Fantasy Religions

Basic Information

Pretty much any fantasy religion to be found in an RPG will be polytheistic - that is, it will be a religion with many deities of approximately equal status¹.

Quite often the religion will also be pantheistic - that is, their many deities will belong to some kind of organization: either the extended family of the Norse, Celtic or Greco-Roman religions or something like the Celestial Bureaucracy of China.

The assorted deities will then have the various portfolios divvied out between them - war for one, agriculture for another, that sort of thing - and they will usually be spread out amongst the different alignments². There will usually be some 'evil' deities who serve no useful function and leave the GM scrabbling for an explanation for why anyone would worship them³ - in real world pantheons evil tended to be shared out amongst the other deities⁴ although some pantheons included an "enemy of the gods" like Tiamat⁵ or Apep⁶ or include a trickster deity like Loki, who is a bit of an arse, but still serves a useful purpose.⁷. Also, few fantasy authors seem to be aware of the Titans of Greco-Roman myth (and their equivalents in other cultures mythiea) - although some do include (usually squiddy) "elder gods" as antagonists in the same mould.

Most of the deities will be worshiped by humans, with the RPG rulebook only sparing enough space for one god each for the non-human races/species. If the system does well, a separate pantheon may be added for one or more non-human race/species in a later splatbook, usually headed by the one original deity, but it will be poorly integrated with the original pantheon - if at all. Rarely, if ever, will humans and non-humans worship the same gods under different names.

However at this point the Judeo-Christian heritage of most FRPG writers normally starts to show at this point - in most game settings the population pick one deity from the pantheon to worship and stick to them (this is pretty much what we call henotheism) rather than worshiping the appropriate deity for whatever they happened to be engaged in at the time. Every deity will have its own, dedicated, full time clergy and religious buildings inside which services will be held at a given time.

It's also not unusual for a fantasy pantheon to consist only of deities that might be popular with adventurers and omit those responsible for the sort of portfolios that have traditionally concerned people going about their ordinary lives - crafts, childbirth, the home … that sort of thing.

When the fantasy religion revolves mainly around the worship of trees, or other things that can be loosely interpreted as "nature" then see fantasy druid, noting of course that fantasy druidism may or may not have lay people.

Sources

Bibliography

1. <pick an RPG> They all do it.

Game and Story Use

So how does the aspiring mould-breaking GM make the religions of his setting less 'standard'?
Some of these ideas might be worth trying:

• Create a pantheism in which worshipers don't have a personal relationship with their deity: they (and the clergy) serve the whole pantheon. There may be one or two full time clerics on the staff of a major temple, but most people venerate the deities as they need them. This would fit very well with the practice of most real world polytheisms.
• Make your campaign animist - there are spirits for every rock and tree, and the more significant the terrain feature, the more significant the spirit. (See Genius Loci.) There may be governing powers for concepts, tribes, cities and things that resemble traditional deities but there will be a lot more localism in religion as well.⁸.
• Add aspects to some of your deities: the head of the elven pantheon is the same deity as the head of the human pantheon, with a different front end for a different species. Likewise the deity who has law as his portfolio is the patron both of the 'Lawful Good' paladin and the 'Lawful Evil' tyrant, and may even be invoked by thieves when they make a solemn agreement amongst themselves.⁹ Again, the Greeks and Romans were both quite fond of identifying foreign deities as a different aspect of one of their own - see the entry on Zeus for an example of how one deity can be worshipped under a variety of aspects by a range of different cults.
• Introduce temples like those of real life paganism - the worship is conducted outdoors, where the deities can look down from the sky and see it, and the building is used only to store idols, treasure and ritual paraphernalia … although initiations and other secret rites might be conducted in an inner sanctum away from prying eyes. Likewise, the temple may not hold regular services: a petitioner makes sacrifices by appointment, when he has a boon to ask of his deity, and there will be a festival on any day sacred to the resident deity, but in general an ancient pagan would no more come and pester his deity on a regular basis than he would wear out the ears of his overlord or patriarch with trivialities.
• Mix the portfolios up … as previous mentioned, the Roman Mars was the bloody-handed Lord of Slaughter and also a fertility deity (being, after all, the husband of Venus) and one of agriculture (many of the ancients didn't separate human, animal and plant fertility). In many worlds the sun deity tends to be one of the "good' deities - make yours "evil" … he may be the all-powerful ruler of the heavens, but he is also the tyrant who demands a heavy tax in water for his rule (in a desert land) or strikes men blind if they do not show him due deference (where snow blindness is a problem). Likewise, the bloody handed "chaotic evil" deity may also serve as the breaker of chains, who represents all of those who struggle under oppressive rule, and those who seek to better their place in society by whatever means: the hard working peasant who seeks to buy his way into the caste of free landowners and the nobleman who seeks to usurp the king by coup and murder.
  • For the uber example of this, try the Aztec pantheon. Seriously. Even the largely benevolent ones are partial to human sacrifice and their internecine squabbles have already destroyed the world on three or four occasions…
• Note that there is nothing actually wrong with having a henotheistic pantheon in your world … all this is just suggestions for how to make things look a bit different. Also, if you want a henotheistic pantheon to look credible, the deities need broad portfolios - very few people could restrict themselves to only those activities covered by a single divine portfolio of the traditional sort.
• You can also have a mixed bag of deities … the Romans were famous magpies of other people's deities, as were the Assyrians, often adopting the deities of nations they subjugated into their pantheon and either calling them an aspect of one of their pre-existing deities or simply adding them without further comment.
  • And then there were the mystery cults … these often co-existed with pantheons, but had single deities or small groups of deities completely unrelated to the pantheon and often conducted their mysteries in private. The Romans loved this sort of thing - Mithraism and the Cult of Cybele were prime examples and there is some suggestion that Romans occasionally dabbled in Christianity in the same way.
    • In game, a new mystery cult can be a good plot hook, source of villains or merely a red herring for PCs. Witness Pliny the Younger's investigation of Bythynian Christianity for Trajan - what appeared to the Imperial court as a potentially dangerous new mystery cult turned out to be nothing sinister at all.
• For a real challenge, introduce a monotheistic world … although you could just base your setting on medieval Europe. A dualistic world, with two mutually hostile deities, such as is found in Zurvanist Zoroastrianism or the beliefs of the Cathars is probably a more playable intermediate, although a fantasy religion based on medieval Christianity could be made dualistic without two much effort; in either case you are left with one 'approved' deity who is the patron of all things good and noble and another 'anti-deity' to serve the classic fantasy role of Lord of Wrong as the inspiration to evil wizards, usurpers and species that are 'Always Chaotic Evil'.
  • The Cathars were a Christian sect that saw the world through a dualistic lens.
• Your setting's God of Evil (if you use one) might need a few twists as well:
  • "The enemy of the Gods is the enemy of society": The Gods define Evil as what is against the common values of society (or more cynically, against the existing power structure). Similarly to some interpretations of Satan, the Lord of Wrong might have a following among revolutionaries or the downtrodden as a symbol of rebellion or equality.
  • "The God of Evil is shackled by prayer": If the Lord of Wrong has a cult, that cult prays against him. Their prayers keep him as a Sealed Evil in a Can, and any theurgy they work siphons off his strength.
    • • This is not without real-world equivalence - in some polytheisms, there are deities that receive worship, sacrifice and prayer in the hope that they will not act - these are generally those that are either malevolent and/or who have a portfolio that is inimical to a pleasant life. Thus their cult and the lay adherents attempt to bribe them into inaction. This can of course flip as the situation changes - whilst the god of disease and plagues will probably always be petitioned to either keep doing nothing or go back to doing nothing and take his plague with him, it's conceivable that a culture might spend peacetime urging inaction on its war-god, but come wartime, the gates of some inner temple are flung open and the worship shifts to urging him to exert himself on their behalf.
• Sword and Sorcery Press smashed the "no titans" meme with their Shattered Lands setting … which takes place with a Titanomachy in living memory…

NEVER try to use fantasy theology as a gotcha on a player - especially not the players of clerics, paladins and other characters that could reasonably be expected to have studied a great deal of theology, and even lay characters should understand the basic morays of religion in their world. Broadly, if an act will have in game religious consequences it is reasonable (absent a very few obscure cases) that the character should be aware of the fact. Once the GM has explained that to them, if they still want to do it, then bring on the consequences, but don't expect them to understand the nuances of the imaginary religion without this. Even if you did put it into the 2000 page campaign handbook.

Footnotes

1. although they may have a hierarchy amongst themselves

2. if the game system bothers with alignments

3. except "because they're eeevil as well" … which is silly

4. for example Mars/Ares of the Greco-Roman pantheon was a psychotic rapist as well as the primary deity of war and a minor deity of agriculture and fertility. Our ancestors were pragmatic people. It's also worth noting that the "psycho rapist" aspect was actually imported from the Greek tradition - the original Roman Mars was a far more upright character. Religions that change over time are entirely plausible, but the fantasy world creator may have to decide whether the god changed or not. And if not, what does he make of his new reputation?

5. Babylonian

6. Egyptian

7. Loki was patron of wizards IIRC and in the Amerindian pantheon the trickster-deity Coyote was an almost Promethean figure

8. This is a lot closer to the reality of ancient Roman paganism than a lot of people know, but animists are by no means extinct in real life - animism is a part of the day to day faith of millions of people in the present day

9. "And may bloody handed Regulus string my soul by the balls if I betray my brothers of the guild!"