Lets talk about God. I am actually growing more in favor of allowing Christians into the setting. I think that a sidebar explanation that for game mechanic purposes only Christianity is treated the same as other religions, many of them historical or mythological and no comparisons or allusions are implied. Then if people still get uptight fuck them plus - free publicity!
From a game standpoint Christianity would be the same as any other religion and/or divine power that provides the source of priest magic of whatever pantheon. Given the different Christians we can bring it even adds more to the political intrigue. I don't think we need 100 million Christians running around, but some couldn't hurt I don't think, and, as you point out, it makes adding certain other cultures to the party easier.
I see it's going to take me some getting used to having to actually check for new posts on this blog rather than just new comments- you posted this over 15 hours before I noticed it. I haven't got a problem with Christianity, I actually rather like some sects of it. The Byzantine will give us Greek Orthodox Christianity. The Turko-Mongolian horde is kind of a religious mess that could give us everything from their native Shamanist Animism to Lamaist Buddhism to Nestorian Chritianity and Sunni or Shia Islam, maybe even Taoism. The Norsemen could be Heathen or Christian, given the time and place I was pulling them from, Christianity was actually more likely, but I liked Heathenry better for them, so I had them relapse. If we have continuing Celtic migrations they will certainly bring Christianity with them, although it'll be the Celtic variety at least until after the Celtic church is suppressed. The Romans are interesting because they are going to be bringing a number of religions with them, including a nascent Christianity that hasn't broken into sectarianism yet. The Chinese are definitely going to be bringing Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism with them. The Japanese will bring Shinto at a minimum, and probably their own versions of Buddhism. The Hindus are bringing Hinduism, obviously. The Arabs I actually envisioned as pre-Islamic Arabs, so Arabic Pagans, Jews, Zoroastrians or Christians; as I understand they were the popular religions among the Arabs before Muhammad's revelation. Non-Human religions we can make up as needed, but I think we need to work long and hard to not copy the old TSR non-human deities, they need to be original to us and alien enough to be really non-human.
ReplyDeleteWhen I click on my link to this blog, I get a page that shows the last few posts, but nothing about comments, so I usually go hours without seeing new comments, hence the new post...lol
ReplyDeleteSo the fact that all these foreign deities have enough power on GW to grant spells must mean that either the Darkness and Light can't interfere with them (at least completely) or they allow the influence for some reason.
I actually have an alternate idea, and it kinda messes with clerics (but only esoterically, mechanically things would stay however we decided (or will decide)) - to cast divine (cleric) spells the caster must be devout. What if it is this devotion (an internal mechanism) that allows clerics the ability to shape the mana and cast spells (the same way it is study and or natural aptitude for mages). Presumably spell casting is a skill clerics learn from other clerics - the act of the casting would really be largely indistinguishable from MU magic...its not like clerics get a voice from their god after prayer prepping that says, ok, here's your spells for today...
Or the foreign Gods are powers in their own right, aligned with the Light or the Darkness. I never gave it a whole lot of thought before, but I guess it gives us a kind of dualistic cosmology ultimately and makes all of the religions Gods, however they are expressed pretty much avatars or servants of the side that they work for. Or not. That really doesn't work as a model for some religions. It works pretty well for the Abrahamic ones, but all of the various Pagan religions have too many different Gods with too many different motives and motivations, Thor and Loki travel together all the time in the Norse religion's tales for instance, but if we made it clearly dualistic they would have to always be at each other's throats. Scholars today debate whether or not Loki's role in the death of Baldur, his binding and release and the whole of Ragnarok was just a late addition to the corpus of Norse myth owing to Christian influence, particularly the Book of Revelation and Armageddon; only Snorri Sturluson mentions it and despite his contemporary's accusations that he was a closet Heathen, he was a Christian.
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