A World with a single God

[Draco_Lord]

So I have recently been thinking about creating my own campaign setting to run games in, I am the type of person who likes a fair amount of control over their world, and being able to say what has and has not happened without needing to reference something is nice. Anyways, one idea I was toying with what having there be a single God or two opposite Gods. The only problem that comes to mind is divine casters, mostly Clerics and the like, who are very much tied to gods for their powers. So I was wondering if people had any idea on how to use something like this.

[Scots Dragon]

Monotheistic religions tend to ascribe to their gods multiple aspects, and religious schisms are something that does frequently happen.

Different clerics could emphasise different aspects and interpretations of their god's message, and have different domains based on that reinterpretation.

[AnimeTheCat]

So I have recently been thinking about creating my own campaign setting to run games in, I am the type of person who likes a fair amount of control over their world, and being able to say what has and has not happened without needing to reference something is nice. Anyways, one idea I was toying with what having there be a single God or two opposite Gods. The only problem that comes to mind is divine casters, mostly Clerics and the like, who are very much tied to gods for their powers. So I was wondering if people had any idea on how to use something like this.

I've toyed with similar ideas, but when I get down to it it just seems far more bland to me. With only one or two deities, there isn't as much cosmic craziness that can occur and the stories seem to get kinda boring and repetitive. What I ended up settling on that worked best in my mind was 9 deities, one for each alignment, who governed different aspects of the planes in conjunction with their counterparts.

For insance, all of the lawful deities governed justice in the planes, and when you died you faced "The Three" to be judged. The Chaotic deities were instigators, cruasders, etc. Those that most commonly started wars, conflict and strife. This not only put the good deities at odds with the evil ones, but also with each other at times. The neutral deities tended towards protection, stability, and resolution and commonly found their place as emissaries and diplomats to the other deities, but also weilded great power themselves, typically aligned with nature or natural, primal forces like hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. There was dynamic between all 9 deities, and since it was only 9 personalities it was easy to actually flesh out such personalities and figure out what made each of them happy, what upset them, and the sort.

The way I tied it all together is that the 9 were all part of the overdeity who created the planes. The overdeity thought that alone, it would never be able to truly make his creation happy, so it split itself into each of the 9 tennets that made it up, including the bad. Everything exists in balance. Good can never fully triumph over evil because good will sometimes be opposed by good. While being a good person and following the laws is great for order and discipline, it restricts the free will of the people which opposed the Chaotic Good deity and whenever the Lawful Good deity tried to extend his order too far, he would be opposed quickly (and at times violently) by the Chaotic Good Deity (who might sometimes be joined by the Chaotic Neutral Deity, but never by the Neutral Evil Deity).

This method allowed for more interaction between man and deity that anything a single or couple of deities could manage.

[Pleh]

I believe the DMG even has a section with advice on this.

Don't forget that deities aren't the only source of Divine power. There's also Nature and even clerics who follow generic Ideals (such as Justice or Mercy).

In fact, there's nothing really preventing you from having a world with 1 deity that has no clerics (doesn't grant power to mortals) and all clerics in the world may only follow their own chosen virtues and ideals.

[Falontani]

I would suggest having the power of clerics come from devotion itself rather than the worship of a deity. This way a cleric could worship an aspect of the deity, the deity themself, or perhaps something along the lines of the deity's dog. Or a tree, a stick, or a city? They could gain their powers from the one deity through their devotion to the ideal of the stick.

[Psyren]

Deities and Demigods has guidelines for this situation (pgs. 7 and 203.) Some things you'll need to consider:

1a) It sounds like you still want clerics to exist; do all of them gain their power from this one deity? Remember that even with one deity, there are several non-gods that could potentially grant spells - whether spirits, powerful outsiders, or even just strong belief in its own right.

1b) Same question, but for non-cleric divine casters.

2) Even if the one deity is the only source, does it cover all portfolios? Does it favor one alignment or ethos over others, or does it encompass all?

3) Does this deity have a church (or churches), and if so, what do these churches believe? Do they all agree with one another on what the deity's message is? Does the deity itself speak to its followers directly, or provide some kind of holy text that's open to interpretation, or nothing at all?

4) How does morality work in your setting? Is "good" a universal concept, or is it defined as following your monodeity's teachings? Is evil a universal concept, or is it defined as rejecting your monodeity's teachings? If morality is universal, do specific moralities get spells from the deity, or do they all?

5) What happens to souls when they die? Is there one destination? Are there two - one for the faithful and one for the non-faithful? Or are there many, as D&D has it now, and are those tied to alignment? Or are souls simply obliterated/cleansed and recycled with no afterlife at all?

As you answer those questions you'll be able to flesh out this concept.

[Elder_Basilisk]

You have a few options depending upon the route you want to take it:

1. Non-gods as a source of supernatural power. You could have one God (or two gods) and a bunch of spell-granting demon princes and arch devils if you want to have room for lots of evil cults.

At the risk of making your limited pantheon only skin deep you could also have spell-granting saints and celestials. The challenge is that this would easily collapse into something functionally indistinguishable from standard d&d polytheism.

2. Different orders/functions. This is different from the "interpretations/aspects" explanation because they can and probably do have the same understanding of their god--just different functions in that God's service. In the canonical Greyhawk church of St. Cuthbert, there are three orders--billets, chapeaux, and stars--with different functions and abilities. You could have the order of the Templars who get the option to choose from destruction, war, law, or strength domains and the order of hospitallers who get healing, good, law, or pact domains and another order of inquisitors with another set of domains, maybe law, Inquisition, mind, and trickery.

3. Different organizations and interpretations. This can be a challenge because it raises the question of which organization or interpretation is correct or if the god doesn't really care and that may not be something you want to address in the game. But it's entirely possible to come up with plausible answers so that you don't need to have either group A is right and group B wrong or the god doesn't care.

One possibility is to have the organizations have different historical, national or racial origins. The church of the elves does things one way and gets the elf and celerity domains and the dwarf church does things another way and gets dwarf and pact domains. They don't even need to have different theology. Maybe they just think that their God made elves one way and dwarves another and they're fine with that.

My own preference would be a combination of 1 and 2, possibly with a dash of 3. You have one God with multiple functional organizations in his church/temple with different abilities. You also have a variety of demon lords archdevils etc to give magical power to evil cults and odd heretical movements. And maybe the players stumble on an isolated mountain valley whose inhabitants seem to worship the same good but that have slightly different organization and abilities. Is it a cleverly disguised demon cult or their God working with a different people in a different environment? That's another mystery to explore.

[smetzger]

My 'world' is monotheistic but has a number of saints.

In a nutshell my world is loosely based on an alternate earth circa 1100.
I generally run published adventure paths RTToEE and Freeport. I just convert each temple to a church dedicated to a saint.

PC Cleric's can chose any two non-evil oriented domains.

Evil 'deities' are powerful demon's/devils and I allow them to grant spells to their clerics. Except they cannot grant Raise Dead or True Res. But the evil Cleric's can cast these from a scroll.

I don't go into a lot of detail on world building, in general it has worked.

[ngilop]

It does not change a thing.

If you have one deity that made the everythings then it is probably above and beyond anything even tertiary related to mortals


You can have 2 Theocratic kingdoms who believe in completely opposing ideas, each one claiming their way is the only true way.

Don't believe me? look at the real world and what insanity man has wrought with religion on earth.

Not to mention there are other outer planar beings that can give and gain divine power as well as concepts like 'peanut butter' or 'brotherhood'

[Psyren]

look at the real world

This is a good way to get the thread locked, so let's not.



One possibility is to have the organizations have different historical, national or racial origins. The church of the elves does things one way and gets the elf and celerity domains and the dwarf church does things another way and gets dwarf and pact domains. They don't even need to have different theology. Maybe they just think that their God made elves one way and dwarves another and they're fine with that.


Personally I would remove the racial domains entirely, but this also works - have each race be able to access their own corresponding racial domain when they worship The One.

[BowStreetRunner]

My 'world' is monotheistic but has a number of saints.

I've had success with a similar setting. Inspired by the Darklands video game, I created a world that replaced the pantheons of normal D&D with various saints. I went further to create several different religious groups - an Orthodox (LG) church, a Reform (CG) church, and a group of Heretics (NE) who prayed to 'fallen' saints. Individual saints weren't necessarily associated with a specific church, and could be followed by any worshiper within a single alignment step as usual. So there were NG saints that were used by both Orthodox and Reform churches. In my world there were a group of "old gods" worshiped by a group of Pagans (N) as well, who replaced the druids of standard D&D.

Ultimately, the resulting changes were mostly fluff and the mechanics of the original game were retained with little difficulty.

[Florian]

So I have recently been thinking about creating my own campaign setting to run games in, I am the type of person who likes a fair amount of control over their world, and being able to say what has and has not happened without needing to reference something is nice. Anyways, one idea I was toying with what having there be a single God or two opposite Gods. The only problem that comes to mind is divine casters, mostly Clerics and the like, who are very much tied to gods for their powers. So I was wondering if people had any idea on how to use something like this.

Make it basically a "distant" god. Everyone prays to it, it doesn't really need clerics by itself. It´s vast, powerful and incomprehensible for mortals, it isn't tied to an alignment or have domains.

Introduce four "aspects" of the deity that people normally can "grasp" and associate with, based on LG, CG, LE, CE (like "the creator", "the shepherd", "the destroyed" and "the all-seeing eye"). This are your major deities.

All outsiders are "angels". Remove the divide between the alignment-associated races, them all being servants of the different aspects. Having "Archangels" that grant divine power will be your intermediate deities.

As others have already said, introducing very specific saints will broaden the mixture of what's available and be the lesser deities.

[NoAnonimo]

There are some intresting topics of homebew about this (I think in this very forum...)

I think everybody suggested some really good alternatives, but the may have made some assumptions beforehand.

Questions:
My suggested questions (not entireliy in-line with above ones):

1. Is it possible to not believe in god?
2. Do all have the option? Is it possible for everybody to choose if they are believer or not?
3. Do different people believe in differents 'aspects' of the god? If so, how did they learnd/discovered its existence? Where they touched by the one god? where they teached?
4. Does god treats different to worshippers and non worshippers? How? Is it a good favor-granting god, or is it a soul hunter god? or both?

Your answers may and will have repercutions on the campaign setting.

About Questions:

Think about the world you want to create. If stuck, ask yourself if you would like to play that world.

1.Are characters just normal people? Or are they special agents created by god itself for a reason? (If so, it wouldn't be possible not to believe, don't you think?).

2. About Religion(s), Church(s) and Power: Is religion optional? Is it the core of the social organization, or is it just a branch?
(Is it a religion-based sociaty, like medieval Europe? Or does church(s) have a minor role on everybodies lifes? Is it a powerful church or just a minor one? Does it have military power? Will it be able to hunt its enemies?)

3. About Religion Transmition: How is religion transmitted?
(Do people learn religion? how? Do they have to go to church? Do everybody talks about god on day-to-day basic? Or is it a secret knowledge reserved just for a few? Is not learning religion punnished? Is learning rewarded?)

4. About God: Treating your mortal creatures.
So, you're God. The ONLY God. How did you arrived there? Did you had to fight with every other god? Are you existing since anything exist? Where you created by something?
Did you created the world? How/Why? Do you want people to workshipp you? Why? Do you have some preference for any creature? (Races, Workshippers, Power).

Feel free to add other questions:
a_ Was religion created? When? By whom? Why?
b_ Do they fight? Why?
c_ How is it politically organized? Is everybody ok with that?
d_ How does it obtain its power? Did god granted it? Do it have a gazillon dollars?

Check spoiler for a Possible world I've been thinking by starting with this questions.

A possible World:

Eukaria is a world created by The One, The only survivor of the Gods War. There, The One left some clues about his existence so creatures would discover. It Wanted the most powerful to know about its existence, so it hide the clues on dangerous place.
Eventually, difterent races found different clues (artifacts) and founded different churchs, using the new power The One gave them. They had acces to different faces of the power of god:
Some elves had the One's crown, wich gave them access to Mind, Oracle, Mentalism and Planning domains.
Some dwarves had acces to the One's glove, wich gave them access to War, Competition, Gem and Craft domains.
Some halflings foud the One's collar, wich gave them access to Art, Comerce, Avarice and Charity domains.

Eventually, their churches grown until they had to adopt some sort of organizations (use the organizations of PH2, for example) and developed a tendency to some alignments. Governments were afraid of the growing power of churches, so they offered gold and lands to their rivals churches to destroy them.
The One, filled with anger, granted power to special warriors, examplars of the most pure hearts, the four Paladins. Purification, Renewal, Sky and Law domains were granted to this fighters.

Some churches were appart of the war, like the Elves one. The Law Paladin allied with them and started a life appart, away of problems.
Halfling church falled when the good leader died. The Sky Paladin offered to guide the workshipers, but halflings declined and instead became chaotics, not realizing the message of its patriarch.
Dwarven and Orc churches fought for conquering lands, betraying the goverments that offered them help, so Renewal and Purification paladins tried to stop them. When they saw that it was too much for them, they reunited a little group of followers and asked The One to grant them a tiny bit of its powers. Cold, Fire, Air, Earth, Storm, Windstorm and Sand Champions were formed that day.

Currently, Eukaria, the world, is summed in a war for stability. Elves are growing in power and they welcome any non-chaotic visitor willing to learn the peace way. Orcs and Dwarven realized that the Paladins and Champions are a strong, threatening force, so they pacted a fragile peace noone is willing to accept. A group of halflings is developing a ritual to revive the Patriarch, guided by the Sky Paladin. However, another branch of the halfling church is not happy with that, afraid of losing its new power.
On the other hand, The One is getting old and slowly losing power, and the profecy says a twisted mortal mind, drunk with the power of the artifacts, will face him in a colossal war for the very Deity power.