[DF] Arabian Nights questions

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by b-dog

In the Arabian Nights setting Islam is the dominant faith but the adventures are in the ruins of the pagan gods (the DF part). The pagan gods are more active in the world too and they teach many magical spells and powers. I am not trying to offend people, I just want to try to make some sense out of what the older pagan gods came from. To Muslims I think that they would think that the pagan gods were at best djinn and at worst demons. Anyway, how would you have the pagan gods be as powerful as Allah yet interact more with humanity? Why would faiths that have gods that interact with people be defeated by Islam? If you have ideas please share. This is the reason I am posting this, go try to organize the cosmology of Arabian Nights.

In my opinion, the fallacy is that one god "defeated" the pagan pantheons. What I think really happened is that Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah just had more charismatic leaders at the time that promised something that the public felt they needed, so the public abandoned the old ways to slip to something new. Just because a religion is dominant does not make its deity/deities "more powerful". Case in point: who is more powerful, the Muslim Allah, the pantheistic Hindi gods still worshipped by 89% of India's populace, or the gods of the Chinese folk religion still revered by roughly an equal number of China's populace? All claim to be more powerful than other two.

Try this: the pagan gods have their own reasons for letting an upstart from the Canaanite pantheon rise to prominence over the Mediterranean, and are waiting for the right time to return, which being immortal they have the patience to wait a few thousand years. Of course, their old ruins still abound, and some aren't willing to wait or have plans to interfere with the upstart monotheistic religions. The djinn are powerful, and many may claim to be the gods of old, which can cause some confusion, but are not - even though some of the pagan gods may simply turn a blind eye or give covert support to these djinn impersonators.

In my opinion, the PCs should not know whether the pagan god they run into is a djinn or an actual god. They should also not know whether the priests of the dominant religion is getting powers from Allah or Shaitan, or whether Shaitan is a djinn or a devil - or an ancient pagan god who is more protective of humanity in general than Allah. Let the players guess and keep them on their toes, don't just decree the dogma of the religion is 100% correct and everything else is the wrong way.