Over the last few months, I have offered some suggestions to players and GMs as to how to better depict religion in gaming, that being the main point of this column. I hope those suggestions gave readers some ideas for making richer, more realized religions. I especially hope they help players or GMs to better get inside the head of a person of faith. This column offers my humble opinion as to the most useful pop culture sources for aspects of religion in gaming.
A Good Evil Religion
Ah, evil cults. Classic gaming villains up there with scheming grand viziers and power-mad wizards. It is easy to describe the evil of a demon-worshipping, hostage-sacrificing cult, but what is their motivation? What gets someone to spend their evenings wearing a black robe and chanting? I think it goes without saying that gamers in general have moved beyond the “What do you want? They’re evil!” level of motivation. It seems to me what you commonly see is something like “they worship the dark demon god Blark’arak’ar because they think he will give them money, power, or wenches.” And, yeah, that gets the job done. Lots of people do lots of horrible things for money, power, or wenches. But I think a good GM can come up with a more complex and sophisticated motivation. The most disturbing, interesting villain is the one who thinks he is doing the right thing. A good example of this is the Sith in the game Knights of the Old Republic.
Now, religiously speaking, the Star Wars universe is a mess. I am hoping to tackle that mess in more detail in the future. What I want to focus on now is the huge insight into the Sith I first ran into in that aforementioned game. The Sith were, for most of Star Wars, a good example of the villains that didn’t have much in the way of depth to their motivation. They flew around space cackling, blasting people, corrupting innocence and seeking power. Then, in the game KOTOR, your characters visited the Sith Academy and learned the Sith code. Which, to paraphrase, is “I embrace the dark side for power, because with power I am free.” Just by taking their motivation a single step further (yes they want power, but why? What do they see as the point of it all?) the writers of that game made the Sith fascinating and challenging villains, because they were doing the right thing. In their minds, they were the heroes of the Star Wars universe. And the characters had to confront an argument for evil that, from a certain perspective, makes sense. In my mind, the scariest villains are the ones who you could almost kind of agree with, and KOTOR made the Sith those villains. On the topic of villain motivation…
A Good Lovecraftian Cult
As a forum commenter complained once, Lovecraft-esque beings are everywhere in gaming. Countless worlds are haunted by tentacled, gibbering devourers from beyond reason, and the cultists that seek to bring into the world These Things That Should Not Be. This begs the obvious questions, what sort of moron brings a gibbering cyclopean madness into the world? The dark demon god may consider placing you at the right hand of his ebon throne, but Great Cthulhu’s just going to eat you. The classic answers seem to be either 1. They think Hastur the Unspeakable is the type who makes loyal subordinates emperor of Australia, or 2. What do you want, they’re crazy. But in Mage: the Ascension you can find a group that worships those sort of beings with full and complete awareness of what they are and what they will do. And these are one of the most disturbing groups of villains I have ever come across, the Nephandi. The Nephandi are (and I am paraphrasing Mage canon quite a bit) mages who work to bring dark gibbering etc’s into the world because they have decided that the world should not be. They made the rational, simple decision that existence is a mistake of the universe, and this is the best way to fix that mistake. And wow, that’s a terrifying thought. For the Sith or the Nephandi, all the blood sacrifices and profane corruptions are the right thing to do. An evil cultist is a more interesting, complex, and frankly, scary villain if in his mind, he is the hero.
On a cheerier note, I want to look at another near-universal feature of religion in gaming, the presence of the gods.
A Good D & D Style Religious World
What I mean by D & D style is that it is world where the gods are real and self-evident. The gods exist, everyone knows they exist, and miracles occur on a regular basis. This is usually the default religious setting of fantasy gaming, but it is actually a type of world that raises huge questions about faith. Is it plausible that religious expression in our world would be anything like in that world? And if not, how are we supposed to roleplay it? I think we can get an excellent answer to that question in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalcedon series of novels. This is a series of three (last time I checked) novels set in a world with a single, universally worshipped set of gods whose clerics perform small miracles on a regular basis. Without going into exhaustive detail, this series is a good source for looking at the kind of questions this type of world raises. First and foremost, what is it like to live in a world where religion is so clearly true? Does anyone do bad things at all? Do splits in denominations till happen, and if so, what are they like? Does religious difference exist, and what does it look like? The books suggest that, while this world is different from are own, people are still people. And that means that yes, we can with some adapting use real-world religious life as a legitimate inspiration and model. Another excellent model for an aspect of religion can be found in the sadly currently defunct Ravenloft Campaign setting.
A Good Religious Hierarchy
For me, one of the most interesting aspects of studying religion is the question of religious hierarchy. What is the reason for the authority given to priests, shamans, elders, etc? And as the first two columns I wrote suggest, this is an area I feel a lot of gaming material shortchanges. We get elaborate temples, numerology, spell lists, and mythology but the authority of a religious hierarchy is usually sort of assumed. If you worship Pelor, you obey your superior in the Pelor church just because. And really, where’s the fun in that?The Ravenloft setting had several excellent, well thought out religions and the one I want to especially praise is the Church of the goddess Ezra. Once again, I am paraphrasing a lot, but the hierarchy is basically this: The visionary prophet who founded the religion chose his successor, who chose his successor, and so on. The religion is divided into four different sects (each founded by someone with a new vision of the goddess) but all the sects respect the overall authority of the successor of the original prophet. The founder of each sect chose their own successor. These successors chooses mid-level church officials for each sect, who then choose the local-level church officials. If you are a cleric of this religion, the source of your authority is clear. You were chosen by someone who was chosen be someone who was chosen by someone (etc) who had a vision of the goddess, and so it makes perfect sense that you would be able to instruct others on following her teachings. If you are designing a religious hierarchy to play any part in your game, please give them an authority that makes sense. If the party cleric has the right to morally criticize others or preach to them about how to correctly follow their faith, why? Why does the average believer take their advice as having more weight then a random ranting nomad? Speaking of the average believer, a good source on that subject is the excellent series Battlestar Galactica.
A Good Sci-Fi Depiction of Faith
In my experience, religious characters (PC or NPC) tend to fall into two categories. One group is those whose faith is their entire personality. They are boring, flat, preachy fanatics who are nothing more then walking, sermonizing list of alignment rules. The second group are characters who talk up their faith while gleefully breaking every rule or belief in private. They are flat-out hypocrites who wrap their amorality in a cloak of piety. And it is not just in gaming we see this limited range of characters. They are stock figures of all forms of entertainment. Of course, both of these types of religious people exist in real life. But neither of them is really the average believer. An exception to this general shallowness in religious characters is Battlestar Galactica. If you watch that series (and you should) you will see a wide range of believers who are doing what real average believers do- struggling with their faith. Struggling to be good, struggling to reconcile the teachings of their faith with their own choices and circumstances, struggling to live up to their deepest beliefs. Also, you see characters that have moral blind spots and flat out failures but also have a true faith and religious devotion. And that’s the way faith actually works for probably 90% of religious people. You struggle, you fail, you have blind spots, but you try. Your faith is not your entire self, but it is a true part of your self. I don’t want to go into to much detail discussing religion in Battlestar Galactica here, because I am planning a future column about it. So I won’t say much more right now other than wow, Galactica is a story that uses religion very, very well.
On the subject of realistic sci-fi TV religion, I would also like to make special mention of the character Shepherd Book in the series Firefly. He is a perfect example of how a believer can be sincere without being preachy, fallible without being a hypocrite, and religious without being boring. Remember, Clerics and Paladins, just because you’re the party’s moral center doesn’t mean you have to be flat or one-note. Switching genres, I would like to offer a final example of general excellent religious world building.
A Good Fantasy Faith
George R.R. Martin’s world of Westeros (found in the Song of Ice and Fire series) is an overall brilliantly realized and realistic fantasy world. I would like to single out a few religious elements of that world that make it especially useful as a model of world building. The first thing that impressed me about Westeros is that religion was a true and noticeable character trait of the people. A character’s religion affected their values, personality, and general worldview. Too often, a character’s religious faith is just a god’s name and an alignment restriction. In Westeros, we see that faith is a basic part of who you are and the way you live your life. Your religion is, after all, the story that you believe explains the world. It is a profound part of your identity, not just a two-dimensional moral code wrapped in “churchy” language.
The most detailed religion of Westeros is the faith of the seven gods. As books have revealed more about the history of the land and the faith, I have been impressed by how real the faith of the seven is, how lived-in it seems. What I mean by this is there is such a sense of history surrounding it. The faith of the seven really seems like the product of a rich history of theology, art, doctrine, conflicts and all the things that a religion accumulates over time. Another common shallowness I see in some representations of religion in pop culture is a chronological shallowness. By this I mean the creator of the world comes up with an ancient religion, and then says “and they basically do that for a thousand years.” There may be a mention of saints, cathedrals, or schisms, but you don’t get the sense that faith has actually been lived by people for generation after generation. You don’t get a sense of true organic change or growth. Not so in Westeros.
A final thing I would like to praise about Mr. Martin’s religion of the seven gods is what I call realism of scale. Worship of the seven gods stretches across every social and intellectual spectrum, and they each put their mark on it. When people from different levels of society share a religion, they have different interpretations of it. And we see this in the religion of the seven gods. This is a faith of both grand cathedrals and small village shrines, of sophisticated theology and local superstition. The educated clerics write treaties on how all of the seven gods are aspects of each other, and the peasants pay that no heed and pray to them as seven individual gods. But even though their level of sophistication is different, all share in worship of one faith. And this is how religion works in real life. A cleric with theological education could have a very different understanding of the elements of their religion then the farmers they minister to. But they will still have that kinship and connection of faith.
In the end, Westeros is a great example of a religious world because, in my opinion, Mr. Martin took the trouble to understand how faith works in the real world, in history, and in peoples’ lives. That’s what all of these sources have in common, and the essence of any suggestions I could offer for realistic religion in gaming. I am planning to explore the religious aspects of some of these settings and series in future columns. All of these are worth watching, reading, or playing in their own right as entertainment. And if anyone can think of a good pop culture religion source I didn’t think of, share it in the forums. I am a religion nerd and a regular nerd, so I’m always up for anything that joins those two together.
Questions? Comments?
