Religion in Fantasy Settings
Religion has been a significant factor within world history. Yet, within the campaigns I have run, it has never played a significant role. Speaking with Kevin, his experiences are the same. Perhaps its the unconscious playing to politically correct times. I’m going to call it a failure on my part to not exploit this obvious gaming opportunity..
Religious aspects are prevalent in most fantasy games. D&D provides a whole host of gods for characters to worship. Yet, you never see that worship carried over into supplements discussing religious differences or wars. Human history is mostly religious wars. Extreme, unconscionable acts have been undertaken in the name of religion. Warranted or not, they transformed us into the society we are today.
Religious differences are taboo. Modern society doesn’t want to consider them, let alone actually discuss them. Putting religion into the forefront of a game is going to be difficult. Yet, it has significant playability.
Consider the Crusades. Consider the American West when religions strove to convert the American Indians. Consider the modern missions to convert tribes in 3rd world countries to a specific religion. I find it all every strange but religious fervor can do that.
It is a Taboo topic. No one one wants to discuss it. Yet, people show up on my doorstep every few weeks trying to ply a variation of religion on me. In a fantasy environment, they would show up and mandate I change. Accept the Lord’s (of the realm) religion or be cast out.
Given the host of gods in most settings, religion is treated as accepting them all. I find that unlikely. Every small village will have a focus on a particular goddess. Expounding her over every other god.
Where are the cults, the religious extremists, the missionaries trying to convert people? How are the Clerics and Paladins of those faiths not trying to do what modern day bicycle riding missionaries doing? Where is the backlash when those gods fail?
As Kevin stated, why are there not lynchings of wizards. If a relatively modern society can lynch people for being suspected of wizardry, medieval ones would jump on it. Crops go wrong? Drought? Whatever it is the local mage or someone passing through would get blamed and probably burned.
I find the topic fascinating because I’ve never considered it within a game. Have you played religion at the extremes?
Tags: Faith & Religion, Ramblings of Mark13 Comments
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Religion is always a factor in my campaigns (and most of those I play in) maybe not always a major factor, depending of the campaign theme and what the players are interested in.
While a village/town/city is likely to have a patron god or goddess, that does not mean they will be hostile to other gods, just not as interested in them. Different gods and goddesses fill different, but needed, roles in the world.
As to why not lynching of wizards, that is pretty easy. When wizards can set you on fire with a word, confronting them requires considerably numbers or magic of your own.
I wrote a setting for my own campaigns which is particularly religious due to being indo-asian in nature and polytheistic, so everyone has a personal collection of deities that he or she will pray to. Deities are a physical reality that can be seen and interacted with, so not being religious is to basically be insane or an alien. However institutions don’t have the implied level of power they would in normal D&D “wow it sucks to live here” Pseudo-Europe. So there’s no all powerful pseudo-christian church to theoretically bludgeon the population with. But religion is still a personal matter that I have all my players take into account when they roleplay. And if it bothers them, they can leave.
For me religion is rarely a major part of a game fro a few reasons. First off, I game what interests me, and bluntly, religion isn’t really that interesting to me. 😛
As a second factor, in a setting where the gods are real quantifiable thing (i.e. worshiping on actually gives you powers to cast spells) faith takes on a very different tone. Not believing in gods in a standard DnD game is like not believing the sky is blue.
Which leads into the whole “lynching wizards” thing. Sure, they could assume it’s a wizards fault for those things. Or they could assume it’s goblins… or any number of things that are proven to exist. That’s why they get adventurers to look into that sort of thing ;). It’s one of those moments where you need to be careful about applying to much real world logic to the fantasy genre.
I ran an alternate history campaign where the primary conflict was a crusade by the divine-powered magics of the west versus the arcane-powered east. I almost always have a major “church” in my campaigns. They are a political and economic force that the PCs can choose to support or oppose. Because D&D faiths are sources of magical power, they tend to become very influential (as would a wizard, or group of wizards.) Magic is roughly analogous to technology in our current society. Nations that have it (whether divine or arcane) tend to be the imperialist forces in the world.
[…] may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!This post was inspired by a post at the KORE rpg blog about the topic. And it got me thinking, which is sometimes not a good […]
Historically, religion has only been an us-or-them, kill the unbeliever sort of affair after the advent of the desert religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In Greek and Roman times, religion was much more along the lines of what we see in a traditional fantasy campaign – lots of gods, tons of temples, and some regions worshiping certain gods more than others, but rarely going on about “our god is the real god”.
Of course, that made them vulnerable when the “our god is the real god” twitchy-eyed folks came along. More than anything, I’d think that the intersection of those two types of worship would drive interesting activities in a campaign world. Especially if all the religions had actual gods behind them.
@Sean: “As to why not lynching of wizards, that is pretty easy. When wizards can set you on fire with a word, confronting them requires considerably numbers or magic of your own.”
Or Faith.
Fanatics in religion lie outside the rules. I get the balance of gods in D&D. In Greek or Roman history? I don’t think so. There is an entire mythology of gods trying to out do other gods. The entire concept of people believing in numerous gods so they are not antagonistic is absurd. Sorry, I just don’t buy it. Historical record doesn’t either.
Apparently I failed to point toward the fanatics. Perhaps history had multi-god tolerant eras but they were far from passive in the modern record. Not Romans, not Greeks. American Indian perhaps. I cannot recall the Norse gods being passive about one another either.
@Mark The Romans were very tolerant towards different gods and faiths. It was a hugely multicultural society and people were free to worship which ever gods they liked.
But with one big exception … Judaism and later Christianity.
The reasons these two were persecuted was that they claimed the other gods did not exist and only the One True God should be worshipped. As the emperor was considered godlike and worshipped accordingly, this caused some offense. Hence, persecution of Judaism and Christianity was state sponsored.
One key aspect of religion in RPGs is one that @JustAGuy touched on.
Gods are real. Clerics gain power from them and they even occasionally turn up places.
This make a huge difference to faith and how people behave. This issue is never really explored in the D&D rules but its a great starting point if you want to create a campaign world with a very different flavour.
@Sean and murph and Chris: I’m not buying it… in fact, I’m not even sure I’ll be willing to rent the whole, “Multideist-group-hug-get-along” notion of the Roman/”insert multideist society here” era. Even when we’re not focusing on the notion of extremists (which is the target discussion group I think Mark was aiming at) we find people doing strange things to “different” people for a variety of reasons.
Here’s my counter-example: Sports. Consider how much more advanced we consider our society and yet, when in the throes of group-think mentality, people still riot and attack each other over the outcomes of sporting events. It’s akin to religion of a different nature, but in my opinion, the analogy sticks.
@Chris: Perhaps they were. The gods, as portrayed, were not so much. I take the viewpoint that gods derive a portion of their power from the number of believers. So gods would always be trying to get more by bestowing more power on those believers that were also good at converting others to their viewpoint. Additionally, since gods are active (perhaps not the best verb) participants in the D&D realm, would they not some at the extremes be apt to reward followers with more power if they diminished the power of the god at the opposite end?
Suffice to say, I obviously have an opinion different than most on this topic. Playing a religion heavy or religious war is not something most people would undertake or enjoy. I find the concept fascinating with significant potential.
Good to see a number of different viewpoints. Diverse views are good. Just because I don’t agree with them doesn’t make them invalid for others.
I’m happy being an outlier.
Religion tends to play a heavy influence in games I run. This is because I made sure the rules supported that type of play. If a cleric or paladin wants to cast miracles they need to convert heathens, smite heretics or build temples. This makes a tremendous impact in gameplay where a cleric goes from a band-aid to a zealot (who can act as a band-aid)
Rather than spam, full information below:
@Zzarchov — Nice. I love the mechanism you laid out. Meshes nicely with my views on the religious potential within a game. Well worth considering for anyone pondering a religiously heavy campaign. Thanks.