TheRPGSite

Branching 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

Maybe they are part scared of running into religious zealots in or outside the hobby who would criticize such uses, and part convinced that it somehow wouldn't be as "fun" or diversified as multiple pantheons and stuff.

I actually believe that religious zealots are going to be upset whatever you end up doing (polytheism? Withcraft!) on the first point, and completely disagree on the second one.

I love Glorantha's Malkioni. I love Lothian's cult in Ptolus. I use Saints as deities in my own Dunfalcon setting, and the Medieval Eurth. It's become part of my personal D&D landscape. I find it richer than all these pseudo-godlings without particular cultures, all belonging somehow to the same meta-pantheon in that wierdly they all seem to acknowledge the existence of each other, to begin with, that we seem to keep getting served to us in various Fantasy RPGs.

PS: I'm actually a religious person. Catholic, to be exact. Just to point out that I am not the religion-bashing type.

Thats a big part of the reason I liked the BANESTORM setting of Yrth - the religions were REAL world religions that we already know. They may have been slightly tweaked for a world where magic works and obviously works - but its still Christianity, Islam, Judaism,...etc.

Instead of a Templar or Crusader knock-off called a 'Paladin' - I can actually play (or my players can) a Templar Knight that actually has magic powers and spells...and can fight with a sword if he so chooses.


- Ed C.

One element I'm just going to carry over from my post in the first thread:

QuoteI go back and forth on this. There are examples to the contrary, but I think that for me it comes down to a sense that the priest of some shady pagan god is easier for me to conceive of as a freebooting adventurer than the priest of a socially pervasive monotheistic religion.

I think another thing is the "more-is-better factor." "More Gods!" is like "More Monsters!" "More nonhuman races!" etc. Of course you can have a great fantasy setting with just human characters, or only human enemies, etc. It can be a compelling challenge to create one. But I don't think including those is necessarily a failing.

Some of this depends on how monolithic the influence is. Many settings boil down to "X Game in Y Drag." Many others take the form of "A cross between X and Y." It would be fairly goofy to have a campaign setting that was ostensibly France in the 1400's and have 25 different gods, but that doesn't mean that it was a "lack of balls" that leads to a setting like Greyhawk.

I almost kick myself for saying it, because it sounds like RPGnet-ese, but I keep trying to come up with dumb campaigns as counterexamples, and then think "eh, I'd play that." "Vaguely Japanese with Samurai and so on but there's a god for each planet in the solar system? Hey why not? Feudal Japan but it's been converted to Christianity since 950 AD? Hey why not."

On the other hand, I love, say, Pendragon. I would gladly play a comparable game set in a romanticized Islamic medieval Arabia. I'm not qualified to write it, either. I have my own personal set of irritations, of course, about history and cultures - certain readings of Greece or Rome drive me nuts, for example.

Now I want to work up a monotheistic campaign setting for D&D with a completely new monotheism. But I'm going to try to avoid project switching right now.

I can see it being a lot of things actually:

Hobby inertia.  I'm not sure why polytheism started as a default but by now it seems to be expected.  My main problem with this is that it isn't presented like real world polytheistic religions, but as a multitude of hybrid poly/mono religions - ex: Forgotten Realms, and it's "If you don't follow one god you're screwed"

Reluctance to offend.  Monotheistic religions play a little to close to home for some.  When you take into account Christianity's hostility to D&D/roleplaying you come to a point where including anything resembling a monotheistic religion might drive customers away.  Also if you only have one god/religion then you might *gasp* restrict player options!

Lack of knowledge about how religions work.  Having a bunch of highly specialized gods - The God of Magic!, The God of Undead Killing!, The God of Wealth! - you don't have to put much thought into what they do or how they fit into a game world.  What do followers of the God of the Sun do?  They fight undead!

My own homebrew game uses a dualistic religion not unlike Zoroastrianism.  Given that one god is out to destroy creation, etc there's only one deity suitable for PC clerics and priests.  Each major culture has a different take on the religion, but that's a different thing.

If you want to check out a cool treatment of monotheism in D&D then look up Sepulchrave's Tales of Wyre (http://www.enworld.org/forum/1709876-post.html#post1709876).

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102ex: Forgotten Realms, and it's "If you don't follow one god you're screwed"

I'm not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate?

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102Also if you only have one god/religion then you might *gasp* restrict player options!

This is an issue. I also have known a lot of players who are disappointed if the campaign doesn't allow them to invent their own weird god for their character to worship.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102Lack of knowledge about how religions work.  Having a bunch of highly specialized gods - The God of Magic!, The God of Undead Killing!, The God of Wealth! - you don't have to put much thought into what they do or how they fit into a game world.  What do followers of the God of the Sun do?  They fight undead!

This seems to be par for the course. I prefer to come up with a god as more of a personality, rather than a god "of" something, and then give a little thought as to why a  mortal would curry his favor. But this does, I admit, sometimes make it difficult to convey to a player what the fuck is the idea with a given god.

In my MRQ2 Moragne setting, I got around the "limited player options" thing people associate with monotheistic religions by having each monastic order, lay order, fraternal order and regional church count as their own distinct cult. They teach different spells and skills, have different requirements to advance within them, and have different runic associations. PCs who want to advance magically can pick one suited to the forms and methods of worship and magic they most want.

I have struggled with this off and on during most of my gaming career. At different points in time I intentionally avoided games which made priests of any religion playable characters (there are quite a few of them out there). These are some of the problems I've had with the whole mess:

1: More than any other adventuring archetype priests are the ones who have the steadiest of jobs. If you are an ordained practitioner of your faith then you have a congregation you should be looking after. It just sounds a bit fishy to have a priest say to the people he is guiding in the community "Sorry folks, I'll be back in about 6 months, I'm providing magical support for a bunch of people who want to kill a dragon that's about 100 miles from this village. I'll be back soon, just hold all the baptisms, confessions, confirmations, regular prayer services etc. until I get back." Now templars or fighting orders are slightly different, but even so they only went out to fight/adventure when they had specific goals in mind. The church just didn't send them off to wander around for no reason.

2: Be it polytheistic or monotheistic player characters just don't have a lot to do with earning the power they throw down. RuneQuest is an example where there is some effort to make priests/runelords earn the powers they get, but in most other games its "you've reached the right level to cast call lightning, here you go have a nice day." I'm 100 percent sure there are home brewed versions out there where priests are held a little more accountable, but I'm also willing to bet they are the exception and not the rule.

3. Fantasy religions absolutely drive me bug-fucking bonkers. It's probably the amateur anthropologist/sociologist in me, but I look at some of these things and I want to call the designer up and scream over the phone "you stupid twat this makes absolutely no sense." Case in point, a common god that crops up is "The God of Madness." Huh? First, who would worship the god of madness. How on earth could the worshipers of the god of madness be able to form a organized religion of any real consequence. Yes, there are ancient religions based on 'ecstatic madness.' But that is expressly viewed as a transitory state of being, not a permanent 'whoohoo look at me I'm a whackadoo priest of madness. I've got custard in my pants and jam for brains.' Even if someone worshiped the god of madness, how would the god of madness notice it? He's madness personified. Madness made flesh. Why should he even care?

4. Monotheist religions often fare little better. Often they are portrayed as monolithic in nature where every facet of the faith is consistent, when we all know it wasn't and probably never has been in the history of our world. Christianity has had an enormous number of heresies, apostasies and just plain splinter faiths. They range from incredibly literal interpretations of the bible to forms of mysticism that border on being positively Asian in their approach to issues of self-determination vs. divine edict and ego vs. divine nature. Islam has it's share of unusual and obscure splinter sects and a little research will yield a vast underpinning of folklore that made its way into the Quran which speaks to the beliefs of the religions that came before it.

All in all I find it a subject which in the end has caused me to stop and think at the beginning of every game 'will I include player character priests; will it add enough to the game to make it worthwhile.' I find it very interesting that if the option isn't even offered most players don't even bat an eyelash at it.

I think really it's more of a question that RPGs miss the mark completely when they deal with religion of any stripe.

I think mostly why priest classes are even involved is that adventuring parties need someone to 'pick up the pieces' after the fight. There needs to be someone who provides magical protection/support for the party and that's what priests do. One option is to just make faith part of the background and move the healing/support magics over to the magician classes. I'm not saying that's a great option, but I'm saying it could be an option and several games pretty much do exactly this.

I've run campaigns with Monotheism, even with the Judeo-Christian god (A Dark post-apocalyptic game).

Right now I'm prepping for a campaign with a religion based on Gnostic Christianity. It's not the only religion in the world, though. That's one of my peeves.

Edit: Incidentally, I'm not specifically religious myself, but I lean Eastern. Lately I'm considering studying Judaism much further.

In RPG terms, Christianity has more than one deity.  At the simplest, you also have the devil, not a common PC choice but there for the bad guys.  You also have lots of lesser entities that are apparently capable of granting powers, such as angels, saints, Mary, and demons - they're grouped into two sides but could be considered different cults. There are also the angels that chose neither God nor the devil in the conflict wandering around.

I've done monotheism in my own campaigns. I thought it worked well. As another poster pointed out, even in a monotheistic religion you can have other powers that keep things interesting.

What I found fun by having one deity, in a fantasy setting where the God was able to prove its existence on a regular basis, was I was still able to have different religions. With one God, you still have many interpretations of what that kind stands for and wants its followers to do. You can even have people who, though they know that one God exists, oppose it for whatever reason. In some ways, if you are trying to do a something akin to medieval Europe, one God works really well.

I suspect the reason for this apparent lack of monotheism (despite Fading Suns, 40K, Pendragon probably) is taht gamers would rather escape it because it smacks too much of the real world and all the shit that real world monotheism brings with it.

I think part of it is simple "fear" of offending someone or driving away potential players. The various sects of the Abrahamic religions can't even agree on what type of god they have, how can a game designer possibly get it "right" in a way that would please them all.
I saw a recent poll in one of the newspapers that showed that most people calling themselves christians view their god as anywhere from being a loving and kind god that cares about them personally to being a vengeful distributor of punishment. Add to that the fact that Atheist and Agnostics make up 15-20% of the population and you stand to drive a pretty good chuck of your potential customers away. All because you tried to represent someone's deity and didn't doing it the way they want/see it or by cramming said deity down the throats of people who don't follow it. That's not even taking into consideration the neo-pagans and followers of other religions.
From my own personal experience, the RPG players I've known have been neo-pagans, atheist or they leaned heavily towards agnosticism. Again this is just from my personal experience and I am not making any claims about all gamers. All I know is there is a reason none of us wanted to play Testament (http://paizo.com/store/byCompany/g/greenRoninPublishing/byProductType/roleplayingGames/mythicVistas/v5748btpy7eu3&source=search) or any other game based off of a real world religion.
So I think it is probably just easier and safer to just make generic fantasy gods that are less likely to offend anyone. Of course I've seen it brought up in some rulebooks, I don't remember which, that if you don't like the multi-gods deal just pick the one that best represents the one you believe in and dismiss the others. This is also why some games are now saying that you don't have to have a deity, but can instead believe in an ideology and still be a cleric or paladin.

Now that I think about it I believe that in most games the religions are quasi-monotheistic. As an earlier poster mentioned the clerics or other followers generally follow a specific deity. So in a way they are kind of monotheistic. The difference being that they don't completely deny the existence of the other deities, they just claim that their deity is just better. Which is similar to real world religion in that even in the real world religions many of the religious texts don't claim that other deities don't exist, just that they aren't the "right" ones. In RPGs the followers of specific deities even go out to fight and kill the believers of other religions. How much more real world does a fantasy game need to be?

That's just my take on it.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;4101143. Fantasy religions absolutely drive me bug-fucking bonkers. It's probably the amateur anthropologist/sociologist in me, but I look at some of these things and I want to call the designer up and scream over the phone "you stupid twat this makes absolutely no sense." Case in point, a common god that crops up is "The God of Madness." Huh? First, who would worship the god of madness. How on earth could the worshipers of the god of madness be able to form a organized religion of any real consequence. Yes, there are ancient religions based on 'ecstatic madness.' But that is expressly viewed as a transitory state of being, not a permanent 'whoohoo look at me I'm a whackadoo priest of madness. I've got custard in my pants and jam for brains.' Even if someone worshiped the god of madness, how would the god of madness notice it? He's madness personified. Madness made flesh. Why should he even care?

Perhaps it is my background in mental health, but I've never seen followers of a deity such as the god of madness as slapstick goofballs. I always pictured them a little more like the cultists H.P. Lovecraft wrote about or like some of the people I have encountered. They don't really see themselves as "mad". They see themselves as the normal ones and everyone that doesn't see things their way is mad or lost. Kind of like any other religion. Although having read your post, and thinking about it for a moment, I can see where people might take it in the other direction.
I don't think I'll ever use followers of those types of deities in that madcap zany way, but I get where you are coming from.

From the other thread:

Quote from: The Butcher;410116Pulp fantasy, the basis for D&D (and by default, for most fantasy RPGs) wasn't exactly big on organized religion, and all too often cast priests as antagonists (with rare exceptions, like Epimetreus from "The Phoenix and the Sword"). In this sense, the D&D Cleric is an aberration, hailing from a combination of Abrahamic mythology and Medieval folklore and literature.

But I digress. I think that pulp fantasy writers like polytheism because it's exotic, and possibly because it may feel easier to downplay religion as a societal force when gods are a dime a dozen.

The observation on D&D Cleric is worth developing a little bit further. I've recently come to realize that D&D Clerics make a lot more sense under Monotheism.

Clerical magic is clearly lifted from Abrahamic scripture and myth. "Evil" (Chaotic) Clerics get called "anti-Clerics" in OD&D; it's strongly hinted that Clerics should choose between Law or Chaos (in OD&D, Neutral alignment is a no-no after a certain level, I forget which). And every edition of D&D before AD&D 2e is ill-suited to represent the differences between, say, a priest of Zeus and a priest of Artemis.

Druids are far better suited to the role of wild-haired pagan priests worshipping cthonic, pre-Abrahamic deities. Wizards are the men and women who lift a middle finger to God and gods alike, and go about twisting the fabric of reality with sheer willpower and hyperdimensional mathematics (a.k.a. "foul sorcery", "man playing God" etc.).

Also, since arcane magic is infallible in D&D, I can easily see a charismatic Wizard setting up shop as the head of a cult, proclaiming himself the high priest of a new deity (possibly an evil, intelligent planar horror who's teaching him magic in return), or better yet, an incarnation of the deity. Imagine the faces on your players when the Evil High Priest fireballs their asses before escaping via dimension door. :D

Quote from: Cole;410106I'm not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate?

Disclaimer: It's been about 10 years since I've touched any Forgotten Realms "fluff" so I might have my head up my ass.

As I recall in FR a character NEEDS a Patron deity in order to have someone willing to vouch for their soul as it enters the afterlife.  This applies to everyone, not just priests, and the implication is that this deity is the sole deity the person is devoted to.

In addition if a character is A) an atheist or B) unaligned with a god they're sent to a special place in one of the nether planes reserved for the unbelievers.  Presumably they're tormented by some creature or something.

This has direct game mechanic effects when you're talking about resurrection spells.

Quote from: The Butcher;410136From the other thread:
The observation on D&D Cleric is worth developing a little bit further. I've recently come to realize that D&D Clerics make a lot more sense under Monotheism.

For D&D I prefer with increasing frequency to scratch clerics and just give magic-users all the spells. I.E. spell-using priests would just be magic-users with a religious inclination. I think that given a monotheistic setup, potentially the monotheistic priests might instead be granted the ability to perform a miracle in the name of their god, but not on the kind of "on-demand" basis that spell casting implies. I think that the ability to perform miracles would be unlikely to be put in the hands of a PC.

I think in a monotheistic society, most PCs probably belong to that religion, but I also think, as has been mentioned by more than one poster already, that a priest probably has more important responsibilities that would make him disinclined even toward more altruistic adventuring than the typical looting and pillaging.

I guess that (outside of the D&D model) the character of the saint who wanders around performing miracles here and there until someone martyrs him is a kind of adventuring archetype; it would be hard to do right. I don't see having five or six saints, or having a saint who follows the other characters around and gets one vote in the party meeting on whether they want to overthrow Baron Von Vile by force of arms vs. use subterfuge prove that Baron Von Vile is an impostor.

Maybe you could use some kind of Ars Magica type of setup where you have one saint and his various devotees and guardians. As much as I enjoy reading about the sometimes bizarre things that Medieval saints are supposed to  have gotten up to, I'm not enthralled by the idea of this as an RPG, though.

99% of the original question can be phrased as "why not monotheism in D&D", because D&D, and games that are heavily influenced by D&D, make up that proportion of the FRPGs written and played.

Given that, a lot of the reason can probably be ascribed to the S&S literature influence. This ties into the American-ness of most fantasy RPGs including D&D. I'll bet if you look at European FRPGs, you'll find more of them that, as part of being based on real history, include representations of Christianity...although possibly alongside of other religions whose followers have access to "powers".

Then you have to ask what the "polytheism" of D&D is. It's mostly a form of dueling henotheisms. Even in cases where there's a truly monotheistic religion in the game-world, as a social phenomenon and even as a source of "powers", it's rarely affirmed by the game design as being actual metaphysical truth: that is, there will usually be alternative religions that also offer "powers". If the game's rules were a theology lesson laying out "how things are", then I don't think anyone in the world could take a really monotheistic perspective.

So with that as a groundwork, what it boils down to is, if you want real monotheism in an RPG, you have to design in an actual metaphysical one true way. Now, this works fine if religion doesn't offer much "magical power" to overbalance other elements of the game world, and provided the will of the Divinity is obscure to humans on day-to-day matters. This is pretty much what held in Christian Europe throughout history: people could easily sustain belief in a single God because miracles were rare and there wasn't a visible proof that a particular interpretation of scripture was correct or demanded specific actions in government or daily life. In short, in real life, free will existed even though philosophers could spin theories about whether it was "really" real.

But if you have a setting where God really exists, is omnipotent, gives his followers powers to intervene in daily life, and reveals a single truth, and where furthermore religion as a social phenomenon exists and (of course) worships the single god, then you basically have a theocracy and there's little for conflict anywhere.

(At least that's it as a sketch. My wife is hungry and we have to get some breakfast. Her will be done!)

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102I can see it being a lot of things actually:

Hobby inertia.
(...)
Reluctance to offend.
(...)
Lack of knowledge about how religions work.

This, pretty much.

You can expand #2 to something more like "reluctance to draw religious zealots and religion-bashers" who too easily relate the game world to religious arguments in the real world.

Quote from: Cole;410139For D&D I prefer with increasing frequency to scratch clerics and just give magic-users all the spells.

That's one of the most popular alternatives to approaching what I call "the Cleric problem" in D&D. "Problem" may be a misnomer, but the gist of it is that the Cleric is not the sort of character one reads about in the fantasy literature that makes up D&D (and neither is his close cousin/usurper, the Paladin, Three Hearts and Three Lions notwithstanding). There are no mace-swinging warrior-priest healers in Middle-earth, or in the Hyborian Age, or in Lankhmar.

Me, I've grown too fond of D&D to do away with the Cleric entirely. When I want to go "Cleric-less", I usually run something else.

Quote from: The Butcher;410148That's one of the most popular alternatives to approaching what I call "the Cleric problem" in D&D. "Problem" may be a misnomer, but the gist of it is that the Cleric is not the sort of character one reads about in the fantasy literature that makes up D&D (and neither is his close cousin/usurper, the Paladin, Three Hearts and Three Lions notwithstanding). There are no mace-swinging warrior-priest healers in Middle-earth, or in the Hyborian Age, or in Lankhmar.

Me, I've grown too fond of D&D to do away with the Cleric entirely. When I want to go "Cleric-less", I usually run something else.

I cannot arrive at the reason why, but the Paladin doesn't bother me as much.

I think that monotheism, if you take a God as typically portraited in FRPGs (that is, an actual god who replies to prayer by granting miracles and spells, who interacts directly with the world's denizens and all) is boring as fuck.

Also, polytheism is usually boring as fuck, because gods meddling with mortals and messing around is also boring as fuck unless you are Homer, or your gods can have their ass kicked by mortals.

What I would like to do is a fantasy setting where priests are just like those in our world: people who claim to be connected with the gods, but unable to prove them as the gods don't answer prayers or make their existance proven. Heck, even Conan stories show that at the end of the day, gods like Mitra are messing around with people (The Phoenix in the Sword features something like this, if I'm not wrong).

I would like a world in which a fantasy hero can completely ignore religion (like some charcter in Viking sagas) and the priests cannot prove him wrong by smiting him with a Solar Lance or whatever. Or worst, by the actual god stepping in and saying "You atheists are fucking stupid."The priests claim to be able to explain magic and the universe, but as usual, their explanations suck ass. Something like that.

Quote from: Cole;410149I cannot arrive at the reason why, but the Paladin doesn't bother me as much.

I'm guessing because the Paladin has more direct translations in terms of archetypes, including Knights, Champions and the like, whereas the Cleric is sort of middle of the road, murky in that regard: half priest, half templar, half healer. It's a construction of the D&D game really. Started as a response to an in-game issue at Dave Arneson's table, and evolved into its own thing with the original game. Sure, you can talk about characters like Archbishop Turpin, but these characters were associated with the Cleric construct after the fact, rather than a foundation for it.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102I can see it being a lot of things actually:

Hobby inertia.  I'm not sure why polytheism started as a default but by now it seems to be expected.  My main problem with this is that it isn't presented like real world polytheistic religions, but as a multitude of hybrid poly/mono religions - ex: Forgotten Realms, and it's "If you don't follow one god you're screwed"

I know exactly what you're saying here, but you just happened to pick maybe the worst possible example, because FR is one setting that doesn´t work that way. A lot of people might play it that way, but if you read the source material itself its pretty clearly one of the most authentically "Polytheistic" settings around.

But yes, most people who do polytheistic settings don't even do those right.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;410170But yes, most people who do polytheistic settings don't even do those right.

RPGPundit

That's my problem specifically. I like polytheism in RPGs too. I like all the gods in Ptolus and all. My problem comes from the fact that in many cases they are completely divorced from any religious/cultural background that would make any sense. For instance in the Forgotten Realms where you have all these different deities that basically acknowledge each other - there are no cultural specificities beyond which god your tribe favors amongst the zillions of gods in the superpantheon of the realms. No different names for the gods. No contradictions between the cultures at all. This makes no sense whatsoever.

Compare that to a world like Glorantha where each Pantheon has its own version of what really happened prior to the first Dawn, who's responsible of what, how Orlanthi remember the Lightbringers and how they brought back Yelm from the Underworld, while Yelmites remember that Orlanth killed Yelm in the first place, while Elves do not give a shit about that version of events. These sorts of things. That makes a LOT more sense, to me.

Quote from: Nicephorus;410126In RPG terms, Christianity has more than one deity.  At the simplest, you also have the devil, not a common PC choice but there for the bad guys.  You also have lots of lesser entities that are apparently capable of granting powers, such as angels, saints, Mary, and demons - they're grouped into two sides but could be considered different cults. There are also the angels that chose neither God nor the devil in the conflict wandering around.

No version of modern Christianity works that way. All four of the above sentences are completely wrong.

RPGPundit

By the way, the concept of "monotheism" in most D&D and other fantasy settings always has upset me as terribly wrong. You have a vast territory, with dozens of kingdoms and peoples of diverse ethnics and happens that everybody worships the same gods of the same "megapantheon", besides the obvious differences in culture, backgrounds, etc. It seems to me artificial and historically incorrect, like an "Unified Theory of Gods" or something like that. Where are the different interpretations or the mutually-exclusive myths? Sometimes I view the monotheistic settings a lot more believable.

I have more to say (great topic!), but very quickly for the record 4e Dark Sun has no deities, clerics/paladins, or miracles, and the religions are mutually incompatible false cults created by insane sorcerors, so there's that.

And: All RPGs are monotheisms.  DM = God.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410176No version of modern Christianity works that way. All four of the above sentences are completely wrong.

So you'd use a modern interpretation of Christianity for a fantasy game, which typically has medieval trappings?  Those who are turned by the devil or possessed by demons would be treated as followers of Christ and the powers they gain would be the same as those of Christian priest?

Quote from: RPGPundit;410176No version of modern Christianity works that way. All four of the above sentences are completely wrong.

RPGPundit

Yep. I totally agree. The only game I've seen it properly handled is Aquelarre, where, at best, praying to a saint can grant you a bonus to a skill roll. If you want a miracle, God is the man to ask.

Yeah. Thing is, in something like the Medieval Eurth, I'm using Saints as deities, more or less, but I'm not using actual historical Saints, using them instead for inspiration in coming up with my own Saints, background, names and all. I don't want the setting to be a faithful reflection of medieval France, or its Church to be an actual faithful representation of the historical Roman Catholic Church. I keep things like the competing popes and all, but I'm not trying to create an historical setting at all. I'm creating a Fantasy setting with some historical dressing instead.

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?

I think it is hard to do well. It took a long time for me to come up with semi-monotheistic religion I do have without having them be a rip-off of one of the real world variety. They have elements of various real world religions but I think I got it to the point where they are their own thing.

However my setup is only semi-monotheistic. There is God, known as the One, and the "gods" are more like powerful angels with more free will.  The One hasn't chosen to manifest yet. Demons are hated by all the religions regardless of how twisted they are.

For those who have my Majestic Wilderlands the Ghinorians believing they are the chosen people of Mitra and their history was inspired in part by history of the Jewish People. The main twist is that instead of founding a 2nd tier Kingdom they went on to become the equivalent of the Roman Empire in the Majestic Wilderlands. The religion evolved into more of a Catholic Church style faith under the pressure of having to rule so many different cultures with their system of ethics.

All the gods believe they are doing what is right no matter how abhorrent it seems to other. Set believe that order is the only way to combat the Demons. Societies dominated by his faith are viewed as Tyrannies. Kalis is a goddess driven by revenge against the Demons after they raped her.  She turned to the use of Blood magic and is willing to do anything to kill Demons and their followers.  Hamakhis tapped into the use of Chaos to fight Demons and now needs the human sacrifice of his follower to control it. Otherwise it will grow out of his control and cause widespread destruction.

The remaining gods have much more benevolent faiths. Finally one of the surviving gods, Horus (not mentioned in the MW supplement), has appeared among several desert tribes and proclaiming himself as the true servant of the One. This is the first true Monotheistic religion in my campaign and is the first to proclaim only the One is worthy of worship.

Nobody knows what the One (God) is thinking about any of this.

Quote from: Lizaur;410178By the way, the concept of "monotheism" in most D&D and other fantasy settings always has upset me as terribly wrong. You have a vast territory, with dozens of kingdoms and peoples of diverse ethnics and happens that everybody worships the same gods of the same "megapantheon", besides the obvious differences in culture, backgrounds, etc. It seems to me artificial and historically incorrect, like an "Unified Theory of Gods" or something like that. Where are the different interpretations or the mutually-exclusive myths? Sometimes I view the monotheistic settings a lot more believable.

It depends on the assumptions of the setting. In the Majestic Wilderlands there are only a dozen or so survivors of the Uttermost War with the Demons. So different religions from different cultures recognize the common elements. For example Mantriv of the Ament Barbarians is the same entity as Thor of the Skandian Vikings. The religions are not exactly the same but at their core they teach the same things.

What a referee should do is lay out his metaphysical assumptions and create the religions that fit that.  In the Majestic Wilderlands I assume there are universal dieties but the specific religions manifest based on the cultures. The final twist is that the Elves are immortal and there are survivors that had direct interactions with the deities. Sylvan cultures, i.e. cultures influenced by the Elves, tend to revere the deities as wise teachers rather than worship them.

It is important to remember the context of fantasy games, in which the religions of this world would seem irrelevant and effete.  The Gods of most D&D settings tend to be comparable to our conception of Heads of State - they are not mysterious unless they choose to be, and their identities are firmly established through constant interaction with lesser beings.  They are convenient Kings and Queens for a narrative in which Player Characters quickly outgrow any awe for a mortal monarch, and they do what Kings and Queens do - they send Our Heroes out on quests, they make and break deals with each other and conceal some of their alliances and motivations, they deliver rewards and punishments... it has nothing to do with religion or anthropology, it's just politics, but it allows a DM to quickly move a narrative along and change things around.

The biggest narrative trouble with monotheism as a cosmic framework is that (misquoting Pratchett and Gaiman) it turns history into a long, complicated game of solitaire.  Middle-Earth is a great example of a fantasy setting in which God, although remote, is Singular, Real, and In Charge, but it has several narrative advantages over conventional Christianity - the god/angel Vala make discussions of higher powers often sound more polytheistic, and there is no Church - Gandalf is a divine emissary, but even he sounds pretty secular most of the time.  Trying to run a Middle-Earth campaign in which Religion is an issue would pretty well ruin the setting, in my opinion.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410170I know exactly what you're saying here, but you just happened to pick maybe the worst possible example, because FR is one setting that doesn´t work that way. A lot of people might play it that way, but if you read the source material itself its pretty clearly one of the most authentically "Polytheistic" settings around.

But yes, most people who do polytheistic settings don't even do those right.

RPGPundit

Like I said up thread it's been ages since I played FR.

How is it more authentically polytheistic than other D&D settings?

Quote from: RPGPundit;410170A lot of people might play it that way, but if you read the source material itself its pretty clearly one of the most authentically "Polytheistic" settings around.

Tell me how it's authentic, because I sure as fuck don't know what the hell you're talking about here.

I much prefer to see clerics, particularly PC clerics, as crusading types which exist outside any formal church hierarchy.  If they want to settle down and establish a temple or abbey they can, and people would probably flock to join a high level cleric's church, but that's not the base assumption.  I also think clerics as a class work best if you remove gods and have the clerics devoted to concepts or alignments. For example, good aligned clerics draw their power from the upper planes because they're devoted to Good as an idea.


Back on topic.  What specific elements would make a compelling monotheistic religion in your typical D&D world?  An element of mystery?  A system of saints, angels, etc to blunt the edge of having one god?  Have some kind of faith based mechanic to cast spells?

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410205Back on topic.  What specific elements would make a compelling monotheistic religion in your typical D&D world?  An element of mystery?  A system of saints, angels, etc to blunt the edge of having one god?  Have some kind of faith based mechanic to cast spells?

Well to me, in large part, D&D's take on divine magic is already geared towards a monotheistic setting in some respects. Look at the Cleric turning undead, or the Paladin smiting evil, defending justice and good in this world. These are elements which are later declined with several gods and such in the classic D&D world setup, but as such, they point more towards Crusades, Templars, Priests practicing exorcisms and defending the Living against the Dead. All these things to mean scream for a Monotheism losely based on Medieval Christianity. Not necessarily faithfully historical mind you, not by a long shot, but at least losely based on that equation. When you start pushing polytheism in the vanilla D&D formula, you sooner or later run into problems. Are there Paladins of Neutral Evil gods? What about a Cleric of a Water God? Why does he turn Undead? And so on so forth. Sure, you can find all sorts of in-world explanations, but more often than not, that'll push towards the dilution of the archetypes and more variants to them, like the kits in 2e, the myriad of class variants, including prestige classes in 3e, multiclassing, and so on, so forth, which is kind of "anti-D&D" in spirit, to me.

Quote from: estar;410193What a referee should do is lay out his metaphysical assumptions and create the religions that fit that.

I think it's been the preferred way to worldbuilding for a very long time, the "top-to-down" approach. My problem with that is that I think a lot of DMs/writers start for the Uttermost Top: they define the the Universal Truth behind the Creation of the Whole Campaign World, leaving no room for uncertainty. I'm not talking about different interpretations of the same divine beings, I'm talking about religions so divergents as Hinduism and, say, australian aboriginal animism. A fine exemple is Middle Earth: a profet can come out from the desert of Harad preaching a new godless faith that revolves around philosophical principles and the elemental forces, but the existence of Eru and stuff renders him absolutely wrong. And I think is a pitty: I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

Quote from: Lizaur;410207I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

I agree. It's great when in world-building you do not answer all the big picture questions, do not cast the cosmology in stone, etc etc. There's a happy medium to find, where you have for instance explanations of the world's cosmology with in-character testimonies that lay out different takes on what exist out there, what created the world and so on. A GM might then decide to explore this or that take through his campaign, and/or ignore others. It makes for a better setting, in the end.

The cleric has been a long time sore spot for me in D&D. To me, the best treatment of clerics/priests in D&D was in perhaps the most maligned version: AD&D 2e.

I always found the 3e priest and its abilities/spell set to be rather inflexible. I laugh particularly in 3e/d20 when I hear about a "warpriest" base class variant or prestige class. I wonder if the 3e cleric isn't a "warpriest", what is it?

As for realistic polytheism, the biggest offender I see in D&D is treating each of dozens of deities as miniature monotheisms, with church heirarchies that mimic Christian congregations in which one person pretty much attends only one denomination for their whole life. In the real world, in modern and historical polytheism, common folk would provide offers to many of the various deities.

Quote from: Benoist;410202Tell me how it's authentic, because I sure as fuck don't know what the hell you're talking about here.

I think the most "authentically polytheistic" setting for traditional D&D is old Grayhawk: at least, Greyhawk has five differents ethnics backgrounds for the human race, and all the gods in the megapantheon belonged to one of those five pantheons. In my own Greyhawk campaign I try to enphasize the cultural backgrounds assembling the god in sort of "baklunish religion", "suelian religion", etc.

Quote from: geekgazette;410133Perhaps it is my background in mental health, but I've never seen followers of a deity such as the god of madness as slapstick goofballs. I always pictured them a little more like the cultists H.P. Lovecraft wrote about or like some of the people I have encountered. They don't really see themselves as "mad". They see themselves as the normal ones and everyone that doesn't see things their way is mad or lost. Kind of like any other religion. Although having read your post, and thinking about it for a moment, I can see where people might take it in the other direction.
I don't think I'll ever use followers of those types of deities in that madcap zany way, but I get where you are coming from.

Now see the deity/religion you describe is more believable. I can get behind humans worshiping an entity that has some sort of long-range goal that on the surface doesn't make sense. But that still doesn't make him the god of madness, it simply makes him a god with an inscrutable agenda. One of the reasons that the cults work in CoC is that the different entities have an agenda, they aren't simply madness for madness sake. The insanity of their followers comes about because they are involving themselves with something that a human mind simply can't comprehend. But even so, the cults in CoC never become very large. They tend to be isolated and small conspiracies. While in many fantasy settings you get gods of concepts like madness, who have large organized churches and gatherings of the faithful. It just seems completely unlikely.

I know it's not as big in tabletop, but Dragon Age is monotheistic, I think.

At least in the 30-some-odd hours I've put into the CRPG, the only god I ever hear about is the "Maker," and their religion is structured like a pseudo-Catholic church, just with less misogyny.

A God of Madness is completely unlikely unless he's real.  If you start with the assumption that the God of Lightning is responsible for lightning bolts and the God of Dreams is responsible for dreams,  I see no problem with a God of Madness who is responsible for insanity.  The God in question would not be required to be personally insane (just as the God of Lightning doesn't have to physically manifest as a lightning bolt), but could be the ultimate source of all insanity, the administrator who decides who goes insane, or in some other way intimately connected with insanity - followers may or must be insane, the amount of insanity present in the world gives the God power, et cetera, et cetera.  Once you assume that there is a God of Madness who may predate humanity, it makes sense for people to worship him because he is a big powerful thing, and it makes even more sense if he can manipulate people into worshipping him as part of his divine powers.  It doesn't have to be something that people would come up with on their own whether or not he actually exists.

Quote from: Nicephorus;410185So you'd use a modern interpretation of Christianity for a fantasy game, which typically has medieval trappings?  Those who are turned by the devil or possessed by demons would be treated as followers of Christ and the powers they gain would be the same as those of Christian priest?

Not even medieval christianity fit your description.  For most of medieval christianity, witchcraft was actually viewed as non-existent, as an example of pagan ignorance.  Later (after the mid 14th century, generally) the view evolved so that it was believed that Witches could commune with the devil, but they were not receiving miraculous powers from a deity, they were instead practicing magic, sorcery. If you wanted to be authentic in that sense in game terms, late medieval "witches" should be magic users or sorcerers.  
There was only ONE god, and only god had the power to make miracles happen. Saints, the virgin, or angels were only intercessors, you could pray to them to ask them to ask their buddy Jesus to help you.  The idea was vaguely that of some kind of big celestial bureaucracy, where the saints were all just lower-grade civil servants, they could file the paperwork for you and give you an edge in getting permission, but it was the boss who would actually make things happen.

RPGPundit

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410201Like I said up thread it's been ages since I played FR.

How is it more authentically polytheistic than other D&D settings?

In that while you or your family might have a particular patron deity that you would be close to, you would NOT have the setup you typically see in fantasy RPGs where you worship the god of bakers so you would never pay attention to the god of legal issues when you went to court.
In the FR, the assumption is that you worship ALL the local gods of your area.  You have a patron, but you go to whatever god you need for whatever you're doing.

Likewise, the FR treatment of deities, while still not quite as good as it ought to be, is fairly messy and regionalized, both of which are marks of Authenticity.  Real world polytheism was extremely messy and regionalized, which you don't usually get in the nice neat universal pantheons of most fantasy worlds.

RPGPundit

High Valor is monotheistic--for the most part. There are still things like pagans out there who don't believe, but the Church of the Martyr seems to be objectively right to most people. (They have Saints who do miracles, and player characters can do the same.)  

Sure some of the old guard Rykarn worship Wôd the Thunderer and the Caen-Cluith worship animal spirits, but any knowledgeable onlooker realizes their mystic rituals utilize magic and anyone with training can duplicate. Not quite the same for the Church of the Martyr.

Those who don't have faith could say the Church of the Martyr has similar magics, just more secretive, but they are, objectively speaking faith driven, not learning driven, and more than a few people just shake their heads at such faithless people and try and lead them to the High Lord.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410230Likewise, the FR treatment of deities, while still not quite as good as it ought to be, is fairly messy and regionalized, both of which are marks of Authenticity.

How do deities differ on the Sword Coast from the deities worshipped in Cormyr? Sure, you've got some candidates supporting what you're saying (Mulhorand and its pseudo-Egyptian pantheon come to mind), but these aren't replicated across the board. More often, you've got racial lines with the Elven pantheon, the drow pantheon, the dwarven pantheon etc, but these really aren't culturally any different from each other.

Moreover, the gods basically are all part of the same mythology, with no variation at all between cultures other than "Lolth was right to do this/she was a bitch that needed to be excluded". I find this to be hardly "authentic", when you compare it to our real world pantheons and mythologies. Does a Viking acknowledge the God of the Christians? Sure, he knows these weaklings worship their God, but it is a false god, or some spooky figure that needs to be crushed, a woman's story, whatnot. These sorts of different takes on faith don't exist in the Realms. It's all the same megapantheon. It's one-dimensional in mythological terms. Not authentic.

Clerics in d&d and pathfinder are so overpowered because almost no one wants to play one. Most gamers aren't trying tomlearn anything about a setting or real life other than what sword was the best. A realistic treatment of religion or any houserule on magic meant to bring out setting inspired flavor almost always fall on def ears because players aren't trying to hear about it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410227Not even medieval christianity fit your description.  For most of medieval christianity, witchcraft was actually viewed as non-existent, as an example of pagan ignorance.

Perhaps, but there are explicit references to demonic possession in contemporary narratives and saints' lives in the early Middle Ages. That may not entail devil worship, but an example which implies some credence of pagans using sorcerous "powers" can be found in the Life of Saint Wilfrid, written not long after Wilfrid's death, circa 710. After Wilfried and his party run aground in pagan territory, "The chief priest started to curse God's people, trying to bind their hands by his magic art." The "spell" doesn't go off, though--he's hit by sling stone hurled by one of the Wilfrid's fighting-men. So it's ambiguous whether the author of the Life believed it could have worked. (Age of Bede, ed. Webb, p. 121.)

QuoteSaints, the virgin, or angels were only intercessors, you could pray to them to ask them to ask their buddy Jesus to help you.

In theory, of course, but in practice the interactions with the Saints were sometimes pretty direct, with no reference to the big J. You can find this in several passages in Gregory of Tours, in the History of the Franks and some of his minor works, where a bishop "goes on strike" against the local saint for not doing his job protecting church lands against some avaricious noble. After rites are withheld, the saint comes around and hits the bad guy with leprosy or some other affliction. Similar practices continued into later times, though focused more on monasteries, see Little, Benedictine Maledictions. All told, this isn't much different from the patronage relationship found in pagan religions, of sacrifices in exchange for divine favor.

Quote from: Benoist;410234How do deities differ on the Sword Coast from the deities worshipped in Cormyr? Sure, you've got some candidates supporting what you're saying (Mulhorand and its pseudo-Egyptian pantheon come to mind), but these aren't replicated across the board. More often, you've got racial lines with the Elven pantheon, the drow pantheon, the dwarven pantheon etc, but these really aren't culturally any different from each other.

Moreover, the gods basically are all part of the same mythology, with no variation at all between cultures other than "Lolth was right to do this/she was a bitch that needed to be excluded". I find this to be hardly "authentic", when you compare it to our real world pantheons and mythologies. Does a Viking acknowledge the God of the Christians? Sure, he knows these weaklings worship their God, but it is a false god, or some spooky figure that needs to be crushed, a woman's story, whatnot. These sorts of different takes on faith don't exist in the Realms. It's all the same megapantheon. It's one-dimensional in mythological terms. Not authentic.

I like the trope of Fantasy Role Playing Games that gods, ghosts, dragons, and elves are not reflective of the culture in which stories about them appear, but are independent beings as free to travel from culture to culture as humans while still retaining their identity.  If we start with the assumption that all the lightning in this and every world belongs to a Lightning God who is a singular being that can be seen and communicated with, then we would not expect one culture to describe him as a musclebound warrior and another culture to depict him as the lecherous king of all gods.  If somebody starts lying about him, he's likely to show up to set the record straight.

Quote from: Lizaur;410207A fine exemple is Middle Earth: a profet can come out from the desert of Harad preaching a new godless faith that revolves around philosophical principles and the elemental forces, but the existence of Eru and stuff renders him absolutely wrong. And I think is a pitty: I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

That a design choice. Create a setting that mirrors what people do with religions in our own history. They arise, grow, combine, split, etc, etc.  However I will caution it is hard to maintain a setting like that over multiple campaigns. Because at some point epic adventures will be run and the players deal with the divine or near enough. And a little of truth is revealed. Given a enough time there is little difference from a setting that started with the "truth" to begin with.

My solution is to focus on the religion. Emphasize that despite the visible power of the divine it is still faith that drives religion. Because of this different individuals and culture deal with religion in different ways. I find this approach allows me to keep the mystery of religion going through dozens of campaigns in my setting despite some of the same players having adventured in the homes of the gods themselves.

I don't have a problem with "megapantheons" in the meta sense; that is, that in the game world all the gods exist in one big mythology on the plane(s) of the gods.  I think that's just a practical element of the game, and only significant due to the fact that in a fantasy RPG unlike real life, you can end up going to the planes where the gods are.
I do find it more important that the whole thing NOT be so neat and tidy down in the material plane, from the mortal point of view.  But one thing I don't agree with is the idea that among polytheists, they should think that other people's gods were false.  Generally, with some exceptions, that was NOT the case.
That wasn't even the case with the original ancient israelites.  Most pagans might think that THEIR gods are the strongest gods, but not the only real ones.
Its also notable that in the FR you have some cities where the worship of particular gods is really pushed (is it Tantras that has Torm as their patron deity?), which is also quite true to the way polytheism worked in our history: you had the "city gods" of Athens, Rome, or Carthage, Artemis of the Ephesians, etc. That's what I meant by "regionalism".  Some faraway areas have their own little pantheons that aren't very worshipped elsewhere, in the bigger cosmopolitan places there's a whole slew of gods that came in though in certain regions some gods are more popular than others.

There are some details that could have made it MORE authentic, like if the same god (for planar purposes) was worshiped with very different names and style/appearance in different areas, or if more of the gods had some weird combinations of domains (like the Sun, music, and healing all in one deity).
 
FR isn't perfect, but by fantasy RPG setting standards, its pretty good. Certainly better than pretty much any of the other D&D settings, and better than most of the other very popular fantasy settings.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;410250In theory, of course, but in practice the interactions with the Saints were sometimes pretty direct, with no reference to the big J. You can find this in several passages in Gregory of Tours, in the History of the Franks and some of his minor works, where a bishop "goes on strike" against the local saint for not doing his job protecting church lands against some avaricious noble. After rites are withheld, the saint comes around and hits the bad guy with leprosy or some other affliction. Similar practices continued into later times, though focused more on monasteries, see Little, Benedictine Maledictions. All told, this isn't much different from the patronage relationship found in pagan religions, of sacrifices in exchange for divine favor.

Yes, this is quite true. Its why the protestants accused the catholics of idolatry, and its why I say that polytheism is somewhat more acceptable to port into a medieval european setting than a medieval middle-eastern setting.  There was a lot of barely-covered paganism going on via the saints.

RPGPundit

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410205Back on topic.  What specific elements would make a compelling monotheistic religion in your typical D&D world?  An element of mystery?  A system of saints, angels, etc to blunt the edge of having one god?  Have some kind of faith based mechanic to cast spells?

I think the closer fantasy monotheism is to contemporary monotheism, the more convincing and interesting it is.

For example, one thing I always try to avoid when creating monotheistic religions is making them monolithic. Even the Catholic Church, which is often used in fantasy settings as the paradigm of giant monolithic institutions, is actually composed of competing factions and sects who differ on points of doctrine, internal organization and goals. And this was even worse in the medieval period than it is now. Different factions, sects, orders, etc. allow PCs to more easily find a hook that interests them wrt the religion, and to choose how they want to engage with it.

As I said, in my Moragne setting, each sect, order and regional church is set up as a different cult (in the MRQ2 / Openquest sense of the word). There are religious orders that teach sorcery, orders of religious knights who teach their followers to fight, friars who can cast divine magic, and even monks who guard a special holy site that allows heroquesting (in this setting, that basically means experiencing the presence of God directly). The various heresies are drawn up similarly - in my PbP Openquest game right now someone is a member of the Coiners, a heresy that trains its priests and zealots to be populist bandits and fraudsters.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410284I don't have a problem with "megapantheons" in the meta sense; that is, that in the game world all the gods exist in one big mythology on the plane(s) of the gods.  I think that's just a practical element of the game, and only significant due to the fact that in a fantasy RPG unlike real life, you can end up going to the planes where the gods are.

I do find it more important that the whole thing NOT be so neat and tidy down in the material plane, from the mortal point of view.  But one thing I don't agree with is the idea that among polytheists, they should think that other people's gods were false.  Generally, with some exceptions, that was NOT the case.

My feeling where FRPG religions really blows it is in the concept of Syncretism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism).  Syncretism causes real world religions to be complex as elements of different religions are mixed together to change one, both, or create something new.

My opinion it is way too confusing for gaming purpose and that there is no good way of making players understand what going on. I find that you can get the flavor of Syncretism by adopting one god many names approach.  That you make a baseline religion for each god and tweak it for the different cultures. Players will find roleplaying stuff about Mantriv easier because they learned about Thor. They just need to focus on the handful of differences.

It won't help resolve issues or conflicts any easier as Mantriv is still the religion of plains barbarians and the Thor is the religion of Sea-borne Vikings. Despite being the same god.

Plus I have developed cultural mythologies for broad regions. The few deities I have combine in different ways in different regions. For example in those lands dominated by Ghinorian Culture there a dualistic Mitra vs Set mythology.

I try to manage the complexity of religions in a way that is comprehensible to players.

Quote from: estar;410289My feeling where FRPG religions really blows it is in the concept of Syncretism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism).  Syncretism causes real world religions to be complex as elements of different religions are mixed together to change one, both, or create something new.

My opinion it is way too confusing for gaming purpose and that there is no good way of making players understand what going on. I find that you can get the flavor of Syncretism by adopting one god many names approach.  That you make a baseline religion for each god and tweak it for the different cultures. Players will find roleplaying stuff about Mantriv easier because they learned about Thor. They just need to focus on the handful of differences.

It won't help resolve issues or conflicts any easier as Mantriv is still the religion of plains barbarians and the Thor is the religion of Sea-borne Vikings. Despite being the same god.

It also occurs to me that, depending on how powerful or active the gods are, Syncretism may be widespread but not necessarily valid. For the sake of an example suppose you have a setting where Mercury is an entity that actually exists - depending on his power level, the game's metaphysics, how interested he is in certain aspects of mortal behavior, it's conceivable that scholars who refer to Mercury may be of the opinion that Hermes is just another name for Mercury, and be correct, and that Woden is also just another name for mercury, and be mistaken, or vice versa. I could see a lot of cosmological models in a game in which a god may be a genuine supernatural entity but for any number of reasons be unwilling or unable to universally correct such a misconception.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410285Yes, this is quite true. Its why the protestants accused the catholics of idolatry, and its why I say that polytheism is somewhat more acceptable to port into a medieval european setting than a medieval middle-eastern setting.  There was a lot of barely-covered paganism going on via the saints.

RPGPundit

I think there is some interesting potential here for a fantasy medieval europe or pseudo-Europe wherein, from a character's perspective, you have such a monotheistic setup, and then behind the scenes, the central god of the monotheistic religion is only the most powerful and popular god rather than the only one.

In the most polarized terms if you have a single "good" deity, the priests of several largely-suppressed cults might rebrand the bloody-minded local gods to whom they pay tribute as saintly figures in order to secretly increase their followings (and their coffers.) Or, of course, there could be a wide range of gray-area interpretations diverging from that premise.

For the BECMI campaign I'm setting up, I separated the concept of a priest from that of the Cleric.  Being a Cleric means that you're a member of a military order, like the Templars.  Plenty of Magic-Users are priests, some Fighters are priests, some Thieves are priests, etc. and that satisfies one of my frustrations regarding religion in fantasy gaming (such as D&D).

The religion is monotheistic in theory, henotheistic in practice, and often at odds with itself.  (Cleric PCs in my campaign start out solely originating from a Templar-like order that got declared Anathema for political reasons and had to flee the continent to survive, and are now re-established in the new colony of the milieu; other sources exist, and may be brought into the game as playable options if current PCs make it happen.)  I'm using a lot from real world orthodox and heterodox history, so it's far more pulp fantasy/sword-and-sorcery in its feel, which is why I'm using this approach to religion.  This satisfies my other major frustration, as the Solar God of this faith is much like real deities- aloof, distant and hands-off towards mortals.  (Hence why there can be heresies, heterodoxies, syncretism, etc.)

Quote from: Cole;410293...the priests of several largely-suppressed cults might rebrand the bloody-minded local gods to whom they pay tribute as saintly figures in order to secretly increase their followings (and their coffers.)

This is a very interesting concept that isn't often explored in RPGs, but could make for a very cool aspect of an in-game faith. There are lots of examples in history where a conquered people continued to worship their old deities by simply renaming them to similar aspects in the conqueror's faith.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;410296This is a very interesting concept that isn't often explored in RPGs, but could make for a very cool aspect of an in-game faith. There are lots of examples in history where a conquered people continued to worship their old deities by simply renaming them to similar aspects in the conqueror's faith.

In a fantastical game you could also have the situation where arguably well-meaning locals, thinking something like "Jesus is great and things are better since we have converted, but if no one is propitiating Bugg-Shash, he will get all riled up and that will be bad," so they decide to work some of his rituals into their dogma. Maybe they dedicate them to "Saint Bedivere" after some martyr they threw into the Pit of Bugg-Shash before they converted, work some of the heathen glyphs into St. Bedivere's iconography, etc. Maybe some of the Bedeverist rituals get pretty bloody too, in secret. But, they think, arguably it's for the greater good of the congregation. Something like that.

Or a crafty god in the mold of Odin or Lugh could himself deliberately impersonate a mortal wonder-worker so as to get "adopted" as a saint in his human guise.

Quote from: Lizaur;410207I think it's been the preferred way to worldbuilding for a very long time, the "top-to-down" approach. My problem with that is that I think a lot of DMs/writers start for the Uttermost Top: they define the the Universal Truth behind the Creation of the Whole Campaign World, leaving no room for uncertainty. I'm not talking about different interpretations of the same divine beings, I'm talking about religions so divergents as Hinduism and, say, australian aboriginal animism. A fine exemple is Middle Earth: a profet can come out from the desert of Harad preaching a new godless faith that revolves around philosophical principles and the elemental forces, but the existence of Eru and stuff renders him absolutely wrong. And I think is a pitty: I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

I agree. Also, I always found worldbuilding by that model boring as fuck. I only care about stuff that is relevant to the game at hand, to the situation at hand. If I develop a Creation myth is because a PC needs to know it. And so on.

And of course, I do not give a flying turd about consistency. Religions are not consistent.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;410209As for realistic polytheism, the biggest offender I see in D&D is treating each of dozens of deities as miniature monotheisms, with church heirarchies that mimic Christian congregations in which one person pretty much attends only one denomination for their whole life. In the real world, in modern and historical polytheism, common folk would provide offers to many of the various deities.

Yep. The Pundit makes a very good case for FR.

Quote from: Imperator;410303I agree. Also, I always found worldbuilding by that model boring as fuck. I only care about stuff that is relevant to the game at hand, to the situation at hand. If I develop a Creation myth is because a PC needs to know it. And so on.

I 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.

I see a lot of statements in this thread like "religions aren't consistent", "that's not how monotheistic (or polytheistic) religions really work" etc...  I agree, but with one very important caveat...in a world where God, if he exists, does not choose to manifest himself.

Elliot basically nailed it.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut if you have a setting where God really exists, is omnipotent, gives his followers powers to intervene in daily life, and reveals a single truth, and where furthermore religion as a social phenomenon exists and (of course) worships the single god, then you basically have a theocracy and there's little for conflict anywhere.

I think that's really the reason why.  You take a monotheistic God, have him grant his priests the power to do miracles with the frequency that a D&D Cleric casts spells, and there is no Atheism, there is no Heresy or Apostasy.  Any Cleric of sufficient level can Commune and find out what the Truth is.  Literally, there is only "Yahweh or the highway".

In order to make it interesting, you have to add doubt and mystery in order to have it reach the level of complexity our real world religions have.  Your God decides not to reveal the truth.  He wants people to find it for themselves.  But then He ends up granting powers to both sides of a religious war and you have to conclude that 1.) He doesn't exist - which is impossible because he grants powers or 2.) He's an uncaring or L/N-E and we're all screwed, might as well be a mage.

The result is, when your clerics have real, visible, power in the world, you go with dualism or polytheism, otherwise you end up with a real cosmic mess of questions the only possible answer to is "God works in mysterious ways."

Quote from: CRKrueger;410404The result is, when your clerics have real, visible, power in the world, you go with dualism or polytheism, otherwise you end up with a real cosmic mess of questions the only possible answer to is "God works in mysterious ways."

Many people think this way in real life, though, don't they?

A genuine monotheistic world is unrealistic anyway. The Abrahemic religions themselves aknowledge the existance of other gods (thus the commandment to only worship this one) and those religions have consistently come into contact with other gods who generally were proved to be weaker.
So you can have a monotheistic culture - as in one where one religion dominates - but even that will tend to define itself in oposition to the other.

Quote from: jibbajibba;410429A genuine monotheistic world is unrealistic anyway. The Abrahemic religions themselves aknowledge the existance of other gods (thus the commandment to only worship this one)

I'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.

"There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet"

God is God fool. I pity the fool who don't believe in God.

Quote from: Cole;410411Many people think this way in real life, though, don't they?

Yes, 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.

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.

First note, the idea of exclusively worshipping one god while implicitly accepting the existence of others is called henotheism, and yes, it's believed that the ancient Hebrew belief started in this state before evolving into monotheism.

Second, as you note, monotheism as a social phenomenon is perfectly realistic, although if the setting is a large enough geographical area, it will probably be challenged by competing beliefs.

Third, monotheism as a setting-ratified cosmological certitude isn't something I'd associate with realism or unrealism, but it can be seen as realistically representing the local worldview of culture that's chosen as the focus of the game. So for example you could say that Christianity has it all right in a game focusing on medieval Europe, but while this may reinforce the subjective sense of "getting inside the head" of a Christian PC, it'll pull the rug out from under non-Christian ones.

Quote from: CRKrueger;410404I see a lot of statements in this thread like "religions aren't consistent", "that's not how monotheistic (or polytheistic) religions really work" etc...  I agree, but with one very important caveat...in a world where God, if he exists, does not choose to manifest himself.

Elliot basically nailed it.



I think that's really the reason why.  You take a monotheistic God, have him grant his priests the power to do miracles with the frequency that a D&D Cleric casts spells, and there is no Atheism, there is no Heresy or Apostasy.  Any Cleric of sufficient level can Commune and find out what the Truth is.  Literally, there is only "Yahweh or the highway".

In order to make it interesting, you have to add doubt and mystery in order to have it reach the level of complexity our real world religions have.  Your God decides not to reveal the truth.  He wants people to find it for themselves.  But then He ends up granting powers to both sides of a religious war and you have to conclude that 1.) He doesn't exist - which is impossible because he grants powers or 2.) He's an uncaring or L/N-E and we're all screwed, might as well be a mage.

The result is, when your clerics have real, visible, power in the world, you go with dualism or polytheism, otherwise you end up with a real cosmic mess of questions the only possible answer to is "God works in mysterious ways."

It depends what kind of monotheism you have.  You don't even need a religious "war" as such, you can have rival factions, all of which end up being able to commune; possibly where God obviously accepts the various positions so they end up being less of theological importance, but more of political or social importance.

Obviously, another possibility is that you could have a single god, grants spells, etc. but the debate is over whether this is a god worth worshipping or not.  The "Unbelievers" could be those who reject that authority, rather than the existence of the god.  You could have druids who worship a generic force of nature rather than a rival god, wizards who seek to find their own path to immortality without bowing to a god, etc.

You can also obviously have a setting where God is relatively silent; you can get rid of a spell like Commune, or you can just limit it somewhat (after all, the traditional Commune spell doesn't really let you get a full-blown conversation); God could be very cryptic about certain questions that society may consider of great theological importance.

And 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.

There's lots of options that don't automatically mean an "everyone has to agree" kind of theocracy.

Also your final premise is somewhat flawed: in our own world, for large swaths of the medieval period in terms of time and area, there really was no doubt in the overall social zeitgeist that God did in fact exist and granted miraculous power.  That's something people nowadays have trouble wrapping their head around: that for medieval christians, muslims, or jews there was no question that God was real, it was a foundation-level assumption of how the world works. You can say "well yeah, but god didn't go around announcing his existence to people", except that to them, he did, ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  Saints were receiving magical visions of God on a pretty fucking regular basis.  This shit was as real to them as it would be in a typical fantasy world.  So in your own fantasy world, unless you had an all-oppressive or constantly physically (rather than "mentally") manifesting God, you really wouldn't be in all that different situation than how things would have been like in medieval europe.

RPGPundit

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.

He didn't, though, for the entire period we're talking about.  It took the age of enlightenment to really change the whole mental view of this. I know this is very hard to grasp for the typical person in the post-modern philosophical world, but it was really like that. There were divine magics and miracles happening on a very regular basis. The power was a reality.

Yes, god wasn't always reliable, but then neither does magic have to be in a fantasy game: opponents make saving throws, your remove curse isn't high enough level, etc.

RPGPundit

Also, there's two different kinds of settings that we can describe here:

The first is one that is a setting-fundamental monotheism.  The world has only one god, period.  Some people might worship something they mistakenly believe to be a god (demons, nature spirits, or whatnot) but they're wrong.

The second is a setting with a monotheistic culture.  The main area of the setting has a monotheistic religion.  The question of whether this is really the only god in town is either not answered by the setting, or it is answered in fact in the negative, but that doesn't matter in terms of the society (or at least, it doesn't matter until some rival god comes along as a menace to the society of the setting).  The Bowlands area of my FtA!GN! Setting is basically this kind of monotheistic game setting.

I'm actually challenging the fact that there aren't enough of either of these kinds of settings.

RPGPundit

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus) 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).

In GURPS Discworld you can go for a monotheistic option by playing an Omnian.

Of course you have to put up with the other gods and their followers giving you shit for it.

In Scion though it is polytheistic by it's very nature there is a mortal run monotheistic cult that "converts" Scions into believing they are servants of Jehova/Christ/Allah.

There is also the Titan Aten who insists he is the one true God and even has a legion of suicide bombers to prove it.

God I love White Wolf. Few other game companies would have the balls to be so outright offensive.

Or so stupid in the way they do it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;414893Or so stupid in the way they do it.

RPGPundit

Maybe, just maybe, somewhere out there is an alternate timeline in which the corporate slogan was "White Wolf Game Studio - More Balls Than Brains!"

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

I've seen a fair amount of monotheistic games out there; of course in most of them the One True God is the biggest, black-heartedest, bastard in existence.

Quote from: Professort Zoot;414975I've seen a fair amount of monotheistic games out there; of course in most of them the One True God is the biggest, black-heartedest, bastard in existence.

Oh yes, another factor popular among gamers, or at least game designers. That kind of cheap sophomoric cynicism about monotheism that's a product of mommy having made you go to church instead of playing ball when you were eight.

RPGPundit

Popular but not universal. There are a couple of Christian game designers out there. Me an Wood Ingham for a start.

Mind you both of us are renowned for loving mockery of Christianity.