Question:

Each philosophy needs to be equally flawed, if you believe a philosophy is superior to the others don't have it in your campaign.
Also normal people usually don't subscribe neatly to one specific philosophy so each philosophy would probably represented by something supernatural that could realistically adhere rigidly to a given philosophy

There are two schools of magic, arcane sorcery and miracles of God.

Arcane sorcery uses demon's souls as a power source, and all demon's souls stem from the Old One, a sort of elder being in the lore.

Miracles of God are portrayed as a wholly different type of magic from sorcery, but through game mechanics like shared spell slots between both miracles and sorceries, and the description of an effegial talisman resembling the Old One,
it turns out that they're both the same and clerics are nothing but two-bit rusemen

Sorry for calling you a fuccboi user :3

That's kind of a dick move to any of your players that decided to be clerics, then again
i did something similar but at-least I fluffed most religions as nice to compensate for being wrong about the universe

I think most clerics weren't aware that there magic wasn't from a divine source, I could be wrong though

*their

Oh yeah, absolutely

I just really hate clerics

>Unrepentant asshole that try to kill you, albeit indirectly multiple times
>Probably hates clerics because they claim to or even do care about the well-being of others
>Is a shit
>The best shit

I didn't mean that sound as cringy as it did. It's pretty bad now that I think about it.

That's kind of funny. I was thinking that divine magic was more sort of faith in an impersonal force of nature or your ideals, and have that be the source of the powers, whereas arcane magic is more scientific as it's something that you can teach and record instead of believe in.
Yea, it is a bit of a fuck-you to the clerics, but I thought about that as a plot point. I wanted to have the whole no-gods thing be something of a secret that's mostly unknown to even the more learned mortals and kind of use it challenge the assumption that the gods are real and somewhat active, if indirectly, in the world. I also had the idea for this great theocratic empire to have an old conspiracy that knows the gods aren't there and fear a revolt from their devout population and thus have a vested interest in killing the PCs before the secret gets out. That plot sounds kind of dumb though.

I think if you have the game reflect the themes and moods that led to the starting of these great philosophies, and let the players draw their own conclusions from that, you have a good recipe OP.

A simple way to examine nihilism is to put a doom counter on the world that the pcs are evidently powerless to stop. Maybe the gods have been killed in a war between them, and now that they are gone reality is slowly unraveling. Maybe !Galactus is approaching and nobody has the power to stop him.

The point is, everyone knows the world is fucked and it's just a matter of time. Maybe the PCs have a year or two at most. What do they do with their time, considering that none of their actions matter? Do they strive to find a way to fight off the end? Do they get drunk and loot dungeons and cities indiscriminately? Do they just go about their lives as normal?

cont

Most importantly, don't do the doomclock reveal until 1 or 2 sessions in so players have a chance to establish roleplaying priorities before you upend them. Of course some players are going to assume that they're SUPPOSED to win against the impossible threat. That's fine, and if everyone wants to play it as a typical "save the world" story, there will be plenty of plot hooks and adventures to support it.

Except in the end any such plans are doomed to failure. In the last story you make it clear that the PCs never stood a chance, so that they have a few minutes at least to contemplate the meaning of their actions in the face of hopelessness.

Incoming

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Use a !Beta-Ray Bill for your nihilism stand-in.
"If life only has the meaning we give it, then let us make good" or some such, sure I misquoted, is better than
"Life has no meaning, everything and everyone sucks and I want to lay down and die"

The first quote is just existentialism, not nihilism.

He was decent before he turned to extremist SJWism.

Is existentialism just an extrusion of nihilism?
"Nothing I do matters and the world is inherently meaningless" doesn't seem that far off from "Only the things I do matter, so I care about the things that I do."

I will admit I am a philosophy light-weight.

Nihilism is basically admiting defeat in the face of a meaningless existence, something Nietzsche railed against (despite him being labeled a nihilist by SOME PEOPLE for some reason). Existentialism tackles this by telling you to find your own personal meaning with life, absurdism handles it by urging you to find joy in the struggle itself (hence the Myth of Sisyphus, a man cursed to push a stone up a hill and watch it roll down again for eternity, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". Absurdism isn't really against existentialism's idea of finding your own person meaning, but stresses that it's ultimately not true purpose anyway.

You could even get into Kierkegaard who's also existentialist to some degree, but argues that you should make a leap of faith and find meaning in your relationship to God, or the idea of God, even if he doesn't exist.

I should add that I've only read Camus (absurdism) and Sartre (existentialism). My grasp of Kierkegaard is no good.

Yes it can work.

Warning:

I've found that when people design something with a theme in mind over a plot then shit because garbage/unegaging.

He could build the setting and plot hooks around theme instead of creating a railroady campaign

Don't do this.

If I were a player in this game, I would never play with you again, and probably never talk to you again.

Yea, I was thinking about that earlier. It's dumb that no matter what you do, you all die in the end. If I want that I can just go outside.

Almost did something like this once.
Players would play as members of a small village in a large crater, saved by the geography while "the darkness" consumed the whole world. They would have a week before the darkness flowed into the crater as well.

Idea was to have a village small enough so I could handcraft each individual NPC and their personality/goals when everyone knew they had only a few days of living left.

Would have been good shit. Players didn't want it, though.

Huh. I find this question interesting because I recently started putting down on paper the beginnings of a homebrew system, which somehow ended up reading like a philosophy/worldview when I read them back to my test subj- play group.

>Reminds me of how I was thinking of a campaign setting where the gods are mysteriously silent, though divine magic still seems to work.
>"If life only has the meaning we give it, then let us make good" / "Life has no meaning,
so let's fuck it all up."

I've tried to combine these before, in a sense, by letting divine casters worship whatever they wish. Divine spells from great powers in official setting books, or obscure deities from tiny supplements, or ancient beings supplicated by cults, or gods entirely made up (at the intersection of domains/ideals/philosophies, actual lies by practitioners, practitioners believing themselves to be gods) all granted identically functioning powers. Using "belief replaces truth" as the central idea, I wanted to convey to the players that miracles existed because of faith, with the two circularly reinforcing each other.

Sadly, the campaigns where I used this never got into high enough levels for the players to peek behind the veil. They never got to realize that their service to divine powers was what was making the powers real within the game world, so they never made it to the Beta-Ray Bill choice.

Yea going back to the gods are silent or never existed. I was thinking that at the end of the campaign when the players battle some cosmic evil or something that they could ascend to godhood and then be the gods that the mortals believe in. I was thinking about it like they expose the grand conspiracy, kingdoms all over the world go into revolt because none of the divine laws matter anymore, so the players become the gods, fight the lovecraftian horror and then keep it up to restore peace.

I love Warhammer 40k because it does exactly this with every Space Marine Legion. So I suppose the way I would prepare it is by using races as a way to portray one ideology or another to its fullest extent, since culture is another big theme I wanna explore in a campaign

You got me bruv

I still wanna play this. I've stopped reading the comic but BAH GAWD do I wanna play the shit out of this. Make a Discordian class so I can cast "see the fnords"

That's not what I'm getting at.

A lot of stuff I've seen where it's built around a theme will lack a soul. The people and the world will just feel off. Their actions and motivations will have little bits of weirdness that show that they aren't there to exist on their own accord, but to serve something ethereal and uninteresting.

No, he had the same problem then that he always had.

His people aren't people, they are plot robots that act until he is forced to show who they really are. And they are seemingly universally agents of larger philosophical concepts. They are not people, but avatars of people. Things born of the philosophy they represent as opposed to the world that they live in.

The characters in his comic are as hollow and lame as the characters in Dungeons and Discourse.

That's not necessarily how absurdism works
Look up Camus, it's not just random shit: it's existentialism with an option to not kill yourself over the uselessness of life

I'd recommend Camus to anyone, even if they're not interested in reading his philosophical essays. The Plague and The Stranger are both fantastic books with the former being my favourite; Bernard Rieux is just such a fantastic character, and his mindset really embodies what Camus is on about.

Literally all your villains and NPCs are already archetypes that fulfill some philosophical idea.

Why would she be eating a whole loaf of bread

She's probably an ancient being like Nyarlathotep or Baphomet or some dumb shit like that if I know anime right.

As far as I remember from the stranger one of the themes was people taking events that had no relation and attempting to rationalize them into a related sequence of events. The idea that the human mind has to make connections where there are none is what's absurd.