Dealing with Deities - Building a 5E Campaign in a Believer's Worldview Pt 1.

About This Series

If you are reading this, you are either 1 of my 2 remaining readers from the early 2000's Blogger Days or you scrolled waa-aay down in the search results after searching for something about Dungeons and Dragons.  For those of you looking for a good RAW justification for stacking bonuses, know that this is not the blog you are looking for.  I'm relatively new to the game and that I found the title of this blog scrawled in the margin of my notes from my 2nd or 3rd sessions playing D&D.  It's now been a year and a half since I started playing, so I'm starting to know what I'm doing (sorta).  Enough that I trust myself to finally write about my experience so far playing Giles of Hamm and what I've been noodling on as I begin to write my own little D&D adventure.

If you found this because a Blogger bot woke up from it's semi-eternal slumber to send you an email notification for a new Dashboard Drummer post, you might not know much about D&D.  I sure didn't.  So as I work through my notes I'll define a few things, like "5E" and "Campaign" and, what that all has to do with Deities, and why there is more than ONE.

Campaigns

The games that eventually grew into Dungeons and Dragons were initially table top reenactments of Napoleonic battle maneuvers with little tin soldiers (I know, weird right?).  A series of battles was a "campaign" - and the name stuck.  

Today a campaign is a story.  D&D - especially the 5th Edition (5E) that I play, is a cooperative way to tell a story that someone has written themselves or prepared using a premade adventure.  Unlike the traditional once upon a time story, the characters (everyone else that's playing) gets to decide on the fly what they will do in a given situation based on what they know and don't know about the overall story.  Imagine if the Wizard of Oz started off in black & white with the tornado; and then the narrator described the house landing on the witch and Dorothy's spiffy new shoes … and then asked her:  What would you like to do?

World Building

Just like the Yellow Brick Road in Oz, the story has to go somewhere.  Dorothy is told that to get home, she should follow the road.  For some reason there's also dancing munchkins and a fully developed backstory about the cooperative labor guild responsible for the manufacture of lollipops that seems to have no other purpose than to provide a good musical number.

Fun Fact:  fanciful singing and choreography aren't part of my D&D experience, but ya know .. you do you.

The stuff like the lollipop guild (and what the conversion rate is for green vs. blue candy ore) is what can make for a good campaign.  Though not always fully planned and sometimes bluffed on the spot, the DM (Dungeon Master) has to know what's off the yellow brick beaten path whether its a One-Shot story that is completed in one session over pizza or a years-long ever expanding map of empires and cities

That brings me to the bit about Worldview.  If you've heard anything about D&D, it's probably something to do with the 'Satanic Panic' of the early 80s when folks in the Church were really into catching what John was saying backwards about Paul and a Walrus and also really sure that a game with monsters and devils was pretty much the worst thing imaginable.  Well, at least the panic made for good investigative news reports and sold a lot of sermon tapes.  

Following the panic, amid dropping sales, a good chunk of the "devil stuff" got pulled from the next edition (2E) but realistically, that's just window dressing.  Whoever is telling the story gets to decide what the world the players are adventuring in is like.  If you want your world to be filled with Care Bears and Rainbows and feature characters with crippling star-dust addictions, cool. if you want to turn each session into an attempt to one-up the SAW franchise, you can do that too.

So, as I create my first one-shot, even though it's incredibly unlikely that any of my characters exploring an Avenger's themed ski-lodge will interrupt a fight with the abominable snow-bunny to ask about the cosmological and theological implications of a holy hand-grenade … I still need to work out how magic works and where good and evil come from and what motivates players to take moral or amoral actions.  

I remember the moment I wrote 'Dealing with Deities' in my campaign notebook.  It was when I was leveling up Giles's character sheet.  In this case, adding a cool spell that I could use to literally 'blast' the bad guys.  I just needed to decide what magical or spiritual being was granting Giles that power.

This wasn't Satanic Panic stuff.  This was Worldview.  It wasn't my story, but I was choosing this character's attributes.  Did Giles have a Evangelical approach to magic use?  With that in mind, I made a few notes over following days on different approaches I'd seen in some of my favorite stories.

Where Does the Magic Come From?

… in no particular order:

Eru, The One 

Much of the core of D&D's setting and characters are high fantasy.  Consequently, you can choose to play the game in a very Tolkienesque way.  It's not featured much in the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but Tolkien's Silmarillion goes into a lot of careful theology setting up The Elemental Powers as the angels that participated in the creation of Arda - themselves created beings made in the mind and heart of Eru, The One.  So, if a phial of shimmering light saves two hobbits trapped in a spiders cave, it's no more magical than the intervention of a saint and all part of Eru's plan.

I'm not going there.  I'm not nearly smart enough to parse out good and evil or give it that much back-story.  Still there is something there about Truth and who's it is. Evil is also there - not as a duality or opposite, but as a vain attempt to create that only succeeds in corrupting what was already sung into being.

The Deep Magic

Magic in the Chronicles of Narnia is also an extension of Creation; but Lewis takes it a step further.  The world of Narnia, Calormen, and the Lone Islands sits along-side our own world (just a jump away) and the children are told explicitly that it's the same God, just different worlds and that they must come to know Him in both.  The Deep Magic that resurrects Aslan at the Stone Table is Redemption told again for that world.

Because the world in my one-shot adventure will in many ways be our own - with some comic book style exceptions - I've got the luxury of ignoring most of the existential questions by just adding in the elements that tweak our reality on the other side of the wardrobe.

Toothy Cows

Likely the least known to my readers, Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather Saga is a great example of an author's Worldview driving a world, but not the story.  Its a great bedtime series to read to little ones and a good fantasy read for medium ones … and a fairly rough tear-jerker / knee slapper for the big ones like me.  Janner and his siblings encounter quite a bit of what we'd label magic in our own world but it's fully integrated with the same tone as the rest of the story (like the above mentioned toothy cows) never explained and perfectly wonderful.

I like this lack of explanation.  There's no danger of running into an R rating encounter in either Peterson's Aerwiar or my silly ski-lodge mystery romp but I like that the Wingfeather World manages to say something about the magic in our real lives and challenge some assumptions in a silly-toothy way.

Midichlorians

In a game that is 25% Wizards and, at a minimum, 5% Cheetos and Mountain Dew, you knew the Space Wizard magic was going to come up right?  The duality of the Force isn't my takeaway here (see my notes on Tolkien's Legendarium) but I have noted that what we learn about the Force comes out over 40 odd years, not in vast exposition dumps, charts, and FAQs.  If this story I'm working ends up having legs (and players) that it can grow into, there's no reason the mechanics all have to be known right away … and honestly, I'm likely the only one that will ever care how the secret magical item really works or where it comes from.  Also, trying to shoe-horn in a lame yet overly complicated explanation half-way through wastes time and causes arguments (see Midichlorians).

Squibs and Muggles

Who can't do magic?  This is the odd example out in my list.  Rowling's own early 2000's Satantic Panic had all the same features of its 80's counterpart (and some of the same faces and arguments).  If there is a Worldview clash with believers and the Harry Potter novels, it's not as a gateway to the occult, but its grounding in a Humanistic perspective.  Magic at Hogwarts is science and quite literally a matter of genetics.  Tapping into yourself and practicing your evolutionary attributes (in the context of struggling against what you don't agree with rather than what is evil) is the central theme.  They are fun but don't point to anywhere or anyone.

This for me would be a cop-out.  The MCU take on magic in the Avengers movies - (that Magic is Science is Magic) reflects the Rowling approach and there will be a few "Nano-Technology" spell adaptations but not everything is knowable. Just like Squibs and Muggles, there is magic in our creation and our story - but it doesn't come from inside us.

More of the 5E Campaign Worldview

My notebook had a few other topics to explore, so you're welcome / I'm sorry, this blog will continue.

Next up I'll continue Meddling with Magic and get a bit more crunchy with a discussion of the 5E Schools of Magic and Supernatural Beings:

• gods, patrons, celestials and their bad guy equivalents
• the necessity of necromancy
• the details of divination