“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”
-The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
I had read Ursula Le Guin before (The Left Hand of Darkness and Lathe of Heaven), but not the Earthsea books. I recently began to rectify that, and some elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, made it in to several blog posts. Tombs of Atuan is the second book in the series.
Belief Is Not Either/Or
In the background of the first third or so of Tombs of Atuan is a society where a (relatively) young theocracy built around a putative godking is co-opting and gradually replacing the old religion. But this is all understood and filtered through the perspective of a child who has basically never left the ritual shrine. The story does an excellent job of establishing this information organically; there are no lore dumps. Tenar, the protagonist, is instructed in part by servants of the godking who have their own motives. The godking doesn’t take an active role in the plot and isn’t an antagonist per se, but the worldbuilding really makes Tenar’s precarious position much more compelling.
RPG settings sometimes explore this space, but usually with a more direct, head-on confrontation, like organized Christianity-style religion versus folkloric paganism. Or a pantheon of clear and unambiguous domains, where the life god is opposed to the death god, and it has always been thus. Tombs of Atuan is a reminder that it can be useful to focus more on the role of religion in people’s lives, how they navigate change, and what rituals are important to them.
Belief Is Ritual
The wizard Ged, the protagonist of the first Earthsea book, appears in Tombs of Atuan as well. Ged’s magic (producing light, changing form, altering the weather) is recognizable as D&D magic, but Tenar doesn’t cast any spells. Her entire power is the ability to enact rituals, to interpret the will of suprahuman entities, to be protected from them, and to petition them.
This makes them "feel" a lot different than wizards and clerics in modern-style RPGs, who have different spell lists but otherwise "work" largely the same. Whereas Ged's magic is proactive and transformative, Tenar's magic is reactive and divinatory.
Belief Is the Attention of Ancient Things
For good or for ill, Tenar has the ear of… something that lives in the titular tombs. Whether these are gods or ghosts or genius loci or something else is not conclusively stated, and doesn’t need to be. Modern D&D draws a hard line between clerics and warlocks, but its easy to imagine that as a matter of public image. Ultimately, everyone who entreats the aid of the supernatural and the supernormal is taking chances with beings who are not and cannot be understood, and that should suggest a gravity and seriousness to the relationship that RPGs don't always deliver on. Belief is less about faith versus atheism, as in the modern world. Belief is more a matter of being willing to expose oneself to the dangerous and largely unknowable attentions of entities beyond mortal ken.
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