Consider the following scenario in a fantasy RPG. While traveling, the PCs arrive at a small village. The villagers tell them that for many generations, the people in the village have left offerings for local spirits. The spirits in turn protect the village. If the village ever fails to make the annual sacrifice, the spirits will be angry. Oral histories attest to this, but there's no other evidence. The offerings make up a significant chunk of the small village’s agricultural output and could otherwise be used to improve their practical welfare.
What will the PCs make of this? If your players are like most players I have met while gaming – basically modern material realists whose spiritual beliefs are centered on personal morality rather than community ritual – they will probably be skeptical of the villagers’ choices. Their first thought will be that this is a waste, or at best, something that preserves community cohesion at significant expense. Because players subconsciously have their ear out for an adventure hook, they may also suspect that some malevolent local creature is manipulating the villagers.
So that’s what the players probably think. But what do their characters think, in a purely in-world sense? They would have to take this situation pretty seriously! There would be room for doubt, but they couldn’t scoff at it out of hand.
Why? When thinking about fantasy worldbuilding, it is helpful to remember how ancient people interpreted gods, spirits, magic, and the unknown. They were not ignorant or backward or “superstitious” in an abstract sense. They were making sense of the world in a way that was pragmatic and sensible within the context of what they knew.
I was thinking about this question in part because of a series of posts on the excellent A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog on how ritual works in a polytheistic world. The author, Bret Devereaux, makes an important point that more games should factor into their worldbuilding:
"The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge."
Why does this matter for RPGs? Well, he begins the first post on ancient polytheistic beliefs with a few screenshots from the Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder video games. He points out how the fantasy RPG adoption of religion – for ethical or philosophical reasons – differs greatly from the real-world adoption of religion.
Clerics, paladins, and other believers in modern D&D basically act like monotheistic thinkers in a polytheistic world. They choose one system, and the stronger their belief, the greater the power granted by that god.
"Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods."
A cleric or paladin in a polytheistic world shouldn’t be a one-true-god diehard. Instead, they should have multiple, flexible arrangements with various gods, balancing the power they offer with their contrasting goals and powers. The fact that fantasy gods are proven to exist and not an article of faith actually makes this more true in a fantasy world than it already is in the real world. A cleric’s advancement should be a careful accumulation of bonds and credits with various relevant gods, uncovering the mysteries of their desires and actions, rather than a linear escalation in the ranks of a single institution of the true faithful.
It is interesting that the original cleric of D&D in 1974 was closer to this ideal than later iterations. They were defined more by their alignment than commitments to particular gods. In contrast, modern D&D presupposes that a single god grants all of a cleric’s spells. Some editions played around with spheres, allowing clerics to tailor their focus, but modern D&D mostly gives some bonuses for the spells closest to the deity’s heart, and then calls it a day.
In the second post in the series, Devereaux notes that the “core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.”
Imagine being a cleric in a world that works like this. What if you want to cast Spiritual Weapon? If you are lucky, perhaps you have a choice to pray to Athena or Ares. Perhaps praying to one will make it harder to seek the aid of the other in the future. Perhaps only Hades can grant the spell Raise Dead, and that’s a big commitment. In such a system, the variety of spells available is constrained not so much by spheres and lists as it is constrained by how many deals the cleric can balance without fatally angering any particular god.
In this way I am a fan of how relics in Knave 2 are so clearly framed as exchanges with particular gods. Compared to modern D&D, this magic is very distinct from arcane spells. It's a form of extrinsic advancement. And it really delivers on the idea of a world with living, active gods, rather than remote, abstract philosophical concepts.
