Gods and Religions Edition Welcome to /wbg/, the official thread for the discussion of in-progress settings for traditional games.Here is where you go to present and develop the details of your worlds such as lore, factions, magic and ecosystems. You can also post maps for your settings, as well as any relevant art (either created by you or used as inspiration for your work). Please remember that dialogue is what keeps the thread alive, so don't be afraid of giving someone feedback!Last Thread: >>93183334Resources for Newfags: https://sites.google.com/view/wbgeneral/Worldbuilding links: https://pastebin.com/JNnj79S5https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/Eo+fK41FKVR7xDpbNO0a0N4k0YYxrmyrhX3VxnM14Ew/Fantasy map generator: https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generatorThread questions:>What are the major faiths in your setting? And what are the gods of said faiths?>How do you create a religion that people will believably worship, regardless of whether the god(s) in question actually exist or not? And where do you look for inspiration besides Christianity?>Speaking of gods, how do you make your gods and pantheons, and where do you look for inspiration on those?>What role do clerics and other religious officials have in society, and what powers do they have, mystical or otherwise? What about their holy garbs?>Lastly, given the date (Happy Fourth of July, BTW), are there any gods with particular ties to a city or nation in your setting, like Lady Liberty or Uncle Sam for the US, and how do you come up with religious festivals, wedding traditions, funeral traditions, etc.?
>>93248678I just cribbed from Demon Souls. There's a religion for miracles and a religion for sorcery, but they don't know they worship the same demon. Though instead of the Old One, the demon is Yaldabaoth, crafter of the physical realm. I've been enjoying researching gnosticism and kabbalah as my religious inspirations. Similar enough to be familiar with both Christianity and Buddhism, but esoteric enough to feel unique. I know a bunch of other games have used gnostic concepts before, but that doesn't mean a given audience is particularly familiar with them.
>>93246202General specific islands are either an archipelago (the result of a volcano moving with the pacific plate, a great example being Hawaii), or an Atoll (the ring of a submerged volcano), or occasionally a sandbar (just a bunch of sand being tossed into a locale.
>>93241569Are they the Hork-Bajir of Animorph's?>Species of six legged parrots completely bork their homeworld environment>The sole exception is an equatorial canyon where giant redwood like forrests grow, however that too is on the risk of going extinct.>So the species modify one of the native animals that are a type of tree climbing dinosaur to keep mending the trees to ensure that biome stays viable. They subsist on tree-bark.>the result is they aren't just tree-climbing dinosaurs, they also are have machetes grafted onto their arms, legs, and tails alongside thick claws that both aid in climbing, but also are used to chop-off tree-bark. They're inadvertant living weapons.>However they also have an average IQ of human children. Being simple vegetarians that just climb trees and eat bark they're very pacifistic, and their creator species leaves them alone occasionally popping into the jungle, but otherwise living in bunkers in the canyon walls.>Things are going well, until the Yeerks, parasitic brain slugs who accidentally got handed a ton of spaceships by the Andalites (alien centaurs that have invented functional shapeshifting) invade looking for new host bodies. And decide the Hork-Bajir are perfect hosts.>The creator species VASTLY underestimates this threat, deciding that they aren't worth conquering and as a precaution genetically modify themselves to be completely incompatible with brain-slugs. This just leaves the Yeerks to turn them into slaves the old fashioned way as they take over the entire Hork-Bajir population.>Occasionally Hork-Bajir are born that are much smarter than average, of average human intelligence or above. These are called Seers in their communities, and are considered natural leaders that the entire community should defer to.
Hey I was thinking of a cyberpunk New York setting, and the various gangs that'd control it. Main one I'm having difficulty with is I was thinking that Harlem (at least the black/non-hispanic part) have basically a gang confederation rather than being broken up into several small individualized ones (like I don't want to come up with individual themes for like the Ethiopians and the Haitians and such). I was thinking like the leadership are the classy suit-wearing types of mobsters, rather than like a 'street thug' sort of characterization. I just can't come up with a name for them.
>The world and universe were created by the single creator deity Anu, essentially the Aristotelian/Christian Thomist first mover>Other gods exist, mostly tied to certain races/factions>Some mortals have ascended after legendary deeds and have become gods in their own right>Dwarves deify certain praiseworthy ancestors>Some elven gods might have had mortal origins too, but because it's so long ago this is unclear and controversial>Elves have a mix of deities based on regular Elven, Celtic, Finnish, Greek mythology, etc. depending on their location>Sleeping undead 'gods' exist more as forces behind necromantic energies or as bestowers of vampirism>Demons and devils want to turn mortals away from just religious worship and to be worshipped themselves>Deities have planar realms were they hang out>Human Byzantines have a blend of Orthodox Christianity and Greek Olympian polytheism>Fantasy Arabs are relatively unique, being monotheists>Sun or moon symbolism is present in many faiths>Norse paganism has a wolf that will swallow the sun and moon during the end times, indicating that they will rampage and destroy cultures associated with these symbols
A rough draft of a continental map. What do you think of it? Don't really want to go into the details yet if there are any massive glaring errors.
Like Small Gods - mortal belief, given time and focus, acts upon magical energies to create a genius loci - a protective spirit of a place.Given enough time, this minor spirit can become more, and eventually becoming what we might call a godAnd sometimes, when the structure of the gods church grows powerful, it surrounds the god with prayers and chants, and people begin to worship the church and not the god. And lacking belief the god may die... and this may not be noticed for some time.
>>93249301Harlem Knights>>93250595Has potential, the rivers should run more northerly. I would get rid of the delta, they are not that common irl, but everybody wants one on their fantasy map.
>>93249225Where i'm thinking of placing the archipelago is roughly around here, could i say it spawned from a piece of the asian or north american plate colliding then retracting with the pacific one ? i'd like the archipelago to have mountains which 'cloak' it and give the sense of it being a mysterious lost land with this massive landscape you'd be shocked no one knew about
>>93251490
>>93251370>Has potential, the rivers should run more northerly.Good catch. I'll do that.>I would get rid of the delta, they are not that common irl, but everybody wants one on their fantasy map.Yeah, I suppose so. Deltas are cool. Well, more than that, what I really want is some swampy wetland that clears out into the ocean up north. Is there a way I can implement that in a way that makes sense?
>>93248678This is exactly what I needed. You see, my setting has four pantheons, each based on one of the four seasons. I can come up with a few spheres of influence for each season, like War and the Sun/Day for Summer, Harvest for Fall, Death and the Moon/Night for Winter and Life and Medicine for Spring, just to give a couple of examples for all of the seasons, but I want to have several more deities for each season, maybe one for each month of the year even, so I need more, what do you think? As for their clerics, I was thinking that the gods would basically play musical chairs between temples as the seasons change, so in summer one of the Summer gods would take up primary residence in a temple, but when autumn comes one of the Fall gods would take the primary spot without much fanfare since it's as natural as the seasons changing for that to happen (I was thinking that there would be smaller altars that would be used for the other three gods in the "off-seasons" as it were), with the clerics also switching the primary target of their devotion between gods as the seasons change, using robes with different colors and decorations to signify the switch in which god they're following at the moment, and which god's blessings are most prominent as a result, save maybe for places like the poles or the equator where there isn't much change between the seasons, so the Winter gods and Summer gods would have permanent temples each respective location, though I'm less sure about the Spring and Fall gods, maybe they each have a region exactly halfway between the equator and poles where they have permanent temples. Again, what do you think?
>>93249053Neat, I guess you could interpret it as the mystic and legalist extremes of Islam except that they're not even knowingly worshipping the same god. What aspects are you lifting from your inspirations?>>93248678One major faith of mine has a gnostic bent. Basically they're conclaves of physicist-monks who stare into event horizons (black holes and the edge of the observable bubble) looking for hints about the simulation hypothesis within reality's decay. There are many sub-sects but the "Recursives" are among the most prominent because they deign to interact with laymen.Rather than some omniscient demiurge they believe that mere mortals simulate themselves and so are doomed to exist within an illusory wilderness of their own shadows. Understanding the simulation and freeing themselves from it is the goal but like Valentinian gnostics the demiurge is ignorant rather than evil. Crucially as the demiurge are alternate versions of themselves the Recursives insist that true liberation is impossible unless the demiurge themself is rescued from their self-imposed suffering, indeed such bodhisattva-like deferred nirvana is taken to be the key to ascending to even greater heights.
>>93251939The Tree of Life is my world map, but a map more through time instead of physical space. Yaldabaoth and his Archons are a race of powerful beings that lived in a colony ship with humanity. They crash landed onto a planet called Sojourn, where they each took different path to survive. Yaldabaoth's other half, Sophia, dies in the crash, which causes him to try and revive her. His attempt at trying to meld archon and human bodies and souls together to create a Nephilim ubermensch caused the Cataclysm, which created the monsters the players will interact with (chimeras, disembodied spirits, cancerous abominations, etc). The players will start in Malkut, only knowing the planet as a dead wasteland as consequence of the planet's history. They'll travel through time, witnessing formative events and attempt to change them to improve their timeline, but won't succeed without first integrating with their anima/animus as a rival time traveling faction. Reintegration is a big theme, as well as enlightenment. They'll never suspect the true nature of the curious metalsmith that is somehow present in each step of their journey.
>>93251490Not really a thing given how huge the pacific plate is, and the way the plates drift around it. Pretty much all the pacific islands are the result of volcanic activity or are like exposed coral reefs. Not to say you can't have mountains, just that the geography is a bit more simplistic.
>>93248678Why do threads autosage after 7 days now? Why isn't the bumplimit capped at 500? Way to kill off creativity.
>>93254073I think there was a trouble causing user on the board that went around fucking with the bumping somehow. I just recently came back to /tg/ and it was like this.
>>93228610one simple way is for there to be communities of men that the Amazons breed with, and they give the male infants to them.>>93251673>swampy wetland that clears out into the ocean up north. Is there a way I can implement that in a way that makes sense?Make a large area near the coast 'swamp colored' and have your river make big lazy loops back and forth as it heads to the sea.
>>93254244>Make a large area near the coast 'swamp colored' and have your river make big lazy loops back and forth as it heads to the sea.Good idea. Thanks.
>>93252630Fascinating. Reminds me of the idea that the Elder Scrolls continents are the same landmass displaced in time along an east-west/past-future axis. The metalsmith's some embodiment of Yaldaboath then?>>93251490A Hawaii situation looks likeliest however if there used to be Juan de Fuca-ish mini-plate it could've been a dangly bit off the Aleuts.
>>93251673Swamps are just ingrown lakes, so make it shallow and wide, and stick a bunch of trees in there. I do recommend this guy's channel. The first half of many of his videos are pretty helpful to get the world state pretty reasonable, but then in the second half he goes into custom made flora and fauna, and it becomes much less universal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KKf6V7ENZc
>>93254395Y'know im probably just overthinking it, it can be whatever really, a piece of one plate retracted, volcanic or dangly like you said.what really matters is figuring out the local climate, from what i've seen where i've placed it the islands will be in a nice spot to get currents coming east and west and the waters are cool which i think means that they'd be temperate to boreal? like oregon or england maybe.
>>93254073Because a certain faggot kept gay threads alive for a fucking month with gay little bumps like "could you elaborate on that" or "besides the obvious, what can we do about x y z". He had a particular, profoundly autistic obsession with magic, magic systems, elements, and children's cartoons. He's still around, and he's still obnoxious.
>>93248678I’m trying to make a setting where all the deities, save maybe for a singular god of Balance, all either fall to the Lawful and Chaotic sides of the Alignment chart, as those two forces are the most dominant in the known planes. Are there any preexisting settings that do the concept justice that I can look at for it ideas, particularly on what domains would go to each side like a Law god of Justice, or how their religions might work (that are not Warhammer, since that’s both darker than what I’m looking for and has no benevolent Chaos deities, not to mention the insane Chaos cultists)?
I don't have gods in the traditional sense but I do have godlike beings. The faiths of my setting are either based on the progenitors of the different races or the creators of different magics.Beastfolk and Dwarves - the Great beasts or the Earth warden. Angels and Halflings - the Archangels or the Wind khan.Leviathans and Merfolk - the Krakens or the Water lord.Light Elves and Dark Elves - the Fae or the Fire rider.Humans - worship the Cosmos and their ancestors but some will mix it with elements of other faiths.Various fiend tribes - mostly atheist but some cults devoted to historical demon kings exist in secret.
