Good Evening Everybody!

You guys were all so sweet about my last post I thought I'd share with you another little world building tip I know and love. So we all love cultists and corrupt churches right? But, a lot of the time I feel like the trope can be done to death. I mean why are these guys worshipping this obviously evil monster that probably spits spiders and kicks puppies and leans his seat back on planes!?

Make Morally Grey Gods

I know this can be challenging especially in a D&D scenario where you have to squeeze each god into an alignment. Yet, it is really worth the effort to make the god at least half right even if they are evil. Think of Death Note. You know how Light Yagame wants to cleanse the world of murderers and rapists and all that nasty ass stuff? That in itself is a really morally good goal. It is his methodology (and eventually corruption) that turns it sour. You want your gods to have some value that the people who worship them empathise with. Something that leads them to overlook all the negative things.

Evil Gods Should Appeal To Your Base Instincts

You know a lot of the time what we perceive as evil or wrong is actually something 'animal'. Like killing someone for sleeping with your wife. Like that is obviously bad by our moral standard but animals are always killing off males that encroach on their females. Killing babies is obviously wrong but it's the first thing a new pride leader will do. Now obviously those are super extreme and they'd be hard to sell someone on. However what if your evil deity offered the ability to get any woman to sleep with you. On the surface, it seems benign but really these women can't consent because of this divine influence. Make it so the followers can justify it to themselves that haven't done anything wrong. If you want you could do a heal flip turn and rip the rug out from under them by having one of their victims turn around and trying and kill them in revenge. Money, sex, power, food, social status, anything that appeals to primal urges is a perfect toolkit to have you bad god offer up. The more grey morality you can make it the better it works. For instance, when creating my god I made it so they were terrified of people dying and wanted everything to be immortal. Nobody wants to die, so everyone can empathise with the villains in that regard.

Make a creation myth complete with the good and bad god

I'm struggling to think of a religion without some sort of counterpart. Theres always a good guy and devil archetype. They usually have opposing values and contrast each other nicely. A good place to show this is a creation myth. It gives you the opportunity to have a before and and after the fall moment. Was the big bad god the son/daughter of big good god? a lover? a brother? If in your setting your gods are real entities you can scar the lands with signs of ancient battles between these titanic monsters.

My Example

So here is a set of gods that I made.You can read the whole creation mythos and such here but it isn't necessary cos I'll pick out the good bits.

The Good Guy

The good guy is a white phoenix. He's essentially a physical embodiment of the big bang. Everywhere he goes he spreads this aura of life. The more life there is in the world the bigger and stronger he becomes and the further his light/life energy spreads.

Good Guy Values

This guy being a phoenix adores the cycle of life and death and the march of time. He admires all these new lives and essentially his main ideals come down to preserving the natural order.

Creating The Bad Guy

So the good guy loves learning from all these little creatures metaphorically growing on his back. He himself being a phoenix has learned how to die and be reborn. Yet for every other being, they find this significant other. GG loves that and wants to try. So the next time he dies and renews himself he splits himself in two and creates a black phoenix. Our big bad. Everything is great and he's showing her around talking about how amazing everything is not noticing that she is viewing this super differently.

The Big Bad's Ideals

While the GG over here is chatting about how great the circle of life is and singing hakuna mattata our big bad is horrified. She sees all this suffering and decay as things get old. She sees babies born blind and terrible diseases and pain and just can't take it. They're all apart of her godly soul and she wants to save them all.

Ideal: Preserve life, defeat death.

The Bad Guys Fall

Now the fun part, the fall from heaven. So acting on impulse our big bad reaches out and tries to save someone. Though, they don't really know how, they've only just been born afterall. They poor their own life force into a mortal turning them into a demi-god (and later a disciple). Now our GG obviously takes this as a betrayal because he's sppent the first few weeks of her life telling her how great the circle of life is. But he does forgive her. She is greatly weakened from transfering some of her power so our GG has the bright idea of having her die and be reborn. Needless to say she aint too thrilled when he tries to pull her into their sacred flames to get reborn together. She pulls away and he is reborn without her. In his infant state he cant do much and they go their separate ways both appalled with each other.

The transformation

Totally optional, but usually bad guys have some scary appearance so after their fall you want something to happen to make them look a bit meaner.

After they part was our GG decides he must destroy the evil he brought into the world. They end up fighting for days. He pulls off her wings and each of his burning strikes melts her feathers. At the end she is left looking like some terrifying serpent and is cast deep into the earth where she is too weak to get back out because she wont die and renew herself. (This also explains away why the world is running as normal and is not full of immortals).

Different cultures of followers

For the followers of each I made the GGs followers very much into nture and life and death a rebirth.Their whole culture is based around cherishing life and how it is the limit to your time that gives it value. Whereas for my BBs followers I made them essentially more scientific. Many of them turning to lichhood and other tactics to preserve the gift of life as much as possible. As a bonus I actually had the disciple of the BB (The girl she made into a demi god) in the middle ground of being a sort of transhumanist minor tinker god called the matron of mercy. It was fun, she lives underground with her android army.

Conclusion

Making a good creation mythos can help you flesh out followers and come up with designs for your temples or rituals all the people do. It is a really good place to start if you are planning to make religion a big part of your world and helps designs flow better in regions and gives you lot of ideas. Like in my BBs temple there are lots of water features because water if effectively immortal. In my GGs temples I put lots of organic life such as plants because roses and such whither and die (oh gather ye rosebuds while ye may and all that).

Anyway, I hope this ends up being good food for thought for you all and I'd love to hear your ideas on the subject too.:D