Currently overthinking how to do religion in my game and wrote a little post about it (My breakthrough with Religiosity in my DnD Campaigns | naybasplacetoputrpgideas)
I am also curios how others have choosen to integrate religion in their games.
As some thats neither religious nor spiritual I am especialy interested in the outlook religious or spiritual people have.
I tend to approach religion from a sociological model, and build outward from there. I start with whatever the âsparkâ of the setting is. This is almost always going to be a big thematic problem or issue that the players will be dealing. Basically the main situation - the core premise and loop to the game.
After I have the âproblemâ down, I think about the society/ies surrounding this problem. Almost all of this starts related to that problem, and expands out from there. I try to think about what would be important to these people, and what they need.
Their needs get translated into their religion. This will serve to explain the practices they have and how they have to navigate interactions in the world, as well as to explain why they donât have what they need, or what threatens them.
Once I have the broad strokes of the religion, I start coming up with mythologies and stories, and that serves to elaborate on the perception of the âgodsâ or whatever cosmology has fallen out of the above worldbuilding.
If this is a new setting, this is kind of around where I come up with my worldâs âtwist.â Almost none of my settings are what they seem like from the outset. This is your classic sort of âthis is actually a sci-fi setting thatâs simulating a medieval worldâ or âthe cosmology is ancient aliens vs. cenobites and the âgodsâ are just weapons one of the factions made,â etc.
This is the stuff that helps me come up with the âmythic underworldâ rules of the setting. Why stuff far down (or high up or whatever the âdirectionâ is) gets weird for the PCs.
Hopefully that kind of makes sense, itâs a pretty scattershot but this is a rough outline of my process, at least for the time being.
Oh and I guess I didnât talk about religiosity at all, but that usually falls out of the nature of the religion and how âbigâ the threats are perceived by the religion.
One thing, just to throw out there from someone I knew working in religious studies, is that defining what is and isnât a religion is almost impossibly difficult. Historically as a concept itâs almost always something thatâs been theorized from a Judeo-Christian point of view, which leads to the obvious problems of trying to categorize it from that specific Western viewpoint. Then you also get other people, like Walter Benjamin, who say that capitalism is a religion.
There is some decent phil overview on the topic here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/#ReflRefeSkep
Not that this necessarily helps develop a world better, but I guess it can maybe help to think of who is defining what categories from what point of view, and the interests they have in doing so.
Yeah âreligionâ tends to be all-encompassing. Itâs also why when you start getting into âmagic systemsâ you find if you want any historicity at all, you have to COMPLETELY throw out any modern fantasy thinking around the subject.