Branching off from the "eastern promise"/arabian settings thread, let's discuss here why the fuck game-setting designers feel like they "have to" use polytheism in their fantasy settings, even in settings that are allegedly inspired by cultures or periods of history that were absolutely tied to a monotheistic religion?

WTF is the problem? Are they scared to do it? Or can they just not envision how to do it well?

RPGPundit

Maybe they are part scared of running into religious zealots in or outside the hobby who would criticize such uses, and part convinced that it somehow wouldn't be as "fun" or diversified as multiple pantheons and stuff.

I actually believe that religious zealots are going to be upset whatever you end up doing (polytheism? Withcraft!) on the first point, and completely disagree on the second one.

I love Glorantha's Malkioni. I love Lothian's cult in Ptolus. I use Saints as deities in my own Dunfalcon setting, and the Medieval Eurth. It's become part of my personal D&D landscape. I find it richer than all these pseudo-godlings without particular cultures, all belonging somehow to the same meta-pantheon in that wierdly they all seem to acknowledge the existence of each other, to begin with, that we seem to keep getting served to us in various Fantasy RPGs.

PS: I'm actually a religious person. Catholic, to be exact. Just to point out that I am not the religion-bashing type.

Thats a big part of the reason I liked the BANESTORM setting of Yrth - the religions were REAL world religions that we already know. They may have been slightly tweaked for a world where magic works and obviously works - but its still Christianity, Islam, Judaism,...etc.

Instead of a Templar or Crusader knock-off called a 'Paladin' - I can actually play (or my players can) a Templar Knight that actually has magic powers and spells...and can fight with a sword if he so chooses.


- Ed C.

One element I'm just going to carry over from my post in the first thread:

QuoteI go back and forth on this. There are examples to the contrary, but I think that for me it comes down to a sense that the priest of some shady pagan god is easier for me to conceive of as a freebooting adventurer than the priest of a socially pervasive monotheistic religion.

I think another thing is the "more-is-better factor." "More Gods!" is like "More Monsters!" "More nonhuman races!" etc. Of course you can have a great fantasy setting with just human characters, or only human enemies, etc. It can be a compelling challenge to create one. But I don't think including those is necessarily a failing.

Some of this depends on how monolithic the influence is. Many settings boil down to "X Game in Y Drag." Many others take the form of "A cross between X and Y." It would be fairly goofy to have a campaign setting that was ostensibly France in the 1400's and have 25 different gods, but that doesn't mean that it was a "lack of balls" that leads to a setting like Greyhawk.

I almost kick myself for saying it, because it sounds like RPGnet-ese, but I keep trying to come up with dumb campaigns as counterexamples, and then think "eh, I'd play that." "Vaguely Japanese with Samurai and so on but there's a god for each planet in the solar system? Hey why not? Feudal Japan but it's been converted to Christianity since 950 AD? Hey why not."

On the other hand, I love, say, Pendragon. I would gladly play a comparable game set in a romanticized Islamic medieval Arabia. I'm not qualified to write it, either. I have my own personal set of irritations, of course, about history and cultures - certain readings of Greece or Rome drive me nuts, for example.

Now I want to work up a monotheistic campaign setting for D&D with a completely new monotheism. But I'm going to try to avoid project switching right now.

I can see it being a lot of things actually:

Hobby inertia.  I'm not sure why polytheism started as a default but by now it seems to be expected.  My main problem with this is that it isn't presented like real world polytheistic religions, but as a multitude of hybrid poly/mono religions - ex: Forgotten Realms, and it's "If you don't follow one god you're screwed"

Reluctance to offend.  Monotheistic religions play a little to close to home for some.  When you take into account Christianity's hostility to D&D/roleplaying you come to a point where including anything resembling a monotheistic religion might drive customers away.  Also if you only have one god/religion then you might *gasp* restrict player options!

Lack of knowledge about how religions work.  Having a bunch of highly specialized gods - The God of Magic!, The God of Undead Killing!, The God of Wealth! - you don't have to put much thought into what they do or how they fit into a game world.  What do followers of the God of the Sun do?  They fight undead!

My own homebrew game uses a dualistic religion not unlike Zoroastrianism.  Given that one god is out to destroy creation, etc there's only one deity suitable for PC clerics and priests.  Each major culture has a different take on the religion, but that's a different thing.

If you want to check out a cool treatment of monotheism in D&D then look up Sepulchrave's Tales of Wyre.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102ex: Forgotten Realms, and it's "If you don't follow one god you're screwed"

I'm not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate?

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102Also if you only have one god/religion then you might *gasp* restrict player options!

This is an issue. I also have known a lot of players who are disappointed if the campaign doesn't allow them to invent their own weird god for their character to worship.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410102Lack of knowledge about how religions work.  Having a bunch of highly specialized gods - The God of Magic!, The God of Undead Killing!, The God of Wealth! - you don't have to put much thought into what they do or how they fit into a game world.  What do followers of the God of the Sun do?  They fight undead!

This seems to be par for the course. I prefer to come up with a god as more of a personality, rather than a god "of" something, and then give a little thought as to why a  mortal would curry his favor. But this does, I admit, sometimes make it difficult to convey to a player what the fuck is the idea with a given god.

In my MRQ2 Moragne setting, I got around the "limited player options" thing people associate with monotheistic religions by having each monastic order, lay order, fraternal order and regional church count as their own distinct cult. They teach different spells and skills, have different requirements to advance within them, and have different runic associations. PCs who want to advance magically can pick one suited to the forms and methods of worship and magic they most want.

I have struggled with this off and on during most of my gaming career. At different points in time I intentionally avoided games which made priests of any religion playable characters (there are quite a few of them out there). These are some of the problems I've had with the whole mess:

1: More than any other adventuring archetype priests are the ones who have the steadiest of jobs. If you are an ordained practitioner of your faith then you have a congregation you should be looking after. It just sounds a bit fishy to have a priest say to the people he is guiding in the community "Sorry folks, I'll be back in about 6 months, I'm providing magical support for a bunch of people who want to kill a dragon that's about 100 miles from this village. I'll be back soon, just hold all the baptisms, confessions, confirmations, regular prayer services etc. until I get back." Now templars or fighting orders are slightly different, but even so they only went out to fight/adventure when they had specific goals in mind. The church just didn't send them off to wander around for no reason.

2: Be it polytheistic or monotheistic player characters just don't have a lot to do with earning the power they throw down. RuneQuest is an example where there is some effort to make priests/runelords earn the powers they get, but in most other games its "you've reached the right level to cast call lightning, here you go have a nice day." I'm 100 percent sure there are home brewed versions out there where priests are held a little more accountable, but I'm also willing to bet they are the exception and not the rule.

3. Fantasy religions absolutely drive me bug-fucking bonkers. It's probably the amateur anthropologist/sociologist in me, but I look at some of these things and I want to call the designer up and scream over the phone "you stupid twat this makes absolutely no sense." Case in point, a common god that crops up is "The God of Madness." Huh? First, who would worship the god of madness. How on earth could the worshipers of the god of madness be able to form a organized religion of any real consequence. Yes, there are ancient religions based on 'ecstatic madness.' But that is expressly viewed as a transitory state of being, not a permanent 'whoohoo look at me I'm a whackadoo priest of madness. I've got custard in my pants and jam for brains.' Even if someone worshiped the god of madness, how would the god of madness notice it? He's madness personified. Madness made flesh. Why should he even care?

4. Monotheist religions often fare little better. Often they are portrayed as monolithic in nature where every facet of the faith is consistent, when we all know it wasn't and probably never has been in the history of our world. Christianity has had an enormous number of heresies, apostasies and just plain splinter faiths. They range from incredibly literal interpretations of the bible to forms of mysticism that border on being positively Asian in their approach to issues of self-determination vs. divine edict and ego vs. divine nature. Islam has it's share of unusual and obscure splinter sects and a little research will yield a vast underpinning of folklore that made its way into the Quran which speaks to the beliefs of the religions that came before it.

All in all I find it a subject which in the end has caused me to stop and think at the beginning of every game 'will I include player character priests; will it add enough to the game to make it worthwhile.' I find it very interesting that if the option isn't even offered most players don't even bat an eyelash at it.

I think really it's more of a question that RPGs miss the mark completely when they deal with religion of any stripe.

I think mostly why priest classes are even involved is that adventuring parties need someone to 'pick up the pieces' after the fight. There needs to be someone who provides magical protection/support for the party and that's what priests do. One option is to just make faith part of the background and move the healing/support magics over to the magician classes. I'm not saying that's a great option, but I'm saying it could be an option and several games pretty much do exactly this.

I've run campaigns with Monotheism, even with the Judeo-Christian god (A Dark post-apocalyptic game).

Right now I'm prepping for a campaign with a religion based on Gnostic Christianity. It's not the only religion in the world, though. That's one of my peeves.

Edit: Incidentally, I'm not specifically religious myself, but I lean Eastern. Lately I'm considering studying Judaism much further.

In RPG terms, Christianity has more than one deity.  At the simplest, you also have the devil, not a common PC choice but there for the bad guys.  You also have lots of lesser entities that are apparently capable of granting powers, such as angels, saints, Mary, and demons - they're grouped into two sides but could be considered different cults. There are also the angels that chose neither God nor the devil in the conflict wandering around.

I've done monotheism in my own campaigns. I thought it worked well. As another poster pointed out, even in a monotheistic religion you can have other powers that keep things interesting.

What I found fun by having one deity, in a fantasy setting where the God was able to prove its existence on a regular basis, was I was still able to have different religions. With one God, you still have many interpretations of what that kind stands for and wants its followers to do. You can even have people who, though they know that one God exists, oppose it for whatever reason. In some ways, if you are trying to do a something akin to medieval Europe, one God works really well.

I suspect the reason for this apparent lack of monotheism (despite Fading Suns, 40K, Pendragon probably) is taht gamers would rather escape it because it smacks too much of the real world and all the shit that real world monotheism brings with it.

I think part of it is simple "fear" of offending someone or driving away potential players. The various sects of the Abrahamic religions can't even agree on what type of god they have, how can a game designer possibly get it "right" in a way that would please them all.
I saw a recent poll in one of the newspapers that showed that most people calling themselves christians view their god as anywhere from being a loving and kind god that cares about them personally to being a vengeful distributor of punishment. Add to that the fact that Atheist and Agnostics make up 15-20% of the population and you stand to drive a pretty good chuck of your potential customers away. All because you tried to represent someone's deity and didn't doing it the way they want/see it or by cramming said deity down the throats of people who don't follow it. That's not even taking into consideration the neo-pagans and followers of other religions.
From my own personal experience, the RPG players I've known have been neo-pagans, atheist or they leaned heavily towards agnosticism. Again this is just from my personal experience and I am not making any claims about all gamers. All I know is there is a reason none of us wanted to play Testament or any other game based off of a real world religion.
So I think it is probably just easier and safer to just make generic fantasy gods that are less likely to offend anyone. Of course I've seen it brought up in some rulebooks, I don't remember which, that if you don't like the multi-gods deal just pick the one that best represents the one you believe in and dismiss the others. This is also why some games are now saying that you don't have to have a deity, but can instead believe in an ideology and still be a cleric or paladin.

Now that I think about it I believe that in most games the religions are quasi-monotheistic. As an earlier poster mentioned the clerics or other followers generally follow a specific deity. So in a way they are kind of monotheistic. The difference being that they don't completely deny the existence of the other deities, they just claim that their deity is just better. Which is similar to real world religion in that even in the real world religions many of the religious texts don't claim that other deities don't exist, just that they aren't the "right" ones. In RPGs the followers of specific deities even go out to fight and kill the believers of other religions. How much more real world does a fantasy game need to be?

That's just my take on it.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;4101143. Fantasy religions absolutely drive me bug-fucking bonkers. It's probably the amateur anthropologist/sociologist in me, but I look at some of these things and I want to call the designer up and scream over the phone "you stupid twat this makes absolutely no sense." Case in point, a common god that crops up is "The God of Madness." Huh? First, who would worship the god of madness. How on earth could the worshipers of the god of madness be able to form a organized religion of any real consequence. Yes, there are ancient religions based on 'ecstatic madness.' But that is expressly viewed as a transitory state of being, not a permanent 'whoohoo look at me I'm a whackadoo priest of madness. I've got custard in my pants and jam for brains.' Even if someone worshiped the god of madness, how would the god of madness notice it? He's madness personified. Madness made flesh. Why should he even care?

Perhaps it is my background in mental health, but I've never seen followers of a deity such as the god of madness as slapstick goofballs. I always pictured them a little more like the cultists H.P. Lovecraft wrote about or like some of the people I have encountered. They don't really see themselves as "mad". They see themselves as the normal ones and everyone that doesn't see things their way is mad or lost. Kind of like any other religion. Although having read your post, and thinking about it for a moment, I can see where people might take it in the other direction.
I don't think I'll ever use followers of those types of deities in that madcap zany way, but I get where you are coming from.

From the other thread:

Quote from: The Butcher;410116Pulp fantasy, the basis for D&D (and by default, for most fantasy RPGs) wasn't exactly big on organized religion, and all too often cast priests as antagonists (with rare exceptions, like Epimetreus from "The Phoenix and the Sword"). In this sense, the D&D Cleric is an aberration, hailing from a combination of Abrahamic mythology and Medieval folklore and literature.

But I digress. I think that pulp fantasy writers like polytheism because it's exotic, and possibly because it may feel easier to downplay religion as a societal force when gods are a dime a dozen.

The observation on D&D Cleric is worth developing a little bit further. I've recently come to realize that D&D Clerics make a lot more sense under Monotheism.

Clerical magic is clearly lifted from Abrahamic scripture and myth. "Evil" (Chaotic) Clerics get called "anti-Clerics" in OD&D; it's strongly hinted that Clerics should choose between Law or Chaos (in OD&D, Neutral alignment is a no-no after a certain level, I forget which). And every edition of D&D before AD&D 2e is ill-suited to represent the differences between, say, a priest of Zeus and a priest of Artemis.

Druids are far better suited to the role of wild-haired pagan priests worshipping cthonic, pre-Abrahamic deities. Wizards are the men and women who lift a middle finger to God and gods alike, and go about twisting the fabric of reality with sheer willpower and hyperdimensional mathematics (a.k.a. "foul sorcery", "man playing God" etc.).

Also, since arcane magic is infallible in D&D, I can easily see a charismatic Wizard setting up shop as the head of a cult, proclaiming himself the high priest of a new deity (possibly an evil, intelligent planar horror who's teaching him magic in return), or better yet, an incarnation of the deity. Imagine the faces on your players when the Evil High Priest fireballs their asses before escaping via dimension door.