Introducing a Fantastic Religion to the Players

[Vahnavoi]

I wasn't talking about how fictional the story is, though; I was talking about how fictional the setting is. A fictional story can be set in the real city of Boston, for example, rather than in some made-up place.

Or are you coming at this from a hardline philosophical position of "There are no untruths about any real thing, as untruths only describe the unreal"? From that perceptive, yeah, a fictional story can't be set in the real Boston, only in a very similar fictional city also named "Boston", which must not be the real one because these events didn't happen in the real Boston. But strict "A thing cannot differ from itself" also means that Boston right now isn't Boston yesterday, either; "You never step into the same river twice", and all that. Maybe that's correct from an absolute perspective, but in normal conversational terms it's possible to inaccurately describe something ("describe a different, possibly non-existent thing"), and for a work of fiction to contain something real ("contain something with distinguishing qualities of something real").

I don't consider it particularly hardline to note realist fiction is still fiction. What you see is not a pipe, it's drawing of a one; your tabletop game doesn't take place in real Boston, it takes place in fictive reproduction of it. So on and so forth. The actual point was that when counting works based on a thing, I see no point in excluding things based on realism - a game set in Boston and a game set in totally-not-Boston are, obviously, both inspired by Boston.

Yeah, I thought of mentioning that, but I didn't get around around to it. You're right that fictional settings are often (almost always?) isekai (Oz, Narnia, etc.) rather than not interacting at all with the familiar world. Some cases even strike me as sort of gratuitous, done more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, which certainly seems to point to this having been the norm, even if that's less the case now.

Which way the trend is swinging right now is a slightly different discussion from simply determining what has been done. I could argue myself that strict closed secondary world fantasy is a fairly contemporary conceit, so if you want to take the stance that trying to do fantasy without real world reference is more common now tham before, eh, it's plausible but not confirmed.

I don't have any particular gripe or disagreement with the rest you said on this tangent.

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For starters, that's what my main reference covers. More to the point, though, my understanding is that players were expected to roleplay their characters' alignments, but weren't expected to read the Dungeon Master's Guide. It didn't occur to me that there might be secret standards for players' roleplaying that the players might not know about, yet potentially be penalized for not meeting. In retrospect, I'm not surprised that Gygax would do something like that. But it's been so long since I've encountered evidence of his "Lawful Evil tendencies", if you will, that I'd forgotten about them. If I were to read straight through an AD&D DMG, I'd probably be way more primed to expect that sort of crap.

You are correct players weren't expected to read the Dungeon Master's Guide. That doesn't change the point: how to adjucate alignment is the dungeon master's job, so of course you will find a lot of the relevant rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide rather than the Player's Handbook. Even the rules covered by your reference include the part that a character's alignment may be graphed by the campaign referee, AKA the dungeon master - that should, by construction, tell you there are more rules for this elsewhere.

If I wanted to criticise "secret information" in games, I would note that the real problem here is that people who weren't let in on the secret, like you, are perpetually left with a mistaken idea of how rules impacted by said secrets actually work. But this happens just as well in games where referee rules are public information; many such rules are not directly relevant to players so players often just don't take time to learn them.

"One evil deed, or one evil individual, may be more evil than another" isn't the same thing as "One culture's evil may be another culture's good, and vice versa", notwithstanding that the same word may be overloaded to refer to either (or other things) depending on context. I don't think that I've ever seen "cultural relativism" used to refer to the former.

Nowhere is it argued those are the same. The real point is that they aren't mutually exclusive. Descriptive moral relativism isn't mutually exclusive with moral realism. It just means "one culture's evil may be another's good" is followed by "one or more of these cultures is wrong". For example, a True Neutral character in 1st Edition AD&D may honestly believe that the status quo of natural world is the true good for everyone, and the ideas of Lawful Good or Chaotic Good are crazy crackpot ideas or outright evil. The True Neutral's subjective beliefs and actions taken due to them determine their standing in relation to extreme alignments, even if they do nothing to change the alignment labels of anyone involved (because, again, those labels are based on judgement from a higher perspective).

This is already visible in how the Great Wheel cosmology is set up. You can have different pantheons, not just individual gods, on opposing sides of the wheel. As a corollary, you can have an entire culture believing that the gods work in a particular way, and another that has violently opposed views. That's already part of what the alignment system exists to describe.

[KorvinStarmast]

Meanwhile, from a diegetic / Watsonian / in-fiction / whatever perspective,

Using fancy terms doesn't change the simple fact that humans from earth play the game.

there's also no mystery, because there's no Earth stuff to compare anything to. The characters in Tekumel aren't perplexed by how Earthlike their world is.

Not so. Tekumel was terraformed by human space travelers and other species from inhabited planets.

Things only look weird from a third mutant hybrid perspective of "Earth exists, and Tekumel also exists".

Actually, within Barker's fiction, they both exist but the Humans from Tekumel (as the game opens) have been on Tekumel for a long time, and do not have the means to travel back across the galaxy and reconnect with Earth. (You might say that the Time of Darkness was the Space Exploration age's version of The Bronze Age Collapse on Tekumel).

A core problem that the humans on Tekumel have is that they are interlopers; they were space travelers who settled there. There are any number of native species on Tekumel (The Hlyss and the Ssú being the two most prominent) whose overall, in-world aims are the purging of humans from the world and their retaking of their home world.

A substantial teaser that Barker left in the game for each group to develop was the rediscovery of some of the old Space Age tech long lost since the time of darkness. Like any well made D&D world, it is post apocalyptic, full of empty / unexplored / wilderness territory, full of rival factions (human, and others) all competing to grow and prosper at the expense of the other factions. (Which is a faithful re creation of the chaos of the Feudal age of the Dark ages through the Middle Ages and High Middle Ages ... which is D&D's sweet spot. Other games have other sweet spots).

Mind you, as Vahnavoi points out, a fictional setting is often described as connected to Earth somehow anyway.

How much difficulty you want to present your players with in terms of the Primary/Secondary overlap is up to you, as the world builder. There is no general case.

As an aside:

Tekumel has grown as a game world since I played and GM'd it. I played with the original book as provided. For example, the Good and Evil gods and cohorts were retconned / re templated. I suspect that he did this as the RPG hobby evolved.

The Gods of Tékumel

The religious systems of the Five Empires are based on two ‘alignments’ (Stability and Change), each represented in the Engsvanyáli pantheon by five major ‘Gods’ (Stability: the Tlomitlányal; Change: the Tlokiriqáluyal) and five ‘Cohorts’ (the Hlimékluyal).

Information in this section paraphrased from Swords and Glory Volume 1, M.A.R. Barker, Copyright ©1983 Gamescience.

These deities are really vastly poweful interdimensional beings, though ‘gods’ to the limited being that is man. For a discussion of these beings and the Scrolls of Pavár, see the relevant History entry. The most comprehensive source of material about Tsolyáni religion and ritual is Mitlanyál.

All of my stuff is still in notebooks and folders. I've traded a few emails with Jeff Barry in the last decade since I know he's a Tekumel afficianado, having been in Barker's original play group.

And thanks to this conversation, I now have a pdf of the original game book, but sadly there are some edits...at least they still spell the Hlyss correctly.

[VoxRationis]

Echoing @Unoriginal:
Almost every game I've ever played in has either used a D&D pantheon (mostly the toned-down Greyhawk one in the 3.5 PHB) or one the GM has invented, and the players (whether or not I am among them) have gotten the message pretty well, in my experience. Just be ready to provide simple reminders for what the characters would reasonably know as part of their setting's common knowledge: "The chryselephantine idol before you wears a diadem of oak leaves, and you recognize this as the emblem of Ceilesyl, goddess of motherhood and healing. The presence of such an idol here means this courtyard is likely consecrated to the goddess and subject to her personal attention. Speak and act here as you would in her presence." If you expect them to know to do a specific thing (e.g., clap thrice before addressing an altar), let them know, or else be willing to accept generalities from players: "I perform the appropriate ritual gestures as I cross the threshold of the sanctuary."

(Or, you know, your players might ignore all that and cold-call the god of the sea and ask him intrusive personal questions right before setting out on a lengthy sea voyage and while currently underwater.)