Oh, one more I would like to add is
Godly Entities
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You can create some gameplay mechanics that allow for different fictional religious beliefs and interactions. Sims can attend religious services and get married at religious buildings. You are going to have to have a monotheistic religion or two to keep the majority happy - but my thoughts driving this are more along pagan grounds and, in particular pagan magical practices (as opposed to the Harry Potter theme in the Making Magic theme. I had thought about trying to design a mod for this shortly before Making Magic was announced and it can still be done.
Think of having rituals and making sacrifices to gods (could be an item or simoleons or food - perhaps the deity has preferences). Spells can be cast through ritual to aid plant growth or change weather or cast love spells or such. Perhaps some dark deities allow for more nefarious control than the love spells, which are already black magic. Yes, this creates a deity occult, which perhaps has both a solid and ghostly form - maybe even an animal form. While generic religions would have vanilla rules, perhaps some edgier rules for custom religions - such as allowing for goetic (black magic) or forbidding blessings. Perhaps you can have rites of passage. Of course custom religions should have custom dieties that can be built into a pantheon (and branches being made possible for those and vanilla religions to share pantheons).
Perhaps you can actually meet with deities after some effort and befriend them - or make enemies of them.... It might be fun to be subject to divine curses for pissing off a deity. They may inspire sims to do good or evil acts - or more neutral acts that fit in with their theme. A fertility god might encourage gardening and woohoo - a sea god might encourage fishing and boating. Nature gods might promote conservation with Island Living.
You'll need a ritual magic skill, perhaps seperate for theurgic (white) and goetic (black) magic. Dieties can perform more extreme and immediate magic, and perhaps we can have demigods who can have some more restricted or lighter powers. A religious study skill could aid in befriending dieties you come across by knowing how to interact with them.
With the politics expansion I suggested above, having open, closed, or privileged religions might be a good thing to connect - and there it may make some bigots realize that certain demands for "religious freedom" are actually demands for religious privilege along the way. You can't teach lessons in vanilla.
