Welcome to How to Be a Better DM, the official podcast of Monsters.Rent. I’m your host today, Justin Lewis, and together we are going to talk about how to improve your gameplay both from a mechanical and storytelling point of view.
Today, I’m excited to talk about an aspect of the game that for me holds a lot of interest and for a lot of people can be a rich source of story elements and intrigue. At the same time, for other people it can be completely boring, and possibly offputting. I’m talking about Gods, faith and religion.
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Now, the very first thing you need to do is assess your table’s comfort level with the topics of God, Religion, and Faith. In some cases, you’ll have a natural understanding. In my case, a few members of my table are also members of my faith, so I knew that they would be ok having some of those topics in the game.
In other circumstances, it would be a smart idea to ask if the table is alright with those themes and topics being in the game. In most D&D settings, having a mystical god or gods is all part and parcel to the game, but depending on how your players feel about it, then you might want to tread lightly. Some games might be focused on the path of divinity, others might have gods as simply an afterthought. No matter what you do, you want to avoid these two mistakes.
Saying this as a religious person, you absolutely do not want to turn your D&D sessions into sermons. I know you’re probably thinking that that would kind of be funny, and it might, but honestly, you don’t want to force players into roleplaying something they don’t want to roleplay. A person’s faith is a very personal thing, and if someone is not a person of faith, religion or Diety, then they don’t have to be even in a make-believe world.
On the other side of the coin, you definitely don’t want to make fun of religion and make it appear as something that is farcical. Even though your players may be ok with it, it’s best not to form bad habits because there will come a time when you sit down to play at a table with someone who cares, and then you’ll make the slip up of a lifetime. Best to avoid those big mistakes. Extend the same consideration and courtesy you would to any other sort of way of life.
Now, with your players on board for having Gods be an active part of the game, let’s talk about some other questions you need to ask. These questions apply to both homebrew settings and settings that are prewritten, but the questions will apply a little differently to each.
The first question that you need to ask is how involved will Godhood (god or gods) be in your setting or game. This is important because if they won’t even matter, then you likely don’t need anything else in this episode. I’d still recommend listening to the end because you never know when a player might ask you a question or make a choice that will make the gods much more involved.
In different settings, Gods behave differently. In some games, Gods are active members of the universe, granting divine boons with ease. In other settings, Gods are basically hidden from sight, deigning not to intervene with their followers’ lives.
It’s important that you know which type of setting yours is and how the Gods will interact with players and NPCs alike. Really, the interaction of Gods falls on a spectrum with an asterisk. The spectrum is set up with very involved on the left and not involved at all on the right. The asterisk stipulates that the spectrum can describe the entire setting and the involvement of each individual deity. An entire pantheon can be relatively involved with one or two being basically inactive. Or you could have the inverse where the pantheon is basically a non-entity with one or two who are trying to control the universe. Both instances can make for a very fun campaign.
Unless you have players who make clerics or paladins you don’t necessarily need to have the gods or god interact with your players. In fact, you could make a case for why your god doesn’t interact with the devoted paladin or cleric.
But if you do have gods who interact with players you need to know how involved the gods will be with those players. Will the god in question have multiple role playing scenes face to face with the player? If they did would that be normal for the player or the god? Each of these choices has impacts on the story and you should definitely help your players realize when something special is happening.
Will your players know that it is a god they are interacting with? Maybe your deity has decided to be a beneficial patron of the player but will not show themselves. The players then may draw the conclusion that a wealthy land owner has decided to show them favor.
Sometimes you’ll need to realize that if one God is involved, like very involved, then that might push another deity who is at odds with the one helping the party to get involved. You might put your party in between a turf war of two gods. That could make for a pretty epic campaign.
I would say that you need to set some pretty simple yet clear guidelines for yourself on what the party members can expect from a deity. Do they hear whisperings of advice when the player has no idea what to do? Or does God just show up in a brief Vision and explain that a certain task needs doing?
When you have established your “rules” for how Gods interact with players, then you get to occasionally break them, which becomes a very fun Plot device.
This question is more about the setting than the individual player interactions. Is your pantheon filled with numerous gods, only a handful or just one? This question naturally morphs into other considerations. For example, if your pantheon is filled with multiple gods, then the likelihood of all of the Gods having omniscience goes way down. Having 7 beings who all know everything that is happened yet have cross purposes becomes very difficult to handle very fast. Or, the gods just know everything to the point that the don’t really do anything against each other so then the Gods become more observers than actors. I suppose you probably could figure out a way to make it work, but I haven’t.
If you have one God, it’s much more possible for them to have omniscience, but having them favor certain things becomes more difficult. Either the God is the God of everything or for some reason your God just very partial to only a few things, like they’ve decided to be the God of the harvest, but there are no other gods. That could make for a very silly setting or one that just doesn’t make sense.
With this question also comes the question of whether or not the characters and the world at large even know about all of the Gods. It might make a fascinating campaign if there are a slew of gods that hide from the world.
Now, that you’ve come up with the number of gods that will populate your pantheon, you need to decide whether or not they will be good, neutral, or evil. You also need to decide whether the gods will actively fight against each other or will they be friendly towards each other and, even if they are somewhat antagonistic towards one another, they’ll still be somewhat friendly?
Let’s take an example. Let’s make up two gods. We have Ordos and Sruptos, the good god of order and the evil god of chaos respectively.
In your setting, will Ordos and Sruptos be battling each other, to the death if possible? Or will they, by nature of the invincibility of Gods, be forced to be cordial and respectful to each other, using mortals as pieces on a game board rather than soldier in a battle? All of these questions add to the narrative and help you know how to bend and twist the story.
If you have multiple gods, then it is common to have gods who have all sorts of alignments.
If you have only one god, then alignment isn’t really useful, unless it is pivotal to the story. For example, if you only have one god, but that God just so happens to be evil, that could be the genesis for a very interesting campaign setting. I’d imagine that the God has some sort of rules that prohibit them from taken certain actions, which allows the characters to still choose to be Good if they want, or the entire cosmos is evil and everything just works within those parameters.
As you can see, how God’s act and react shapes in very large ways how your story goes.
Now, I just brought up a point that forces us to think about these next two questions: 1. Can Gods be killed? And 2. Can anyone become a god?
In the previous example of Ordos and Sruptos, I explained that they might have to treat each other like game partners because they can’t kill each other. The fact that both are invincible is very important because it explains why they would want to be nice to each other. They are essentially stuck with each other forever.
So in your campaign, you need to decide early on if Gods can be killed. It may be that that turns out to be the secret quest of one of your players. They want revenge on one of the Gods because they let their wife die or something like that. That can become a very epic story very quickly.
You could also take the opposite approach and show that the God’s cannot be killed. In the same story of a player who wants revenge, the entire story could be about the God trying to gain back the trust of the vengeful player, while also explaining that they can’t be killed. The DM could even throw in some touching moments where the God explains that he’s tried to kill himself but it didn’t work.
If gods can be killed then you need to start figuring out what does and doesn’t kill a god. As I’ve already mentioned, that means that you also need to figure out why any other gods haven’t already tried killing their rivals. In most cases, God Killing will be a very difficult task. In many ancient mythologies, Gods were “killed” but if their body parts were reunited, the God was essentially brought back to life. In other fantasy settings, like Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, when a “god” dies, their power essentially either rests on the planet the God was bound to or the power seeks out another “host” transcending them to godhood. How will it be in your setting? Can anyone kill a god? What happens when the God dies? If they were the God of sunrises, does the sun stop rising? All of these are important
The next question that needs to be addressed is whether or not becoming a god is possible. This too could potentially become a personal quest of one of your party members, so you need to know whether or not it is possible. This question can be decided in the moment, though as you are roleplaying.
If the answer is yes to the question of can anyone become a god, then you probably need to answer the follow up question of “Why aren’t there more Gods?” The natural answer will likely be because becoming a God is very difficult. A more interesting answer might be that becoming a God is not even actually that desirable for reasons that are unknown to most people.
The point I’m trying to make with these two questions of Killing or Becoming Gods is that diety can be very powerful plot points and since they can be very powerful, you must treat them with care and attention. Your player’s will wonder why Gods can be killed at the drop of a hat. You better have a good well thought out reason. True, you can probably come up with something cool in the moment, but it needs to make sense because in most cases Gods have their hands in a lot of pots, so to speak.
Now that we’ve talked at length about using Gods in your campaign setting, let’s start diving even deeping into how to move your story along.
We all know that great stories in D&D start with plot hooks, or rather simple introductory elements that entice player’s to explore a particular story line more to eventually find a much large and more fulfilling story.
A simple example of a plot hook is, “While digging through this dungeon you find a strange bow made out of black wood in the hands of a corpse that dried up decades ago. You pick up the bow and in your mind you hear, “Hello!” The player does not know practically anything about the bow except that it said hello which is interesting and curious.
When it comes to faith, there are limitless plot hooks to use. That’s probably the most common way to use Faith or Religion or God as a plot device. It can help start the story.
Another interesting tidbit about plot devices is that they are just plot hooks, except usually you have knowledge that connects past experiences to the plot hook.
An example of this would be, “While traveling on this long road to do your Diety’s bidding, you turn a corner and see your God bartering with a local merchant. He does not notice you. You approach him and confront him, only to have him completely vanish. Before he did though, you put your hand on his arm and were not shocked with his power. He felt warm, and mortal…”
This plot device has the same elements as a plot hook, in that it makes the consumer of the story curious and incentivized to finish the story, but we have some knowledge of the god before the exchange.
In my estimation, there are only two ways to really use plot devices and certainly only 2 when it comes to faith. The Push and The Pull
A plot device is designed to move the story along. Since our players are the main motivators of the story, a plot device in D&D is designed to get the players taking action in any particular direction. A good DM then, gives lots of reasons for players to have their characters choose various paths.
The Push method is generally something that happens or exists in the space a character is in that the character wants to avoid or eliminate. In the case of faith or religion, a few examples include
For the most part, the Push method is the installment of some sort of negative circumstance for the character. The idea here is that the character wants to avoid something negative.
The pull method then is quite the opposite. It is the pursuit of something positive. Usually these circumstances exists (or don’t yet exist) elsewhere. Some great examples of this are:
In all of these, the character is reaching for something that they do not yet have.
In reality both of these methods are really the same. It doesn’t matter much whether a character is running from the hopeless condition they are in, or if they are running to find hope somewhere else. In fact, it only matters if it matters to the player and the character.
Now, let’s talk about using faith and religion as tools to affect change within a character’s life and make them more dynamic. Usually, this means introducing conflict. I sometimes view conflict in a story as sort of a very hard object that will either break a clump of minerals of crack bits off, slowly revealing the precious gemstone inside.
Either way, we use these elements to create instances in which the character knows that things have changed and that they can’t continue being the person they were.
Religion, faith, and God are perfect for this kind of application.
My go-to usually involves something that my character in question already wants. I then try and make them want that thing either more difficult, more confusing, or strangely attainable. I figure they already have this motivation, so let’s put a twist on the motivation. When it comes to religion and faith, there are a few examples that you might try.
The first method is one that a lot of us have probably experienced so I would maybe opt for this one first, although it strangely might be harder within a fantasy D&D setting. This is the faith crisis. Most of us who grew up with one faith or another probably had wonderful experiences as a kid but then realized that the world is a lot harder to make sense of when we grew up. You could have the same thing happen to your player. Admittedly, it’s very common that a faith crisis develops when someone thinks about the religious organization rather than the tenets of the religious organization, but there is nothing wrong with a character questioning the tenets of their God. In the very well written books of R.A. Salvatore, spoiler alert, Drizzt Do’Urden, the skilled Drow Elf from the Underdark realizes that he has no affinity for the teachings of the Spider Queen Lolth. He experiences a faith transformation and decides to forgo all the customs and teachings of his entire people in favor of what he believes to be right and good. That’s a perfect example.
Also, a quick side note, these Character Drivers must always come with some benefits and some negative consequences. In the case of Drizzt, he was able to live with a clean conscience, but he was also forced to leave his homeland or face death.
Now let’s make up an example of a faith crisis that your character might undergo. The most obvious faith crisis would be for the character to discover that a large part of their religion is just a cover for malignant activities. That’s too easy. Let’s do something a little more nuanced.
Also, I must add that a faith crisis doesn’t always mean that the character abandons the faith. Sometimes the Faith Crisis turns into a metamorphosis.
So for our example, let’s say Exander the Tiefling Paladin serves my homebrew god of Coronus, or Crown as he is commonly called. Crown champions the leader, the patriarch, those in command, and those who make difficult decisions. He is all about guiding those who lead people. Exander decided to follow Crown because Exander’s father, Exantos, prayed to Crown for guidance in protecting and providing for his family. Exander always felt the trust his father felt in Coronus and was deeply moved. He grew up wanting to be a leader himself and believing that a leader, a king, a governor must have the best interests of the people.
Then Exander becomes an adventurer.
One thing you need to know about my homebrew world of Integrity, is that the alignment of the pantheon changes. Each god cycles through all of the alignments. This is essentially their zodiac. Priests spend enormous amounts of time trying to divine which God will be evil and which god good every year, as the alignment shifts at the turning of the year.
This means that each god preaches their philosophies in both a good and an evil light.
Along the road, Exander and his companions meet a high lord, who rules with an iron fist, but who is a devout follower of Coronus. Exander’s party decide to topple this high lord to bring peace back to the region. During the final battle between the two, Exander calls to Coronus for power and aid, only to see his opponent, the evil high lord, doing the same thing. Their power cancels each other’s out and Exander is left to fight with just his martial prowess for the duration of the combat encounter. Exander’s party kills the evil high lord, and peace is restored to the land, but Exander is left shaken. This was the first time he came face to face to his direct counterpart. He realizes that the same god he prays to for the power to topple these evil hierarchies is the same god who grants the evil hierarchies Exander fights against power.
Exander then has to take a deep long look inside himself and decide whether Coronus is worth following.
That’s one example of a faith crisis. In this example, the character, Exander, could decide that he wants to continue serving Coronus or not, but the conflict is there. Exander can no longer pray to his God without remembering fighting someone who did the same thing.
Another great character driver is having a character find faith.
It probably goes without saying, but you’ll want to make sure your player is alright with the direction you want to take them. That’s a bit tricky to do because most of the time you won’t site them down and reveal to them your master plan. Instead, you need to watch for signals to determine if they are alright with you trying to meddle with their faith. In most cases, you put out the adventure hook or the plot hook and if the player bites then they are interested in seeing what happens. In some cases, you’ll have to know your player, like if you have the player serving a god that has them doing good things and the character finds out that the God has been evil the whole time, that might piss of some players.
I divert myself.
So, in most people’s lives, finding faith is a very long process, and a very important one. Finding faith and faith crisis’ are very intertwined because often, it’s questions that lead the searching soul to find some sort of peace with the answers supplied by a faith or a belief.
So if your player has a lot of moral questions, you can try placing religious of faith based figures in their paths. Let’s say Tarian grew up on the streets of Bastion City, the capital of one of the nations in my homebrew setting. Tarian wasn’t an orphan but he was often alone because his parents were altogether terrible at being parents. They didn’t really care for Tarian and only spoke to him to demand that he clean something or go steal something. Because of this, Tarian grew up dirty and mangy, both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense. But Tarian was strangely gifted a kind and gentle heart, and being forced to do those things hurt him everyday. Finally, Tarian finds friends and leaves the city as an Adventurer. Along the way, he meets a Priest of Ossus who teaches that people can live within the harmony of nature and that naturally people are good. He is deeply touched by these teachings and decides to devote his life to Ossus. He revels in the outdoors and the peace that being away from cities brings.
Let me also be clear that just because one of your characters finds their faith does not mean that you can’t turn around and hand them a faith crisis. Most people who join new religions often have to make sacrifices and change their way of life. If the character didn’t have a faith crisis at some point, then it wouldn’t seem real and the character would seem to be in denial.
Now, let’s talk about creating a homebrew religion.
The religion you create for your world has to match the world and its themes and style. For example, if you created a world that was very much like Cartoonland from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, then the religion doesn’t have to make sense at all.
On the other hand, if your world is set in simple Faerun, then it’s probable that most of the tenets of the religion need to have some semblance of believability. Not everything will need to make sense, but you won’t have people who worship a sun God rubbing jelly on their underarms as a sacred ritual. It just wouldn’t fit.
Usually, you start with the God and then work backwards.
If you have one God or many, your creativity can be unbounded, but whatever rules or tenets of the religion you decide to stipulate, make sure that there is a religious reason behind it and that it follow the feel of the god.
Let me give a few examples. In Integrity, my Homebrew world, there is a god names Alas, or commonly called Wing. She is the God of freedom, of the wind, of wanderers and exploration. She is prayed to commonly by travelers who go where the wind takes them and by free spirits who haven’t a care in the world. She does not really have an organized religion. Her followers follow Gurus who spring up here and there after they’ve communed with her or reached a deep level of freedom.
Now let’s contrast that with Coronus, the God of leaders, fathers, hierarchies. Corouns definitely has a well established religion with levels within the clergy and ways to advance up the ranks. In fact, Bastion, one of the nations of Integrity, is a monarchical theocracy with the King of Bastion being the head of Coronus’ church. This is exactly what I mean, you need to craft the religion to be modeled after the God or Goddesses.
I find that when making a new religion, you want to ask a few questions.
With all of these questions you can generate the bulk of the religion. Let me also be clear that in most cases you will never write the entire religion. It probably won’t even be necessary for your game. Instead, you just create as much as you want or can and then let your player’s “Discover” the rest.
Finally, let’s talk about how to coach your players to roleplay their faith and piety. I suppose this section of the show is really just talking about roleplaying in General, but we might be able to talk about a few points specifically regarding religion.
If the player really wants to roleplay things really well, then I would highly recommend they learn about some of Earth’s religions. I took a Religions of the World class in college and I learned about many religions that weren’t my own and the thing that I learned the most deeply was to respect all displays of faith. Many people who follow a religion do so at great sacrifice to themselves. As a roleplayer, you want to be cognizant of the fact that someone who has faith will not know everything but will do things because of their deep belief.
In roleplay, this might look like a character having some real emotional anguish over whether or not they helped pay money to a beggar. Or, for fun flavor, you can make up a religious holiday that your character’s religion celebrates and in the middle of a long travel sequence, roleplay it.
You could have your player wake up that morning and cook some sweet cakes and then randomly throw pebbles at everyone else in the party, similar to how we pinch people who don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s day (though that isn’t a religious holiday per se).
As a DM, you can sort of give your player things to roleplay with, for example, if the characters enter a Tavern, you might have someone in the tavern wearing a symbol of one of the characters’ religions, and then the PC and NPC can sort of meet each other and just sort of nerd out over the religion for a second. Or you can go the opposite way and have the NPC wearing a symbol of a rival deity and have immediate tension in the room for no reason.
Simple things like this can go a long way if your player is already up for roleplaying and trying to get into character.
Overall I think religion and faith in D&D is a very cool aspect that you can do a lot with. Clerics and Paladins get their magical energy from their gods for crying out loud. In a world where people can get magical energy to do spells and kill people lots of things can happen. Be willing to experiment and try new things so that your players get the best experience possible.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s show. Send me a direct message at how to be a better DM or at monsters rent on Instragram and we can see if you can’t add anything else to our show today. Thanks for listening my friend. I truly appreciate you being willing to let me talk with you and I hope that you’ll join the Guild and join our Discord Server so that you can talk with me too.
We’ll be back next week for another show, but until then, let’s go ahead and roll initiative.
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