Friday, August 30, 2019

Dungeons and Dragons, "The Preserver"

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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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)
  3. 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.
  1. Acts like breaking windows, burning feeding pens, or despoiling supplies are small acts, these are often called “transgressions”.  
  2. 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”.  
  3. 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.

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.

“Nothing like stomping out a cult to bring a community together,” said Gaul, the orc paladin.
______________________________
            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.