Dungeons and Dragons, "The Church of the Trinity"

Gods of Dungeons and Dragons

            I have over the years put out several entries on the topic of fictional religions.  I never really went anywhere with my discussion of Religion as an aspect of settings that I wrote about years before that, but since then I have tried to come at the topic in ways that would make it interesting for someone who had been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a while or someone new.

            In each instance I have tried to either go in an entirely new direction like with my unique take on Orcs a while back.  I then did a short follow up to that with a pair of orc characters in that context.  There was also a more traditional pantheon of deities that act in concert with one another, "The Five".  I did a follow up to that one in which I created a team of characters that each serve as an exemplar of the various members of The Five.  Then there was “The Preserver” which was my attempt to graft a messianic style belief system onto environmentalism-oriented religion. My last entry was the “High Arcana” a religion based on Tarot Cards.

                This will be the first blog entry for me in quite a while, and the first on DnD in even longer… But I wrote most of this material back when 3.5 Edition was still the primary edition, so there might still be some language in there that suits that type of setting better.

 

This is an excellent rendition of the Triforce, which manages to include additional imagery from the games in each part, further illustrating the use of 3 in each sub-symbol.

The Trinity

Holy Symbol: Triangle (sometimes a Key or Doorway)

Divine Domains:

Gaia: Forge, Life; Isis: Knowledge, Tempest; Ishtar: Nature, Peace

Favored Weapon:

Gaia: Mace; Isis: Spear; Ishtar: Bow

 World View & Mythos: In ages past before the world had formed three goddesses came from the void and created the world.  Gaia, created the earth, rolling the lava, sand, soil, stone, clay, and metal that upon all else would be built.  Isis, poured from the heavens the rains which filled the open chasms to make the seas and oceans, and cut fine lines thru the earth to form the rivers and ponds.  Last came Ishtar, who breathed out the wind which carried with it the seeds of life.  It was then, as the spirits of life took hold that the trinity returned to the heavens never to return.

 Beliefs: It is most often believed than when creating the world the goddess imbued the world with a set of natural laws which favor strength, contemplation, and tenacity.  It is the role of the living to use these virtuous qualities to tame the wilds, dream of grand designs, and build great works.  Large cathedrals, gilded and lit with the light of gloriously ornate windows define the great architectural vision that the followers of the Trinity believe to be the natural order of things.

                There are 3 primary holy books, each devoted to the study and philosophy that each god supposedly represents.  The first book is the Tenants of Gaia, and emphasizes how to live a stable life and emphasizes strength and the harvesting of natural world.  The second is the Wisdom of Isis, which speaks of the flow of time and the changing world and changing self, it teaches about meditation and contemplation.  The last is the Teachings of Ishtar, which speaks about the importance of growth, that growing as a person thru new experiences, growing one’s community thru procreation, and growing the wealth and bounty of the world thru constructive action.

It is not uncommon for a cleric to emphasize the teaching of one goddess and seek to emulate that particular goddess’ role, picking for their domains the favored element.

 Practices: Those who follow the Trinity favor matriarchal social orders, with women taking the role of teacher, religious leader, and administrators, these roles seen as a natural extension of their position as mothers who create and cultivate life.  Men are seen as laborers and soldiers whose strength constructs and protects the homes and fields of the people.

 Superstitions and Taboos: Followers of the Trinity take Hospitality very seriously, to the point of having numerous inns and shelters founded in their name.  To harm a guest or host is one of the direst of sins.  They are very much in favor of civilized life and are the favored faith in many major cities lending a study of architecture to the cities defenses in the form of walls and gates.

 Churches and Denominations: the Trinity is worshiped in numerous communities and nations and is often recognized as being a de facto state church.  However it is a polyglot of a religion.  Originally there was a single church which still exists, it split into two denominations based on the role the church would have in the politics of nation states.  It fissured again over the role of the church hierarchy itself, and has subsequently fractured numerous times based on several prophets that have followed after.

 1) The Inclusionists are considered the original church, it was their practice to assimilate religious practices from those they converted and incorporate the local folk heroes and gods into the myths and legends of the church as a whole.  Their art is exceptionally varied and it looks at the world in a global context, doing its best to not involve itself in the political affairs of nations except to offer aid to those in need.

 2) The Politicos were the first group to break from the Inclusionists 1300 years ago.  They saw it as not only excusable but necessary to align themselves with various governments and political groups within nations to exert change, seeing politics as a reality that must be dealt with in the pursuit of spiritual truth.  This group has fractured and has separate but related churches in each of the nation states on the continent and holds varying levels of influence within each.

 3) The Exclusionists broke from the Inclusionists 500 years ago.  They wished to return to a purer form of the original faith and began destroying and excising rituals, saints, and practices that were not a part of the original texts from the church’s founding.  They too take a global view of the faith, and aside from taking combative stances against the other churches as quasi-heretics, they mostly do not involve themselves in the political affairs of the world.

 4) The New Dogmatists is an umbrella term that captures all small churches that have fractured off from the Exclusionists since their founding.  These groups followed one particular prophet or guru to create a new church with a new holy text to annotate the original holy texts.  The three largest were the Wanderers, who believed that the Goddesses are still in the world, wandering among us either guiding or judging our behavior and meeting out lessons; then there were the Exiles who believe that the Goddesses created this world to house evil spirits and only thru self-purification could one cleanse their would and float up to the heavens to join the Goddesses in paradise; and the Lamp Lighters, a group that believed in the claims of four prophets that they were sent by the Goddesses to found a new church in the world, this movement was the first and only group to dogmatize a crusade for the faith, all previous crusades for the Trinity are seen more as state action on behalf of the various churches; the Lamp Lighters nearly swept the continent before devolving into infighting and eventually being put down, they currently exist in very small groups that “keep the lamps lit” for the return of their now vanished prophets.

Social Organization: Traditionally there was no martial tradition in the faith, and holy war is not a concept backed by dogma or faith in any of the churches. There have been instances in history where a “Liberator of the Throne” position has been created to protect the faith via force of arms especially in the context of a Politico denomination’s efforts within a nation. Otherwise there are two major groups within the religion. 

1) The Builders/Laborers, men who devote their lives to the Trinity further the cause thru the construction of buildings, the production of food and goods, and the tilling of fields.  Men are rarely seen in positions that require extensive academic study, instead vocational training is taught to them from a young age in communities where the Trinity is the primary religion.  Architecture and engineering are the rare examples of tasks that require much greater study.

2) The Scholars, devout women by contrast are taught art, literature, history, and music.  They are seen as the cultural and spiritual heads of a community.  They contribute to the intellectual pursuit of such communities, with the only labor intensive practices taught to them being sculpture or ornate metal work.

Cults & Heretics: There exists two offshoots of this faith that stand in direct conflict with it.

1) The Church of the Creator Above believes that the Trinity are secondary agents to a greater more powerful being, that this being is the true font of creative energy that allowed for the formation of the world and life.  They see the worship of the Trinity as heresy and seek to appeal to a deeper and more true alliance with this greater being they call Ptah.  That there is no archeological record to support some more ancient form of the religion that had a singular creator at work has done nothing to deter them.  Often they are seen less as a danger and more as a contrary and strange group that exists as a harmless counter culture.

2) The Trinity of Kings is a dangerous cult.  They believe that the goddesses were actually gods, and that the myth that women as the wiser sex is a lie spread by the insidious conspiracy that is the Matriarchy.  While some defend them as having legitimate points that gender should not exclude a person from a life of vocational or scholarly pursuits, the truth runs much darker. The Trinity of Kings cult believes in the violent subjugation of women, that they should be confined to the role of slaves and sexual toys.  Women have been kidnapped, raped, and ritualistically murdered by this group.  Their violence is not limited to women, as many men who work for the faith have had their hands cut off or been blinded.  The gods’ names are Cronus, Set, and Anu.

Heretical Symbol:

                Ptah: Circle; Trinity of Kings: Phallus

I enjoy this 2e rendition of Ptah, the 3e version looks, sad, tired and confused.

Heretical Domains:

                Ptah: Creation (Forge); Trinity of Kings: Life, Order, War

Heretical Favored Weapon:

                Ptah: Warhammer; Trinity of Kings: Longspear

 Inspirations

            This is going to be pretty obvious, but the big inspiration here are the Three Goddesses of “The Legend of Zelda” and the concept of the Trinity in Western Religion, primarily Christianity.  I highly recommend this video which discusses with real sincerity the religion of Hyrule, and there are other videos I will link that talk about the trinity and other concepts as I feel they can be interesting.

                As for the heretics, the primary concept there is a gender flipped version of the Early Mother Goddess concept.  The name Ptah is an obscure Egyptian creation deity whose name fits the renaming scheme I used, replacing the three goddesses of Hyrule with real life goddesses that I felt fit well enough.

                The Trinity of Kings is a parody of the fascist/misogynistic group/movement of “Return of Kings” and by extension the online communities of Pick Up Artists and other creepy dipshits. This is taking their crap and drawing it out to a medieval/dark age style monstrous level of behavior beyond even the sad and dangerous material of today.

                Aside from those factors the idea that a religion incorporates material from the various cultures and communities it attempts to convert is a well-known history in Europe, as the source of numerous rewrites of mythology into folklore-history, this is especially the case with Celtic Mythology. Beyond that a big part of Protestantism was a departure from a perceived idolatry of the Catholic practice of adopting those pagan symbols and traditions.

                As always I wanted to create prompts to allow someone using this material to shape it into their own world, so the various splits of Politico and New Dogmatists could allow for logical permutations within the world while keeping this vague outline as a referential core that can be reinterpreted by the players, “I want to be the Joseph Smith of this world” as a character motivation could be useful.

                Remember, the goal is to have fun while learning about and exploring ideas from the real world with fun permutations. Just like with all fiction.

______________________________

                If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.