All you need for rich religions without the lore spiral.
So you want your world to feel real, and it's time to scheme up some godly goodness. There's two ways we know to screw this up real good. The first is to just forget to do it, and all the sudden you've got a fantasy ripoff of whatever religion you know best in real life. The second is to go way too deep. Reading a 350 page tome cover to cover that goes into a wild fantasy pantheon, then realizing your table did NOT do their homework, and this is gonna take a lot of exposition. Well, following the system in this episode will give you just enough for some incredible roleplay.
It's a lot of fun to create gods and religions for your games, and the process is pretty easy to get you playing. We first hunker down in the Strategy Stateroom where we talk about building a deity, then a religion to go with it. The deity requires a backstory, traits, and a goal, similar to any NPC. Building a solid religion takes figuring out some values, a goal of the followers, the path to get there, allies and opposition. That's it! This gives your characters and your game master so much to work with.
Then we head over to the Extradimensional Gateway to pull some of our favorite people into D&D, turning them into our pantheon of extraordinary deities.