Exchange of Realities

Inspired by this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. The carnival topic may be religion, but at the core, both religion and superstition are beliefs.

There are a lot of terms whose definition becomes fuzzy when brought into a fantasy world, but none go quite as gray around the edges as “superstition”. So what, in such a world, actually constitutes a superstition? The answer: there are a lot of factors involved.

In today’s world, a lot of people attempt to draw a line between religious belief and superstition. In a fantasy world where the gods are involved with what’s going on, this gets a bit harder to define. With small numbers of big gods who make it clear what works and what doesn’t, this can work pretty well. But what happens when the gods are smaller and more numerous? Particularly when it gets to the point where there’s a god for everything from the space between the stars to your favorite spear, and not all of them are necessarily good at making their desires clear. Is always taking off your left shoe before your right a micro-prayer or a superstitious ritual? Is it really displeasing to the gods or trying to retract your own life if you retrace your own steps?

Of course, the presence of gods doesn’t mean there won’t be superstition. If anything, the existence of trickster gods ensures that there will be, because spreading the things can be an amusing pastime. One wonders if they even tell their own worshipers the proper rituals.

The gamer, of course, has it a bit easier compared to the residents of the world—but not by much, and only from a metagame perspective. Sure, you can just decide that anything that has a mechanical benefit is real, and the rest is superstition. But even being superstitious can give a mechanical benefit if you take the right Flaws. Besides, what about those things that have a mechanical effect that you just don’t know about? Or the flavor-text portions of the ceremonies conducted by the established religions? They may not have a mechanical effect, but calling them superstition may well result in a number of mechanical effects being aimed in your general direction. Close enough, right?

Speaking of which, how much of the ritual behind magic is really necessary within the framework of the world? Is the material component behind a fireball truly required, or was it just the result of the inventor finally getting the spell right after having soiled his hands falling on a pile of bat dung? Do people have to yell the spell name as they finish casting? If they don’t need to, do they have a reason for doing so anyway?

And of course, no two people within the world will consider the same set of things superstition, interfering divinities or none. One’s sacred ritual might be another’s ignorant nonsense, or one’s method that worked more often than not another’s empty gesture.

No matter what, there will be the human element. The one commonality in almost all fantasy worlds is people, or their local analogs, seeing themselves as small creatures in a big world and clinging to whatever they can find; seeing something work, apparently too often to be coincidence, and clinging to that as a way to feel like they have more power than they actually do. Sure, there are people who claim that advanced societies would be beyond that (along with being beyond the need for myth), but I doubt it for the above reason. Belief, even erroneous belief, is a powerful thing.