Scars of War Dev Blog Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 696
You see, when most CRPG writers sit down to write up the religious lore for their game they generally do something like the following.
1. First, cycle through the basic elements or principles of existence, creating funny names and assigning Gods to those elements. Gods of Fire, Light, Nature, Being Mean to People, etc etc
2. Assign two dimensional personalities to these Gods based around their particular element. Fire Gods are quick-tempered, Life Gods are compassionate, Being Mean to People Gods tend to enjoy stealing your lunch money and kicking puppies.
3. Assign each God to a race. Because nothing says 3 dimensional lore quite like assigning a single overarching principle to an entire racial group. But hey, Elves are already scraping the bottom of the creativity barrel, why not go all out and assign a nature deity to them, one that is neutral even! Tradition demands it.
3. Make up some sort of creation myth involving these Gods. Something about how they get together in the beginning of time and create the world then each goes off and creates the initial members of their favored race. Later they probably all squabble with the God of Being Mean to People. And then maybe the other Gods triumph over him and lock him away where he can't possibly escape, unless the Orcs or Necromancers or whoever find his tomb and conduct a ritual requiring 5 pieces of a magic amulet/crystal/staff. Which get scattered across the world, instead of being safely locked away in the divine wall safe.
4. Done! Creativity redefined! Now you only have to assign spell lists to priests, which is easy '˜cause the Gods are already cleanly divided into neat categories.
Bleh. Missing the point, in my opinion. Even if you ignore the obvious lack of creativity stemming from the copy-pasting of Dungeons and Dragons. Religion in a setting isn't really about Gods, as strange as that sounds. It's about people. Specifically, how people interact with faith, with the concept of higher power/powers, with the struggle to understand the mysterious. How they try to reconcile these mysteries with the driving factors at play in the real world around them and their own existing mental framework. It's not the Gods that are the interesting part of the setting's religious framework, it's the people. In the above method, religious social structures are pretty much an afterthought, if they are thought of at all.
