Heretic's Guide to Devotion & Divinity Review

I've had my eye on this title from Eventyr Games for a while now. The Heretic's Guide to Devotion & Divinity delivers on tools that I was hoping for from Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous but which were missing.

Rather than outlining a pantheon and established lore, this title seeks to help a GM in the solo play of setting creation by providing practical advice on creating your own material that touches on themes of religion. 

I don't know that I can provide high enough praise for how Heretic's Guide to Devotion & Divinity delivers on its promises. In the spirit of sourcebooks from earlier editions, this book truly delivers a GM options into interweave religion and its themes into their RPG. It approaches its purpose from a mature perspective, and provides awesome tools. This includes a section on building stat blocks for deities should you decide that you want to go the way of previous editions of D&D and allow them to be fought—and possibly killed. 

Further chapters provide actionable and inspirational advice on weaving elements into your campaign, whether that be through descriptive or ritual elements, or in holidays. There are flavorful examples and idea seeds for religious ceremonies like funerals and weddings ready to employ in games, and providing an awesome vehicle to add lore or secrets and clues of your story into. Others include discussions of how to make the use of spells like Resurrection more impactful and descriptive. This makes sense! This is a powerful moment in a narrative, and giving a GM tools to make the use of these spells more evocative leads to more immersive games.

Compared to similar books on employing religion in your fantasy tabletop roleplaying games, this book stands head and shoulders above competition like the Book of the Righteous. The tools that it provides to GMs are the type of world building materials I wish were more common. I highly recommend anyone interested in exploring these themes or creating their own fantasy pantheons with realistic details for their games to check out Heretic's Guide to Devotion & Divinity.