Forgive (or not) the thread necro here but my thoughts have returned to this topic (mostly due to rewatching GOT before the new season comes out) and another issue I would want to address in GH is the position of the church.
Obviously, there is the Old Faith as has been mentioned above but the Oeridians, for example, have 27 gods in all. How could that be incorporated into a single faith (assuming you wanted to as I would).
What about the Nine (or Seven to mirror the Aerdy Houses) Great Houses of the gods. Could each Aerdy House have a patron god / house of gods?
The Oeridian gods don't really work as a cohesive pantheon unless you add deities.
At the very least, you need to add the common gods. They need a god of magic, they need a god of the sun, they need a god of death, they need an oerth mother, and so on. By now, whoever the Oeridian tribes worshiped 1,000 years ago, they're an integral part of the pantheon.
The Oeridian gods in particular need at least another generation of elder gods to properly explain where they came from. Who were Celestian and Fharlanghn's parents? If Merikka is a cousin of the wind gods, who were her parents and grandparents? Who were Heironeous and Hextor's fathers? Who were Zilchus and Kurell's parents? The Oeridian gods are full of pairs of siblings, which implies that they have parents. If they don't, what makes them siblings? Did they hatch out of different sets of uncreated eggs at the beginning of time? Possible, but not very interesting.
Remember that the Oeridians don't exist anymore. The Oeridians have been dead for a thousand years. Except for scholars, almost no one speaks the Old Oeridian tongue. Almost no one is of purely Oeridian blood. No one's going to worship "the Oeridian pantheon" as if that's a thing that anyone still cares about in the modern age. Since the Great Migrations new gods have arisen, old ones have faded into obscurity, and the old pantheons have both blended and split.
So it's not going to be as simple as "each pantheon is a religion." Religions are going to be shaped by politics more than anything. People in the Great Kingdom believe what they believe because the Holy Censor of Medegia decreed it, and if they didn't they'd be burnt as heretics. The people in the Pale believe something else because the Pale was settled by people who fled the Great Kingdom after a religious schism. The people of Nyrond have different beliefs than the Great Kingdom because the two nations have a history of war and hatred which prevents ecumenical cooperation and encourages differentiation.
That's not to say that people aren't influenced by the mix of peoples who settled their nation, just that there's a lot of room for theological change since then.
Most churches are going to be state churches, or associated with cleric-led states like Veluna, Almor, Medegia, the Pale, and Ekbir. Keoland doesn't have a state church, so religion there is less homogeneous and more full of charismatic cults.
Remember that religion is more than a list of gods; it's a set of beliefs about the origin of the world, the nature of the afterlife and the soul, the origin of evil and the nature of sin. It's about what responsibilities people have to one another and the gods. Can a mortal become a god or is that blasphemy? Can sins be pardoned by buying indulgences? Does free will exist? Do the gods prefer animal sacrifices or is that a savage practice the gods abhor? Is a god the same person as their avatar or are avatars separate, created beings with goals and personalities of their own? Can angels fall? Are devils descended from fallen angels or are they a separate creation? Are demons divine accidents or do they predate the gods? How many hollyphants can dance on the head of a pin?
Broadly speaking, you can plug in any group of gods and the religion will be pretty much the same. I mean, obviously a pantheon of twelve evil gods will be different from a pantheon of twelve good gods, but a group of people who revere Wee Jas as the patron of magic isn't going to be terribly different from a group of people who revere Boccob as the patron of magic unless there are a lot of other things about them that are different.
Probably almost everyone acknowledges as many gods as possible, just to be safe, but some gods are going to be more important than others and some may disagree on whether two gods (for example, Bleredd and Fortubo) are masks of the same god. For simplicity, I prefer giving a given church twelve or so major deities that they consider to be the most important. The LGG's lists of which deities are most popular in a given nation are a good start.
As the previous thread I started that you link to above suggests, I still have issues with a variety of competing religions in a more gritty GH. I can visualise a cohesive church that honours several gods but the place of each of the many religions in society is something I struggle with.
The biggest I can see (and kind of the way I visualize it for my campaign) is a single church that existed for the Great Kingdom, something like the a mash-up of the Catholic Church and the state religion of Rome, where as the Church developed and the Great Kingdom grew, more gods were added, some deleted, some promoted, some demoted. That would have covered a good deal of the Flanaess. In provinces of the imperial GK, some local gods were such a big part of the culture that they remained the focus and were co-opted with a wink and a nod, with the imperial cults tacked for official purposes, eventually making some inroads with some of the native upper classes. In other places, revelatory religious movements centered around one god caught fire with the local population and eclipsed the old cults and gods. As the GK's empire broke down, things began to change more drastically, with the imperial Church being torn by official schisms, and rebellious provinces no longer accepting the authority of the Holy Censor. In other places, though there was no longer political cohesion and sometimes actual hostility, the Holy Censor remained a revered figure, and had to perform a cautious balancing act between the Overking and his flock in the rebellious former provinces.
I can visualise a cohesive church that honours several gods but the place of each of the many religions in society is something I struggle with.
A single church for the whole Flanaess?
Not necessarily but a relatively cohesive church in traditional feudal kingdoms, or at least the former Aerdy lands as Smillan sets out above. The Baklunish have their own religion as would the Flan (the Old Faith). Not sure what I would do with the Thillonrian barbarians but I think the three main traditions could be developed quite easily without overly damaging GH canon.
That's basically my take on it. The Great Kingdom once enforced a single state church, but when Nyrond became independent the faith split; Nyrond's church was then centered in the Prelacy of Almor before that land's desolation.
If you wanted an exact parallel of Westeros's deities:
The Old Gods = The Old Faith
The Father = Zilchus
The Mother = Sotillion
The Virgin = Atroa
The Crone = Wenta
The Smith = Bleredd
The Warrior = Hextor (Heironeous in Nyrond/Almor)
The Stranger = Nerull (or Celestian?)
The Red God = Pholtus
The Drowned God = Procan
The Storm God = Velnius
Nerull's cult is important in Ivid the Undying and elsewhere, so it might make sense to make Nerull part of the Seven. On the other hand, you could lump him in with the Old Faith instead and just have some evil, subversive Old Faith cultists do all the things the Nerull cultists do. In the official Aerdi church, you could replace Nerull with Celestian as the mysterious god who escorts souls across the Astral Plane to their final destination. Or you could use Telchur, I suppose, if you wanted to emphasize the other wind gods' seasonal aspects. You could fuse Telchur and Nerull together as a single god of winter and death.
The Flan gods could all be part of the Old Faith, and other important deities like Trithereon, St. Cuthbert, and Fharlanghn could be thought of as lesser gods, recognized but not major figures in the church pantheon.
Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves) includes a fantasy pantheon known as the Twelve. The interesting thing about it was there was also a god known as the Nameless Thirteenth worshiped only by thieves. To others, the idea of a thirteenth god in the pantheon was a heresy, but thieves believed him to be their special pantheon, equal to the others but existing in secret. I thought that'd be a good approach for the faithful of Kurell.
They do show a Johann's End, which -- according to an article by Gary Holian -- is/was the first "town" liberated by the forces of Keoland and was used as a headquarters by Keolandish forces for the retaking of the rest of the Earldom.
Which article is that? _________________ My campaigns are multilayered tapestries upon which I texture themes and subject matter which, quite frankly, would simply be too strong for your hobbyist gamer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI
The Kingdom of Keoland, by Gary Holian, in the Living Greyhawk Journal, back in 2000.
You reference a project I was working on -- with Gary -- back in 2013. So I don't remember exactly which issue that was. I'd have to go looking for it. Sorry.
The Kingdom of Keoland, by Gary Holian, in the Living Greyhawk Journal, back in 2000.
That article was my initial guess - but I checked it, did a search for "Johann" and "End" and didn't find either, which is why I asked.
Since you affirmed that it was this one, I just re-read the entirety of section (8) - The County of Flen - and still didn't find it. The map at the end shows Keoland's border as extending no further west than Godakin Keep - Johann's End would be off the map and not in Keoland. I did a text search on "retaking" and "liberate" and got nothing.
I really can't find the reference about Johann's End in this article. _________________ My campaigns are multilayered tapestries upon which I texture themes and subject matter which, quite frankly, would simply be too strong for your hobbyist gamer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI
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