Flat Earth Atheist / Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica 3^rd Edition makes Magic Versus Science a game mechanic: "Reason" is a fifth metaphysical force akin to Magic, Faerie, Heaven, and Hell, so characters can invest in the virtue of True Reason and even resist supernatural powers through it. However, this comes across as outright delusional in a setting where supernatural forces and beings are both real and extensively studied, so later editions do away with it.
• Beyond the Supernatural features Nega-Psychics, whose unbelief is so strong that it actually (if ironically) disrupts any magic or psionics around them. In Rifts, however, where it's kind of hard to disbelieve a dragon staring you in the face, it becomes more of a matter of defiance.
• Dungeons & Dragons: A few settings have examples of this:
  • Forgotten Realms: There are still atheists. This is despite the fact that gods regularly take physical forms and rampage around the countryside, and that new gods rise while others die in every decade. Really, the existence of gods would be no more questionable than that of the President... Incidentally, there's a Fate Worse than Death reserved for atheists (and those who, ironically, decide to worship the Overgod Ao).
    • Or if they believe in the existence of the gods in general but doesn't choose a specific patron deity. Or their patron deity happens to be dead. Or if this patron deity rejects the worshiper for whatever reason. The fate in question: one's soul is strapped to the Wall of the Faithless and slowly digested by it over the course of millennia.
    • In the new edition, a continent as well as two countries have been brought over from a world where gods haven't existed for about 30,000 years, so anyone from there might have a justification.
    • Yet another reasoning behind it is the old Athar standby of agreeing that there does indeed exist powerful planar beings called gods that are worshiped by many — but that doesn't make them proper gods. Considering that (up until 4th Edition) several gods had died within human living memory, you can see where they're coming from. The Defiant (a group of former clerics and paladins) uses this basis to reject belief in the gods' divinity too. Others simply view the gods as unworthy of worship.
    • In the backstory of the setting, the empire of Netheril ultimately fell (and magic across the Realms was diminished from what it once used to be) because its wizard-rulers convinced themselves that the "gods" were really just other wizards who knew tricks they didn't feel like sharing. Eventually, one wizard called Karsus did come up with a spell designed to let him attain godhood, and from a certain point of view could be said to have succeeded in casting it, too...but he couldn't handle the sheer power that came with his "success", and that's why the title of the Realms' goddess of magic changed hands from Mystryl (who performed a heroic sacrifice to save the world) to the first Mystra (Karsus himself, unusually for a Netherese archmage, never actually planned to become a god — he was aware that his spell would end with his death, and the entire thing was intended to be a Heroic Sacrifice where he used his temporary godly power to save his people).
  • Greyhawk: In Oerth, the native clergy of the Flanaess is opposed by the so-called Skeptics movement established primarily in the County and Duchy of Urnst. The more extreme members of the movement believe that the gods of Oerth are pure fiction and that their clerics are frauds, with clerical magic not granted by divine sources but coming from within like arcane magic or psionics. The more moderate Skeptics admit the existence of beings called gods, but they claim that these gods did not actually create Oerth and furthermore many of them started out as mortals who ascended to demigod status and later to godhood. Therefore the Skeptics deny these gods their faith. They're little more than a fringe group, and the one time a Skeptic gained political power, it turned out to be a disaster—one of the previous Dukes of Urnst drastically raised church taxes when he took the throne, caused a series of riots in the nation's capital, and ended up dying when no cleric would heal him after he was wounded in battle with mountain raiders.
  • Since Planescape is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting, this is common; although the Athar tend to be more Nay-Theist than this, there are others who are not (the fact that the Powers, while existing, aren't necessarily the prime movers and shakers of the setting helps). There is also an adventure involving killing a god by inducing Flat Earth Atheism: a Mind-Control Device that you could use to give a suggestion to the entire population of a prime-material plane that their god did not exist... which would make that belief come true.
  • Ravenloft:
    • Atheism is common in Lamordia, a domain where mad-scientist-style skepticism prevails. In other domains, heretical philosophers sometimes speculate that divine magic is actually derived from the Dark Powers, rather than the gods it's commonly attributed to; however, as most ordinary people have never even heard of the Dark Powers, theirs remains a minority opinion. (Out of character, it's left up to the DM to choose.)
    • In fact, this was why Dr. Mordenheim was damned and cursed in the first place. He refused to believe in any power greater than man, being an admitted atheist all his life. However, the gods did exist, and they saw his attempts to create life using technology as blasphemies. To punish him, they granted his wish, breathing life into his creation, cursing him with something that would condemn him forever for the evil he was bringing into the world. While Adam, his creation, is the true darklord of Lamordia, Mordenheim is as much a prisoner of the Ironic Hell as Adam is.
    • In a metagame example, a minority of Ravenloft game masters opt to assume that there are no "Dark Powers" in their individual campaigns, and phenomena such as the Mists, curses, and Powers checks are simply a byproduct of innate metaphysical laws that operate within the setting.
  • Eberron avoids this trope. Divine Magic is the product of faith, Arcane Magic is just a force of the world. Someone with the proper training could have divine magic if he believed enough. It's even possible for clerics to turn from their religion and keep their spells. In fact, some mortals (and undead) have set up faiths centered around them, and their clerics get divine magic. Gods do not take physical form (except for one, The Traveler, and it's more the stuff of myth, like in ancient Greece). There are miracles that could be the work of the gods, but that is open to interpretation. In the setting, the actual existence of gods is up to a character's belief, as the gods do not act as proactively as they do in the Forgotten Realms, for example. Fiends are the original occupants of the material plane, and their religious implications are downplayed. Angels and Devils are just Outsiders. There are even some books that suggest the gods are based on the legends of certain Dragons.
  • One AD&D sourcebook reveals that Asmodeus feeds on the souls of atheists. The book acknowledged that this is difficult in a setting where Gods are manifestly real. The tactic of Asmodeus is to grant magical powers to someone, allow a cult to grow, and then withdraw those powers. The cultists become disillusioned and believe their leader a charlatan, at which point they are "vulnerable" to atheism.
  • The Ethergaunts are Humanoid Abominations that have "rationalized divinity out of their racial philosophy". This actually weakens them: while that philosophy lets them No-Sell many arcane spells, they have no such defense against divine magic because they don't acknowledge or understand its source.
• GURPS has the Mundane advantage, which at its highest level will enforce dull normality around its owner by turning werewolves and aliens into guys in rubber masks and magic into cheap fireworks.
• In Nomine: A decent proportion of Hell are atheists, despite being, you know, fallen angels cast to hell for going against the Lord and engaged in a millennia-long war with the angels. This is largely because a) many demons were actually created as such post-Fall and were never in Heaven, b) God is generally a very mysterious fellow even to angels, and, most importantly c) if there's one thing demons are good at, it's lying to themselves...
• Ironclaw and Jadeclaw have agnosticism as a character flaw in 1st edition. Flaws were removed from the main rules in 2nd. Interestingly it notes that wizards who consider magic more of a science are likely to take it.
• Over the Edge has Evan MacDonald, whose skepticism is so great he nullifies anything beyond the mundane around him, be it magic or "just" mad science. In one sample adventure the world is conquered by necromancy, leaving everyone helpless to resist — but MacDonald is still walking around in a bubble of normal reality.
• Pathfinder: Gods are real, active, and extensively documented in the default setting, so local atheists usually accept their existence but believe that they're just powerful supernatural entities with an unusually high Super Weight, not anything to be worshiped. Justified in that there are quite a few Deities of Human Origin and at least one well-known way to ascend to godhood — to say nothing of the mercenary who deified himself by mistake while black-out drunk.
  • The nation of Rahadoum in the setting is built on this; the government not only rejects but outright bans the practice of any religion, and while organized religion is still active in secret, at large the institution has been replaced with a reverence for the nation's legal code and more philosophical systems. This is justified in-universe in the fact that decades-long religious conflicts previously devastated the region.
• Unknown Armies. There is an NPC whose skepticism is so strong, he has an antimagic aura. Which, in turn, makes any attempt to prove the existence of the Unnatural to him impossible.
• Warhammer:
  • The official policy of the Empire is that the Skaven don't exist. Apparently dragons, giants, lizardmen, zombies, goat-headed mutants, and inconceivably powerful chaos gods are fine but five-foot-tall intelligent bipedal rats are just too much. It's unclear if anyone actually believes this policy, however. Indeed one sourcebook states that "there are two myths about the Skaven: The first is that they don't exist. The second is that anyone believes in the first." In general, it seems that there are two reasons for the stories of Skaven not existing:
    • Firstly, the Skaven themselves put a lot of work into maintaining this status quo, killing or bribing people who learn too much, and stealing physical evidence. They even have magic that makes people not want to believe in them.
    • The second reason is that the Skaven are numerous, organized, and extremely close (as in everywhere all the time). Every other threat to humanity is either small (like chaos cults), disorganized (like beastmen), or far away (like the gods of chaos). So while the Skaven aren't the most serious threat they're the one most likely to cause paranoia and constant terror.
  • You also got Necoho the Doubter, the chaos god of... atheism... (Worship makes him weaker.) Given how long it's been since he was mentioned in canon, he must be one of the most powerful gods around by now.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The God-Emperor of Mankind wanted to eliminate all religious beliefs from the Imperium and make mankind trust in science and logic. However, it's heavily implied that the Emperor was more than aware that actual daemons existed, but was trying to starve them, essentially. All was going swimmingly until half of his sons sided with the aforementioned, very real, Chaos Gods and started a galactic-wide rebellion. The cosmic irony is that after these events the Emperor became the official deity of the Imperium, and it seems he is now forced to work by his faithful people to save mankind from extinction...
  • During the early years of his Face–Heel Turn (depicted in his own novels), Evilutionary Biologist Fabius Bile clung to a twisted version of the Imperial Truth, refusing to believe that daemons or the Chaos Gods were self-aware creatures. Some background material indicates that, by the 41st millennium however he has come to accept their existence, even if he still sees no need for their patronage. A few of his more devout followers have expressed amusement at this, since in actual practice he's one of the most useful servants for all four and technically a minor god in his own right thanks to all those creations of his that worship him. This interacts with the setting's Gods Need Prayer Badly rules in strange ways; for instance, in the same novels he successfully gets a daemonic army to aid him by giving their leader the "gift" of his disdain. The Warp is fueled by emotion, after all, and Bile's emotion is evidently quite valuable.
  • The Tau also qualify — they believe in the power of logic and science, and refuse to believe in the idea of the truly supernatural, even after repeated battles with Chaos, the Eldar, and the Sisters of Battle. These groups employ, respectively, daemons and humans mutated by the Dark Gods (and sometimes both in the same creatures), living avatars of a war god present as figures of molten iron carrying a giant sword and an ever-bleeding hand, and what can only be described as divine magic to the point of one of their heroines self-resurrecting and having a few beings tantamount to angels.
    • There are fairly reasonable explanations for the various phenomenons they encounter (they may be wrong, but that doesn't mean they don't make sense). There are plenty of genetically modified humans or other alien species, so the idea that Mutants are just another type of these isn't unreasonable. Daemons could easily be just another type of aliens with advanced technology, and Soulstorm shows the Tau hunting for the technology behind the Battle Sister acts of faith (needless to say, without finding it).
    • A large part of the issue is that the Tau are simply unfamiliar with Chaos and Psykers. There are no Tau psykers, and psykers are required for daemons to take physical form. They certainly don't deny the existence of Daemons or the effects of Psykers after they have encountered them, even if they fail to properly understand them. Hence the short story where a Tau army believes they slew Slaanesh — they had no idea about the existence of Chaos Space Marines or Chaos Gods at the time, so they were unaware that Slaanesh was the name of that band's patron deity as opposed to their commander. It's this ignorance that makes them so dangerous in the eyes of the Imperium; they consider the Tau Too Dumb to Live.
    • This also makes them dangerous to Chaos as well. As the Tau have a Warp presence that's practically nonexistent, they have an innate resistance if not immunity to daemonic influence. This means that the usual tricks employed against the Eldar or Imperium don't work on them, and as the Tau's sphere of control grows, the area that Chaos can influence shrinks. The Tau at best see the servants of the Dark Gods as psychotic maniacs and would rather not tamper with their tools, seeing as they might have something to do with the madness. They even go so far as to kill Kroots who consume Chaos Space Marines.
    • Turns out the Ethereals know damn well that Chaos is real but hide this knowledge from the rest of the Tau. The main reason Commander Farsight formed his own breakaway colony away from the Ethereals is that he figured this out. He believes that denying the existence of the supernatural is a mistake and that the Tau cannot prevail with their technology alone. They need magic of their own. Farsight puts this philosophy into practice on the battlefield, wielding an alien sword of mysterious origin called the Dawn Blade. Although it has been mentioned several times that if he ever actually understood what the sword does (it's a daemon weapon that extends his life by draining the lifespan of those it kills) he would probably commit ritual suicide.

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