More Necromantic Nonsense: The Profane Dead, the Bacterial Ghost, and the Dinobomb

Last time: New Necromantic Monsters and Factions for Weirder Worldbuilding 

Milieu: The Profanity of the Undead

Inherent to the idea of undeath as traditionally understood in most folklore and derived fiction is a wrongness and a fundamental reversal of what that person (or their society) viewed as natural and holy in life. Undead should not be kinda vaguely, ambiently unholy – they should specifically reject, pollute, or invert the values of their pre-undeath society.

Random table: In what way are these undead profaning what was most holy to them in life?

1. Ghoul-minotaurs, mouths dripping with beef tallow, worship at a profane altar to Our Lady of the Abattoir. 
2. Deadwood-dryads and treant snags knock down healthy trees and suck the life out of green shoots.
3. Revived rust monsters galvanize metals instead of rusting them. Highly prized by dwarven metalworkers who are heretical enough to deal with necromancers. 
4. Skeleton-fish, repelled by bodies of water, hurl themselves against the doors and windows of the fishermen who caught them, silently begging for their killers to consume flesh they no longer possess.  
5. Shadow-beholders emit blinding shafts of darkness, haunting living eye tyrants and threatening to deprive them of their most precious sense.
6. Poltergeist-gargoyles enraged by the physicality the spirit can no longer embody, possess statues across the city, toppling them onto unsuspecting passerby.

Monster: Bacterial Ghosts 

Non-sapient animals generally do not project sufficient soul-stuff to create ghosts. But there are exceptions. For example, when particularly large numbers of microscopic organisms die suddenly, their collective extermination can produce a ghost large enough for people to perceive.

This ghost is amoeba-like, with its “mouth” forming on any of its appendages. It is sometimes mistaken for an ooze. It cannot communicate or even really think in a way that people understand, but can be frighteningly motivated, as undeath seems to give it a collective direction that its constituent organisms lacked in their single-celled lives.

Random table: What is the bacterial ghost doing right now?

1. Lurking in a pond, consuming algae until they can build a Swamp Thing-like body.
2. Plotting revenge, hoping to destroy the bleach factory responsible for their innumerable deaths.
3. Unliving symbiotically on a ghost sloth.
4. Possessing the micromancer who foolishly bestowed awareness on their colony.
5. Researching spells with names like “pierce membrane” and “corrupt mitochondria.”
6. Haunting the innards of the cow where they once dwelt while still alive.

Treasure: Necromantic Clothing and Equipment

Much of the ordinary clothing and gear that people use in their daily lives is obviously derived from living things. Usually such items are too far removed from life to be affected by necromancy. Usually.

A particularly diligent necromancer, taking the time to study the processes behind the creation of clothing, tools, and armor, can add a spark of unlife to such items.

Random table: What necromantic equipment is available for those with the stomach to use it?

1. Compass armor. Leather armor that retains the ability of the cattle to sense the planet’s magnetic field. The wearer instinctively aligns north-south when standing around idly for a turn or longer.
2. Silk-shroud robes. Fine silk robes with hidden pockets containing zombie silkworms. The silkworms will spin silk to repair any damage to the robes. With patience, the silkworms can be goaded to reshape the garment; for example, refashioning the robe into strong silk-rope to escape a tower.
3. Snakeskin belt. When unbuckled, the "clasp" is capable of biting to deliver deadly poison once per day. Wearing tough gloves or carrying antivenom is strongly recommended as it is easy to forget and receive a nasty bite while undressing at the end of a long adventuring day. Stylish.
4. Naptha bomb. Rock-oil from a natural seep. Looks a lot like alchemists' fire. When thrown like a grenade, the necromantic reagent reanimates whatever ancient animals decomposed into the oil. Unpredictable due to the unknown (and probably cross-contaminated) mix of biological matter that made up the oil, but the best-case scenario can produce a terrifying amalgamation of undead dinosaurs.

Next time: Yet More Necromantic Novelties: Necropolis, Shark, Severance

New Necromantic Monsters and Factions for Weirder Worldbuilding (Part 1 in an Undying Series)

Necromancy is part of the vanilla fantasy vernacular that informs many RPGs. You can't have your skeleton warriors and life-draining ghosts without some fiction explaining how these spirits are spooking the PCs. Some fiction really digs deep into what a setting defined by necromancy would look like. But many fantasy RPGs only scratch the surface. Let's grab our corpse-exhumation shovels and dig a little deeper.

Monster: The Griefer

Adventurers call it the griefer. It’s a dungeon ghost that can only possess a freshly-killed body. Immaterial and barely visible, the griefer will follow adventurers or dungeon factions around the dungeon, waiting for conflict to produce a suitable corpse to possess.

The longer the griefer lingers without finding a body, the more disruptive it becomes, leveraging what weak spiritual id it possess to generate alarming noises or frightening images, hoping to startle dungeon dwellers into deadly conflict.

Adventure hook: A griefer is piloting the body of an heir to a minor noble family. The sibling who is second in the line of succession badly wants the body returned, so they can prove that the heir is dead. The reward depends on retrieving the body in reasonably good condition. The griefer is very motivated to avoid capture... but its possession of the body is also staving off decomposition.

Milieu: Necroarchy

With age comes wisdom, and mere death does not change that equation. Indeed, serving as a living member of the city council is almost like an audition for service after death in a city where broad acceptance of necromancy makes this possible. The enormous round council table features seats for the living members, while the undead members’ skulls sit on ornate stands at their stations. 

Adventure hook: The council requires a quorum to make important decisions, but several of the council skulls have been stolen. The government is paralyzed by this bizarre and unprecedented theft. The living council members suspect each other of the crime. Or perhaps it is a rival city-state, seeking to undermine the dead city's power. What no one yet knows is that the thief is actually the former lover of one of the deceased members, who they seek to resurrect. They stole the other skulls only to draw suspicion away from them.

Faction: The Great Skeleton Army

Animated skeletons persist. Bleached and fleshless, they do not rot like zombies. Indifferent to the sun, they do not need to flee the light, as vampires and shadows do. Easy to create en masse, they can be raised even by a necromancer of relatively modest power. And they often persist long after their creator has died (and likely joined their ranks). The great skeleton army is one such example, inspired by great examples like this one.

No one remembers why the great skeleton army was created, or who they were originally intended to fight. It obeys no clear leader, although some skeletons mimic the roles of officers. 

Random table: Encounters amidst and near the Great Skeleton Army

1. Skull-scout. Catapulted ahead or dropped from the sky by skeletal birds, these disembodied skulls scout for activity and then report their findings after the army recovers them. Endowed with more intelligence than a typical skeleton, they are usually bored, and eager to chat with passersby.
2. Grave sapper. Skeletons that spent ages buried underneath the earth are particularly adept at digging. Travelers are in for a harrowing experience if they meet the sappers by stepping on a weak patch of ground falling into an active tomb-tunnel.  
3. Parallel travelers. Like small fish swimming alongside a shark because the big predator scares off smaller predators, some living people will travel in the wake of the skeleton army to protect themselves from living threats they feel are more dangerous.
4. Impressment gangboss. Gathering skeletons to swell the skelly ranks. They are supposed to find “naturally occurring” skeletons, but are not above sourcing them from the living when needed. "I swear these skeletons just fell off the back of a wagon, boss."
5. Skelevangalist. Seeks to free bony brethren from their meat-prisons. Will shush living creatures who attempt to speak to it, claiming it is listening to their “bones' voices.”
6. Camp followers. Not that kind! No boner jokes, please. Opportunistic humans will trade goods and services that skeleton soldiers can't manage themselves. 
7. Bone collector. Skeletal ragman who collects stray bones from the battlefields, offering its wares to skeletons that have lost pieces to time or turmoil. Humble and easy to miss, but secretly essential to the army’s (literal) cohesion.
8. Desiccated deserter. Fleeing the military life and eager to find a place among the fleshy world.

Next time: More Necromantic Nonsense: The Profane Dead, the Bacterial Ghost, and the Dinobomb

Class, Ancestry, Background — Choose Two, Drop the Other

Old-school games sometimes leverage the concept of race-as-class (also known as ancestry-as-class). An elf or a dwarf could be a character choice functionally equivalent to (and exclusive of) a class like cleric or magic-user.

Later editions of the game separate ancestry and class as distinct categories on separate axes; classes are defined by advancement, while ancestry is (usually) inherent and unchanging. But ancestry-as-class maintains its appeal in some OSR systems, as it simplifies character creation and makes it easier to “play up” what is distinctive about a non-human character. And other games have tried to find a happy medium between these approaches.

In that spirit, here’s an alternative way to split the difference between modern and old-school; pick two out of three among ancestry, class, and background, and just drop the third.

Ancestry and class, but no background. This is already implicitly pretty common in D&D. D&D 5E’s backgrounds are one of its better game design structures, but many players pay them little heed. They choose a background at character creation in order to pick up an extra proficiency or two, then forget about them soon after. Ancestry plus class, with no background, just formalizes this implicit choice. Whatever this PC did before the dungeon, it isn’t relevant to their new life of adventure.   

Both are dwarves, but their backgrounds are very different.

Ancestry and background, but no class. This is something like ancestry-as-class in old-school play, but with a background to give the character some more texture. Part of the appeal of ancestry-as-class is that it can take powerful abilities like darkvision, underwater breathing, or even flight and cordon them off from complementary class choices. Adding a background helps distinguish one dwarf from another, and give them a bit more personality. It’s easier to put some more mechanical weight on backgrounds too; one can extrapolate from the flavor text and ribbon abilities of the 5E backgrounds and imagine ways they would be more prominent in play without classes sucking up all their oxygen.

Class and background, but no ancestry. Obviously a character still has an ancestry. This choice simply means it isn’t mechanically relevant. In old-school D&D, this is something like what a human fighter or human wizard was; it was just taken for granted that humans were a “blank” in terms of ancestry, and possessed no special powers. But in modern play (or in games that mix play styles), that is worth reconsidering, because those games have tended to give humanity some mechanical heft (for example, a bonus feat in 5E). It takes a little extra work to reason out what an elf with no elf powers or a dwarf with no dwarf powers looks like, but I think it is possible. For example, a class-plus-background character may nominally be a dwarf, yet does not possess signature abilities like darkvision because they grew up on the surface, or in a subgroup of dwarves who otherwise just don’t naturally have darkvision.

Stolen Board Game Mechanic: Add Value to the Unpicked Choice

Spots is a push-your-luck dice game. Players take turns choosing action cards, which dictate how they roll dice that turn. After they take their turn, the action card they chose is exhausted for the round. When all but one action card has been chosen, all actions are refreshed and the process begins again. This is arguably a form of Dutch auction, although with accruing value instead of decreasing price.

Pretty straightforward, right? But there’s a small rule that is secretly important to the game. The final action card that was left unselected gains a token that allows for a one-time reroll of the dice. Whoever picks that action card next will get to keep any tokens that have accumulated on the card, and can spend those tokens later. So if the players favor certain cards over others (and most players will), the unpopular card(s) will gradually accrue additional value as more tokens accumulate.

This mechanic is great because it automatically "balances" the perceived power level of the options available to the players. It doesn't matter if that’s an actual play design imbalance, where some choices are better than others, or simply a preference among the players for a certain style of play. The imbalances between the choices are self-correcting over time, as some quantity of tokens will eventually bring a less-popular choice into competition with the more popular ones.

Consider applying this mechanic to discrete, mutually exclusive choices in an RPG. For example, consider downtime for a party of three PCs in a fantasy adventure game like D&D. Each time they return to town, each PC can choose one of the following (in addition to resting): level up, gather information, carouse, research, or shop. Only one player may choose each action, and each player only gets one choice.

Player A chooses leveling, player B chooses research, and player C chooses shopping. Gather information and carouse go unchosen, so they each get a token that allows for one in-session reroll of the dice. Whoever chooses these options in the future gets to keep any tokens associated with that choice. Even if carousing or gathering information goes several downtimes without being chosen, the accumulation of tokens will eventually compel someone to take them.

The 5E Megadungeon: Death, Magic, and Cats

Last week: Running a Megadungeon Campaign in D&D 5E

Last week we covered darkvision and laid out the factors that make 5E insufficiently lethal for typical megadungeon play. Now lets discuss some solutions.

Tailor monsters to make them punch harder, but also die faster. Tweaking monster stats is categorically easier than getting PCs to buy into house rules that lower their own character’s powers. In addressing a common complaint with 5E that combat tends to drag on, I’ve found it helps a lot to make monsters hit harder, but be less tough. With some relatively modest adjustments, it is easy to cut an eight-round slogfest down to a tight three-round nailbiter. Monsters leave a bigger dent in PC HP totals, but PCs also have the satisfaction of taking them down before the battle gets boring. 

Cap leveling up somewhere between levels 8 and 12. D&D 5E is tuned around the first two to three tiers of play. The second tier ends at level 8 and the third ends at level 12. The game is fun in the fourth and fifth tiers, but parts of it break down, and it is certainly not suited to megadungeon play. I ran several hundred sessions of 5E in a game that went from level 1 to beyond level 20, and while that campaign worked for location-based play at low levels (including quite a bit of time in the Caverns of Thracia), it was essentially obligated to transition to scene-based play at high levels.

A megadungeon campaign really needs to stay location-focused for its duration, and the easiest way to make that happen is to agree at the outset to cap the PCs’ level. You can choose where you want to cap the level based on which dungeon-bypassing powers you really want to limit. A series of posts from the early days of my blog attempts to catalog which 5E powers bypass dungeon obstacles at various tiers.

This will take some buy-in from the PCs, but make the case that it is required to run a cool megadungeon in 5E. Capping progress doesn’t even require an explicitly old-school perspective. The idea of “E6” D&D (which caps progression at level 6) came out of the crunchy 3.5 D&D world all on its own. And maxed out PCs can become powerful figures in the local area, engaging in domain-level play. If the players still aren’t convinced, a megadungeon campaign isn’t right for them anyway.

Limit where the PCs can rest. The average modern-style party will gravitate toward a simple gameplan: Fully unload on any antagonists they encounter, then pass out on the spot for eight hours. There's some variance based on group composition – a minority of classes in 2014 5E are optimized around short rests – but most 5E groups will have a majority of long-rest-oriented PCs like wizards and paladins who want a solid eight hours of sleep so they can once again go supernova on the next monster that looks at them funny.

You are going to have to disabuse them of the idea that it is OK to rest in the dungeon. For a lot of players, it’s going to take some convincing.

Out of character, tell the players that resting in the dungeon or the surrounding wilderness is highly dangerous. Have NPCs reiterate this in-character. Ultimately, the PCs will attempt it anyway, and you should adjudicate consequences firmly, demonstrating how hard it is to get a good long rest in the dungeon. Of course, if the players take clever precautions to secure a long rest in the dungeon, reward them.

Finally, if you don’t think this will be enough to motivate your players, discuss a house rule at session zero that long rests are simply impossible inside the dungeon. I’m trying to be conservative with the house rules here, but this one may be worth it. 

Leverage time and antagonists against long rests. If resting in the dungeon isn’t practical, most PCs versed in modern-style play will pragmatically come up with an obvious fallback solution; retreat quickly to safety after every combat encounter. This is not really a bad thing; smart OSR PCs will keep avenues of retreat open as well. 

But retreating after every fight will slow the game to a crawl. Fortunately, both old school games (strict time records and faction play) and story games (clocks and fronts) offer some tools to incentivize modern and trad players to play differently. 

Establish antagonist NPCs and factions early, and then telegraph to the players how they are advancing their agendas every time the PCs take a long rest. It may help to present the PCs with antagonists right from session zero. A good example is the conceit used in Electric Bastionland and other games; have the party start with a shared debt they have to pay off. It could be one of the powerful factions in the town, or in the dungeon itself. The important thing is that the debt-holding faction both has a reason to be  antagonistic toward the PCs and methods for creating time pressure. 

Magic is ridiculously abundant to the point where you solve most of the normal OSR challenges with cantrips that half the party have.

I agree with this in a general sense. Cantrips are one of my least favorite parts of 5E, and they trivialize many parts of the game that old-school play emphasizes. 

But the problem is really limited to a small subset of cantrips. The biggest use-case of cantrips is essentially providing a DPS floor for full spellcasters in combat. I don’t enjoy this design decision, but it fits with how modern play handles combat, and we don’t need to change combat much to empower the megadungeon experience.

The genuinely concerning cantrips are the ones that trivialize challenges outside of combat. If I was running a megadungeon in 5E, I would modify or rule out a few cantrips:

• Light and Dancing Lights would be the obvious ones to ban or nerf by “promoting” them to first level, per the discussion of visibility and darkvision in the previous post.
• Mage Hand should probably receive the same treatment, given how useful it is for manipulating traps and doors without risking oneself. It may still be worth the spell slot even if “nerfed” to first level. If a player is interested in the Arcane Trickster archtype (a rogue subclass), you may need to negotiate with them how to interpret this adjustment, as Mage Hand is baked into that archetype’s core powers.
• Guidance is not causing a problem for a megadungeon specifically, but it is bad game design, so I would probably ban it if I was cutting other spells anyway. 
• Minor Illusion is a consideration, although strictly adjudicating it can denude it of its worst applications. 

The rest of the cantrips in the 5E.2014 PHB are not really disruptive to megadungeon play. Non-cantrip spells are a resource expenditure question, and are essentially covered by the time pressure tools discussed above. Sure, having access to Fly or Dimension Door can subvert some dungeon challenges; but these are precious spell slots if we cap the PC's level somewhere between 8 and 12. 

So yeah, a 5E group is going to move through the megadungeon more quickly and suffer fewer casualties than an equivalent old-school group. But they're not going to trivialize a well-run megadungeon. 

Cat People???

Running a Megadungeon Campaign in D&D 5E

A post on the 3d6 Down the Line Discord expressed skepticism that the Arden Vul megadungeon could be run in D&D 5E. 

And I get it. D&D 5E would not be my first choice for a megadungeon either. 

But I have run a lot of 5E with an OSR mindset, and I believe I could run a megadungeon in 5E with (relatively) modest house rules and campaign assumptions, if for some reason I decided to do so.

All points below are in the context of the 2014 5E rules. I do not own the new 5E books, but understand they do not deviate far from the 2014 rules, so I expect this approach would broadly work there as well. I also anticipate that most of the same ideas would apply to the 5E-compatible systems that have come out since 5E was released into the Creative Commons.

Below are the four issues that the post identified, addressed in turn.

Everybody Has Darkvision

I agree that darkvision is over-prescribed in 5E, and that darkvision can undermine old-school exploration by removing the question of visibility. But a serious part of the problem is that a lot of players and DMs don’t even follow 5E’s rules as written, and assume that darkvision is a more potent ability than it actually is.

D&D 5E’s rules allow creatures with darkvision to see in darkness as if it were dim light. That means disadvantage on Wisdom (perception) checks and an inability to see colors. Darkvision is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for a proper light source, particularly when checking for traps or keeping an eye out for secrets and treasure. I also remind players that whenever they are within the area of a source of light – whether from an ally, the environment, or an NPC or monster – that light prevents the use of their darkvision until they move out of the light. When I explain all of this to 5E players, they often choose to use light, even if they don’t “need” to, treating darkvision as more of a plan B, or an option for stealthing apart from the group.

Monsters face the same limitation. Whether an intelligent monster decides to rely on darkvision or use light typically reflects its level of confidence in its place in the dungeon hierarchy. Those confident in their control of the space use light. Those fearful of discovery favor the darkness.

Of course, an intelligent monster with 120’ darkvision will rely on the darkness more often than a creature possessing typical 60' darkvision, because it expects that it will have an edge. Creatures with tremorsense, blindsight, and similar abilities actually can functionally “see” in darkness as well as they can in light, so they do work in the way that many players think darkvision works. Creatures with those senses actually will completely skip light, for the most part. This makes them significantly scarier opponents in their native environment than creatures with mere darkvision.

If I was going to go further in houseruling this issue, I would take darkvision away from elves, and leave it to just the gnomes, dwarves, and tieflings. But even without altering the ancestry rules, darkvision can be brought into check simply by following the rules as written strictly.

It’s Impossible to Die in 5E

Let’s start with two easy caveats. First, simply removing 5E’s playculture presumption of level-appropriate encounters solves part of this problem. Even the most optimally constructed low-level 5E characters are not going to last long if they arrive at Arden Vul and beeline for the lair of Craastonistorex, the old and powerful green dragon. Once the players realize that difficulty is dictated by where they go and what they do – not what is appropriate for their current level – they will act more prudently.

Second, at very low levels, the problem isn’t really that pronounced anyway. Low-level PCs in 5E are much tougher than B/X or OSE characters, but they can still go down after just a few hits. The death saves system usually gives them a few chances to survive, but a deadly dungeon can kill many PCs outright through massive damage from falls and traps. In combat, monsters can also opportunistically focus on downed characters and quickly finish them off. Remember that any source of damage to a character on death's door equals a failed death save. Lowly goblins or kobolds become much scarier when they drag a downed PC away into the darkness, rather than “fighting fair” and engaging the PCs who are still standing.

But beyond those two caveats, I acknowledge the issue OP raises. At about level 5, 5E PCs get a lot stronger, and they don’t slow down from there. PCs in 5E at middle to high levels create a series of interrelated issues for DMs who want to run a megadungeon game that cares about exploration, time, and resources. I believe there are at least four interrelated issues that cause problems here:

• 5E PCs have massive amounts of HP
• 5E PCs have a lot of resources to replenish HP
• Both play culture and player powers make it unlikely that PCs will get lost, captured, or otherwise separated from safe locations where they can rest and recover 
• Modern play culture presumes little or no time pressure, so choosing to rest does not come with an inherent cost

A few different adjudication techniques and house rules can solve a lot of these problems. We'll cover those next week.

Next week: Death, Magic, and Cats

Pantheon Prompts: Questions for Fantasy Deities

Deities are too dull in too many RPGs. We can do better by randomizing inputs, but sometimes we need to study use other solutions. 

Browse these two Wikipedia entries: Janus, the ancient Roman god and a typical RPG fantasy god, like Azuth from the Forgotten Realms. They are radically different. And I mean beyond the obvious difference, in the sense that one article is summarizing mythology while the other was created as gameable content. The differences prompt a number of questions that can make fantasy deities more interesting.

What are the deity’s spheres of influence, and which of those have nothing to do with dungeons? At least half of a deity’s spheres of influence or domains should have no direct connection to adventuring. A good worldbuilding tool is to consider how much the supernatural and divine is applied to mundane, real-world problems, as I discussed when writing about trade magic.

What is named in this deity’s honor? The real world is flush with honorary words. Months, days of the week, cities, and people are easy ones, but the influence can be less direct. Think about how morphine comes from Morpheus, or how the atlas is literally named after Atlas.

What rituals do their followers observe? This is a big one that TTRPGs tend to ignore. But rituals are central to religions both historical and contemporary, and it is a missed opportunity to leave them out of worldbuilding.

What are the aesthetics and purposes of their temples? Places of worship should not be abstracted or generic. Structures and civilizations are integral to the worship of the gods. The god of lightning’s shrine is atop the tallest tower in the city, covered in a tangle of conductive copper aerials. The god of disease’s temple is within a decommissioned sewage treatment plant. You get the idea.

In what secret places are they worshipped? Public worship and cult worship should tell us something about both the religion in question and the society surrounding it. Remember that cults are a function of how society understands that religion, not just an internal moral quality associated with the deity itself.

What are their relationships with other gods? I don’t mean the usual “the life god and the death god hate each other” RPG stuff. That’s fine, for what it is, but it is not going to make these deities seem alive. Classical pantheons often featured siblings, spouses, and children among the gods. The Greek and Norse pantheons keep reappearing in new fiction because those remain compelling relationships, even as more complex (but also abstracted) fantasy pantheons blur into the background. 

What is their priesthood like? Do they even have one? If yes, are the practitioners locals? Do they choose to become priests when they reach adulthood, or were they raised expecting this to be their purpose? Are they assigned by some distant authority, or elevated by the local community? You don’t have to answer every question, but answering at least a few will make them much more real.

Where does the deity reside? Again, think through this. “The fire god lives on the fire plane” is intuitive, and we don’t want to subvert expectations just for the sake of doing it. But “the fire god lives in the Slagmouth, the fourth incarnation in this world of the ever-erupting world-heart, born astride the corpse of the titan Jokulos, who legends say claimed the first burning fire from deep within the earth…” OK, that’s a little purple, but the players are probably awake and looking at you with curious/worried expressions, right?

What beliefs about this deity are contested? This is a big one. TTRPG rulebooks give players the impression that every god is a known quantity to everyone in that world, with their purpose and ethos conveniently compressed in table format. Even in a world where gods are demonstrably real, there would still be a great deal of ambiguity and disagreement about a particular god’s priorities, desires, and goals. Most fantasy worlds presume that deities still must communicate their liturgy through priests, and even spellcasting clerics only have the broadest and loosest ways to divine the divine’s will, at least at low levels. As I’ve said before, D&D’s cleric spell list actually does a great job of illustrating how cleric’s very gradually get more and more insight into their deity as they level up, from a crude thumbs up / thumbs down for Augury, all the way up through the ability to Gate to the deity’s plane of existence and ask them questions directly. This ambiguity about divine intent should be expressed in the books and come through in-session more often. 

What is the etymology of their name? Not every game needs this, but it can be fun. Consistent use of language is going to show that a lot of thought went into the worldbuilding. You don’t need to create an entire constructed language or etymological tree. Use shortcuts, like using Latin-derived words for all the lawful religions, and German-derived words for all the chaotic religions.