Losing Your Religion

The Dice Bag is hosting this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, and the topic is religion.  That seems like a pretty wide-open field, to me.  While I was considering possible subjects for my post, though, I reflected a little about the way religion is portrayed in Dungeons & Dragons (and, perhaps by imitation, in many fantasy roleplaying games).

Fantasy roleplaying tends to present pantheistic religions.  Furthermore, these are often of two sorts.  The first presents a pantheon of gods for each major race within the setting; this is how D&D handled the topic from first edition to third.  The second, which fourth edition employs, presents a single pantheon of gods.

Neither of these reflects the development of myth and spirituality in the real world, though the former is a bit closer.  In reality, different beliefs tended, naturally, to spring up in accordance with cultural divides (and therefore geographic divides, too).  Unless all of your dwarves are a single society, for instance, it would be more “realistic” for a distant clan to have an entirely different set of religious beliefs than the dwarves in the characters’ home region.

But there are many religious beliefs that are given short shrift by the typical fantasy world.  Monotheism is rarely explored as an option.  Animism and totemism tend to be relegated to global backwaters.  And atheism is rarely a factor.

Then I thought — what about a fantasy world in which atheism is the predominant belief?

First of all, in order for an atheist-dominated world to work logically, one of three things must be true:  There are no gods; or, the gods are distant; or, the “gods” are not really gods at all, and the fact has been proven (though perhaps rejected by some).  If there are gods, and they’re involved in the world, then atheism isn’t a viable philosophy; it might be held to by a few, but it would never come to dominate, in the face of contravening evidence.  Each of those possibilities has different implications for the world.

The first case, in which there are no gods, is the simplest in concept.  It also requires the most change to the assumptions of the typical D&D-style fantasy RPG.  If there are no gods, for instance, then what of clerics?  Is there no divine power, or is belief in a philosophy sufficient to power clerical spells?  If the former, how does that affect the game’s assumptions about healing and other cleric class functions?  If the latter, why is a belief in a (nonexistent) god not sufficient to power spells — or is it?  (And if it is, then why has that power not been taken as proof of that god’s existence?)

The second case involves gods that are distant.  They do not interfere with the day-to-day workings of the world.  Perhaps they are concerned with greater matters; perhaps they have abandoned the world; perhaps the world has abandoned them.  There are still likely to be believers, particularly if the gods at one time in the world’s history were more involved than they are in the world’s present.

It might be that there are still clerics.  Through ancient ritual, they can still tap into divine power, but as the gods by and large stopped answering prayers, the influence of the clergy waned.  This loss of prestige might be accompanied by the rise of arcane magic, a force guided by supernatural laws rather than by impersonal gods.  Those who possess both the talent and the faith to wield clerical magic are rare, and becoming rarer with each generation.

Another option is that the gods have never shown much involvement with the world.  This is substantially identical to the “no gods” case in most particulars.

In either case, you might consider what would happen if the gods’ attention were drawn (or drawn back?) to the world, and what sort of event might be of sufficient magnitude to do so.  The return of the ancient gods could be a truly epic moment for the campaign.

Finally, there’s the third and strangest case.  In this scenario, the gods exist — sort of.  The thing is, they’re not really gods.  Perhaps they’re technologically advanced beings from another culture — a continent unknown to the people of the player characters’ part of the world, outer space, an alternate dimension, the far future.  Perhaps they’re powerful magical creatures masquerading as gods for their own purposes.  Either way, they possess a source of “divine” energy, and they can empower clerics.

Among the questions this leads to:  Who are these people, exactly?  Why are they pretending to be gods — or are they actively claiming not to be?  How were they proven not to be truly divine, and was it a recent development, or was the discovery further in the past?  Do people tend to resent them, live with them, still follow them?  What is the nature of the “divine” power source?

There’s nothing stopping you from combining the second and third cases, either:  there really are gods, but they’re removed from the world for whatever reason.  A group of people/creatures, though, has been impersonating gods.  Why?  Did they steal real divine power to do so, or are they providing some sort of alternative?  Are they a nefarious force that’s locked the real gods away and drained their power?  What gave away the deception?  What are the likely ramifications if the existence of true gods is uncovered?

Of course, it would also be possible to design a completely atheistic world — one where no gods exist and there’s no mention of anything of the sort.  This could be a very alien world for the players, though; in the real world, a great deal of literature, art, and architecture is bound to religion and its concepts.  There are idioms and words that would simply not have developed were it not for the influence of religion.  And a question should be borne in mind:  Given the human tendency to create myth to explain events, why did religion fail to develop in this world?

This is barely scratching the surface.  The idea of an atheistic world appeals to me, though — the design considerations would be different from my usual game world.  I’m sure the play experience would be, too; even if there are still clerics around, religion would be a far less ubiquitous force.

Related posts:

1. What Religion Means
2. Myth Direction: the Faerie Courts
3. Hanging in the Balance
4. Renaissance Mandate
5. Hunter of the Dead