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Gods of Dungeons and Dragons
I really liked writing up my unique take on Orcs a while back, that their society has a different take on religion that I think makes them more interesting than the simple brutal monsters they are often portrayed as. I did a short follow up to that not too long ago with a pair of orc characters in that context.
I also never really went anywhere with my discussion of Religion as an aspect of settings that I wrote about Years before that.
There was also my creation of "The Five" a pantheon of deities that act in concert with one another. I did a follow up to that one in which I created a team of characters that each serve as an exemplar of the various members of The Five.
To that end I figured I would write up some of my stranger and off the beaten path religious aspects of my own campaign world and see what people think.
Preservation
Holy Symbol:
Celtic Knot
Cleric Domain: Life
World View &
Mythos: The world is adrift in a vast swirling sea of energy and matter
that has no form or intelligence. The
world formed spontaneously out of this energy and has been slowing dissolving
back into it since its creation. In eons
past a powerful and wise being known as the Preserver ascended to a higher
plane and was able to harness the raw energies to protect the world from
dissolution, this being is called the Preserver.
The
Preserver sees life as worth protecting in all its forms and understands that
life must consume energy to exist and perpetuate and allows life to take from
him the pure energy of the sun and stars to make life well and beautiful. However, the natural inanimate state of mater
and energy causes the world to often move toward burning itself to a lifeless
cinder.
Beliefs:
The core
belief system can be broken down into 3 large commandments.
- Limit entropy in the world around you, this can mean refraining from eating to excess or from keeping a fire burning when people are no longer in the room.
- Cultivate life, this can be expressed in a number of ways, either by planting trees or helping someone who is sick until they get better.
- Seek peace, conflict destroys and peace preserves, this can be taken to its logical extreme of pacifism or be the commitment to not use violence unless threatened with violence.
Practices:
In
general the practices of “Preservers” is looked on kindly by Druids and Rangers
as most communities tend to be small, docile, and try not to over clear, over
hunt, over till, or otherwise over tax the land. These communities are however not a source of
surplus and rarely trade with outsiders.
These communities are vulnerable to the rare instances that crops do
fail. Preservers are good foragers, and
their peaceful presence means that they often can depend on the kindness of
neighbors or strangers who trust that the Preservers will not take more than
they need and will make amends in the future.
Superstitions and
Taboos:
It is taboo to kill for sport, start a wildfire, or leave something
to rot that could be put to use. Lucky
charms are common in the faith, they tend to be crafted by hand from stones or
fallen branches and use a braided knot patterns of lines. There is an emphasis on air, earth, and water
in the elemental symbolism of the faith.
Seeing these as stable elements. Some believe that fire is symbolic of
the chaos that the world sprang from, lifeless, shifting, consuming, and
without meaning.
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| “It is a cold flame that lights the lanterns of an undead mind, that is the fire of a world annihilated, that flame is the light by which we set our course to the truth of truths.” |
Social Organization:
There are three major sub-groups of Preservers.
- The first is the most pious and are only called Preserver Ascetics. These individuals wear little cloths, scavenge for food, and wander the land in small pilgrimages planting trees and often doing simple manual labor on farms in exchange for small amounts of food. They wish to take as little from the world as possible and ultimately pass on leaving the world a little better off for their presence. They are strict pacifists and tend to eat a very raw diet.
- The second are the Common Preservers. These are typical farmers who seek to live in small villages or towns and rarely produce more than subsistence levels of crops and livestock. Priests that serve these groups will tend to live and work in simple cottages and conduct lessens in groves or other areas of natural beauty. Communities of this type will endeavor to plant trees in previously barren areas, and will often put large stones in rivers to slow the flow, symbolically staving off entropy (and allowing more plant life to grow without being swept off by the rushing water)
- Guardians are the third and smallest group. An order of knights that live simply and charitably they seek peace thru preparedness for war. They are known to be decisive when attacking, merciful in victory, and kind to those who host them. They are much more the type to prioritize hunting demons, undead, and aberrations rather than coming into hostile conflict with terrestrial creatures and humanoids.
Churches and
Denominations:
There are two large Preserver Churches and the schism
happened 250 years ago over the role of written texts and dogma.
The first
church are called Text Preservers. This
group is so dubbed because they saw the value in not only preserving life but
in preserving knowledge. They see books
as valuable and sacred materials, and to be generally knowledgeable to be a
virtuous quality. This group is more
favored by Wizards who make use of the public libraries and composition schools
that these churches host. This is the
church that can be found in larger communities and cities.
The second
are called Ballad Preservers. This
church prefers an oral tradition to pass on their knowledge. They use music and rhymes to help keep the
information easier to remember without aid of writing it down. They are less committed to nuance and more
the living spirit of the information.
These groups are preferred by smaller communities that do not have the
space needed for a library. This church
is also valued by barbarians that see them as more accessible to their
illiteracy, and Bards (called Skalds) are seen as favored by this church.
Cults & Heretics:
There is a single large cult that formed in opposition to the Preserver belief
system, this group is called the Order of the Black Fire. This group believes that life itself is a
mistake, a perversion of the natural state of endless swirling energy without
form or meaning. This group performs
acts to encourage chaos and suffering.
Arsons, assassinations with the hope of causing war, and the poisoning
of wells and crops to cause famines and plagues are all acts of terror they
might be responsible for.
They seek
to destroy on a large scale the perversion of life. Undead are rampant within the group and it is
part of their text that, “It is a cold flame that lights the lanterns of an
undead mind, that is the fire of a world annihilated, that flame is the light
by which we set our course to the truth of truths.” Their battle cry is, “Death to all”.
Heretical Symbol:
Twisted and Blackened Wire (often in the shape of a flame)
Heretical Domain:
Death
Heretical Texts:
The core text of their religion is “The Antithesis” which is often written in
Abyssal with a translation in Common printed alongside. This book details the philosophy of Thanatos,
or Death Instinct. That all beings on
some level know that they should not be alive and seek oblivion and freedom
from the constraints of being alive.
Rather than
simply embracing this impulse and committing suicide, believers are encouraged
to work toward relieving others of their delusions about the sanctity of life,
and to spread destruction in ways both small and large.
- Acts like breaking windows, burning feeding pens, or despoiling supplies are small acts, these are often called “transgressions”.
- Larger acts of faith include the destruction of holy sites, the murder of people of special repute (this can include one’s own family), or the incensing of war, these are dubbed “desecrations”.
- The largest of acts that can be accomplished would be “cataclysms” which involve using magic to upend natural forces causing such widespread upheaval and destruction that the world is fundamentally changed for the worse.
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| Also, the fun part of cults is that you can insert a bigger evil behind them. For instance, this is Mandrakk, the EVEN BIGGER EVIL behind Darkseid in DC's "Final Crisis". Mandrakk is a cosmic vampire that was going to drink the universe dry of the blood of creation... ...I think... |
Inspirations
I don’t think there will be much surprise here that I was
inspired by environmentalism. I feel that
while there are large movements toward a spiritually guided faith in nature that
such movements are completely eclipsed in modern society by various flavors of
Christianity, Islam, and other major religions around the world. I took elements from numerous larger religions
and grafted them onto a nature-oriented faith. Positioning the Preserver as a messianic
figure that preached conservation efforts as a virtuous lifestyle sets this in
stark contrast to any nature-oriented religion I know of in real life.
Other elements, like the Preserver Ascetics were taken from Eastern
depictions of Buddha in the early days of his explorations of faith. While the popular image of the Buddha in the
West is a laughing fat guy, a large part of the journey of that religious
founder was his time as an ascetic.
The small religious communities, Common Preservers were
taken from self-sustaining religious communes like the Amish. The Guardians, a religious order more based
on idealized versions of the Hospitallers, an order of knights that emphasized
battlefield hospitals over conquest (again, “Idealized”) but also mixing in
elements of Sikhism, a religion that practices some of the largest acts of
charity in the world and is more and more vegetarian, but at the same time has
a core tenant to carry a weapon in readiness to defend itself. I find the Sikh religion intriguing in
general.
Lastly, comes the Order of the Black Fire. Originally that image of a black flame was
the metaphor I used to explain how undead work in my game. That they consume and move, but they cast no
light or heat. I liked the image, but
beyond that I see it as sort of a Satanic version of Nirvana. That life is an aberration that needs to be
stomped out.
Rather than try to teach people the 8-fold path or bring
them enlightenment, they instead just annihilate all life in an attempt to end
the cycle of rebirth. I also wanted to
create a villain that is uncomplicated in their evil, too often since I started
reading more and more political literature and fantasy stories like “A Song of
Ice and Fire” my bad guys have gotten too complex and my players often feel ill
equipped to debate them and too disheartened to try and stop them. Having guys who just want to cause an apocalypse
and use various flavors of undead and “kill it all with fire” to accomplish
their goals makes for an easy adventure.
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“Nothing like stomping out a cult to bring a community together,” said Gaul, the orc paladin.
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