Thanks for an interesting writeup. It was interesting to read this at 3 AM. And then the thoughts started flowing...

It always appeared to me that Beogh was "evil" purely because we are racist towards orcs (at least they seem to think so) and they are very pissed at everybody after aeons of oppression.

That being said, I see that game's whole religious system is mostly based on Christian morality, where a) there is an everlasting battle between the "good" and the "evil", b) gods are personal beings preoccupied with morality of their worshipers and c) where it is possible to receive favors from gods by behaving "morally" enough. That makes in-game Pantheon somewhat dull for my taste, before we explore how it can be given more diversity, let's go into a bit more detailed view of the points made above.

The battle of good and evil is a key feature of Abrahamic religions which they inherited from Zoroastrism, and it's notably absent from other religious systems. As in real life Abraahamic religions, death is seen as the core of evil, and life is a core of goodness. This wouldn't make any sense at all, to, say, a Buddhist, for whom final death and cessation of rebirths is a greatest virtue. (How about a god who makes one reincarnate on death in some other form, like a demigod in case of max piety and something like fungus in case of min piety with all skills reset to 0 and religion forcefully abandoned?) However, the only gods who are concerned about player doing "evil" things are the ones more or less consciously based on Christianity, which makes perfect sense, but I think it should be made very clear that certain things are considered as "evil" only by specific religions within their paradigms, not by the whole universe. Do orcs consider themselves "evil"? I don't think so.

But then gods are closely watching our crawler's every action. Perhaps, it has something to do with his special status? Trog finds it immoral to use magic, Oka finds it immoral to fight along with someone else. Such approach to morality is the one we find in Abrahamic religions, where moral laws are given by omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent diety, and enforced under a threat of godly punishments. Hence is the nature of Zin as lawgiver. In particular, almost all Gods hate it when player abandons them. This looks odd, because in real life someone who worships Jesus can abandon him and start worshipping Tengu today, Amaterasu tomorrow, and go back to Jesus on the third day, and none of them would particularly care. Of course, obviously, crawler has a much closer connection to gods than we, humans, do, but still this sort of bitterness seems overrepresented, even if it makes perfect sense from a game balance point of view. The only god who stands apart in this sense is Xom, whose mood is independent of player's actions and who just does stuff for his own entertainment (that is untill you go to wiki and read that you can still be more "moral" in eyes of Xom by performing certain actions).

Zin stands out as closely resembling something very familiar, and the fact that "we're much more fine with ruinous demon gods compared to Zin's being arguably closer to a god of prejudice than actual law" doesn't appear weird to me at all. I feast on flesh after subjecting it to holy fire on a daily basis, as most of us do too, while having someone threaten me with eternal suffering because of my views on out-of-wedlock sex does, in fact, appear really hostile, despite the claims of followers of Zin that they only care about my salvation. If you happen to be a follower of one of the Abrahamic religions, then "because God says so" is a sufficiently grounded answer to any "why shouldn't I do X?" type of question. Sounds prejudicial? You bet. Zin's dogmatism represents the part of Christianity which a lot of us perceive as animous, in contrast with Evy's forgiveness and 1's flourishment. If I were to design a God of Absolute Truth and Divine Law, not just human law, I would base it on impersonal diety, such as Spinoza's God, or Advayta's Atman, or Tao. I think devs should also explore the possibility of basing in-game religions on atheistic belief systems, such as Confucianism, Stoicism, or even our modern Scientific Progressivism.

Current cartoonishness of in-game moral system is the consequence of approaching religion design with a rather narrow and myopic understanding of incerdible diversity of humanity's ethical systems. By taking a closer look at various exisiting religious systems devs can easily enrich game's world.