Recently I watched some Legend of Vox Machina and one of the big plots of the series was focused on a cleric losing her connection to her deity. With the show being rather trope-y, it went the usual route of the deity saying what amounted to "I haven't forsaken you, you have forsaken me" and so on. It felt like such a worn out story beat. Then I started going over the various relationships between religion, spirituality, gods, their chosen and their faithful I've seen in RPGs and the list started getting so long I figured I'd best start writing things down. So if you want an inspiration for a character, setting detail or the like, hope you enjoy!
Morally absolutist religions and lawful stupid
With the religious commandments being absolute and unwavering, the role of a cleric or a paladin is to execute them on the behalf of their deity without question. Essentially, they become an extension of their god of choice.
In terms of playing a character like that it tends to veer towards the Lawful Stupid category. The player is discouraged from making their own decision, instead applying the religious law like a blunt instrument. Worse yet is when the GM punishes a player for not playing their paladin according to their interpretation of the religion and takes away their powers for being "bad".
From a narrative perspective, characters like these are rather limiting in a game. If they always act in a certain way with no nuance, the GM basically knows what they will do in any situation they are put and you are not really playing a character as following a script.
Absolute decrees, flexible interpretations - Tyranny
A different approach to absolutist religions would be those presented in Tyranny. In that game you are an archon of a tyrannical god-like entity Kyros the Overlord. They send down Edicts for what they will to happen, and yours is the ability to bend them. If Kyros curses a land to burn as long as forbidden knowledge lies in a citadel you can fulfil it by moving the books elsewhere, which fulfils the letter but not the spirit of the Edict.
This interpretation of religion might be a bit hard to pull off in a casual pen and paper RPG campaign. You would probably have to have characters that in some way are forced to obey a given religion, but at the same time struggle against it for what they believe to be the morally correct outcome. Similarly, the deity sending down the decrees would have to be powerful enough to force the players to act on their behalf, while also accepting players interpretations of its decrees as valid (which could be due to not caring, or being a rules lawyer, or maybe following some alien logic of "I commanded it, it happened, therefore the way it happened must've been the way I commanded it" (sounds like something Malfeas would do honestly) or something).
I think the closest thing to this I've seen in an RPG would be Sidereals from Exalted. They are the troubleshooters of Fate. They go in when something that shouldn't have happened happened and their job is to set history right. However, while Fate might chafe against it, they can exert their will as to some things. Maybe they don't want to kill a child that should've died in a flood and instead decide to Lone Wolf and Cub it.
High autonomy and task delegation - The Immaculate Order
If you want to avoid the pitfalls of Lawful Stupid, you could have a religion that gives its priests a high degree of autonomy while delegating tasks to them. In this scenario a deity or even a religious order could send a cleric or a paladin on a quest or to a specific location and trust they will take care of any problem they will encounter. The PC then is responsible for acting on the behalf of their religion to the best of their ability while still having the autonomy to make their own decisions and interpret the rules and orders as needed.
A good example of this would be Exalted's Immaculate Order, a state religion that focuses on being the intermediary between the myriad gods of the setting and the people, as well as hunting ancient monsters that stalk the land. The Immaculate Monks are send on their missions and expected to get things done, but there isn't much beyond a mortal oversight on them. Their power is their own and nothing will curse them for letting something slide or getting corrupt since first of all, religion in Exalted doesn't work that way, and second of all, the Immaculate Order is a manufactured religion that is used to keep the world behaving in a certain way according to some people in power.
Exalted and "no backsies" on power
Since I already touched on it, might as well expand it here. In the world of Exalted by default you play a demigod hero that is empowered by the gods or the elements. You could be the priest of the god that gave you power, or just someone that was awesome enough to impress them, but at the end of the day, you are marked by their power. You're not a paladin or a cleric per-se, mainly by the dint of this being an eastern fantasy.
At the same time, just because a god gave you some of their power doesn't mean they hold any sway over you. An exaltation is a one and done type of deal, the god can't take away your power or stop you from getting more powerful after they have given you the spark (without killing you of course, but considering you were designed to be a titan-killer, few are stupid enough to try).
This essentially means that a god choosing you as their champion puts a lot of faith in you to be a good long-term investment, and similar to the previous section, you are afforded a lot of autonomy in representing them.
Taboos and caveats of power
Adjacent to the default Exalted's "no backsies" on power are divine or supernatural powers that come with some taboos and caveats. You are still not beholden to a deity to use your divine magic, but you have something else that is limiting you and your behaviour.
This covers your 5e D&D paladins that have to upkeep their Oaths or risk becoming Oathbreakers. They could, say, be questing for glory and have to perform great deeds and avoid cowardice. These pain the character in broad enough strokes that you don't fall into the "lawful stupid" category of the older edition paladins while still directing the character to working in a certain way.
In Fading Suns you have religious priests of The Universal Church of the Celestial Sun that wield power in the setting, both literal and figurative. They tend to the peasant folk to keep them on the right path, they act as advisers and confessors to the nobility, and if needed be, they take flamethrowers to burn the heretics...
They can also manifest Theurgy, a magic that comes with a small caveat - Hubris. If you do bad things, like murder, steal, or get excommunicated that Hubris will grow until your character becomes a sinful plague on the land.
Some type of Exalts in Exalted have similar taboos. For example, the Abyssals are champions of the dead and are forbidden from taking on a name, acknowledging who they were in the past life, or even creating or saving lives. It doesn't mean they are physically incapable of doing those things, but usually there is a high price to pay associated with those transgressions.
These kind of mechanics work well for when you want to give player characters power they can use for good or ill, while at the same time putting some thematic or gameplay restrictions on what to use them for. As long as they are not too restrictive, they will keep the players in check without ruining the fun. While this limits some murderhobo behaviour in some bad gamers, for a high-level play this could also limit some stories you could tell, ones of unchecked power corrupting people and so on (hello again Exalted).
Religion of shared interests - Sathraism, SWN's Psychics
A different way of expressing religion is through how the practitioners share common interests unique to that religion. An example of this are the members of a minor heretical sect from Fading Suns called the Sathraists.
Fading Suns is a scifi fantasy game where people travel between worlds through stargates floating in space. There is one quirk to that - when you jump, for a moment you become one with the universe in an addictive flash of nirvana. This is what caused psychic powers to get introduced to the human race. However, since people started getting addicted to those jumps, soon Sathra Dampers were developed that shielded the people in the ship from the psychodelic effects and made space travel more mundane.
This didn't stop people chasing the high though and figuring out how to get their next fix by meddling with the ship engines. Eventually, you had a minor religious heretical cult develop around this phenomena of people that help protect one another, help score their next hit and look out for anyone new that might have experienced the phenomenon themselves. The religion comes from the shared experience, needs and interests to support its practitioners.
A similar phenomena can also be seen in Stars Without Number. It too is a scifi fantasy game that has psychics. One quirk about them though - a new psychic will most likely burn themselves out pretty quickly and become everyone's problem if they don't have a mentor to teach them how to use their powers. They need someone with a specific psionic power to help them get over their initial hump before they learn how to control their powers and so on.
While the setting is a mostly blank and open ended sandbox, you could infer someone would start a psychic order religion that seeks out new psychics and trains them in how to properly use their power as well as teaching them a religion based on those powers. Again, a religion based on shared experience, needs and interests of the practitioners.
Power through conviction - oWoD's True Faith
White Wolf offered us another take on religion with Old World of Darkness' True Faith merit. It was a bit of a weird power that had different interpretations throughout the various game lines and editions. It mostly boiled down to this - if you believed in religion strong enough, you could perform some miracles or generally use it to smite creatures of darkness.
In one of the scenarios of the Gehenna book however, we can infer that True Faith is not tied to doing religiously good deeds or even the approval of Yahweh (oWoD had a very judeo-christian focused backstory, down to Vampires descending from Caine).
In the Wormwood scenario, a group of Vampires hide in a church and await god's judgement after he destroys all of the world's vampires in 40 days and 40 nights. One of those vampires in question is Ferox, a Gargoyle bruiser with True Faith 9 (out of possible 10). He's mostly there to keep peace and is not above hurting or killing people to do his job. He's a zealot through and through.
At the end of the scenario, all of the characters are judged by Yahweh directly and can either be purged of their Mark of Cain and become people, or get smitten into dust. Ferox falls into that second camp, probably to the surprise of similar murderhobos that might've been playing oWoD in the 2000s with a similar build and attitude.
It is certainly an interesting take on religions in RPGs, although it might come off as flat in execution. You can't really judge if a player character has enough conviction to continue using their powers, and possibly confronting their conviction in their righteousness with actual religious morality or the will of a deity would have to be a big event that amounts to "you're playing your character wrong, stupid". So there probably is a reason why this kind of powers didn't make the transition to Chronicles of Darkness.
Power through self-improvement - Monks, Elemental Dragons
To contrast with gaining power through religiously-motivated self-conviction, there is a similar concept of gaining power through self-improvement - spiritual purity and all that. D&D's Monks are an example of that - they are a class focused on mastering oneself and using spiritual energy that is divorced from a specific deity. Of course you have spiritual teachings and similar training how to achieve said mastery, so it would tie to a religion or several. Most importantly though, Monks as written can't lose the power they gain, and they are not beholden to some cosmic force, which sets them apart from a number of similar entities like say, the Jedi Order (that on paper at least follow "the will of the Force" and can turn to the dark side).
We see a similar concept to that in Exalted, not only in the form of various heroic mortals with their martial training, or Sorcerers that can achieve great feats without being Exalts, but also in the way how Elementals work. They start off as rather mindless manifestations of the elemental forces that eventually can develop sentience and personhood. Then through spiritual enlightenment they can reach further levels of essence refinement, turning into Lesser Elemental Dragons. If they continue, they can even turn to something comparable to the most powerful beings in the setting - Greater Elemental Dragons that stretch for hundreds of miles and can devastate continents. This happened at least once, and now that Elemental is buried beneath a mountain range, while others are discouraged from becoming that enlightened...
Sometimes you can have religion and spirituality without the need to worship a specific deity, all the while earning some cool powers.
Appeasing your powerdaddy and quid pro quo powers - Warlocks
A different take on the power balance between a deity and their practitioner could come from the relationship a D&D Warlock has with their patron. A common interpretation of this class is that the patron can't take away the power they granted the Warlock, but at the same time if the Warlock wants more power they need to earn them by appeasing their patron. This does give them a good amount of leeway for some back and forth as needed, while still preserving an interesting power dynamic.
I'm not telling you to do something, but... - EvWoD Infernals
This one is a little bit particular. In Exalted vs World of Darkness you have Infernal characters. They wield the power of hells themselves. Their power sets revolve around destruction and bringing about the end of the world so they could rule the reforged world. That being said, unlike their original counterparts from Exalted, there is nothing controlling them. Once they get their power, it is theirs to keep, use and abuse.
What keeps this category different from "no backsies" however, is that the powers themselves shape how the characters act. But when you have the power to turn water into acid, irradiate the landscape, create zombies and graft hellish implants onto people while turning them into fomori, it kind of informs which direction the character will fall towards.
These kind of powers use the carrot rather than the stick approach to moulding the chosen of a given deity: "You don't have to be a cruel tyrant, but if you want to it is so easy". It can only be achieved by very deliberate game design, focusing not only what the powers can do, but what intentionally they cannot do and what kind of character is painted by this positive and negative space.
Deities as avatars of cultures - Godbound's Made Gods
A completely different approach to religion is presented in Godbound in the form of Made Gods. As the lore goes, humanity achieved post-scarcity utopia, solved all science and all that stuff. The last thing they needed to iron out was philosophy and figuring out who was right. Because they couldn't agree on an answer, they turned to the only person that could settle their dispute - the abrahamic god figure of their world, the Creator. They stormed the gates of heaven, broke into its throne room only to find its throne empty. So they thought to themselves - if the Creator is not here to settle their dispute, they will have to wage a final war to prove who is right. So they stripped heaven and reality itself for parts to build great artefacts of power and Made Gods - avatars of their philosophy and civilisations, the most powerful engines of war imagined.
The role of those deities in Godbound is to represent their cultures and wage war on anyone who did not conform to their rigid beliefs. They did require an army of priests and theotechnicians to upkeep, but they did offer their believers a tangible afterlife in a heaven made by that Made God. It was a much better alternative to the hell where everyone else would go to that was hijached by angels out of spite for humanity breaking reality and shattering the world.
Making your own gods - Kuo-toa and YES!
On a similar note but perhaps a smaller scale, sometimes you can create your own gods on a much more personal level.
One example of that from D&D comes in the form of Kuo-toa, an amphibian race that can invent their own deities for protection. While those wouldn't be nearly as powerful as more established Forgotten Realms pantheons, it's certainly interesting.
Something similar also happened during Dimension 20's Fantasy High series. During the game, Kristen Applebees, a cleric, started having doubts about her faith when she realised she was brought up in an extremist cult, and after meeting her deity face to face realised he was basically a frat boy douche. Eventually, she started a new religion, complete with a new god of YES!. A nice capstone to her arc.
Serve the people, embody the ideals - Alchemicals
Going back to Exalted, we have yet another different expression of religion and its relationship to people in the form of Alchemicals and Autochthonians in general. In the setting you have a titan named Autochthon, basically Hephaestus mixed with Primus. One day he decided to peace out, turn his body inside out and create a world out of it called Autochthonia. He raptured a bunch of people to populate this world before disappearing from the main part of the setting.
One things settled he gave the people a new religion to follow so they would maintain his body while he slumbered. At the same time, he taught the people how to turn the most devout and accomplished among them into heroes called Alchemicals (basically a cross between a human, golem, transformer and RoboCop, but at the same time a communist hero of the people). They needed those heroes to take care of them and so they would grow over time to become new cities (think Metroplex). It makes a bit more sense in context...
So here you have a religion with a lot of back and forth. Autochthon needs people to maintain his body and provide him prayers to sustain him. People need Autochthon to provide them with raw resources to sustain themselves and Alchemicals to protect them from the raw elements and other big nasties that lurk in the robotic world. Alchemicals need the people to help maintain themselves (especially when they grow to city size and become immobile). All of this is wrapped in a religion that promotes the good of the community, selflessness, hard work, communism, and duty to Autochthon.
It's a rather rare take on religion, where your god needs you to survive, and you also are expected to serve your community above yourself, being an actual hero of the people.
Polytheistic priests
A large view of clerics, paladins and people of faith in general in RPGs come from a western perspective. You pray to and have relationship with one god, you follow one faith that has a strict set of tenants and so on. But that doesn't need to be the case. Your game could have a pantheon of deities (like Humblewood), or go all out and give everything a god to manage it (like Exalted). So what then are the roles of people of faith?
While you could have some clerics dedicated to worshipping one deity in particular (like Brides of Ahlat in Exalted), you'd more likely have the priests be focused on serving multiple deities. Whether that's through worship, guiding people ("if you have troubles with your fields, this is how you pray to Henwin"), as well as being the intermediaries between the people and the gods.
That last one especially is the focus of the aforementioned Immaculate Order. That set of beliefs postulates that the gods should not interfere with mortals and the Immaculate Monks are the ones that resolve disputes between gods and people. So if a river god cries too much and floods a town, you know who to ask for help.
Now if the setting has gods that form a somewhat cohesive pantheon or can generally co-exist (like Humblewood when you look at it - the deities there form a somewhat cohesive whole and even Kren, the evil fox deity is not a completely evil being) you can have priests representing a lot of gods without an issue. The problem arises when they start becoming incompatible with one another.
In Exalted for example, you have gods and Exalts that are worshipped by mortals on regular basis. The same world also houses Yozis, ancient mad titans that spite the world for being defeated eons ago, and the Neverborn, fossilised dead titans that wish for the whole world to end. Each of those have their own kind of devotees (mortals, demons, nihilistic ghosts) that mostly don't see eye to eye.
So while you could still have priests that represent and handle multiple deities, chances are they wouldn't represent everyone.
Conclusion
While there are probably many more different relationships between religion, spirituality, gods, their chosen and their faithful, I think this should be a good enough start for players or game designers to get some inspiration for their next creations.
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