Fantasy Religions

[JayRay]

I make it no secret of my personal religious beliefs, so I often struggle with religions or beliefs systems outside my own. However, and I like to reference C.S. Lewis in a lot of my discussions of religion in fantasy.

C.S. Lewis put forth a lot of Christian Allegories in his books relating to "The Chronicles of Narnia" - Aslan being Jesus and so on and so forth. So, even in keeping with that idea, I found that symbolism of one's religion, or lack thereof, can carry over into the RPG game quite well.

Ancestry Worship - You don't necessarily need gods in a game, if you have prophets or aged wise ones who left the world after passing down a particular set of laws or a great comtribution, was the father of a great nation. People can develop orders and well, cults, to carry a sort of Apotheosis of an ancestor. For added fantasy, you can have that ancestor actually still contact his people, or even a malignant usurper who portrays himself AS the ancestor as a means to subjugate a society.

Light World/Dark World - Rather than belief in one specific (or mutiple deities), there could be an understanding that instead, millions of spiritual agents or forces aid in positive aspects, and the same balanced amount chimes in with their battle cry for the negative aspects. A varied version of this could possible be attributed to the ideas of the Force, being neutral, but having agents (Jedi) and (Sith) in conflict, but both using the same supernatural flow between them.

Cybertheosis - Belief, much like in Utopian Gods example, but instead of being placed into the creator of a specific function-achieving machine, but in the sentience of the machine itself. Take for instance the idea that technology continues to grow in power and ability to obtain information as an incremental rate, year by year, as more and more information is able to be stored on smaller and smaller receptacles. Imagine if the same was true with A.I. and that sentient begets ego, and ego then begets megalomania, and then a (fake) belief that this A.I has transcended knowledge, becoming omniscient. Now, while no machine could possibly ever know absolutely everything, it would be interesting to see if these machines command deity-like 'worship' from organics. The Borg from Star Trek, might be considered a crude version of Cybertheosis, as it believed its Collective is all-knowing, and individual organics were FORCED into serving the collective with their cultural distinctiveness being change to serve them. They also believed that they were omnipotent, from the most used term listed for the Borg 'Resistance is Futile'

Royalty Worship - Now, while our own history loves to worship their kings like gods (The God-King Xerxes, Pharoahs, China's Emporers) I love the stories of Dark Sun, where the Sorcerer Kings would use a combination of magic and psionics to rule with absolute power over a slave mass population in a world where quite literally, the Sorcer Kings held life and death in their hands. In a world where there is very little to no water, and such powers exalted these men to the status of gods, it became no doubt that the closest worshippers of these royals actually saw some of their holy prayers take tangible form, due to the psionic nature of the kings.

Chess Team - This is a simple concept in religion... two gods, or a god and an anti-god. Each one can only direct his agents on the world. Now, these agents, can often have SOME of the powers of their benefactor, but not all, just like a chess player can move any piece on the board to a square if he follows the rules of the board, but each piece has a different path and different power (Bishop moves diagonally only)(Rook, Knights, Queen, Kings and Pawns respectively)Now the pawns might be the most mortal or approachable, even possible able to be dispatched in a storyline, but the main agents, the gods keep them around for as long as possible. Chess never favors the pawns, just as a spiritual battle never favors the lackey, but in a power vaccuum, each lackey has a chance for greatness in ambition, just as every pawn can become a potential queen.

I'm sure there's plenty of other one-off religious ideas out there, so I had to add this...