How fleshed out are the gods and religious customs (including evil ones) in your setting?
Not at all. What about yours?
>>97678728There is so much inspiration to choose from between human history.
>>97678760And which inspiration did you use for your setting?
>>97678552Hey buddy we have this thing called the world building general. You should join us there!
>>97678871Moloch and Baal make great inspiration for evil gods.
>>97678892Can you elaborate further?
>>97678930Child sacrifice
>>97678552Very, if any player were to say the right thing they might be handed a rare artifact, or insta gibbed and have to make a new character.
We should get a bunch of professors in ancient religions to come up with a Pantheon for some sort of massive worldbuilding project.
>>97678892They are often depicted by Christianity as evil gods. Often involving child sacrifice. Most of that is bad translation work and propaganda though. It's likely molach was not a god but a type of sacrifice.Interesting stuff though
My deities are a sort of chicken and the egg thing where collective prayer created them but then the powers the races use come from them aswell but they were birthed by mankind's needs for some light in the darkness, which is literal because the world was black until they developed the first magic which was fire
>>97678552I use many of the gods fleshed out in old Dragon magazines for the world of Greyhawk. They had gods of every alignment, so a cleric had a big selection to choose from to devote himself to. A LG priest knew who his allies were (other LG, LN, NG and N), as well as those priests, races and other worldy creatures (CE, NE and CN) he should oppose as a matter of course.The world map also indicated the general alignment (and the gods worshipped) in each country, so a cleric knew which areas he would be welcomed and supported in and which ones would attack him on sight. An evil priest of Hextor would tend to get hounded out of or executed if discovered in the Shield Lands, but welcome in the devil worshipping Great Kingdom. Likewise, a LG priest of Heronious would get the opposite treatment. It leads to some interesting roleplaying when travelling in far and foreign lands, as alignment indicated which side a character was on in the ongoing heavenly and earthly war.
>>97678871mainly Christianity for evil religions
>>97679781I wonder if this area is nice
Less is more. Also all gods should be evil from a mortal's pov.
>>97678892Moloch wasn't even a real god and Baal refers to several gods as it just means "lord".
>>97679835>using evil religion as a template for evil religions
>>97679883There's no way that entire region would allow an evil country to exist in such a perfect strategic peninsula.
>>97679883>plot twist: the LG nation is a barren wasteland while the CE empire is a lush garden
>>97678552Each one has one paragraph describing their story, one describing their rituals, one describing their priesthood, one describing their holidays, and one describing their names.I've just got 9--1 per alignment. And the descriptions and their appearance in the game has very much been about their religious practices. The gods themselves, as individuals, are kinda irrelevant.
>>97678552All gods are evil, petty dicks who abuse mortals with their whims.
>>97679931I've never been a fan of making evil gods and religions about twirling a mustache. My evil gods are still worshipped by regular people, most of whom worship all of the gods depending on what they need when. One of the evil gods is the winter goddess, to whom you pray for a short winter and relief from bad weather. She's also the goddess of deception and change, so people might pray to her if they're struggling with corrupt officials, or if they're hoping to get away with something, or if they are trying to find out the truth of something and think someone is lying so that maybe she'll expose their lies. Another one of the evil gods is over death and magic. So she gets prayed to by people who want to communicate with the dead or learn magic. People use her name as an expletive or to curse someone else. Common people don't question the gods or why they do the things they do. But when you think a god can do something for you, you make a sacrifice and pray to them (like you sacrifice fruit or wine to the winter goddess). And priests who follow the evil gods aren't necessarily seen as bad people, just because they're philosophically committed to the worship of evil. Ok sure, dude is a priest of the evil goddess of winter. But when I need something from that goddess, I gotta have someone to go to. And we need someone to make sacrifices to the goddess or our winters are going to come early and stay late and fuck up our crops. So their priests get treated as outsiders who are welcome in formal settings, but most people avoid them when they can do so without being rude or giving offense. I think it makes for a more interesting and realistic religious landscape. And my players seem to like it, but to tell the truth they haven't particularly questioned it much, and all they interact with are priests and holidays and temples.
>>97679891The idea of a bored evil god empowering random farmer kids into heroes to fuck with other gods, nations, and mortals in general sounds hilarious.
>>97679740Oy Vey good work distracting from the parallels of ancient tophets and epstein's island today
>>97680719>naming the heir of the dukedom, a successor of long line of knights, who has trained his whole life as your celestial champion? BOOORIIING>making this random son of a whore bastard with a lame leg and missing eye the greatest hero this realm has ever known? Now that is a challenge!
>>97680751Moloch is believed to have been a specific religious ritual, rather than a god. And a tophet was the religious site where it would have been performed. It does appear to have been the sacrifice of a first born son. And it was practiced rarely, but widely, in Canaanite society, including by the early Israelites and Judahites, as well as the Moabites and the Phoenicians. However, the practice seems to have died out by around 700bce, at least within Yahwhistic traditions (during the consolidation and standardization of worship under Josiah, during which it becomes expressly forbidden for Israelites). It seems to have survived in Carthaginian society until around 150bce. There are zero parrallels to current politics. These were ancient near-eastern religious practices that were part of Canaanite society. Canaanite society included all of the minor nations along the eastern coast of the Mediteranean from modern day from somewhere around modern-day Syria down into the Sinai Peninsula. Moloch's practice is attested in sacrifice to a number of the polytheistic, Canaanite pantheon including Yahweh, Chemosh and some of the Baals ("Baal" means "lord" and there are a buncha gods named Baal--not just Baal Hadad who we are usually referring to when we use "Baal" without qualification).
>>97680911>Lord's Prayer = Baal's PrayerWake up, sheeple!
>>97680763It gets even funnier if the worship of the hero functions as worship of the deity that made the guy their champion.If they send enemies for the hero to slay, his legend grows, as does his worship and, in turn, the worship of the deity.Pretty good deal, especially with both sides being in your pocket.I don't know how the good gods could turn this around, at least without destroying the evil gods' unwitting champions.Sounds like something for a more humorous campaign, or a really dramatic one, with such a major plot twist.
>>97681186Lol. I suppose that's true. Isn't it from the didache?
