Yeah. Thing is, in something like the Medieval Eurth, I'm using Saints as deities, more or less, but I'm not using actual historical Saints, using them instead for inspiration in coming up with my own Saints, background, names and all. I don't want the setting to be a faithful reflection of medieval France, or its Church to be an actual faithful representation of the historical Roman Catholic Church. I keep things like the competing popes and all, but I'm not trying to create an historical setting at all. I'm creating a Fantasy setting with some historical dressing instead.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410090Branching 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?

I think it is hard to do well. It took a long time for me to come up with semi-monotheistic religion I do have without having them be a rip-off of one of the real world variety. They have elements of various real world religions but I think I got it to the point where they are their own thing.

However my setup is only semi-monotheistic. There is God, known as the One, and the "gods" are more like powerful angels with more free will.  The One hasn't chosen to manifest yet. Demons are hated by all the religions regardless of how twisted they are.

For those who have my Majestic Wilderlands the Ghinorians believing they are the chosen people of Mitra and their history was inspired in part by history of the Jewish People. The main twist is that instead of founding a 2nd tier Kingdom they went on to become the equivalent of the Roman Empire in the Majestic Wilderlands. The religion evolved into more of a Catholic Church style faith under the pressure of having to rule so many different cultures with their system of ethics.

All the gods believe they are doing what is right no matter how abhorrent it seems to other. Set believe that order is the only way to combat the Demons. Societies dominated by his faith are viewed as Tyrannies. Kalis is a goddess driven by revenge against the Demons after they raped her.  She turned to the use of Blood magic and is willing to do anything to kill Demons and their followers.  Hamakhis tapped into the use of Chaos to fight Demons and now needs the human sacrifice of his follower to control it. Otherwise it will grow out of his control and cause widespread destruction.

The remaining gods have much more benevolent faiths. Finally one of the surviving gods, Horus (not mentioned in the MW supplement), has appeared among several desert tribes and proclaiming himself as the true servant of the One. This is the first true Monotheistic religion in my campaign and is the first to proclaim only the One is worthy of worship.

Nobody knows what the One (God) is thinking about any of this.

Quote from: Lizaur;410178By the way, the concept of "monotheism" in most D&D and other fantasy settings always has upset me as terribly wrong. You have a vast territory, with dozens of kingdoms and peoples of diverse ethnics and happens that everybody worships the same gods of the same "megapantheon", besides the obvious differences in culture, backgrounds, etc. It seems to me artificial and historically incorrect, like an "Unified Theory of Gods" or something like that. Where are the different interpretations or the mutually-exclusive myths? Sometimes I view the monotheistic settings a lot more believable.

It depends on the assumptions of the setting. In the Majestic Wilderlands there are only a dozen or so survivors of the Uttermost War with the Demons. So different religions from different cultures recognize the common elements. For example Mantriv of the Ament Barbarians is the same entity as Thor of the Skandian Vikings. The religions are not exactly the same but at their core they teach the same things.

What a referee should do is lay out his metaphysical assumptions and create the religions that fit that.  In the Majestic Wilderlands I assume there are universal dieties but the specific religions manifest based on the cultures. The final twist is that the Elves are immortal and there are survivors that had direct interactions with the deities. Sylvan cultures, i.e. cultures influenced by the Elves, tend to revere the deities as wise teachers rather than worship them.

It is important to remember the context of fantasy games, in which the religions of this world would seem irrelevant and effete.  The Gods of most D&D settings tend to be comparable to our conception of Heads of State - they are not mysterious unless they choose to be, and their identities are firmly established through constant interaction with lesser beings.  They are convenient Kings and Queens for a narrative in which Player Characters quickly outgrow any awe for a mortal monarch, and they do what Kings and Queens do - they send Our Heroes out on quests, they make and break deals with each other and conceal some of their alliances and motivations, they deliver rewards and punishments... it has nothing to do with religion or anthropology, it's just politics, but it allows a DM to quickly move a narrative along and change things around.

The biggest narrative trouble with monotheism as a cosmic framework is that (misquoting Pratchett and Gaiman) it turns history into a long, complicated game of solitaire.  Middle-Earth is a great example of a fantasy setting in which God, although remote, is Singular, Real, and In Charge, but it has several narrative advantages over conventional Christianity - the god/angel Vala make discussions of higher powers often sound more polytheistic, and there is no Church - Gandalf is a divine emissary, but even he sounds pretty secular most of the time.  Trying to run a Middle-Earth campaign in which Religion is an issue would pretty well ruin the setting, in my opinion.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410170I know exactly what you're saying here, but you just happened to pick maybe the worst possible example, because FR is one setting that doesn´t work that way. A lot of people might play it that way, but if you read the source material itself its pretty clearly one of the most authentically "Polytheistic" settings around.

But yes, most people who do polytheistic settings don't even do those right.

RPGPundit

Like I said up thread it's been ages since I played FR.

How is it more authentically polytheistic than other D&D settings?

Quote from: RPGPundit;410170A lot of people might play it that way, but if you read the source material itself its pretty clearly one of the most authentically "Polytheistic" settings around.

Tell me how it's authentic, because I sure as fuck don't know what the hell you're talking about here.

I much prefer to see clerics, particularly PC clerics, as crusading types which exist outside any formal church hierarchy.  If they want to settle down and establish a temple or abbey they can, and people would probably flock to join a high level cleric's church, but that's not the base assumption.  I also think clerics as a class work best if you remove gods and have the clerics devoted to concepts or alignments. For example, good aligned clerics draw their power from the upper planes because they're devoted to Good as an idea.


Back on topic.  What specific elements would make a compelling monotheistic religion in your typical D&D world?  An element of mystery?  A system of saints, angels, etc to blunt the edge of having one god?  Have some kind of faith based mechanic to cast spells?

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;410205Back on topic.  What specific elements would make a compelling monotheistic religion in your typical D&D world?  An element of mystery?  A system of saints, angels, etc to blunt the edge of having one god?  Have some kind of faith based mechanic to cast spells?

Well to me, in large part, D&D's take on divine magic is already geared towards a monotheistic setting in some respects. Look at the Cleric turning undead, or the Paladin smiting evil, defending justice and good in this world. These are elements which are later declined with several gods and such in the classic D&D world setup, but as such, they point more towards Crusades, Templars, Priests practicing exorcisms and defending the Living against the Dead. All these things to mean scream for a Monotheism losely based on Medieval Christianity. Not necessarily faithfully historical mind you, not by a long shot, but at least losely based on that equation. When you start pushing polytheism in the vanilla D&D formula, you sooner or later run into problems. Are there Paladins of Neutral Evil gods? What about a Cleric of a Water God? Why does he turn Undead? And so on so forth. Sure, you can find all sorts of in-world explanations, but more often than not, that'll push towards the dilution of the archetypes and more variants to them, like the kits in 2e, the myriad of class variants, including prestige classes in 3e, multiclassing, and so on, so forth, which is kind of "anti-D&D" in spirit, to me.

Quote from: estar;410193What a referee should do is lay out his metaphysical assumptions and create the religions that fit that.

I think it's been the preferred way to worldbuilding for a very long time, the "top-to-down" approach. My problem with that is that I think a lot of DMs/writers start for the Uttermost Top: they define the the Universal Truth behind the Creation of the Whole Campaign World, leaving no room for uncertainty. I'm not talking about different interpretations of the same divine beings, I'm talking about religions so divergents as Hinduism and, say, australian aboriginal animism. A fine exemple is Middle Earth: a profet can come out from the desert of Harad preaching a new godless faith that revolves around philosophical principles and the elemental forces, but the existence of Eru and stuff renders him absolutely wrong. And I think is a pitty: I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

Quote from: Lizaur;410207I don't want, as a DM, to know the ultimate truth of my campaign setting, moreso my players.

I agree. It's great when in world-building you do not answer all the big picture questions, do not cast the cosmology in stone, etc etc. There's a happy medium to find, where you have for instance explanations of the world's cosmology with in-character testimonies that lay out different takes on what exist out there, what created the world and so on. A GM might then decide to explore this or that take through his campaign, and/or ignore others. It makes for a better setting, in the end.

The cleric has been a long time sore spot for me in D&D. To me, the best treatment of clerics/priests in D&D was in perhaps the most maligned version: AD&D 2e.

I always found the 3e priest and its abilities/spell set to be rather inflexible. I laugh particularly in 3e/d20 when I hear about a "warpriest" base class variant or prestige class. I wonder if the 3e cleric isn't a "warpriest", what is it?

As for realistic polytheism, the biggest offender I see in D&D is treating each of dozens of deities as miniature monotheisms, with church heirarchies that mimic Christian congregations in which one person pretty much attends only one denomination for their whole life. In the real world, in modern and historical polytheism, common folk would provide offers to many of the various deities.

Quote from: Benoist;410202Tell me how it's authentic, because I sure as fuck don't know what the hell you're talking about here.

I think the most "authentically polytheistic" setting for traditional D&D is old Grayhawk: at least, Greyhawk has five differents ethnics backgrounds for the human race, and all the gods in the megapantheon belonged to one of those five pantheons. In my own Greyhawk campaign I try to enphasize the cultural backgrounds assembling the god in sort of "baklunish religion", "suelian religion", etc.

Quote from: geekgazette;410133Perhaps 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.

Now see the deity/religion you describe is more believable. I can get behind humans worshiping an entity that has some sort of long-range goal that on the surface doesn't make sense. But that still doesn't make him the god of madness, it simply makes him a god with an inscrutable agenda. One of the reasons that the cults work in CoC is that the different entities have an agenda, they aren't simply madness for madness sake. The insanity of their followers comes about because they are involving themselves with something that a human mind simply can't comprehend. But even so, the cults in CoC never become very large. They tend to be isolated and small conspiracies. While in many fantasy settings you get gods of concepts like madness, who have large organized churches and gatherings of the faithful. It just seems completely unlikely.

I know it's not as big in tabletop, but Dragon Age is monotheistic, I think.

At least in the 30-some-odd hours I've put into the CRPG, the only god I ever hear about is the "Maker," and their religion is structured like a pseudo-Catholic church, just with less misogyny.

A God of Madness is completely unlikely unless he's real.  If you start with the assumption that the God of Lightning is responsible for lightning bolts and the God of Dreams is responsible for dreams,  I see no problem with a God of Madness who is responsible for insanity.  The God in question would not be required to be personally insane (just as the God of Lightning doesn't have to physically manifest as a lightning bolt), but could be the ultimate source of all insanity, the administrator who decides who goes insane, or in some other way intimately connected with insanity - followers may or must be insane, the amount of insanity present in the world gives the God power, et cetera, et cetera.  Once you assume that there is a God of Madness who may predate humanity, it makes sense for people to worship him because he is a big powerful thing, and it makes even more sense if he can manipulate people into worshipping him as part of his divine powers.  It doesn't have to be something that people would come up with on their own whether or not he actually exists.