Developing Religions

[kroot]

So I'm working on a world for a future Pathfinder or Burning wheel game. Almost all of the races will be homebrewed, and many of the classes will be too.
I plan to make the line between divine and arcane magic fairly blurred, and in fact it may be that the reason one can derive power from prayer will simply be as a result of placebo.
The world has a pretty large scale, and I plan on making it involve loads of different cultures.
I want the diversity in religion to show this, but I don't want to have to write a bible for all of them.
How do you develop RPG religions that aren't simply "This god represents this sphere of influence". How should I go about developing shamanism or ancestor worship? In addition, how can I develop religious interactions that have nothing to do with how the deities literally interact. I don't want it to simply be a crusades situation where everyone denounces the other's gods.

[Honest Tiefling]

I think the first step is to ask how do people interact with the gods? In Ancient Egypt for instance, temples were not centers of worship, they were the god's literal house. Priests were heavily involved in government, and the Pharaoh was both their leader and their link to the divine. In Ancient Greece, people did what the gods wanted and appeased them with festivals because otherwise they would come and smite you.

Do people need priests to communicate with gods? What do the gods do if you do something they don't like? What do the gods want you to do? How does one show reverence? What is a temple to this faith? What is the role of a priest in society?

[Gwaednerth]

Think about how governments and peoples have viewed religion. It might also be helpful to look as syncretic and nonsyncretic religion, animistic (shamanistic) religion, and pantheism. For instance, I developed a setting in which a major nomadic people called the Griths followed a monotheistic, animistic, and semi-shamanistic religion. Essentially, their theology was that their god was the only true god, but any other god they encountered must be a general answering to the one true god or to his eternal nemesis. That way, the religion became syncretic; conquered peoples could join and still continue following their old folkways. There were also animistic aspects, because they believed both in spirits of nature and of dead family members. The spirits of the land were soldiers in the one true god's war, and familial spirits were charged with guiding the living towards their part in the mortal world. This means that the society as a whole is, in some sense, the clergy because they all commune (or at least believe they commune) with familial and terrestrial spirits. However, the GroduGrod (an emperor/supreme general/pope) also exists as the direct arbiter/messenger of the supreme god's will, giving the religion a certain centrality.

Think about what matters to your world's societies, and what deities would grow out of that, or think up a general religion and then work out the religion that would follow from it. Also consider different groups within your religion. Almost every major religion has both a centralised and/or orthodox camp and a more spiritualistic camp (think of the ulama and the sufis or the pope and the monastic orders in Islam and Christianity)

[Grinner]

In traditional societies, myth and ritual are two central components of religious practice. Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars. One of the approaches to this problem is "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory," held notably by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, which holds that "myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual."[1] This theory is still disputed; many scholars now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_and_ritual

I recommend you begin by figuring out what sort of events happened in the past which produced stories, stories which were told and retold by locals down the generations. These myths will form the basis of the local religion. As the Wikipedia article indicates, academic opinion is divided over whether rituals develop afterwards to reinforce the stories or whether rituals develop simultaneously. For the sake of simplicity, you may just wish to assume the former.

To answer your question about shamanism and ancestor worship, keep in mind that these sorts of religions are more personal, so the religion is going to be more idiosyncratic than a more organized religion. There will be fewer dogmas and more personal traditions.

The Crusades thing is probably going to be more a result of political conflict combined with monotheistic tendencies. Going by a hazy memory of a middle school world history class, the Romans, being polytheistic initially, were inclined to accept foreign gods as alternate identities for their own gods.

[Max_Killjoy]

A couple other issues to keep in mind.

* Fact vs faith -- a world in which the claims and details of the religion(s) are demonstrable facts will be different from a world in which things must be taken on faith. This is something of a sliding scale. The more blatant and reliable and demonstrable the gods or their blessings are, the less religion has to do with what we consider "faith". Two priesthoods who can both reliable provide healing, effective blessings, dazzling smitings, and other gifts from their god(s) are each going to have a hard time claim that the other religion is "LIES!"

* Gods as characters vs religions as moral and social structures -- depictions of ancient polytheistic faiths in popular literature and high school classrooms has tended to focus on the gods as individual characters, rather than the myths, rituals, and beliefs of their followers. Starting with D&D, many gaming products have followed that path. See, any edition of Deities and Demigods. Compare with LudicSavant's threads on these forums.

[LudicSavant]

I have been summoned!


* Gods as characters vs religions as moral and social structures -- depictions of ancient polytheistic faiths in popular literature and high school classrooms has tended to focus on the gods as individual characters, rather than the myths, rituals, and beliefs of their followers. Starting with D&D, many gaming products have followed that path. See, any edition of Deities and Demigods. Compare with LudicSavant's threads on these forums.

To be fair to popular fiction, many hit novels such as Game of Thrones, The Way of Kings, and Ancillary Justice are great examples of religions as moral and social structures, and generally avoid the issues of Texas School Board-filtered textbooks in their worldbuilding. Also, compare... say... Faiths of Eberron to Deities and Demigods.

As for Deities and Demigods, I don't think they were trying to neglect religions as cultural structures. I mean, just look at the way the books are structured. Every entry in the 3e Deities and Demigods book has an intro, followed by a Dogma section, followed by a Clergy and Temples section, followed by a statblock. It's set up to cover dogma and clergy as the bulk of the fluff entries! It's just that the entries can be kind of... underwhelming. For example (just opening to a random page and grabbing a completely random entry):


Dogma: Cults of Aegir thrive in seaports. Cultists do not attempt to fit in or to make friends. They teach that those hoping for safe voyages across the sea must appease Aegir. Members of the cults tend to be crews of trading and fishing vessels that sail out of sight of shore. Their membership doesn’t reflect a shared preference for evil, but rather a healthy fear of Aegir.

It's just... bland. Every sentence of that could use improvement. Let's break it down piece by piece...


Cults of Aegir thrive in seaports. This is something that has bugged me about a lot of deity entries in D&D... the emphasis on what class of people are the worshipers. "This is Fighter God, worshiped by fighters. This is Wizard God, worshiped by wizards. This is sea god, worshiped in seaports." Don't do this! For one thing, readers can figure it out for themselves that some wizards probably think Wizard God is cool, they don't need to even be told. It's just padding space. For another, if you're making a polytheistic faith, people are worshiping multiple gods in different situations; this seems like an awkward sort of monolatry. Not that there's anything wrong with monolatry in your setting, but if it is a monolatrist faith you'd think there'd be a more diverse following, with people of all walks of life applying the lessons of the god to their lives in various ways.


Cultists do not attempt to fit in or make friends. Uhm, what? What kind of cult is this that doesn't try to recruit people? Even if there is some sort of reason, this just comes off as 'hey, this is an Evil deity, so let's make his followers arbitrarily antisocial for no reason.'


They teach that those hoping for safe voyages across the sea must appease Aegir. This sentence is just boring, and most of it goes without saying. Of course the cult of Aegir is going to teach you that you should appease Aegir. You could have a sentence equally brief but much more useful/interesting alluding to how we appease Aegir for safe voyages. "Followers throw favorite souvenirs overboard so that Aegir might spare a returning voyage." Bam, just as short, gets across all the same information that the old sentence did and alludes to more interesting details and practices besides. Now instead of something that you could have guessed without reading anything, now you have this image of someone parting with the thing of greatest sentimental value they acquired on a sea voyage, acknowledging that they could not have gotten a journey at all without Aegir's mercy, and all the little scenes and philosophies you can build around that.

But they don't do anything like that. They just keep it really, really bland.


Members of the cults tend to be crews of trading and fishing vessels that sail out of sight of shore. See my issues with the first sentence.


Their membership doesn’t reflect a shared preference for evil, but rather a healthy fear of Aegir. It's a problem that readers are primed to assume that followers of Evil deities just do stuff for the evulz in the first place, and that it has to be clarified that they aren't. That said, I feel like they could have gotten more out of just focusing on what they are, rather than on clarifying what they're not.

[TheYell]

It might be that ancestor worship and shamanist totemism is tied into cultural patterns of propriety that discourage disharmony and zealotry that leads to pogroms and crusades.

Part of the strength of assigning gods to specific domains is that you cant really eliminate one god from the pantheon. How can you obliterate Death? though maybe the temple of Death in one city is politically vulnerable. in such a situation the pantheon as a whole has to be assaulted to topple it.

[LudicSavant]

I don't want it to simply be a crusades situation where everyone denounces the other's gods.

There are a ton of ways to have multiple religions without them all denouncing all the others all the time. One of these is syncretism.

Maybe Grob'nathal is just the Orcish word for your war god Cyrus, whose avatar approached them under that name long ago. Maybe Cyrus and Grob'nathal are separate and are both the real top war god, but in different cosmic districts (like how GitP has a "Northern Pantheon" and "Southern Pantheon" and so forth). Maybe Grob'nathal just gets added to the pantheon right alongside Cyrus, with some story about them being brothers covering different aspects of War. Maybe two different religions are just different paths to unity with the divine for different kinds of people (like, say, the Four Yogas in Hinduism; "There are many paths but the peak is one"). Maybe your religion doesn't claim to have a complete and perfect canon already in place (thus allowing the mythology to grow and change to explain new things as needed), treats religious lore as attempts gathered by various peoples over time to try and understand the nature of the divine, and gathers myths from other cultures as eagerly as they would technological lore. Lots of options.

[Max_Killjoy]

I have been summoned!



To be fair to popular fiction, many hit novels such as Game of Thrones, The Way of Kings, and Ancillary Justice are great examples of religions as moral and social structures, and generally avoid the issues of Texas School Board-filtered textbooks in their worldbuilding. Also, compare... say... Faiths of Eberron to Deities and Demigods.

As for Deities and Demigods, I don't think they were trying to neglect religions as cultural structures. I mean, just look at the way the books are structured. Every entry in the 3e Deities and Demigods book has an intro, followed by a Dogma section, followed by a Clergy and Temples section, followed by a statblock. It's set up to cover dogma and clergy as the bulk of the fluff entries! It's just that the entries can be kind of... underwhelming. For example (just opening to a random page and grabbing a completely random entry):



It's just... bland. Every sentence of that could use improvement. Let's break it down piece by piece...

This is something that has bugged me about a lot of deity entries in D&D... the emphasis on what class of people are the worshipers. "This is Fighter God, worshiped by fighters. This is Wizard God, worshiped by wizards. This is sea god, worshiped in seaports." Don't do this! For one thing, readers can figure it out for themselves that some wizards probably think Wizard God is cool, they don't need to even be told. It's just padding space. For another, if you're making a polytheistic faith, people are worshiping multiple gods in different situations; this seems like an awkward sort of monolatry. Not that there's anything wrong with monolatry in your setting, but if it is a monolatrist faith you'd think there'd be a more diverse following, with people of all walks of life applying the lessons of the god to their lives in various ways.

Uhm, what? What kind of cult is this that doesn't try to recruit people? Even if there is some sort of reason, this just comes off as 'hey, this is an Evil deity, so let's make his followers arbitrarily antisocial for no reason.'

This sentence is just boring, and most of it goes without saying. Of course the cult of Aegir is going to teach you that you should appease Aegir. You could have a sentence equally brief but much more useful/interesting alluding to how we appease Aegir for safe voyages. "Followers throw favorite souvenirs overboard so that Aegir might spare a returning voyage." Bam, just as short, gets across all the same information that the old sentence did and alludes to more interesting details and practices besides. Now instead of something that you could have guessed without reading anything, now you have this image of someone parting with the thing of greatest sentimental value they acquired on a sea voyage, acknowledging that they could not have gotten a journey at all without Aegir's mercy, and all the little scenes and philosophies you can build around that.

But they don't do anything like that. They just keep it really, really bland.

See my issues with the first sentence.

It's a problem that readers are primed to assume that followers of Evil deities just do stuff for the evulz in the first place, and that it has to be clarified that they aren't. That said, I feel like they could have gotten more out of just focusing on what they are, rather than on clarifying what they're not.


The "god for this guy, god for that guy" approach they've long taken has been an issue, when "as practiced" these religions were for the average person more along the lines of "if I want a safe birth and healthy child, prayers and offerings to this god; if I want success in battle, prayers and offerings to that god". Or at least, that's my impression of how they were practiced.

My comment about literature wasn't regarding fiction, sorry -- it was regarding the way that non-fiction presentation of the religion so often focuses on the deities as characters / personalities / individuals, rather on the beliefs and practices and so on of the followers.