This is not going to be a thread that talks about how Eurocentric a lot of fantasy settings are. I think it's fairly obvious. With the exception of games based on feudal Japan or wuxia films, there are few settings that do not use medieval Europe as the default. The fantasy literature tradition, which forms the basis for many fantasy settings, is dominated by writers who are influenced by (for lack of better terms) dead white guys. These things are well beyond an individual game designer's efforts to control, so I will not focus on them either.

The issue I want to address here is what specific things game designers can do to diversify the mythic and aesthetic elements of the game world. Time and time again I have come across "worlds" which present only a single part of it (usually the most European-looking one) as being anything of interest or importance. In the rare games that use a different culture as the dominant one, it is quite obvious that there is more to the world than is shown. However, the tendency is to make the game about the setting, and I'm not always interested in that.

These things by themselves don't bother me. Middle-earth is a prime example of the type of thing I'm talking about, and I love it to death, but I want to see something different. (Note: I know that way too many game designers try to be Tolkien in the ways they create their worlds, and this is probably a big part of the problem.)

An example of a game that does something of what I'm looking for is Fading Suns. An example of a setting that does this is Star Wars. I'm not exactly sure what they do that makes it work for me. What is it that the creators of fantasy settings can learn from science fiction and space opera with regards to cultural diversity?

One thing to consider is in discussing games based primarily on a European Medieval world, we're (probably) only discussing material released in English. So a bias in that direction would be pretty natural. If there are people on the Forge from a non-western society, which has its own RPing publishers, we should be very interested to hear from them. Are things similarly biased towards their own country's cultural heritage?

Of course, you're talking not about changing bias (or explaining it) but in broadening our horizons. But if some non-western fantasy exists out there, say written in Hindi, that would give us an obviously viable alternative.

It's strange, 'cause it seems to me that your two positive examples (Star Wars and Fading Suns) are both terribly eurocentric. Look at the names in the original Star Wars: Luke, Leia, Han, Darth Vader. All European. Look at the faces. Fading Suns may not be "fantasy europe" but it is a setting dominated by a Catholic Church, with an edge of Victorian sentiment. All heavily european.

This is not to say they are bad settings. Frankly, I think that most of the "European" settings that exist do Europe pretty darn poorly. But that might be another issue.

As game designers and as GMs, I think we need to understand why such settings are so widespread. I think a big issue may be player indoctrination. I have a world which extends from fairy-tale castles to Incan-inspired mountain valleys to a really cool alternate China. But, mostly, I run games in the "Euopeanish" section (really perhaps more North African, but that's neither here nor there), because I can say to my players "You live in a mountain shepherding village" or "you live in a large, old port city" and they know what I'm talking about. If that village was Peruvian styled, or that city was Chinese, there would need to be a lot more explaining. An alternate setting requires a strong commitment to an existing setting bible and a really cool hook to draw people in.

As far as non-european settings, I'd take a close look at Al-Quadim and Dark Sun for 2nd ed D&D. One is a fantasy based on the tales of a not-European culture (medevial Arabia) and one is a fantasy that, while not explicitly from anywhere, contains a lot of elements from very old Fertile Crescent cultures like Babylonia and Sumer. Dark Sun, particularly, covers its setting elements extremely well, and has a great hook (scantily clad desert babes riding insects!)

yrs--
--Ben

Hi guys,

I think a few things can help folks convey cultural ideas easier without necessarily having to resort to 300 pages of detailed setting information.

•Ideals

Focus on a few key values and ideals held by the culture. Show some examples of them in tradtions or customs, and also be sure to show where they fail or are selectively applied.

•Social Power Structure

Who's on top? All the various issues such as caste, race, gender, age, etc. can be explained. Be sure to include if the power structure is rigid, or if there are exceptions to the rule.

•Imagery and Flavor text

Never underestimate the power of artwork and colorful text. You can look at Trollbabe's artwork for images of empowered women and the Shadow of Yesterday for a setting that isn't primarily european. First edition Legend of the 5 Rings had really good flavor text, particularly in any history bit or character description.

•Reference to other sources

Movies, music, books, real world cultures to look at as models, etc. As the culture becomes more fantastic this becomes less and less applicable.

All of these methods are effective and efficient for conveying culture and setting. Picking up almost any core White Wolf book and you can see how they build alternate "world-views" with something like 200 pages, although the basics of it are usually transmitted in 5-10 pages at most.

Chris

Hmm, this is an interesting topic (especially since I'm running a campaign in a npn-european setting that has been with gaming since basically the start - Tekumel). A serious problem with a non-european setting is that more verbiage is necessary to convey information than a european setting. Of course as Ben mentions, our european gaming settings don't tend to be all that true to europe either. We rely so heavily on cultural shortcuts (and D&D has a huge influence here).

I'm getting an interesting perspective because my new player is Russian. From what he talked about today, it sounds like much of the Russian gaming is LARP. Talking with him has really got me thinking that I need to do some more reading to expand my own horizons to understand Tekumel better.

Chris raises some good points. Tekumel is presented in some of those ways, but mostly not. Reading the novels helped me a lot though. The game text (especially the original EPT text) really distorts the change vs stability conflict of the Tekumel religion (from the novels, we find a priest of stability marrying a priestess of change - not what you would expect from EPT's characterization of the two sides as good and evil).

Prof. MAR Barker has also pointed out on several occaisions that the game (even the game he runs) is not real Tekumel. I suspect even his game is more european than he envisions Tekumel as being, though he is mostly referring to things like the frequency of magic items and spell casters and such in his comment.

Time and time again I have come across "worlds" which present only a single part of it (usually the most European-looking one) as being anything of interest or importance. In the rare games that use a different culture as the dominant one, it is quite obvious that there is more to the world than is shown.

There are a few other places to go:

Glorantha (HeroQuest being the current system) has a significant number of non-European style cultures, some better fleshed out than others. Some are vaguely Native American, some are vaguely Chinese, and some are -- well, unique (the Lunar "We are all Us" culture and the Uz "Uz is Uz and Dem is food" culture spring rapidly to mind).

Iron Crown Enterprises did some interesting things to Middle-Earth, including significant supplements on the Haradrim (North African-equivalent people), the Easterlings (very Slavic in nature), and some far-eastern cultures (the Wood Elves of the East are particularly strange, IIRC).

SkyRealms of Jorune is just wierd, if you can find a copy. the PCs are pre-citizens (Tauther) in an alien world (Jorune), trying to build up enough brownie points (challisks) to become citizens (citizens) of the main culture, which is basically post-apocalyptic. It's sort of a fantasy/science fiction mix.

Of some note, I think, is JadeClaw from Sanguine Press. It's the only (or, at the least, the first) English-lanuage RPG written by an Asian -- Chuan Lin is culturally Cantonese, and the book does an amazing job of reflecting the Wu Xia culture in an anthropomorphic setting. Actually, the anthropomorphic part helps sell the Asian worldview to some extent, the same way the IronClaw furries sell European classism.

I'm also with Ben in thinking that most RPGs actually do a lousy job of reflecting Medeval Europe, just so you know.

In his original post,

Green wrote: The issue I want to address here is what specific things game designers can do to diversify the mythic and aesthetic elements of the game world. Time and time again I have come across "worlds" which present only a single part of it (usually the most European-looking one) as being anything of interest or importance. In the rare games that use a different culture as the dominant one, it is quite obvious that there is more to the world than is shown. However, the tendency is to make the game about the setting, and I'm not always interested in that.

Im probably rambling, but..

Are fantasy rpgs really mostly set in medieval europe? Id say they are set in fantasy settings based on European fantasy literature, which only contain elements of medieval Europe. If you take out The Church, stick in polytheism, decrease mortality, improve literacy and prosperity, and then parachute in elves, dwarves, and orcs, how much medieval europe is left? Castle aesthetics?

I suspect that fantasy per se is a European idea - I would love to broaden my frpg horizons, by reading the Hindi Fritz Leiber, the Russian Clark Ashton Smith, or the Chinese Tolkein - but I dont think they exist.


On the practical level, game designers should probably:

stick some big physical barriers between cultures, so they can plausibly diverge extensively

and definitely:

when introducing spiffy new exotic elements, please 'ground' them in scenario and encounter ideas. Got some fantastic idea about guilds and technology? Show me the adventure.

Apologies if this is off-topic, but this thread has brought to mind a long standing problem ive had about creating believable fantasy cultures (and their attendant social, political, and economic structures)

How do you reconcile these stuctures with the fantastic power of individuals in a rule set like D&D? Or any system with a significant power curve?

ie: Why does Gonzo The Magnificient (20th level D&D magic user, Rune level RQ characters, etc) obey the King? Ok, maybe this King is an Aragornesque superhero too, but what about his heir? Or his heir's heirs?

This issue might well be even greater in an unfamiliar setting, as theres no comforting warm bath of cliche to dip into.

Was Genghis Khan the mightiest warrior? And how would a pseudo-Mongol culture actually ruled by the ancient shaman look?

clehrich wrote: At the end, you say that you're not always interested in setting. I think I'm misreading the end part, not the start, but can you clarify?

I do have quite a lot of suggestions for how to break Eurocentric paradigms in culture/setting design, actually, but if you want specifics I need to know before I go on a tear that that's what you're looking for! Can you help me get clear on what you want to discuss, precisely, in terms of "specific things game designers can do to diversify the mythic and aesthetic elements of the game world"?

Green wrote:

clehrich wrote: At the end, you say that you're not always interested in setting. I think I'm misreading the end part, not the start, but can you clarify?

Certainly. I didn't mean I wasn't always interested in setting. What I meant is that I'm not always interested in a setting that simply swaps the medieval Europe default for another one. In other words, I don't want the game to be about the setting. For instance, L5R or Ars Magica.

Suggestions are fine, although I am unclear on what you mean by specifics. I don't need specific examples of games that do the things you suggest, but I hope your suggestions aren't something vague like, "Don't forget about the brown people."

NN wrote: I suspect that fantasy per se is a European idea - I would love to broaden my frpg horizons, by reading the Hindi Fritz Leiber, the Russian Clark Ashton Smith, or the Chinese Tolkein - but I dont think they exist.

Ben Lehman wrote: BL> So what you want, in my reading, is to not have to work for something that requires work? I'm missing something here, I think.

I suspect that the other settings being held up as examples here likewise are things that people's groups played for a long, long time.

Some of this is simply that alien settings are cool! People who are going to want to play in them are going to want to explore them. Why else would they want to play in them, if they didn't matter?

Chris is offering a really great thing here, Green. He is very well trained in a lot of cultural studies issues, to a level so far beyond "don't forget about the brown people" that I could not tell you. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Bankuei> Thank you for understanding. What you have written is the sort of response I'm looking for. Thanks.

Hi Green,

I would highly recommend looking at both HeroQuest and The Shadow of Yesterday.

HeroQuest's setting, Glorantha is highly detailed, complex and intimidating, but if you'll notice that not only do several different cultures get their own outlook, you also get some neat interactions between the cultures and mixing. Like in real life, cultural transmission occurs on several levels, from domination/occupation of one group over another, cultural exchange through trade, marriage and close habitation, as well as some bits of reverse culture adoption(the dominant culture taking up some of the oppressed culture's habits).

The Shadow of Yesterday presents several cultures, already deeply enmeshed with each other, so it is also an excellent resource to look at for groups that have been co-located for some time. It is also a clear and easy read in regards to what each culture is about.

As far as demonstrating the multiculturalism, it is key to use the example ideas I gave before with the focus of making sure that each culture to be featured is clear, along with examples of common interactions between them.

Chris

Bankuei> With all the good press HQ has been getting, I definitely would have bought it by now, but I can't seem to find a copy in my FLGS.

Ben> I'm sorry for my snappy reply. Being cooped up in the house due to snow and ice tends to make you less than amicable.

Green wrote: The issue I want to address here is what specific things game designers can do to diversify the mythic and aesthetic elements of the game world.

However, the tendency is to make the game about the setting, and I'm not always interested in that.

What is it that the creators of fantasy settings can learn from science fiction and space opera with regards to cultural diversity?

Okay, so I've been out shoveling snow and thinking about this -- there isn't a lot else to do while shoveling 3 feet of snow. I then came back in and wrote up a little discussion about designing fantasy settings so they don't come out Eurocentric... but it ended up 23 pages. So I need to fix that up, polish it, and put it up as an article. But in the meantime, your question....

I think the first point is to recognize what we mean when we say that these settings are Eurocentric. Green doesn’t want to debate this, and neither do I. I know what he means, and I think he’s definitely right. The basic points are:

• The baseline assumptions about how people live and work and think are founded on Euro-American models. For Tolkien this was deliberate and very much the point; for very few other fantasy writers is it so. Nevertheless things like feudalism and such seem to be accepted norms.
• Fantasy cultures are, as a rule, monolithic. The Elves think and act like this, while the Dwarves think and act like that. Humans have several cultures, but each is a monolith unto itself. Again, for Tolkien this was deliberate, and at the same time he hinted that this was in part a matter of perception: the hobbits just don’t know enough to understand the intricacies, but it’s clear that Minas Tirith is not actually a monocultural city, but has all sorts of funny subcultures.

But Green doesn’t want to debate this, so let’s not. Repeat: do not debate whether these worlds are Eurocentric—Green started by asking us not to do so in this thread.

Okay. So how do we get out of Eurocentrism?

The basic problem is that the assumptions are very deep, and changing the surface isn’t going to change the depth. You’ll get a shallow imitation of something different, but it will just slide into bad Orientalism or exoticism if you don’t uproot and just slap a little paint around.

Here are my suggestions.

1. Don’t start with history, mythology, or anything like that. Start with society: this is something Tolkien for example wasn’t all that interested in, and if you build a distinctly non-European society, you’re well on your way out of Eurocentrism.

2. Forget logic, coherence, or clarity. Just forget them. Human culture doesn’t work that way. People don’t sit down and say, “Hey, let’s design a culture to be in.” Culture happens organically, and that means messy.

3. Focus on cities and other dense populations. You need to know how the common folk live, but the answer is that they live by whatever gets them food: agriculture, pastoralism, etc. But in the city, you can create an unholy mess. Remember that no big trading city should be more than about 75% composed of members of the dominant culture. Include lots of enclaves of other cultures within them. Ignore lords and so forth; tack them on once you have some notion of how the whole mess sort of looks.

4. The basic principle of culture is that it is discontinuous and contested. Thus it is normal, when examining a culture from without, to see incoherence and confusion. Seeing how it all works smoothly takes a lot of patience and study. Therefore if a fantasy culture appears coherent, rational, or comprehensible, you’re doing something wrong. Which leads to my #1 principle of fantasy culture design:

• Anything consistent, constant, and coherent in a society requires explanation, because it is abnormal. You need to know why this is so, you need to know who maintains it, and you need to understand why it is in those people’s best interests to maintain it. Without constant vigilance, it will collapse into friendly messiness again.

For example, if everyone in the society is gung-ho about the national religion, someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to keep them wound about this.

5. One possible way to start is to take two utterly unrelated human historical cultures, in broad sketch, and mash them together. Take anything that makes perfect sense and break it. Then pound it all with a hammer until you have a nightmare of confusion. That’s a pretty good start for what real culture looks like.

6. Do religion late, and make it messy and incoherent. Assume that it makes no sense to anyone but the people involved. Assume that five priests in a room have seven opinions. Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power. Assume that ordinary people don’t pay a lot of attention to any of this, and mostly offer bits of food or whatever to the appropriate gods because they sort of think they ought to and it’s what dad always did and besides, it brings you good luck. Don’t worry about who believes what. Very few religions are primarily about belief or especially faith. If there are ethical tenets, the vast majority of them are about being good citizens, in whatever sense; the rest are about sticking to the tenets.

7. If you want big historical background stuff, do it last and impose it on already incoherent and messy cultures. Let that change things, but only to complicate, never to simplify.

Your object is to create a world of cultures and societies (not the same thing!) that are sufficiently detailed that you can spin out fine detail at need, but are mostly overview sketches so you don’t waste time.

This is just a few sketch points to get us started. Green, this any help?

clehrich,

Beautiful. Thank you. I'm flattered that I inspired an article, though. I look forward to reading more of what you had in mind.

Well, the article grows apace. Sigh.

Glad you liked those points, Green. Any particular points you want to bring up that I didn't touch, or disagreements, or things you want to expand on (or want me to expand on)?

One further point, though:

To my mind, the art of designing a really good fantasy setting, be it Eurocentric or otherwise, really resides in everyday life. If you understand deeply how ordinary people live, in various walks of life and various parts of the world, the rest can lie gracefully over the surface.

Tolkien was extremely good at a number of things, but when it comes to everyday life it was only the hobbits he really did thoroughly. For them, he seems to have drawn on his own country life and his idealized picture of how it should have been, how it was at its best. But he doesn't seem to have liked cities much, if you ask me, because his cities don't seem very livable.

In order to work out a non-Eurocentric everyday life, you need to have a working knowledge of things like economics and a little anthropology. Some cultural history of places other than home would help a lot as well. Remember that the basic principles are always the same: food, clothing, shelter, sex, and entertainment. The rest is gravy.

The thing that probably hits home most, of course, is sex. If family relationships work quite differently than they do in typical imagined Euro-American cultures, everything will connect outward from that and make the whole seem quite alien and different.

This is why starting with myth and history, or religion as usually conceptualized (a bunch of gods), is unhelpful: these things don't matter to ordinary people's lives very much, at least not directly. What you really need to know is what they eat and who they sleep with.

clehrich,

I think that's about it. If anybody has something else to add, I'm all for it, but I found what I was looking for. Thanks.

clehrich wrote:
This is why starting with myth and history, or religion as usually conceptualized (a bunch of gods), is unhelpful: these things don't matter to ordinary people's lives very much, at least not directly. What you really need to know is what they eat and who they sleep with.

A related counterpoint: wouldnt our models of anthropological and economic organisation - European or non-European alike - also be undermined by the supernatural in a high-magic world?

Id think that if its a high-magic world, have different game mechanics for magic and religion in the different cultures. You may want a unifying logic, and a "true" cosmology behind the variety, but keep it hidden from the players, and dont let any one culture get to close to the truth.

Yes, that whole "how common people react to religion" statement is something I wanted to address as well: Chris is talking about how things work in a culture very much like our own, or that of our direct ancestors, but I do not consider it a good base model to work from in all or most instances.

If you take older cultures, and some other not-so-older cultures, as your baseline, the idea that the common person will react to religion as something "only them there priests worry about, but say your prayers cause dad did" breaks down as a good model.

Let us take a culture like that of the traditional Ojibwe people, instead. In such, religion is something the common people do pay a very great amount of attention to, because it is intertwined with one's very life. For example, the Ojibwe have a saying, "Everything I do is a prayer." And this is very much true -- there is a spiritual, religious, ritualized aspect to every action, from waking up to sleeping, to greeting one's neighbors, to asking to play a game with friends.

You would no sooner fail to perform the proper rituals, and more importantly, no sooner fail to understand why you were performing these rituals, than you would fail to breathe.

The ancient Norse pagan culture is another much like this, where religion is in the hands of the individual people, not the "priests", and life is structured according to codes of honor and behavior dependent upon what the Gods have said is the proper way to act. Similarly, and in the same general section of the world, you have the Lapps.

The whole "religion is what dad did, and that's why" attitude comes from urbanization and progress, rather than some inherent property of people. Once you move back to more tribalistic cultures (perhaps because they are survival-oriented) -- like the Ojibwe, and like the Norse -- you find that the religion practiced is vitally and immediately important to the people, as much as anything else physical and immediate (like growing food, hunting game, and building shelter).

I might also go into various Muslim cultures and subcultures as a counterpoint to Chris' idea of how to build religion into a culture, but I think everyone understands my point.

Mark and NN:

You do bring up an interesting point. However, at the base level, I still think clehrich's advice applies. Even when experiencing the same event, people tend to have wildly divergent ideas on exactly what is happening and why. Take UFOs, for instance.

If you put magic into the equation, any number of things can result, depending upon your point of view. It can be a divine gift, a taboo (things mankind was not meant to tamper with), a curse, a sign of supernatural origins, a natural force, etc. One, some, or all of these may be true for a given culture.

For a non-European model of magic, consider Africa. In Africa, you generally have two forms of magic. The first type of magician is a medium. They interact with spirits for the benefit of the community. The second type of magician is a sorcerer, who uses his abilities in malevolent ways. What's interesting here is that sorcerers are not banished or harrassed into leaving since it's generally held that angering a sorcerer is not a good idea. I'm not saying that people never got fed up with a particular sorcerer and took matters into their own hands, but there was never something like the Inquisition. This creates some interesting dynamics in a culture that has a perspective on magic. You can't simply kill or banish sorcerer, especially since they can come back as spirits. You have to neutralize their powers or appease them in some way.

We're getting a bit afield, but Green seems pretty easy about whether we're debating something useful, so....

greyorm wrote: Yes, that whole "how common people react to religion" statement is something I wanted to address as well: Chris is talking about how things work in a culture very much like our own, or that of our direct ancestors, but I do not consider it a good base model to work from in all or most instances.

I wrote: Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power. Assume that ordinary people don’t pay a lot of attention to any of this, and mostly offer bits of food or whatever to the appropriate gods because they sort of think they ought to and it’s what dad always did and besides, it brings you good luck.

If you take older cultures, and some other not-so-older cultures, as your baseline, the idea that the common person will react to religion as something "only them there priests worry about, but say your prayers cause dad did" breaks down as a good model.

Let us take a culture like that of the traditional Ojibwe people, instead. In such, religion is something the common people do pay a very great amount of attention to, because it is intertwined with one's very life. For example, the Ojibwe have a saying, "Everything I do is a prayer." And this is very much true -- there is a spiritual, religious, ritualized aspect to every action, from waking up to sleeping, to greeting one's neighbors, to asking to play a game with friends.

You would no sooner fail to perform the proper rituals, and more importantly, no sooner fail to understand why you were performing these rituals, than you would fail to breathe.

Mark Woodhouse wrote: The case differs somewhat when you are dealing with a certain kind of fantasy. When the 'gods' are a real thing that people encounter as a part of daily life, the direction of influence that Chris talks about can get reversed (or at least equalised somewhat). For us humans who live in a world where the gods, in so far as they might exist, are only ever operating behind the scenes and we can only hypothesize about them, the direction of social construction is as Chris describes it. We have the culture we have, built up from the messy basics of everyday life, eating, sleeping, sex, death, conflict. We rationalize a cosmic order to explain and justify it.

When that cosmic order is accesible and concrete, we may consciously try to order our culture on that model, or react against it. Essentially, the gods are part of our culture.

Clerich asked:

Do the Kachina walk amongst the Hopi?

If I were doing this sort of thing in a fantasy game, I would have the great revelation be this: the gods are only gods, nothing more. That's the great secret, the thing that makes the difference between adults and children. The children think the gods are something really amazingly special and different. The adults know that the gods are just gods, not like us but really a lot like us, and that life goes on.

apparition13 wrote:

I wrote: If I were doing this sort of thing in a fantasy game, I would have the great revelation be this: the gods are only gods, nothing more. That's the great secret, the thing that makes the difference between adults and children. The children think the gods are something really amazingly special and different. The adults know that the gods are just gods, not like us but really a lot like us, and that life goes on.

This is certainly a great idea for a fantasy campaign, but I think the point Mark Woodhouse was making is that assumptions about the relationships between gods, religion and society could be vastly different if gods are unambiguously manifest in the setting. When the demons of Khorne are pounding on the gates of Kislev religion has an immiediacy we don't experience. Life doesn't just go on when religious epiphanies are daily occurances, or more accurately it does go on, but not in any way we are familiar with. As an example, when I first encountered Glorantha I thought it was a setting that was all about what life would be like when politics, culture are determined by religion and ethnicity and even species are rendered immaterial by cult affiliation. All Swords of Humakt are brothers in arms, whether duck, troll, dwarf, or anything else. I then discovered this wasn't quite what the case, but I'd still like to see it done. [emphasis added]

clerich wrote:

What I'm trying to get at, and not doing it very well, is that the crucial point is everyday life. See, if encounters with the gods or demons or whatever is everyday life, then that everyday life looks really different; as you say, it's not at all what we are familiar with. My contention is that if those things are everyday life, then they are everyday life. I know that sounds like a dodge, or a non-statement, but it's quite a big point.

If the gods walk among us, not conceptually but actually, they're people. Not quite people like us, but people. And that means they're part of the system.

Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power.

apparition13 wrote: Nope, clouds part. To paraphrase, what we are familiar with is "everyday life", what you are refering to is "everyday life, version 1.1 the gods are amongst us". The details of what is experienced would be different, as they are for us and our medieval ancestors, but the psychology of everday life (another day, another dollar; same shit, different day etc.) would be the same. So the rabbit god in the carrot patch again, wouldn't be a source of wonder and awe but frustration and "honey, I thought you propitiated him this week". About right? If it is I'd hazard a guess that we are talking about the same thing, just viewed through differenct lenses. The way I see it, the more lenses the better.

I believe my confusion stemmed from the use of system in this extract:

If the gods walk among us, not conceptually but actually, they're people. Not quite people like us, but people. And that means they're part of the system.

with system, as political system, implied in section 6 of your original post in this sentence:

Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power.

Combine "system" with "people" and I think politics, hence the misunderstanding.

The point is that the gods become politicians

The discussion about the influence deities would have on everyday life if they manifested all the time is interesting, but I would prefer to keep things on topic and read about gods walking amongst us in another thread.

To bring the discussion to a more relevant point, I believe that going beyond the Western understanding of spirituality is indeed a great way to break away from the default Eurocentric cultural model. In particular, moving from the transcendant to the immanent spiritual perspective changes the way people view their place in the world. I agree with Chris in that immanent divinity would lead people to deal with gods and spirits as family and neighbors rather than beings completely beyond our understanding and experience. A parallel example I can think of is a person who has been able to see and speak to spirits since childhood. Regardless of what you believe about spirits, the person who sees them perceives and interacts with them much like they would anybody else. The rules of interaction and the manner of contact may be different, but no more different than using a telephone or the internet to contact someone.

As far as magic and non-humans, I think what we must be careful of (and what is more or less what has been said throughout this thread) is making assumptions about how they work. If we assume that non-humans are simply biological variations of humans or other animals, or that magic is a force that can be quantified like gravity or electricity, we run the risk of making everything just like it already is. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you cannot answer questions about magic and non-human entities until you define magic and what makes non-human entities the way they are. I'm not saying that completely disregarding real history and real science is the goal, but I think we should use these as springboards rather than boundaries. For instance, something I've considered is making photon-based life forms that loosely correspond to angels, devas, and fairies. Rather than spending so much time finding reasons why it can or can't exist, I'm more interested in exploring the natural, social, and metaphysical ramifications of this idea.

Otherwise, why play fantasy?

Green wrote: To bring the discussion to a more relevant point, I believe that going beyond the Western understanding of spirituality is indeed a great way to break away from the default Eurocentric cultural model. In particular, moving from the transcendant to the immanent spiritual perspective changes the way people view their place in the world. I agree with Chris in that immanent divinity would lead people to deal with gods and spirits as family and neighbors rather than beings completely beyond our understanding and experience.