Author: Renfrew (---.verizon.net)
Date: 11-05-2004 21:31
I just read your article "First thing we do, we kill all the Clerics".
It touched on some things I've been thinking about lately.
We visit these fantasy worlds for a variety of reasons, but among them to get closer to some kind of primal mystery, the amorphous world of fairy tales, the uncertain world of our childhoods. Otherwise we'd just role an RPG variation of The Sims, if we rolled at all. Two observations:
1) A campaign in a D&D universe is really very Cartesian. Everything explainable, mechanistic, empirical. Including, as you say, religion. In D&D all questions are answered, everything that happens in a game session is expected to have an explanation in game terms (the very definition of fairness). And, preferably, you should be able to fight it and kill it. Magic is really physics, monsters are really just big animals. No big mystery, find the answer in a book down at the mall.
2) Another way to have mystical uncertainty in a universe with observable deities running around, is to really introduce the question of whether they are divine. Perhaps they are non-divine beings on the same continuum as human beings, rats & bacteria, just with vast powers, immortal, able to grant spells, and living in alternate planes. But ultimately mundane. Clerics don't need to have a religious interpretation to what it is that they do, they just need to keep their patron deity happy. Or perhaps the apparent volition of these entities is just an illusion - they are forces of nature, no more or less divine (or sentient) than the wind, rain, or asphalt. In such a universe you could have atheists ("These so-called gods are just big bullies") and monotheists ("God relies on faith... not miracles"), post-modern secular humanists ("It is meaningless to speak of the gods' existence outside of our perceptual framework") as well as fundamentalists ("These gods are truly gods and any other idea is heretical, blasphemy, a danger to your immortal soul"). Perhaps these so-called deities themselves ascribe to various points of view regarding the nature of their own existence. Do they, in turn, worship? Do they have souls?
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