Quote from: Arminius;853665I mentioned earlier that we'd had a thread a while back dealing with multiple religions & sects in a monotheistic campaign. I just did a little digging and I think this is the one:

Why Polytheism?

Today I learned that James Maliszewski posted here 52 times.

For pretty much any game with actual religions I would recommend and prefer a strictly agnostic approach. Actual, provable and most importanntly controlable divine intervention do not work very well in the context of historical Christianity, especially when you come to the many, many schisms and divides. Can heretics or heterodox preachers channel the power of god? Are they truly heretics if the Trinity doesn't seem to care and grant them those powers? Assuming that there are some practices that are beyond the pale for the clergy (when it doubt, think Alexander VI.), where do you draw the line? Or do you go the other route and only allow divine magic for the truly dedicated? It just raises too many questions and creates needless conflicts. And that is before you add any other religion.  

The important part however is, that Christian history is filled with great stuff to build fantastic adventures of all sorts around them. How can anybody read about something like the Cadaver Synod (for instance) and not come up with an adventure idea or two?


Anyway, I wasted some money and actually bought Kingdom of Legend; after all, I do plan run a campaign set in this era starting Thursday, and more information about this would be helpful, or so I thought. It is a surprisingly bad book. Some of its inherent stupidity is a result of the no-Christianity premise, and thus it is logically that the setting doesn't include the Vatican state, even though they do have the Ordo Teutonicus and its realm.  It also doesn't have Bohemia or Prague, because a long-standing tradition of alchemists and the legends about  golems don't match with a fantasy setting, or something like that.
And somehow the authors think that Turkish is written in Cyrillic letters.

I replaced Christianity with the Unconquered Sun in my Albion game because it allows me to have something ALMOST exactly like the Catholic church in the 1400s while still fitting better witth the magic system, the existence of clerics, and the law/chaos alignment themes I wanted in the setting.

It would be ridiculously simple for someone to change it back if they wanted.

Quote from: DavetheLost;853010Really? Other than the Best Forgotten Realms (much of the history of which is Earth with the serial numbers filed off) can you give some other examples?

It seem sto me more of th egaming world is doing Tolkien or Howard.

My apologies; the thread dropped off my radar, and I didn't respond before now.

I don't think I was clear enough.  What I meant to say wasn't that the gaming world invariably did Christianity-less medieval Europe.  It was that the vast majority of treatments -- published or otherwise -- of medieval Europe by gamers all but omit Christianity.

Quote from: Warthur;853018The major exceptions I can think of are Ars Magica, Pendragon, Cthulhu: Dark Ages and Vampire: the Dark Ages.

I wouldn't even give those games credit for being exceptions.

In medieval Europe, damn near EVERYthing was about religion.  The intelligentsia, such as it was, were overwhelmingly clerics.  The Church was the major landowner in almost every region, the chief beneficiary of the majority of wills.  Almost everyone was a churchgoer, and a mark of a conspicuous Bad Man was that he often wasn't, or that he was a (gasp) heretic.  Theological conversations were the order of the day.  The Crusades dominated the martial energies of Europe for most of the period.  The pronouncements of the local bishop or abbot had as much weight as those of secular authorities.  Knights fought more often with the name of saints on their lips than of ladies or feudal overlords.

Published settings don't really reflect this, and I've only seen one campaign that ever did.

I have played and GMed Vampire: Dark Ages and King Arthur Pendragon extensively.

In Vampire religion really didn't play a big part. The Church was more set dressing than anything else. Despite the whole "lineage of Cain" thing the vampires didn't wrestle with religious questions. The Church had its vampire hunters, but that could have been a secular vampire hunting organization in many ways. The Church just didn't feel integrated.

In Pendragon the opposite was true. In that game the differences between Roman and British Christians, and any Christians and Pagans often came to the fore. Holy men, chapels, and religious hermits were frequent encounters.

In Vampire there was always a sense that "God is not really real" in Pendragon God was very much real.

That despite Arthur being some five or six hundred years before Vampire and the Crusades.

Quote from: Beagle;853288I can understand it. It is not exactly an act of great bravery to ommit one of the major forces in the setting the authors tried to recreate

I would frame it more along the lines that it doesn't really benefit the author to make a decision which cuts out certain portions of the gaming market. Any inclusion of real world religion will alienate (some) members of other or no religious affiliation, the truly devoted of that religion will certainly note such a decision mostly on what the authors (from these readers' point of view) got wrong, and the only people it helps to retain is those who look at a historical Europe sans Christianity and say, "well that ruins the verisimilitude for me."

Quote from: Beagle;854222For pretty much any game with actual religions I would recommend and prefer a strictly agnostic approach. Actual, provable and most importanntly controlable divine intervention do not work very well in the context of historical Christianity, especially when you come to the many, many schisms and divides. Can heretics or heterodox preachers channel the power of god? Are they truly heretics if the Trinity doesn't seem to care and grant them those powers? Assuming that there are some practices that are beyond the pale for the clergy (when it doubt, think Alexander VI.), where do you draw the line? Or do you go the other route and only allow divine magic for the truly dedicated? It just raises too many questions and creates needless conflicts. And that is before you add any other religion.  

The important part however is, that Christian history is filled with great stuff to build fantastic adventures of all sorts around them. How can anybody read about something like the Cadaver Synod (for instance) and not come up with an adventure idea or two?
.

Just speaking as a player, I would personally find it much more interesting to treat a mythic christian setting the same way one treats mythic norse mythology or hindu mythology. I would prefer the GM treat it as true and make specific choices on his own (not necessarily reflecting his or her personal beliefs but reflecting what works best for the setting).

Of course just throwing in an analog works too.

The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of players out there don't give a shit.  Tried that 30 years ago, about two people noticed and nobody else cared.

90% of all American Christians are utterly ignorant on the influence of Christianity on the Middle Ages, why should a random sampling of gamers be any different?  Any discussion on this board already is a result of massive selfselection bias.

The vast majority of gamers want their fantasy medieval game to be about as medieval as Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland.  If you don't believe me look at World of Warcraft, or what happened to Guild Wars 2.

Quote from: RPGPundit;856040I replaced Christianity with the Unconquered Sun in my Albion game because it allows me to have something ALMOST exactly like the Catholic church in the 1400s while still fitting better witth the magic system, the existence of clerics, and the law/chaos alignment themes I wanted in the setting.

It would be ridiculously simple for someone to change it back if they wanted.

I like that idea even better than using real Christianity. It neatly fulfills the same role as the Church did in shaping medieval society, but won't turn nonreligious players away and religious players cannot find fault because the religion is fictional.

As for real world religions in RPGs, one of the best games we ever had was playing The End (1e), a game that takes as its start that the Evangelical Christians are right about the Rapture and the End Times, with a group composed almost entirely of non-Christians. We had a Jew, an atheist, several pagans, and a Native American traditionalist.

What made this work, and unexpectedly well, was that we all agreed "this is the way the game world works. We'll leave what we actually believe about this aside."

It is worth noting that Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu, etc mythology are "fun stories" to some, "religion" to others. They just don't have the cultural power that Christians do.

But, I think it is a good observation that most gamers don't really give a shit about religion or culture in games. "Deity" was always just a slot on the character sheet that Clerics filled in and everybody else ignored.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;856261The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of players out there don't give a shit.  Tried that 30 years ago, about two people noticed and nobody else cared.

90% of all American Christians are utterly ignorant on the influence of Christianity on the Middle Ages, why should a random sampling of gamers be any different?  Any discussion on this board already is a result of massive selfselection bias.

The vast majority of gamers want their fantasy medieval game to be about as medieval as Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland.  If you don't believe me look at World of Warcraft, or what happened to Guild Wars 2.

I would agree that a fantasy setting doesn't need to be terribly historical or based on real world religions. I think with fantasy worlds what most GMs and players want is the ability use their imagination creatively. Being chained to the real world can limit that, particularly if the group isn't interested in doing a bunch of research before making a town or secret society. My point was simply that a fantasy world that assumes the Medieval world view was true, would be interesting to me.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;856261If you don't believe me look at World of Warcraft, or what happened to Guild Wars 2.

I know what you mean about WoW, but what happened to Guild Wars 2? I'm not familiar with that game or its community.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;856272My point was simply that a fantasy world that assumes the Medieval world view was true, would be interesting to me.

"The Highest Level of All Fantasy Wargaming" does this in spades if you can find a copy of the hoary old chestnut.

Quote from: DavetheLost;856314"The Highest Level of All Fantasy Wargaming" does this in spades if you can find a copy of the hoary old chestnut.

   It's not hard to find ... but doesn't it also assume that God is a pretender to the position and dependent on mortal worship for power?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;856272I would agree that a fantasy setting doesn't need to be terribly historical or based on real world religions. I think with fantasy worlds what most GMs and players want is the ability use their imagination creatively. Being chained to the real world can limit that, particularly if the group isn't interested in doing a bunch of research before making a town or secret society. My point was simply that a fantasy world that assumes the Medieval world view was true, would be interesting to me.

Interesting to me too.  Just not very popular.