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The Alien
2011-04-07, 10:49 PM
This maybe a weird question given how much divine spell casters are woven into the game, but has anyone ever attempted to run an atheist (that is, no gods) campaign? Perhaps one where clerics are limited only to philosophies?

Xefas
2011-04-07, 10:58 PM
I'm guessing you mean in one of the various editions of D&D? Well, so far as my knowledge reaches on the subject, in Eberron, gods don't actually play a hand in the world, and clerics are just especially driven individuals who support a cause (even if that cause is an entirely non-existent deity). I don't know a lot about it, but I recall reading something about patriot-clerics that I liked immensely.

And that's an official campaign setting, so I don't see why such a thing would be a problem.

Knaight
2011-04-07, 11:16 PM
This maybe a weird question given how much divine spell casters are woven into the game, but has anyone ever attempted to run an atheist (that is, no gods) campaign? Perhaps one where clerics are limited only to philosophies?

The vast majority of my campaigns have no definite gods, mostly because I'm far more interested in what people think than what is when it comes to divinity. If there is some sort of divine magic, there are a bunch of ways to handle it, I'm partial to minor spirits.

begooler
2011-04-07, 11:34 PM
I prefer for the deities to not actually be something that's sitting out there statted up. Instead, they are a group of people's ideas, that has some sort of history as to how it came about. That history might be that a bunch of elves were in a war with some orcs, and they came up with a god that would help them fight orcs. It might be an actual extraplanar being that started a collecting followers who believe it is a deity, but it itself isn't really anything more powerful than a deva or the like.
In these cases, you have to say that divine power for casting spells comes from someone being devoted to an idea, not from a god handing it to them.

Ashtagon
2011-04-07, 11:35 PM
This maybe a weird question given how much divine spell casters are woven into the game, but has anyone ever attempted to run an atheist (that is, no gods) campaign? Perhaps one where clerics are limited only to philosophies?

Off the top of my head, Dark Sun has that, and technically Mystara does too (clerics worship/follow a philosophy... the immortals just happen to be particularly far advanced in worshipping/following that same philosophy).

Amnestic
2011-04-07, 11:45 PM
I'm about to run a campaign with no divine magics whatsoever. Does that count?

Of course that doesn't technically make it an atheist campaign; there could still be a pantheon which I haven't figured out yet. I doubt they'd play any sort of serious role in the campaign even if they did exist.

YouLostMe
2011-04-07, 11:45 PM
I have done this... It's really no different from any other campaign. You just don't have Clerics, Favored Souls, the BoED or BoVD, and some other god-ish-stuff. In addition, plot hooks and rest centers that deal with religious stuff are gone.

However, the game continues to run itself. Nothing super-interesting here, boss.

Knaight
2011-04-08, 12:12 AM
In addition, plot hooks and rest centers that deal with religious stuff are gone.


You can certainly have religions without real gods, there simply must be belief, and often mutually exclusive beliefs in different religions at that. Having actual gods interferes with that more than anything, particularly if they are the sort of extremely interventionist types which make their presence known very loudly and thoroughly, such as in D&D.

Now, one can also have a game where religion doesn't exist. For the most part this would be extremely odd, but it is considered acceptable within the genre of far future space opera.

Mutazoia
2011-04-08, 12:20 AM
This maybe a weird question given how much divine spell casters are woven into the game, but has anyone ever attempted to run an atheist (that is, no gods) campaign? Perhaps one where clerics are limited only to philosophies?

Check out Iron Hero's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Heroes) No divine magic what so ever... (and very little arcane magic)

I personally have run campaigns with the religious system bases on Catholicism, where rather than worshiping Gods, the clerical orders were followers of the various Arch Angles and Saints. Naturally Evil Clerics worshiped the other side and had a standing kill order on their heads.

Otogi
2011-04-08, 12:32 AM
As in with no deities, or without religion period? Because the first is very capable, the second I feel not so much unless you're going for a less detailed campaign.

Mayhem
2011-04-08, 01:02 AM
I'm sure if you gave healing spells etc to sorcerers, or some kind of specialist wizards, things will rock on as per usual. A long-term campaign may start to feel a little odd though, but if you aren't looking for it then it won't be missed.

The shujenga from complete divine work pretty well as a replacement for clerics actually.

Solaris
2011-04-08, 06:24 AM
I've done it. No clerics, druids, or any divine casters. I just added a number of curative and restorative spells to the wizard/sorcerer spell list (at a higher level than the cleric got 'em). Party went on as usual.

Mulletmanalive
2011-04-08, 06:35 AM
Well, the idea of philosphies being powerful is simple enough.

As i'm a fan of having power taken away from clerics if they defy their religion's rules, this is a little patchy for me as there's a lot of personal interpretation in philosophies.

A very vague real world allusion includes two of the earliest Chinese religions' [Confucianism and Daoism] earliest forms were actually just discussions of ethics and effective rulership between intellectuals. If their ephemeral principals granted power in the being followed [as Daoism's only text at the time suggests], bam, you have divine casters.

If you go with this last one, i suggest checking out the Priest class from Necromancer games as most philosophies are fairly passive and influential because of it....

SurlySeraph
2011-04-08, 11:39 AM
Borrowing the Planescape factions to let people choose from a pretty big range of philosophies would be a good start.

Marxism
2011-04-09, 12:00 AM
I enjoy playing characters that belive all magic is arcane and clerics are liars. Just make clerics into another class of arcane paladins into knights of a cause and poof atheism!

Reluctance
2011-04-09, 12:13 AM
Dark Sun's done it. Eberron follows a popular trend of coming close, by making the gods distant and mysterious.

What are you hoping to do with a definitively god-free campaign world, though? Holy orders and evil cults are fantasy staples for a reason. (The way 3.5 does divine magic has its problems, but that's a flaw with 3.5.) Before you cut out easy and convenient plot hooks, ask yourself what you expect to gain from such a removal.

Amnestic
2011-04-09, 12:31 AM
Dark Sun's done it. Eberron follows a popular trend of coming close, by making the gods distant and mysterious.

What are you hoping to do with a definitively god-free campaign world, though? Holy orders and evil cults are fantasy staples for a reason. (The way 3.5 does divine magic has its problems, but that's a flaw with 3.5.) Before you cut out easy and convenient plot hooks, ask yourself what you expect to gain from such a removal.

Well for me...

The Mages (i.e. any wielders of arcane power) are in most definite control and have been, in a vast variety of Empies, for thousands of years. There's a rift of distrust and outright hatred between Commoners (i.e. non-magic users) and their Mage masters. Having Divine magic might throw a wrench in that, since they're arguably as powerful arcane casters and it adds a whole other level to the dynamic.

Divine and arcane magic probably don't appear that different to uneducated Commoners, but the spread of the alignments for divine magic users (something they're dependant on) mean they'll never all be aligned with the Mages, nor the Commoners. Adding a third side (I avoided a fourth by also cutting out any psionics) was undesireable, as the focus on the campaign was going to be the Mages, the Commoners, the ever reoccuring cyclical history of the Empires, and the unusual talents which the PCs possess ("Fixed" Truenamer, Shadowcaster, Hexblade and Swordsage).

So in conclusion, what I got from removing Divine Magic was a greater focus on the main subject and less personal headaches with how to think about people's mixed reactions to divine magic given the huge rift between those with Arcane and those without.

DontEatRawHagis
2011-04-09, 12:36 AM
I've had players complain that I run Dark Sun just because it is low on deities. My idea for next campaign, homebrewed high on deities. The seperation of all deities from the real world is very thin, most are either barred from entering, jailed, don't like visiting, or are just plain lazy.

Fun thing is is that I am an atheist running a very religious DnD game.

Ravens_cry
2011-04-09, 12:56 AM
Well, I am monotheist, and I like to play up the polytheist factor of typical D&D, having holy characters venerate at least partially all gods that do not offend their sensibilities . I don't see it as funny, I see it as part of the experiance of role playing.
I am also working on a world with distant, but real, deities based on the "Elemental Gods" article in Dragon magazine #77, each god having several sides and aspects, with a deity just as likely to have good as evil worshippers, with different nations and cultures seen them in a different way. The hard part is working this into the whole 3.5 domain system.

YouLostMe
2011-04-09, 01:39 AM
You can certainly have religions without real gods, there simply must be belief, and often mutually exclusive beliefs in different religions at that. Having actual gods interferes with that more than anything, particularly if they are the sort of extremely interventionist types which make their presence known very loudly and thoroughly, such as in D&D.

Now, one can also have a game where religion doesn't exist. For the most part this would be extremely odd, but it is considered acceptable within the genre of far future space opera.

Well, that's kewl and all, but it's not the game I played. Had I played a game where Gods weren't real and Clerics got their powers from philosophies or fake gods or whatever, I'd report that.

But I haven't. I'm just talking about my personal experiences.

elpollo
2011-04-09, 06:42 AM
Well, that's kewl and all, but it's not the game I played. Had I played a game where Gods weren't real and Clerics got their powers from philosophies or fake gods or whatever, I'd report that.

But I haven't. I'm just talking about my personal experiences.

To be fair, the OP asked if anyone had done a no-god campaign. You said you had, then said that it removed religion, which, as knaight pointed out, isn't necessarily true (see: any game set in the real world).

NichG
2011-04-09, 10:53 AM
I did this and then subverted it. Basically, the PCs started in a medieval-esque setting where people believed in gods, but you could trace down all divine magic to non-divine sources if you tried to, which led to mages constantly proclaiming the superiority of their approach as non self-deceptive and so on. The party proceeded to discover that there were networks of worlds out there in space, each with wildly different cultures and alien peoples. And while they had various beliefs, no actual deities seemed to exist. However they did discover that the souls of the dead tended to flow a certain way, towards some great attractor of souls that seemed to be consuming them and preventing them from reincarnating or being raised.

So they tracked this great attractor down and found what was basically a divine being floating in space, and that led the campaign into an arc about what these divinities were actually doing. It gave a nice sense of how distant in scale the divine was from other stuff (at least for this campaign).

Warlawk
2011-04-09, 02:49 PM
A lot of people have pointed out Dark Sun without really saying how it works. It has two different sources of Divine Power. Elemental Priests draw power from the elemental planes/rulers. They divided the cleric spells into Classifications of General, Water, Fire, Air and Earth spells. There were also Templar which were divine casters that drew their power from the Sorcerer Kings. Each sorcerer king had bonded with a powerful entity which served to channel magical power into the king and he could then funnel it down to his Templar who used it to cast divine spells. These entities were ancient and virtually extinct so it was not something you could simply "track one down" to set up a new sorcerer king.

Druids remained largely unchanged except they were dedicated to protect a particular region or powerful natural place and drew their power from that.

IMO an atheist D&D game could be largely unchanged, you just change the source of clerical power to fit your vision for the game. You can even keep the same villain tropes by having cults dedicated to powerful evil spirits that they venerate as gods. This puts the "gods" themselves within reach as a BBEG for your average game instead of limiting that aspect to epic level play.

The Alien
2011-04-09, 03:37 PM
Thanks for all your suggestions. I had forgotten that in Dark Sun the gods were absent. I think that makes a good model for the campaign I'm designing.

Knaight
2011-04-10, 12:05 AM
To be fair, the OP asked if anyone had done a no-god campaign. You said you had, then said that it removed religion, which, as knaight pointed out, isn't necessarily true (see: any game set in the real world).

Yeah, my point was entirely that removing religion wasn't necessary, as I interpreted the statement as saying both that the game you were in removed religion and as implying that a game without gods was a game without religion, which I disagreed with. The concepts are entirely different, one is about what people think, and one is about what is, reconciling those states sums up quite a bit of human effort.

Concerning the real world, lets not discuss the extent to which gods are in it. That never ends well.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-10, 04:39 PM
I enjoy playing characters that belive all magic is arcane and clerics are liars. Just make clerics into another class of arcane paladins into knights of a cause and poof atheism!

I'm playing such a char atm. A paladin with lotsa levels of wizard. With a healing belt, well chosen feats and spells and a wand of clw, he's doing pretty well at it.

He's wrong in this setting, but its still great fun.

Fiery Diamond
2011-04-10, 11:34 PM
Yeah, I ran a campaign with no deities. The religious orders were followers of "religious philosophy" so to speak, so there were still temples, but the temples served more as hospitals and places of goodwill and sanctuary than actual worship centers. I didn't mess with the divine magic at all, just had it stem from "power of spiritual belief" rather than the "messing with random crap" (wizards), "in your blood" (sorcerers), or "power of song" (bards) of arcane magic.

ffone
2011-04-11, 03:28 AM
This maybe a weird question given how much divine spell casters are woven into the game, but has anyone ever attempted to run an atheist (that is, no gods) campaign? Perhaps one where clerics are limited only to philosophies?

Pretty much every 'homebrew setting' I've ever seen has been athiestic or nearly so ("the gods are dead", "the gods are frauds", "churches tell you you need to pray to their idol for spells but really you don't if you just believe in yourself", something like that.) Divine magic is usually refluffed as either personal philosophy / belief driven, or just a generic way of 'learning' or 'tapping into' magic like sorcery, etc.

Edit: lulz, after posting that I scanned the other replies, and I see another bunch of examples of this phenomenon. :)

Yora
2011-04-11, 03:54 AM
My current setting is purely animistic. All spirits and demons. The spirits of the sun, the moon, and the sea could easily be called deities, but they are just the very most powerful of the spirits.

Killer Angel
2011-04-11, 05:10 AM
atheist (that is, no gods) campaign?

Neither Necoho (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=190383&highlight=atheists)? :smallwink:

Viktyr Gehrig
2011-04-11, 05:11 AM
Even easier in 4e, with healers from every power source; you could ban the entire Divine power source without significantly changing the way the game plays. Of course, there's nothing saying that the religions in your world have to be theistic at all-- plenty of real world examples of religions that ain't.

So you could have Divine power source coming from faith alone, with philosophical Clerics and Paladins. Or you could ban the Divine power source. You can have religions that revolve around arcane magic, or primal magic, or psionics. You can have religions that have no mechanical effect at all.

Sat down with Player's Option: Spells & Magic once and detailed all of the religions I was going to use for a campaign setting. There were plenty of Clerics, of course, but I also re-did Bard as a form of priest, Druids, Shugenja... and so on.

Roderick_BR
2011-04-11, 03:54 PM
I'm sure if you gave healing spells etc to sorcerers, or some kind of specialist wizards, things will rock on as per usual. A long-term campaign may start to feel a little odd though, but if you aren't looking for it then it won't be missed.

The shujenga from complete divine work pretty well as a replacement for clerics actually.

Archivists would work well, since they are pretty much clerics that uses spellbooks like wizards (called prayerbook, but all in all, they are wizards specialized in mimicing divine spells). They could just be that, a different kind of caster than wizards, no connection to actual gods or anything. They could still be spiritual leaders in some places.