The Human Spirit

Question: How does YOUR group deal with the monotheistic religions? I'm not asking for various solutions that I could take if I ran a game, I can visit the forums for that. I would like the solution that YOUR group has taken please.

Our groups treat monotheistic religions as powerful forces in the modern world, but nearly nonentities for the divine; they are largely human inventions.

The original gods who were part of those religions at their inceptions are still around, of course - the Hebrew Yahweh, the Egyptian Aten, the Canaanite El, the Arabic Allah, and all their trappings from the heights of their worship thousands of years ago - but they are not really the gods of modern monotheism. The big-G God of Christianity and Yahweh have little in common, the first being an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent ruler over all existence and the second being a bad-tempered storm god worshiped by his tribe in the first and second millennium B.C. The Allah of the ancient Arabs, a god of spirit and the world who served as the conduit between mortal worshipers and the rest of his pantheon, has little to do with the all-powerful Allah of modern Islam. At some point, humanity took off running with those religions and turned them into the immense, complicated spiritual architectures they are today, and sort of left the old gods upon whom they had been based in the dust, forgotten and in most cases strenuously denied as even being the source of those religions. It's a bizarre situation; it's an example of gods being so thoroughly worshiped that they were actually shunted out of the popular consciousness entirely.

This doesn't prevent divine figures from manipulating mankind through monotheistic religions, of course; Aten is prone to claiming himself to be all monotheistic gods and has been known to use agents of the Vatican and the Kabbah in our games (in fact, Geoff has even had a run-in with a nice old Legendary man named Muhammad who had some interesting things to say about Aten's angels and why fighting them was futile). El does much the same, though more discreetly from the sidelines. Yahweh has not been heard from as of yet, but I suspect that if players happened to ask Baal about him, he might have some choice words to say about his fractious cousin. Figures like Christ or any of the other prophets, if they do turn up in our games, are likely to be Scions or Titanspawn looking to use the widespread human belief in monotheistic religions to their advantage.

For us, there's no way to make monotheism work in the game without severely damaging its premise; either the monotheistic gods are just Legend 12 like everyone else, in which case their legends are all hype and no substance (disappointing! Other gods' legends are treated as true!), or they're all-powerful beings that the Legend 12 pantheons can't hope to compete with, something that seriously changes the game world and not in a way that we enjoy (disappointing again, except in that players-can't-ever-reach-the-top way). Not only that, there's no reason for us to bother with monotheism; this is a game about polytheistic religions and their ability to exert influence over the world, and as such there's really no need for monotheism to be in play. Since belief doesn't create the world (though it certainly helps shape it), the fact that large swaths of the planet believe in a single monotheistic god doesn't actually cause that god to exist.

Honestly, I think it's pretty cool that humanity could manage to invent something so huge, complex and emotionally charged, all on its own with only minimal or accidental meddling by the gods. The power of humanity's belief is a strong one in Scion, and the fact that they can create entire huge religions without bothering with the gods themselves illustrates that core human power.

So monotheism exists in our games, but it's a human invention; by humans, for humans, and used by the gods with only occasional success. Huge, unassailably powerful deities that no polytheistic pantheon could hope to compete with do not exist, but the incredible power of human belief does.