QuoteThere's also the problem that you sort of steal a faith's thunder when it's not a matter of faith at all because the Great God Zrkoth can just come down and say hi whenever he'd like.  Everyone KNOWS he's real.  If you've got a mage or a cleric with the right spells you can go drop in on him for tea.  He's on plane 3, apartment 7, just take a right past the Dimension of Infinite Weasels.

Agreed. If you can determine something exists and reasonably count on it to come through in the clutch then you don't need faith. That faith and reasons for its necessity is underneath at lot of what RPGPundit and flyingmice are refering to.

EDIT: So, it follows from there, that to make religion central to the world you need god(s) that are, in the words of Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, absentee landlords. As others have suggested in various ways.

Quote from: J ArcaneThe thing I found that helped the most was to basically write their Bible.

I found that wonderfully practical too. You don't actually have to write it, but you need to figure out how it's written, what is the relationship between the human and the devine, central myths and historical events important to the religion, and how religious thought interprets said events.

-clash

I generally avoid making a pantheon that everyone worships. I also dislike anthropomorphic gods. And uniform religious worship of each god. So I avoid these things.

In my current D&D pirate game (the one I DM), there are many gods, with many aspects, worshipped by hundreds of little cults that vary in importance. Most of the gods are actually totems, or archetypal objects, rather than Zeus-rip-offs. The gods are understood to be their totems, and to manifest in a lesser way in other examples of the same type. Different sects disagree on what the totems are, what the gods manifest in, what they represent, etc. Most people worship whichever god is convenient or expected as the situation demands, rather than being fervent worshippers of a single god their entire lives. And how they practice is determined by context.

For example, some human soldiers might be preparing for a raid against the great hobgoblin-elvish empire of Tash. The human soldiers are visited by a cleric of the Vengeful Sword (a sect of the overall worship of the Sword). The cleric tells them that the Sword will only bless them if they swear to show no mercy to any Tash, since the Tash have driven out the worshippers of the Sword. The soldiers aren't too happy with that (they want prisoners to ransom), so one of them visits a shrine to the Sword of Discipline. The priest there tells them that to get the divine favour of the Sword, they've got to be courageous in the face of danger, not betray their chums in a tight spot and accept any genuinely offered surrenders they're given (he's cool with them killing the Tash because the Tash did drive out the followers of the Sword). The soldiers find this much more agreeable and go off to raid the Tash.

Meanwhile, the Tash are preparing their defenses. The local priest invokes the Throne Ascendant, a giant mountain / dead volcano that hosts the religious, cultural and political centre of the Tash empire. The Throne Ascendant is the dominant religion of the Tash Empire, and it understands the Throne (the mountain) as representing stability, law, and the just punishment of those who strive to cause chaos. As part of the preparations, a priest of the Fiery Throne brings some cannons to line the walls of their fort. The Fiery Throne is a sect that sees the creative power of the Throne as its most fundamental quality. They oversee and magically assist the forging of cannons, great metal ships, and other mechanical devices. The two priests squabble over who is in charge, and whether the commander will attend the daily services of the one or the other.

Violence ensues as the humans raid the Tash.

Quote from: J ArcaneThere's also the problem that you sort of steal a faith's thunder when it's not a matter of faith at all because the Great God Zrkoth can just come down and say hi whenever he'd like.  Everyone KNOWS he's real.  If you've got a mage or a cleric with the right spells you can go drop in on him for tea.  He's on plane 3, apartment 7, just take a right past the Dimension of Infinite Weasels.

Or in Exalted's case, you can bug him at work and get him written up by his supervisor.

I think the key to bringing any culture alive for people is ritual.

As always in roleplaying, the things which bring some part of the game world alive for the players are the same as the things which bring the real world alive for them.

So with day-to-day life, it's day-to-day details, like

• what people call the place where they crap and piss - the toilet, the bathroom, the restroom, the cabinet, etc; or
• what they call some implement or symbol everyone carries - the Saxon scramseax, the Catholic rosary beads, etc; or
• what they eat and drink - the Italian pasta, the Scots oats porridge, the Hun's kumiss, the American hot dog, etc
• How people dress, what's the cut of their clothing like - just compare Western jeans with Afghan pants to see how different a thing as simple as a pair of leggings can be.

It's those simple everyday things, with their own names, very familiar to those people and strange and alien or even incomprehensible to others, that stuff brings a culture alive.

The same goes for religion. When we think of a religious person, we'll often tend to think of them in meditation or prayer. But that's not when a religious person tends to feel most religious - they have rituals. The Jew gets up before dawn to pray, often rocking back and forth ("davening") as they read the Torah, the Moslem drops down five times a day, the Catholic goes to confession/reconciliation, the Hindu puts the dot on the forehead, the Pitjantjara people dance and sing to tell their people's stories (their history and religion are inseparably tied together), and so on. The rituals of eating and drinking and prayer and manner of dress and so on, it's these that give the religious person the sense of belonging, and feeling of "being religious."

To focus on the creation story is fundamentally a modern Christian perspective, because it involves "belief", which is primary in that worldview. But in many other faiths, other things come first - ritual, or ethics for example. The feeling of religiousness comes for those people not from belief, but from actions and symbols.

So I would say, think about the rituals they have. Because we live in a secular society, we often think of "ritual" as something quite restrictive and separate from day-to-day life; but that's because we've forgotten how many secular rituals we have. That we say hello, goodbye, please and thankyou, that we wear ties or skirts, call one another "Mr" or "Ms" or "Dr", that we open doors for people or expect waiters to wear black and white - these are all rituals. If they're not followed, we get at least a moment of surprise, if not of actual offence.

Ritual is "a formalised, predetermined set of symbolic actions generally performed in a particular environment at a regular, recurring interval." More generally, by ritual we define ourselves as part of a community of people who also perform that ritual. It gives us a sense of identity, and of community.

So by presenting rituals which are alien to the players, but natural to the characters in that religion and culture, you bring it alive for them.

Just, you know, don't overdo it. A little bit goes a long way

Quote from: RPGPunditThat sort of stuff, big mixed up pantheons with big mixed up areas of specialty, and different "aspects", is what makes a religion seem appropriately classical.

I agree with this - and the rest of your post - 100%. In my view, the only campaign setting which gets classical religions and pantheons right - heck, the only one within a mile of getting this right - is Glorantha, and that's thanks mainly to Greg Stafford's background in folklore. The Cult Compendium reprint should be required reading for anyone designing religions for games.

Another point people miss about pantheons: a lot of their features come about as a result of cultures with entirely different religions clashing. Roman religion underwent a sea-change thanks to the influence of myriad different cultures, and you ended up with pseudo-Olympian gods and mystery cults from all over the mediterranean coexisting with old-style divinities like Dis Pater and Jupiter - as well as a bunch of Emperors granted godhood for entirely political reasons.

Quote from: JimBobOzSo by presenting rituals which are alien to the players, but natural to the characters in that religion and culture, you bring it alive for them.

I was starting to formulate a response along these lines, but you pegged it much better than I would have. I think that this is true of many things in rpgs and not just religion, too.

Since Glorantha has been mentioned, interested parties may like to have a look at HeroQuest Voices.

I confess that I chose to minor in Religious Studies in part due to this very issue.

That's an excellent site, droog, thanks for posting it!

You're welcome. We are all us.

This thread has been helpful so far. Thanks all.

Any other personal experiences?

Also, fantasy literature recommendations? Anything that had really interesting spiritual/religious concepts.

If you can find a copy for cheap enough, or just at your local library, Barry Longyear's The Enemy Papers features one of the best fictional religious texts I've ever read.

Quote from: Consonant DudeAlso, fantasy literature recommendations?

Well, The Gods of Pegana was among the first efforts to create a consistent and completely fictional religion in modern fantasy literature...

I started reading this thread with the notion of posting about 75% of what pundit posted and about 60% of JimBob posted and bits others' posts along the way, but of course, they got their before me.

What I'll post instead is writing & editing advice.

Don't rely your first pass to catch mistakes, but more importantly, leave some strategically placed key mistakes in. You will almost certainly find that your written material is too cohesive in form; use the opportunity to go back and put in details and contradicting points of view that call your pro-religious figures' side of things into question.

Write from a different angle, then perhaps a 3rd view, then take another look at the first view. Think about religion in the real world and the problems it has making its case for truth and accuracy. The reason for those problems is that other people have different views and definitions and issues and so on.

Then do all that again, and perhaps again.

Martin's A Game of Thrones is a pretty good example of a setting where the writer did exactly what I'm talking about (of course, he's an exceptional and long practiced author, so he did it in a lot less time than it would take one of us).