[Lore] Worldbuilding Part 4: The Great Kingdom & The Great Church

     The two parts of my setting that I really want to flesh out some more are the Great Kingdom and the Great Church.  Really generic names I know, but for now they work.  The main thing I want to do is use the Great Kingdom and Church to really emphasize and develop the alliance between the humans and demi-humans.  Now that I've already established that the races are pretty friendly towards each other, I have to come up with some good reasons as to why that is.

    One idea is that the Great Kingdom is not just a single realm but it's actually made up of several minor kingdoms.  This idea seems really cool to me because originally, I had wanted to make a confederacy of some sort as opposed to a kingdom and this option is basically a combination of those two systems.  The human kingdom would be the most dominant and the rulers of the demi-human realms would swear fealty and pay taxes to the Overking.  I'm not exactly sure how many minor kingdoms I would create.  My first thought is that each race would have a kingdom but I might group some up with each other (dwarves and gnomes, for example).  I also read a blog post a while back about a campaign where all of the demi-humans were all considered to be part of "Faerie" and they were ruled by an elf prince which I think is really cool but it might be too fairytale-esque for my tastes.  Although, I have been thinking about classifying halflings as a type of elf, probably of the wood variety, and regular elves would just be high elves or something but I'm not 100% sold on the idea.  I do like that halflings get a bonus to ranged weapons though and that feels pretty elf-like imo.

Perhaps performing last rites prevents the dead from rising again.

    The other idea to lean into the Lawful alliance is to have them all share the same religion or god(s).  This is a bit different from what I've done since I typically just go with racial deities but after getting into the idea of having one god and many saints, a universal religion doesn't seem that far-fetched.  Something about dwarves, elves, and men all worshiping the same guy just felt off to me but it's slowly feeling less weird.  This is actually something I noticed in the example of play in the Basic Rules where Sister Rebecca, the cleric, performs the last rites of her church for Black Dougal upon his death but doesn't when Fredrik the Dwarf died.  I could be reading way too into this, but to me, it implies that humans and demi-humans don't follow the same religion.  It also implies that alignment isn't necessarily tied to religion since Sister Rebecca, who is Lawful, was willing to perform last rites for Black Dougal, who is most likely Neutral.  I'll be honest, part of me really wants to run with the implications of the rule books (and some modules, primarily B1) even though this particular one would go against the whole alliance aspect I'm focusing on.

Clerics from B1

    Anyways, one of the ideas I had for the Great Church (formerly the Church of Radiance) is that it is no longer only about Ohm.  Instead, what I had in mind was that the Great Church could serve as a religion of Law.  My earlier post about the Church of Radiance already plays into this idea with the demi-humans having their own patron saints but now, instead of having saints, their deities would be recognized as allies to the god(s) of humans.  I also liked this option because it would give a solid reason as to why there is an alliance between these races and why they are (potentially) part of the same kingdom.  When these races met each other and were able to speak in Lawful to each other, they realized that they were on the same side in this cosmic struggle between Law (good) and Chaos (evil).  The lack of demi-human clerics could also imply them being either godless or misinformed in their worship of their god(s).  A human cleric could've come along, done some miracles in the name of god and convinced the demi-humans to convert.

    Again, I feel like I could go either way with the monotheistic or polytheistic Great Church.  I also feel like I could just be incredibly vague and say that characters worship "the gods" and leave it at that until my players start asking questions about who they worship.  That is pretty boring though, at least for me.  Mystery is good but not knowing anything about my own world isn't really what I'm after.

    Maybe a shared religion isn't necessary to justify an alliance and them all being threatened by the forces of Chaos is enough to become fast friends.  That could work and I could just chalk up each race as being henotheistic so that they can still have their own, individual god(s) to worship but it doesn't immediately create hostility between them.  At that point though, why wouldn't the Great Church just include each Lawful deity.  Is it because the human majority doesn't see the utility in worshiping the dwarf gods?  I guess there could still be sects of monotheists but idk how common they'd be.  One benefit of going the henotheistic route is that conversations like that of Conan and Subotai would be pretty commonplace, which is cool.  The cleric could speak of their devotion to some ascetic saint while the dwarf shrugs it off, claiming that his god of gold and ale is a much better deity.

    I think part of my problem with worldbuilding these religions is that I wanted to establish an official religion for the Great Kingdom and have all the clerics be a part of it but maybe that shouldn't be the route I take.  There could still be a popular religion that would exist in all the main towns but maybe as you travel into the villages, you encounter more folksy religions that worship the "old gods" or something like that.  That could be pretty cool.  There could even be a sect of the Great Church that is much more intolerant of other deities that could try to root out these "heathens."  Maybe the priests of the Great Church teach that there is only one god and that the demi-humans have been deceived by the demons of Chaos.  The demi-humans themselves would be Lawful, due to being created by the one true god but they are currently separated from the truth due to these evil beings tricking them.  In my previous post on religion I said that Ohm was simply the most powerful god, so that could be another source of tension if I don't go the monotheistic route.

    Also, I've changed my mind on the saving throw bonuses I wanted the saints to give out.  While kind of a neat gimmick, I think it would be better to just have the gods and saints not really do anything for the characters, besides the occasional vison/dream or punishment.  In the most extreme and dire of circumstances, the god or saint might come down to help but that would be a one of a kind event.  Holy relics and artifacts, on the other hand, would give bonuses and various abilities to whoever found them.

    I'm gonna end the post here.  This ended up being mostly a brainstorming session so I'll have to think it over some more but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there.  I'd be interested in hearing how anyone who's reading this has handled gods in their game.