As I watched “Jason and the Argonauts”, which is taken straight from Greek mythology, I thought about how much divine intervention there was.
The ancient Greek divinities were nothing more than super powerful beings exhibiting the traits of human kind to an exaggerated degree. They meddled in human affairs, played favorites in their schemes against other divinities, demanded respect and sacrifice from humans, and judged humans for the same acts they themselves performed. I’m not going into any theological or literary analysis here, since this is an RPG blog. I’m just looking at the game mechanics of it.
If you have a game where players get a lot of divine intervention, the examples of Greek mythology are one example. I am not as familiar with other mythologies and their acts of divine intervention, so I will use them as the extreme example on one end of the spectrum.
The Greeks had oracles in locations all over the shores and islands of the Aegean Sea. The locations of the oracles where also often the site of temples to specific deities. There were shrines and temples all over. The biggest temple in a city was for the patron deity of the city. Of course, that model is each city being a city-state with a city controlling a surrounding territory. They had all kinds of different forms of governments from monarchies to democracies, with oligarchies and dictators among them.
They had nature spirits, like nyads and dryads, demi-gods like Herakles, and a full pantheon with a king and queen of the gods and gods for every purpose. There are even the titans, the old gods, overthrown and replaced by the current ones.
The myths are full of stories of everyday people who do some affront to a god and are punished for it, or are one some great quest or series of quests from the gods, or agents of the gods. From the myths, it seems that a rules system like that would make it relatively easy to get the gods involved. Insulting the gods seems to be the best way to get their attention.
Some other RPG setting would have a middle of the road mythology where the ability to draw the positive or negative attention of the gods is indeed rare. Some games this might be limiting clerics to gaining their spells, even though AD&D 1st edition says that 6th or 7th level spells are granted directly by the cleric’s diety, assuming they are in good standing.
I have read of other RPG settings where the campaign has little or no contact from the gods and few to no real clerics. To me, this is a little too far for my taste. How about magic in such a situation? Is it more or less powerful? Does it take the place of the gods?
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable doing too much work on a religious system for my campaign setting(s). I don’t like using real mythologies for divinities. I can see skinning a real world mythology and changing the names to speed things up, or making a few main divinities for weather, harvest, sea, death, magic, etc.
In my brother, Robert’s campaign, he has a diety called, The Justice Maker. There are no temples to him, at least non that we have ever encountered. He is true neutral and holds the scales of judgement. One time a player was in trouble and yelled, “Help me, anybody.” and rolled something like 01 out of 100, and “fortunately” got The Justice Maker, who in return for his aid, required a service that had to be done within the bounds of one’s alignment or have it shifted. My character, a cleric to a different diety, somehow got sucked into helping with that quest. Robert is quite the artist and he made a painting of The Justice Maker. He is a figure with a faceless helmet, with a billowing cloak about him, and in his hand is a point-down sword where the hilt functions as the beam to the scales of justice. My words can’t do the painting justice, ugh sorry for the pun.
My character once got divine intervention from his diety to help make a crystal ball, but had to trade most of his magic items, build a temple, and do another great service. That was expensive in magic, treasure, time, and risk.
The same character later sought intervention again, but there is some table weighted by how often or recently we last had aid. Robert always hams it up, and says, “Diety’s hotline, how may I help you?” Or he says there is a busy signal, or no signal, or you get somebody else. The somebody else bit can be really bad if you are in alignment deviation territory. Since my fighter/magic-user/cleric has been faithful to his diety, while not getting his diety, got a demi-god assistant, who is now Griswald’s patron.
I believe we have a base 10% chance for divine intervention. Doing really great deeds that further the cause of law or good or the main bent of our deity helps as do actions that directly help the diety’s aims. It is not as divine intervention heavy as Greek mythology conveys, but there is a back story of good vs. evil on an epic level. Sometimes the characters get a glimpse of that, and take part. For example, Griswald has Orcus mad at him for desecrating a temple to Orcus. As a hero type, Griswald has made a lot of enemies among the really nasty types, and due to politics among the not so bad types has some of them for enemies too.
