Fantasy Religions Primer, Part I--The Religion of Critical Role

The great Matt Colville had a stream a while back in which he designed (or began to design) a pantheon of deities for his campaign setting, which got me thinking about fantasy religions and what makes them good or not.  So I'm going to give more thoughts about that in this post, but before I get into that, I want to begin with how Colville began his stream.  Colville made the claim that you don't actually need a fully developed pantheon of deities or a complex religious system for a fantasy game, especially D&D or one of its variants.  After all, the game mechanical component for clerics is a set of wholly abstract "domains"--all you really need to do as a cleric is select the "Light" domain, and you never have to worry about the gods or worship or whatever (that's exactly how 13th Age tells you to handle it, by the way).

Colville is 100% right.  If fantasy religions are not something that the DM/GM is interested in, it can be completely hand-waived away.  There are a ton of things that are just hand-waived in fantasy worlds--here's a great series on all of the problems of D&D economies, for example--and it can absolutely be done with religion, as 13th Age proves.  Or, in some cases an even easier solution than hand-waving is to just pick something "off the shelf" and stick it in the campaign.  That's what Matt Mercer did when designing his campaign world for Critical Role--all the gods are from the 4e default pantheon, plus Sarenrae from Pathfinder/Golarion (I noticed he got rid of the proper names for those gods and goddesses in the Tal'Dorei campaign book, presumably for copyright reasons, but I have to say I like the titles they came up with better than the original names).  The fact that Mercer didn't come up with the Raven Queen didn't in any way lessen the storytelling he was able to do around the Raven Queen.  World builders, especially folks starting out, can easily get into the trap of thinking they have to build everything from scratch, making the task seem overwhelming.  Instead, I think the way to go is to work on what is interesting to you and then just borrow the rest from someplace else, or just ignore it and move on.

So, you don't need to think deeply about fantasy religions and how they would function.  But some people are really into religions as an aspect of world building, and I am one of those people.  When I am not writing about D&D, I am writing about real-world religious issues, and faith is a big part of my life, so it is not surprising that this is an area of interest for me.  When I get a chance to play (as opposed to running the game, which is most of the time), I tend to play clerics or paladins, and I am one of those players who does care about the temple rituals and mechanics of the fictional faith, not just the domain and cool powers my character gets.  And while Colville is right that much of the world building surrounding religion is really for the benefit of the world builder and not the players/the game, you should do the things that are fun for you, and fun for me is thinking about how to make the fantasy religion seem as "real" as possible.

So, this series is going to take a look at fantasy religions, how they work, and some things to think about when you are designing a fantasy religion or implementing a pre-existing one into a campaign.  To make things a little more comprehensible, I'm going to focus on five fantasy religions as exemplars--the religious system of Exandria as described by Matt Mercer in Critical Role, the "Faerunian pantheon" for the Forgotten Realms (set forth, most recently, in The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) and the religions of Eberron, both by Wizards of the Coast; the gods and religions of Midgard by Kobold Press; and the OG of religious presentation, Glorantha.  I could have picked others, either inside or outside of the greater D&D sphere, but I went with those because the Forgotten Realms is the default campaign world for D&D 5e, and thus the Faerunian pantheon is the default religious system for people playing the most popular tabletop RPG, Critical Role is the most public vehicle for D&D and shows how religions can be used in the context of actual game play, and the other three are, in my judgment, particularly interesting and/or outstanding implementations of fantasy religions.

But, to begin, I want to talk about Critical Role and how Mercer uses gods and religion in his world.  Note that I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but some of these discussions require some generalize spoilers of broad show themes.  I am also far, far behind on Season Two of Critical Role, so if Mercer has changed things up in his presentation of religion, I will likely miss all of that--this is primarily coming from Season One.

As mentioned above, Mercer borrowed the "Dawn War" pantheon from 4e and dropped them into Exandria.  The Dawn War pantheon itself is a mix of deities from previous D&D sources (Moradin, Corellon, Pelor, Bane, Lolth, etc.) with a handful of new entities to fill gaps (like the Raven Queen).  The Dawn War gods and goddesses are perfectly serviceable on their own, but ultimately they are just names on a piece of paper.  What is interesting about the Exandria deities is how they fit into the world and how religion functions for people in the context of the world.

The general presentation is that each deity is worshiped in the context of its own, more or less self-contained religion.  Pike, as a cleric of The Everlight (Sarenrae), is part of a church of the Everlight that is dedicated only to the Everlight.  Pike's religion is different from the religion of Lady Kima, who is part of the Church of the Platinum Dragon (Bahamut), with different rituals, edicts, organizational structure, etc.  Now, because the ethos of the Everlight and the ethos of the Platinum Dragon are similar, or at least not in direct conflict most of the time, these two religious institutions can cooperate and co-exist, as we see in a place like Vassalheim.  This is because, in part, it seems pretty clear that the members of the Church of the Everlight accept the idea that the Platinum Dragon exists as a separate divine entity, and visa versa.  Some folks are on Team Everlight, and some folks are on Team Platinum Dragon, and while I would imagine that folks on Team Everlight would prefer that more folks got on board with Team Everlight, the existence of folks worshiping the Platinum Dragon does not raise any internal theological problems for the Church of Everlight.  Likewise, while the worshipers of the Betrayer Gods are bad and opposed by the Church of the Everlight, everyone accepts that the Betrayer Gods actually exist, and are broadly speaking peers to entities like the Everlight in terms of power and scope.

The usual critique raised with a set-up like this is that it doesn't reflect how polytheism functioned in actual historical cultures, and that's true.  But Exandria's religious system as portrayed in the show is not polytheism.  The closest real world technical term is "henotheism," though even there Exandria's system doesn't perfectly line up with the real-world examples usually offered for henotheism because many of those examples (Hinduism of the Vedas, for example) teach that all of the different gods are ultimately different manifestations of the same unitary principle (whereas, again, it seems pretty clear that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon are "objectively" different entities).  Actually the closest, if controversial, parallel to Exandria's religion is the way pre-exilic Judaism talks about the God of Israel.  If you read the Book of Exodus without the later, definitively monotheist pre-suppositions of later Judaism, the most neutral interpretation is that the God of Israel is a particular deity for a discrete group of people, one who is better and more awesome than the gods of Egypt, but that the gods of Egypt are real entities with real power.  Exandria's deities lack the hard-edged exclusivism of the God of Israel of Exodus (at least, in general), but the concept is basically the same.

So, there are some parallels to what Mercer is doing to the real world.  But, much more to the point, this system makes a great deal of sense as a fantasy religious system for a D&D game, both from the point of view of the logic of people in the fictional world and from a meta-game perspective of real people sitting down to a table to play D&D.

From the meta-game perspective, the primary advantage is that religion in Exandria more or less works the way religion works in the real world now, or at least in the broadly pluralistic West.  If you live in the 21st Century West, you are familiar with a religious framework in which people are members of one of a set of discrete religions, each of which has a singular focus of worship, doctrine, organizational structure, and ethos.  Notwithstanding the real distinctions between those religions, by and large they are able to co-exist and work together around broadly similar goals--Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Jews go to different houses of worship, but otherwise generally get along fine and have at least compatible world-views.  That sociology of religion is the result of a complex series of ideas and events, all of which entirely anachronistic if projected back onto a quasi-medieval or quasi-ancient world.  But, so what?  It's familiar to the people sitting down to play the game, and doesn't require them to take onboard anything about how actual religions work in the real world outside of their generalized experience.  And if the DM and the players don't really care all that much about religious questions all that much anyway, then you are not adding any unnecessary mental work to anyone.

But there is also in-game logic to this system.  First, the Dawn War pantheon is particularly well-suited for this sort of set up, because the different gods and goddesses are both broadly defined and somewhat overlapping.  In doing so, it avoids the problem of explaining why non-adventurers would ever be members of a particular god's church.  Consider the deity Bane as portrayed in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.  Bane is the god of tyranny and hatred, and (at least at one point--I'm not up on current Realms canon) was the exclusive religion of the city of Zhentil Keep.  Now, clerics of Bane make perfect sense, both from an in-world sense and from a story sense, as they are part of a powerful organization that believes it should rule everything in the name of a god who should rule everything.  But imagine being a shopkeeper living in Zhentil Keep--how does worshiping Bane benefit you or impact your life?  You could imagine buying into a kind of quasi-nationalism or manifest destiny idea--we are going to rule everything in the name of our god, and I am part of that larger struggle.  But manifest destiny doesn't put food on the table or insure that childbirth will be safe or any of the other real-world tasks that occupy the bulk of people's lives.  If the religion of Bane is only about tyranny and hatred, it doesn't really speak much to the day-to-day experience of an ordinary person.  And if ordinary people would never join your church, then it isn't much of a church.  These narrow faiths work better as cults, consisting of only dedicated elite worshipers.

By contrast, the non-Betrayer Gods in Exandria mostly cover a wide set of abstract ideas.  The Platinum Dragon is about justice and a certain vision of order and stability; so is Erathis the Lawbearer, and Moradin the Allhammer.  Those visions are probably different, but all of them could be the basis for a vision of society and social order, and so you could imagine any of them being a respectable religion for the Exandrian equivalent of the dutiful, upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.  Likewise, farmers might follow the Dawnfather or the Wildmother or maybe even the Archeart.  The only rather narrow portfolio among the Prime Deities is the Raven Queen, and even there life and death is fundamental to the experience and world view of people, so it would have broad applicability.  The point is that these religions are broad enough to encompass regular people doing regular things, and thus they make sense for regular people to belong to.  And the evil Betrayer Gods like Bane are more like cults, which makes sense in light of their more narrow focuses.  Many folks will not care about any of this, but to me this adds verisimilitude to the setting--a place where people live, as opposed to simply a platform for adventurers.

The other reason this structure makes sense in the context of a D&D campaign setting is that it takes into account the radically different religious epistomology of a fantasy world.  All real world religions must grapple with limitations on knowledge of the divine--how do we know about God/the gods?  In a D&D world, this complex question becomes much simpler, because you can just ask the gods direct questions and have at least the possibility of getting direct answers.  The level of mystery surrounding divine things is radically reduced, at least so long as you retain the default D&D assumptions about things like planar travel, spells like Contact Other Plane, and the like (which is why, as we will see, Eberron and Midgard both charge those default assumptions in order to preserve the elements of mystery).

Sure, the gods seem to intentionally give limited or incomplete information to worshipers--the folks on Lady Kima's team that went into Kraghammer probably would have benefited from more detailed intelligence from the Platinum Dragon beforehand.  But the fact that you can go to the gods and ask them questions suggests that religions in such a world will have more concrete, consistent information about the nature of the gods.  If there was some church somewhere that taught that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon were actually the same entity, Pike could definitively clear up the matter directly with the Everlight when she spoke to her on the Island of Renewal.  Splinter movements, doctrinal drift, schisms, heresies--all of those things that are common in real-world religions would be much, much less common in a world where powerful religious leaders can just submit disputed questions directly to the source.

Likewise, being a low or mid-level cleric in Exandria (or any other fantasy world where you can talk to the gods directly) is much more like working for the government than it is being a part of the religion as we know it.  If you are a mid-level official in the bureaucracy, you are not directly communicating with the President on a daily basis, but you know that it is possible to ask the leader a question and get a concrete direct answer, even if you must do so through proxies.  In fact, in D&D worlds like Exandria, it is actually easier to do that than it would be in the real world, as the deity can functionally see everything that is going on and talk to multiple people at once.  So, you don't necessarily need to go "up the chain of command" to get your answer, and it would be much harder for the "telephone game" problem to crop up (someone accidentally or intentionally distorting the message that gets passed down from the leader).

This means, in turn, that religions would be much more consistent from place to place and culture to culture.  It makes sense that the worship of the Prime Deities is more or less the same across continents, especially where you have one central locus of religious worship and authority that has endured and maintained continuity from when the gods walked the land, Vassalheim.  But, again, Vassalheim displays a relationship between the gods that is more like the World Council of Churches than like a classic polytheistic pantheon--an alliance of essentially independent organizations as opposed to an interconnected and inter-related set of cults.  This center of gravity for religious practice would reduce cultural differences and drift, because there would be a singular, "objective" reference point for the proper way to follow the Everlight, the Platinum Dragon, et al. 

The bottom line is I think Critical Role's presentation of religion is one of the most sensible and "realistic" presentations of fantasy religion assuming you are working from all of the baseline D&D assumptions.  "Fantasy World Council of Churches" is probably what you would end up getting if the gods were directly accessible, you had an array of multi-cultural, semi-overlapping deities, and long-term continuity of practice and worship.  If you are looking for a model for how to run religion in a campaign world that uses all of the D&D-isms, particularly if you and your players don't want to invest much time or mental bandwidth in the religious system, what Mercer has done is a great place to begin.  It's a great example of "leaning in" to the rules material in building your setting, as opposed to trying to jam a historic model into a fantasy world.

The State of Fantasy RPGs, Part IV--Why World of Warcraft Matters

In a couple of places in the last few posts, I have made the claim that the shift toward more story-based and narrative focused games in the tabletop RPG space is not just because of the popularity of Critical Role or the design features of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition, but reflects a broader, more structural change in the tabletop RPG hobby.  And, I think that change has to do with the ubiquity of video games, and more specifically the existence of MMOs like World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Online (for purposes of this post "World of Warcraft" is going to be used as a stand-in for all fantasy MMOs, because everything that applies to World of Warcraft for purposes of this discussion applies to those other MMOs as well).  Those games fill a space and provide a play experience that originally was filled by tabletop RPGs, but video games do it better.  As a result, tabletop has drifted toward experiences of play that MMOs can't recreate.

Let's unpack that a bit.  I would venture to say that the vast majority of people who play tabletop RPGs also play video games to some degree.  And the vast majority of people who play either of those two forms of games have a limited budget in terms of both disposable income and free time.  So, at least on a conceptual level, a hour spend playing a video game is an hour you could instead be playing a tabletop RPG, and visa versa.  Video games and tabletop RPGs are, in that sense, substitute goods.  That's not to say they are the same, or that there is no reason to prefer one over the other, but that to the extent you spend more time and money playing one, you are likely to spend less time and money playing the other.

In an absolute sense, all video games are substitutes for tabletop RPGs, as it would be seen as a faux pas to be playing Fortnite or Minecraft while you are in the midst of a climatic battle in 5e or Pathfinder, so you have to pick one or the other.  But, in a much more specific way, games like Skyrim and the Witcher series are a more direct substitute, as it allows me to play a character in a fantasy world that kills monsters, collects gold and other loot, interacts with NPCs, completes quests, explores new areas, etc.  In other words, playing Skyrim allows you to do many of the the kinds of things that you do in most tabletop RPGs, so it makes sense that if you can't or don't want to play D&D, you might play Skyrim instead.  But an even closer substitute is an MMO like World of Warcraft, because World of Warcraft lets you do all of the stuff you can do in Skyrim but also allows you to interact with other players.  So MMOs also allow you to get some component of the social dimension of tabletop RPGs, alongside the loot and quests and what have you.

If it is the case that World of Warcraft and D&D are substitute goods, why would someone pick one over the other?  To answer that question, the place to start is to look at what each of them bring to the table that the other does not.  Approaching it from the WoW side, the biggest thing that you get with a video game is the visuals.  Instead of having to imagine your character, the monsters, the terrain, and all the rest, you get to see all of that, often in beautifully rendered detail.  There is a definite benefit and joy to imagining things yourself, but the visual representation has definite advantages, especially in complex situations like combat.  Second, MMOs provide better options for a solo experience.  You can make a character and go on quests without having anyone to play with.  Plus, keep in mind that when WoW came out in 2004, there was no such thing as Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds--if you wanted to play a tabletop RPG, then you had to gather together people physically in the same spot.  If you were in an area or circumstance where you didn't have people around you to play with, you basically couldn't play a tabletop game, whereas with MMOs you could meet people through the game and get that social interaction that way.  Finally, the resolution of mechanical actions in video game is faster, as the programming is able to calculate hits and damage, and translate that into game action, at a speed that no tabletop game (no matter how simple) can do.  As a result, actions in MMOs, especially combat, moves much, much faster than even the most streamlined tabletop RPG.

With that in mind, consider a classic form of tabletop RPG scenario--the mega-dungeon.  In its classic form, it is a big, set-piece series of primarily combat and loot-oriented encounters, with large groups of players approaching it in a primarily tactical way.  In other words, precisely the thing that WoW is best at recreating in its high-concept raids.  A WoW raid gives you all of your combat and loot-oriented tactical mega-dungeon goodness, except everything moves much faster and you get to watch the thing unfold in real time.  I understand how others could disagree with this, but I think MMOs provide a better experience for playing those kinds of games than tabletop RPGs do.  And, in an environment where MMOs and tabletop RPGs are substitute goods, some significant segment of people are going to migrate from the tabletop to the computer or console.

In light of this, there are basically two choices.  One is to try to splice elements of the MMO experience into the tabletop experience, essentially co-opting the advantages of the MMO for the tabletop.  In his excellent video on 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, Matt Colville makes the point that many of the design decisions behind that edition make much more sense when you realize that the original plan was for the game to ship with a dedicated virtual tabletop platform.  People complain that "4e was trying to be an MMO," and that is true in the sense that the designers were thinking about how to take the things that MMOs provide that the tabletop experience does not and integrate them into the play experience (as opposed to the way that phrase is usually deployed, which is to accuse the designers of 4e of "selling out" and mindlessly copying WoW).

As we now know, a combination of unforeseeable bad luck/tragedy (the original lead designer of the online tools committed a murder-suicide just after the launch of 4e) and a perhaps over-optimistic timeline made the virtual tabletop component of 4e vaporware, leaving a game that was in some meaningful sense incomplete.  But someone is going to go back to the well and try this again in the near future, perhaps with an even greater focus on the visuals.  I am really interested to see how the game master mode in Divinity 2: Original Sin grows and evolves over time, because that might reflect the ultimate end-point for some of the concepts they tried to roll out for 4e.   Imagine a game platform that allowed for both pre-scripted, WoW-style content and game master generated content that a single character could seamlessly transition between.  And, because the rules mechanics where the same in the computer game and on the table, you could then port your character to a home game sitting around a table.  Isn't that, in some sense, the ultimate version of something like Pathfinder Society? [and why isn't Paizo exploring that path as opposed to whatever the heck Pathfinder Online is?]

That would be very cool, but it doesn't exist right now.  So, the alternative is to push the tabletop experience toward those things that you can't get via video games, even MMOs.  Tabletop RPGs can't compete on visuals, and they can't compete on combat speed, but they have a human DM or GM who can change and swap out story elements on the fly, manage character and interpersonal interactions, and otherwise bring all of the story and narrative parts of the game.  MMOs can't do any of those things.  Think about how crude the dialogue options are in something like Skyrim or the Bioware RPGs as compared to the kinds of dialogue that you get in a normal tabletop game session.  No video game can have the player decide, 7th Sea style, what sort of quest he or she wants their character to complete and have the system whip it up out of the ether.  Video games are necessarily constrained by their systems and their need to design elements (or at least the mechanisms that generate the elements) in advance, while the tabletop experience can transcend those limitations.

Because of this, it makes sense that people who are looking for something different from MMO-style experiences are going to be drawn to tabletop RPGs that are oriented toward story and narrative, because that's the thing they weren't getting from the MMO experience.  I have been struck, in my totally informal survey of Youtube channels of people new to tabletop RPGs evangelizing for the form, how many of them say "I was big into WoW, and then I found Critical Role and was inspired by the storytelling to try tabletop RPGs."  Narrative and story is where tabletop RPGs have a comparative advantage over video games, and so pushing in that direction is the way to showcase the things that the form does better than its alternatives.  I can do something that looks a lot like the Temple of Elemental Evil on a computer screen, but I can't recreate anything like a session of Monsterhearts in the same way.

It follows then, as video games get better (better visuals, more complicated quest structures, better online and collaborative functionality), it makes more and more sense for RPGs to push toward the place of its comparative advantage.  It's not surprising that mega-dungeon style play was more popular in the early days of the hobby, as that was before you had robust substitutes on the video game front.  A game like Ultima I, with very basic visuals and constraints on story complexity imposed by storage limitations, is an inferior substitute to playing D&D, even if all you are looking for out of either of them is killing monsters and taking their stuff.  As video games get better, they make a stronger case as a substitute for tabletop play; as video games make a better case as a substitute, tabletop is encouraged to push into places where the video game is not a substitute, i.e. narrative and character-focused play.  I think this is what we are seeing in the tabletop RPG space right now.

This does not mean that playing a dungeon crawl on a tabletop is Badwrongfun and everyone should take up a narrative style or they are Doing It Wrong.  But some of the folks who are rather vocal in their disdain for narratively-focused play tend to present the trend in that direction in almost conspiratorial terms--nefarious outside elements intruding on the original truth of tabletop RPGs and imposing alien ideas and concepts.  That's nonsense--people aren't moving from mega-dungeons to character stories because they have some secret agenda, but because they think they can get the mega-dungeon experience better by booting up a computer.  There are clear "market forces" at play, and not simply in terms of tabletop game designers wanting to make products that sell (though, that, too).  "Do what you are good at" is always a solid piece of advice, and narrative and story is what tabletop RPGs are best at, especially when you take into account the alternative vehicles for some of the other modes of play.

Once again, the moment you buy tabletop RPG books is the moment get to play however you want forever.  I'm not interested in triumphalism or gate keeping.  The point is not that old-school play is not fun; the point is that many people find they can get that same fun in a more accessible form by turning on a computer.  Instead, they are coming to the tabletop RPG space looking for something different, something the computer can't provide.  And the tabletop RPG space is providing that, and will likely be focused on providing that more and more as time goes on.  The move toward a more narrative style is a natural and I think an inevitable product of people thinking about the kinds of things tabletop RPGs do best, especially when compared to alternatives.