DND, Faith, Religion and Gods: How to Do It Right

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.

Before I get into the rest of today’s episode, I want to take a moment to talk about The Guild. For those of you who don’t know, the Guild is our unique membership for dungeon masters. It allows you to connect with other DMs like yourself and get access to a library of video courses and downloadable resources for your gameplay. Oh and it’s 100% free. I hope you’ll join us there, so go to monsters.rent/get-started and scroll all the way to the bottom.

Table Comfort

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.

Avoid Pushing Religion

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.

Avoid Making A Farce of Religion

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. 

How Involved Will Your Gods Be

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.

Interactions with Players

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.

Will You Have One God or Many

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.

Is Your God Good, Neutral or Evil

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.

Can Gods be Killed?

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

Can Anyone Become a God?

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.

Using Faith as a Plot Device

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

The Push

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

• The character grew up as a child of insane cultists worshiping a demon lord
• The character lives in a town where a religion runs rampant and is very xenophobic
• The character has been persecuted themselves
• The character does not agree with the popular religion of their area

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

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:

• The Character wants more peace in their mortal life
• The character wishes to attain great spiritual power
• The character wants to rid the world of evil (or good)
• The character wants to restore a religion to its previous glory

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.

Using Faith as a Character Driver

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 Faith Crisis

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....