Quote from: Shasarak;1116071So is medieval authentic just adventuring in the real world europe in the 1400s?

No. Real Medieval culture within the real Medieval Paradigm.

So a setting where culture, society, institutions, economy, etc all work the way they did in the middle ages, and where the world is the way Medieval people historically believed it to be.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1116359No, that's where you're wrong. Gods and Saints are two very different things. In some religions (like Hinduism) you even have both. Catholic saints are not treated like gods. They are, if anything, more similar to the role played by guardian spirits in some pagan faiths.
.

You could play on that line drawn by the church though between veneration and worship, where a figure like Mary starts to become a god in the setting due to the formation of a heresy around her. I guess that would depend though on how you deal with the cosmology of one god (is the monotheism objectively permanent and set into the universe or is the power of the god linked to worshippers). I think that would make for an interesting threat in a campaign, a saint that grows in power so much it threatens the order of the church (and presents players with an interesting choice).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1116369I guess that would depend though on how you deal with the cosmology of one god (is the monotheism objectively permanent and set into the universe or is the power of the god linked to worshippers).

My experience in working through this that you have to start with some first principles. Then everything flow from those as a consequence.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1116369I think that would make for an interesting threat in a campaign, a saint that grows in power so much it threatens the order of the church (and presents players with an interesting choice).

One aspect of my cosmology is that The One created the universe, men, and elves. Then sent the Lord act as guide and teachers. The Lords are powerful divine being akin to archangels.

However their direct contact with Men and Elves led to the rise of demons and war at the dawn of time. Some of the Lords were killed in that their essence disappeared from universe. The surviving Lord imprisoned the demons in the Abyss and decided they would fulfill their mission of guidance and teaching through faith and religion.

However powerful and wise, the Lords were finite beings not The One. Some of them were effected by the war with the demon negatively. Espousing philosophies that most cultures fine unappealing or extreme. Ten Lords participated in this agreement including three with extreme philosophies.

An eleventh Lord did not, Horus. At first Horus remained withdrawn and did little to involve himself in the mortal realm. But as history unfolded he saw the rise of religions around the other Lords and religions that worshiped them as gods.

So a millennia ago, he decided to reveal himself to a group of tribe as a divine prophet of The One. Proclaimed that there was no god but that the One, he was his true prophet and all other religions are false. Started gathering followers, finally emerging as a threat to civilization in last century.

This threat formed the background to a campaign I ran ten years ago, part of developing my Majestic Wilderlands supplement. The climax of the campaign was the players tracking down Horus, using the Chromatic Crystal (a powerful divine artifact), capturing Horus, and transporting him to the Abyss to be imprisoned.

But since The One has never chosen to reveal himself to the Wilderlands even after the forementioned events, the question still remained at the end of the campaign, did the player do the right thing? Who represents the will of The One, the Lords who setup themselves up as gods with their own religion, or Horus who was trying get everybody to worship the true creator of the universe, The One.

Hey Pundit.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1116359No, that's where you're wrong. Gods and Saints are two very different things. In some religions (like Hinduism) you even have both. Catholic saints are not treated like gods. They are, if anything, more similar to the role played by guardian spirits in some pagan faiths.

I think it very much depends on how you look at it, and how granular you make your analysis.  I agree that Gods and Saints aren't THE SAME, which is why I specified that their roles aren't that different from a FUNCTIONAL perspective, not that they are in fact identical.  If a total outsider, the proverbial alien from outer space, were to look at the cults of the saints and how observant Catholics used them in worship, they would look very SIMILAR to how pagan peoples used the various lessor intermediary spiritual beings in their respective pantheons.  

For easy of reference I simply referred to these as "gods", but we could talk meaningfully about the distinctions between saints and heroes, demi-gods, local spirits, etc etc.  I would probably argue that the Greek equivalent of the Catholic saint is probably the divinely descended hero.  In Proclus' cosmology the spirits of departed Heroes server a similar interdicting function, providing assistance to men in their ascent to "The One" and away from the entanglements of matter.  

Quote from: RPGPundit;1116359This isn't quite accurate either. Any movement toward the idea of recognizing an over-arching or principal god (in any sense other than the "father god", ie Odin or Jupiter, which is not the same thing) only started entering pagan thought after interactions with Christianity (or in some cases, Judaism or Islam) and can largely be attributed as a response to what appeared to in some ways be a more intellectually sophisticated faith. The idea of an overarching single deity DOES appear in religion in other civilizations (India- Brahma, China - Shang De), but not in Europe (at least, not by itself and not until very late in the lifespan of paganism).

Sorry, but I don't find that claim convincing.  The idea of a single supreme being shows up quite explicitly in Plato and the Stoics, and that's several hundred years before Christianity.  If you take a broader view and look at less explicitly philosophical and more mytho-poetic usages, you see hierarchies of deities descending from first principles (which were also understood as conscious Gods) going all the way back to Sumer.  

What exactly various ancient groups thought is very much an exercise in historical speculation, but we can see pretty clearly that the idea of a supreme being or ultimate being did not originate with doctrinal monotheism per-se.  What monotheism did more accurately is flatten the ontic hierarchy, and collapse the various categories of value under which men had previous lived.  Rather than a chain of gods with overlapping areas of authority we had simply GOD, as direct creator of all that is, was and will be.  This may be good or bad depending on your point of view.  I personally think it was a little of both.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1116359Obviously. However, as I pointed out in an earlier video, D&D "paganism" gets everything wrong about Polytheism too, and people have never done that right either.

Usually yeah.  I don't know if people have NEVER done it right, but it is tougher than people think to develop an authentic cosmology.  Of course, you could also argue this same point about pretty much any complex human endeavor that shows up in TTRPGs.

I listened to TRP's podcast and joined just to talk about this. I do have monotheism in my campaign. I use the real world religions and call it the Death Cult Campaign.

The background information on how this campaign started is as follows.

The campaign arose after we had been playing for many years and like anyone else we listen to the news. A number of years ago a real world murdering death cult came into the news more prominently. This death cult has waged war against the entire world for nearly 14 centuries. As we were past the age of military enlistment we wanted to do something beyond our support for those fighting and for those being killed by this death cult. So we created this campaign.

The real world death cult has conquered an entire continent in the past, except for one country, and portions of others and in doing so has killed over 650 million people (270,000,000 on that one continent alone) and have enslaved 100's of millions of people (a practice they continue to this very day. They have made eunuchs of the men and sex slaves of the women and children by the 100's of millions for nearly 14 centuries. That enslavement, especially the sex slavery of women and children continues to this very day. The death cult considers even the converts among the enslaved peoples to be nothing but slaves, their possessions. Their racism is among the most extreme on earth, but it is matched by another large group that may someday figure in the campaign. The death cult practices cruelty on a level that is beyond imagination to the uninformed.

So for this campaign, we first rolled history back 1400 years. On the continent that would be conquered in the future of our world, there was one kingdom that endured into the 20th century as the lone bloodied survivors, but that kingdom is now mostly dead, falling to the death cult and to be fair, these people were no saints either. But on the world of our campaign, this kingdom was over 100 times bigger on a massive plateau sitting a mile above sea level. There are only two ways off this plateau, as only two spots present anything other than a sheer mile high cliff. One spot leads down to the main part of the continent following an enormous river that flows from the plateau. At the opposite end of the plateau along the side where it meets the ocean another enormous river leads down to the ocean. This plateau is blessed with abundance rainfall and is very fertile.

The action takes place 700 years after the rollback point, and the original D&D technology and magic assumptions apply and every invasion of the attempt of the plateau has been turned back, usually at a great cost in lives. The plateau has an anomaly that is present nowhere else in the world. An area of a little over 100,000 square miles (about 2.5%) of the plateau has randomly occurring openings into another world that constantly open and close for very short periods of time, they never seem to open and close in the same place twice. We are not sure that only two worlds are involved. Brave volunteers have survived to come back, but they are a minority and of those that survive only a few bring back anything of value, but that value can be immense and some things have lead to advantages in the war against the death cult.

This kingdom is focused on growing more powerful so that someday they may march off the plateau and put an end to the death cult that rules the entire world outside the plateau except for one large area. The plateau is the only place in the world where any freedom exists, the only place there is no slavery, the only place that women have any freedom to be anything other than a sex slave and a laborer.

The premise of this world is that the death cult completely wiped out all white people and the only remaining races are black (our heroes), brown (the death cult) and yellow (currently outside the purview of the campaign). So all of the west is now under the control of the death cult. The death cult worships a fake god, a pagan moon god of old and a fake prophet who preached the enslavement, murder and rape of all infidels.

Meanwhile our heroes worship the real god who sustains them and has opened this world to the other world.

The players are members of those brave volunteers who travel into that other world and face monsters worse than anything that they ever imagined for the hope of bringing back treasure and magic to help defeat the death cult and to grow in power beyond anything that exists in this world and come back with the fruits of their labor. They strive to create beachhead in the other world so that greater numbers can be made the beneficiaries of the power inherent in the other world.

One of the things that has resulted from this magic is to make childbirth much safer and because of that their population is now growing much faster and in a few years will greatly increase the number of fighting men they can field. Alongside this the growing ability to heal many wounds that previously would have killed most who suffered them has also been of great benefit.

The clergy has been changing throughout this time as they are gaining new powers and abilities.

When this opening occur into our world, monsters come through into our world and magic is starting to grow in our world. Other men and women are gaining other powers slowly but surely. We are told that things that only used to work in that other world and now starting to work in this world. Someday we will march down off the plateau and take the fight to the death cult.

The evidence points to another great civilization that existed in the other world and it may or may not still exist somewhere in the other world. We are always looking for them, mayhap they will be allies.

This then is The Death Cult Campaign!

I have modeled the clergy on the Catholic Church to the best of my very limited knowledge about Catholics. The saints are those that have been raised to immortal status and they interact indirectly with the world.

The death cult is modeled on the pagan cult of Islam and its political attachment to sharia law, slavery and rapine.

Quote from: Jason Foster;1116438The death cult is modeled on the pagan cult of Islam and its political attachment to sharia law, slavery and rapine.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4028[/ATTACH]

Maybe we should move this to politics now?

Quote from: Snowman0147;1116443Maybe we should move this to politics now?

No, just remove the asshole with one post who just showed up to threadcrap.

Quote from: Brendan;1116424Hey Pundit.



I think it very much depends on how you look at it, and how granular you make your analysis.  I agree that Gods and Saints aren't THE SAME, which is why I specified that their roles aren't that different from a FUNCTIONAL perspective, not that they are in fact identical.  If a total outsider, the proverbial alien from outer space, were to look at the cults of the saints and how observant Catholics used them in worship, they would look very SIMILAR to how pagan peoples used the various lessor intermediary spiritual beings in their respective pantheons.  

Looking, and to outsiders, would be the operative term here.

QuoteSorry, but I don't find that claim convincing.  The idea of a single supreme being shows up quite explicitly in Plato and the Stoics, and that's several hundred years before Christianity.  If you take a broader view and look at less explicitly philosophical and more mytho-poetic usages, you see hierarchies of deities descending from first principles (which were also understood as conscious Gods) going all the way back to Sumer.  

Plato's forms are not really meant to be taken as an actual belief in a single god, and all indication was that Plato on a practical level was a (probably somewhat agnostic) polytheist. Socrates seemed to treat the idea of gods as purely a symbolic concept. In ancient greece there were philosophers who speculated on monotheistic concepts (certainly, they would have been familiar with Zoroastrianism and Judaism, so the idea was not entirely foreign to them) but it was not really an attempt at making Greek Polytheism a more sophisticated religion with an over-god.

That didn't happen until the Neo-Platonists, which were writing explicitly in reaction to the rising tide of Christianity.

Quote from: Jaeger;1116504No, just remove the asshole with one post who just showed up to threadcrap.

Or, you know, just ignore it.

Quote from: rpgpundit;1116535or, you know, just ignore it.

Whoa, let's not get too crazy!:eek:

Quote from: Chris24601;1116019The big issue with using monotheism in fantasy is if spell casting is in any way tied to faithfulness to it then you've got no doubts about who is in the right. There's no Roman/Orthodox split because whichever one is wrong no longer gets spells from their prayers. There's only one of Judaism, Christianity and Islam because one of those has it right and can work spells (or none of those are right and some other religion can prove its right via spells.

D&D's psuedo-polytheism was a simple solution to allow different factions to have divine spells without one definitively being right.

The other solution is you make magic faith agnostic; either like 4E where, once you're imbued with divine spellcasting by a ritual, it can't be revoked... so the heretical corrupt bishop can't be revealed by not being able cast spells anymore -or- there's no divine magic at all so you have to take all religion on faith.

Even more, with a spell like Commune you either can know authoritatively whether some doctrine is correct or not; if different clerics get different answers, then the universe is clearly polytheistic (different powers are answering) or else the spell does not do what it says.

Quote from: Panzerkraken;1116028Those three would be a prime use for having religious wars in a monotheistic setting. God/Yahweh/Allah grants spells and powers based on piety, and each of the religions receives them based on theirs. He also doesn't get involved in worldly matters, but doesn't stop his Faithful from doing what they feel is right. Simply put, it's not his concern.  And so each of the three religions, all of whom worship the SAME God, can gain spells and kill each other over who was right and whose prophet/messiah was God's true messenger (spoiler alert: they all were, but people didn't hear the message...).

If "monotheistic" means "having one uninvolved god (or some other number greater than or equal to 0, but nobody can tell the difference)" then this would work. And maybe that is the correct interpretation of monotheistic and an accurate reflection of medieval society: "everybody" believes there is one god.

QuoteIn terms of corruption; your corrupt bishop in question is tempted by the devil, and if he's been corrupted, then his powers are coming from him.

If some other power can grant the same spells, then why isn't it also a god?

Quote from: rawma;1116566Even more, with a spell like Commune you either can know authoritatively whether some doctrine is correct or not; if different clerics get different answers, then the universe is clearly polytheistic (different powers are answering) or else the spell does not do what it says.

If "monotheistic" means "having one uninvolved god (or some other number greater than or equal to 0, but nobody can tell the difference)" then this would work. And maybe that is the correct interpretation of monotheistic and an accurate reflection of medieval society: "everybody" believes there is one god.

If some other power can grant the same spells, then why isn't it also a god?

And this is why I generally separate magic from religion in any setting I'm creating.

Frankly, one of the biggest problems with Medieval Authentic Fantasy is that it doesn't account for the fact that what people believe to be true doesn't make it true and a huge part of religion is that you have to take it 'on faith' because you're not seeing the sick healed and the dead raised or the monsters in the woods... those are all stories you have to take on faith based on the credibility of the person telling them to you and if you go looking for the dragon that lives in the cave over the next hill, not only are you unlikely to find a dragon, there may not even be a cave.

Any religion that can definitively prove itself as THE TRUTH makes depicting an authentic medieval (or any other real period) world impossible.

The ONLY way I've ever been able to square it in my head is if you leave religion out of any extant magic system. You can have a medieval feeling world where the secrets of magic replace gunpowder or other technologies. You could even have spellcasting priests who study this magic (and as some of the more educated of the period, spellcasting might even be more common among them)... you can even have people try to declare that working this magic is proof of their divine power. But as the actual truth it blows up way too much of what the human experience is for the world to feel authentic.

Because if, say, the Catholic God was proven to be demonstrably real tomorrow. If his priests could suddenly perform miracles before live studio audiences and visions of angels saying "The Catholic Church is right about everything" were happening every other day... every other religion collapses practically overnight. Every government whose laws fly in the face of Catholic doctrine will be in chaos.

If God and his dogmas are proven truth then why would anyone do anything other than bow down in worship with every waking hour to ensure their getting to Heaven?

If God is proven true... then either Divine Right of Kings is true and anyone even thinking of rebelling against their lot in life is damning themselves to Hell or it is false and every King is an unjust oppressor that must be overthrown for the glory of God. And if Divine Right of Kings is a thing then Kingdoms couldn't war with one another because they know the king of a given land is ordained by God and to threaten that is to condemn yourself to Hell.

And "God only cares about piety not specifics of dogma" ignores that some religions basically declared other religions to be satanic and any true God wouldn't have his followers kill each other over who's most pious.

If you want a monotheistic medieval fantasy world... you pretty much have to make magic a separate force independent of religion or the theological implications will pretty much wreck any internal coherence to any conflicts you intend to have in the setting.

Quote from: Chris24601;1116573And this is why I generally separate magic from religion in any setting I'm creating.

I was told once (and although I cannot say if it's true or not, it's at least as plausible as an urban legend) that the Catholic Church declared it an article of faith to believe that there is a logical proof of the existence of God from first principles, without saying what that proof was. So I guess that a lack of internal coherence will not necessarily make a society or a religion impossible; indeed, many religions seem to thrive on paradoxes.

But my preference would also be to separate spells and miracles in some way. It was jarring when I first played D&D that wizards, acting alone on only their own knowledge and strength, seemed to be so much more powerful than any cleric - that a wizard's mind blank spell could defeat even the scrying ability of an actual god; that a wizard could cast wish but a high priest could not. But many cleric spells were more reliable or less risky, and there were some things that, while not explicitly stated in the rules, we treated as exclusively the domain of the cleric (which mostly boiled down to healing spells). I would separate the big things that magic might do (healing, affecting vast areas and distances, creating things, interacting with the cosmological powers, changing people permanently) from the small scale of local damage, temporary influence, buffing for a single fight, conjuring temporary allies and so on - the former are miracles, the latter spells. Miracles are paid for out of divine favor earned or recovered only from divinely approved activities (worship, sacrifice, good works or whatever) while the latter are paid for out of personal resources (spell points or slots, or maybe hit points) recovered by resting.

Hmm, I have probably ignored most of Chris24601's point to pursue my own thought on divine versus arcane magic. I can only hope that a non sequitur is more medieval-authentic than not.

Quote from: rawma;1116566Even more, with a spell like Commune you either can know authoritatively whether some doctrine is correct or not; if different clerics get different answers, then the universe is clearly polytheistic (different powers are answering) or else the spell does not do what it says.

This assumes an all knowing god, who takes the time to personally answer, who has no sense of humor and one who never changes its mind. Also assumes that the answers given leave no room for interpretation.

Is it wrong to covet your neighbors wife?

Answer to priest one - (God is very busy creating a new world someplace), Hey Gabriel can you take that question?  Gabriel answers (trying his best to sound authoritative): It is a mortal sin to covet your neighbors wife and your soul will be cursed to eternal torment.

Answer to priest two - (God is in a philosophical mood): It is the nature of man to appreciate beauty in all of its forms, but it is wrong to act on impulse.

Answer to priest three - (It is late and God has had a few): Is she hot?