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

Oofta · 2024-07-15T00:28:29+0100

The majority of my campaigns take place in an area loosely based on Norse mythology with demi-human deities coming from Greyhawk but still tied into the lore. So Moradin forged Gungnir and so on, elven deities are the Vaenir.

Like most pantheistic religions, the vast majority of people aren't dedicated to a specific god. They revere the pantheon and only the chosen few are dedicated to a specific deity. The gods are largely distant and more concerned about their own affairs and the foretold end of their reign with Ragnarok. Occasionally celestial beings will interface with mortals, typically in the form of Valkyries. Even a very high level cleric will, at best, be sent occasional dreams or visions. Odin is not going to be your best bud, he's got other things on his mind.

I've also repurposed the 9 worlds so, for example fiends and most evil gods reside in Jotunheim which also contains Avernus and the Abyss. Travel between realms is extremely limited, you can't get to Valhalla unless you can get past Heimdall. You only get past Heimdall if you're dead and escorted by a Valkyrie.

So for me, the gods are real but frequently distant. Their minions occasionally interact with mortals, which holds true for evil gods as well.

Steampunkette · 2024-07-15T00:46:12+0100

Most games I've run have been in other people's settings to save myself the large hassle of designing however many gods there are.

But now that I'm making my -own- settings? They're a lot different from what I've played in, before.

In Sins of the Scorpion Age, the gods are distant entities that you don't -want- the attention of. People worship to placate the gods and keep them from stirring enough to interfere with mortal matters because the gods are not loving or caring. They are forces of nature and expressions of destruction... Save one. The Flower. A Martyr whose worship is fractured between those who seek to enact her vengeance and those who wish to peacefully respect her sacrifice.

Meanwhile over in Sunset Riders, the gods of Acadia come in 3 religious groups. The Civil Religion, which has semi-distant gods worshipped as a collective who protect the world from horrors beyond. Animism, which seeks to invest life and soulstuff into animals, plants, and geographical features to foster growth and healing. And Tall Tale Folk Heroes. While they are not gods, themselves, they are memetically malleable with ever greater stories having ever greater effect on them and their abilities, allowing other mortals to invest soulstuff so long as the story continues.

... so I think maybe I hate the "Traditional" D&D God setup.

Micah Sweet · 2024-07-15T00:51:58+0100

Reynard said:
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?

I use the classic fantasy pantheon model most of the time, because people understand and are comfortable with it, and it works. I have zero problem with this.

MarkB · 2024-07-15T01:03:19+0100

There are two things I really like about Eberron's take on religion.

1. Gods are remote and hands-off. It brings actual faith back into the equation, rather than religion being just picking whichever of these obviously-real deities best suits your morality and/or agenda.

2. The prevailing religion consists of pantheons, and for most people it's more typical to worship the pantheon as a whole, offering up prayers to particular deities depending upon circumstances, rather than choosing just one as 'your' god - though that is also an option.

pukunui · 2024-07-15T01:27:32+0100

MGibster said:
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.

Not even Eberron? I mean, you can easily run campaigns in Eberron where gods and religion don’t matter at all, but you’ve also got things like the Church of the Silver Flame, which undertook a crusade against lycanthropes in the past and recently turned the nation of Thrane into a theocracy.

The Sovereign Host has its pantheon of goodly deities who oversee the good / neutral aspects of daily life and its group of cast-out evil deities who represent the bad parts of life. And some people think the Sovereigns are actually dragons (or dragons who became gods).

That last idea made me want to develop a homebrew world where the gods are dragons (one for each type of chromatic, metallic, and gem), but I couldn’t ever find a satisfactory combination.

In the past, I ran campaigns in a homebrew world where the major religions were cribbed from Game of Thrones and Dragon Age, among other things.

Charlaquin · 2024-07-15T01:33:01+0100

Staffan said:
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.

I agree in principle, but I have come around recently to the conclusion that this approach clashes with the high-magic bombast that D&D tends to shoot for. As such, I’ve been shifting my approach lately to one where the gods are much more present and meddlesome, with the famous Greek myths as my barometer. It wouldn’t be the direction I’d go for a hypothetical perfectly-tailored-to-my-tastes fantasy RPG. But for modern D&D, having Greek-inspired deific presence and intervention feels less like swimming against the current, and is also very cool.

Charlaquin · 2024-07-15T01:39:29+0100

Steampunkette said:
In Sins of the Scorpion Age, the gods are distant entities that you don't -want- the attention of.

This is a secret sauce I actually love for highly present deities, and is one of the inspirations I took from the Greek myths. The gods are dangerous and petty, and worship is often more about avoiding their ire than about devotion to their ideals.

Scribe · 2024-07-15T01:41:16+0100

I've had

FR like, Gods are players, have Stats, and so on.
Eberron like, Gods maybe dont even exist.
God's are real, but distant.

I think that I've arrived at a point where excluding Gods, and likely the Planes, is just a missed opportunity to me. The direction gone with Paladins and Clerics especially, just seems like we are missing something.

Granted a lot of folks have issues with Religion, but I think Fantasy and RPG's allows for a perfect opportunity to explore, discuss, and think about this space within our collective human experience, without a lot of the potential angst in dreaded 'real life'.

As my Grandfather always said, "2 things are to be avoided in polite conversation. Religion, and Politics." and I think to exclude Gods and Religion from D&D cuts out something that to me, is very interesting.

"What if God's were real."

cbwjm · 2024-07-15T01:58:05+0100

I have 16ish gods in my setting with different cultures following different pantheons made up of different gods. The gods themselves tend to be distant, turning up only rarely now that they've brought order to the world.

As an example, the dwarves follow only 4 gods which represent their values. The soul-forger (creator of the dwarves, the craftsman, the protector of the dead), the Protector (a warrior who defends others), the Earthmother (strong connection the earth), the Thunderer (god of storms and inspiration who greeted the dwarves when they left their mountain homes. The other gods aren't really followed by them.

Next door, a human culture follows or acknowledges the Immortals, all the gods, though some are dark gods who aren't actively worshipped by the populous, these immortals are gods of order led by the Sun Father who led them from the frozen north to a new home.

People pray to all of the gods in their pantheon, and clerics follow all of the gods of the pantheon selecting a domain from those granted by the gods of their pantheon, assuming the faith has clerics, the Wyld Faith doesn't include them.

In other areas, the gods aren't followed. People either follow the elements (think WoW shaman) in the form of the Primordials or the Titans, or follow false gods (such as the demon worshippers in my take of Egypt who are all warlocks rather than any sort of divine spellcasting class). In some of the elemental worshipping areas, gods have been brought in who have replaced the Primordials formerly worshipped.

pukunui · 2024-07-15T02:04:37+0100

Charlaquin said:
This is a secret sauce I actually love for highly present deities, and is one of the inspirations I took from the Greek myths. The gods are dangerous and petty, and worship is often more about avoiding their ire than about devotion to their ideals.

I really like the approach taken in the Theros book. I wish we’d gotten more than a rudimentary 1st level adventure for that setting.

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

Oofta

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Steampunkette

Rules Tinkerer and Freelance Writer

Micah Sweet

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MarkB

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pukunui

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Charlaquin

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Charlaquin

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Scribe

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cbwjm

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pukunui

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