This is something of a divergence, but as long as you were talking about a game where religion and belief played a major factor...

Does it bother anyone else that RPG worlds tend to be nearly monotheistic? Generally, either everyone believes in the same old legends and gods, or at most they worship different partucular gods but acknowledge the existence of the others. Now compare that to the massive plurality of real spiritual tradition.

What I think would be an interesting tack is a gameworld where magic and spirituality have a real and definite effect on the world and people - that is, wizards can bend reality and summon up powers from the void, devout clerics can heal and protect their followers, and so on - but nobody really agrees as to how or why it works.

For instance, the wizards could see magic as a purely mechanical thing - those in the proper state of mind can perceive and alter fundamental natural forces, as easily as ordinary men strike flint and steel to make sparks for fire. The clerics will insist that their abilities are granted them by their One True God - which means that wizards and clerics of other religions must be consorting with false gods. A shaman will say that his power comes from the ancestral spirits of the land, while an infernalist will readily admit to consorting with evil beings in exchange for temporal power. The average magic-user may not even care about how the power works: the incantations are simply passed-down wisdom and as unremarkable as day and night.

Now, obviously they''re all right to some extent - their power is real and visible. But how are these disparate ideas to be reconciled? The game could follow a young cleric as he travels the world on a quest to catalogue the evil sorceries of the infidel barbarians. But as he travels, he may come to question the assumption that all non-church magic is evil. Surely the folk remedies of the old herbalist do not amount to deals with the devil...?

The White Wolf games, when at their best, do a good job of portraying a world of many supernatural creatures and magics, each of which has its own ideas about how and why they exist and have their powers.

At any rate, it''s just something I wanted to throw out there.

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-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

quote:Does it bother anyone else that RPG worlds tend to be nearly monotheistic?

Dosnt bother me but I can say that one of the reasons that the god of my game ''turned'' was because of the numerous belief systems down on Eroya (what you would call earth )

quote:Just name your god fred and make sure its not a golden calf, a guy with a lot of arms, or that he died on the cross to forgive our sins (sorry, I''m only familiar with christianity ) and you should be FINE!!!

heh heh, fred haha lol


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