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Most fantasy religions are a church with the names changed. To build one that isn't, decide two things separately: what's actually true in your world, and what the faith says is true. Where those don't match is what your characters will fight over. Answer the first part once for your whole world, and the rest once for each faith. You don't need every question. Two or three on each card is plenty.
Start with the people
Leave the gods for later and think about who this faith is for. Once you know what it does for them, the rest is easier to build.
What are these people afraid of, or short of? What does the faith promise them?
Part 1: What's actually true in your world
Answer these as the author, not as a character. Your answers are facts about your world, whether or not anyone in it knows them. You may come back to add something once you start comparing them with what each faith teaches.
Origin
How the universe and the world actually began.
- What's left from the world's beginning that people can still see or dig up?
- Is whoever or whatever started the world still around? Does it still do anything?
The Sky
The sun, moons and stars, and the day, the year and the seasons they give the world.
- What happens in the sky that nobody in your world can predict, like a comet? Is there anything so rare that no one alive has seen it?
- Which thing in the sky matters most to them, and why?
Deities
The gods, goddesses, or cosmic forces active in the universe.
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Most fantasy religions are a church with the names changed. To build one that isn't, decide two things separately: what's actually true in your world, and what the faith says is true. Where those don't match is what your characters will fight over. Answer the first part once for your whole world, and the rest once for each faith. You don't need every question. Two or three on each card is plenty.
Start with the people
Leave the gods for later and think about who this faith is for. Once you know what it does for them, the rest is easier to build.
What are these people afraid of, or short of? What does the faith promise them?
Part 1: What's actually true in your world
Answer these as the author, not as a character. Your answers are facts about your world, whether or not anyone in it knows them. You may come back to add something once you start comparing them with what each faith teaches.
Origin
How the universe and the world actually began.
- What's left from the world's beginning that people can still see or dig up?
- Is whoever or whatever started the world still around? Does it still do anything?
The Sky
The sun, moons and stars, and the day, the year and the seasons they give the world.
- What happens in the sky that nobody in your world can predict, like a comet? Is there anything so rare that no one alive has seen it?
- Which thing in the sky matters most to them, and why?
Deities
The gods, goddesses, or cosmic forces active in the universe.
- What does a god get out of being worshiped? What happens to a god nobody worships?
- What can't a god do, even for its most faithful follower?
- Does a god's help look any different from your world's magic? Could someone watching tell the two apart?
How one novel answers the worship question
In Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (1992), gods exist because people believe in them. The god Om has only one genuine believer, a novice named Brutha, and finds himself in the body of a tortoise with almost none of his power.
Go deeper
Magic System Checklist: if a god's help works like magic, work out where it comes from, what it costs and where it stops.
Afterlife
What happens after death.
- Can anything people do while they're alive change what happens to them after they die? If so, what? If not, why not?
- What, if anything, do the living see of the dead? Ghosts, voices, a body that doesn't decay?
Part 2: What the faith teaches and does
Start with one line for each card above: what does this faith teach about Origin, The Sky, Deities and Afterlife? At the end, you'll check those four lines against what's actually true.
Teachings
What the faith teaches about the world and how to live, and the sacred writings that hold it.
- How does the faith say it knows all this? Through a vision, a book, a line of teachers, or reasoning?
- Which of its rules costs followers the most to keep, and what do they give up for it?
- Who's excused from its rules, and who gets to decide?
- Who started the faith, and what did they get out of it?
Go deeper
8 Modes of Knowing: eight ways people decide what's true, for more on how the faith knows what it knows.
5 Moral Spectrums: five scales of right and wrong, to help you find the values behind its rules.
Practice
Worship, ceremonies and rites, and the places where they are held.
- What do followers give up when they worship, and who ends up with it?
- Which rite is meant to keep the faith's promise to its people, and what do followers believe it does?
- What can followers do on their own, and what needs a priest?
Clergy
Who leads the faith, how they are chosen, and what power they hold.
- What stops a priest from saying the god wants something the god never said?
- What's one order from the ruler the priests would refuse? When that happens, who do ordinary people follow?
- What do priests have to give up, and what are they allowed that nobody else is?
Go deeper
1000+ Stock Characters & Archetypes: use the Religious filter for priests and other religious characters.
Heresy
How alternate beliefs are handled by the dominant religious power structure.
- Which two of the faith's own rules can't both be kept at the same time, and which side keeps which?
- When this faith punishes a heretic, does the heresy shrink or spread, and why?
- What would someone lose by leaving, even if nobody punished them?
Go deeper
Ultimate List of Cognitive Biases (Premium Toolkit): on why attacking a belief can make people hold it more strongly.
Part 3: Where the faith and the truth don't match
Nothing says the faith has to be wrong. It can be right about all of it.
- Go back to the four lines you wrote about what the faith teaches, and mark each one. Is it right, wrong, silent, or right for the wrong reason? That last one means it works, but not for the reason the faith gives.
- Where did each mistake come from? People might have misread something real. Someone might have lied for their own gain. It might have been true once, or a god might have said so. It matters which, because after a lie, the liar knows the truth. After an honest misreading, maybe nobody does.
- What can everyone see that the faith has to explain, and how does it explain it?
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What would happen to the faith if someone found proof against what it teaches? That depends on what it counts as proof, which you decided on the Teachings card when you said how it knows what it knows.
- If it trusts visions, it can ignore an old record.
- If it trusts one book, it can't ignore an older copy that disagrees. It splits, because neither side can call the book a lie.
- If it trusts a line of teachers, it only changes if the leader accepts the proof, and a leader with something to lose might not.
- If it trusts reasoning, it can't ignore sound proof. It has to change its teaching, or argue that the proof isn't sound.
It's worth marking a second faith the same way. Where both get the same thing wrong, maybe nobody in your world knows the truth.
An invented example
What's true: The gods hold back the sea, except on nine nights every nineteen years, when the lowlands flood. The dead linger as ghosts for a year, then fade.
What the Lamplighters teach: Their god sleeps on those nights, and a lamp on high ground lets him find you. When a ghost fades, it has gone to his hall.
- Right or wrong: Climbing to high ground does save you from the flood, so that part is right for the wrong reason. The hall is just wrong.
- Where the mistake came from: The founder guessed why ghosts fade. The guess fits what everyone can see, so nobody knows any better.
- What it has to explain: Thieves fade just like saints do, so the faith says thieves go somewhere other than the hall. One heresy says everyone gets there.
- If proof turns up: The faith trusts its book, so ghosts prove nothing to it. Only an older copy of the book could split it.
Your sheet
Copy this into your notes once for each faith, and fill it in. The lines under WHAT IS TRUE are the same on every sheet, because they're about your world, not about one faith.
If you run a game, you can hand your players the lines under WHAT THIS FAITH TEACHES and keep the rest to yourself.
Plain text
Where to go next
- The Faction Design Blueprint (Premium Toolkit): to build the church as an organization, with its own goals and the tensions inside it.
- Ultimate List of Secrets & Revelations (Premium Toolkit): to plan when and how the truth comes out in your story, and what changes afterward.
- 8 Modes of Knowing: on why people who trust different kinds of proof can't settle an argument.
- 9 Stages of Spiritual Growth: if your story follows one believer's crisis of faith or spiritual growth.
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