How do you deal with religion in your setting /tg/? I want to

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I made my own.

https://sites.google.com/site/gitpwotbs/home/loftier-things

>>50177374
I ask the players who's characters are religious what it's like.

If the players don't care I probably won't either.

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>>50177374
Do as God wills.

>>50177374
I picked a number of political ideologies and baked them into the subtext of every religion, working backwards from there.

>>50177374

I usually make up religions that are made up of people with (more or less) good intentions, but often acting on reduced levels of knowledge (when compared with more learned men/women in the setting).

For example... I once made a cult of friendly and helpful necromancers who think every raised skeleton is basically a saint or angel, abstaining from entering/re-entering heaven because they want to keep helping the living find their way to heaven. So the necromancers and their walking menageries of rotting flesh and bones are actually eager to help people (undead never tire, making them expert helpers; clearly, it must be a blessing from Heaven!), but get odd looks because of... well, walking corpses.

So, they are acting on knowledge that they *think* is correct ("proper" undead are blessings from god/heaven, etc.), but which every learned person, like wizards and such, would know is complete bogus and that an undead skeleton is nothing more than a regular pile of unthinking bones animated by magic.

But hey, Joe Average doesn't have wizard experience or arcane schooling, so he's much more likely to go "yeah, that makes sense" when the friendly necromancers start preaching and showing off how helpful the undead are, especially when the religious folks are helping out and offering helpful advice, while the wizard is by his tower and shouting how everyone else are idiots.

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You know there's more christian denominations than catlicks, right?

There's orthodoxy, armenian church, gnosticism, copts and so on. Or you could try other eastern religions like Zoroastrianism or Kabbalah.

If you want a broader answer, follow this guideline: Urban or relatively advanced societies have a well defined, centralized, hierarchal religion while tribals or nomads have various, decentralized religions where one god has many names depending on the tribe that worships him and there are generally dozens if not hundreds of little deities that families and tribes individually worship.

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>>50177374
>The Catholic Church is good, funds education and genuinely aids the impoverished through charity and compelling nobles to take better care of their flock
>The Catholic Church's leadership is thoroughly corrupt and evil, but a group of benevolent bishops seeking to restore the Church to its former glory seek to overthrow the current leadership either overtly or in secrecy
>The Catholic Church is full of priests, deacons and bishops that are more than eager to exploit the superstitious population for their own gain. The current leaders of the church start an inquisition in hopes of rooting out corruption among their own ranks.

I took your idea and respectively reversed it, nuanced it so the good bottom is afflicted by an evil top and nuanced it so a good top tries to eradicate an evil bottom respectively. It's not that difficult with a little bit of creativity.

And that's assuming you want a Catholic Church analogue in the first place. You could easily do without one, especially because most fantasy settings are polytheist/paganistic.

>>50177374
Religion is, at least in the setting I'm currently DMing, nearly ubiquitous. If you don't have one you're seen as kinda weird. Who the hell do you give thanks to? Who do you want to be like? From where, on high, does your soul come from?
The problems of evil and suffering aren't really addressed. Acting in the will of your god is considered good, and you aren't exactly liable for your actions in that sense. Of course if you kill someone's child in the name of your god it's just as likely their god is going to order vengeance. If not, someone will claim it was anyway. Holy wars are particularly prominent.
As far as the physics/laws/magic/whatever go, wizards confirmed most revelations relating to that years ago. Religion isn't so much spiritual as it is being a part of some crazy powerful motherfucker's entourage.

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>>50177572
Now i want to play a character based around this concept.

>>50177818
Feel free to do so!

In my campaigns, religions are almost like political parties. Nobody judges you for which one you choose, but they all kinda bicker over power, public opinion, and which one is right.

Secretly, they're all wrong, because the gods they worship were all once mortals who ascended to their current station. There is something else that created everything, and a rare few can communicate with it. It guides them and empowers them in ways beyond conventional divine magic can. It breaks the rules because it wrote the rules, and you have no idea what it wants.

I find it's actually sorta refreshing to have a 1500's deal where there's an embattled catholic church, pagans in the far off frontier, heresies and new churches popping up on every street corner, wars of religion, etc.

It's sorta nice sometimes just to have the average person in the setting be explicitly christian rather than having to create my own religion or file the serial numbers off the catholic church.

For more fantasy settings, I like to have a few religions of my own design duking it out with the church of prester john which is a vaguely more heretical version of nestorianism.

All of my settings have religious conflict and turmoil, likely because my interests lie in the 16th and 17th centuries and especially the 30 Years War. A good way to do things is to look for some of the weird Christian sects that haven't been very successful. Gnosticism, Adamites, Cathars, Arians, and the like. Mix liberally with some other real world religions and you have something that's generally recognizable to people, theologically speaking, but kind of exotic and alien. Remember to make sects within those religions. Even if they're fairly minor theological debates, you can have shit like the real life Realists vs Nominalists debate adding a bit of tension within the church. Big homogeneous blocks are boring.

>>50177374
God is not a real entity, but the shape of God in the mind, the thoughtscape of warship enables a lot of magic.

I hate the idea of some bog standard evil religion primarily because the alignment system permeates and is cancer.

Other then that I just try to find what's cool and build a religion/culture based on the oncept.

One being Santa Muerte only with more overt catholic images with allusions to aztec/mayan roots (i.e. themes of sacrifice and respect for elders and the dead being a big deal) as well as a conflict between people who are still practicing the old ways such as ritual human sacrifice to ensure a good harvest and the people invested iin the reformation trying to stamp out old practices.

Beyond that, I just have a catch all pantheon with no hard specific groups so literally two factions that worship the same god could be at each others throats (like in real life).

I had the gods in the setting I ran a campaign in represent dualities of life. Life and death, hope and despair, knowledge and confusion, war and peace, etc. So they have a large amount of sway in a lot of life and people can be like "Eh, you got the bad side of the coin"

Having a priest of the god of knowledge and confusion to serve as a walking, talking fountain of vague guidance was handy. He was a blind oracle with a lot of divination magic and other rituals, so he provided the party with ritual stuff and magical items to accomplish goals that he asked them to do. He would learn the paths to these goals in a very vague sense through prophecy.

The party also later met an undead cleric that tended to the catacombs of an ancient order of paladins. He was imprisoned by a bunch of orcs and necromancers. After they freed him he gave them a bunch of healing, religions implements, and holy artifacts/magic items to aid them in their quest.

An easy way to make religion a valued force of good in a campaign is to have the party directly benefited by it. Not just clerics and paladins, but everybody. (Some people, like my party's rogue, still won't appreciate it.)

I try and do some research into real world religions so the ones in setting feel more real. On whole I try be as even handed overall in whether it's good or bad, there are good religious people and bad religious people aswell as good and bad non belivers.

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>>50177374
>all I know about religion is a bunch of memes about catholics

You got bigger problems than your campaign m8

>>50177374
Go with evil murder cult, base it on islam.
Thats the easy way.

Nature concale of druids to keep balance is other, take inspiration from paganism/buddism.

Its not that hard but most of the time its not worth unless you have some priest/cleric/fanatic in your group.

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>>50181756
>Go with evil murder cult, base it on islam.
>Get killed for depicting Islam like a violent murder cult
Truly the religion of peace