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[peachvers]

imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

[chandrar-nalaar]

you have a beautiful imagination

[iguanamouth]

[rainbow-femme]

Hi yes hello it’s me the local wizard, and I- Ok well “evil” feels like a strong word but yes, that’s me. Anyway, I need your help. I know I stole away the kingdoms 12 princesses, that’s my bad. Listen, I didn’t think this through. It didn’t occur to me that having a dozen angry young women from early teen to early 20s and giving them giant powerful wings would be a bad idea.

I know I’m the one who cast the curse but it can still only be broken with true love. I’m begging you, somebody, please come and fall in love with these girls and make them leave, I can’t take it anymore, it sucks so bad. I can’t keep getting viciously bullied by one of the largest living species of waterfowl anymore. I’ve tried running away but they can fly so they just find me. I’m getting nothing done.

I’ll pay you, I’ll grant you wishes, I don’t care, please just come and fall in love with the mean angry women who live in my yard and hate me so bad

[rpgsandbox]

April is Mega Dungeon month on Backerkit.

Projects include:

Castle Zagyg for the Castles & Crusades RPG by Troll Lord Games, based on Gary Gygax's original dungeon.

Jewel in the Sky, a science-fantasy dungeon for the Cypher system by Monte Cook Games.

Hastening Doom for 5e D&D by Kobold Press.

Metadungeon for the DIE RPG by Rowan, Rook & Decard.

Castle Whiterock for 5e D&D and Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games.

[xaosseed]

Intrigued by Metadungeon, hard to go wrong with Gar Hanrahan

[knightwithakay]

inspired tactic from our gm:

[knightwithakay]

[radiantmorningstar]

Open Source TTRPG Resources

Open Source TTRPG Resources

Here's a collection of forever open licensed tabletop roleplaying games and resources. Borrowed from and inspired by the Forever Open Source

[this-is-cool]

The superb sci-fi concept designs and sketches of Mark Zhang - https://www.this-is-cool.co.uk/the-superb-sci-fi-designs-and-sketches-of-mark-zhang/

[pocketss]

ouuh brother

[secretsnowclub]

TTRPG School: Required Reading

This is an alphabetical list of writing on tabletop games, video games, games broadly, and a few adjacent topics. It is required reading. I am not agreeing with anything by having it on this list. Some of the works feature bibliographies and links to other works which they are referencing or in conversation with. Read those if you can. There are works I wanted to include on here but have been taken off of the internet, and I was unable to find them elsewhere beyond my hard drive.

You should read the following (just one a day or one per week, and maybe write a little personal response to it):

About Games and Beings Serious & Why Do Things Have Outlines, Bateson - https://garadinervi-repertori.blog/post/639473512034222080/gregory-bateson-1972-metalogue-about-games, https://garadinervi-repertori.blog/post/166320033101/gregory-bateson-why-do-things-have-outline

Against Procedurality, Sicart - https://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap

Anti-Canon Worlds and the UVG, Rejec - https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2019/anti-canon-worlds-and-the-uvg/

Avoiding Inapt Discussions in RPGS, Prescott - https://blog.trilemma.com/2023/07/avoiding-inapt-discussion-in-rpgs.html

Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character, Bowman - https://www.nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/

Blorb Principles, snan - https://idiomdrottning.org/blorb-principles

Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice, Rutskarn- https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=5773

Don’t Incentivize Ethical Behavior, Siew - https://slowlorispress.com/post/742713305722961920/dont-incentivise-ethical-behaviour

Game Design is Mind Control, Crane & Sorenson - https://genesisoflegend.podbean.com/e/episode-21-%e2%80%93-game-design-is-mind-control/

Homo Ludens, Huzinga - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/b0899cfad820ab8ad7033952b7a022ba1d7cab9d.pdf

Inevitable Architecture, Woods - https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/inevitable-architecture/

Libre Baskerville Jam - https://itch.io/jam/libre-baskerville-jam

Morality Play, Pokey - https://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/post/183941596800/morality-play

Moralizing and Manipulating in TTRPGs, IdleCartulary - https://idlecartulary.com/2023/09/02/moralising-and-manipulation-in-tabletop-roleplaying-games/

New Simulationism, Sorenson - https://samsorensen.blot.im/new-simulationism

On Romantic Fantasy and the OSR, Manola - https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2015/07/on-romantic-fantasy-and-osr-d.html

Playing to Win, Maz - https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html

Revisiting GNS, Baker - https://lumpley.games/2025/04/07/revisiting-gns/

Rules Elide and its Consequences, Sinclair - https://web.archive.org/web/20230401204032/https://cohost.org/jared-sinclair/post/1211889-rules-elide-and-it

Sinistar or: How to Play Games Wrong, Joel - https://youtu.be/OFbhDs_8k1A?si=DGo4y1U3xr_8Qq0z

System Does Matter, Edwards - http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/system_does_matter.html

Systems of Relation, Dragon - https://possumcreek.medium.com/systems-of-relation-c3b27fc4cc99

Ten Manifestos, Harmony Zone - http://harmonyzone.org/ManifestoJam/TenManifestosForGroupsOfNoPeople.html

The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and the Beginner’s Guide, Danskin - https://youtu.be/4N6y6LEwsKc?si=DMFViwSTOOa4W6PY

The Big Three, Sorenson - https://memento-mori.livejournal.com/175828.html

The Forms and Fluidity of Game Play, Nguyen - https://gamephilosophy.org/pcg2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C.-Thi-Nguyen-2014.-The-Forms-and-Fluidity-of-Game-Play-PCG2014.pdf

The Hidden Art: Slouching Towards A Critical Framework for RPGs, Laws - https://web.archive.org/web/20080625014524/https://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/hiddenart.html

The Impermanence of Art, Bissette - https://web.archive.org/web/20241114224733/https://cohost.org/chrisb/post/2011604-the-impermanence-of

The Monomyth Thread, Libre, Kazumi & Udernation - https://bigstuffedcat.itch.io/the-monomyth-thread

Thinking About Formal Incentive, Marcia B - https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2023/09/thinking-about-formal-incentive.html?m=1

What are assumptions about how to play an OSR adventure that you think might not be commonly held as desired?, Scrap Princess - https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/LinksToWisdom/What_are_assumptions_about_how_to_play_an_OSR_adventure_that_you_think_might_not_be_commonly_held_as_desired%3f

What is a Game?, Suits - https://web.archive.org/web/20061010064123/http://www.stsintl.com/articles/whatisagame.html

What Should We Do With Our Games?, LeMieux & Boluk - https://alt254.itch.io/what-should-we-do-with-our-games

I put this list together in response to seeing a lot of the same arguments and discussions happening in regard to system-matters discourse, and it’s thinly veiled offshoots. The original goal was to ask people to understand both sides of the discussion and the reasons for pushback against both sides. After compiling, it now comprises more than just history and the goal is simply education and the sharing of ideas.

Hope you get something from it,

Snow

[vintagerpg]

Bonus post! I’ve been sitting on the April 23, 1951 issue of LIFE Magazine for a couple of years and there’s really no better time than now to show it off. What’s so special about it? A four-page filler story titled “Mythical Monsters: These Beasts Existed Only in Man’s Imagination,” which shares the basic details of seven creatures — Su, Griffon, Yale, Basilisk, Gorgon, Manticore and Unicorn — all illustrated by Rudolf Freund.

I saw this for the first time at the Rockwell Museum, as part of the Enchanted exhibit — they had the magazine in a case, and also the original manticore piece, which resides in their permanent collection! They’re incredibly striking. Freund is a technical master and makes some intriguing design choices that gesture at the real-life animals the legends were garbling up. And they have a little bit of the mid-century modern aesthetic about them too, which is a novelty. Really beautiful work.

[zedecksiew]

CHAPTER SERF

CHAPTER SERF is a tabletop roleplaying game and adventure, set in Warhammer 40K, where you play those hooded peasant weirdos you sometimes spot in the backgrounds of the art.

Full PDF downloadable >>>HERE<<<

+

Here's the pitch:

+

CHAPTER SERF is a game about candles.

As a fan of Warhammer 40K, I think about Space Marines a lot. Space Marines are:

Feudal aristocrats, with all the uncaring impunities that affords;

Literal grandsons of God, with monastic habits;

Genetically engineered super soldiers;

Children, kidnapped and brainwashed before puberty.

These are not well-adjusted, fully-developed persons. When do they ever get the opportunity?

What would it be like, to serve such persons? To run their supply chains? Keep their households? Satisfy their desires? Clean up their messes?

+

In artwork and cinematics; on miniature bases and in bitz boxes; described in comics and novels, Space Marine architecture is replete with candles. 

So many candles.

A Space Marine doesn’t think about where candles come from, or what candles cost. (They think about war and xenos and traitors, stuff like that.)

A Space Marine wants candles—so there should and must be candles.

CHAPTER SERF is a game about getting an emotionally-arrested, casually-genocidal bossman demigod—to whom it would be sacrilege to say no—the candles they want.

+

I keep trying to write fan TTRPGs for 40K.

The first was Paper Route, also set on a giant flying cathedral of a spaceship. I never finished it. It was called "Paper Route" because the ship was cargo hauler, transporting a planet's worth of office paper. There were orks with origami guns, and paper-wasp tyranids, and eldar scooped up alongside a whole forest.

Where my mind was at with Paper Route was: "40K should be funny."

The second 40K TTRPG thing I made was for Kieron Gillen / Rowan Rook & Decard's DIE RPG. It was an adventure called "POWERSWORD PURGATORY"---a bunch of 30-year-olds, former regulars at ye-olde-FLGS, get Jumanji-ed into POWERSWORD (ie: not-Warhammer 40K) for one last hurrah.

With "POWERSWORD" I was trying to work through how I felt about the fandom, and 40K's place in culture now. Its drift from Thatcher-era DIY nihilism to corporate-IP neatness; its earnest embrace of "xenophobia is justified actually" power fantasies.

+

CHAPTER SERF is my third attempt. And my strongest, maybe?

Because it isn't a piss-take. There are jokes in it, of course. It wouldn't be 40K without jokes. But I am taking the Warhammer 40K setting seriously. I'm not being meta, nor winking at the reader.

I finally have something genuine to say, through all that grimdark set-dressing---about the weight of inhuman institutions crushing ordinary humanity, and what we make of the scraps soul left us:

Forcing a mother to betray her own son; Saving a labourer from lobotomising servitorhood; Arranging the funeral of a Space Marine's discarded lover;

+

Design-wise, I am most pleased with CHAPTER SERF's favour mechanic.

The Imperium of Man is an extremely feudal network of bickering fiefdoms, each with iron monopolies on different facets of far-future life.

It made sense to me, to link what stuff you can have with how much factions like you. Buddy with the Mechanicus and you get access to fancy bionics and lightning guns. Piss off the astropaths? No psychic powers for you.

This is essentially a gear list married to a faction / major NPC relationship map. I like it because it removes the need for players to worry about dollars and cents---a thing that makes no sense in most 40K TTRPG framings.

+

I hope people find CHAPTER SERF a fun idea. I am pretty proud of it! I particularly enjoyed writing the various vocations / professions---thinking up what sort of servants Space Marines would want / need.

I started making some sketches for it, but I can't really spare the time to make all the art that I need---so the PDF is text, only, I'm afraid.

I did the layout myself, in Google Slides, which I know is the least efficient way to do things---but hey! If that isn't 40K I don't know what is.

Full PDF downloadable >>>HERE<<<

[stuffedcrocodile]

A Miscellany of Links pt. XXV

Random Tables d100 – Hireling Hobbies or PC Pastimes (d4 Caltrops) D20x5 Great Grails (Archons March On) d100 Woefully Encysted Creatures (Blog of Forlorn Encystment) Farmer Drama 2 Ethyria Farm Life + (Elfmaids & Octopi) Resources 10 Reasons Why the Guild has a Partial Map (Rise Up Comus) Who feeds all these monsters? Monster Keepers & Menageries (Elfmaids & Octopi) DOWNTIME DEMANDS OF…

View On WordPress

[beatcroc]

THREE-DIMENSIONAL ALIGNMENT CHART

x-axis: lawful–neutral–chaotic y-axis: valid–dumbass–bastard z-axis: unit–bitch–motherfucker

[beatcroc]

lawful: for better or worse, one bound to law, order, and retaining stability  neutral: no general inclination towards good or evil chaotic: hell raiser of various motives

valid: does their best and tries their hardest, usually for their greater good dumbass: for better or for worse, clueless. no leaning toward good or evil. bastard: a dick for the sake of being a dick

unit: gets through their problems and tolerates being wronged bitch:  gets through but makes a big deal about it motherfucker:  makes their problems other people’s problems

[sawkinator]

I present to you… the New Alignment Chart:

[finalvortex]

ninte asked me to put my comment on this version of the post so it was all in one place so

hey we found that if you combine this with the distinguished-functional-disaster alignment you get a perfect description of any character.

sans undertale? valid neutral disaster unit vriska? functional chaotic valid bitch

[beatcroc]

[crocincrocsart]

unpopular opinion: Vimes is kind of drama queen

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think

[thestuffedalligator]

Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?

[davetheshady]

excuse me?????

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

vimes is a drama public employee

[magicjudge]

Old Magic Rules: A Horrible Rat’s Maze

So, back in the ancient days of the early to mid 1990′s, Magic didn’t have a comprehensive rules system. The game began with basic rules like for any other game, with the understanding that a group of players would decide among themselves how a situation worked if it wasn’t clear. 

(The original Alpha/Beta rulebook, whose text you can read here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/original-magic-rulebook-2004-12-25)

No one could have expected the amazing success that magic became so quickly, however. With more people getting introduced to Magic and more cards being printed, the need for official rulings on certain timings and interactions became increasingly important. These rulings were given by Magic’s first “rules manager” Beth Moursund, a.k.a. BethMo. She was the very first WotC netrep on usenet and her rulings were the closest thing to official policy that existed at the time.

Over time, these rules built up into an awful tangled mess, especially when it came to timing and priority. Early Magic didn’t have the stack, rather there were batches and at certain points a batch became complete and all of the spells and abilities in it would resolve without anyone being able to act until that batch was finished resolving.

These complicated rules were aptly illustrated in issue #9 of the Duelist, which featured this mindbending series of charts illustrating the timing rules:

(Image source: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/arcana/rules-maze-2002-07-03)

So yeah… a little bit painful…

Other “highlights” of the early rules included:

Damage prevention windows

Creatures and other permanents being “on the way to the graveyard”

Combat not being its own separate phase, but just something the active player could go to at any point during their main phase

If you’re interested in learning more about this madness for some reason, you can read a copy of the Fifth Edition rules online here:  http://hudecekpetr.cz/other/rulebooks/rulebook-fifth-1997-03/index.html

Luckily, WotC came to their senses in 1999 and decided to overhaul the rules completely for Sixth Edition, finally giving us the first version of the Comprehensive Rules and streamlining spells and abilities with the Stack that we all know and love today. 

While the rules have changed a bit since then, there hasn’t been a set of rules changes even approaching the magnitude of the Sixth Edition rules changes. (The Magic 2010 changes were a minor tremor in comparison.)

[anim-ttrpgs]

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[anim-ttrpgs]

This contributes significantly to "DM Burnout."

[anim-ttrpgs]

This ended up on r/curatedtumblr where it is plainly apparent that nobody knows what the hell "adventure module" means. Which is once again D&D5e warping the entire artform by publishing nothing but modules that are strictly railroaded scripts and so making everyone think that "adventure module" exclusively means "a strictly railroaded script."

I'm gonna have to make a big post at some point explaining what an "adventure module" is.. once again flabbergasting how often and how hard I have to go to bat for extremely foundational elements of this hobby

[wiserodin032402]

my personal stance has slowly become 'oh god we need games to have proper adventure modules so people will know how to play'. The dearth of material or advice for how to run even middle-market systems makes running them a pain in the ass.

The best TTRPGs in the world are nothing if the developers cannot include proper example materials on how a game is constructed and run, which is what good adventure modules are.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Yeah, this is kind of a weakness of TTRPGs as a medium, they require a lot of manual player input to work correctly, and yet very many TTRPGs do not actually tell you how this specific TTRPG is supposed to be played. They tell you a bunch of mechanics and stats, but they do not tell you how these mechanics are supposed to be approached or applied. And this leads to people playing that game wrong, and having a worse experience for it.

[mc-cookies]

the thing is even if your game doesn’t work with a traditional dungeon-crawl style capital M Module (which was a concern for a lot of reddit commenters), it’s still helpful to have a setting document or an adventure hook or something that tells people what kinds of things might happen in a game

[fivekoboldsinacoat]

I haven't personally *run* many non-dungeon-crawl games, and part of that is definitely due to a lack of pre-created "modules". Like, its great to give the tools & guidelines on how to build scenarios / adventures / sessions... but not providing any pre-built ones is a big roadblock!

(It is an OSR dungeon crawler, but honestly, props to Mausritter, yet again: that tiny core rulebook includes not only the rules & charts to create your own hexcrawl setting and adventure sites, but a fully pre-built & playable one of each.)

[anim-ttrpgs]

Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear script you follow.

Here’s a very old, very classic adventure module for classic D&D from my dad’s attic.

It has a map of the dungeon (as you will see, it is not a linear series of fights, it’s a complex location the party explores. That line drawn in pencil tracks the way the party happened to go when this was played, not the way they’re “supposed to go.”)

And it has a full fleshed out description of the rooms and different interesting and interactable things within the rooms. It has pre-statted monsters, traps, etc.. The party explores it and tries to get out alive with as much treasure as they can carry. You can also weave this into an ongoing campaign or a “story” - it’s “modular,” that’s the point of a "module." When I ran this for my group’s rotating-DM AD&D campaign, the party was hired to rescue three children who were kidnapped by goblins. The goblins had one, but the other two escaped and got lost in the not-goblin-controlled parts of the dungeon, requiring the party to explore every inch of it to find them.

Of course, this kind of module cannot be used for a “plotted” D&D campaign, because it is designed to quickly kill unwary characters. But if you’re wanting your PCs to have plot armor, you really should not be playing any edition of D&D. It’s not designed for plotted stories, it’s designed to be a game where shit happens that you then tell stories about later.

The party in our group did suffer some pretty severely bad injuries, but no deaths, because they’re a group of competent, capable, and careful mercenaries.

“But that’s a dungeon crawler, modules like that don’t work for non-dungeon-crawler games!”

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, an extremely non-dungeon-crawler game, has modules very much like this. In Eureka, the party doesn’t delve into dungeons, they talk to people, look for clues, and solve mysteries.

So, Eureka modules provide a “Truth” for the GM’s eyes only which lists exactly what happened that resulted in there being a mystery to solve, a “hook” for why the PCs would have gotten involved in trying to solve the mystery, and a set of relevant locations, often with maps. (The locations may be connected on a larger city/town/area maps but usually travel between the important locations is abstracted.)

The locations are given full descriptions, various points of interest that might be relevant to the investigation, info for the GM about what the PCs will find if they inspect those things properly, etc. They also include NPCs with visual and personality descriptions, lists of what information the NPC knows about the mystery, and how they might react to certain actions from the PCs.

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is even less comparable to a dungeon-crawler than Eureka. It’s a interpersonal politics sitcom-y comedy game where a Drow Mistress and her pathetic minions try to keep up appearances in a cutthroat society where the social expectations are arcane, byzantine, and very high stakes. Reputation is everything.

Something will go wrong in the palace, and the party will have to hide that it is going wrong and act like everything is fine while impressing the neighbors.

A module for Silk & Dagger comes with a particular problem that’s going to happen in the palace and when and where in the palace it will happen, as well as a guest arriving and/or some other social obligation. It includes visual and personality descriptions for the NPCs, and how they will react to certain actions by the PCs.

These are games which are about three very very different kinds of characters and situations, and yet they all benefit from having adventure modules.

[prokopetz]

If you’re writing about a character who’s rich and has a big house, and you’re writing in any sort of historical setting, I can’t help but feel that you’re missing an opportunity if you never talk about the Guests.

In a modern context, big houses rarely serve any narrative purpose beyond jokes about rooms nobody has ever been in, but historically, all that extra space had an important function. Apart from families generally being larger and multi-generational households being the norm, hospitality was a major part of a wealthy household’s basic social obligations. Travel was time-consuming and expensive, and obviously your rich buddies couldn’t just rent a room while they were in town (how gauche!), so you’d be expected to put them up for as long as they cared to stay. Indeed, being able to put up lots and lots of guests was one of the basic ways you demonstrated your high status.

This expectation of hospitality extended beyond your immediate social circle, as well. If you were the big name around town, you could expect to have government officials, artists and philosophers, travelling nobility, and the like hitting you up for a spare room on very little notice, and you had to be very careful about saying “no” because refusal might be construed as a snub – or worse, an admission that you can’t afford it! The upshot is that, at any given time, a large household might be playing host to a bewildering assortment of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, celebrities both far-ranging and local, dignitaries, con artists, miscellaneous weirdos, and that one guy who nobody can quite place, but whose presence everyone is too polite to question.

(The miscellaneous weirdos are a big part of it, in fact. If you’ve ever wondered how someone makes a career out of something like “being France’s most famous lover”, that’s basically how it worked: you’d use your outlandish reputation to prevail on some random wealthy jerk’s hospitality, hang around their house as an “honoured guest” for a couple of months, then discreetly move on before you wore out your welcome and repeat the whole process somewhere else. There was a whole class of people who made lifelong careers out of being entertainingly weird guests.)

Like, sure, there’s no obligation to get into any of that if domestic affairs aren’t the focus of your story. However, if you are keeping the plot close to home, it’s something where a little bit of extra thought can pay large dividends. Keep it in mind when you’re plotting out that Pride and Prejudice Batman AU next time!

[vonbaghager]

there's one post that was going around during the shutdown that was something like "all zombie/pandemic doomsday media from here on out is going to have to have a scene where a bunch of people are running towards the infected while claiming the disease is a hoax"

and atm i'm really feeling like. well, now we have a really clear answer to the question of "why would anyone in a fantasy world worship a god of evil and torture and murder who backstabs everyone who allies with them?" and the answer is one of: 'because they think they're too special to be backstabbed,' or 'because they think their evil god will just torture and murder The Nonbelievers,' or 'because they think they can reap the rewards of worship before the torture sets in'

or, finally, 'they were raised to believe evil and torture was a good thing and they didn't see any problem with it until the evil and torture inconvenienced them personally'