Deities and demihumans
Been meaning to answer the latest Game WISH for a while, as it’s a pet peeve.
Li has already written about good old D&D Baervan, so I will merely note that I have written about him too and move on, merely noting that gaming very rarely tackles the sheer hegemony religion often represents, and that seems a shame.
The al-Qadim system of gods feels grafted-on to me and always has. They’re there because something needs to give clerics their spells, and more or less for no other reason. Pure game mechanics, in other words, and it irks me. Either get rid of clerics altogether, replacing them with sha’irs or some other sort of genie magic, or tie clerical magic to something that doesn’t feel like Olympus plucked bodily out of Greece and dumped in the desert.
The construction of Fate, with the Law and the Loregiver, I quite like, as it offers plenty of scope for in-character philosophy—one of my husband’s NPCs is a profound skeptic, and Juskinah agrees with him more than she finds it politic to admit. I see no reason that the pragmatic-moralist-ethoist dimension of al-Qadim clericdom (which isn’t a bad formulation, all told) can’t be tied to the Law instead of a gaggle of ill-sorted gods.
Rat’s campaign boasted a rather curious sort of Sisterhood—a chain of brothels run by women, for women, with its own Great Mother–based religion for background and its own army of (female, of course) agents. This is one of those things that shouldn’t have worked but did. I can’t quite explain it. Part open subversion, part playing with gamer stereotypes, part bawdy humor (in a group mature enough to handle such), part pure weirdness—I’m sorry they never got a chance to recruit Rat.
Tamasi’s religion was a rarity amongst gaming religions—it was, quite simply, godless. Not even quite deistic, as I understand the term. Or, at least, if darkness was deity to her (and it surely was), it was the sort of uncaring primum mobile that human religions don’t generally seem to go for. I’ll admit I never worked all that out fully, though—and I shan’t have the chance now, of course.
Now, on to pet peeves…
The more power a deity has, the more remote it ought to be from the point of view of the players. Honestly. That’s how it has to be. Which is why I think the stat blocks in Deities and Demigods and its ilk are thoroughly pointless for gameplay. What characters see isn’t the gods—it’s the social and cultural effects of worship and worshippers. Guess what hardly any splatbooks pay attention to? Stupid. Just stupid.
Especially since the really juicy roleplaying stuff lives in church hierarchies, schisms, moral dilemmas, and the like. The link between clerics and deities in D&D is entirely too direct. It isn’t the deity who should be enforcing doctrinal correctness—it’s the deity’s church, what else is a church for? And moving the focus back to the gameworld instead of the outer planes is practically always a good thing.
Is there room for direct experience of deity in a gameworld? Sure there is. I got no beef with local deities, sharply-limited deities, quasi-deities, whathaveyou. I think the Pegana deities, from the Big Three right down to Kilooloogung, are terrific game-world deities. And I’m all for a good epiphany—ought to happen more often. I just think gaming ought to pay a lot more attention to the social aspects of religion than it generally seems to.
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