Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Example

Working through the Fantasy Religion Design Guide, our first step is to decide on the scope of religions on the world we are creating. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll have two different religions for two different cultures, although their areas of influence may overlap as in the real world.

The world could easily have more religions, but following rule #1 of Dungeoncraft (never force yourself to create more than you need) and because a clash of religions isn’t part of the early campaign, two religions is actually more than enough for now. If this article wasn’t designed to show some religious variety we would probably only detail one religion.

For the first religion, we’ll follow up on one of the examples (using an object–a chess board–to show the relationships between the gods of a pantheon) mentioned in the Fantasy Religion Design Guide. The second example illustrates an atheistic religion meaning a religion centered around a concept instead of a god.

Continued…