where you KNOW there is an afterlife and being flat out evil has long term after death effects. (No empowered clerics though. Though there are temples and dedicated artifacts.) Then ponder how that effects the dynamics of villains and the general populace. Negative forces have a much harder time getting traction.

Runequest from its very inception had the concept of religion built into the structure of magic. Players can only learn Rune magic by joining a cult and advancing within the religious organization to learn the runes they teach.

On the larger scale, if you know the gods exist (because magic works and clerics raise the frickin' dead), who in their right mind is going to risk an eternity in hell by worshipping an evil god? Much of your life would be a quest to find salvation -- as it was in our own history back when the vast majority of people did believe in god and the devil. Being excommunicated was a serious threat when you believed that you would roast for eternity.

Which is why we probably don't take religion too seriously in our games -- we're having too much fun slicing one another to bits to worry about whether that is a GOOD thing.

D&D and some other settings imply and at times directly prove that if someone is eveil enough and dedicated to some god then they may actually get rewarded and off the proverbial hook. At least for a little while.
D&D in particular shows again and again that if you are evil enough you can become a god.
Also likely many evil gods tell their followers they will be going to some reward. When in fact they aint.

Lots and lots of ways to go at it. Most just kinda gloss it over or treat it like real world religions where the gods are not very active in mortal affairs or have a hands-off policy. Or are only infrequently active. Though spectacular when they are.

That was one of the fun parts of OD&D and AD&D. Not only could you meet gods. You could beat them up and take their stuff!

Quote from: Arkansan;702536So I just finished reading M.A.R Barker's article on religion in fastasy roleplaying. The article hit a lot of points that I have been thinking about without particularly articulating for a while now. Anyone else feel that something as important as religion, particularly in a setting where the default assumption is that the gods really do exist, ought to get a more thorough treatment?

Is there an URL for this article?

I found it tooling around on Scribd. It is called Create a religion in your spare time for fun and profit. I would post a link but I am on my cell phone at the moment. Really an interesting article, lot of good food for thought with a nice step by step at the end on how to create what believed would be a much more natural religion for gaming.

I do dislike games where the gods are not only 'fact' in a world, they regularly take an active part, but the churches are treated like polytheistic Christianity (except for the obligatory Evil Religion that acts like a cult), and "faith" is supposed to be a meaningful concept.