New Idea: Gods and Demons, Priests and Paladins - Faith and its Consequences

[electricpaladin]

Last time I came here, it was with a game that wasn't really very first thoughtsy. It was basically done, and it's still coming along nicely. But this one (I'm feeling prolific) is really very raw. I'm hoping you find it juicy and want to sink your teeth into it.

So, some musings on a game I'd like to create.

First, a little background on myself and my interests:

I have always been fascinated by religion. I majored in religion in college, with a focus in my native faith (Judaism), but I am deeply impressed by all religions. I also spent lots of time studying Islam and a little time studying Japanese religiosity.

My favorite religious motifs are monolatry and henotheism. Henotheism is the adherence to one deity, but without denying the existence or value of others. Monolatry is the worship of one god because the others are goons, not because the others don't exist. In the ancient middle east, monolatry was the rule of the day. The tribes had their various deities, and when the tribes went to war, they liked to imagine that their gods were going to war, too. The winner's god was clearly tougher than the loser's god, so the losers would all gladly convert to the religion of the winner – the innovation of Judaism was Jewish guilt, the belief that their god hadn't lost, he'd just abandoned them because they were bad! Anyway, when two tribes wanted to get together, they'd just 'discover' that their gods had become – or were all along – related. Sometimes gods would become each other's parents and children, or sometimes they'd get married, or turn out to be siblings. It's thought by some that this is how some pantheons formed.

My favorite genre is two genres at once. That is to say, I am in love with syncreticism, the blending of two or more faiths, genres, or ideas into a unique, quirky whole. Steampunk is a good example of a syncretic genre, partaking of Victorian sensibilities and design motifs and science fiction technology. When there's magic thrown in, I like it even more. The Final Fantasy motif of adding advanced science to fantasy settings without explanation excites me. This extends to religions as well. I find syncretic faiths fascinating – even more so when you realize that all faiths are more or less syncretic.

Finally, my favorite class from my D&D days was paladin. Not priest, oddly enough. I don't think I played a single priest. I like the idea of trying to live up to an impossible standard, of doing your best to be a good and balanced person despite living in a mad world.

So, what does this all add up to?

I have an idea for a game. The setup is this – the players take the role of characters who come from a monolatrous culture. They are all worshippers (faithful or not) of the same deity, and they – together with the GM – define that god and the culture they come from. Those who chose to spend character generation resources on it can have faith-based magic powers. There may or may not be other kinds of magic powers; I'm leaning towards not.

The idea is that the gods limit your behavior, but they can be a source of strength, both literal and figurative. But their limits are difficult to adhere to, and can sometimes trap you in bad situations. How do your reconcile your faith with your heart? How do you interact with people of other faiths, and how do they interact with you? How do you live a faithful life in a complicated world?

I also imagine instructions to the GM to make antagonists that foil both the individual PCs and also their deity. So, antagonists within their culture who play off their deity's bad traits, or demons and other gods who likewise hold a dark mirror up to everything they hold dear.

Setting-wise, I'm thinking fantasy (maybe plus something else...). Something with lots of isolated cultures that aren't too far apart for games to cross boundaries, but also aren't too close together for the fast-and-loose player-created approach to setting creation. That is, a setting where I can get away with leaving almost every region undetailed, so the PCs can make stuff up, but still have enough written-in stuff to provide ample hooks.

And finally, for antagonists, there are, as implied above, room for factions in most regional religions. And you can always fight with your neighbors. And I like the idea of working demons – as anti-gods – in somehow, but I'm not exactly sure.

On sources, I am heavily inspired by some of the feel of Dogs in the Vineyard, though I am imagining this as being broader, thanks to the player-created setting element. After reading my above self-profile, I doubt anyone will be surprised to discover that I immediately jumped on Dogs for its 'gunslinging paladins' feel.

System wise, I'm not sure where I want to go. I know I want the relative morality of actions vs. adherence to or denial of faith principles to be important, but I'm not sure how yet.

So, what does this inspire in you?

[Arturo G.]

The idea is that the gods limit your behavior, but they can be a source of strength, both literal and figurative. But their limits are difficult to adhere to, and can sometimes trap you in bad situations. How do your reconcile your faith with your heart? How do you interact with people of other faiths, and how do they interact with you? How do you live a faithful life in a complicated world?

This is the paragraph where I found the most juicy stuff. There are a couple of declarations of intentions about what the game is really about.

I would start from here. You should have a clear idea of what are the characters like. I assume the kind of interactions are going to be very social and internal struggles. What does define them which brings this kind of conflicts up and front, and make them interesting to play?

I like the idea. Let us see how do you develop it.

[flammifer]

Cool idea! I like it!

Apart from Dogs in the Vineyard, it reminds me of one Warhammer game I played where all the PCs were members of the same religious order; it worked pretty well for group coherence.

It reminds me of a mechanic I had played around with some times back (without ever actually testing it): when at character-creation, the players get to buy attributes; some that advantage them but disadvantage the group, some that disadvantage them but advantage the group - a kind of prisonner's dilemma really (depending on how much negociation there is between players). I played with the idea where the group was a family (so the player's choices could determine the family's reputation, wealth, secrets etc.), but it might be even more interesting if it's used for the Tribe's god in a fantasy world, because it can be linked to special powers and commandments and stuff like that.

So, depending on the player's choices, the god could be a major influence on what happens in the game, or just a background plot element.

Some random god attributes:
- Holy Flame: The characters guard a fire that must not be allowed to burn out. Any fire lit from the Holy Flame is "blessed" (like holy water - repels undead and evil magic), but must not be used for mundane purposes (cooking), come in contact with water or left unattended. Meditating in the light of the Holy Flame dispels curses. Priests have access to fire spells.
- Accursed God: the tribe's god is considered evil by most neighboring cultures.
- Secret God: outsiders must not know of the existence of the god, or his name, or his rituals. Priests must hide their face from outsiders, avoid being noticed, and have access to shadow spells.

...  cursed blood,  tempting demons, diet restrictions, blood purity, tradition of meditation, tradition of debate, prophecy, revealed knowledge, holy epic, curse of vagrancy, angelic help ... you can do a lot of fun things!

[electricpaladin]

Ok, time to roll up my sleeves and get into the filthy underbelly of this idea.

I imagine the first session opens with some hashing out. The players and GM agree on a premise, goals, talk about the length of the game, bat around a few character ideas. They talk about the written and unwritten rules of play. "Don't kill anyone's character without permission." "I'm really not ok with torture in games." "My grandma just died, so please be merciful to any older, matronly figures, ok?" Or whatever. The kind of stuff I think players should always hash out at the beginning of a new game.

Then, the thing starts. The GM takes what the players have said so far and synthesizes it into a single god theme.

Then the players go around the table, listing traits of their deity, their culture, and their relationships with the environment. You can pass if you like, but if everyone passes the first person is compelled to go when it's their turn again. Anything that is too contradictory (or contradicts one of the game goals established in the pre-play hashing) can be vetoed, but other than that, what says, goes. This stage stops when every player has successfully contributed two traits.

The goal, you see, is for each player to contribute one trait that their character finds comforting, or supporting, or strengthening and one trait that their character finds challenging - one Faith trait, one Doubt trait. But as this is going on, you are also sorting the traits your fellow players suggest into Faith and Doubt traits. After the round-robin is done, you narrow each Faith and Doubt down by adding a phrase that summarizes how your character interacts with this trait.

The GM can add traits if there aren't X traits (where X is the number needed for the game to fly), or if he feels the players missed any core concepts.

And... that's all I got for now.

I expect that after this, there's some more conventional character generation, where you give your characters various personal traits. I'm also not sure how Faith and Doubt come into play... maybe kinda like Aspects from Fate? Except, maybe you can Compel yourself, to show how you make sacrifices for your faith, but they strengthen you, or something.

Also, this is a fantasy game, so there should be some options for magical powers, especially faith-based magical powers, but I have no idea where to go with that.

So let me give you an example:

I'm running this game for you and two of our friends. During Phase One: the Hashing, we agree that we want to play a game about... faith, violence, and community. We agree that the basic feel of the culture is that it will be a simple, aboriginal-style culture dealing with economic pressure from its neighbors. The players will be the young men of a village. They have to work in a nearby larger city and bring money home to help their village survive. This will be a long-term game, so to keep the game flowing we discuss the idea of making the big city's god evil. I break in and suggest that instead the city is home to many gods, some of which are awful demons, so that your characters can get involved in all sorts of subplots involving trying to be good people in this big scary city.

Ok, we hash out basic character concepts, and Phase Two begins. You have decided that you want to play a young woman who wanted to be a priestess, but couldn't because she needed to go to the city to feed your family. So you've got these high ideals in conflict with the somewhat squalid situation you're in. But you're also young and full of blood and life, and this could conflict with the strictures you're so fond of, especially when you're faced with the temptations of the city. We'll see.

I begin by providing a little flavor, since what we all decided on is very high-concept and doesn't tell us much about our game's style. So I say: "wind god."

We go around in a circle. It goes pretty simply because we're all awesome. After the players are done, we end up with six traits. You sort them thusly.

Faith
Our god is very strict about matters of purity and has sometimes-nonsensical rules about what is pure and what isn't.
Our god demands sacrifices of autumn leaves thrown into the air.
Our religion believes in demons, and demon-hunter/exorcist is a valid profession.

Doubt
Our god has a bias towards women
Our people have an ethnic/cultural conflict with several of our neighbors.
Our priests wear masks to hide their faces.

And you add the following phrases:

Our god is very strict about matters of purity and has sometimes-nonsensical rules about what is pure and what isn't. - I like to feel pure and clean
Our god demands sacrifices of autumn leaves thrown into the air. - This ritual is uplifting
Our religion believes in demons, and demon-hunter/exorcist is a valid profession. - I was saved from possession as a child and admire the exorcists.

And...

Our god has a bias towards women. - I have a strong sense of justice.
Our people have an ethnic/cultural conflict with several of our neighbors. - I have met our neighbors and they seem like good people.
Our priests wear masks to hide their faces. - I'm a little vain.

Now we know something about your character's culture of origin, something about your character's personality, and something about your character's past... but I don't know where to go next, so we stop playing for the night and go home.

[electricpaladin]

I had a talk with my inimitable girlfriend, and she had some interesting thoughts on the setting.

First of all, it sounds very tribal, so I'm going to go with that. The setting will be a river valley with numerous tribes, some nomadic, some settled, living along the river and in the hills. I'll probably pull a map out of my butt, something with different terrains to inspire players and GMs.

The setting is on the cusp of urbanization. There are numerous small cities dotting the landscape, places where several tribes linger and discover the temptation to abandon the ways of their fathers and mothers. The greatest of all is a huge city of all tribes and all gods, situated at the mouth of the river, where all the tribes come to trade with each other and with the ships that come to this region from far away lands.

The idea I'm going for is that it's better to believe in something - a god, a philosophy, anything - and to have doubts, than to believe in nothing, or to believe in something so fervently that you become a zealot.

To this end, I am going to introduce demons in the setting. Again similar to Dogs in the Vineyard, I think demons in this game are old, cthonic forces, "Bad Things From Before" that heroes and gods banished in the "Long Ago." In the absence of faith and the advent of selfishness, the demons can come back.

So the game is about being hung between demons and zealotry, with faith in-between. The cities, and the Big City, are places of temptation.

More thoughts later, hopefully more coherently. In the meantime, comments welcome.

[Mickey]

Hey there, I haven't had time to organize my thoughts on this but your idea did in fact inspire me! So I simply had to write some sort of reply, even if it is just to say that I am going to reply xD

*Changes to serious tone* Lately I've been of a mind that the resolution system for a RPG should be embedded as much as possible in the context of the game itself; the two should not be separate things. The approach you have taken is interesting because the ideas of Faith and Religion perpetuate the rules of the game and the actions of the players within it (and their supposed antagonists).

Ok so it turns out I do have something to say now after all!

it's better to believe in something - a god, a philosophy, anything - and to have doubts, than to believe in nothing

This core idea is what I found most "juicy" (the extra bit about Zealotry I left out because I feel that it is a subdivision of the first part of the quote). It reminds me of something said by Fredrick Nietzsche:

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

Sounds pretty dismal, but what he's basically saying is that, to quote: "When one gives up [Christian] faith, one pulls the right to [Christian] morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept, the faith in God [or other higher power], one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."

Now this could of course apply to any religion (hence the parentheses), but the basic tragedy remains the same: how does one retain any system of values in the absence of a Divine order? I liken this to what you said about how when one tribe conquered another the defeated tribe would then convert to the victor's religion. Because their faith had not brought them the prosperity they had hoped for, it is assumed that their current beliefs are now flawed, and must be abandoned.  With no higher power left to turn to (they need to have one, or else they descend into nihilism -see below), the defeated tribe look for a new faith in which to place their belief. Since the victor managed to defeat them, their faith must be stronger, and worthy of belief.
This is the same thing that happened during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (the repercussions of which are still being felt today). Science came in and essentially defeated religion. The loss of an absolute basis for morality led to nihilism (the belief that no action is logically preferable than any other, and that existence has no higher meaning or goal), a fundamental anarchy of belief that leads to the self-destruction of the believer.

Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize (or refused to acknowledge) this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. Nietzsche sort to find a solution to this problem by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This work of reevaluation has also occurred throughout history as old beliefs are challenged and new ones are made to replace them.

So what am I trying to say here?? Well first off that I agree with what you are saying (a good start xD), but also that I like the idea of various faiths battling for supremacy, perpetuated by this fear of nihilism and anarchy. Before battle, each faith sees the other as flawed and, therefore, nihilistic.

"What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?" this part affects me greatly as a game designer. My urge to design role play games stems from a need to fill the hole left by an absence of faith, with a new system that I can believe in -or at least a world in which belief can take place (that my designs almost always feature magic in some way is no small coincidence).

I suspect that many other role play gamers and game designers are also motivated by this need. 

[electricpaladin]

Running off to work, but I've got to say before I go:

You have supplied an (at least tentative) name for the game.

Sacred Games.

Let's see if it sticks. More thoughts later. LOVED your comment.

[electricpaladin]

What Sacred Games

Ok, so, here we go with the system.

I am in love with resource mechanics and incentives, so I'm going to include them in this. Here is my idea.

In addition to the Faiths and Doubts described above, you get some points (8?) to divide up amongst three basic person stats: Soul, Mind, and Body. They range from 1 (terrible) to 6 (great!), with 3 being 'average'. Then you get some points to divide up amongst skills. Skills are pretty open - pretty much anything less broad than "Body" is a skill, including 'strong arms' and 'book learning,' as well as the more conventional 'sword fighting' or 'archery.'

For conflict resolution, I'm thinking your basic Fudge take-off (I just read Shadows of Yesterday). You add your Stat and your Skill, you roll some fudge dice, you compare it to a difficulty set by the GM. I'll need to modulate the number of Fudge dice you roll based on the mechanics of the system - don't want too much chaos, or too little, but I can work that out later.

Now we get to the fun stuff. The resource/incentive mechanic.

So, you have two pools of points: Ego and Faith. You get Ego by gratifying your Doubt traits, either the cultural/religious belief itself or your attitudes about it. So the your character from the above example could get Ego points by... helping men achieve justice in your sexist society, being nice to your neighbors, or admiring yourself or having others admire you AND by acting out against your culture's matriarchal sexism, trying to thwart its efforts to defeat your neighbors, and scorning the mask-rites. You get Faith points by acting in accordance to your Faith traits: being pure/obeying the purity laws, performing uplifting rituals (especially the leaves-in-the-air ritual), and helping/becoming one of the priest-exorcists or generally defeating demons like they do.

You can spend a point to add +1 to any roll or +2 to a roll related to one of your Beliefs or Attitudes. And, the GM can compel a la Spirit of the Century, offering you a Faith or Ego point to act against your interests but in accordance with one of your Beliefs or Attitudes, and forcing you to buy him off with a Faith or Ego point.

Now... I what I still need is:
A mechanic to encourage falling out of balance.
A mechanic for flipping Faith and Doubt into each other.
The bread-and-butter of rpgs - something for damage.

Other thoughts:
I think I need a third category of Beliefs - maybe just that: Beliefs, things that a character believes about herself and the world, not just religious/cultural beliefs that she draws Faith and Doubt from...

Hm... I think I've got a good start here. More to come later.

[flammifer]

An interesting thing to do with the Mind / Soul / Body stats would be to have them also correspond to how weak to certain temptations one is.

High Body score : weak to pleasures of the flesh
High Mind score : weak to intellectual rationalizations, arrogance and doubt
high Soul score : ? either it's the "less useful" stat but the only one without a downside, or it corresponds to zealotry, or being tempted by another religion, or valuing love above religion ...

A simpler scheme would be
* Body: temptation
* Mind: doubt
* Soul: heresy

.. like that the characters can struggle with different issues without requiring any extra stats / traits for that.

[Mickey]

Sacred Games is a solid name -pretty much sums it up doesn't it

You can spend a point to add +1 to any roll or +2 to a roll related to one of your Beliefs or Attitudes. And, the GM can compel a la Spirit of the Century, offering you a Faith or Ego point to act against your interests but in accordance with one of your Beliefs or Attitudes, and forcing you to buy him off with a Faith or Ego point.

Sounds compelling Is the GM representative of a 'god' in the game? By that I mean is he an impartial witness and umpire of the game or is he actually part of the setting?

Perhaps temptation ie "a mechanic to encourage falling out of balance", could be used by the Antagonist (or something). Whereas the GM can 'Compel' you to forgo you Interests to act in accordance with your Beliefs or Attitudes, the Antagonist can 'Tempt' you to go against your Beliefs or Attitudes and act in accordance with your Interests.

Forgive me if I've made an error here, but I'm pretty sure you mentioned an Antagonist somewhere in here xD

[RadiantWind]

Nice, but you should include the "religion" of atheism. Atheists don't believe in a god, so they could be a unique class.