Quote from: RPGPundit;410475I'm actually challenging the fact that there aren't enough of either of these kinds of settings.

RPGPundit

I wrote settings that fit both. Funny that. I must have been presciently preparing for this discussion.

High Valor (Monotheism is true, the High Lord is the one true god.)

Tribes of Mother Night, has the latter. The original god was Mother Night, and she had two sons. Eur and Haelot. She retreated and let her sons grow--but they grew eventually as rivals.  I won't go into the long mythology, but one culture worshiped Haelot to appease his fury.

Humans you see were the children of Eur, and Haelot's creation "woman."  The ones that kept faith with Eur and Mother Night were given the ability to become animals to hide from Haelot. (Eur fashioned the world and animals, Haelot the sun.)  

The culture that appeased Haelot with worship became a patriarchal sun-worshiping one, and he eventually seemed to tone down his fury. Of course his religion has those who truly believe and those who abuse its power for their own sake.

Of course the game has prejudice as a theme, the interplay of religion vs true piety, and other things like that. It's all basically to play the game around. Sure you could use it just to fight monsters and take their stuff, but I wrote it with more social gaming in mind.  Join mercenaries and fight for Llalheim  Be one of the Tribes and fight for life against prejudice and near extermination? Hunt relics of another age when the rage of Haelot smashed cities with his divine power? Survive in the Shining Empire of Ylosia, was the Witchhunters sniff at every door, and the priesthood grows more corrupt, finding "witches" everywhere they sniff wealth or power?


Of course the mythology may be just that--myth. Some can do magic with fate's threads, some call upon light, others darkness, some master the ways of the world through adoration of the path of Eur. Do they know the truth? Or one brand of it? Is there an absolute truth or is all the mythology veiling something else?

Someday I'll get a new edition of that done. Gah so many games to write.



Of course I've been gaming a long, long time. So it is quite possible I've notes for other settings of other types as well. (Although both HV and Tribes were published.)

To my less than encyclopaedic knowledge, FR is actually a peculiar setting because there is no doubt that all the gods exist individually.  There are no mortal sceptics in a world where the gods occasionally manifest as avatars and kick the snot out of each other in broad daylight.

In other polytheistic settings there are religions and sects with magic-using priests, but there's no clear indication that their powers are granted by the specific god they worship, a single deity of many aspects, a neutral, ego-less Force-like energy or whatever else, so there's plenty of room for disbelief and cultishness even in settings where faith grants supernatural power.

I think the presentation of D&D sourcebooks is largely responsible for the peculiar renderings of polytheism in the game.  Whenever an entire range of something is presented, it tends be accepted that all of these things are present in the game world, so when Torm and Tiamat are presented side-by-side in the deity section of a setting book it leads to an assumption that both religions are roughly equal, when in fact Tormism may be an overwhelmingly popular religion while Tiamat worshippers gather at tiny shrines, or are non-existent or outlawed in most places.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410473And of course, you can have games (like Forward... to Adventure!) where there's no difference in the magic system between priests and wizards (they use the same spell lists), so that magical power is not even partially monopolized by the priesthood.

One wrinkle could be that like gestures and verbal incantation, faith is also a path to manipulating magic. Magic is a universal force in the setting and a person of strong faith can cast spells because it allows them to focus their will in one of the ways that permits the casting of spells. The more intense one's faith is the more powerful magic that can be wielded using this path.

So truth of religion can be just as mysterious as our own world but priests can have their spells.

Quote from: estar;410515One wrinkle could be that like gestures and verbal incantation, faith is also a path to manipulating magic. Magic is a universal force in the setting and a person of strong faith can cast spells because it allows them to focus their will in one of the ways that permits the casting of spells. The more intense one's faith is the more powerful magic that can be wielded using this path.

So truth of religion can be just as mysterious as our own world but priests can have their spells.

One book I have read draws the line between magic and faith quite simply as this: Faith propitiates, Magic compels. Yet other than that they tend to look mostly the same in early human cultures.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410439I'm not theologian, but this seems dubious.  I can see this applying to the ancient Hebrews, but Christianity for a long time as acknowledged only one god, and it's pretty much one of the core tenants of Islam.

But the devil is by almost any defintion a god.

Islam accepts the old testamant where God triumphs over Baal and the Gods of the Egyptians (who you knote can turn their staves to snakes and perfom other lesser magicks)
Now theologically the argument might be that there is only one God but their are lesser beings with a variety of demiurgical power who can grant mortals power over the mundane be they Djinn, angels, devils, demons or saints. By any rational description these are gods or demi-gods at the very least.

So it all depends on how you define the word God I guess.

All this interestingly reminds me of a joke by Jimmy Carr. ' Saying you don't beleive in magic but you do believe in God is a bit like saying you don't have sex with dogs, apart from labradores.'

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;410460Yes, but "divine magic" isn't very visible, it's generally ambiguous at best to many eyes, and people of different beliefs can cite "miracles" or other "divine magic" coming from their deity or conception of the spirit world. Without ambiguity and subtlety in divine interventions, the one god ends up looking like a schmuck.

Not always true the 'magic' of the Marabouts (Islamic saints found across the Magreb) is highly visible and is tied to their baraka and its essence can actually be stollen by others.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410090Branching off from the "eastern promise"/arabian settings thread, let's discuss here why the fuck game-setting designers feel like they "have to" use polytheism in their fantasy settings, even in settings that are allegedly inspired by cultures or periods of history that were absolutely tied to a monotheistic religion?

WTF is the problem? Are they scared to do it? Or can they just not envision how to do it well?

RPGPundit

Likely they are scared of it, and find it "boring."  It can't be nearly as cool as the trite stuff in their heads.

Of course Dragon Warrior's Land of Legend and The Fantasy Trip's Cidri do include monthesim and don't shy away at all from basically cutting and pasting history.

Quote from: jibbajibba;410521Not always true the 'magic' of the Marabouts (Islamic saints found across the Magreb) is highly visible and is tied to their baraka and its essence can actually be stollen by others.

You've seen it, then?

Quote from: Esgaldil;410334I certainly respect that as a choice, but there seems to be an assumption in this discussion that establishing a firm and transparent cosmology is always inferior.  FRPGS so often deal with things like the afterlife, clerical power, and planar travel that I don't see why the interest in creating a culture that mirrors or comments on the culture of our opaque world should necessarily trump the interest in establishing from the top down what the cosmic rules are, which generally includes some understanding of who (if anyone) is in charge.

In this world the Irish will tell you one thing about ghosts, dragons, and fairies, and the Japanese will tell you totally contradictory things about ghosts, dragons, and fairies.  That doesn't mean that a good FRPG setting must include totally different rules for ghosts, dragons, and fairies every time the adventurers are in a new culture, or that the rules for ghosts, dragons, and fairies should be left vague.  I don't see any significant difference between ghosts, dragons, elves, and gods.

Oh, I'm not saying it is inferior in the least. But certainly, it diminishes my sense of wonder as GM. I guess I'm just tired of many ultra-detailed where may things with no impact on your game whatsoever are described down to the last nit to pick.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;410602You've seen it, then?

Of course I totally beleive in pixies, goblins, Allah, Jesus and fairies.

Well, first of all our Earth *is* politheistic: at the very least, we have different religions with different gods - not to talk about various splinter groups and heresies

But my idea is that, in a "classic" fantasy world, belief equals "real power" (i.e. spells), at least for the servants of the Church. Now, this wipes out all things interesting in monotheism: an heresy whose members still get power from the God is inherently not an heresy. The philosophic debate at this point may become interesting, but moot.

The same with "evil" groups: if they do get power, *at the very least* you have Manicheism, i.e. the idea that *two* gods exist: the God of Good and the God od Evil.

An alternative could be to tie monotheism to clerical magic (miracles) and assume that "heretics" use classic arcane magic (magic users). My knowledge of the Bible is rusty, but, IIRC, Jesus' disciples every now and then met some magic users proclaming to do "miracles" - only to promplty have his magic dispelled with dire consequences (the archetipal example is Simon Magus being owned by St. Peter).

Personally I like more polytheism: I just like, for the characters, the opportunity to choose what better represents your beliefs in life. And my last campaign was centered on an Iran-Contra like scandal caused by the "good gods" - thus the idea that they are "uber-powerful chiefs of state" is not far off...

Quote from: Esgaldil;410334I certainly respect that as a choice, but there seems to be an assumption in this discussion that establishing a firm and transparent cosmology is always inferior.  FRPGS so often deal with things like the afterlife, clerical power, and planar travel that I don't see why the interest in creating a culture that mirrors or comments on the culture of our opaque world should necessarily trump the interest in establishing from the top down what the cosmic rules are, which generally includes some understanding of who (if anyone) is in charge.

In this world the Irish will tell you one thing about ghosts, dragons, and fairies, and the Japanese will tell you totally contradictory things about ghosts, dragons, and fairies.  That doesn't mean that a good FRPG setting must include totally different rules for ghosts, dragons, and fairies every time the adventurers are in a new culture, or that the rules for ghosts, dragons, and fairies should be left vague.  I don't see any significant difference between ghosts, dragons, elves, and gods.

My take here is (and this point gets missed a lot) that just because the GM has access to an unfettered vision of the universe doesn't mean that mortals do. After all, even in our world, furious debate with conflicting interests have evolved around items for which there are demonstrable facts.

I had a home campaign that was monotheistic. There was one God, but there were also Saints. Clerics could take one Domain from the God and one Domain from a Saint. Each Saint only had one available Domain. God had all of them.

Based on this, it was easy to set up different factions within the Church, and one adventure had the characters complete a quest that helped one Faction defeat another Faction over some minor tidbit of dogma.

Quote from: danbuter;414637I had a home campaign that was monotheistic. There was one God, but there were also Saints. Clerics could take one Domain from the God and one Domain from a Saint. Each Saint only had one available Domain. God had all of them.

Based on this, it was easy to set up different factions within the Church, and one adventure had the characters complete a quest that helped one Faction defeat another Faction over some minor tidbit of dogma.

What was the quest like? Did it have a metaphysical element or was it essentially public relations/propaganda?

They recovered a relic that had been stolen. The relic had writing on it that proved that a Saint had founded a cathedral. The other Faction had been claiming their Saint had founded the cathedral, and had been taking the tithes. This let the founding Saints faction take the cathedral over. (So I guess it wasn't really minor for the city, but for the overall Empire, it was not a huge deal).