Religion is use

[deaddmwalking]

Of course, humans and whatever oher races are in the settings have spirits as well. So you can just worship people and they'll become living gods.

Under your proposed system, is there any reason why a cleric shouldn't always choose to worship themselves?

[Emerald]

Personally, I think that's overly-reductive; the existence of the Dread Necromancer class doesn't render Clerics of Nerull redundant anymore than the existence of the Fire Mage class renders Sorcerers, Warlocks, Warmages, Wizards, or Wu Jen redundant, because they do different things in different ways at different levels of complexity.

The cleric 'chassis' isn't very flexible. If you think that you should have a priestly order of Necromancers that isn't quite like the Dread Necromancer, you can actually come up with a class that represents that. I'm going to guess that as you start thinking about your class there are a lot of elements that you'd be willing to start tossing aside that are part of the existing cleric. You might not care about 3/4 BAB; you might not care about heavy armor; you might not care about the d8 HD. You might end up with something that really looks more like a flavor of wizard for the chassis, but ends up having some unique flavor that really captures what your priest of super not-quite-dead things ought to be. When you dump those other abilities you can add things like sacrificing sentient beings for buffs to saving throws and/or hit points as class abilities, etc.

Fundamentally, a priest of undeath has more in common with a Dread Necromancer than with a priest of butterflies and happy thoughts - trying to make them fit the class is absurd when you think about it for any length of time. The only reason to do otherwise is tradition!*.

*I'm the papa.

Chassis-wise, yeah, the Cloistered Cleric exists, so the idea of a less tanky cleric works just fine. I'm not saying that the specific 3/4-BAB-and-a-mace cleric necessarily has to exist, just that D&D has plenty of broad classes and narrow classes that overlap with each other to various extents and that's basically fine, so claiming that the cleric shouldn't exist because there are similar classes out there doesn't make much sense.

Now, you could make the argument that all classes should be narrow, so the wizard should be split into 8 or so school-based specialist casters, the druid should be split into a bunch of nature themed casters plus a shapeshifter and a beastmaster, and so forth, and that's an eminently reasonable position. But that would lead to splitting the cleric up into a bunch of classes too, as you suggested, not ditching it and just giving every religion a sort-of-close class to serve as their main priest class.

The concept behind D&D paladins and clerics is essentially the same thing. Even as a person who is habitually a cleric player, I probably wouldn't cry if the class was dissolved. Sure, there's space for the high priest who has miracles or a crazy prophet likewise, but that isn't anything a wizard class couldn't handle.

Paladins and clerics both fall under the "holy warrior" umbrella, but they're distinct enough in terms of flavor (lone crusading warrior vs. servant of the faith) and mechanics (lots of passive buffs, auras, etc. vs. active spells) that they can still support their own classes.

A beguiler, bard, spellthief, factotum, and UMD-using rogue all technically fit under the "Cha- and Int-focused guy with good skills and arcane magic" umbrella, but they all have different amounts of magic, different sets of skills, different theme-supporting class features, and so forth, so collapsing them into one class would lose a lot of that variety.


I guess in general I'm not really in favor of dropping or merging classes in favor of other classes when you can just have more classes; sure, split them up or tweak them if necessary, but the end result of "You don't need X, you can just play a Y" boils down to just a few monolithic Fightan Guy, Magic Guy, and Magic Fightan Guy classes, and that defeats the whole purpose of using a class system where every class has its own mechanics and playstyle.

[OgreBattle]

Gods as an extension of human psyche or an aspect of the self is another option

So not just worshipping yourself but becoming an avatar of a concept that’s not necessarily another historic being

[Chamomile]

Let's say we're going with the "split everything into a bunch of little classes" option, because that is the option which has every advantage except for requiring much more work to accomplish. We're definitely going to want a Healer class, and then...

And then what else do we want out of the Cleric's design space that isn't just a Paladin?

[Username17]

Let's say we're going with the "split everything into a bunch of little classes" option, because that is the option which has every advantage except for requiring much more work to accomplish. We're definitely going to want a Healer class, and then...

And then what else do we want out of the Cleric's design space that isn't just a Paladin?

Depends on how small the classes are. I could definitely see someone telling me that there's a "Healer" that specializes in healing magic, and a "White Mage" that specializes in abjuration magic, and a "Rune Priest" that specialize in buffing magic. That wouldn't seem weird. Indeed, when you look at he many things that the D&D basic Cleric does, you find many things you could hang a class around. Cleric magic does: Healing, Banishment, Protection, Demon Summoning, Ally-Buffing, Biblical-Themed Smiting, and Oracular Divination. I would submit that you could make a perfectly reasonable class that focused on any one of those seven things, and indeed that you could mix and match any of the 21 different two-theme combinations and make a class around that. Like, you could imagine a class that summoned an angel and then kept it going with healing magic right? Or a class that did oracular divinations and fought with curses and doom saying?

What there's no need for is a class that does all of those things and is also a heavily armored warrior. That's both too specific and too broad. CoDzilla wasn't a description of a character class that was too powerful - it was a description of a character class that shat all over the role protection of other character archetypes.

And when you come down to it: there's no reason for Yathinstree and Saint Cuthbert to be the same character class. Those characters aren't expected to do the same things in or out of combat - so creating a character class that gives all the abilities integral to both character concepts does nothing except create the CoDzilla problem. Where a character can do their thing, but if it becomes for some reason important to show up one of the other characters they can go off script and also outperform one of the other characters in their area of expertise. That shit isn't fun and undermines every advantage a class system has.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Let's say we're going with the "split everything into a bunch of little classes" option, because that is the option which has every advantage except for requiring much more work to accomplish. We're definitely going to want a Healer class, and then...

And then what else do we want out of the Cleric's design space that isn't just a Paladin?

You don't need a healer class, and in fact, you don't want just one.

In any 3.x game, there are like 20 base classes that you could potentially choose, but someone ALWAYS has to play the cleric. Even if they're Evil McUndead Commander, they end up with healing as something they're expected to do. A few groups will get a wand or otherwise try to bypass the problem, but since clerics can do everything given a chance to pray for spells, you always need one.

There's no reason a barbarian couldn't get a 'second wind' ability that let them grunt and groan while raging to recover some number of lost hit points. There's no reason that a bard's access to healing magic couldn't come earlier. There's no reason a Ranger couldn't make a Knowledge Nature check and Heal check to find Kingsfoil and an hour to remove poison or energy drain.

A priest of the god of wrestling doesn't have any more thematic justification to healing magic than a fighter.

[Harshax]

Glorantha handles religion best. It’s arguable all about religion. Your culture + cult affiliations determine your starting skill set and available powers. Advancing in cult hierarchy gives you more credibility in your home town, access to more cool powers and access to mythic quests that can potentially change you or the world around you.

Cults have intricate associations of allied and enemy deities. You worship the thunder god, who is friends with the trickster god because mythic adventuring reasons. You get thunder god spells and one or two trickster spells.

There is zero deus ex machina in Glorantha. Even during mythic quests, you are assuming the guise of your god. Ideally, your enemies are assuming the guise of your god’s mythical enemy. So even highly personal quests and goals have a built in reason for a major NPC to be the bbeg at the end the f a mythic adventure.

It’s all really good, except it is a lot of work to setup the gods and their conflicts and and get players to care. Glorantha isn’t the best model for D&D either, because anyone can have magic powers, just by doing quests for their cult. multiclassing in the 3X paradigm doesn’t cover this idea, because members of the death cult are straight up fighters, with powers that let them confirm criticals, sever souls, and should permanently destroy undead.

Even wizards have cults and those cults have cultural control of related spells, but in Glorantha ‘wizard’ is just the nomenclature for ‘cleric’ from a different culture.

[Hicks]

Honestly, I think if you're going to have a separate "divine caster class" be it's own separate thing, the 2e model for priestly spheres combined with a roleplaying hook per sphere or per diety would be ideal. Each diety would have a list of virtues and vices that conform to the tennats of their worship.... and those would superceded a virtue and vice that the sphere divorced from a deity would have. Like the fire sphere demands burnt offerings as a virtue and extinguishing flames as a sin... but Ra's expectations have nothing to do with that.

[OgreBattle]

A priest of the god of wrestling doesn't have any more thematic justification to healing magic than a fighter.

Wrestlemassaging a dying man back to life sounds great

[Harshax]

A priest of the god of wrestling doesn't have any more thematic justification to healing magic than a fighter.

Wrestlemassaging a dying man back to life sounds great

Father Nelson’s Full Recovery is a 5th level spell.

[DrPraetor]

There is a lot of talking at cross-purposes due to muddy thinking.

There is no objective answer to what should be a different class. In a villain RPG, where everyone plays an evil spellcaster, you might want a Necromancer and a Death Priest to be different classes, with synergistic abilities to animate corpses and to bless/buff undead. In a typical D&D-type setting, that results in either a ridiculous class-plosion where you have Spider Priests and Venom Mages and Bards who are different from Skalds and so on; or, you get round pegs in square holes as the Skald and Spider Priest are both "clerics". Personally, I like handing out "priest" as a kit, so a Bard adds Hallow/Unhallow to his spell list to become a Skald, and a Venom Mage adds them to her spell list to become a Spider Priestess, and so on. But that is a personal preference and not a universal optimum.

Most of the previous paragraph is beside the point, though, because it does nothing to answer more fundamental questions, like - what purpose does having a religion serve in this shared work of fiction, and is it fulfilling that purpose well? It's worth taking a step back from the assumptions made in D&D - which are simultaneously anachronistic and ahistorical and also bad for the shared fiction.

Glorantha doesn't go the route I would like but at least it's relevant to the question. It varies a lot across editions, but Glorantha has between 1 and 4 religions, depending on how you look at it.

From one perspective, Glorantha has only one religion, because both pseudo-animist spirits and celestial spell-granting deities are objectively real phenomena. People will be members of different cults, but original versions of Rune Quest only had one pantheon. Even later versions don't differ among pantheons, in the sense that even different polytheistic religions differ, in their content or in the roles of their priests; as for example a Roman Flamen and the various priestly roles in traditional Chinese religion are very different.

Now, as a kid I really liked the different Glorantha magic/religion systems.

You had shamanic/battle magic, that you got from animist spirits. You had rune/divine magic, granted by remote deities. You had sorcery, which was a pseudo-atheistic thing. These were practiced by different societies that took a dim view of one another's magical practices, to varying degrees. There was also a team chaos although you didn't play those guys. Rune Quest itself is a train wreck, but let's talk Glorantha.

All the rune priests are basically the same, even if they get different spell lists. Whether this really counts as four religions or not, it's got some breadth of conceptual space and it integrates the magic and religion pretty completely, which is more satisfactory if you want a setting that seems better grounded in history and folklore. But did they serve the needs of the game better than D&D? Probably not, because having the elves get instructions from their plant goddess and having the dwarf want to do whatever sorcerer stuff didn't support group story-telling. Most versions of Glorantha aren't very well thought-out, in spite of all the setting material that's been churned out in 45 years (older than 2/3 of the world's population, by my rough estimate.)

But, comparing Glorantha and Greyhawk moves at least a bit along the kind of degrees of freedom you ought to have.

[Harshax]

But, comparing Glorantha and Greyhawk moves at least a bit along the kind of degrees of freedom you ought to have.

D&D typically treats all clerics as monotheists. Leaving it up to players to decide how a priestess of Beory reacts to Hextor or Boccob, based on how close their worshipper's alignments align with their own.

Few Greyhawk books associated each religion to the culture from where it originated. You had to dig to find out what god was Baklunish for example. MC could try to tie it altogether to create pantheons, but D&D treats all clerics the same.

This is fuckall good for the MC, because the page count wasted on religion only gives you different colored vestments for the same Power Ranger.

Religions should be treated just like Kingdoms, competing guilds or merchant princes. Sects should have relationships with other sects, both good and bad. They setup common alliances, common foes, and grey areas where similarly allied religions have inter-pantheon conflicts. Even though the God of Wealth and Lust is allied within the same major pantheon, it is still at odds with the God of Poverty and Socialism. These priests might band together against a common foe, but revert to infighting when no common enemy threatens their existence. Religions support kingdoms or guilds, by giving them divine right or support them with their clergy and templars.

Maybe 30 years ago, there was a guy online named Tal Meta, that took the 4 major human pantheons of Greyhawk and wrote up all the cults as RuneQuest priesthoods. He figured out how cults should be integrated as ally or foe.

Forgotten Realms did the whole kit thing to make every cleric a specialty priest, which was a default book at my table in order to keep things interesting. Being a priest of Garl Glittergold gave you access to to wizard's Illusion school and some thief powers. They were functionally different then the worshippers of Gruumsh and that added a lot of mechanical flavor to the game.

Even if the MC wants to only use one generic Cleric class, religions can still be useful to identify the goals, alliances and conflicts of organizations import to the campaign. Assuming D&D, the bare minimum work for the MC is to maybe make 9 sects, one for each alignment, paint broad strokes for the goals of each axis, then compare them to identity obvious or singular areas of agreement and conflicts. This can as simple as drawing Green, Yellow, Red or Grey Lines between these 9 cults to represent Allied, Associated, Enemy or Neutral relationships.

The Player can be free to add in a religion by simply choosing an alignment, and two Domains. The MC just pops the new religion in to the bare bones established previously and sketches high level associations between the new cult and the existing religions. As the campaign expands, the MC can introduce local cults in the same way, to enhance the story or add flavor, without having to waste time writing up a new pantheon to justify the existence of one class.

[DrPraetor]

Religions should...

why should religions work that way? Are you claiming this provides verisimilitude? Are you claiming this is good for running a game? Are you claiming this provides a somehow intrinsically more satisfying setting for the game, even if the "let's be a team of adventurers" premise is actively stymied?

The Player can be free to add in a religion by simply choosing an alignment, and two Domains.

Is the second part meant to be an explanation of why the first part "should" be how things work? As in, the stuff you say religions "should" do somehow enable player characters to slot in procedurally generated religions? Because I don't see the connection, but also adding "Flamen of Shango" who have Artifice and Storm domains, is not adding a new religion, it's just adding a new deity to an existing religion/pantheon. Furthermore, if you're grafting the Flamen of Shango onto a poorly-thought-out pseudo-Olympian religion, you haven't answered the question of why your game world has or wants such a pantheon in the first place!

If you examine most D&D settings with any care, the answer to "why do we have this pantheon?" is the ass-backwards, "so that the clerics have someone to worship."

I admit that letting players generate new cults - along with new nationalities and so forth - and fill in character background for themselves in that way is often desirable in a high fantasy game. It's both player-empowering and (potentially) DM-labor-saving.

[Harshax]

why should religions work that way? Are you claiming this provides verisimilitude? Are you claiming this is good for running a game? Are you claiming this provides a somehow intrinsically more satisfying setting for the game, even if the "let's be a team of adventurers" premise is actively stymied?

Yes and Yes and Yes (personally) and No.

I'm inclined to treat big details about a campaign world like Chekhov's Gun. If you're going to bother to fill out a pantheon it must, at some point, be important to the narrative. Otherwise, why waste the word count putting that in your game? If MC intends to run a game where the religious orders of the world aren't stakeholders in the campaign's story arc, then just let player's madlib the name of their cleric's deity, pick two domains and skip all the rest of the detail.

You definitely don't need religious orders to exist in the campaign to justify the existence of clerics. You only need it to justify conflicts. And, if done thoughtfully, the prewritten religious choices for Team Adventurer shouldn't be stymied to any more degree than say trying to have a Necromancer and a Paladin be in the same party. I mean, at some point players need to sit down and come up with a cohesive team. So letting the party clerics fill in the details of who they worship and who their religious allies and enemies are should follow along the same premise that puts all the players on the same team in the first place.

Personally, I like using cults to color code Team Monster. The Serpent People gods and the Devil Worshippers and the Four Horseman are all fun to dress up thematically, with specific spells, vestments, goals and artifacts. Having shit like that in the game gives lore nerds a chance to learn specific strengths and vulnerabilities each cult might possess. You wouldn't prep sticks to snakes if you're assaulting the temple of Set, because Knowledge: Religion would tell you that all serpents, magic or otherwise, are automatically allied with his priests.

[Username17]

As an example, let's talk about the four religions in the Orientalist Fantasy Thread. The intention is that all four of them set up monasteries, nominally support the empire, train their own soldiers, and mostly tolerate each other.

One of the things to remember about religion in fantasy is that generally "faith" isn't asking for much. The afterlife and divine beings are demonstrably real. Being an "atheist" has to have a different meaning altogether if Zeus is right over there. And so the religions in your fantasy world are able to have the kinds of evidence-based arguments that scientists have today. If there are different religions, that's something you have to explain. Religion A probably can't deny the validity of Religion B, because Religion B's mystical mumbo jumbo provably works.

This is where the "One Truth, Four Ways" doctrine becomes really helpful. The different religions in our Orientalist Fantasy Empire worship different things but don't deny the existence of the magical things worshipped by the other religions.

The first on offer does an Ancestor Worship deal. So obviously, if the afterlife is contactable then what the dead want is objectively verifiable with necromancy. The sales pitch of the pyramid scheme of satisfying your ancestors with gifts and relying upon your own descendants to do the same for you has obvious appeal. This provides structure and stability to the empire. Necromancers allow people to speak with the honored dead and give people hope that if they keep their nose clean that future generations will set aside grave gifts for them. This makes maintaining a status of "honored dead" after death very important to people, which will make them want to get their infractions discharged during life. The necromancer priest is a confessor, a medium, and an organizer of major holidays.

The second on offer does the worship of animist spirits representing plant and animal totems. Now the big thing of course is that it's a fantasy game so the spirits are provably real and can genuinely be helpful or destructive. The rituals used to appease the spirits genuinely work and failing to do them carries material rather than social consequences. The priest who comes and blesses your crops in the name of the crow spirits is not a cultural affectation, they are a specialist contractor who provides a service with real results.

Then you got the monks who study the flow of chi. They have water chi, wind chi, and fire chi and they can genuinely do stuff with that, And while they don't enforce a structure onto society and the calendar the way the previous two religions do, these chi monks have real powers including the ability to heal wounds. These priests then become trusted doctors and experts. They ask for the feng shui of town to be adjusted by moving ponds and people do it because they don't want to get cholera.

And finally you have the priests of the celestial sphere. These behave most like the priests in our world because while Celestials are definitely real, they also mostly don't interact with the mortal world. Celestial events clearly happen, but whole years can go by without a province experiencing a typhoon or earthquake. The divine visit and make proclamations, but they don't appear on demand and individual villagers might go their whole lives without actually seeing a daeva.

-Username17

[Harshax]

One of the things to remember about religion in fantasy is that generally "faith" isn't asking for much. The afterlife and divine beings are demonstrably real. Being an "atheist" has to have a different meaning altogether if Zeus is right over there. And so the religions in your fantasy world are able to have the kinds of evidence-based arguments that scientists have today. If there are different religions, that's something you have to explain. Religion A probably can't deny the validity of Religion B, because Religion B's mystical mumbo jumbo provably works.

If worshippers of Thor and Ogun and Zeus can’t refute their god’s command over weather and thunder, because their priests can obviously call lightning you move the goal posts for means of cult propagation from one of suppressing heretics to secularly culture and economic ones. At the end of the day, the Zeus worshippers have absolute certainty that their rapey bull with lightning for testicles has lead them to prosperity and half-god bastards. Their success leads to a population explosion and when they start looking to occupy the fertile lands over there, already inhabited by people who swear oaths to that ginger short-handled-hammer thrower, they may have one of two responses: They’ll decide that Zeus just needed to put on a heavy winter coat and had to change his appetite for worship in the cold north. And when they migrate there, they’ll keep calling him Thor in your language, but will continue to keep calling him Zeus in our own. Alternatively, the priests will be so invested economically in raising bulls for sacrifice and virigin molestation that they’ll think it is their duty to spread the good the word and supplant Thor’s worship with Zeus.

This is where the "One Truth, Four Ways" doctrine becomes really helpful. The different religions in our Orientalist Fantasy Empire worship different things but don't deny the existence of the magical things worshipped by the other religions.

In your setting, the Four Ways are all allied. The sum of worship from all their cults equate to divine and secular power. From my read, I don’t see a heavenly reason for the ancestor worshippers from two different cultures to ever fight over spiritual resources. In fact, priests would actively suppress antithetical opinions that the people over there are heretics to our belief over here because they perform ancestor worship differently.

But then, how does non-competing beliefs deal with secular greed and avarice and other human foibles? Imagine a merchant here, wanting to expand his economic empire by marketing incense sticks to an untapped market. If he’s immoral, or worse: his ancestors made their fortunes immorally and thereby justifies his actions as faithful, he might sabotage paper manufacturers in another town, where ancestor worship involves exquisite paper folding and origami burning. He starts peddling his incense sticks and the locals, knowing that ancestor worship is a divine constant, start buying his products because they no longer have origami art available to appease great-great-grandpa.

So, what is the divine value of worship? Where is the conflict?

In Greyhawk, you have people worshipping Hextor and Heironeous. They’ll never ever be friends. That kind of setup is the typical boolean condition for constant strife. Unless there is some existential threat arrives to unwind them both, players can only choose one to be on Team Adventurer.

In Orientalist Fantasy, you still need a conflict to justify putting religion in the setting in the first place. What does it mean when someone upends the status quo of religion in the Orientalist Empire?

I imagine at some point you’re also going to introduce a fractured managerie of counter cults representing “Many Ways, One Deception”. Demons, angry ghosts and those seeking supreme power driven to reforge, disrupt or simply unmake the One Truth. A pious merchant would never justify profit through immoral means knowing that disrupting divine harmony would open portals to oni and hopping vampires. Maybe the pious merchant was possessed by some errant angry ghost or demon? Maybe there’s a secret network of rebels who hope to benefit from the patronage of a powerful Demon to overthrow the government? Maybe the merchant is part of a much larger conspiracy to overthrown reality?

[OgreBattle]

I think the romans liked to find equivalents, “oh their lightning god is their version of our...”

There’s some neat artwork of Egyptian gods in Roman clothing when the Roman Empire conquered them

We also got history of Egyptian Set going from guardian to enemy or Pharoah Obama pushing Atem over all other gods

[Thaluikhain]

Don't know about the Romans, but when Herodotus was writing about the Persians, he expressly described their god Ahura Mazda as their system's Zeus.

The Romans would also sometimes pray to enemy gods before a battle, and promise them a bigger temple if they changed sides. Which says a lot about their view of the divine.

[OgreBattle]

So something I’m not clear on, did greeks or romans view their pantheons as historic truth watching them like how Simpsons Christians do, or did they view it more like being a hardcore fan of a certain band, a good luck ritual, a metaphor for human psyche?

[Thaluikhain]

Depends, attitudes varied.

On one hand, there were things you flat out did not do because it'd annoy the gods. Kings had a certain divine right to rule, you could overthrow them and install yourself as tyrant, but you'd better keep the people on side because they'd put up with things from a king they'd not accept from a tyrant. When the Athenians drove out their tyrant dynasty and replaced it with a new democratic system, they didn't have a king. So one of the official positions running the government each year was called the king (the "Archon Basileus"), and out in charge of certain religious things so they could have it both ways.

They promised to sacrifice a goat for each Persian they killed before the battle of Marathon. The victory was bigger than expected, about 6,400 or so Persians were killed and they didn't have enough goats, so they sacrificed a set number each year until they repayed it all. Their Spartan allies missed the battle as they were in the middle of a religious festival and they couldn't send a general beyond their borders until it was over. They did want to get involved, so they had their general spend the festival just barely on their side of the border and their force marched as soon as it was over and arrived just in time to help frighten the Persian fleet away from Athens.

Sometime later, the Delian League treasury was housed in the temple of Athena in Athens cause nobody would dare steal from there (in theory).

On the other hand, whilst the Greek gods were being worshiped, Greek philosophers could sit and ponder their nature and not get murdered for talking about it. The theory that Zeus (et al) wasn't a god, but an ancient king of legend whose story got embellished (possibly Zeus or the Zeus dynasty overthrew Kronos or their dynasty who overthrew Uranus or theirs) was an ancient idea.

Vergil's Aeneid is basically Trojan War fanfic, and took quite some liberties with the old stories. This didn't get in the way of praising Augustus and the Romans in general.

Now, been ages sine I studies this, so I might have some details wrong, but in general I think it's fair to say that attitudes varied a lot from person to person and generation to generation. During the Roman Republic it was common for people to complain that their customs and religion weren't being upheld properly anymore, which means you had very different ideas on the subject.

[Blicero]

So something I’m not clear on, did greeks or romans view their pantheons as historic truth watching them like how Simpsons Christians do, or did they view it more like being a hardcore fan of a certain band, a good luck ritual, a metaphor for human psyche?

The answer I usually see put forward is "it's complicated".

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... elieve_in/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... n_ancient/

[Username17]

In Orientalist Fantasy, you still need a conflict to justify putting religion in the setting in the first place.

No.

You need conflict in the setting, but individual setting elements don't need to be sources of conflict. You need conflict to tell stories, but you also need setting and characters and events and shit. Conflict is necessary but not sufficient to tell stories. Religions can exist to do other things than provide central conflicts of the stories.

In fact, one of the central premises of an RPG is that the player characters are working together. Which in turn not only doesn't require conflict to come from every potential source, it requires that conflict doesn't come from many sources. The player characters are going to be an ensemble and not in conflict with each other. This means that every selection that a player can make in character creation must be at least potentially compatible with every selection that the other players make.

In the Orientalist Fantasy, it's entirely possible for one player to be playing a Priest of the Ancestors while another player is playing a Celestial Path Monk. And that means that it is absolutely imperative that Priests and Monks of those two disciplines are not inherently in conflict.

-Username17

[Harshax]

In Orientalist Fantasy, you still need a conflict to justify putting religion in the setting in the first place.

No.

You need conflict in the setting, but individual setting elements don't need to be sources of conflict. You need conflict to tell stories, but you also need setting and characters and events and shit. Conflict is necessary but not sufficient to tell stories. Religions can exist to do other things than provide central conflicts of the stories.

In fact, one of the central premises of an RPG is that the player characters are working together. Which in turn not only doesn't require conflict to come from every potential source, it requires that conflict doesn't come from many sources. The player characters are going to be an ensemble and not in conflict with each other. This means that every selection that a player can make in character creation must be at least potentially compatible with every selection that the other players make.

In the Orientalist Fantasy, it's entirely possible for one player to be playing a Priest of the Ancestors while another player is playing a Celestial Path Monk. And that means that it is absolutely imperative that Priests and Monks of those two disciplines are not inherently in conflict.

-Username17

I never suggested that any Path in the Four Ways should be in conflict with other Paths. I suggested the Four Ways should be in conflict with something Not the Four Ways. Because the inherent question of establishing a Religion in the first place is, What the fuck does all this mean? Who or what am I? How do I get by in the world? Why is this way important? What happens if I don't follow this way? That last question is invaluable to defining Team Monster.

[rasmuswagner]

As I see it, there should just be magic-users.

Some magic-users are hermetic hackers, and learn spells from books, academia, and so forth.

Others are part of an organized religion, and learn their spells there; they have access to cool secret spells and young boys, but also have busybodies poking their nose in and judging them.

Still others are wanderings exorcists and intercessors to the "spirits" (whatever those are), and learn most of their spells from powerful spirits.

And Bob the Wizard can absolutely learn a spell from a dying priest, or be granted knowledge of Fire Enema by a Fire Spirit. Chuck the cleric can absolutely learn forbidden magic from Bob's Blasphemous Book, and Shaggy the Shaman can also do both.

[Harshax]

If none of the elements in the Campaign are in conflict with Team Adventurer, then all your plot points become immediately obvious to the point that you only get to run one Enemy Within campaign and every story after it will seem derivative.