Real World Religions in D&D

 It seems ambitious, after letting the blog die shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, to start off again with a multipart post, but this is a tricky subject. When I was a wee gamer lad, our home game settings were eclectic. One friend might tell you, "I want to play a guy like Bulwyf from The 13th Warrior," while another wanted to play Gandalf, and still a third wanted to play a Crusader. As a result, one popular thing to do was to decide your home game setting was part of a multiverse, a conglomeration of adjacent universes that connected somehow, usually through portals. 

In this, we were probably influenced Time Bandits, where a map to the "holes in Creation" is a key plot MacGuffin. Another influence was Michael Moorcock's series', most of which took place in completely different universes that could be visited by the right means, such as the Dark Ship that sails the Seas of Fate or Balwyn Moor. So it was that you could gather together characters from any media property. It worked in the DM's favor as well; with such an arrangement, you could bring in creatures and elements from other stories and combine them in wild ways to make interesting plots that resonated with your players.

The problem with such a home game setting, for me, is that I'm a stickler for plausibility and accuracy. If I have a character who worships Thor, I want to draw from as much real-world Thor information as possible, instead of just making my own stuff up. I'm not averse to making it up as I go along (far from it) but with real world deities, you have special issues.

1. Just because they're mythical to me, doesn't mean they don't carry a special status for someone else. I learned this lesson the hard way as a very new DM, when putting a historical-Jesus-worshipper in a Hârn game. It wasn't obvious to the player at first, because the worshipper referred to his god as "Yeshua," but my research had shown me that that was the way the name was probably pronounced back in the day. I had my first real argument with a player then. His argument was that this was basically blasphemy, as I was taking a real God and acting like it was a game. I pointed out that Deities and Demigods had the Indian pantheon, which (among others in that book) is still worshipped by millions of people in the real world; the player in question played a cleric who worshipped Kartikeya, primarily because he had a 2% chance of getting the god's aid when battling devils and rakshasas. The argument ended with the player shouting at me, "But Kartikeya isn't REAL!" and storming out of the store; we never saw him again.

While neither myself or the player handled that situation particularly well, thinking about it then and now reminds me that, whenever you include a real world thing in a game, you have to do it with sensitivity. Obviously, there are millions of people who would take exception to the idea that Kartikeya isn't real: in the state of Tamil Nadu, three of the six richest temples are dedicated to him. But for my player, raised in a culture where Jesus is obviously real and every other deity obviously isn't, there was a big difference. I'm not making any judgements on his reaction here, I'm saying you have to treat any real world elements introduced into a game with respect. Since I'm an agnostic by inclination, this was a tough lesson.

2. Being consistent with the Real World is a benefit, not a burden. I've spoken with DMs who prefer to riff off of their own ideas only. They take a name and concept and everything else is their own creation. And there's nothing wrong with this approach. It works at the table.

But there's a reward to doing the research. As an example, the Celtic pantheon in Deities and Demigods is pretty crazy. There was no really homogeneous "Celtic" culture, despite what the Romans said about them: you have Gaelic Celts from Ireland and the Isles of Man, Brythonic Celts from Wales and northern England, Gallic Celts from France and southern Germany, and many more. And in each of these groupings there are tribal differences, with each god having a "tutelary deity," a patron god that defines their cultural identity. The pantheon the writes came up with for DDG is a mishmash of gods picked from each of those cultural groupings, all mixed together. It's the equivalent to having Greek, Near Eastern, and Egyptian gods in the same pantheon.

Now, in the real world, you actually had those things. In Ptolemaic Egypt, the Greek-descended rulers wanted to ease tensions between the Greek and Egyptian people in the city, and they created new religions for hybrid gods, like Serapis who combined Osiris and Hades. But for it to "take," it has to make sense: the new hybrid gods were supported by the rulers, who wanted to use the religions to pacify the populace.

But in researching the Celtic deities, I read stories and legends of a wide variety of Celtic heroes from many cultures. All those stories go into the "GM Vault" part of my brain, where they ideas percolate and fester, and eventually pop out when I need a cool improvisation at the table. None of the research is wasted. And if a player wants to find out more about the god they chose for their character, I can always say, "Look it up on Wikipedia." If you've stayed consistent with the source material, then you've given your players huge fields to mine for their own ideas and creations. It's never a bad thing to unload some of the GM prep-work onto the players.

3. Be vague, but be vague in specific ways. This one's the tricky one. Every DM says too much at some point, whether revealing a secret or surprise intended for the players, or giving too many hints about the plans and plots of the NPCs, or even just giving the players the wrong impression about a location or event. So, most DMs eventually learn to be vague. But when you're doing real world religions in your game, you have added wrinkles.

One of the ideas I hate to see in games, is when gods are explicitly revealed to exist. The Forgotten Realms does this in spades, where any bartender could be a god in disguise, or an exiled god, or one who lost his powers. Sometimes it seems like every bar is staffed by godlings and retired 20th level adventurers. I think this does the gameplay a disservice. Vagueness in what the players "know" is true only serves the story.

Cleric players will say, "Of course my god exists, I get spells." Wizards get spells. Warlocks get spells. Spells alone shouldn't be the one proof for the argument, especially since in vanilla D&D it's not clear what the mechanism is whereby the cleric is imbued with this power. Do you see your god specifically appearing in front of you and touching your head for a blessing? How many clerics does this god have and how much time must be spent dispensing these powers? Heck, if you were a god, how would you know to trust that these people will use their powers in your interests?

Eberron does an interesting thing with cleric spells. In the Eberron setting, spell power is delivered to the cleric by divine servants appropriate to the religion. So, angels come to you and dispense the power. And they do it for clerics specifically because clerics are their front-line agents in the world, and they have an agenda. Because they're not fully divine, they become much more approachable and usable in various DM plots. Maybe a group of angels has been deceived, or is planning something other angels disagree with. Real-life religious schisms can be excellent models to draw from. Maybe your cleric gets an inkling something is wrong when the spells she gets are a little different from what's usually available. This could be a great way to introduce new spells into your campaign while also dropping leads the players can follow up on to create more interesting stories.

I prefer a game where the actual status of any truly divine being is left completely vague and subjective. Because that's real life. "I knew Kartikeya was real when I prayed to him when the building was on fire and I was spared!" Are there other possible reasons for that character's survival? Sure. But what matters is what that character believes is real. And you can apply this faith all the way up the line. The angel delivering your spells absolutely knows that Melech is real. Why? Because she knows. She has faith far greater than most mortals could ever know, it's been tempered by thousands of years of existence. The sunk-cost fallacy means that her faith is unshakable at this point, even without tangible evidence of Melech's existence or non-existence.

I like this because it leads to stories that I find more interesting. You can absolutely have a religious schism where both sides still have their powers, but are diametrically opposed due to one slight difference in dogma. Layers of nuance can come from the slightest thing, without some ultimate arbiter to make a definitive ruling.

Anyway, that's enough for now. I've probably contradicted myself anyway, but I'll leave addressing that for next time.