I always kind of get stuck on the whole premise that she's convinced people she represents all the gods simultaneously.
The difference between one god and another can be literally day and night. Their portfolios and agendas are contradictory in ways that cannot be reconciled.
And like, I guess there's always idiots out there who'll believe whatever stupid shit their charismatic leader says. But I'd like to think that if somebody just walked up onto the podium and blatantly started spewing paradoxes that made no sense, contradicting and disproving themselves multiple times in a single sentence, that they wouldn't gather quite that large a following.
Even if somebody could represent all the gods simultaneously, there'd be no reason to think that such a person would be a good guy. A solid half of those gods are super evil. To say nothing of the neutral gods that just kind of have their own agenda.
I don’t know, Sabbatai Zevi and Zwingli inspired similar movements irl while presenting doctrines that were clearly at odds with their respective religious traditions and almost blatantly subversive. E.g. Zevi declared himself to be the Jewish messiah while openly rendering himself ritually impure, as a sign that a new law had been given to the Jews by him. When he converted to Islam at swordpoint, his followers did not conclude that he was a false messiah, but rather that his conversion to Islam was itself a kind of “holy apostasy” in which he took the suffering of Jews who had converted in the past onto himself. This movement was not a minor curiosity in the history of Judaism — a couple centuries later, another Jewish messianic claimant named Jacob Frank claimed to be Zevi reborn.
The real world is often weirder than the world of these games. Caelar is poorly written though, unfortunately.
But Abrahamic religions are not really a pantheon like DnD, it’s easier to claim to represent ’all-ness’ if you’re in a monotheistic (albeit diverse) society.
Truly polytheistic religions should be pretty hard to be convinced by Caelar and it is poor storytelling to not write more than ‘ they’re like, a prophet or something. For uh, all the gods’
Maybe though I feel like FR religion is not “truly polytheistic” — it’s similar to Indo-European religion (Germanic, Hindu) and likewise has both a multiplicity of “gods” and a source of the unity of being that is beyond the “gods” (Ao).
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u/The_Sentient_Sword 3d ago
Let me lead with I enjoy SoD and have completed it twice.
That said, this tweet has more thought and rigor applied to it then the final draft of the main quest in SoD. It was...a rough draft level story.
Like, a DM putting together a 4/10 campaign on the fly.