D&D General Religion in D&D: Your Take

[Tonguez]

I just meant "worship" is a strong term forvthat relationship between Conan and Crom.

"You shall fear the Lord your God" - Moses

Fear and Reverence are often the same thing

 

[Reynard]

"You shall fear the Lord your God" - Moses

Fear and Reverence are often the same thing

I don't know, Conan doesn't seem to fear Crom either. But, sure, I guess he counts as a "patron deity."

 

[James Gasik]

I mean, Movie-Crom did send Valeria back to save Conan's life, so he can't be as uncaring as the Cimmerian claims.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

"You shall fear the Lord your God" - Moses

Fear and Reverence are often the same thing

This.

Awe-inspiring and fear are the same in Hebrew (תירא). “Phobos” is used in the Greek, also with the explicit connotation of reverence.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

What I want in in a campaign is:

- Consistent gods. I hate the schmorgesborg of gods. Even if there are different states and religions, they are based on the same gods except with different names. Maybe some gods are more powerful in certain areas because of that god's relationship with the people.

-Exception: Some lesser deities/spirits/holy places that can exist locally but their power isn't far-reaching.

-Humans are insects. I've been in a lot of games where the power of the gods depends on the worshippers. I dislike that take. It's so mortal-centric. Like the Dresden Files. In general, I think, why should mortals have any say in anything at all? I was recently reading up on Babylonian mythology/religion after the old and new gods went to war, Marduk ordered that a race be made from the defeated god, Kingu so that they could serve the victorious gods. That race was humans. Their whole purpose is to serve the gods because the gods maintain order in the universe. In a campaign, Clerics are the ones who perform the rites, make sure the gods are appeased and spread the words and laws of the gods. They probably would have the most political clout in this scenario.

- EVIL and GOOD beings involved in moral affairs: This is the purview of demons, devils and angels. Gods don't care enough. Maybe fallen gods might because they're imprisoned or whatever but those gods are impotent to do anything. Maybe some demons want to see the return of a titan or something or a devil wants to tempt mortals and increase the power of its cult. Maybe some angel is enforcing the worship of a particular god(not that that god cares but they're not complaining) This is where mortal 'worship' empowers immortal beings. Not so much that they need mortal worshippers to be powerful but it extends their reach in the mortal world and increases their power in their own domain by finding souls to trade, garnering favours and increasing their political power. These devils and angels might be in the category of 'local gods/spirits' or 'patron' deities or even pretending to be a local spirit to trick mortals into favoring them. This is where Warlocks get their power.

- I don't necessarily need to have the gods walking around the earth but the idea that they are revered or feared and that sacred places are sacred. Sure, maybe your character hates this one 'fallen' god but, sure as hell you won't desecrate a shrine for fear of the consequences. Any place that has a bit of power of a true god should be awe-inspiring. I prefer when the gods are imperfect but are also forces of nature. Humans put too much focus on their own self-importance - it's why we treat our planet so badly and I don't want to see it in my D&D games.

- Religion and politics has to be important because that's where all the adventure happen. The strife caused, not specifically from the gods themselves (as I said above, the gods rarely care what mortals think), but from how lowly mortals implement their worship. That and demons, devils and angels are stirring the pot, trying to advance their own agendas.

edited spelling/grammar

 

[Ruin Explorer]

NOTE 1: this thread is in D&D general because I think D&D does religion a little differently than other fantasy games due to the traditional inclusion of classes like the cleric and paladin. That said, feel free to discuss other fantasy games if they are appropriate.

NOTE 2: This thread is about fantasy religions and how the gods and their servants interact with playing D&D. It isn't about religion in general. You can use real world religions (ancient or current) as examples in discussion, but let's not make it about real world religions, please and thank you.

With that out of the way:

I was listening to a Great Courses on life in the ancient world and in talking about Mesopotamia and especially ancient Egypt, it got me thinking about how religions works in our campaigns. D&D religion is a weird chimera of myth and history, with mostly bad takes on both (at least as it relates to real world religion). That said, I find the place of religion in a D&D campaign to be fascinating and think there is some room for a discussion on how we, as individual worldbuilders and GMs especially, portray that element.

Dragonlance was a strong early influence on my view of how religion fits into a D&D campaign. I have leaned on the trope if the return of the lost, forgotten and/or old gods a bunch of times. Not being a religious person myself, I don't really model these forgotten faiths on anything particularly real, but rather use the trope as a way of talking about cycles of civilization and apocalyptic ends to them.

I also rather like the portrayal of religion in Eberron, where there are multiple religions that take very different forms, from pure philosophy to monotheism to traditional D&D pantheons.

One thing I have only toyed with in short games or one shots is the idea of legitimately living gods walking the earth, ruling their cities or otherwise directly lording over mortals. Like, if the city gods of Mesopotamia were active and not just bound to their statues. Being a cleric would be a different thing if your god summoned you before her to answer for your behavior on last week's dungeon delve.

How does religion fit into your D&D campaigns? What models of religions and faiths do you prefer? Are their settings that do religion really well for you? Do you make it an important part of worldbuilding or even play?

Personally my reaction to "religion in D&D" is "It'd be a good idea".

I mean, that's snarky but I'm serious, because there's really only one D&D setting which actually has religion/faith in it. Eberron.

There are a couple of others where it's sort of borderline - Taladas (not Anaslon) for example treats religion as religion/faith in a way that at least somewhat resembles the human experience of religion/faith.

Most D&D settings? Nope. It's just confused, unimaginative nonsense. You can't have faith/religion in the same way if the gods actually do walk the earth. It's not religious faith at that point, it's more like having faith in your boss at work. Faith isn't really even the right word in English for that, more like trust, or reliance. And the religion elements feel completely lame in that context too, because why are you building churches and so on, why are you having these ceremonies and so on? It's just unimaginative fantasy authors failing to follow through on their concept. There's a reason that societies where there's an actual belief that the gods are actually around and active in the world (rather than the more distant and abstract monotheist notions) tend to be keen on sacrifices and public worship (if any) and usually strongly believe in spirits etc. (i.e. animistic beliefs) as well as bigger gods. Yet in these settings, there's always an insistence that religion basically works like modern monotheism in most ways, whilst simultaneously having priests with massive magical powers, gods turning up in person with some regularity, or being visit-able, and so on.

So I think if you're creating a setting, you need to pick a lane!

Like, do you want actual religious faith/devotion and religion? For religion and politics to intermix in historical-like ways? Then you can't have the gods walking the earth in like, living memory (and given so many beings in D&D live hundreds of years, that's a very long time!). You can still have Clerics etc., but the fact that all Clerics etc. get the same amount of power, and there aren't stronger and weaker gods and so on would not escape people's notice.

Or do you want The Gods Walk The Earth, as it were, in which case faith becomes essentially trust or even simple "following orders". This is quite often seen in JRPGs and anime, I would note. I feel like Japan having a partially animistic approach to religion and the world even to the present makes Japanese creatives typically better able to handle these themes in a way that makes sense, compared to many Western ones. And if you do this, like, follow through. For example, holy wars are going to be exceptionally brutal and horrific if the god in question is actually directly handing orders to the people in charge.

What you really don't want to do is just create another bland mish-mash of mid-century (mis)understandings of Greco-Roman(-Norse) religion, combined with weird out-takes from Christianity, and try and both have gods who definitely 100% exist and constantly interact with the world but are also "distant and mysterious", because all you do there is make a bland mess. Which is exactly what the "religion" in the FR, GH and main Dragonlance and so on is. Bland, implausible messes created by people who on the whole, lacked both the desire and ability to look seriously at how religion would work. I kind of forgive it because it was "building the plane whilst it was flying", but it's not great. It's not something to aspire to or emulate.

 

[Celebrim]

Religion in my game is heavily based on historical reality in antiquity. Although I don't explicitly reference any real world belief my game is strongly influenced by Greek myth, Hinduism, and east African religious practice. There are over 1000 gods and I've never documented them all and I make up many of them as a go. I often describe the world as what if Etruscan rather than Roman world views came to dominate the culture.

Generally this is occurring as a backdrop as unless the player is playing a Cleric or a Paladin (or to lesser extent a Shaman) they tend not to engage heavily with religious practice, and when then they do they aren't engaging with religious practice in the way a typical member of the community is since their duties tend to give them a henotheistic outlook rather than the polytheistic outlook that most NPCs have - most NPCs have absolutely no problem offering up homage to a god that doesn't represent their own beliefs closely or at all which is an outlook super foreign to the modern world. Gods in my campaign are active and pervasive and carnal and their cults are active and pervasive and heavily entwined with government power and are pervasive in the life and rituals of a community. You will probably meet at least one god in the course of my campaigns and they are basically just another NPC occasionally working a minor miracle but generally preoccupied with their own complex affairs. Their machinations are always sort of bubbling behind the scenes as their cults via for power and influence over the cultural affairs of the community.

In my opinion, by far the best book on religion in D&D is Aaron Loeb's "Book of the Righteous", and it helped crystalize for me what I wanted from my vaguer ideas from early play. I even stole a few deities, albeit not his excellent cosmology because I didn't want to go down to a dozen deities having already established dozens of them. In literature, one of the few well down polytheistic settings IMO are the five gods from Bujold's Curse of Chalion, albeit IMO only as presented in the first two books before Bujold undermines her own setting. One of the things that I absolutely insist on is that your pantheon should look like deities that average people would actually want to worship, a standard that pretty much every official D&D setting hard fails. The worst of these is FR which is composed of very generic deities to serve the gamism of adventuring party henotheism against the evil cults - god of fighters, god of rangers, god of thieves, etc. versus the gods of baby killing, wanton destruction, and puppy kicking.

One thing that absolutely goes away in my version of the game is this dual mishmash of polytheistic gods and also another layer of angels and demons. The gods may have divine servants and messengers, but there aren't two hierarchies in the outer planes in my game. The gods of my campaign world have semi-divine spiritual vassals and not a competing hierarchy of other spiritual beings.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

EVIL and GOOD beings involved in moral affairs: This is the purview of demons, devils and angels. Gods don't care enough.

I mean, the main reasons to do this--the main reasons players want this--are all quite simple and extremely hard to replicate with angels. Devils are fine, do whatever you want there (after all, for much of history, most peoples' "demons" were literally just another people's gods). But gods, specifically good gods (and thus, implicitly, some evil gods that oppose them), have uses that are extremely difficult to replicate. Those are:

• "Well done, my good and faithful servant." A mere angel saying this stuff, even a powerful one, simply cannot hit the same way as an actual deity doing so. It feels different to have the gratitude of a god.
• Changing a god's mind. Again, it's different to actually impact the gods themselves; an angel may be set in their ways as much as a god can be, but by their very nature it matters more to affect a god than to affect an angel so.
• Finding faith, or returning to it after having abandoned it. Angels are powerful and good and worthy of respect, but they're rarely (IMO never) going to be the targets of genuine devotional love, nor of the bitter disappointment of a lapsed believer.

Again, all of these things hinge on the very fact that deities ARE so big and important--for them to genuinely care, to genuinely listen, is precisely what makes it matter that they have morally good goals and that one or more PCs have, had, or (re)gain a personal and caring relationship with them.

Perhaps this is just my actual IRL faith talking, but if you took the above things and swapped out an actual literal deity (e.g. Bahamut, one of my favorites) for a mere angel or archangel, it would lose the vast majority of the impact. It wouldn't completely ruin it...but it would get perilously close. One of the greatest faults of Pullman's antireligious screed, His Dark Materials (a story that is good despite its explicitly intentional antireligious polemics), is that it commits this specific thing. "God" doesn't exist, the Church is explicitly a lie, "the Authority" is just the first/oldest-still-existing angel (and a horrible, vicious tyrant, science-denier, and all-around monstrous horror in angelic form.)

 

[Celebrim]

Or do you want The Gods Walk The Earth, as it were, in which case faith becomes essentially trust or even simple "following orders".

As opposed to what?

And if you do this, like, follow through. For example, holy wars are going to be exceptionally brutal and horrific if the god in question is actually directly handing orders to the people in charge.

In a typical D&D setting, the model for a holy war is less likely to be a crusade or a jihad as it is to be the Greeks versus Troy - no less brutal and horrific for the fact there is no one god in question but a dysfunctional brutal family playing out their family drama with mortals as tools for their own grievances and also the cause of their own further grievances against each other. Whether or not the gods are handing out orders is less relevant than that they are taking sides and messing in the affairs both directly (taking chariots and fighting alongside the mortals, and occasionally even getting wounded) and indirectly through divine favor influencing the outcome of battles both personal and corporate.

I very much agree with your post except that I don't think there is a contradiction between gods walking the earth in living memory and historical religion and politics because all of those historical societies themselves believed in gods walking the earth in living memory. And I really dislike faith as this nebulous power rather than its historical meaning of fidelity and trust. But for that matter, I really dislike in setting "faith" meaning much of anything because as soon as you bring up "faith" in the context of religion then you are doing a Christian pastiche rather than any sort of historical polytheism. Faith is unimportant to most religions, and shouldn't be used as a synonym for religion any more than church should be used as a synonym for religion.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I mean, the main reasons to do this--the main reasons players want this--are all quite simple and extremely hard to replicate with angels. Devils are fine, do whatever you want there (after all, for much of history, most peoples' "demons" were literally just another people's gods). But gods, specifically good gods (and thus, implicitly, some evil gods that oppose them), have uses that are extremely difficult to replicate. Those are:

• "Well done, my good and faithful servant." A mere angel saying this stuff, even a powerful one, simply cannot hit the same way as an actual deity doing so. It feels different to have the gratitude of a god.
• Changing a god's mind. Again, it's different to actually impact the gods themselves; an angel may be set in their ways as much as a god can be, but by their very nature it matters more to affect a god than to affect an angel so.
• Finding faith, or returning to it after having abandoned it. Angels are powerful and good and worthy of respect, but they're rarely (IMO never) going to be the targets of genuine devotional love, nor of the bitter disappointment of a lapsed believer.

Again, all of these things hinge on the very fact that deities ARE so big and important--for them to genuinely care, to genuinely listen, is precisely what makes it matter that they have morally good goals and that one or more PCs have, had, or (re)gain a personal and caring relationship with them.

Perhaps this is just my actual IRL faith talking, but if you took the above things and swapped out an actual literal deity (e.g. Bahamut, one of my favorites) for a mere angel or archangel, it would lose the vast majority of the impact. It wouldn't completely ruin it...but it would get perilously close. One of the greatest faults of Pullman's antireligious screed, His Dark Materials (a story that is good despite its explicitly intentional antireligious polemics), is that it commits this specific thing. "God" doesn't exist, the Church is explicitly a lie, "the Authority" is just the first/oldest-still-existing angel (and a horrible, vicious tyrant, science-denier, and all-around monstrous horror in angelic form.)

I see where you are coming from but don’t necessarily agree angels can’t be powerful messengers that inspire awe. There are many example in the Bible that have angels as messengers and the people they appear to are afraid or in awe. Those experiences can still be transcendent.

I’m also not saying the gods can’t have a moral compass or ideals but only that their power and is so beyond mortal understanding. That power isn’t dependent on mortal worship. That’s my preference is all I’m saying. Would a god be upset if a mortal was breaking its laws? Probably. Does it care enough to do anything? Probably , if it wasn’t so involved in its own dealings. Clerics are there to deal with mortals. Angels can send messages and dispense Justice if need be. The god will rarely intervene.