Felltower, Religion, and Intolerance

I probably blogged about this a while back, but ever since Google switched to the "improved" blogger interface my in-blog search results have been total garbage. So, now Google does search poorly? I may have to DuckDuckGo a solution to my problem.

Religion in Felltower

In my DF Felltower game, religion is basically a monotheistic pseudo-Christian religion centered around the "Good God" and his many saints.

A good part of why I chose a monotheistic religion is because a lot of Western history is centered around monotheistic religions. You can have fights between believers, too, because worshipping the same god doesn't mean you all agree on how to do it.

I also chose it because the lack of experience with polytheistic religions means players don't quite know how it works. This is why you end up with a guy whose PC worships Ares going around attacking NPCs who worship Athena or Poseidon, or the priest of Tyr trying to convert heathens who worship Thor or Hel. I don't know a whole lot about polytheistic religions myself, but it doesn't seem like you generally chose a specific, single god and then treated that god as if it was the only one. It's not a collection of mutually-exclusive monotheistic religions all with the credo of "accept no other god as a god."

Plus, people have a very, very mixed bag of knowledge about non-Christian gods. I didn't want to make up a bunch of my own gods, and I didn't want to deal with the usual D&D party of one worshipper of Thor, one of Nuada, one cleric of Athena who otherwise acts like a Christian priest, a Dwarf who worshipps Clandeggin, and an atheist (we always have at least one.)

To avoid that kind of issue, I went with a simple, vaguely defined, humorously named "Good God" and moved on. Clerics are clerics of that religion. Undead fear its power. Demons hate it. And done!

Other Religions in Felltower

That said, though, I never said that the Good God was the only God. Or that worshippers automatically reject the existence of other gods. Just that PCs didn't have the option of worshipping other guys and most "pagan" religions were old belief systems largely fading away.

What I figured as the world and game expanded, was that I could start sticking in "Old Beliefs" and the religions of different cultures. The Good God might not have sway in those areas, but still have reach in those areas (in other words, Normal Sanctity.)

All in all, I could have a simplified religion that wouldn't get in the way and be able to have some unique cultures that NPCs belonged to or ancient gods people could stumble across.

Actual Play Ensues

But something different happened in play, though - the players and their PCs have defined a strong subset of Good God worshippers as being very strongly No God But God oriented. That is, there is worshipping the Good God, and there is demon-worshipping evil, and that's that. We've had one Arab-themed PC that I can recall, but he wasn't around long enough for his beliefs to come up. Presumably he worshipped the Good God but just belonged to a different approach to worshipping him.

We've had vaguely-defined heresies, too, like when two characters decided they worshipped the Ebony Death Goddess, a magically animated statue* for a while. One of them eventually renounced his beliefs. The other just has a tattoo and doesn't say anything about it.

We've had a number of different priestly orders, from the fanatically evil-hunting but earthly Holy Inquisitors that Inquisitor Marco belonged to, to several unnamed demon-hunting and undead-hunting orders, to a generic priest or two. We've had one PC who insists there is an Inquisition that acts as Internal Affairs for the priesthood, watching and judging all clerics on their behavior. It's mostly a joke, but I'd bet money that someone will eventually make a character who is part of that Inquisition.

In general the line of play has become this:

- Worship of the Good God, in increasingly fanatical and intolerant versions;
- Mild acceptance of casual worship of the Good God, which gets you grudging acceptance by the Clerics and Holy Warriors;
- non-worship of the Good God, which makes you unworthy of help (unless you're a PC);
- heretics, who worship any god but the Good God, who must be destroyed (or reasoned with, but not too strongly, if they're a PC);
- Evil, which consists of everything else (and any other kind of worship.)

Even druids, who respect and interact with nature and take that as the basis of their power, are at best suspect. Elves, who all have Sense of Duty (Nature) and hold that above all else, are considered non-believers in the Good God and therefore bad** and suspect.

NPCs who don't worship the Good God but have the Cleric template - well, I'm not sure anyone knows what to make of that. Evil Cleric, sure. But getting power from a supernatural non-Good God source? Ehh . . .

Intolerance

What we've ended up with in my campaign are:

Sense of Duty (Co-religionists) [-10] = a very broad disadvantage that applies to many, many NPCs. Potentially everyone you meet.

Intolerance ("Evil" religions) [-5] = you have a specific and intense hatred for specifically evil beings and their worshippers. Demons, intelligent undead, etc. and anything marked with Truly Evil. Some overly broad play of it is making it very similar to the next disadvantage.

Intolerance (Other religions) [-10] = you have a specific and intense hatred for anything that isn't part of your religion. This does mean you hate druids and the beliefs of elves, too. Don't take this if you ever intend to negotiate with NPCs who aren't also worshippers of your god in the same way you are.


Sense of Duty (Good Entities) is meaningless because Good Entities are also your co-religionists. Or are part of your actual religion's structure of beliefs.


Conclusions

I think it's far too late to put the genie back in the bottle. I know some of my players will read this, and will want to make a non-Good God worshipping polytheistic "Old Believer" but allowing that was never my intention. Allowing it now won't help, except to cause more issues as all of the hard-core believers to have to dance around the wording and spirit of their disadvantages to adventure with your guy.

So here we are - in a Good-but-intolerant vs. Evil worldview dominating the game space.

Interesting, isn't it?




* That totally cleaned up in a fight, because it's a powerful combatant. But also because the player running it didn't read the description, I didn't notice, and the EBG was run as a player-loyal, tactically-deft, analytical fighter leveraging its many attacks and high skill instead of being an IQ 8 construct that basically coin-flips between two tactics and just kills the next nearest foe. I guess that was a special EDG, after all.

** Witness Rangol Grot, who the PCs were looking for excuses to kill besides "he has something we want and we don't want him around." Not a Good God worshipper? Okay, the cleric is on board with killing him because of that.