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How to make Gods & Religion Matter – 5 Tips for Divine Inspiration in D&D

When the existence of gods and angels is an indisputable fact, you’d think that faith, religion, and everything in between would play a huge factor in any D&D setting – but in 5E, the divine usually ends up being reduced to nothing more than an afterthought.

Where do we find the divine oaths that aren’t just the paladin’s excuse for swift justice? Where are the fearsome celestials that the heroes will actually have a reason to fight? The cool rituals, the holy organizations, and the mysterious divine agents?

Well, since they aren’t anywhere to be found in the official 5E publications, we decided to share our own top 5 DM tips to make deities, religion, and all the other holy stuff a meaningful part of your D&D game!

Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity expands options for celestial monsters, adding avenging angels and holy horrors to your games!

1. Define the role of Gods & Religion in your setting

The first to make the divine an important part of your 5E game is to define what role you actually want gods and religion to play in your fantasy setting.

Who are the gods and what can they do? Do you want a single unified pantheon of gods with their own domain – or do you prefer 10 different gods of thunder who’re constantly competing with each other? Do you want the gods to be powerful beings that can physically manifest on the Material Plane – or do they agent through divine agents, if they even care to act at all?

And what about religion? Atheists are probably rare phenomena in your setting, but there are still a thousand ways religion and faith can be practiced. Do people worship a single deity, or do you prefer a transaction-based polytheistic society where people pay tribute to a specific god relevant to a specific goal – ie, if you want a good harvest, you’d turn to the God of the Sun or God of Fertility, while prayer to the God of War wouldn’t be of much help to the crops.

You don’t have to decide on all the details, but once you’ve established the role of gods and faith in your setting, you can start littering your world with marks of worship – from religious traditions and ceremonies to various sayings, superstitions, and other subtle ways faith and religion are practiced – to make it feel more alive!

You should also think about what role religion(s) plays in the public sphere. You don’t have to flesh out every religious organization, but you should at least consider who’s paying for the temples, the religious festivities, and the resurrection spell the characters might request from their favorite local priest. Some religions may be all about philanthropy – or be about nothing but doomsaying – but other religious organizations may have huge political influence that you can use to drive your plot forward!

2. Make the Divine Feel Cool

This might be a no-brainer, but in a fantasy setting filled with magic, where gods and angels are real, you have all the tools you need to make the divine feel fantastical! From a priest preaching in a booming voice to an angelic choir so beautiful that listeners are magically blessed by it, you want the divine to feel.. Well, divine! And, since we’re talking about the power of gods here, you don’t have to worry about the mechanics – a divine agent’s abilities can go far beyond the spells and magic that the players already know if you think it’d be cool!

3. Have Religion Impact the Characters!

When you start giving religion and faith a more visible role in your setting, you also want it to have a concrete impact on the characters. There are a lot of ways you can do this, such as having the party be blessed at a shrine, having a divine figure offer auguries or bring back a dead party member, or having a religious organization ask the characters for their help!

In our upcoming sourcebook Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity, we’re also introducing divine oaths that characters can forge with a deity, gaining blessed powers in exchange for vowing to follow the ideals of the oath they swear – such as the Oath of Truth that grants advantage on Insight checks and some other neat features as long as you stick to the truth and don’t break your oath by lying!

Divine Oaths are a great tool to reward religious role-play and help faith become important for the players’ characters, which leads to another important piece of advice: Remember to reward the players for their religious role-play!

If the party’s cleric takes the time to hold a burial ceremony for a fallen comrade, why not reward the cleric with inspiration – or perhaps bless the entire party with the effects of a heroism spell for 24 hours? And if the barbarian makes a blood sacrifice to the God of Death or God of War before a battle, they would probably feel pretty good about themself if the entire party got a +1 bonus to attack rolls during their next combat.

4. Use Divine Foes!

Using guiding angels, knowledgeable seers, and other divine agents can be a great way to drive your plot forward and give the players a taste of divine awesomeness. Likewise, few things are scarier than facing a misguided celestial adamant on slaying the characters!

The Monster Manual contains just 7 celestial monsters in total, most of which the party will likely never have a reason to fight (unless you’re running a game of evil angel-slaying unicorn hunters).

In our upcoming sourcebook  Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity, we’re providing more than 30 divine monsters and seraphic horrors that you can pit against the party, and if you prefer to use your own imagination, you can always use the statblock of a fun creature and give it a divine twist.

Check out this FREE 20-page same of Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity which includes an Oathbinder NPC that can forge lasting Divine Oaths between characters and their deity, a handful of divine monsters, a ready-to-play relic hunt adventure – and, of course, sacred magic items!

“Soulsplinter Sprites manifest when a fallen hero’s spirit leaves the body but clings to the Material Plane – and must be caught or killed before a resurrection spell is possible! Check out  Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity for more than 30 unique divine foes for your D&D game.”

5.

Use Cults & Zealous Sects

The fifth and final tip for giving your 5E setting a healthy dose of divine inspiration is to have religious factions such as cults or zealous sects play an integral role in the plot of your game.W

What really makes a villain work is a motivation that we can relate to, even though we don’t necessarily agree with it – just think of Thanos cutting the universe’s population in half so that the remainder might survive without starving! We may not agree with his plan, but we can understand the motivation behind it.

Faith and religion are great tools to make your setting feel more alive and authentic, even if it has no real importance for the overall plot of your adventure, but having a faction motivated by their (misguided) religious beliefs is just a really great way to legitimize whatever cruel shenanigans the BBEG is up to!

And that leads us to a final bonus advice: Do not steer clear of the clichés. Yes, having a deity’s representative visit a character in a dream vision might not be super original, but there’s a reason it became a cliché in the first place – and that’s because it works! So, don’t hold back on using cults, dream visions, or a mad god causing a cataclysm, just because you’ve read about someone else doing something similar.

Conclusion

That’s our top 5 DM tips for making the divine matter in 5E!

If you also feel the divine aspect of the world’s greatest role-playing game is too often reduced to an afterthought, check out this FREE 20-page same of Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity and consider grabbing your own copy of Heretic’s Guide to Devotion & Divinity on Kickstarter!