From a Christian standpoint, I find that sometimes I feel like I need to defend the choice to play “real world” games that have cosmologies that are totally different from the typical Christian view of cosmology (and which I personally believe to be the actual “real world”). That could be the quasi-atheistic pessimism of the Lovecraftian cosmos, or the humanistic gnostic cosmology of Unknown Armies, or the mechanistic transhuman sci-fi of Eclipse Phase.

My defense would be that: 1. Games are stories, and even stories set in the “real world” can have fantastic elements; 2. In our world, there are a lot of different cosomologies that people believe in, and if we’re portraying those people honestly we should strive to understand and sympathize with their beliefs; and 3. By imagining different cosmologies and playing out how they might affect a world if they were true, we can both better understand real people with different beliefs from ours, and better appreciate how our own cosmological beliefs can (or should) affect our actions.