I have seen a lot of games both gen and smut use gods as their reason for people being in the game. I've seen gods be the backbone of RP games since the early 2000's, actually. It's a concept that's heavily used and often much more thought gets put into them, that rarely get used in the actual game, then into the NPC's who characters might encounter to get their information from.
I liked the anon above's comments because they mostly focused on the native culture in a way that approached it logically, without reliance on media, necessarily, to get their points across. They also had a clear understanding of how plots or background info like 'praying to gods to be made fertile' might cause a schism OOCly: you will have players who really don't mind, but you'll have that one player whose either got a pregnancy kink and a bad case of tactlessness (I mean I already have one, I can't imagine it would take long to find someone who has both) who will take it too far with someone else and it will explode, or you'll have someone join for whom that is a squick who drums up who comes across something relatively un-obnoxious but who makes a big deal out of it. What I mean to say is that while pregnancy and fertility are not a bad thing inherently, players get weird about it.
So what I'm trying to say is that it would be really cool to see more development on the natives: do they also live in the modern village, or do some of them live there and some choose an older way of life? If they're split, why? Who are their leaders and how do they interact with the gods? Are the gods physical and able to move among people? I'd like to see more in the way of cues that player characters can follow, and they'll get that from observing the world around them. I don't know if you need NPC's for everything necessarily, but writing background info and fleshing out the world with more focus on how people native to the setting interact with it, moreso than the gods from on high who are overseeing things... that seems more interesting to me.
ayrt, with apologies
I have seen a lot of games both gen and smut use gods as their reason for people being in the game. I've seen gods be the backbone of RP games since the early 2000's, actually. It's a concept that's heavily used and often much more thought gets put into them, that rarely get used in the actual game, then into the NPC's who characters might encounter to get their information from.
I liked the anon above's comments because they mostly focused on the native culture in a way that approached it logically, without reliance on media, necessarily, to get their points across. They also had a clear understanding of how plots or background info like 'praying to gods to be made fertile' might cause a schism OOCly: you will have players who really don't mind, but you'll have that one player whose either got a pregnancy kink and a bad case of tactlessness (I mean I already have one, I can't imagine it would take long to find someone who has both) who will take it too far with someone else and it will explode, or you'll have someone join for whom that is a squick who drums up who comes across something relatively un-obnoxious but who makes a big deal out of it. What I mean to say is that while pregnancy and fertility are not a bad thing inherently, players get weird about it.
So what I'm trying to say is that it would be really cool to see more development on the natives: do they also live in the modern village, or do some of them live there and some choose an older way of life? If they're split, why? Who are their leaders and how do they interact with the gods? Are the gods physical and able to move among people? I'd like to see more in the way of cues that player characters can follow, and they'll get that from observing the world around them. I don't know if you need NPC's for everything necessarily, but writing background info and fleshing out the world with more focus on how people native to the setting interact with it, moreso than the gods from on high who are overseeing things... that seems more interesting to me.