Gimme That New Time Religion...

Ah, religion in D&D, where the wielder of the power to literally bring the dead to life with a word (and a 5000 gp diamond) is viewed as a mobile first aid kit. For the Shattered World, I of course needed to honor this fine tradition, but I was also thinking about what effect real, tangible, provable, on-demand, your pays your money and you gets your healing, including for amputees, miracles would do. Further, I didn't want to pretend Earth faiths didn't exist. By the same token, I didn't want to stat out Yahweh and decide if Jesus could take Odin best two falls out of three.

I have still not decided on the precise, real, nature of the gods -- but from a game mechanics perspective, any god who is sincerely believed in by enough people is real in terms of casting spells, sending avatars or servants to do their bidding, and so on. Thus, Earth religions produce clerics, favored souls, paladins, and so on, just as Arithian faiths do. The exact domains for various Terran faiths is something I need to work on next, but the following is my initial essay on religion:
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The power of the divine is undoubted. Those who serve the will of the gods can heal wounds, summon divine aid, smite their foes with fire or lightning, walk on water, and perform many other miracles -- including calling the souls of those departed back to their bodies. After the Crush, Earthborn religious leaders of great devotion and true faith found that they, too, could work miracles -- but their powers were no greater than those of worshipers of alien gods. In future times, it will be that a great deal of theology and debate will be had around this topic, and great books will be written, and great philosopher will espouse, but here and now, in the time just after the Decade of Fire, all that matters is that those who befriend a priest will live longer.

The inhabitants of Arith brought with them their gods, and the peoples of Earth found that the ancient rites, preserved by neo-pagans and cultural revivalists, worked as well. Still, most of the Earthborn in the former United States followed a monotheistic faith, and most still do -- especially after seeing a Rabbi form a golem from the mud of a ruined field, or a Minister lay hands on a dying man and seal his wounds.

Over the two decades since the Crush, the various sects and denominations of Earth faith have changed. Many of the more mainstream Christian churches have merged into what some are calling the United Church of Christ. Older denominations still exist; they're just smaller. There are estimates that at least four Popes currently exist, as the fragmented remains of the Catholic Church argue over just who are the true heirs of Rome. The Jews, concentrated into cities and never many in number, are now nearly extinct, and Rabbis have become wanderers, traveling from holdfast to holdfast, in order to provide religious services to what survivors may exist. (Oddly, the Jewish faith has begun to attract converts from among the Free Peoples, especially the Dwarves.) Islam remains strong in the Mideast, but less so in the United States -- again because so many Muslims dwelled in the now-dead cities. Christianity, the faith of the farmland and the suburbs, survived well.

Odinists in America, many of whom lived in the upper Midwest and the Northwest, have revived their ancient gods. Neo-pagans and wiccans have cobbled together a form of Druidism which allows them to tap into the power of nature itself. Converts to the ways of the 'invaders' also abound, and there are many who have turned from the gods of Earth to the gods of Arith.