Alternatives to Aslan

Christ-Adjacent Fictional Theology for the Cringe-Conscious Worldbuilder

This post is an idea I’ve had kicking around for quite some time, but my motivation to write it up is occasioned by something more recent: I bought the first volume of Gods of the Forbidden North on DriveThruRPG, at a sweet 80% discount. This isn’t a proper review, as I haven’t had time to even fully read it, much less play in its sandbox, though that sandbox looks good, but while skimming it, I found the section describing the Lawful church in the campaign setting.

And, ew.

The Hadean Temple is a monotheistic religion, worshiping a “Trisagion”, meaning “Thrice-Holy”. Oh, dear. A little on the nose to start with, but it can’t be… oh, but it is! In GotFN, we find a:

· Bog-standard ontological argument for God’s existence, specifically an argument from perfection (which launders human supposition into reality)

· Theodicy based on free will (yuck)

· Rejection of death as normative (true, but following the pattern)

· Exaltation of martyrdom

· The word Theosis

· Saints exalted and consciously interceding on behalf of still-living believers

· An “Immaculate Woman”

· “twelve aboriginal families”

· A “Heavenly Mistress” that has “Cosmic Offspring”

· Bishops and a Pope (okay, Exarchs and a Patriarch, but let’s stop pretending)

To be clear, I’m not mad that the author is laundering their religion into the game, despite my theological differences with the author (well, a little, free will theodicy sucks and is a stumbling block to many). I’m appalled at the sheer blatant laziness of it. Additionally, there is something very obnoxious about making a game for others in which every single one of your personal beliefs is objectively correct (note, if the author of GotFN is not Catholic, I will apologize. I don’t think I’ll have to). If I made a game setting where all the five points of TULIP were objectively correct and universally supported by society, with anyone not believing them either an idiot, ignorant, or evil, well, I’d expect people to be annoyed at the implication.

To The Point

The purpose of this post is not to tear down GotFN. I mean, I’m doing that (in part, I quite liked their evil cult, very well-thought out, though a few aspects felt a little like modern political commentary, and the wilderness, dungeons, and cities all look good as far as my skimming can tell), but GotFN is emblematic of the unfortunate tendency of modern Christians’ inability to tell fantasy stories without descending into preachy cringe. Put bluntly, JRR Tolkien was a better author than CS Lewis, and The Horse and His Boy is a better novel than The Last Battle. Further, while I do not have access to the Book of Life, I strongly suspect that The Lord of the Rings will have been an instrumental means of salvation for more people than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, or something like those tropes). Sadly, far too many Christian authors take their cues from Lewis instead of Tolkien.

A New Generic Theology

What, then, is a Christian author (RPG setting creator being a type of author) to do? One option is to present a non-Christian cosmology as reality, for instance, a Mythic Greek setting. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”, after all, and a Christian secure in their faith ought not to fear the caprice of Zeus inducing RPG players away from Christ. However, this does not show a better path.

Alternately, you can steal Tolkien’s vaguely monotheistic, semi-deistic cosmology. But that gets old fast if everyone is doing it. Further, the Valar are not quite suited to the needs of a Classic Dungeon Fantasy class-creation system, not being worshipped directly, nor granting miraculous powers to intermediate priests.

Therefore, the true purpose of this post is to offer a new generic theology for Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy RPG campaigns, one that is “Christ-compatible” in the same way that Aslan is homeomorphic with Jesus (at least, in CS Lewis’s conception of Jesus), but avoids directly telling players what to think, offers a multitude of “deities” for Player Characters to worship, and encourages excellence and advancement of characters in a diegetic manner. Better yet, it should not answer every question, so as to preserve a sense of mystery and wonder that modern fantasy often over-explains to death.

The Theology Itself

In The Beginning, there was already The Throne of Heaven. It has existed as far back as the eldest immortals remember. And for as long as it has existed, no-one has sat on it. Coming nigh unto it is a challenge in itself, as the Sphere of the Empyrean Heavens scorches at all Chaos from those who enter it, and the sight of the Throne proper is enough to banish the proudest of archfiends and humble the most holy of archangels. None have sat on it, for those Lawful enough to even stand next to it are, by necessity, self-knowing enough to realize their unworthiness, and wise enough to guess at the terrible fate that would befall any being who should impiously sit upon it. Some sages conjecture (contrary to the testimony of the archangels that have guarded it since the beginning) that some have sat on it, but the wrath of the Throne has unmade them so thoroughly that their memory has been purged from reality itself.

The angels of the Empyrean Heavens know that the one whose seat is the Throne of Heaven is their master. The lack of any sign of said master (besides the Throne itself) is the source of more than a little existential angst. Many of those beings that mortals have called the Ruinous Powers were once angels but turned against their instinct. Some of these say the Throne is a test, and that the Creator has given mastery of the cosmos to the one strong enough to claim it through its protections. Others say that the Creator has abandoned his (her? Their? No-one knows) creation, and that the Throne shall remain vacant forever, or that perhaps one day the Creator will return, but that such a delinquent Creator deserves no praise and no honor. Others will even say that the Creator has yet to assume his full power (or even be born, sometimes), and will retroactively create Himself and the Throne. In general, each of these “demons” (as the sages class them, though the peasantfolk will call any malign Incarnation and more than a few malign natives “demons”) will give a slightly different tale, but they agree in this: “F*** Heaven, F*** The Creator, F*** the role in the divine bureaucracy that I instinctively feel I should be doing, I’m getting my bag, and you aren’t stopping me.” (Well, quite a few disagree on “F*** the Creator”, but only because they think themselves the Creator-to-be.)

While the sages try to pin down the immortal, eternal powers into neat categories of “demon” and “angel”, the truth is that all exist on a continuum. The instincts that the angels were created with are vague, hardly more than innate aptitudes for certain aspects of the cosmos. A weather-angel can raise hurricanes and calm tornados, but where these phenomena should go is a matter of opinion, one that seemingly every weather-angel differs on.

Some sages posit that once the call of rightness was stronger, that all knew their place with certitude, but that the greatest of the angels, in total defiance of the divine will, rejected it and attempted to sit upon the Throne. According to these sages, the annihilation of this angel splattered the cosmos with his debris, which occluded the Way of Truth from mortal and angelic sight alike. However, this view is in the minority, as, well, the guardians of the Throne insist no such being ever existed, and there are logical objections raised against this view (surely such impudence could not even approach the Throne? Why would it rebel if it could see the Way?).

To mortals, such matters are a distant concern, if said mortal is aware of them at all. Many among the angelic host have set themselves up as divinities in their own right, paying more-or-less homage to a vague overgod, but mostly demanding worship in exchange for favors. They need not be rebellious (at least, not consciously), with many telling themselves that they indeed deserve the praise that mortals give them, and that this is the just order of the cosmos. Morality is often hard to distinguish from one’s own desires… Even among the most humble of the angels, mortals cry out for something closer and more approachable than an absentee overgod, leading many angels of great humility (and more than a few of great self-delusion) to serve in the role of god.

The demons form cults just as their angelic brethren do, though often through less scrupulous means. Mortals are powerful, but their power is wasteful: immortals gain most of their strength by consuming the waste-power of the mortal soul (what ACKS II calls “arcane and divine power”). Those immortals of foul disposition practice more nefarious methods, crushing souls for quick bursts of power, capturing souls to squeeze them for power via torment, and other foul designs. Even the Lawful angels will sup on the energy cast off by martyrs who worship them (or, for the humbler angels, worship with them as an intercessionnary intermediary; it seems to make no difference)

The soul’s nature itself is one of hot debate among sage and immortal alike. It is undeniable that it exists (far too much magic affects it directly, not to mention the generation of divine power), but what happens when its carrier dies is a matter of confusion. Careful weighing of souls by the most talented psychopomps shows that not all of its power is shed by the moment of death, a loss of energy with every death. While some cults hold that the cosmos will slowly die due to this loss soul-energy, others claim that missing energy is recycled via reincarnation into new souls. Certainly, the creation of a new mortal increases the amount of soul-stuff in the cosmos, though not by as much as the average death reduces it. Those who hold to reincarnation say that the explicit memories of the past lives are stored in a cosmic holding room, waiting for their bearers to take them up again after (usually) some final eucatastrophe involving the return of the Creator. Others say there is no reincarnation, at least not until the return of the Creator, but that all souls sleep in the bosom of the Creator, beyond the cosmos, and that new souls are gifts from a Creator that has not wholly abandoned his creation. Still others say that the souls truly destroyed, and that the conservation of soul-stuff that so many psychopomps insist must occur on death is a delusion, pointing to how mortals passively generate soul energy as they live. Others dispute this passive creation, stating that it is really gathering of existing energy on a level below detection!

The Upshot

In this cosmological framework, you can create Lawful and Chaotic cults to your heart’s content. They all can exist side by side, as the uncertainty at the very top of the cosmology allows all of the Lawful religions to be “true” simultaneously, without making a (witting) liar out of one of their gods or resorting to platitudinous nonsense like “all religions are pathways to the divine”. Law can even fight Law over the nature of Law, something far too human to omit from a fantasy setting! And if a player wants to play an atheist, well, he can’t be firmly proven wrong (at least, not in terms of the overgod, various powers and principalities might take offence), at least short of the Final End (Judges are advised not to have that occur during their campaigns). Indeed, for such ambitious PCs of Chaotic alignment, the Throne might seem the ultimate test…

Inspiration (of the non-divine kind… well, all inspiration is divine, just, don’t make scripture out this, okay?)

For the Christian uncomfortable with role-playing in a world without Christ, God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) created the Throne, the cosmos, and everything in it. Christ will take up the Throne, in a redux of the Book of Revelations. He’s just out for lunch at the moment, “to prepare a place for you in my father’s house”, as He said (paraphrasing). The direct inspiration for this cosmology is found in Revelation 5, namely in John’s despair at the apparent absence of anyone worth to unseal the scroll. Additionally, I apply an exegesis I am uncertain of, reading the Four Horsemen of Revelation 6 as empowered by the absence of rule from the Throne’s rightful occupant. Additional inspiration comes from 1^st Samuel 8 and Exodus 32. The, of all things, Chinese traditional religion inspired the thought of heaven as a bunch of slackers and corrupt functionaries wasting the Jade Emperor’s resources, and Exalted RPG was also an influence (mostly influenced itself by Journey to the West, which is my source of traditional Chinese myth, along with various Xianxia fanworks)

This is a bit far out of my usual wheelhouse, and I’m unused to wearing my faith on my sleeve publicly like this. Still, please share your thoughts regarding this in the comments below. (and, for the sake of the Autarch Discord’s No PVP rule, not there, as a precautionary measure) And remember, if you believe in free will, you were always meant to do so from eternity past. :P

EDIT: Well, early IRL feedback makes me feel the need to clarify: CS Lewis is a great author, and I highly recommend The Chronicles of Narnia. I'm also less sure about whether he or Tolkien is in “the lead”, w/r/t salvation, on reflection, but I'm quite sure both would renounce any credit, as a good Christian ought. However, I still think LOTR introduces Christian ideas to a broader audience than Narnia.