Editing Religion (section)

===Religion as a story device/Functionalists===
Compared to the two types of writers found below, these writers are usually just attempting to model their work after real-world [[Mythology]] and are frequently attempting to keep their views of Religion separate from their work. Frequently comes in one of two subspecies:
* The [[Standard Fantasy Setting]] default: The world is ruled by an ordinary polytheistic pantheon, usually close to some admixture of Norse and Greek mythologies.  Some of them also have a Top God more powerful than all the others, and maybe the in-universe creator of everything who is mostly hands-off in cosmic affairs.  The gods of these religions tend to focus on specific areas (gods of [[Paladin|Justice]] and [[Druid|Nature]] are common, for subtly obvious reasons) and frequently want their followers to propagate or promote these things.  
* The kind of setting they wanted to make dictated the nature of the divine. For example, in [[Exalted]] just about all the figures anybody would call a "God" (besides the Exalted) are Useless, because the Exalted (which includes the Player Characters) are the guys who were made specifically to do whatever the gods needed them to do for reasons inherent to the setting, to go with the main theme of the setting for the PCs: "You can do ''almost anything'', except '''avoid the consequences of doing that anything'''".