Quote:
Originally Posted by b-dog
I really don’t mean there needs to be Old Testament Book of Esther style genocides and massacres, I would just like a little realism in the religions. I doubt that a cleric who worships Zeus would think of Odin as being the same god.
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It depends what sort of realism you're going for. Historically, it was natural for cultures to map their gods onto the gods of other cultures that they encountered. This was commonplace in the Mediterranean (see
Wikipedia), with Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Romans, and others mapping their gods onto each other (and developing new gods, like Serapis). It was even common for gods within the same general cultural region to have different aspects in different communities. If someone wanted to interact with a particular aspect, they would travel to the shrine in a community that emphasized that trait.
This sort of realism combined with the basic idea that the pantheon is universal could create fun elements in play. Perhaps a cleric of the War God in Nordlond needs to travel to a distant country to interact with a different aspect of the War God (to gain knowledge, or a new spell, or a holy artifact, etc.). The god would have a different name there with different statues and rites and whatnot, but the cleric would be fundamentally interacting with the same divinity.
Of course, in a world where the gods walk among mortals, this can get confusing and complicated... and fun! The winter snows never arrive in Nordlond. Priests of the Snow Queen are worried... she's been, er,
colder than usual. The PCs are sent (because... omens!) to the distant desert land of the cat people where they must free an avatar of Sekhmet, who may be the equivalent of the Snow Queen. So many excuses to send the PCs to the far corners of the earth!