Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 75th Game WISH column:
A lot of neogamers I play with are uncomfortable with taking real religions and putting them into play. With all the 'Satanist' backlash against D&D that there’s been, do you feel comfortable having any religion in your games? Do you scrub it of anything controversial?
Well, now. This is a topic on which I have so much to say, that I hardly know where to begin, nor am I certain (even after thinking about it on and off for most of a week) that I can really say it coherently. But I'll give it a shot.
First and foremost, I select my players from a pool of friends, all of whom, I think would be more likely to make arrogant finger-flicking "get away from me!" motions at anyone who came around talking about Satanism than to be concerned in any way. This is the benefit to gaming as an adult, with adult friends, rather than in my mother's kitchen with a bunch of high school ageed friends.
(And for the record, while I was intellectually aware that some idiots considered the games as Satanic, I went to a Catholic high school. We had a faculty moderator for the wargaming club. Had we felt it necessary, instead of gathering at various private homes, he would have sponsored a role playing games club, too. The "Satanic backlash" thing was an intellectual curiosity for me that I never quite understood on a gut level.)
That said, I usually do not strive to put moedrn day religions into my games, but I usually make an attempt to put some religion in, where appropriate. In my Amber game, Sins of the Fathers, one of my players proposed a daughter of Corwin who is religiously Muslim, but my Amber is most irreligious. I have put some potential hooks into the game that might make that background important, but I haven't decided whether or not to exercise them.
In my Nobilis game, In Media Res, there's certainly a lot more religious imagery. After all, the functional equivalent of Noble politics is religious. I don't want to go into too many details, though, because I don't want to ruin things for the players, if and when any of it becomes significant.
So that leaves things more along the lines of my older, more traditional type of fantasy games. Now, those readers who don't know me personally should know that on my worst days I'm a sneering atheist, and on my best days I'm a bitter, cynical agnostic. Or maybe that's best and worst, respectively. Regardless, man's fundamental quest for understanding his place in the universe has traditionally caused a flowering of religion. I cannot conceive of a convincing culture, fantasy or otherwise, that doesn't have some sort of religious schools of thought. So, in order to have a culture that even begins to ring true, I need to design a religion or three that goes along with it.
The problem is, that's not as easy as it sounds... if it sounds easy to you. It doesn't, to me. In a fantasy game, I usually end up putting religion last, because it's so dependent on everything else. It turns out, I'm fairly allergic to putting real-world religions in my standard fantasy games, but not because I'm afraid of offending anyone. Just because it doesn't feel right.
I'm certainly allergic to anything that smacks of the old Deities and Demigods style of religions in games. Ieugh. Yes, let's assign statistics to our gods and hve them prancing around the countryside like monsters. Ieugh. Even dressed up in terms like avatars and placing them on various hard to reach planes of existence, it still strikes me as twee. It's similarly hard for me to imagine anything really closely resembling Christianty or Islam or even Buddhism springing up in the presence of real, repeatable, magic, so other than as a general inspiration.
That leaves me with constructing my own. Which, as I said, is harder to do than it is to describe. My own tendency, these days, is to design worlds which, like ours (at least to my agnostic/atheist eyes) offer no solid proof of divinity anywhere, becuase I can't figure out what a society would look like if there really were solid proof of gods. I can't figure out what religions would pop up if you had anything even resembling the D&D standard inner planes/outer planes superfluity of divine and infernal creatures.
I have a lot of future campaign ideas clunking around in my head at any one given time. I've got at least one, if not two, for Nobilis alone, probably a decent one for Amber (better than my current one, I think) and scads and scads of self-contradictory ideas for more standard fantasy games. A lot of them are religious-themed, though, so clearly there's something in the back of my brain that wants to be expressed, experimented with, or tinkered with.
One of them is a sort of an exposition on some of the also-rans of religious history. I've had the hankering to design a world where the basic culture conflict was between a mostly Gnostic-inspired people and a mostly Hindu-inspired people. Another, now that I think about it, would be something of a personal challenge-- start with some stripped-back, mostly manageable version of the D&D "theology" at least to the point of having demons or devils around in some degree, and a few other like creatures, and then designing motives for the supernaturals that are reasonable, and mortal religions around it all, without making anything stupid, corny, or trite.
By my reckoning, I will have time to run that first idea in 2015, and the second idea perhaps by 2022.
Posted by John Novak at December 9, 2003 11:38 PM