This question is not setting or system-specific.

I'm preparing my dark fantasy campaign. It's a homebrew setting, more low fantasy than high fantasy. I'm trying to make things a little cohesive for this campaign (we have another one that is a high fantasy mish-mash).

Coming up with interesting magic disciplines, races, creatures, kingdoms, politics, is pretty easy for me but I'm always stalled at religion. I want a single religion or pantheon but I'm tired of the clichés such as "God of War", "God of Nature", "God of Broncoburgers" and the like... And of religion essentially granting "miracles" that are nothing more than spells of a different kind.

Anyway, I'm not looking for specific suggestions as much as asking for your own thoughts and experiences. How have you made religion(s) interesting and consistent in your world? How have you made them an interesting part of the world. How do you keep the balance between insuring religion has a constant evocative presence in the setting without becoming a set of cheap superpowers?

Also, any fantasy literrature to recommend where religion(s) is brilliantly handled?

Here is a radical idea: don't give priests cool magical powers.

Plenty of real world religions have managed to become potent and central parts of people's lives without throwing Cure Light Wounds around everywhere. Sure, there's big, ostentatious Lourdes-like miracles and whatnot, but those are rare, rare, rare, and not even part of the day-to-day lives of your average worshipper. Major religions get that way because they provide a philosophy which satisfies their followers' spiritual and emotional needs, and because said followers include folk from all strata of society, from the people to the elite.

Here's something I'd like to see in a fantasy world: a church which has avoided the pitfalls the medieval Catholic Church fell into by not developing much beyond the "network of monasteries" level. The monasteries are places people can go to retire from the world and contemplate god, and are sources of (non-magical) healing and aid to the surrounding villages. The church lacks friends in high places, and is often threatened by them, but it has the support of the masses and that's what counts in the long run.

Well, in one of our campaigns (that was never played) we created a pantheon putting the gods into families so to speak.

Each family was based loosely on the Good <> Evil spetrum, with each of its members based on the Order <> Choas spectrum.


Of course, in the end, we scrapped the whole system because we hated the whole idea of order vs choas, so our current religious system is either good or evil now (in truth, there are no shades of gray, but the people believe there are.)


Our current way of doing things is really great. Lots of good conflict, as both good and evil priests can essentially do the same things, but the ways they do them are drastically different.

Quote from: Consonant DudeI want a single religion or pantheon but I'm tired of the clichés such as "God of War", "God of Nature", "God of Broncoburgers" and the like... And of religion essentially granting "miracles" that are nothing more than spells of a different kind.

Having a single religion is not, in my opinion, the way to make religion interesting any more than putting one item on a menu is normally a way to make a restaurant interesting.  Ultimately, what makes religious debates interesting are the world view implications of the perspectives involved.  If you don't have multiple perspectives, then there is no debate or disagreement.  Certainty also takes a lot of the wind out of religious debate, too.

What I did in my D&D game was create a cosmology that could be interpreted different ways depending on how a person interpreted the known elements, what they believed about the unknown elements, and what their focus was.  In other words, everyone acknowledged the same plane structure, things like resurrection and reincarnation spells, where souls go when people die, and so on but they all disagreed on what it meant, where it was all going, and what was or wasn't beyond what was known.  So I'd suggest creating an interesting cosmology that has some unknowns and ambiguity remaining in it and then build up a few (2-4) interpretations of that cosmology supporting different philosophies of life, and that should give you an interesting religious landscape for your game.

Fantasy religion is never addressed as a religion in games, but as a method of differentiating PCs. This is because most fantasy game designers don't actually like or understand religion. In order to make a fantasy religion as interesting as real religion is, you need to understand what makes real religions so fascinating for their adherents, and apply this.

-clash

Quote from: Consonant DudeAnyway, I'm not looking for specific suggestions as much as asking for your own thoughts and experiences. How have you made religion(s) interesting and consistent in your world? How have you made them an interesting part of the world. How do you keep the balance between insuring religion has a constant evocative presence in the setting without becoming a set of cheap superpowers?

Religion in fantasy campaigns has always been a problem for me. Honestly most times I leave religion out, magic either becomes spiritual (healing spells etc) in nature or there are generic gods who give no power to their believers.

When I did use religion - clerics, priests etc - I made it a central theme of the campaign. Basically there was one Goddess whose aspects were worshipped differently in differents parts of the setting. So, in one place she manifested or so her followers claimed as a violent warrior and they had access to the appropriate spells, in another she was a healer,whose worshippers naturally received healing spells etc or she manifested to a group of ecoterrorist as a fearsome nature spirit.

She (It ?) communicated with her followers through dreams. Depending on how strong belief in her was, the more overt the powers received. So in some places there were extremely fundamentalist worshippers who did not tolerate any deviations from dogma for fear of offending her and losing her favour. This naturally led to conflicts with other worshippers/peoples. The more one believed the greater the power.

The socio, political and economic fabric of this setting was drenched in religion. There was no magic, so you could say that for some, belief in the Goddess constituted a belief in magic - the supernatural. Indeed, some followers of certain aspects branded worshippers of other aspects as heretics - warlocks - who needed to be cleansed. The setting was rife with religious paranoia. It was a setting dominated by the Priest and Holy Warrior caste. Fun times.

I don't have much to add, except, it will be interesting to read how others have handled religion in their games.

Regards,
David R

My advice, read up on real religions to give you a clearer idea of how to make Fantasy religions seem credible.

Part of the trick is that most fantasy religions I've seen are WAY too consistent.  Real  religion is usually a huge jumble of historical and cultural inconsistencies that are the product of a lengthy evolution of that belief system over time.

Also, in classical religion, pantheons were never as straightforward as they seem to be in D&D.  In D&D you seem to have the "Sun God", the "Fire God", the "God of Death", etc etc. But if you look at classical pantheons, you get stuff like Apollo who was the god of the Sun, of Music, and of Doctors.

That 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.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditPart of the trick is that most fantasy religions I've seen are WAY too consistent.

I think certainty is a bigger problem than consistency, but I'd agree that many fantasy religions are too neat and clean and don't have the sort of hooks that allow for differences of opinion, schisms, and heresies in real world religions.   The problem with games like D&D, that have the capacity to essentially visit Heaven and Hell or ask questions directly from the deities and spells that allow efficient communication and travel across great differences, is that it makes a certain amount of sense for religion to be both certain and consistent so that's the path many people take.

Quote from: RPGPunditMy advice, read up on real religions to give you a clearer idea of how to make Fantasy religions seem credible.

Part of the trick is that most fantasy religions I've seen are WAY too consistent.  Real  religion is usually a huge jumble of historical and cultural inconsistencies that are the product of a lengthy evolution of that belief system over time.
 
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That 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.

RPGPundit

Exactly.

Quote from: RPGPunditMy advice, read up on real religions to give you a clearer idea of how to make Fantasy religions seem credible.

Part of the trick is that most fantasy religions I've seen are WAY too consistent.  Real  religion is usually a huge jumble of historical and cultural inconsistencies that are the product of a lengthy evolution of that belief system over time.

Also, in classical religion, pantheons were never as straightforward as they seem to be in D&D.  In D&D you seem to have the "Sun God", the "Fire God", the "God of Death", etc etc. But if you look at classical pantheons, you get stuff like Apollo who was the god of the Sun, of Music, and of Doctors.

That 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.

RPGPundit

I tried to address this in my homebrew setting.  When I went about designing most of the pantheon for my world, I ensured that most gods had a secondary and/or tertiary domain.  For example, my God of Death is also God of winter, scribes, and felines. There is not one church, but both the High Church, who believe that all gods are separate gods under one High God, and the Aspectionists, who believe that all gods (and indeed, all of creation), are merely aspects of the same supreme being.  Then there are dozens upon dozens of obscure sects, local harvest gods, gods translated from other cultures and blended into the existing pantheon, and generally one fun jumble.   So just because a player's Cleric of the God of Death bops into a temple 1500 miles (or 50 miles) from his home city doesn't mean he'll find anything close to what he's used to, or even practices he wouldn't see as heresy.

Religion is a complex subject.  The trick is to present it as such to your players without bogging down your game in it.

The thing I found that helped the most was to basically write their Bible.  

By sitting down and actually writing out a mythology and a religious text for a people, it gives you a much more coherent idea of what that religion is like that a bunch of names on a page.

The problem I have with the stock D&D "passle of gods" is that it's just that: a bunch of gods.  No coherent mythology, no religious texts, nothing to really make it all feel like a religion.  In the case of where they instead treat each god as it's own religion, it again falls down because it just doesn't wind up making any sense.

There'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.

Quote from: RPGPunditMy advice, read up on real religions to give you a clearer idea of how to make Fantasy religions seem credible.

Part of the trick is that most fantasy religions I've seen are WAY too consistent.  Real  religion is usually a huge jumble of historical and cultural inconsistencies that are the product of a lengthy evolution of that belief system over time.

Oh, I completely agree with that. Except I'm trying to get that feel you get but with some divine interventions once in a while. Because I want higher powers and religion to be active in the setting, it's difficult to build religion and spirituality from the point of view of followers, no matter how flavorful that might be.

But I shall think about that further!

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

That is so amazing... and completely nuts!

Was it a lot of work? How much did you write?

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.

Yeah, that's the toughest thing for me. There's a fine line between running too much on faith and running too much on tangible divine interventions. I'm trying to find the sweetspot and it's not easy.

I find that it is one of the most challenging aspect of fantasy world building for me.

I didn't write a whole lot.  Basically I just got their creation story, and the creation story of magic.

But it helped for me to sort of get into the mindset.  By putting youself in the frame of mind of that "religious text" style, it sort of helps you understand the religion.  

Plus a lot of just sort of comes naturally at that point.  

I wish I still had the piece handy, I'd be glad to share it, but I've no idea where it is at the moment.