I used careful scaling, blurring, sharpening, cropping, framing, contrast enhancement and black tinting to turn a single base image into a story told in a sequence of five panels, because I lost too much detail in that base image when I scaled it to fit. The Base Image was by elukac from Pixabay

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests and spokesmen to interrogate the deity in question directly.

One of those central questions is ‘Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?’ The stock answer is a platitude about ‘God’s Plan’ that (to me) always seems to evade the question and is never satisfactory to those receiving it.

This was a problem that was considered very carefully in crafting Cyrene, the deity and her mythos in Assassin’s Amulet (see The Creation Of A Deity: The Origins Of Cyrene and Cyrene Revealed: an excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet – the first is the backstory of the creation and the second an edited excerpt of the content from the game supplement itself).

Today’s post is going to offer a number of better answers for you to put into the mouths of priests and deities in your game world for use when tragedies strike people who don’t deserve such misfortune.

Some Caveats and Important Contextual Notes

I’m NOT trying to convert anyone, here. If you have faith, that’ wonderful for you. If you don’t believe in higher powers, that’s fine, too – but it only makes it more imperative that you have reasonably convincing answers to put into the mouths of your NPCs when this (and similar issues) arise, for the sake of plausibility if nothing else.

The problem with presenting this sort of list is that it directly challenges GMs to answer the question of why these answers are not sufficient for them in real life – and those can be uncomfortable questions to answer. I have my own answers to those questions, but I’m not here to force them on anyone else.

Again, I’m not trying to create controversy, here. This is strictly an intellectual exercise regarding one philosophical aspect of the simulated unreality in which our games take place, nothing more.

So, without further ado, let’s talk a little turkey…

1. Toughen Them Up

It is often said that mothers, and those who suffer from some sort of ongoing medical problem causing pain, have a higher pain threshold. Certainly, most military organizations seem to operate on the belief that pain experienced in a controlled environment (basic training) makes soldiers more resilient under combat conditions, when the lives of the soldier, and the other members of his unit, stand in the balance. That principle – toughen ‘them’ up, either directly or indirectly, so that they become fit to be ‘soldiers of [God]’, can be used to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Consider the logic: if bad things happened to bad people, it can be perceived as simple justice, and no-one save those who fall into the category of ‘bad people’ can be expected to learn a thing. These are not going to be inclined to be ‘good soldiers’, no matter how many object lessons they experience.

The preferred recruit is always going to be a ‘good person’ (from the perspective of the recruiting sergeant). Therefore, these people should suffer more, not less, to equip them to fight and survive.

But a deity who is seen to be unjust and a persecutor will find it hard to attract recruits – so the optimum balance is achieved by distributing pain and ill-fortune as evenhandedly as possible. It’s just that there’s an ulterior motive for the suffering of the worthy and spiritual.

2. Egalitarian Worship

If all men are created equal, and all are treated equally by the god(s), with no room for fear nor favor, it encourages people to see others as their equals. No favored sons permitted. Gods can’t spare their followers, because the faith of those followers will then become a crutch, a way of avoiding punishment, a way for the unworthy to swell the ranks of the worthy. One bad apple can contaminate the whole bunch.

This goes far beyond ‘you get what you deserve’ or ‘as ye sew, so shall ye reap’. It elevates thinking of yourself or your group as ‘special’ or ‘chosen’ to one of the ultimate sins, in the eyes of the deity.

The flip side of this particular coin is that this is a particularly heartless philosophy, one devoid of empathy. You can either embrace that, or you can compensate for it with greater empathy in other ways.

For example, the price of a Healing Deity making a cure available for every ailment might be for everyone to suffer equally, no matter how much the deity might wish it did not have to be so – ‘no pain, no gain’.

There is a deep-set implication of some sort of ‘cosmic balance’ that is served by this egalitarian approach; the nature of that balance should be the subject of deeper thought by the GM.

3. Balance Of Good And Evil

Speaking of deeper balances, let’s talk about elementary account-keeping. In order to spend, you have to have money – that’s fairly basic. Even if you borrow money, you have to repay that debt, usually with interest, making things more expensive in the long run.

In order to bestow suffering on those who do not worship a deity, that deity might need to build up their ‘bank balance’ by forcing the faithful to suffer. Of course, having a greater bank of suffering built up than you inflict upon the non-faithful would be cruel; so this world-view only works if the deity ‘spends’ every cent they accrue.

Bad things happen to good people so that bad people can be made to suffer.

Or, contrariwise, it might be that bad things happen to good people to accrue the capital for good things to be done to good people. It’s just another interpretation of the same basic philosophy.

In most campaigns, it is the faith of the followers that is the fundamental ‘power unit’ of what the deity does. This proposal suggests that it is not their faith that matters, it is the suffering inflicted on the faithful – the matter of their faith simply determines to whom the resulting ‘credit’ will accrue.

I, personally, find this to be a very bleak and dystopian concept, and hence one that would suit a very bleak and dystopian game world.

4. A Harsh Education

‘Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind’. In many game environments, Gods are limited, not omnipotent, even within their pantheistic role. Gods inflict pain on worshipers because painful things will happen anyway, and the caring Deity wants to equip their followers to survive in a hostile and harsh reality.

This philosophy works particularly well if there are one or more groups of antipathetic non-Deities – Devils, Demons, etc – who are outside the control of the Gods, and who inflict suffering for their own perverted pleasure / gain. It can even be seen as immunizing the faithful against the far worse suffering that the faithful may encounter, because the Gods can’t protect people against everything all the time.

There’s a lot of resemblance between this philosophy and that of justification number one, above. This is also a very paternal / maternal concept, reflective of the ‘strict parent’.

5. An Appreciation Of Contrast

This is, perhaps, the answer that most accords with my own personal philosophy – without the occasional bad time, you have no appreciation of how good the ‘good times’ actually are, in fact you are more inclined to take them for granted.

No-one who has not suffered from some chronic medical problem fully appreciates the occasional pain-free day, or so it seems to those who do so suffer. Certainly, those subject to chronic disease are far more appreciative of ‘good days’ when they happen to occur.

Gods can inflict suffering just so that the faithful can properly appreciate a lack of suffering. After all, it may be beyond the power of a Deity to bestow a life that is any better than a lack of suffering.

This plays into the attitude of many horror stories about wishes like The Monkey’s Paw – the concept that life is a zero-sum game and that one person’s reward has to be built upon the suffering of one or more others. There is only so much ‘wealth’ in the world, this theory runs – whether that ‘wealth’ is good fortune, or prosperity, or health, or whatever – and anyone being gifted such wealth requires it to be withdrawn from someone else. Over the whole of a society, the best that a deity may be able to do is provide a lack of suffering – most of the time.

‘Into each day of sunshine, a little rain must fall; into each deluge, there will be a break in the weather, an eye in the storm’.

In a metaphysical sense, suffering could be said to occur because someone, somewhere, is depriving others of their fair share of good fortune. Greed can be satisfied only by the suffering of others. It follows that greed for more than one’s fair share of those good things listed earlier will eventually be harshly punished. But, until that happens, a lot of other people will suffer through the actions of satisfying that persons greed and ambition.

6. A Test Of Faith

It’s easy to be faithful when that faith is never put to the test. Gods may inflict pain on their worshipers to test their faith, seeking to identify the elite, who can then be rewarded either in this life or the next. This concept is endemic within the Christian faith, where only the ‘worthy’ will be welcomed into heaven. It reeks of elitism.

But there can be many subtle variations. Perhaps the elite are to be singled out to perform in the direct service of a deity in the protection of the general populace from a worse fate – this is an ‘officer candidate school’ equivalent of the ‘basic training’ concept offered as justification number 1. The testing is to see who can be trusted with the power and authority that the Deity grants to the elite in his service – and the freedom and independence that power and authority bestow.

Heaven is for sheep, in this worldview – anyone can earn their way into it. It’s enduring the suffering without losing faith that is the pathway to real rewards.

No-one who subscribes to this philosophical approach can do so fully without having read Robert Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy Of Justice” (link is to Amazon, available in Hardcover, Paperback, and Audio CD – the printed versions are reasonably priced, I will get a small commission if you purchase).

Job is the story of God persecuting a worshiper to prove to Satan how strong that worshiper’s faith is. This persecution takes the form of shifting the worshiper from his native world to others at random intervals while throwing the promises of rewards at him and then snatching them away. Enduring a shipwreck, an earthquake, and a series of world-changes Alex and Margrethe work their way from Mexico back to Kansas as dishwasher and waitress.

Whenever they manage to make some stake, an inconveniently timed change into a new alternate reality throws them off their stride (once, the money they earned is left behind in another reality; in another case, the paper money earned in a Mexico which is an empire becomes worthless in another Mexico which is a republic). These repeated misfortunes, clearly effected by some malevolent entity, make the hero identify with the Biblical Job.

The protagonist, Alex, attributes these misfortunes to Satan, while Margrethe attributes them to Loki (she is a pagan by Alex’s philosophy). As they near their destination they are separated by the Rapture – Margrethe worships Odin, and pagans do not go to Heaven. Finding that the reward for his faith (eternity as promised in the Book of Revelation) is worthless without her, Alex journeys through timeless space in search of his lost lady, taking him to Hell and beyond.

— Summary partially excerpted from this Wikipedia page. I can’t go into much more detail without spoiling the book for anyone who hasn’t read it.

If you are one of those unfortunates who haven’t read ‘Job’, it is definitely worth your time. Be warned, Christians may find it challenging.

7. The Chess Player

Moving on, we have a variation on the omniscient omnipotent “not a sparrow falls” / “God’s plan” concept, in which the Deity is a master manipulator who is steering humanity (or part thereof, or equivalent) toward some end that only he / she can perceive – but which is so worthwhile that any short-term pain inflicted is amply justified.

Problems with predestination can be avoided by having some other agency actively working to oppose this idyllic future, causing the Deity in question to continually revise his plans and strategies.

I’ve used this basic concept (usually in the form of a Pantheon vs Something Else) a number of times.

My superhero campaign contains a deliberate progression at a metaphysical level – from us vs them, to good vs evil, to order vs chaos, to cooperative world-building vs the forces of anarchic destruction and nihilism in the guise of ‘freedom’.

Each such conflict eventually ends in a cataclysmic confrontation between metaphysical exemplars of the philosophy in question that destroy almost everything, but which leave a residuum that grows and evolves into a reborn reality, shepherded into existence by the next generation of metaphysical entities.

The Zenith-3 campaign is currently building toward the next such confrontation – in fact, the Apocalypse is the underlying tapestry of the current campaign.

One reason for using it so often is that you don’t need to create a fully fleshed-out grand strategy – you can do most of it on the run, as opportunistic moves and half-baked tactics cause responses and reactions. This convenience can save you a lot of world-building time, which can then be devoted to other campaign needs.

8. Dominance Games

One of my persistent criticisms of Deities as Stat Blocks is the potential for non-Deities (read: the PCs) to challenge and even overcome / overthrow the Deities, something that is inherently embodied in the concept of restricting Deific power levels to a mere set of numbers.

Naturally, I’ve examined the opposite choice, in which Deific ‘turnover’ is accepted, and Gods view mortals as potential rivals and heirs even though said deities are inherently dependent upon the mortals. This, in fact, was the central conceptual spine of my Rings Of Time campaign.

This asserts that the Gods (1) use mortals to do their dirty work, because they are always less than myth and legend would have it, and (2) inflict suffering on the populations subject to them (whether they worship the deity or not) as a means of establishing, reinforcing, and cementing their dominance over those potential rivals.

If you choose to go down this path, a central concept of the Theology that results needs to be the reasons why the Deity is dependent on their mortal followers. There are endless possible answers, and variations on those answers, to explore.

For example, one that I have never utilized is that Mortals give the Gods a Moral Foundation; without mortal worshipers and the object lessons that the Deity gets to experience through them, they become Evil (Devils) or Anarchic (Demons), they lose their way as it were.

Whatever the ties are that bind the two together, these love-hate-fear relationships are central to the resulting mythos.

One of my earliest posts here at Campaign Mastery was A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs. This is exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind.

9. An Illusion Of Simplicity

Finally, we have the possibility that – at least superficially – one or more of the above appear to be true, but that appearance is the result of oversimplifying an even more complex reality.

This is “there are more things under heaven than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” writ large and made manifest.

The usual approach to this possibility that I recommend is to pick one of the others (the over-simplification) and use that to define restrictions on behavior – then, once the players are familiar with it, and with its implications, carve out an exception, a case where what has to be done doesn’t fit the model.

No theology in a game should ever hold all the answers; the fringes of understanding should always contain dark corners and unexpected departures for future discovery and exploration.

I’d like to close this section of the article with a (relevant) quote from Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

— quotation provided by brainyquote.com.

There may well be other answers to the question; but these nine are all better than that wormy old proverb, in terms of credibility and plausibility (it is worth pointing out that some of them can be simplified into that proverb, however).

Having Priests articulate one of these arguments in response to the question, or offer it as comfort to those suffering loss, and believe it wholeheartedly, puts their faith (fictitious though it is) onto a firm characterization footing.

Of course, each of these, if taken as the official position of a theology, will impact the practices and beliefs of that theology in other areas. That sort of extrapolation is not possible in an article of this scope, and rests too strongly on other aspects of the game worlds offered by the GM.

In other words, you will need to explore the ramifications for your game world on your own. But at least this is a starting point.

Oh, and don’t ignore the possibilities raised by the converse question: “Why do Good Things happen to Bad People?” These can be equally illuminating, and a good Theology should be able to answer both!

Application

The articles that I linked to earlier offer a demonstration and example of how to go about such extrapolations. We were very careful to make Cyrene a deity with rich characterization, with both positive and negative aspects, and with some aspects that could go either way depending on the individual’s circumstances.

In general, the impact of a particular philosophy or theology will come down to (a) offering appeasement, (b) seeking protection, (c) giving thanksgiving, or (d) requesting intervention (one way or another), and each of the possible answers listed earlier will manifest in all four of these.

In addition, there will be (e) some races / classes / professions that are thought to be protected by their relationship to the answer, (f) some that will be considered threatened, (g) some that may be considered offensive, and some that are considered (h) friends, (i) allies, (j) enemies, or (k) interested observers / subjects of observation.

The complexities of Theology

By the time you have entries under each of those headings for the chosen justification of suffering promoted by a specific deity / priesthood / clerical order, you will have developed a diverse, rich and compelling set of interpretations and roles for the deity, just as we did for Cyrene. You can easily determine, on the fly and as necessary, how any given group or profession will relate to the deity in question and vice-versa.

Once you have done two such interpretations for the same deity (favored by different priesthoods / sects / orders / groups) or for a different deity, you can start exploring and defining the complex ways that they can interact and interrelate. Heck, even a broad conceptual description of those others is enough to get you started.

That’s all we had for the other deities in Cyrene’s pantheon. The relationship of that conceptual thumbnail with the one deity who had been fleshed out was enough to start fleshing out the others. Each deity subjected to the process then forms a building block to further define others.

The bigger picture that results

This simple process can turn a bland list of deities into a genuine pantheon with its own internally consistent and original Theology. Even if the perceptions are erroneous, and all this merely projections onto the Deities by over-inventive mortals, you achieve an ever-tighter integration between that Theology and the game world, the environment in which adventures take place, making it more unique, more interesting, and more complete.

The justification of suffering is a toolkit for the enrichment of your game in all sorts of ways. It’s never a wasted exercise.