No evil-but-everyone-thinks-they're-good churches in D&D

[Lago PARANOIA]

So there I was, reading some Knights and playing some Breath of Fire and it occurred to me that one thing that Dungeons and Dragons uniformly lacks throughout its settings and sorely needs is a corrupt/sadistic/deluded/etc. religious sect akin to the lines of the Catholic or Wahabbist churches.

This trope exists in fiction to the point of utter cliche, so what's taking so fucken long for D&D to get on the bandwagon? Where are the slave markets being opened up by holy priests? Where are the witch hunts? Where are the massive lines of people lining up for genital mutilation? Where are the priests torching innocent villages under suspicion of heresy and corrupt?

C'mon, D&D, you're letting me the fuck down.

[Prak]

Pelor the Burning Hate

[Lago PARANOIA]

I mean churches where the fact that they're dicks is intentional on the part of the authors, not an amusing plot hole (Pelor and his dick Johan) or unfunny lapses in moral judgment.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

It's probably a function of having dedicated gods of evil plus a fair number of people with the ability to detect evil. When posers are easily caught, it's hard to establish a corrupt, dishonest church of a supposedly "good" faith. Of course, that only goes for traditional D&D settings. They could probably get by with something like that in Eberron, and I'm not sure how they've changed the rules for detecting alignments in 4e.

[Lago PARANOIA]

When posers are easily caught, it's hard to establish a corrupt, dishonest church of a supposedly "good" faith.

I didn't say anything about being dishonest or corrupt as in abusing legitimate authority. I meant more akin to the WH40K churches where even though they're doing evil things they and their followers think that they're doing good. It's not an act, it's not hypocrisy. They're just That Wrong.

So why no churches/gods like that?

There's no rules for detecting alignment in 4E, AW.

[Kaelik]

Talos.

They kill shit and have human sacrifice for funzies.

They are described as having congregations in giant fortresses in volcanos and on fault lines.

They are the League of Evil, and you will fear them.

[Koumei]

Too much influence by staff who believe in the Sky Fairy and refuse to draw any parallels.

[magnuskn]

When posers are easily caught, it's hard to establish a corrupt, dishonest church of a supposedly "good" faith.

I didn't say anything about being dishonest or corrupt as in abusing legitimate authority. I meant more akin to the WH40K churches where even though they're doing evil things they and their followers think that they're doing good. It's not an act, it's not hypocrisy. They're just That Wrong.

So why no churches/gods like that?

There's no rules for detecting alignment in 4E, AW.

A lack of campaign worlds where that would fly, then? As Absentminded_Wizard said, Eberron would probably work in that regard, both from the alignment side ( good churches can have evil priests ) and the afterworld ( a dreary Hades-like place, so a new god, claiming that he offers a "better" afterlife has a good chance of getting lots of followers ).
In general, gods in Eberron have a rather hands-off approach to their followers.

In other places like Faerun, there are too many high-level characters around, who would know that the whole thing is a fraud and stop the new church in its tracks. Not even to mention that the other gods may have to say one thing or two about a new competitor. And they will send down an avatar or two for a healthy dose of smiting.

[Psychic Robot]

It's a game marketed at 13-year-olds. Given D&D's less-than-stellar public relations history with religious devotees, making a religious sect that parallels the Catholic church is asking for trouble. Also, Warhammer does it better with Sigmarites/The Emprah anyhow.

[mean_liar]

You need moral ambiguity hardcoded into your setting for that to work: alignment detection and auras make that difficult in 3e. Not only that but the gods have to be okay with what's being done in their name, necessitating an impenetrable wall between god and sect that doesn't exist in 3e except in Eberron.

[magnuskn]

For completeness sake, one should mention that in Golarion ( Pathfinder RPG campaign setting ) there does exist a church of a false god, the church of Razmir, the living god. Who is no god at all, but an impostor and has subjugated the police state of Razmiran, where worship of him is mandatory.

[A Man In Black]

It doesn't work because you can't keep a secret. Enough players will have read through your entire campaign setting and will already know that the Church of Secret Nogoodniks is evil. Even if people don't abuse the OOC knowledge IC, you have a lot of issues. You can't use it as a surprise, because the surprise is already blown. You get people who want to make Secret Nogoodnik clergy or believers to have an excuse to be jackasses to the rest of the group.

It can work just fine in your game, since only the GM has to know what's going on. It just doesn't work terribly well in a game that belongs to everyone.

[TavishArtair]

Too much influence by staff who believe in the Sky Fairy and refuse to draw any parallels.

I don't believe this is true. Look, Sky Wizard's Guilds have intense rivalries with each other. Thus, any chance to pin the blame on someone else's guild or Sky Wizard or whatever is just oozing with possibilities. Yes, it does mean that the Protestants would write Catholic-like churches whereas the Catholics would write Protestant-like churches, but I don't believe religious beliefs play any great function into it as an author. If anything, I would blame it on the general ambivalence of D&D players towards religion... even those who are highly religious are more likely not to be committed strongly to the organizations, and thus not have a huge hate-on for a church.

Mostly, I think it's avoided because everyone DOES do it... in their home campaign. So it's kind of unnecessary to write it up. But yeah, a church with actual paladins is kind of hard to work as "secretly evil, visibly good." Paladins will notice their loss of abilities for constantly supporting evil even if they don't actually detect their companions as evil.

[Thymos]

The only one that comes to mind is the one in Ptolus. Of course it was intentionally set up to not be good, the god is Lawful but not Lawful Good. So the church has it's good sides and it's bad sides (the leaders can be evil, the paladins are good but not high up in the hierarchy).

[Aharon]

I think a lot of neutral churches can fill this role.
To take the Forgotten Realms as an example, Waukeen is a neutral god of trade. If the players, over the course of the campaign, meet many neutral good clerics who help them, they might be surprised to later have to deal with the neutral evil cleric that furthers the portfolio of his goddess by trading with slaves and drugs.
Or how about Gond? - characters could profit from some magitech they get from the church, and like it, and are then confronted by a gnome cleric who plans great experiment, disregarding the fact that it will result in the death of thousands of whatever race the PCs care for).

I guess in other campaign setting, one might do it similarly. Of course, the players know that the church is neutral, and this could theoretically happen, but if, until then, it didn't happen, they will still be surprised.

[hogarth]

The only one that comes to mind is the one in Ptolus. Of course it was intentionally set up to not be good, the god is Lawful but not Lawful Good. So the church has it's good sides and it's bad sides (the leaders can be evil, the paladins are good but not high up in the hierarchy).

The Church of the Silver Flame in Eberron is like that, too (a mix of good guys, zealots and corrupt priests).

Like A Man In Black said, it takes some of the oomph out of it when it says right in the campaign book "Hey, these guys look like they're good, but they're really evil".

[Lago PARANOIA]

Mostly, I think it's avoided because everyone DOES do it... in their home campaign. So it's kind of unnecessary to write it up. But yeah, a church with actual paladins is kind of hard to work as "secretly evil, visibly good." Paladins will notice their loss of abilities for constantly supporting evil even if they don't actually detect their companions as evil.

I do think it's kind of funny that we refuse to even acknowledge 4E's fundamental changes to the alignment system to the point where we're talking about 2E-3E specific alignment quirks as if they were True All The Time.

[Doom]

Not just alignment, a paladin (sic) of 4e really doesn't have much in common with paladins of D&D.

And that's the real issue. Unless you specifically say 4e, many people will assume you're talking about the D&D of the past 30 years, as opposed to the 4e thing.

[Vebyast]

A fun related idea, which is easier to pull off: invert the pattern. Convince the party that one of the major churches is this, despite it being completely contrary to all evidence (and, in fact, contrary to reality). The more extreme the party's reaction the better.

For example, I once had a party totally convinced that there was a CN god named VecnaPelor, who was using the Vecna and Pelor personae as strawmen to keep the good and evil pantheons in perfect balance. Of course, all of this was total bull, based on some extemporization after a flubbed decipher script roll in the bottom of an illuminati ruin. It was beautiful. They didn't trust a cleric for the rest of the game. The party's cleric of Pelor actually changed deities because of it.

It's easier to do because you don't actually have to change anything in the campaign setting. The churches and gods are all behaving exactly as they do in the book, for exactly the reasons described in the book. The only thing you have to do is have some widely-separated ancient ruins do this, or have the big bad tell the party about his conspiracy theory to mess them up.

[A Man In Black]

A fun related idea, which is easier to pull off: invert the pattern.

For some reason, this reminds me of a discussion of paladins (LG 3e-style paladins) of Asmodeus on the Paizo boards, and how James Jacobs barged in with "You're doing it wrong!"

[Thymos]

Well, I think part of it is to not make the church actually evil. Let them have paladins, let them have good guys and also let them have corrupt bastards as well. That way the church is conflicted, and probably better set up for adventurers.

The ptolus one for example has the paladins, which are good seperated from the leaders, which aren't.

[TOZ]

I've always thought it would be interesting if when people actually got to the top of Celestia, they found it was just like hell and their souls got shredded to feed the power of the good gods. Making them just as evil as the other gods, and propaganda being the only reason they aren't viewed the same as the evil gods

[TavishArtair]

Mostly, I think it's avoided because everyone DOES do it... in their home campaign. So it's kind of unnecessary to write it up. But yeah, a church with actual paladins is kind of hard to work as "secretly evil, visibly good." Paladins will notice their loss of abilities for constantly supporting evil even if they don't actually detect their companions as evil.

I do think it's kind of funny that we refuse to even acknowledge 4E's fundamental changes to the alignment system to the point where we're talking about 2E-3E specific alignment quirks as if they were True All The Time.

4e's alignment system is totally inconsequential, so I don't see a reason to consider it. Sure, you can have an evil church in 4e just fine, because once someone is invested with divine power there's no "hooks," no ways to pull it back. You can't punish bad behaviour. So 4e clerics and paladins have even less of an obligation to their community than a 3e wizard did, since at least runaway exploitation of his defining class feature required a town that didn't shoot him on sight. And honestly, at that point I'd rather just get rid of the concepts of churches and temples as having special magical powers unique to them at all, to underscore how they are just another organization.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I've always thought it would be interesting if when people actually got to the top of Celestia, they found it was just like hell and their souls got shredded to feed the power of the good gods. Making them just as evil as the other gods, and propaganda being the only reason they aren't viewed the same as the evil gods

That's actually the default. They use nicer and gentler language but in the end your souls feed either your god or the essence of the plane if you aren't a follower of a god. Being sufficiently badass might buy you some reprieve as a proxy or outsider of some sort, but in the end your soul is toast.

[TOZ]

I don't know, maybe it's cause I haven't read Manual of the Planes, but I never got that impression from any of the books.