what should a fantasy religion even be?
many setting take their cues from tolkien, and if you really put into words the impulse behind middle earth I think you could say it was "a setting where divinity is so baked into the nature of the world that everyone takes it for granted". Theres no atheists or skeptics, but there also aren't any temples or priests which is extremely odd when you actually notice it. Gandalf or elrond or whoever might reference the valar or something, but nothing that even comes close to worship.
most fantasy settings have a kind of vulgar henotheism splatterred over half-understood pseudo-christianity (yes, even the evil gods in most settings are pseudo-christian). On a philosophical level, the closest parallel I can think of is mesopotamian religion, where each citystate has a native god, tho generic fantasy tends to have more universalist ideas about what "worship" entails. As for religious practice and its role in daily life, most people in fantasy settings have actual zero religious affiliation; not even "attends church on holy days" level of devotion, it is simply nonexistent. the only character that tends to even specify their religious inclination is the cleric/paladin. Rulers in particular are an odd case, since historically they've had a pretty huge incentive to maintain, if nothing else, a religious pretense for the public image
all this begs the question, should fantasy even bother to incorporate religion? I mean, is it worth it trying to make religion an importnat part of your setting? I've been thinking about this for a few months and it really seems like a catch 22 with no good answer. if you try to play to a more "historically accurate" form of religion, players will just default to fantasy cliches. If you make something that evokes modern religions then might seem like you're trying to push one of them. If there are ways to make up fantasy religions what are they?
inb4 have you tried not playing dnd
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the only way is to study religion and mythology and get a understanding for it
>he doesn't use GURPS Religion to develop realistic belief systems for all his settings
ngmi
This is confusing religion with cosmology. You absolutely do not need a concrete cosmology to write an engaging religion; most of any given religion's practitioners don't really engage with the cosmology aspect of their own religion because its either too esoteric or not relevant to them.
The LACK of concrete understanding is what creates the Mystery aspect of religions that motivates real faith, and the lack of the same is often what fantasy religious writing lacks.
>You absolutely do not need a concrete cosmology to write an engaging religion
now that i think of it the op's picture kind of perfectly captures this. In the fromsoft games i never got a clear picture of what worshipping marika or gwyn actually meant, but the player gets a very detailed view of the cosmology of the setting by picking through the ruined remnants of its civilization ("detailed" relative to anything that would be known by the inhabitants
First you need to know the basics.
Until two thousand years ago faith was inherited and deeply connected to nature. Christianity was the first universal religion and rejected both the human condition and nature as worshipful but rather glorified only the external Creator of both.
Unsurprisingly everything afterwards was colored by the single most successful civilization in human history so you'll be hardpressed to find anything original.
If a setting claims deities need prayer for sustenance it's already a bad system.
>Until two thousand years ago faith was inherited and deeply connected to nature.
>Christianity was the first universal religion
that objectively false
It's still true today as it was back then. The only difference is that Islam sprang out of an anti-trinitarian heresy and Buddhists learned that they can actively start conversations instead of waiting like a quest giver in vidya.
Many things we take for granted were started by only one group of book readers.
That line at the top just cracks me up. Thanks, I needed that.
Or just write down individual aspects of each religion you come across (real or fictional) on small pieces of paper, shuffle them thoroughly and draw 2d6 of those notes to make your new religion.
A fantasy religion should
1. Reflect something important to the culture that practices it
2. Support the themes and conflicts of the story being told
3. Be memorable to the players
Or you're straight up not roleplaying. You're just jacking off.
>1. Reflect something important to the culture that practices it
>2. Support the themes and conflicts of the story being told
>3. Be memorable to the players
what would examples of religions that do NOT obey these rules look like?
doesn't the religion in, say, game of thrones, break rules 1 and 3?
>doesn't the religion in, say, game of thrones, break rules 1 and 3?
Which one?
The Faith of the Seven is fairly straight forward and well spelled out without venturing too far into the cosmology of it all. One god with seven faces, all generally benevolent in theory. Different aspects of their culture and life with few to no situations one or another can't apply.
The Red God is clearly evil through the actions of his clergy, and their devil character leans so far into the "shall not be named" it's literally "We are the good guys cause... we just are okay?!". Which works for a small cult, but it's also portrayed as a hugely popular religion in the east. Almost like it's the default.
The Drowned God and the Black And White God are so shallow they basically don't exist. Characters mumble some stuff under the breath to indicate they believe and it doesn't seem to actually go beyond that for literally anyone.
>Which works for a small cult, but it's also portrayed as a hugely popular religion in the east. Almost like it's the default.
It could be a western reinterpretation of an eastern religion. kind of like how the cult of mitras was popular amongst the roman army, but radically reinterpreted who and what mitras was from zoroastrianism, and it never gained a foothold amongst general roman society
No, weirwoods/drowned god are pretty important to their cultures, weirwoods and r'hllor are pretty iconic too. Faith of the seven however does break all 3 rules, its extremely barebones and doesnt feel fleshed out at all
>what should a fantasy religion even be?
Whatever you want it to be.
basically has it right, but it varies somewhat depending on what exactly you're making.
>You're just jacking off.
I honestly think this is ok if you aren’t annoying about it and forcing it on your players. Every “world builder” or creator is going to be a little self indulgent sometimes and that’s ok. It’s actually insanely cringe to create a world 100% to cater to your players or potential players, it lacks soul and passion. You may as well have a board or suits and a diversity consultant help you too.
If you want players to engage with ANYTHING, you need to tie it to a reward. I played in a Greek myth game and players routinely made sacrifices to the Gods, prayed lengthy well-thought prayers, etc. because there was always a mechanical reward. Either a scaling buff or sometimes an actual intervention in the world, like an elemental intervening in a fight.
You can do this in other ways if you don't want your religion to be active in an obvious supernatural way though! As you point out, real power in the real world derives from religion. Say you play a game like FantasyCraft where there are social ranks, holdings, trophies, etc. -- perhaps they can only hold those and move up in the world if they can show their piety and leverage that holy legitimacy.
Are you talking about Agon? That game is great for how well the mechanics cleave to the genre.
Every religion is fundamentally a transaction between worshippers and worshipped. Mortals do things that they think the god will like, and in exchange the god grants them boons or leaves them alone depending on the god's domain. There's obviously an undertone of mortals knowing they're nothing compared to the gods and are humbly sucking up, but it's still transactional. In a setting with actual real gods this would just be more obvious. This is why settings where gods actually need worship for whatever reason fail at doing anything interesting. Gods shouldn't need anything from the mortals, the mortals are desperately trying to make themselves either useful or less annoying to prove they're worthy of the gods being nice to them.
So why does that preamble matter? Simple: since religion is a series of transactions, the nature of those transactions will reflect a ton about each culture and god. You need to come up with what each culture values, which will be a reflection of their history. You need to come up with how they view each god and their domains. Do they worship the god of disease because they hope the god will show mercy and keep them free from disease? Do they hope the god will spread disease to their enemies? Do they demonize the god completely, ban all worship, and place all their worship into healing gods? And so on.
>This is why settings where gods actually need worship for whatever reason fail at doing anything interesting.
Depends. A clever idea could be the gods do need worship to survive BUT they actively prevented the mortals from knowing this. All the gods, even those who are enemies, are in on it 'cause once the cat is out of the bag, that's it for all of them. Mortals all pray because sucking up to the almighty gods, occasionally, very rarely since that requires power, they get a small boon. It just don't happen so often because "they work in mysterious ways" or "you didn't deserve it because you weren't faithful enough/did some sins you might not remember". Guiding the players thru a religion politics and conflicts focused campaign then have them discover this would feel awesome for both the GM and them.
>A clever idea could be the gods do need worship to survive BUT they actively prevented the mortals from knowing this. All the gods, even those who are enemies, are in on it 'cause once the cat is out of the bag, that's it for all of them. Mortals all pray because sucking up to the almighty gods, occasionally, very rarely since that requires power, they get a small boon. It just don't happen so often because "they work in mysterious ways" or "you didn't deserve it because you weren't faithful enough/did some sins you might not remember".
That's my setting, except the boons aren't that small or infrequent, since the gods are all trying to compete with each other for supremacy.
>Every religion is fundamentally a transaction
The person who typed that has to be one of the two:
1) israeli
2) American
Quite possibly, both. There's no way a Muslim, a European, be he Christian or Atheist or a wacky Occultist, or a Chinaman can have a world-view that warped.
Transactional relationships were common in Roman, contrasting with the appeasing character of Greek "worship", and guess which empire has men daydreaming?
My fave is when they tricked Tiber into eating scarecrows instead of human sacrifices.
“Dipshit river god. He can’t even tell the difference.” Is such a hilariously Roman outlook.
I didn’t know that Rome did do human sacrifices. Why is that.
Rome made a big buckaboo about how what separated them from the uncivilised was their lack of human sacrifice. Even banning the practise outright fairly early. Of course they totally had human sacrifice, they just didn't call it that.
The king of Nemi (A priesthood of Diana) was either killed or killed others for ritual purposes, people were sacrificed to bring good fortune in the punic wars, and as mentioned by
many of their other rituals were heavily human sacrifice flavored like the triumphs.
And of course the first gladiatoral munera were basically funerary sacrifices of gladiators.
I'd argue the term 'human sacrifice' is largely a matter of perspective. In the same way some cultures think that cousin marriages 'don't count' as incest when they totally do. I'd argue that the Witch Trials were in essence human sacrifices but they get to 'not count' because Christianity is somehow a more 'enlightened' religion than the others.
Thats an excellent point. However the Romans were aware of the hypocrisy on this one.
It's how literally every religion started, anon. You believe there are beings of great power, let's call them gods for simplicity. You believe they either are the source of various forces and great things in the world, like fire and lightning and the seas and the deserts, or at least hold great power over them. You accept that you, as a mere mortal, do not have powers over those same things, so you come up with rituals that you believe will appease the gods that do. You can research literally any ancient religion and you will find that they fundamentally spring from that same mentality, they just end up having thousands of years of lore and complicated mechanics built up around them. Even something as simply as the concept of tutelary gods amounts to "hey god, we'll agree to worship you and give you prestige throughout our entire land if you agree to help us beat up those other people who worship other gods" with religious lore amounting to a giant pissing contest between competing neighbours; this is present through Greece, the Middle East, India, Japan, etc. in ancient history.
Muslims literally blow themsleves up because their god promises then sex in the afterlife. You fricking moronic turk living in an apartment in Germany.
I steal themes from Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours
More importantly, fantasy faiths should never, ever provide temporal benefits. Systems with "religious spellcasters" can never contain a compelling narrative about faith.
But Cultist Simulator literally have you playing a religious spellcaster. The core gameplay and narrative revolves around discovering and casting spells for your own benefit.
Cultist simulator is not a TTRPG and doesn't tell a story about faith per se, but I will clarify my position:
Faith in D&D and other fantasy settings isn't faith. If your religion is demonstrably real and repeatable, it's not a religion, it's a type of esoteric diplomacy. If you can go to some building and literally meet your god, or if you can ask your god to do the dishes and he does, then faith means nothing and the compelling qualities of zealous characters evaporate.
I do feature "real" occultist magic in my settings, but occult figures are false gods - merely magicians trapped in mortality with the rest of us - and they always demand truly hideous sacrifices. Capital-G Gods, on the other hand, don't perform tricks but instead wrote all the rules of the universe to begin with.
Based take and kind of exactly what elder scrolls is.
The true good gods don’t really give you anything but they are the ones who created the material world and their bones are the pillars of the earth, whereas the Daedra, the evil demon gods, require hideous sacrifices and in return bestow power and boons to their champions
Nearly every religion in the world has analogies to spellcasting, what are you on about?
You just need to divorce it from typical spellcasting in your system in a way that makes it less game-ifiable than, say, Vancian magic.
NTA, but are there any systems that do that well in your book? Obviously DnDogshit doesn’t count.
Man, take a break. Stop posting. Forever.
>what should a fantasy religion even be?
A toy players can engage with. A source of conflict between factions for PCs to get involved in. A cause for PCs to fight for (or against, as the case may be). A wellspriing of lore about the setting (whether the religion's myths are true or not, can say a lot about the religion itself. If you want to make it "realistic" or "historically accurate" is on you, but remember it's a matter of personal taste. Most players won't care unless it's something that actually impacts the game.
>many setting take their cues from tolkien
If only
>but nothing that even comes close to worship.
Lol?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Elbereth_Gilthoniel
The Valar are not gods and not supposed to be worshipped. A hymn in praise is not worship.
fwiw when I wrote that I was kind of taking off from this little interview snippet.
?si=L8myC662j64mAU1r
I'm not really an lotr autist, so i'm definitely interested in other people's takes on the subject, but it makes perfect sense to me that tolkien would want to make a setting that avoided anything which smacked of paganism
>setting that avoided anything which smacked of paganism
nah, I think he was a cool guy and understood that making a fantasy religion for his world, wasn’t sinful.
Crafting a fantasy religion involves developing core beliefs, gods, rituals, symbols, hierarchy, cosmology, sacred sites, magic's role, ethics, and cultural influence. Determine beliefs about the universe, create gods with personalities, establish rituals, define symbols, decide on leadership roles, outline creation myths, designate places of worship, integrate magic, set moral guidelines, and consider societal impact.
>what should a fantasy religion even be?
Creating a compelling fantasy religion can indeed be a complex task, but it can add depth and richness to your world-building if done thoughtfully. Here are some considerations and strategies for crafting a fantasy religion:
>Consider the cultural context—beliefs should reflect values, fears, and aspirations. Develop a cosmology and mythology with creation myths and stories of gods. Decide on a pantheon or singular deity, or explore alternative concepts like animism.
>Define rituals, ceremonies, and religious practices, integrating them into daily life. Determine the role of religious institutions—are there temples, priesthoods, or monastic orders?
>Consider the balance between secularism and spirituality. Explore ethical and moral teachings, addressing issues of morality and justice. Recognize religious diversity within your world—different cultures may have unique beliefs.
>Integrate elements of your religion into storytelling—use themes, symbolism, and motifs. Challenge clichés and stereotypes to create something fresh and original.
With creativity, sensitivity, and an open mind, you can create a fantasy religion that enhances the richness of your world. By carefully considering these aspects and weaving them into your world-building, you can create a fantasy religion that enhances the richness and authenticity of your fictional world. Remember to approach the task with creativity, sensitivity, and an open mind to explore new possibilities.
Are there any fantasy religions that you think are actually put together well, real gods or otherwise, that are more than just direct copies of real world religions? The religions of Discworld have some interesting twists even if they're mostly humorous parodies, just to start things out.
>Are there any fantasy religions that you think are actually put together well
No, Barker wrote a book on why It's essentially impossible.
>Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
Is this the book you mean?
No, Uh, I can't find the complete thing but this is a shorter article he wrote about on same subject.
Well, that was boring, full of itself and full of cope, thanks for wasting my time. Complaining that fantasy religions don't have thousands of years of human ignorance and self-contradiction put into them is about at sensible as complaining that olympic athletes aren't able to flap their arms and fly. I don't see why you would waste your time partaking in this thread at all.
It is, however, somewhat funny to read a text from 1980, that contains pretty much all the same complaints I've been reading non-stop on /tg/ since the board was created. I'm not that surprised, since I've read Knights of the Dinner Table already, but still.
Discworld was parody. Elder Scrolls had some really great stuff pre-Oblivion. In fact, Morrowind can be used to convert a normie to Catholic Christianity.
How difficult can it be to give every deity more than one appearance?
>Morrowind can be used to convert a normie to Catholic Christianity
I'm curious as to how you would go about this
Once a normie understands that Catholic Christianity is the Bible plus the Holy Tradition, here it's the one of Rome, they can learn that there's a difference between accusation and inherent quality.
Many things held against the Tribunal Temple in the video game and extended lore such as forum posts are accusations levied against the Roman Catholic Church. Upon closer inspection they're little more than cardboard and paint, so to speak. Either they're levied against the wrong faith (Kaaba used to house 360 gods and goddesses until all were replaced until one horned man with two right arms called Allah remained, and rabbinical Judaism began introducing Canaanite mythology into their oral literature) or are entirely fabricated (Easter as a term is exclusive to Germanic languages, Saturnalia is almost half a lunation off sync and the Catholics didn't have birthdays until relatively recently, and the Scientific Method's thesis is property of the Church). Accusations change nothing. After all, the Satan's title is literally translated as accuser, someone who tells you what you did or what you are.
If you want a real church experience don't go to a building that can be repurposed into a Walmart.
Make it a Walmart with stained glass.
So just a brick of a building with fancy windows. Not really what I was looking for, but I suppose it'll work for one temple, thanks. I was thinking that there would be some variety among the temples (and I'm sorry for not communicating that properly), but at least I've got one down.
Morrowind actually helped me find religion because as I looked into the inspirations of the lore I realised world religions were more indepth than just "Muh sky daddy"
Also, sorry OP but this thread is just gonna devolve into /misc/ and r/atheism rants about how religion is "le bad". My biggest advice if you want to write a real-feeling religion is to make God/gods non-present and have their influence be subtle and worked through men, it not only makes the setting more evocative (as things are driven by flawed mortals and not all-powerful gods), but makes things like ancient myths and stories all the more impactful
The Eldar revere the Valar in the same way Catholics are supposed to revere Saints, but they would NEVER worship them.
What if I told you "sky daddy" is a way to refer to Satan, the father of deceivers and price of the power of the air, in Christianity? Again, the enemies of the Church can't meme.
Just because you think you can that doesn't mean anyone before you has or ever will. "Sky" is a better synonym of "heaven" than it is of "air", and "daddy" a much closer equivalent of "father" than "prince". It's quite clear what figure within Christianity this refers to. It's very ironic to declare people unable to meme when you are clearly so incredibly desperate to claim this square peg by jamming it into your round hole.
You need to remember that the Satan is an imitator. Whatever he does is always second. The skyfather figure in pagan mythologies show traits the Satan is associated with: lightning, wrath, and the sunny sky. According to Greek myth Apollo succeeds Zeus once he dies. Who's Apollyon? Who does the Satan transform into?
You need to remember that none of this is real
Of course none of it is real. God is coming back and we're von Neumann bio-robots who failed to terraform this fake and gay Earth.
>Morrowind actually helped me find religion because as I looked into the inspirations of the lore I realised world religions were more indepth than just "Muh sky daddy"
you’re a true subhuman degenerate if you needed a video game to tell you that
>In fact, Morrowind can be used to convert a normie to Catholic Christianity.
>if you really put into words the impulse behind middle earth I think you could say it was "a setting where divinity is so baked into the nature of the world that everyone takes it for granted"
That's not really how I would put it. Most people in Middle-Earth don't really seem to know the origins of their world nor do they seem to care. It strikes me as an overwhelmingly agnostic and secular setting, where God has very little influence and His existence is just kind of esoteric knowledge. People don't thank Eru for their daily bread or when they find a coin on the street or when they narrowly escape an orc ambush. Tolkien was a Christian and we can recognise Middle-Earth as basically Christian, but its inhabitants are mostly concerned with tangible phenomena. I think Tolkien wanted a pre-Christian society but also didn't want his heroes to be pagans.
In my setting people revere the four elements and the four deities that embody each one (along with some thematically related secondary aspects), with different cultures each prioritizing at least one god, often two, over the others. I was partially inspired by Avatar, but I want to make my shit more distinct than that in ways that amount to more than just having people often revere more than one element instead of the solid elemental cultures in Avatar, not to mention the fact that the show didn't go into much detail about that from what I remember, so I'd need to expand things anyways. I have some basics for each religion, like priests of Earth being barefoot and having crystals in the uniform (at least among the higher ranks), or priests of Air wearing tassels that blow in the wind and/or feathers and studying the stars and movements of the sky, but that's just the start, and I could use some feedback on the matter.
that's pretty cool. It's taking some of the jrpg tropes about religion to it's logical conclusion imo, and I think it gives the setting a bit of oomph. You really could use some of the jrpg priest tropes and apply them to each class of priest
>water priests are constantly damp and have oily skin and nappy hair
>earth priests have a dust cloud around them constantly like linus
>air priests have birds nest in their hair
>fire priests sneeze sparks
Nice to see a reply upon waking up!
I was looking more for ideas on religious rites, uniforms, temple designs, and other shit like that, but high level priests having their respective element affect them as a sign of their closeness with their deity is a great idea I hadn't considered, though the actual change might need a bit of tweaking, thanks!
Just throw in an Earth Mother and Sky Father and be done with it buddy. You're not gonna win any awards for going further than that.
Speaking of pseudo-Christianity, how might you go about designing temples for fantasy deities that are more than knock-offs of Christian churches, or ones from other religions from our world? Because I’m working on an urban fantasy scenario where temples suddenly appear one day, bringing magic with them, and I want said temples to be distinct from those already on Earth even if there are strong parallels in the styles. Create a sort of architectural uncanny valley effect.
There's only so many ways to create what's effectively an indoor auditorium where a bunch of people listen to one dude. Even in religions that rely less heavily on dudes preaching, religious buildings tend to be places of cultural congregation and are designed as such. They are after all where people are expected to gather in mass (hence the name) on a regular basis, and religious days end up becoming important festivals.
If you want to emphasize the uncanny valley fantasy nature of it, design them around how a non-human species might gather. Like for example imagine a race of giant bug people gathering in massive hollowed out dirt mounds, where the central auditorium is surrounded by gallery-like openings in the dirt walls.
That wasn't really where I was going with the "uncanny valley" mention, but it's an excellent suggestion regardless, thanks. Any other thoughts on designing fantasy temples?
It all depends heavily upon whether or not the gods of your setting are
1)quantifiable and demonstrably real.
And 2) present and apparent in the day to day lives of the people.
Real life religions are based around a lack of understanding for how things work, so we use gods monsters and demons to explain them.
But if the gods are quantifiable and present to the setting , then why /wouldn't/ you venerate them to some degree?
In my setting the gods are quantifiable, but not typically present. Leading humans to create several different religions , each with their own rituals and rites around the same God.
In one culture the God of the law, vengeance ,justice and bloodshed demands that you beat prisoners to death as the children dance wildly around in celebration that a wicked man met his end.
In another culture, the faithful are expected to use whips to literally beat the evil out of a willing participant each year on the eve of the summer solstice.
This is incredibly important.
Faith especially hangs in the balance. Faith is what happens when God is hard to know or not obvious. If the deities are very front facing then faith would no longer be a big religious virtue.
Faithfulness, I’d say, would still be important. Humans are unfaithful to people they love all the time so I don’t see that disappearing.
how would you distinguish between faith and faithfulness? Like "thou shalt hold no other gods before me?"
Faith is believing in the unprovable.
Faithfulness is staying loyal despite there being lots of tempting alternatives.
So yeah “thou shalt have no other gods before me” is a good example of both:
>Faith that God is real, and is the only god worth worshipping
>Faithfulness to stay loyal to God and not ‘cheat’ on him with other gods, no matter how enticing their cults or how frustrated I am with God
So even if a god is standing in front of you - you’ve heard their voice, seen them walk in town - there is still the charge of faithfulness (abiding by their precepts, wanting to make them happy even if it doesn’t make you happy, not joining the cult of the QT Goth Waifu goddess in the next town over).
My thought is that if people can manage to cheat on spouses, abuse their kids, lock their parents in a home without visiting, then there surely would be the capacity to be unfaithful to a god even if their existence was indisputable.
>My thought is that if people can manage to cheat on spouses, abuse their kids, lock their parents in a home without visiting, then there surely would be the capacity to be unfaithful to a god even if their existence was indisputable.
The israelites did this like 10 times in the Old Testament and god punished every time. They 100% believed that god was real and their god, but they’d get pissed at him for not always giving them the easiest road imaginable and they’d turn to cannanite demons like moloch
I just try to come up with various pantheons and work backwards from there. After all, gods are generally undeniably real in these games so the first step to me seems to be coming up with those gods and then figuring out how and why people would worship them.
In my own way overthoughtout setting every race has a pantheon, be it the elves fey royalty who represent the four seasons or the dwarves hero worship or the halflings river goddess or the mainland humans have angels and devils and a One True God who's too far up the ladder to interfere in their daily lives or the barbarians dozens of warrior clan totems or the islanders primal element worship. Plus various cults and underground religions. Humans for example have mixed feelings about devils, who are clearly evil but also serve the purpose of punishing the wicked and holding back the endless demon hordes of the abyss. Fallen Angels but Angels still, and they deserve respect and placation. But that is a slippery slope that has lead to more than one actual devil worship cult (actually an entire notRoman empire falling into devil worship is a central point in the settings history, which is quasi-post apocalyptic in the wake of the fall of said empire.)
Once you come up with what they worship you can figure out why, and once you figure out why you can write some blurbs about how. You don't need an entire book series, your players will never actually care that much, but it's a nice spice.
I've been thinking about bitheism a lot while building a setting, with the major themes being centered around duality, pairs and the number two
>God was split in two, upper body (fruit of knowledge) and lower body (fruit of life)
>two major celestial bodies (the star and the Gas giant which the setting's moon orbits)
>two major factions with opposing ideologies
>most religions are centered around the family structure (mother and father) or the worship of the two celestial bodies mentioned above
Also, partially related question, why is monotheism so popular in irl religions?
From a purely pragmatic perspective, it makes more sense (since even polytheistic religions usually have a singular starting god, if you go far back enough) and it's far easier to keep united (polytheistic religions were paradoxically too tolerant and syncretic, look at Rome if you want a reference, where people continued worshipping native gods up until the point Christianity was adopted, and the lack of a central structure from the pagans made it impossible to effectively resist.)
Polytheistic religions tend to be very regional, the only exception I can think of is Hinduism, which had a period where it spread to Southeast Asia, but was outcompeted by Buddhism, local faiths, and Islam, eventually receding to it's origin point of India.
>Also, partially related question, why is monotheism so popular in irl religions?
Believing in a single universal god lends itself more easily to conquering other cultures, since you can simply tell yourself you're enlightening the heathens to the universal truth.
>Believing in a single universal god lends itself more easily to conquering other cultures, since you can simply tell yourself you're enlightening the heathens to the universal truth.
This, and also science. Having one God who declares what's objectively so and not so helps.
Then why have most great Empires of history not been monotheistic? Even those that became monotheistic, like the Romans, did so only long after their founding and were certainly not uniformly monotheistic until much later.
Science as we know it is a Christian invention, is a common saying outside of the West. They know the decline in discoveries is due to the "divorce" of the University from the Church, something Heisenberg fought against.
"Science as we know it", at least the experimental side of it, largely grew out of alchemy, which predates Christianity but happily coexisted with it.
No it didn't. Alchemy as an extension of Natural Philosophy accomplished absolutely nothing. While many University-educated early rationalists were interested in alchemy, they were interested in it to see if they could crack Aristotelian physical logic and ultimately concluded that they could not. The process of trying to crack cause-and-effect through deliberate trial and documentation of results is the baseline for the scientific method, but that's not what actual European alchemists were doing.
I think it's also a little sketchy to say that alchemy "predates" christianity. Sure, people were doing magic and mixing shit, but alchemy as we would think of it largely grew out of early medieval alexandria, and took on most of the attributes we associate with it in the islamic era
Alchemy was a magical practice. Stop believing Hollywood. We can say mechanics predate Christian thought, which is absolutely true, and the explosion of discovery and invention began with a faith that literally tells you to stop thinking about yourself. Why else would all games depict the reverse of historical fact?
Not necessarily true, it just gives the urge to spread the religion more. Non-Monothestic conquerors tended to not care and only instil new religious doctrines rather than complete overhauls (IE. Considering the Roman Emperor a god amongst your own). Monotheistic ones required complete and total overhauls. Usually conversion came after as a byproduct of conquest, or was something instilled through local politics and squabbles like in England and Scandinavia, where there wasn't some great holy war.
An excuse for stuff to happen.
Your players do not and never will care about in universe religions, because the gods are likely at a power level where they will never ever be messing with them. "Messing" is the key word here. Players only care about what they can interact with. A dragon that they can go to and slay? Badass. Some dwarven god that's on page 23 of your primer? Boring!
So to my first point, you merely needs gods and religion in place to have something to point to when people get curious. "Where do I get my cleric powers from?" Point to a god. "Why are these cultists trying to do this weird thing?" Point to a god. "Why is the culture in this kingdom like this?" Point to a god. That's all fantasy religion is good for.
Just copy Glorantha. Greg Stafford wrote a realistic mythology in the 1960's using comparative mythology. Glorantha and Runequest are THE Gold Standard for how to do fantasy religion and societies.
Lol.
He took a book of mythology, stripped it of any meaning, threw it in a blender, and created the dullest shit setting as a result. Fricker was dumb AND a lazy hippy.
He's a perfect example of how not to do it.
What about a setting that’s a good example of what you SHOULD do then?
Is there anything that one should remember when worldbuilding cults?
Yeah, don't actually call them cults unless you're running a setting where a centralized established church is using the term to refer to pagan religious practices. The modern pejorative sense didn't exist until the late 19th century and didn't become popular until the 1930s and 40s.
The difference between a cult and a religion is down to how they approach what you could call 'the problem of the pews' ie- how to make people sit on them. Lets be honest with ourselves- there's nothing really more outlandish in the Quran or Bible than what's in scientology in terms of religious beliefs. Hell- I'd argue that mormonism started life as a cult before it became a mainstream religion. But what seperates mormonism from scientology however is that Mormons wanted more butts in the pews, and therefore moderated to accomplish this.
To elaborate- in order for Utah to become a state, the Church of Mormon had to get rid of the polygamy, which they did. Later in the 1970's they got rid of the part of the religion that said black people weren't allowed in because they decided they didn't want to alienate potential black converts (or anti-racist whites). They wanted to pack as many butts in the pews as possible which is what most religions do.
By contrast- scientology would NEVER get rid of the part where you have to pay more more money to the church to screen for like neurodynes or whatever it is, because the Scientologists aren't interested in getting as many butts in pews as possible. They aren't trying to be a mainstream religion, they are interested in being a cult, because the trade off from mainstream appeal is intense control over the people in the church (and therefore tight control of their wallets.
TLDR: A religion is forced to moderate to stay mainstream, a cult trades mainstream appeal for intense control over a small population. The moment a cult reaches a large enough population (say when Christianity became the official religion of Rome) it stops being a cult.
Cults, historically speaking, are splinter groups of a larger faith community dedicating themselves to only part of what the faith community held to be one among many important things. For example, when Islam began it was taken to be a cult solely dedicated to God the Father or Gnostics who were convinced that God the Son and God the Father can disagree.
More accurately speaking, those would be called heresies that eventually become sects.
Heresies are the false ideas which deviate from the truth, see the literal translation and the denial of the Son of God for a real world example, and sects are split off groups which grew out of sections, hence the term. Nowadays they're mostly synonymous but there was a time when they posed a threat to the cohesion of the state while being besieged by outside forces such as infidels who denied the Son was crucified and returned from the dead.
Even in the middle ages, how much of a threat would that have been? I mean I understand that if you actually believe in the religion that being of the WRONG religion sends you to hell and that's serious business and everything. But in terms of state cohesion you had plenty of islamic states get along just fine. They even got along just fine having large israeli and christian minorities- arguably they did way better in the middle ages than christian kingdoms did.
Guess this
counts as religious worldbuilding. tldr is that a Pythagorean number-cult mixed with an old-timey palace economy came together as a computerized command economy no unlike what OGAS was sold as. Many MANY failure points but could be interesting as a fist contact scenario with surprisingly advanced natives whose world comes crashing down once you introduce the concept of 0 or something.
Provided it didn't dive too deep into the "all is illusion" schtick striving to understand the world's patterns as expressions of the Tao could have led to similar results imo.
So help me out with a religion I'm trying to set up. I was thinking how a lot of fantasies tend to combine european paganism (like the hellenic gods) with a catholic aesthetic and tried to figure out how I could get that to actually make sense.
What I came up with is like how a lot of pagan gods got demoted to saints you have a similar thing here. The Old Gods were around doing classical myth stuff but a giant demon invasion occurred and caused a thousand year dark age that collapsed most of the old empires. Angels (and heaven more broadly) came down to help fight off all the demons by teaching mankind (or rather womankind) white magic. The angels (and specifically the Archangels) took prominence in religion while the Old Gods are still venerated but are practically speaking demoted in importance. Meanwhile the Church tends to be tied closely with the politics of the local successor states having a lot of catholic politics and imagery, and having a number of all female paladins to fight demons and a mostly female inquisition to root out demon worship and cults (men tend to join knightly orders of monster hunters that are aligned with the church but don't answer to them directly and tend to be more localized).
(cont.)
Now something I was thinking of is how there might be sort of dub-denominations in this setting. And how they might be tied to the different races. I want to tie the different races to the larger cosmology and have all the non-humans be relatively recent additions to the universe. Elves I was thinking are what you get when you mix a Human and a Fairy (and a Fey is a neutral even that has been banished to the mortal plane). The Elves put more emphasis on nature spirits or something along those lines. Giants would be a race (7-9 ft tall) who are mostly peaceful pastoralists I was thinking venerate the old gods more than the angels (but still acknowledge their role in things). I want to combine Dwarves and Halflings into the same race (a Dwarf becomes a Halfling when they become a godless liberal, shave their beard, and move to the surface), Halflings I was thinking just pretty much adopt wholesale the orthodox version of the religion, but I was thinking the Dwarves practice like an almost fundamentalist version of the religion that they claim to be like the original version, but as to the actual differences I can't think of many.
Now I was thinking that there's a number of Archdemons with associated cults that are the source of black magic, and stuff like vampires, succubi, and necromancers, and I'd like to flesh those out a lot more. I was thinking maybe there's a holy order that is dedicated to fighting each specific Archdemon.
Does anyone else like the Eberron method of religions? The Eberron method is more "realistic," for lack of a better term: different competing models of the divine, some of which are compatible with one another, some of which boil down to faith in gods whose existence can never be truly verified.
A religion is more akin to a real-world religion in that it presents its own "rules of the divine," which may or may not be compatible with other religions. There is no one universal pantheon in Eberron that all gods get filed into.
Do you like it when a fantasy setting uses this method for distinguishing its religions?
Contradictory ambiguous cosmology is nice. Below certain crazy power levels it's not like player would ever get to find out one way or another for sure is it?
I prefer it when there's a degree of interpretation to religion, since that's what real life is like and it allows a lot more nuance.
If Zeus is just hanging around at the pub throwing lightning bolts at fools it removes a lot of fun stuff that you could explore and use to expand a setting. I put it in the same category of like 'all-evil orcs' it's not a bad trope, it's just not as interesting as the alternative.
Like it was something I liked in Dragon Age Inquisition- everyone starts treating you as the second coming of a prophet since you have the ability to close demon portals. But it's up to you to interpret if this is from pure happenstance or a legit act of divine intervention. There's even the option to roleplay as an atheist about the whole thing which I appreciate. Meanwhile several different people have different reactions to your characters- the existing church is mostly just concerned if you plan to challenge their existing political authority. Others see you as an oppurtunistic heretic and charlatan. Then there's a number of true believers who think you hold holy power. And depending on your race, gender, or class, several people have to reconcile your identity not molding well to the scripture and deciding that God is having you 'redeem' the rest of your people (the clergy are all women, mages are considered second-class citizens, and dwarves and qunari are just wholly removed from the religion entirely so being a man, a mage, or the wrong race throws a small wrench into the whole religious reading).
Well, what if the gods are real, but only directly communicate to their higher-ranking priests, and their messages are easily misinterpreted, can that work if done well?
Well that factored a lot into Greek religion where they had a number of Oracles. However the Oracles tended to favor prophecies that'd be true in either direction. Like I think one was offered to a Greek King that was going to war against the Persians, and the Oracle told him if he did a great empire would fall. He lost, and with it his imperial ambitions, but it would have been true had he won too. Greeks in general quite liked ironic and self-fulfilling prophecies.
>Greeks in general quite liked ironic and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Why were they so fond of that kind of thing anyway?
Oops, didn't realize that this didn't attach.
40k memes aside, why is it that sci-fi and religious beliefs clash so much? The answer is that genre is a mistake and sci-fi is pidgeon holed into a state of being some kind of fantasy where people are ultra-rationalist who have long since done away with the belief in a beared sky daddy and instead turn their worship to philosophical idols or whatever the author was jerking off to at the time.
There are plenty of sci fi stories that deal with religion.
Dune explicitly deals with issues of faith, A Canticle for Leibowitz is so openly a religious work that the author rejected it after growing disillusioned with Catholicism, the Star Diaries uses the concept of robot monks to satirize both religious beliefs and communist movements, battlestar galactica is a story about mormonism in space, Star Trek has an episode where a robot develops an ethical framework based on divine command theory, Isaac Asimov wrote several stories which prominently features religions, and I'm pretty sure GRRM wrote a sci fi short story in which the hero is a Catholic inquisitor who has to stop a heretical splinter group of the church just to name a few.
Sci fi when it's good is a tool used to explore social trends, philosophical questions and the impact of various technologies. Ideas you put in (good) sci fi are ideas you are questioning, insofar as they are not merely ingrained things the author is taking for granted. And you're just a dweeb who doesn't want his religion questioned.
Which is funny to me because Sci-Fi always tends to deal with religion in a far more complex and indepth way than Fantasy.
The concept of religion clashes with the concept of rationalism. And I don't mean 'being a rational person' I mean the world view that all things can be explained and eventually intuited with enough data and understanding. Let me phrase it to you this way-
One of the arguments for God is that of the 'First Mover' by Thomas Aquinas. He argued through what was basically his understanding of the law of cause and effect that there must be some sort of 'first cause' that everything in the universe must derive from. Or otherwise the universe must be a string of cause and effect without end. He therefore concludes first that this 'First Mover' is both real, and also God.
But a modern rationalist perspective would not make those same conclusions- they'd argue we lack enough data to reach that conclusion. It is entirely possible we have a chain of cause and effect without end given our understanding of the universe (or rather, we cannot discount that possibility when we know so little of how the universe was created), they would also say that even supposing that there was a 'First Mover' it would not necessarily be God. It could have been a really big rock for all we know. Or a really small rock. Without any sort of divine intent or knowledge.
Religion is rooted in FAITH, while science is rooted in EVIDENCE. One can of course believe in both religion and science and find a way to reconcile these two things. However if they do, they do it with the tacit recognition that there is an element of doubt- that they could be wrong about their religion, that not all things should be taken on faith.
I think it's fine to be religious. I think however there's a certain subsect of people who cannot embrace the concept of doubt that rationalism requires to understand the universe, and those people are just buttholes.
Thomas Aquinas did not come up with the argument of the first mover. Thomas Acquinas is mostly just interpreting Aristotlr, and Artistotle came up with the unmoved.mover.
What do you need to remember when designing a fantasy pantheon, and what is yours like? I just use the Greek one personally.
More or less what I do with ideas of shinto, daoism and budism/hinduism sprinkled in. Basically the base gods are all the same for everyone (Big Father, earth mother, tard sons) and millions of smol spirits/godlings, along the tartarians/avernian than are basically traped inside the earth (so dungeons)and inbetween beings than are more or less independent (fairies, titans, jotuns) in a incesant low level war with humans being in the mid and trying to survive. Big gods (in dnd anything bigger than 20 level) are forbiden to trod in mother earth (aka the mortal realm) so they don't damage her, so they use proxies from religions/sects to monsters (so here comes stuff like minotaurs, monster animals and horrors).
I keep thinking of how different religion would be in a world where the gods are provably real and frequently interact with the affairs of mortals and make what they want clear, meaning the religion isn't dictated by what is convenient for the rulers and priests in power like in the real world.
>Interesting that there weren't more "Tengri" situations where a sole overgod simply slots in above existing hierarchies.
This usually didn't happen because it pleased no one and was essentially alot of societies and cultures "gateway drug" to Monotheism. Deus Sol Invictus in the Roman context attempted to syncretise Christianity and Roman gods, but failed because it essentially pleased no-one by going the middle ground and only served to further weaken Pagan institutions. It existed for, what? 100~ years, and never really caught on en-masse.
pretty good vid on the topic. guys even got a book about worldbuilding
>all this begs the question, should fantasy even bother to incorporate religion?
Yes, even if it doesn’t interest you, your fantasy world needs religion in it, if you want to have a good setting and for me to take it even 1% seriously,
>I mean, is it worth it trying to make religion an importnat part of your setting?
If it is something that you are knowledgeable about and interested in, yes. If not, no. But again, even if you aren’t interested in it, you still need it as a background element to have a believable world.