Worldbuilding 5h: Buildings of Worship

The Reader seems to understand that tackling a game world on this level has more to do with understanding how things work than with providing a lot of details.  For example, I don't need floorplans of quays and storehouses to make use of these things in my game world.  I don't need stats for the gong farmer who might attack the party in the dark, thinking they're bandits.  I don't need fifty village street maps for fifty villages.  I don't need the squire's family tree drawn out to know he has one.  Misconceptions about what "worldbuilding" is lie behind the failure of designers to produce something deep and complex.  There's some idea going around that the actual "building" part requires tables, pictures, plans and excessively gritty details ... when in fact, what's needed is knowing how a shore front or a transshipment point works.

The actual layout can be scrawled out in five minutes during the game, while the players watch (as we're getting rid of the screen).  When I do this, I draw a box and say, "This is the storehouse."  Then I draw a crooked line.  "This is the water line; there's a quay and this is another quay."  Then I draw an oval next to the quay.  "Here's the ship.  What do you do?"  The players don't give a damn that the ship doesn't look like an actual detailed ship plan for a one hour adventure, with my taking 8 hours of fastidious work to make it look "real."  It's as real as it needs to be in the player's heads.  They only need to know where the ship is.  The rest we can play without pictures.

For me, this is the real "tradition" that underlies D&D thinking.  You tell me your mage wants to be a "Moon Witch."  I say okay.  Then we figure out what that means as we go along.  We don't need 55 pages in a splatbook telling us the 32 kinds of moon witch your character can be.  It's just a waste of our time.

Because I get asked endless questions by players about everything, I've given considerable thought to everything — as is evident in this string of posts.  With each conceived thing, such as the present list of facilities, I'm on the hook to discuss what that thing is.  The answers rely considerably upon research, but let me explain something about D&D.  We will never find all the information we need, because the answers being given out there in the world are not tailor-made for people who are interested in a space where people can walk through and take action there.  Where it comes to details about a "simple village house of worship" in the 15th century, we can find examples; but we won't learn how the church residents were organised or what their jobs were at that time.  We might find a few tiny details about how these churches were planted, but those details won't be sufficient for D&D.  Therefore, we have to understand something very well.

Worldbuilding is fictional design.  By necessity, we have to sit back, close our eyes, consider everything we've been able to learn from research and then tailor make the remainder out of whole cloth.

So as I approach the subject of village churches, mosques and temples, understand that I'm talking about D&D, not the real world.  Perhaps some expert knows the truth about the interactions between church leaders and their authorities or congregations, but I don't choose to become a similar expert.  For one thing, the next facilities post has to be about making and marketing in the period, so I can't waste my whole worldbuilding verve on religious edifices alone.

And hell, what difference does it make anyway?  I run a game world where the gods are real, where they fight one another for every believer because another believer is what makes them a wee bit more powerful ... and so the religious systems in my game world are built by people who have actual, physical proof of the existence of these gods.  This makes a religion in my world NOTHING LIKE the real world, which must run all it's services on faith and little else.  There was a Martin Luther in my world, but the 95 theses he hammered on his door absolutely did not include the argument that by faith and faith alone did one know God.  He knew better.

Because of this competition, a type-4 village has only one church, mosque or temple.  More developed hexes have sub-cultures, and therefore sub-temples, with certain religions being tolerant of others.  The hard and fast rule, from Medieval history, is that the least tolerant church or religion is Christianity.  The most tolerant is ... Islam.  Go figure.

I've been meaning to write a post about the development of religion in the game world, but I keep putting it off.  I shall have to get on that this week; in the meantime, let's limit our interest to the building itself, its inhabitants and its function.

The easiest example is the Christian church, since I know it best and have had much personal experience with its doings.  I was raised Lutheran, though I no longer believe in its teachings, or that of any religion.  Unlike a rabid youtuber atheist, however, I concede that the advancement of religion and it's function were necessary for the advancement of society and civilisation, though not in the interpretation of the Bible as a "moral document," which it most definitely is not.  Were I to find myself in a church, I would attend the service respectfully, I would sing the hymns when appropriate, kneeling and praying when appropriate, and I would smile and greet the minister and others without creating an incident.  I would not stay longer than strictly necessary, however.  I bring this up to explain where I come from with regards to religion.  I have studied theology and can defend it; I find large parts of its thinking process fascinating and worth deconstruction; but I don't believe in it as a faith.  I don't really care who does, however, unless they take it upon themselves to sell me their religion.  This is where things get sticky with me.

The purpose of the Church is to bind the community together.  The duties of the pastor or priest are to do more than deliver a good sermon and overlook the proceedings of the service.  A pastor attends his or her flock, daily, addressing their physical and emotional needs as best one can.  Much training in being a pastor involves speaking with the devout and people like me with RESPECT, something rarely found or understood among Pentacostals or Evangels, who don't receive practical training and are therefore in it for the power, the prestige and the money.  An excellent example of what it is to be a parish priest can be found in the 1978-81 humorous British series, Bless Me, Father.  Here's an example of the show dealing with the supernatural from a church perspective.

Members of a small temple include the priest, potentially a curate, which is a sort of apprentice priest (and not, as Gygax thinks, a member senior to a priest), a housekeeper and a caretaker, called a verger.  Here's a nice story from Somerset Maugham about a verger, from the 1950 movie, Trio.  The verger segment starts at 02:41.

Most likely all these people are kind, friendly, generous and most often interested in strangers, particularly if they're of the same religion.  It's their business to bring in new blood ... and an outsider's contribution to the collection plate is always welcome.  Perhaps it's my personal view on things, but in part it's my experience as well.  A church leader is always looking for people to lead, and wisely does not seek to turn away anyone and make enemies.  Religious strife only occurs when each side of the matter simply refuses to be patient and respectful.  The Spaniards would have done much better for themselves in the Netherlands if they hadn't been so bloody minded about their Catholicism.  The same can be said about the Protestants in Ulster, the Protestants in Scotland and the Protestants in the American colonies.  It's the confounded way people have sometimes about insisting that their answers are the "right" answers, coupled with the like resistance of other peoples who are just as certain and inflexible.

In any case, these larger contentious religious warring peoples can hardly be found in the rustic setting of a back-country village church.  Let the people of Florence battle in the streets; let the rivers in Paris run with Huguenot blood; let some pigheaded heretic scream epithets in Zurich, Geneva and Prague.  This village is none of those places ... and so, "You're a moslem, are you?  Why, what a strange person to have come around here.  Have you had your dinner yet?"

It isn't that I'm naive.  Rather, it's that I believe the earnestness of a religion depends upon its proponents — chiefly, what they think they have to lose if they concede a little ground.  The Count of Wittembourg has taxes and land to gain if he switches to the Protestant church, while the Emperor of Austria and the Pope in Rome have something to lose if he does.  A demand is made, followed by an insult, followed by further demands and threats and raising of armies ... much more of it for the sake of which hands the peasant's coins fall into rather than the fleshiness of bread and the bloodiness of wine.  But we say its the latter because that makes us sound so much holier than a grubber of Mammon, which the Bible plainly counsels against.  After all, the Bible clearly counsels in plain Hebrew, Greek, Latin and so on that killing the Ammonites is absolutely in the cards.  Thus, Ammonites, Saxons, what's the difference?

The country priest has a slice of mutton to lose and the company of a traveller to gain.  So the exchange rate plays much better towards complaisance and beneficence ... provided the traveller doesn't remain and import too many of his or her "kind."  Whereupon everyone gets ridiculous because that fundamental principle, "The Priest is there to bind the community together" gets threatened somewhat.

There's a reason my game world takes place in 1650.  Just prior to that date, Europe had ruthlessly decided to test the theory that the musket and the sword are stronger than faith (and the desire for money and power), only to find it piles up a lot of dead and fails to settle anything.  The Spanish have withdrawn from the part of the Netherlands that doesn't like them, European Catholicism has decided to be more tolerant, the border with the Ottomans is in a relative state of peace ... and while peaceful co-existence doesn't reign everywhere, it is a brief period of concluding that winning through trade, nationalism and education is perhaps a better tactic.  England drags its feet on this for another 10 bloody and annoying years, but 1650 is nevertheless on the cusp of the Restoration.  It is a time that suits me.

Listen, I should talk about the church building, but I think we'll let that go until I get into hexes with 3 hammers.  There's a lot to say about that, enough for a whole other post.

I'll finish by saying to my Patreon supporters, thank you for your support and your input in the comments.  I have very much left to say about worldbuilding, though I must also take some time out to discuss some other things this week and the next.  Rest assured, my patience and commitment to this series remains intact.