Listen to the Rain

Haven't used that icon in a while. I finished Shadows of Amn but I need to get back to Throne of Bhaal.

So in my constant jumping around from RPG project to project, I've recently been trying to modify True20 to fit my design sensibilities and am thinking about running a game in the grey box-era Forgotten Realms with it (1351 DR or so), and one of the things I'm running headlong into are the fundamental assumptions underpinning D&D religion. D&D has clerics, who are literally Bishop Odo and Bishop Tilpin crossed with Abraham Van Helsing. In original D&D a holy symbol was just a cross, and a lot of cleric spells replicate miracles from either Tanakh or the Christian Bible. A cleric is a devoted servant of their god, spreading the word and attempting to enact their god's agenda within the world. But this all takes place in an explicitly polytheistic worlds where each god has their own area of influence.

The devotion to a single god that shows up in official material, the way D&D religion is like thirty different monotheisms that all happen to be side-by-side, is one of the weirdest parts to me. I was telling sashagee that you'll have the god of winter, who's all about freezing people to death and having wolves eat their crops, but then there'll be a temple of winter built in a market town, where every Sunday people come to hear winter sermons from the winter priest, who was appointed to his position by the local winter bishop. And the followers of winter wear furs even in summer to demonstrate their devotion, and maybe if there's a writer who's given enough word count they'll have some kind of Midwinter holiday celebration described. But why do people do this? What do they get out of it? What's so great about winter and in a polytheistic world why wouldn't you do what real-world polytheists do and consult specific gods for specific problems. Well, it's because the god of winter is the center of their devotion, right? They have faith.

And that's the problem. Faith, for the overwhelming majority of human history and for the majority of existing human religions, is secondary to practice. That's not to say it's pointless--Islam has the shahada and Judaism has Maimonides's "Thirteen Principles of Faith," for example--but especially in Forgotten Realms, the current official D&D setting, faith is the most important principle. The gods derive their power directly from the faith of their worshippers, which is why clerics go out and try to proselytize--gods who have no followers vanish. Faith is of ultimate importance.

In the real world, though, what usually matters is specific acts. In Roman state religion, the form of the rituals was of ultimate importance, to the point where a mistake made in the words recited invalidated the entire ritual. There's an elemental of this in Judaism as well, in the way we interpret the Third Commandment. Not taking G-d's name in vain does not mean not saying "G-d damn it," it means not using G-d's name heedlessly or frivolously, such as by prayers that are unnecessary or to no purpose, so there are entire lists of foods and what specific blessing they call for you don't use the wrong blessing and thus say G-d's name in vain.

Modern people often have a "try your best, G-d will understand" attitude about things, but that is not historical. The gods had expectations that things would be done a particular way, in the same way that if I went to see a performance of Hamlet I'd expect the "To be or not to be" speech to be in verbatim. The belief of the priest or the worshippers did not matter in the least. But there's little sense that D&D clerics really do any sort of rituals. There's no sacrifices, there might be daily prayers but it's often not clear, and while sometimes this is described I've rarely seen it actually portrayed. There are few strictures that don't relate to usable weapons and armor. Second edition had some of this with its specialty priests, but 5e doesn't have anything like that since clerics are divided by their granted domain, and there's nothing mechanically to differentiate one cleric with the Arcana domain from another. They aren't religions in the ancient sense. The religious duty of a cleric is turning undead and casting cure light wounds.

The other major Protestantism of D&D religion is how top-heavy it is. Protestant Christianity has the trinity and...well, that's it. Ancient religion was absolutely filled with a vibrant spiritual ecology, with gods of major concepts like "the ocean" or "the underworld" all the way down to gods of "the city I live in" or "the lake we fish from" or "my family" and basically everything smaller than a major concept is completely missing from D&D. What would have been ancient local gods, dryads and naiads and so on, are physical beings in D&D with stats who can be killed. There are no city gods the way that the Egyptian city of Thebes had Amun, Mut, and Khons as the gods of the city. There are barely any spirits at all as ancient people would have understood the term.

This means there are no gods whose area is limited. Ancient peoples believed that even powerful gods had geographic limitations to their power. You can clearly see this even in Tanakh:

"Meanwhile, the officials of the king of Aram advised him, “Their gods are gods of the hills. That is why they were too strong for us. But if we fight them on the plains, surely we will be stronger than they."
-1 Kings 20:23

The ancient idea of omnipotence was not the ability to do literally anything, it was the ability to exert power in all places, and this was not common. Gods were local and tribal. I know this is ignored so that clerics aren't stuck in a particular area and can travel to wherever the adventure is, but local deities is part of interesting local culture.

In Chiyoda, the local rice god Sanbai lives up on a mountain, and the point of the Mibu-no-Hanadaue festival is to alert him that the rice-planting has commenced and call him down from the mountain to assist. Official D&D does not have anything like this.

I get the sense that a lot of people aren't interested in it, though. They want D&D primarily for character drama and cultural exploration is low on their list, if it even exists. I'm reminded of this post I wrote from the author who thinks that picking a race in D&D should be like picking a Fortnite skin and they should all be completely interchangeable. That attitude is completely alien to me but it exists. The number of people interested in a more accurate depiction of ancient religion is always going to be smaller than the people who want to make a cleric of the God Of Granting Flamestrike 3x A Day.