Quote from: Pete Nash;446977I must admit of late that I've had an urge to write a Mahabharata book for BRP or MRQ2. I think I could squeeze a lot of gaming goodness out of the setting, though sadly it probably wouldn't be that popular outside of a core niche.

Kings, heroes, honour, war, castes, proper polytheism, duels, impossible challenges, devastating astras and an opportunity to weave in pre-destiny into character creation. Lots of potential!

I was tempted to do something similar, though not for those systems.  I even tried starting on it a couple of times; but it never seemed to manifest.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jibbajibba;445974In the Real religious schism often leads to sectarian violence, Sunni vs Shiite, Catholic vs Protestant, Muslim vs Jew, Christisn vs Muslim,  etc etc . Any lawful or good diety that would provide both sides of a conflict with magical powers to go out and kill each other is dubious.

Real religious schisms most often lead to sectarian violence when there is a political or cultural angle to the conflict that is the primary driving force rather than a religious one that often leads adherents of the sects to do things that run counters to their religion.  Those conflict generally break along cultural lines as well as religious lines.

There is a reason why Quakers, the Amish, and Suffis aren't generally mentioned in discussions of sectarian violence, except maybe as victims of it.  There is also a reason why there has been relatively little sectarian violence in the United States despite the numerous religious sects that live there, including several home-grown ones.  It's not a given that religious sects will try to kill each other, particularly when the sects in question are truly and deeply religious or when political power is not also at stake.

I do agree that a Lawful deity would only provide magical powers to the sect or sects that get the doctrine and rules right.  A (Neutral) Good deity, on the other hand, may care less about doctrine and rules but would withdraw magical powers from sects that start hurting or killing innocents if they engage in any sectarian violence.  A Chaotic deity would probably not have rigid doctrine, and would probably withdraw magical powers from anyone who tried to create a rigid sect or doctrine.

Quote from: John Morrow;447264Real religious schisms most often lead to sectarian violence when there is a political or cultural angle to the conflict that is the primary driving force rather than a religious one that often leads adherents of the sects to do things that run counters to their religion.  Those conflict generally break along cultural lines as well as religious lines.

There is a reason why Quakers, the Amish, and Suffis aren't generally mentioned in discussions of sectarian violence, except maybe as victims of it.  There is also a reason why there has been relatively little sectarian violence in the United States despite the numerous religious sects that live there, including several home-grown ones.  It's not a given that religious sects will try to kill each other, particularly when the sects in question are truly and deeply religious or when political power is not also at stake.

I do agree that a Lawful deity would only provide magical powers to the sect or sects that get the doctrine and rules right.  A (Neutral) Good deity, on the other hand, may care less about doctrine and rules but would withdraw magical powers from sects that start hurting or killing innocents if they engage in any sectarian violence.  A Chaotic deity would probably not have rigid doctrine, and would probably withdraw magical powers from anyone who tried to create a rigid sect or doctrine.

I would agree with all of that.

Wow is that a first

Probably worth pointing out that the Quarkers and Amish are both Active pacificists as well, the the point of going to prison rather than get drafted to the army. I imagine an Amish internicine war would be quite amusing with 2 or 3 groups of very serious men with beards staring at each other and tutting.

Quote from: John Morrow;447264I do agree that a Lawful deity would only provide magical powers to the sect or sects that get the doctrine and rules right.

I would suggest that it would be quite possible for more than one sect to "get the doctrine and rules right", at least inasmuch as those matter any given Lawful deity.  Unless said deity is the God of Micromanaging Every Last Fucking Detail, there would no doubt be more than one way that a sect could vary from another and still end up satisfying any conditions set by a Lawful deity.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;445753How many religions in RPG settings do you know which have different sects or groups?

Because this is another big issue in why (in particular in fantasy setting) RPGs' treatment of religion is so fucking off; all too often all the faithful are of one big mono-cultural mono-dogmatic bloc, which is not how religions work in real life.

Assuming that the existence of gods is trivially verifiable, I think you need to go one way or the other. Either:

(a) The gods are real and involved in the daily business of the church, in which case sects are unlikely to exist because you can actually get reliable updates from god. "Is Bob right or Paul right in interpreting scripture X?" "Bob. Here, lemme just update that blog post to clarify things." "Well, I guess that settles that question."

You can get some interesting stories about Paul, angry with his god's betrayal, storming off... but since he's no longer part of the god's faith, it's not really a "sect". If gods can't cut off their clerics from spells, Paul might be able to sow some confusion, but that's about it.

(b) The gods are more hands-off... or at least, more ineffable. (Paul storms off... but he keeps getting spells even as he starts preaching his alternative doctrine. Is the god really that flexible? Is there a new god? Is Paul's god the true god and the original church has been subverted by a demiurge or demon? Or vice versa?)

I've taken the latter approach in the campaign world I've been running since 2000: I consciously chose to limit myself to a single pantheon of the Gods of Civilization (the good guys) and a single pantheon of Demon Gods (the bad guys).

The worship of the Gods of Civilization is dominated by the Imperial Church, but over the past few centuries a wide panoply of Reformist movements have been gaining traction. The Imperial Church itself has also changed over time, and there are even older belief structures which venerated the Gods of Civilization (and out of which the orthodoxy of the Imperial Church evolved).

I've found this can be particularly rewarding when it comes to adapting existing modules into the campaign world: Rather than just adopting the new gods talked about in the adventure, I'm instead forced to figure out how the religions depicted can be translated into legitimate aspects of the Gods of Civilization. Over time this has tended to add depth to the pantheon, instead of simply spreading all that detail out in a thin smear over a multitude of pantheons.

Quote from: VectorSigma;445791Friction between sects was a major theme in one of my homebrew campaigns, but the players didn't get into it.  They're not comparative-religion nuts, so it didn't do it for them.

My current campaign is set in Ptolus, which has been re-tooled to fit into my campaign world. The biggest changes focus on the practices of worship. (So the Street of a Million Gods, for example, is still primarily focused on Pantheon worship -- although some of it gets pretty esoteric.)

I was pleasantly surprised when the players jumped into a sequence of events I intended to be mainly background detail: They are now deeply involved in the politics surrounding a schism within the Imperial Church involving the local equivalent of a Bishop declaring the rest of the church corrupt and naming himself the equivalent of the True Pope.

Quote from: misterguignol;445803The trick, I think, is to make these kinds of details intersect with the characters' livelihoods.

Matches my experience, too. In the case of the current church-schism plot, the PCs got tied into it because one of the PCs was a living saint for the God of Magic. I was anticipating him going to the local Bishop for guidance, but once he did the local Bishop realized that having a living saint under his influence gave him the political leverage he needed to launch his True Pope campaign.

That put the PCs pretty much front-and-center in this one.

In another campaign, a player took it upon himself to found his own Reformist sect.

Quote from: RPGPundit;447401the God of Micromanaging Every Last Fucking Detail

If someone gave me apotheosis that's the field I'd choose!

Glorantha.

Quote from: RPGPundit;447401I would suggest that it would be quite possible for more than one sect to "get the doctrine and rules right", at least inasmuch as those matter any given Lawful deity.  Unless said deity is the God of Micromanaging Every Last Fucking Detail, there would no doubt be more than one way that a sect could vary from another and still end up satisfying any conditions set by a Lawful deity.

RPGPundit

I am pretty certain that is exactly what a god of law would be like, come on they're a omnipotent diving being who's one aim in life is to make sure that everyone does exactly what they are told. It would be like my wife crossed with the Taliban

Quote from: RPGPundit;447401I would suggest that it would be quite possible for more than one sect to "get the doctrine and rules right", at least inasmuch as those matter any given Lawful deity.  Unless said deity is the God of Micromanaging Every Last Fucking Detail, there would no doubt be more than one way that a sect could vary from another and still end up satisfying any conditions set by a Lawful deity.

Quote from: John Morrow;447264I do agree that a Lawful deity would only provide magical powers to the sect or sects that get the doctrine and rules right.

That's why I included both the singular and plural as possibilities.

Quote from: jibbajibba;447723I am pretty certain that is exactly what a god of law would be like, come on they're a omnipotent diving being who's one aim in life is to make sure that everyone does exactly what they are told. It would be like my wife crossed with the Taliban

I think that's a pretty narrow view of Lawful that you have there.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;447768I think that's a pretty narrow view of Lawful that you have there.

RPGPundit

I am not so sure,  have you read Deuteronomy.....

Quote from: jibbajibba;447776I am not so sure,  have you read Deuteronomy.....

So what? That's just one perspective of what a Lawful deity need be like.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;447866So what? That's just one perspective of what a Lawful deity need be like.

RPGPundit

I am open to ideas give me some examples.

Some Law gods

Jehovah
Marduk
Maat/Thoth
Quetzalcoatl

All of these gods inspired some pretty proscriptive Laws with plenty of sacrifice and execution for minimal crimes. Now if we put to one side the concept that these were all ideas used by an educated elite to manipulate the prolitariat and assume they were divinely inspired then these gods of law are petty micro-managers.

Now if you are saying that a God might not care about what their follows do and grant powers to anyone without paying due care and attention then ... possibly but it doesn't sound much like a god a law to me. I would have thought that paying attention and sticking to the rules were pretty much a given. We are not talking Bacchus here after all.

But again give me some examples I am not religious about this

I also think it's useful to get away from the whole "Gang of Yahwehs" model of godhood. Pagan gods are closer to what we think of as superheroes than invisible, omnipotent, beneficent abstractions like Yahweh's supposed to be.

The reason a god can't clear up its followers' confusion could be as simple as being in a different country sorting some other shit out. Or he might be around, but too busy fucking those sweet high priestesses / wandering shepherdesses to pay attention to your stupid problems. He might be drunk. He might be stuck at the bottom of a pit he fell into. Or the other local gods might've told him to fuck off and stay away, or else they'll cut his bollocks off.

Maybe he hasn't decided which kind of worship he prefers, and is letting them sort it out themselves. Maybe he likes the variety in sacrifices and demands (sometimes you want horse, sometimes you want roast chicken, sometimes you want a nice warm blanket). Maybe his servants and vassals in the spirit world handle most request and appeals, and they're pretty dim, or open to bribery, or unable to communicate in a clear way due to their character. Maybe he spends most of his time on the road, away from his nagging god-wife, and therefore rarely visits his temples. Maybe he doesn't like his high priest, but is stuck with him for some reason.

He's probably worshipped by an incorporated group of his descendants (supposedly) who trade off duties and who change things whenever they want, rather than a specific ecclesiastical organisation interested in maintaining well-defined dogmas.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;447938I also think it's useful to get away from the whole "Gang of Yahwehs" model of godhood. Pagan gods are closer to what we think of as superheroes than invisible, omnipotent, beneficent abstractions like Yahweh's supposed to be.

The reason a god can't clear up its followers' confusion could be as simple as being in a different country sorting some other shit out. Or he might be around, but too busy fucking those sweet high priestesses / wandering shepherdesses to pay attention to your stupid problems. He might be drunk. He might be stuck at the bottom of a pit he fell into. Or the other local gods might've told him to fuck off and stay away, or else they'll cut his bollocks off.

Maybe he hasn't decided which kind of worship he prefers, and is letting them sort it out themselves. Maybe he likes the variety in sacrifices and demands (sometimes you want horse, sometimes you want roast chicken, sometimes you want a nice warm blanket). Maybe his servants and vassals in the spirit world handle most request and appeals, and they're pretty dim, or open to bribery, or unable to communicate in a clear way due to their character. Maybe he spends most of his time on the road, away from his nagging god-wife, and therefore rarely visits his temples. Maybe he doesn't like his high priest, but is stuck with him for some reason.

He's probably worshipped by an incorporated group of his descendants (supposedly) who trade off duties and who change things whenever they want, rather than a specific ecclesiastical organisation interested in maintaining well-defined dogmas.

Oh I can totally agree that a god of shagging sheperdesses or getting drunk isn't going to be paying much attention to their worshippers. In fact it might be quite nice to have their followers miraculous powers fail pretty consistently as a result.

Justin summed it up very accurately. Either the gods pay attention in which case this shit matters or they don't.

But surely if they don't then that should have an effect on play? So if you are the servant of a lawful god then you can guarentee getting your spells on time, that your turn undead power won't fail you at that crisis point etc ..
If you are the Servant of Blauugh the Lord of Hangovers and Lost Weekends then whilst dogma isn't goign to be high on your priority list maybe consistency isn't goign to be very good either.

Now as I mentioned up post you coudl go to the Marabout tradition. These Islamic Saints have magical power, baraka, and it can be physically manifest. There are plenty of examples of Marabouts tricking each other and stealing their Baraka. ( http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X8waCmzjiD4C&pg=PA931&lpg=PA931&dq=marabouts+and+baraka&source=bl&ots=hG-jm-02L5&sig=ZntubaFnpe9YB1saovXJWQIxFp8&hl=en&ei=VUiLTaSoDMXBhAfwhrC4Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=marabouts%20and%20baraka&f=false )
But you will note that whilst Marabouts are closer to god their baraka doesn't seem to be god given but rather is their own. So this is a substantial break with the typical D&D cleric (well the typical D&D cleric where some attention has been paid to religion so not really typical at all but you get what I mean)