One of the things that frequently frustrates me about fantasy games (and literature, by extension) is the presence of gods. I mean, the real, incontrovertible, presence of gods. The undeniable possibility that a god might sit next to you at a tavern or smite you about the head with his holy cudgel and restore your lost levels.
Culturally, it makes sense. Just as Norse folk knew Odin hung from his tree and Babylonians knew Marduk was the son of Ea and Damkina, and Christians know Christ died for their sins. That doesn’t account for the difference between proof and faith, though, which is a central characteristic of religion.
The problem when gods become demonstrably true is that the mystery of their presence evaporates. There’s no room for heresy, since you can just commune with the god in question and ask what her holy writ really means. There’s no room for a figure like Thomas Aquinas, Jan Hus, or John Calvin. Vaudois and Cathars wouldn’t exist if they were wrong, and they’d be the institution if they were in the right. The divinely inspired are demonstrably either true or charlatans. The mystique of Percival, Launcelot, and Galahad vanishes. You can ask the god in question whether Joan of Arc is His vessel, or if she’s just a brilliant loon. The ambiguity — the frisson of a brush with something potentially unknowably greater than man — evaporates.
And the presence of multiple gods eliminates the innate conflict of the question of the One True Way. Sure, in the real world, religious intolerance is the source of untold grief, but in the context of fantastical fiction, it’s a gold mine. Except when it’s not, when the provable presence of gods inclines the setting to a cosmopolitan acceptance of other faiths, even the ones that involve the kidnapping of innocents and the cutting open of them and stuffing them with live snakes to sate the thirsts of some deranged Typhon-analogue. Which is itself hand-waved away by pseudo-legal decrees of "worship of evil gods is against the law in this village." Who keeps track of that? What in-world figure consults the metaphysical Deities & Demigods to make the necessary legal proscriptions?
