D&D General Religion in D&D: Your Take

NOTE 1: this thread is in D&D general because I think D&D does religion a little differently than other fantasy games due to the traditional inclusion of classes like the cleric and paladin. That said, feel free to discuss other fantasy games if they are appropriate.

NOTE 2: This thread is about fantasy religions and how the gods and their servants interact with playing D&D. It isn't about religion in general. You can use real world religions (ancient or current) as examples in discussion, but let's not make it about real world religions, please and thank you.

With that out of the way:

I was listening to a Great Courses on life in the ancient world and in talking about Mesopotamia and especially ancient Egypt, it got me thinking about how religions works in our campaigns. D&D religion is a weird chimera of myth and history, with mostly bad takes on both (at least as it relates to real world religion). That said, I find the place of religion in a D&D campaign to be fascinating and think there is some room for a discussion on how we, as individual worldbuilders and GMs especially, portray that element.

Dragonlance was a strong early influence on my view of how religion fits into a D&D campaign. I have leaned on the trope if the return of the lost, forgotten and/or old gods a bunch of times. Not being a religious person myself, I don't really model these forgotten faiths on anything particularly real, but rather use the trope as a way of talking about cycles of civilization and apocalyptic ends to them.

I also rather like the portrayal of religion in Eberron, where there are multiple religions that take very different forms, from pure philosophy to monotheism to traditional D&D pantheons.

One thing I have only toyed with in short games or one shots is the idea of legitimately living gods walking the earth, ruling their cities or otherwise directly lording over mortals. Like, if the city gods of Mesopotamia were active and not just bound to their statues. Being a cleric would be a different thing if your god summoned you before her to answer for your behavior on last week's dungeon delve.

How does religion fit into your D&D campaigns? What models of religions and faiths do you prefer? Are their settings that do religion really well for you? Do you make it an important part of worldbuilding or even play?

As a general rule, I think religion and faith are much more interesting than gods. That's why I like the Eberron way of making gods distant. It removes the focus from machinations among the divine (like in FR) to actions among the faithful, who may or may not be in accord with the actual divine powers.

The gods in my campaigns have either been distant, unreachable by mortals, and generally aloof or like Greek Mythology - occasionally very vain, flawed and meddlesome but never in a way that made complete sense from a mortal perspective. You couldn’t count on a god of Light and the Sun to always be dedicated to crushing the servants of Darkness. The way I ended up explaining this was that in one of my campaigns, these gods (Light and Darkness) were two aspects of the same entity. They were in conflict, but it was like being in conflict with themselves. Lolth and Eilistraee were the same situation. I liked part of the Drow origin story but always felt that Corellon was also the one who really caused the schism through his pride and ego. Lolth was cast out but the separation fragmented her into two entities, one filled with anger and hatred, and the other still good and nurturing but still an outcast for going against Corellon.

I always goes with distant gods, be it in FR or any other setting.

In my FRs, the gods where banished to their realms by Ao after the Time of Troubles which caused the Spellplague ( I dont need 500 different Mystra's death). The only godlike entities able to walk the land are those who "died" and were retrograde to quasi deities before the Pact Concordant, so the Dead Three, Gilgeam, then Mulrandhi pantheon and a few more.

My preference is for religion to be mostly invisible, like it is in Tolkien's legendarium in which, for example, there are presumably people who believe in Eru, but there are almost no churches or temples to speak of, and you hardly ever see anyone worshipping him.

In practice, I let the players, especially those playing clerics and other divinely concerned characters, decide how much focus is going to be placed on religion in the worldbuilding and actual play of the game.

I’ve done up some pretty in-depth myths and stories for my primary homebrew, down to the priesthood and a few holiday/festivals, but haven’t gotten into the typical worshipper level of detail.

However, what I have consistently found is my players DON’T want this sort of detail in their game. Most are actively against bringing in discussions about religion of any sorts (often due to animosity towards real-world religions), so the details I’ve come up with don’t get to be used, other than for background for adventure fodder.

I tend to frame some kind of religious war in the background that the players can choose to dive into if they desire.

I develop the religions as naturally occurring organizations rather than pure representations of the gods that they worship. So they are typically several factions and subfactions of these religions.

Dragonborns inclusion in recent additions have been very helpful because it allows me to explore the several different aspects of dragon dumb as religious sects.

Reynard said:

How does religion fit into your D&D campaigns? What models of religions and faiths do you prefer? Are their settings that do religion really well for you? Do you make it an important part of worldbuilding or even play?

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I've always found D&D to be rather secular which is odd considering the inclusion of the Cleric, Paladin, and of course the myriads of gods floating around. I attribute this to two things, the first of which is the separation of magic into two categories: divine and arcane. The second reason is that D&D encourages player characters to look at the world through the lens of modern western liberal values heavy on individual rights with its freedom of speech, religion, property rights, and even separation of church & state.

For the most part, religion doesn't seem to matter in most D&D campaigns. No, not even for Clerics or Paladins. I'm hard pressed to think of any official D&D setting that does a decent job with religion. That said, I've tried to incorporate religion in meaningful ways in some of my campaigns. When I ran Curse of Strahd, for the first three levels I ran my own adventures outside of Barovia, and the church of Waukeen was an important part of the local community and an oft visited place by PCs and NPCs.

I usually default to two competing forms of religion:

One is the worship of small gods who are usually physically present in the world. This ranged from giant animals or dragons to the worship of natural phenomena like a waterfall. This is very inspired by Studio Ghibli films.

The other is the worship of a singular god or pantheon that's distant and more a vehicle for conquest or control than anything else. Think hierarchy of priests, religious government, etc.

Neither side is explicitly good or evil (usually), but I enjoy the conflict that naturally occurs between these two styles of worship. I also like the fact that D&D has room for many different styles of religion!

It generally only comes up if there are paladins or clerics in the party. I have two modes for religion in my games, the first is the 4E Dawn War pantheon and the second is a kind of fairy tale animist set up similar to Planegea.

It's only in the second, animistic mode, where religion really seems to matter. I really prefer that style, but it's a lot more work to basically have everything be alive with a spirit and potentially animate.