My thanks to CourtFool and his Taoism thread for giving me the kick in the pants to get around to actually posting this stuff. (“Other people actually think this might be interesting!? Holy crap!”)
The boards just ate my first post because, being an idiot, I didn't save before hitting submit. Which means you get spared a long introductory post. I intend to use this thread to share my notes on a setting I’ve noodled at for a few years now with the working title of The Churchlands. It’s full of shameless stealing, so if you notice something looks like I lifted it from somebody else, I probably did.
My major influences include:
Joseph and Frances Gies’ Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City
The Wheel of Time
Way too many Wikipedia articles
Regular old D&D lore and settings, particularly Birthright and FR, but also general D&D and Greyhawk stuff
Sepulchrave’s Tales of Wyre over on the ENWorld boards, which are down and thus I can’t presently link to.
Piratecat’s Story Hour from the same place.
My intro to anthropology class from years ago
Diarmaid McCullough’s The Reformation (mostly for its description of late medieval Catholicism)
Exalted
Green Ronin’s Book of the Righteous
And scads of half-read history books and things I’ve misremembered all mixed together. I'm historically-inspired, but this isn't real history being adapted by any stretch.
Posts will come in two overlapping genres: Setting notes themselves adapted from things I wrote previously. I’m very undisciplined and often write until I run out of gas or interest, then hop to something else. As such the Churchlands are far from a complete setting. Working titles, the setting name included, will probably remain. Setting notes will inevitably be a mix of what the Churchlanders and other world locals believe to be the case and what actually, form an external perspective, might be the case.
The second, partly in dialog with CourtFool (and others are welcome too), are my thoughts about setting tropes in D&D and my preferences for how they ought to work, which the setting notes are sometimes illustrations of and which sometimes informed my developing preferences the other way around.
Comments, questions, and suggestions are all welcome. The post immediately following shall continue from over in the Taoism thread, since I think it makes a little more sense to toss it up here instead of there.
Most D&D games I have been in barley seem to pay any attention to religion at all. The gods are expected to grant their Clerics spells. Beyond that, no one really cares. I have rarely seen anyone play a Cleric that actually attempts to expand their god's influence throughout the world."Just give me my damn spells!"
Or even serve their gods aside from the occasional application of boot leather to evil. That works for clerics of battle gods and crusader gods, but even there it's far from thorough. Take the average D&D god of war. He's pretty much the god of settling differences through battle. Battle's the best thing around. It's cool. It's what life's about. Shouldn't this guy's priests probably be lobbying to resolve every dispute through at least a duel of some kind? Wouldn't refusal to fight, at least when fighting isn't suicidally idiotic, be a kind of sin? (Maybe even if it is suicidally idiotic.) It could turn the character into a walking stereotype, but one hardly finds many real world priests who shrug off the chief commandments of their religion as casually.
Then again some typical gods would be effectively amoral and probably not care. Does the god of elemental earth have an opinion on morality? Probably not, or if he does it would be rather abstract. Now mining, that he cares about. :)
It probably does not help that a perverse amount of D&D writing on gods is focused on things that are rarely going to be relevant to any game, namely the gods' exact personalities and such. Unless one is going to meet them, which is pretty rare, this stuff is much less important than the dogmas, rites, practices, and so forth of the religion. I mean I've got no objection to using a book of god stats as a bestiary. The idea that gods are not just immortal and very powerful but effectively omnipotent and untouchable is fairly monotheistic. But even for people who want that in their games, it's not something they need every session. Religion details, however, should be relevant any time a cleric is present. Or so one would hope.
The sometimes-maligned 2e FR books on the pantheon had the right on this. They had statblocks for the deities, but aside a paragraph or two at the beginning of each entry they were chiefly about the religions, complete with major centers of worship, important holidays and practices, vestments, etc. Then a page or two of a usually overpowered specialty priest class and some religion-specific spells at the end, of course. I even had a player who, bless him, took the entry on Torm to heart and did his best to have his character perform all the recurring ritual obligations. (One was something to the effect of arranging a banquet which he then served to the disadvantaged. He had to do this I think once a month.)
Of course there is a point where all of that can turn into one player having lots of fun and everybody else just sitting around, which can be especially hard in PBEMs where such a scene could go on for weeks instead of minutes. But that's a logistic issue peculiar to how I run my games rather than a problem with the thing in itself.
Do Paladins even have gods? I mean, everyone knows they have strict codes they have to follow…but everyone just plays them like an over-annoying Dudly Doright.
I think even aside what entails lawful goodness, the paladin is a class that suffers from having an extremely narrow flavor niche in past editions. I'm not sure that it makes sense to have a single generic order of paladins, unless they have some kind of generalized patron like the good gods collectively or some sort of unaligned goodly celestials. To me individual orders of knighthood, or just martial priesthoods, make more intuitive sense. Have one, or more, for each god that it fits and call it good. But that's a lot more work.
Which also, of course, raises issues of the difference between a cleric and a paladin. Originally I think the cleric was designed around a kind of warrior monk type, like the Templars before the banking. My 2e PHB lists Bishop Odo as an inspiration, unless my memory has failed me. But the idea space of cleric has drifted, especially with the inclusion of less martial deities, to something more like a generalized priest role and the paladin has taken up a lot of the slack. That's fine in itself, but the cleric as a walking wall of steel second only to the fighter doesn't quite fit with anything but a sort of Norse-style warrior god or crusading orders if it's meant to comprehend the whole of the religion's theological professionals.
My inclination for years now has been to take the cleric as a priest first and a warrior maybe never, but I haven't done a lot of rules tinkering on it. A paladin would be a specialized religious warrior. The name has enormous game baggage, but one could swap out certain abilities and make it into a sort of customized-for-the-faith holy warrior. Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous does something like that, but I never looked at it too closely due to the difficulty of replacing a SRD class with one I would have to manually type in for my players to use. It's a lot of upfront work, especially knowing my most likely player of it would play a paladin type with it anyway. He loves that kind of character, whether it's a well-coiffed figure of courtly love (he used to romance elven princesses) or a grungy guy with lots of armor spikes that swears a lot. (I am informed that one of his oaths, "Bane's Codpiece!" traveled from our group to make an appearance or two at GenCon.)
I think religion offers one of the best opportunities to really get into your character as well as endless plot hooks.
Absolutely. For most premodern people, religion is "what they believe in" almost entirely. Even if they have all sorts of secular ideas and goals, they tend to be sacralized. (This isn't just the Divine Right of Kings, Sacred Kingships, and the like but also simple everyday stuff. We still have a bit of that, with priests blessing fishing boats and the like. I got a kick out of a Catholic player when I had the party catch an NPC priest of Moradin in the midst of the blessing of the pickaxes. "That's *exactly* what they would really do!"
Most D&D worlds are intensely god-saturated, up to and including miracles practically on demand, so one would think it even more true there. Granted most campaigns play moderns in past drag, and that's not unreasonably considering we are moderns and seriously following premodern attitudes could get awfully uncomfortable awfully fast, but it's something I've struggled with on occasion.
It cuts both ways. A person's spoken word doesn't mean a lot to us and tends to be disregarded, but it's something that was taken extremely seriously in the past when documents were fewer and held in less esteem than the sworn word of a man of known good character. (This was true even for things like titles of nobility sometimes, which of course gave everyone a good reason to go to war in disagreeing.) That's something that could seemingly be worked into a campaign fairly painlessly.
Global prejudice against women, more than cosmetic racism towards other ethnicities which are meant to be equally good in-world and options for PCs, and so forth is a lot harder. Tolkien had trouble with the orcs being a race of evil so, as I understand it, decided that there were good ones we just never saw. The popular medieval conception of Islam was pretty much Always Chaotic Evil, with Mohammed being identified with the Antichrist. In the Reformation the Protestants did the same thing with the Pope. Trying to reflect that in-game and not make everybody uncomfortable is hard, especially with the assumption in D&D that there really is such a thing as objective Good and Evil and people consciously and willingly serve both. "Gosh Samnell, your fairly clear analog to Christianity is full of baby-eating villains and not a single decent human being in sight. What does that say to us?" or alternatively "Gosh Samnell, your villains are literally the Ku Klux Klan. That's, uh..." Neither quite works, but in different ways.
And it all clashes with our sense of verisimilitude because we know in real life that a supermajority of people do not actually, consciously, without excuse or reason, do things just for the evil. Rather the omnipresent theme is that everyone does what they believe is right and good, or at least understandable. Even the social dynamics of really vile prejudice include manifold justifications for it. I've certainly read enough of them, both because I'm one of the targets and because one of my major interests in reading history is in people behaving badly on a massive scale.
Of course some things are much easier than others. Killing people and taking their stuff is already moral in the framework of the game. On a basic level, that's the D&D narrative for the great many games. We can just write orcs and goblins off as subhuman, morally or otherwise. It's a game, after all. Saying the same things as one says about orcs about the dark-skinned ethnicity native to a warm continent, by contrast, is just outrageous. (And I struggled with this and ended up rewriting two descriptions of human ethnicities for an FR game when I learned a new player was black. I had never thought about it before, and I don't think that the writers had either, but putting myself in her shoes and reading them made previously innocent-seeming description into unpleasant racial stereotypes straight from the real world.) We can honestly say to ourselves that an "orc" is just made up. It may be informed by real world referents, but it is not them.
One thing I've experimented with on and off is the fact that game worlds pretty much by definition did not have Platonism or Christianity, or other religious systems that teach that the flesh is, if not evil, at least inherently prone to sinfulness. They've never been through the Victorian period and all its prudery. As such cultural attitudes about monogamy, marriage, sexuality, nudity and the like could be very different. My players are generally relatively mature about such things, but I've seen reactions to other writers playing with less restrictive cultural tropes decried for writing their porn into the game. Maybe they are, but even if that's so it's not necessarily all they're doing.
Any fantasy world is going to have both the same constraints and restrictions pressing on cultural development as we have had, but also a whole variety of other inputs which could lead its development in wildly different ways. That could mean it produces things like less-exploitative, or even non-exploitative polyamory and the like. That would be far from the least plausible thing in a typical D&D game, and doesn't seem so strange that it breaks the sense of the world being a thing itself like, say, having jet fighters, nuclear missiles, and Barack Obama as an NPC would do for most fantasy settings.
I've kicked around throwing what I have up in a thread or on a blog or something just for the hell of it.I would be interested in looking it over.
And here we are. :)
Dotted. Let me know if you want me to delete this so it isn't cluttering things up.
Not at all, dot freely. :)
I started adapting my notes on the Great Church a few hours ago and got writing afresh again. *sigh* I really can't help myself sometimes.
As I said last post, in collecting things I started with writing again. I'm going to try to break things up a little bit into more manageable bits since I'm long-winded enough with the post window here, let alone a Word doc with theoretically infinite pages. :)
The Great Church
(With thanks to Green Ronin’s Book of the Righteous)
A Rough History (mostly as seen by outsiders)
The Great Church is a latecomer to the Churchlands, though over the past several centuries it has become effectively the only public, legal, legitimate religion functioning therein. It’s deeply interwoven into society and in many respects greatly resembles medieval Catholicism, except that it’s a single church and religion that serves multiple distinct deities and does so without any monotheistic gestures. These are not aspects or faces of one divinity, but rather each individual separate gods united in religion, not theology. The separate gods explicitly predate the unified religion.
Prior to its arrival, most to all of its deities had their own, independent, typical D&D-style religions. Each one was a sort of thing unto itself, with a unique dogma, rites, rituals, temples, and complicated relations with other religions. Generally speaking, each church revered one god especially important, if not necessarily paramount. These gods ran the usual gamut of D&D divinity. Many, but not all, were peculiar to human spirituality. Other intelligent races had (and most still have) independent and possibly unrelated religious traditions particular to their own cultures.
The Great Church began in the distant past, in what is effectively prehistory for the present-day Churchlands. A holy man who revered the Builder of Walls, the preeminent god of the Great Church’s pantheon, had an epiphany and decided that one church should revere all the gods, excepting the gods of evil. He would build a wall of faith and bring civilization and order to religion, encircling the good and hedging out the bad as walls do. This being fairly close to what most people actually did in their daily lives, allowing for local variances in emphasis and focus and aside his particular Builder-focused theology. The evil sorts of gods were more propitiated to ward off their attentions; their faiths being more concerned with sacrifices and donations to spare people their wrath.
The Great Church was by its nature ecumenical and syncretistic, rapidly becoming the most secular (in the worldly sense, not the Richard Dawkins sense) of religions and accreting a broad panoply of its own myths and hierarchies. Many of these were adapted from older religions, harmonizing myths and massaging them into a form more congenial to a broad, orthodox religiosity.
The god-specific religions, even the goodly ones, tended to be a bit esoteric and mostly concerned with temple priesthoods and religious professionals. Their places of worship were often private, small, even confusing. The priests had the job of worshiping full time and made their income off donations and sacrifices. Few of the temples had grand halls where the flock would be preached to. When that kind of thing was called for, preaching often happened in the streets, marketplaces, or open fields. A typical pre-Church temple would have had more private cells and shrines for worship, rather than a great vaulted cathedral where hundreds could come to worship together.
The Great Church was different, explicitly reaching out to the great mass of people and appealing to their immediate needs. It was communal and participatory, not insular and esoteric. It gave them a faith that they could practice together in a formal community rather than somewhat haphazardly. In a sense, it opened up the kind of highfalutin religiosity of temple priests to the commons. Initiatory rites and revelations once reserved only to devoted priesthoods that were often practically hereditary became open to all. The consequent rapid gain in adherence made the Great Church into a political power very quickly. By the time many of the inward-directed religions discovered they had a serious competitor for the hearts and minds of the populace and its leaders, it was quite nearly too late and their disunity and disorder worked strongly against them when it came to fighting back for social dominance. Several smaller faiths joined up to the Great Church as a whole for self-preservation and other pragmatic, political reasons. Others were just plain theologically compatible to begin with.
Within a few generations the Great Church won explicit state favor, making it for the first time one of the established religions of a nation. From this time the Church dates its calendar, which is now the chief scholarly calendar common across the Churchlands, the years AEC, an abbreviation from the liturgical language of the Church which remains the main international tongue of the Churchlands. (Most places actually use regnal years, and even the church uses the regnal years of its Supreme Patriarch for most uses, but when comparing years or addressing topics that would involve conflicting regnal years, AEC is preferred.)
Initially, the Great Church was one among many established religions but it gained enough influence and outright power over time to begin declaring the remnants of the separate religions heresies. Those who refused to repent, join up, and commit to Church orthodoxy were declared evil and under the sway of demonic and infernal confusions and perversions of True Doctrine. Over a few centuries, the Church succeeded in exterminating or driving underground every independent religious movement within its reach. It acknowledges that the religions it ate up existed at one point, but now considers them to have been hopelessly twisted by errors both human and supernatural.
The “evil” (for typical D&D types of evil religion, not necessarily the self-conception of the religions themselves or even the reality on the ground at the time, which could be very ambiguous) religions were suppressed much more aggressively. Any knowledge of them is officially forbidden. If they’re still around, they’re so far underground that everybody has forgotten about them, including the Inquisitors. In practice, anything that doesn’t hit the Church party line is now considered a remnant of an evil religion and treated as such.
The Great Church is intensely opposed to arcane magic of every kind. The gods gave men the ways to work miracles in their name. To do anything like that outside the Church is the very worst form of deviltry. The purges of arcanists happened roughly contemporary with the rise of the Great Church, starting a bit after it attained significant power and continuing for a while afterward. For roughly a century, things escalated from restrictions on the legal rights of arcanists and ersatz anti-arcane riots and the like into near open warfare. Arcanists had always been rare, and the Church outnumbered them greatly. Furthermore a potent wizard or sorcerer often took years to grow into power and in all that time was intensely vulnerable. Once the Church managed to interrupt the generational turnover of arcane practice, what passed for organized wizardry rapidly collapsed. Spellbooks were burned, scrolls destroyed, etc. Any arcanist, by definition, was in thrall to unknown powers at best and more likely infernal potentates. The wizards who survived either hid themselves very deeply or fled to an archipelago to the southeast of the Church’s domain and beyond its practical reach. (The typical Churchlands ship is a galley, fine in clear weather and in sight of land but easily lost in storms and rather top-heavy. The archipelago is perhaps a week’s sail from the Churchlands with few landmarks and no safe harbors between.)
The occasional sorcerer still manifests, but the Inquisition is pretty good at taking care of them as they’re often alone and very confused about what’s actually happening. Many, though not a majority, turn themselves in. If they have the misfortune to manifest publicly and can’t pull off a very quick lie while under a lot of stress, they may be torn apart by a superstitious mob.
This anti-arcane attitude translated progressively into an extreme animus against the Churchlands’ native elves. Their indigenous spirituality resembled the Old Faith (essentially animistic druidry, often described as “the million pagan gods of heathenry”) which the Church had long classed as a species of witchcraft. But worse than that, it actively incorporated arcane magic into itself. As such the elves could not have been a more perfect nemesis for the Great Church. They were non-human, and thus suspect as the gods gave men their shapes and any difference from that was the sure mark of a curse of some sort and probably a perverse nature in itself. Certainly they did not have souls that could be saved. They were arcanists and thus in the thrall of unspeakable evil powers. They proved this when they could be brought to battle and employed their witchery to devastate the armies of the righteous. They were insular and somewhat secretive and remote, like the religions the Great Church had supplanted. They even inhabited dense forests that were uncongenial to the Churchlands’ preferred military tactic: the armored cavalry charge. Just to top things off, the elves had openly harbored human arcanists fleeing the purges.
Few in number and slow to reproduce themselves even before the Churchlands took a hostile interest, the elves rarely cared for an open fight. They retreated further and further back into their dark northern woods, but generations of on-again, off-again campaigns against them took a great toll. One by one their strange crystal and tree cities began to fall, each burned to the ground and the land salted and blessed to purge it of dark magic and ensure no black seeds sprouted again. Until finally the Church launched one last campaign, having at last found where the final city of the elves lay. Torch-bearing knights rode through the wood and found…nothing. The structures remained, but the elves were gone and with them all their artifacts. From then to this very day, no elf has been seen in the Churchlands. None know what befell them, if their evil masters turned on them, if they fled to some secret place to plot revenge. As such elves rapidly became a kind of boogeyman, legends and dark spirits haunting the woods. Any strange or inexplicable act, especially in the north, might be blamed on them and hidden elves became a part of the same category as witches writing their names in the black book and cavorting with demons in the wood, evil spirits, and the like.
The Great Church Today
The Great Church includes at least a half-dozen major gods (probably in the 6-12 range if I ever write them all up) and more minor deities. They have personal names, but these are strictly forbidden to all save ordained priests and are spoken only to impart the knowledge to new priests. Instead each is referred to by a title, such as Builder of Walls or Opener of Ways.
The Great Church is comprised of a secular and a monastic clergy. The secular honor every deity of the Great Church equally in their place (the Builder in construction and ordering of things, the Opener at death, etc). They are by far the greatest number of the clergy and generally constitute what people think of when they think of the Church. The monastic clergy are not necessarily monks in the D&D sense or in the stereotyped sense of tonsured guys in monasteries copying books. Rather they choose to specially devote themselves to one god in particular…but only within the limits of the Church. They’re like the Dominicans or Franciscans, each having particular practices and rules but still firmly in the remit of the larger religion. Certain tasks are traditionally given to them, at least when a proper member of the order is available, and individuals in the world might have preferences for members of one order or the other which for nobility can translate into endowing or supporting shrines, monasteries, and so forth. Local burghers often form private corporations which sponsor much the same. Each of course takes great pride in “their” monastery, scriptorium, shrine, etc.
In game terms, the Great Church has probably four to six domains and secular clergy choose among those. Monastics have access to a single unique domain for their order, which they must take, and then their pick of the Great Church’s domains in general for the other. The effect I’m going for in play is that there are two kinds of legal, above-board religion. One is sort of general for players who just want to play a relatively typical pseudoeuropean priest and not worry too much about doctrines or odd restrictions on behavior. Those players can pick a secular clergyman. The other is for players who like more oddball holy PCs with a stronger unique flavor, the monastics. I got the idea from Ptolus, so thanks Monte.
The Great Church:
Its gods and their orders. Or all the ones I've made up so far.
(And yes these do skew toward the tendency I complained about in a prior post where gaming text tends to talk far more about the gods than the religions. I own up to it. :) )
Where I include rituals and such, emphasis is on the unusual and demanding as sort of charismatic data, rather than more mundane things like morning prayers. Listing is not meant to be exhaustive, as there are always loads of things large and small that I just haven’t thought of but would be part and parcel of a major religion. Also several sacred practices are, well, a bit mature in their content. Please consider yourself forewarned.
The Great Church is extremely humanocentric, and furthermore is explicitly theistic and tied to human civilization. It lacks a god of magic, for obvious reasons, and is also devoid of anything you might consider a nature deity. Those are the Old Faith and thus the kinds of fell entities that you sell your soul to (or just superstitiously revere even though they’re mundane objects, you pagan fool!). Nature is not a romantic thing to the Great Church, but rather a savage, chaotic, uncontrollable protean mess that does not care in the slightest for humanity and its unique place as the gods’ special creation. It also deliberately lacks any kind of world-creating deity. Humans are viewed as a special and collective creation of the gods, but the cosmogony proper is ambiguous and generally not spoken of as it’s seen as an invitation to heresy.
The Builder of Walls
The Builder is the god of civilization, who lifted man up from animalistic barbarism and taught him the secret of masonry to protect him from the weather, monsters, and savages who perversely reject his ways. The Builder was the original sponsor of the Great Church and is thus one of its paramount deities. Walls are his totem, but the wall is taken as a symbol for all the benefits of civilization. Thus the builder is also the god of discernment and distinction (what is or is not within the walls), of protection, of law, organization, etc.
The Builder is usually depicted as a mason with rough, work-worn hands and the tools of his trade present. When he’s being depicted or reverend in a particular context not related to masonry itself, the mason’s tools are replaced by the proper vestments and tools of a lawyer (in his legal aspect, naturally), a shield (for protection), and so forth. The greatest statue of the Builder is a colossal edifice that nearly brushes the roof of the Supreme Patriarch’s own cathedral, bearing four arms and hands to carry all the ritual implements in sacred unity. By church law, no other depiction can include more than one set.
The Opener of Ways
The Opener of Ways is the god of death, the way he opens being the one to the afterlife. He’s the funereal deity, present at every death. Without his attendance, death is not possible. The Opener is not a god of the underworld. His one and only task is to play grim reaper. His order is very small and mostly limited to mausoleums and the like. Many people find his clergy decidedly creepy.
The Opener is depicted as an old man with an enormous black beard and bald head, always wearing a voluminous white shroud. (White, not black, is the color of mourning in the Churchlands. The poor who can’t afford to keep white clothes clean will do their best and try to wear a white ribbon or something to that effect.) The Opener’s statues are always clothed in the shroud. It’s never a part of the stone itself. He is always depicted with one hand beckoning outstretched and those in mourning will often touch the beckoning hand in an act that acknowledges their own mortality and their grief for the one who so recently touched the real thing. When one dies in battle for the faith, which is fairly rare in recent centuries, the Opener’s shroud may be anointed in the blood of the fallen. These shrouds remain on the statue for as many years as the fallen served the faith. All others are removed once a year, in the spring, and burned during a special ritual.
The Sublime Thought
The Thought is the deity of enlightenment and revelations. It (the thought has no gender and is depicted as a faceless, androgynous figure) has a small but influential order of ascetics. It provides the Church with its great philosophers and theologians, utterly unconcerned with worldly knowledge. In addition to supplying the Church with its chief theologians, it is also extremely influential over the Inquisition. The ultimate penalty for heresy, provided the sin is only heresy and not complicated by demonic involvement or the like, is to be turned over to the order to be rendered incapable of repeat offenses. Everything the offender was is no more and he is remade and repaired to the role the Church has set for him.
The Thought’s order's highest authority are the Undying Anchorites, who live their entire lives in intense prayer, immured inside tiny cells. When one’s body grows too old to continue on, the anchorite selects another from a pool of candidates prepared and trained their entire lives for the task. The elder anchorite imparts all his or her knowledge and insights into the successor, including all the knowledge that the elder was imparted with, dying in the act. The successor is then immediately immured. By tradition anchorites take young hosts. The exact preferences depend on the anchorite, and each has subtly different roles that inform these preferences, but it’s extremely rare for a host to be younger than ten or older than fifteen. The Thought considers this a form of rebirth, the old anchorite becoming incarnate in the new form as it enlightens and merges the souls of the old and new into one.
The anchorites are the Thoughts’ (and in fact the Church’s) most stable and continuous line of Undying, but others do exist. All serve special purposes in the order, directing particular monasteries, sees, serving as advisors to the Inquisition, and so forth. Some of these have been tragically lost over the centuries. Aside the council of anchorites, which none have ever heard actually confer with one another despite their cells being directly adjacent to and facing into their circular, domed audience hall, most Undying are extremely obscure to the general populace.
The Thought sponsors a unique group of sacred guardians, stylites who stand untiring atop high pillars. Most major cities in the Churchlands have at least one and the Thought’s monasteries tend to have a half-dozen or so. However, a stylite’s position is fixed so as war and misfortune have shaped and reshaped cities, some are in the outskirts, some in the center, and some even a few miles away from present-day cities. Some watch over places where no one has lived in centuries, or even odd places no one has ever been known to live. A broken, uneven line of stylites mark the boundaries of the Church’s earthy remit in the foothills of the Eastern mountains, whence came the Fell Winter and the Prince of Wrath in the Demon War centuries ago.
It is said that nothing can hide from a stylite’s gaze, but as befitting the Thought their eyes turn not to this world but to the supernatural. Most stylites serve for a number of years before retiring, during which time they do not age and of which they have no memory. Stylites have no mortal needs during their tenure and none has spoken during its time since the vanishing of the elves, when all the stylites spoke in a single voice heard throughout the Churchlands declaring, at the exact moment that the first knight reached the last city of the elves, that the elves were no more.
The myths associated with the Thought are extremely ambiguous as to its nature. While canonically it is a person in the sense that the other gods are, no story explicitly refers to it as such and several ancient myths tread close to referring to it as an object. However suggesting that the Thought is in fact an object, or anything other than what the rest of the gods of the pantheon are, is a heresy.
All devoting themselves to the Thought must foreswear the pleasures of the flesh and accept ritual castration, which is they perform upon themselves in a public rite to demonstrate comprehensively to all the renunciation of the flesh. Those who are not truly devoted will not survive the ceremony, while those who are will experience no pain but instead illumination. (The Thought accepts clergy of both genders, and there is an equivalent ceremony for women that is bloodier by far, but most devotees are male.) Many practice additional mortifications as a devotional activity.
The Three-Eyed Queen
The Queen, wife to the Opener of Ways, is the judge of the dead. When they come to her, she reads their souls with each eye in turn. The yellow eye shines, revealing the shadows of all the soul’s sins. The black eye is utterly lightless and fills with the radiance of all the soul’s virtues. The third eye is colorless and it is the eye of judgement, looking into the other eyes. If the black eye is so full of light it outshines the yellow eye, the soul is judged good and goes to its reward. If the black eye and yellow eye are equally bright, the soul is to be reborn. If the yellow eye outshines the black eye, the soul is damned.
The Queen’s order serve often as the faith’s judges in matters of canon law, a role they share with the Builder’s order. Each must put out her own right eye (the Queen accepts only female clergy) and replace it with a black stone before they can accept ordination. The Queen’s priestesses are rarely secular judges in most places, that privilege being reserved to the nobility, but their advice on matters of law is often persuasive.
The Queen’s priestesses must marry a man and must give birth to at least one child (a girl, contrary to normal Churchlands custom, is generally preferred) who is then given up to be raised by the Church. Those who do not complete this duty by the time they accept ordination have only one year in which to marry and one more to become with child. Failing their sacred pledge is taken as a sure sign that one has taken up with dark powers, for who could break a sacred oath sworn to the goddess herself? Least of all one of her own true priests. Most who plan to be priestesses make their choice before or shortly after puberty and fulfill their obligation prior to ordination. Those who fail at one or both tasks are arrested as witches, interrogated by the Inquisition to learn the extent of their sins and if they have corrupted others, and then burned alive and the Opener of Ways does not collect their souls for they have betrayed his wife.
There are more, but they're barely more than names.
Life in and with the Great Church
The Great Church practices pedobaptism (baptizing children, generally infants) and this formally initiates you into and obligates you to the Church. Adult converts, very rare since the Great Church attained domination over Churchlands religious life, would likewise be baptized. Baptism protects the recipient from all manner of evils and identifies the recipient as a member of the flock to the Church’s divine magic. In game terms, you detect as “Good” to Great Church divine casters and their spells. In practical terms, the Great Church often sees the absence of this kind of “Good” as evidence of evil.
However baptism alone is not sufficient to remain good. One can fall into sin and yield to temptation. Those who have sinned seriously may repent, going to a priest and making confession and accepting penance in order to receive absolution. Confession must be witnessed not just by the priest, who may be of any order, but also by three other members of the Church. These need not be clergy, and instead are often friends of the penitent. For those who wish to emphasize their repentance, the witnesses may include the aggrieved parties and may be more than three in number.
Confession and absolution apply to ordinary sins, those not touched by supernatural evils like witchcraft, magic (the previous two are slightly different sins), heresy, demon worship, paganism, or something of that sort. Those such acts tarnish one’s soul so completely as to revoke the blessings of the baptism. Such people, which include any who have taken part in the initiation rituals of most heretical cults, are seen by the Church and the Church’s magic as Evil. Acts, doctrines, and people which the Church has formally anathematized are always Evil and performing those acts, preaching those doctrines, or being those people makes you Evil.
However, a gray area exists. Some classes of act may approach heresy. They may touch on the edges of supernatural evil. But they don’t quite come all the way. These may warrant curative measures such as excommunication, which can be revoked, and may allow for repentance. (Anathemas, by contrast, are never revoked.) Some acts do slip through loopholes in canon law and a great deal can depend on the nature and attentiveness of the local clergy and Inquisition. Humans who have never been baptized into the Great Church are not by default evil, but are at very great peril as they are infinitely prone to serious sin and virtually incapable of resisting its lure. They can never truly be “good” outside the Church.
In the North of the Churchlands, regular access to clergy is rare. Most parish priests are circuit riders who spend much of their time in their cathedral churches and ride their circuit a few times a year, though noble manors and castles often have a full-time priest in residence and those living near to a shrine, monastery, or the like have better access.
At the age of accountability, which varies from place to place, a new sacrament initiates the parishioner into adult membership in the Church. This isn’t strictly speaking necessary, and in fact if often costs some bit of money or service to have performed, but going without the rite of passage means one is not legally an adult in the Church’s eyes. One cannot thus be married. One cannot call on the Church’s good offices to intercede with the nobility. One cannot enter into holy orders. In most places, one cannot legally swear an oath or enter into a contract of apprenticeship. In many, but not all places, one cannot legally inherit land, title, or property. That does not mean that these prohibitions, excepting taking holy orders, are universally enforced but they can be a very serious bar to one’s advancement in life. As such most followers will undertake the sacrament at some point, though it may be later if funds must be raised or may be given on promise of a share of labor given out over future years. Generally speaking the North is more lax about such things, while the Southern Churchlands are much more strictly observant, abetted by most communities having a parish priest far more readily available.
The sacrament of marriage is required to bless any union with legal status, though again this matters less in the North, and less for the peasants and serfs, than it does for the propertied gentry and nobility. Children born out of wedlock are not legally heirs and cannot inherit, and out of wedlock as a matter of Church law includes all marriages not blessed by the Church. However the nobility often have the wherewithal to secure indulgences to have their bastards legitimized should the need arise. The poor are not so lucky, but having no titles and little property to dispense the stakes for them are much smaller. The Thought absolutely refuses to solemnize marriages, but all other orders do so for members of the faith.
Divorce and annulment are practically impossible to secure, barring heresy or the involvement of supernatural evil. Since such a criminal could not possibly be a member of the Church and follow its ways, it is impossible for that person to have been legally married. Even in this case the petitioner would have to satisfy the Inquisition and/or local bishop that he or she had nothing to do with the dark deeds aforementioned and is blameless in them. This often involves costly trials and lawyering, effectively reserving it to the aristocracy.
Remarriage after the death of a spouse is rare, but acceptable.
Of interest almost exclusively to the nobility is the sacrament of investiture, by which one formally acquires noble titles and fiefs. Investiture is not absolutely required, except for the Emperor, as titles generally pass by operation of law, but is seen popularly and politically as the act of the Church blessing the transfer of authority from person to person and generation to generation.
The Church must, however, be involved in formally attainting someone and stripping them of noble status. Since the Church seldom openly takes sides in political disputes, it’s extremely rare for even the most victorious noble to strip someone of title and dignities. Fiefs might be transferred, as they are property, but nobility is a character of one’s being. The nobility, generally speaking, prefers this situation as a noble bereft of a fief may reacquire it or gain another while a commoner has far fewer prospects for either. Traditionally nobles facing this fate are given the option of execution instead.
Investiture, distinct from other sacraments, is always performed by a member of the secular clergy.
The Empire, the Marcher Lords, and the Demon War
This is a bit of history and politics I've fleshed out in some more detail, and the history is a bit part of the foundational myth that frames the Church's modern self-conception. It's also a kind of national epic for the Churchlands, despite the fact that aren't really a single nation. As such I suppose it's a bit like how the Reconquista influenced the development of Iberian proto-national consciousnesses. It's alluded to once or twice in the previous history post, and probably full of continuity glitches, but tales of the Demon War are stories about who the Churchlanders are, what they're about, and what's important to them. There’s a cycle of them, which I mostly haven’t written, comparable to the Illiad, Odyssey, etc.
The Empire, which I have yet to name, is not a true empire in the usual sense. Rather it’s a kind of international fraternity with legal rights and structures that hold some prestige but are not always as binding as they could be. It’s a lot like the Holy Roman Empire or the European Union. The Emperor is elected by a group of hereditary electors from among their number, or rarely outside it, but in practice is hereditary and has gone through several dynasties. The Emperor has technically sovereign power over the entire empire but in practice has only his own personal influence and political might. There have been strong emperors, and the position is prestigious, but weak emperors are more common.
The Empire was set up midway through the Great Church’s consolidation and as such does not, legally speaking, encompass the Churchlands entire. Rather it’s based a bit off-center and cants to the east. At no point do its bounds actually meet the mountains that conventionally mark the limit of human settlement in the Churchlands to the east and west.
The territories of the Empire’s south-central region were the original heartland, where the Church first coalesced into a serious political power and for a time ruled in all but name. For a while it got rid of that caveat, but things have tilted back and forth since. There are still sovereign sees, prince-archbishops, and the like up to and including proper States of the Church in a mostly contiguous area around its ancient center, but all of these are separate fiefs held by the Church rather than technically speaking a part of the Church itself.
When religious consolidation really began, partly through regular politics and partly through religious wars, the Empire expanded rapidly over the central region of the Churchlands’ subcontinent, thanks in part to already strong Great Church contingents in its targeted realms. The lands further afield to the east and west, the realms of the Marcher Lords (from a Great Church point of view anyway) were less penetrated by the new religion and more hardened and militarily adept thanks to being frequent targets for raids out of the mountains on top of the normal feudal warring. Your human neighbors might want to burn your lands, rape your peasant women, and generally wreck up the place just to feed their armies while at war (and their armies are mostly peasant levies with a hard core of professional knights), but they ultimately want to take that land for themselves. The giants, goblins, and the like out of the mountains on the other hand want to end the world of men.
The Great Church’s adherents tried the military option, but met limited success. Worse, the threat to the lot of them drove some Marcher Lords to tie their fates to those of the land’s remaining wizards who by this point had no problem turning armored columns of Church knights into human candles. (At the time a lot of the nobility in Church-dominated areas was near irrelevant, practically reduced to flunkies for warrior-bishops and the like, a fate few aristocrats relished.) For a while, the issue held in the balance.
Then in the Giant’s Wall (the eastern mountain range) a nameless shaman brought Kostchtchie across from the Nether Planes astride a massive dragon, the last one ever seen in the Churchlands. The Prince of Wrath rapidly unified all the giants under his fist and set out into the East Marches not to raid but to do literally what the Marcher Lords often imagined the goblins and orcs wanted to accomplish: to end the world of men. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of giants descended from the heights and brought winter forward with every step, the great Nether Winter that froze men alive in what should have been the heats of summer.
The lords of the East March could not hope to battle such a menace alone, and the Empire knew that the horde would hardly stop at its borders. Also, the Prince of Wrath was in fact a demonic potentate and the Great Church was the sworn foe of such things. Even giving the appearance of slowness to act might well provoke revolts at home.
A treaty was quickly written and bound the lords of the East March to turn out their wizards and convert, but in exchange the Empire would not grow to include their lands. Those would remain theirs and those of their lines in perpetuity. They would retain all titles and rights. The Empire would then rush to their aid and join its considerable forces to their own.
Thus the Demon War was joined, wherein many a saint earned fame. In the end, the giants may still have prevailed if not for the valor of Saint Rydian, the Dragonslayer. Blessed by all the gods and accompanied by his sworn band, the Twelve Companions, Rydian slew the Prince of Wrath’s dragon even as its breath slew him. The demon lord fell from his dying mount before the whole host of his army and at that moment the Nether Winter was broken. Kostchtchie slew the Companions to a man, but his hold over the giants was shattered and they collapsed in war amongst themselves, proving far easier for the host of the righteous to harry back into their mountains.
The Prince of Wrath was not seen again after his battle with the Twelve, but rumors of his return and activities within the Giant’s Wall continue to this very day.
At the conclusion of the war, the lords of the West Marches faced the knowledge that they could no longer depend on their eastern counterparts to distract the empire and instead the two parties might march together and crush the West. Acting quickly, they offered to accept the same agreement as the East had while the land was still exhausted and devastated by war. The Empire and Church accepted and thus their lands entered the faith at great advantage, which they have used aggressively to retain and improve their standing not just as marcher lords, but also within the Empire’s bounds.
I apologize to all geologists and climatologists, who certainly know better than I do, and happen to read this and any related posts
The Churchlands are a large peninsula or a small subcontinent, bracketed by mountains to the east, southeast, and west. It’s oblong and tilted a at loosely a thirty degree angle with the west being at higher latitudes than the east. I’ve never been able to make up my mind if there’s a significant inland body of water (a very large lake or small inland sea) or not.
The southern section is generally a fairly pleasant, semi-Mediterranean climate (especially the southeast) and dominated by fairly open farmland interspersed with small forests and woodlots. In the north this gives way to a more continental climate with rockier soils, more forests, and so forth before finally reaching a stormy northern sea. The whole of the area is relatively well-watered.
North and south, the land becomes more rugged and settlement more sparse as one approaches the mountain ranges. Much of it, especially in the south, might still be usable pasture or farmland, if on a smaller scale than elsewhere, but the danger of humanoid and giant raids makes settlement extremely unappealing the closer one gets to the mountains.
The Builder’s Arm
A mountainous, sparsely-settled peninsula extending south for some distance from the coast of the Churchlands and wrapping around east to enclose a significant bay and including extremely treacherous islands and reefs at its end, the Arm is the lesser of the Churchlands’ two mountain ranges. In addition to the peninsula proper, it continues for roughly two-thirds of the width of the Churchlands along the west coast, before slowly giving way to an unhospitable, windswept plain. While by any measure substantial, the Arm’s peaks are dwarfed by those of the Giant’s Wall on the other end of the Churchlands.
Human settlement on the Arm is limited to fortified monasteries (mostly devoted to the Sublime Thought, which also houses its Undying Anchorites in a mountaintop fortress and palace here) supplied by mule trains that pass from fortified waystation to fortified waystation, never camping in the open if can be helped. Local agriculture is limited by terrain and by the vicious hobgoblin and other goblinoid tribes. Most lay inhabitants are pastoralists that live in wooden palisades by night, often near to or adjoining waystations or monasteries which they help support and staff.
Even these hardy settlements are heavily concentrated in the eastern valleys, with the monasteries generally further out. Maintaining the safety of the route to the Anchorites’ palace is a part of the training of many church knights and the local Marcher Lords offer tithes of armsmen from their personal guards on a regular basis. Throughout the mountains are isolated gold and silver mines which supply the majority of the Churchlands’ stock of such metals. These are protected by small fortresses and paid soldiers in the employ of the realms, mostly those of Marcher Lords, which claim title to the mines. The workers are chiefly criminals, who can be sentenced to labor here for decades at a time. Ore trains, carrying the precious metal back to the Churchlands proper, are a frequent target for both human and humanoid banditry.
On occasion, miners strike passages that are clearly the work of an intelligence and advanced masonry skill, though no human civilization has ever been known to occupy the Arm in force, or to delve so deep. Monumental passages extending straight for miles have been discovered, but such places are ill-omened. More than one convict-miner has thought to escape down a newly discovered passage and returned mad, or been found later in the mines, dead by his own hand. Most such passages are explored barely, and then only enough to be sure they’re what they appear to be, before being sealed off and tunneled around. Whatever lives down among them, if anything, is a secret many believe the gods do not mean for men to know. The Great Church takes no position, save to say that prudent and godly men deal not in things made by inhuman hands.
The Giants’ Wall
Opposite the Builder’s Arm and generally oriented on a north-south axis instead of the Arm’s curve, the Giant’s Wall is taller and far more forbidding. While the Arm rarely goes above the tree line, the Wall has several ranges with permanent snow and no less than three known glaciers.
The wall is not so thick with humanoids as the Arm, but makes up the difference in the strength of those present. Among the peaks are tribes of giants living in cloud-castles and packs of trolls roam the valleys. The Wall is far more rugged and less explored, with nearby lands marking their boundaries in the foothills at best and those borderlands being constantly alert for giantish raids. None can forget that the Prince of Wrath himself brought the Nether Winter and his host down from the Giants’ Wall.
Several passes through the Wall are known, but these lead only to the Great Desert and are thus strictly the province of daring explorers, and those foolish or bold enough to try to collect the bounty that eastern Marcher Lords place on giantish ears. Agents from nearby realms maintain small bands of pathfinders and scouts to watch for giantish activity (which are the main claimants of the ear bounty) but human activity therein is otherwise unheard of. Giant raids into human lands, while in frequent, are generally devastating.
The Great Desert
To the east and south of the Churchlands, beyond the Giant’s Wall, stretches the endless Great Desert. The Desert is the ultimate eastward frontier of human knowledge, a nearly literal sea of sand composed of such an incredibly fine-grain that it cannot support the weight of a man. A few explorers have dared attempt it with huge wooden shoes to spread their weight, proceeding very slowly. At various points these daredevils have found rocky outcroppings of solid land. Several are known and a few maps of dubious accuracy exist, but none have much to offer and all are difficult to reach. Mysterious creatures live beneath and within the sands, being in the main hungry and large.
The Desert rarely sees any kind of breeze, but when it does massive sandstorms blot out the sun for weeks on end, the grit blinding and choking any who venture out in it without protection. Legends tell of lost cities on solid ground large enough to be called islands, but none have ever located such a place and returned to tell of it. Beyond the desert, if truly anything, is known only by secondhand stories of far-ranging traders from the Isles of Sorcery. They claim that another mountain range encloses the far end of the desert and beyond that is the Empire of Dragons. Such stories are obvious myths, lies born in those pernicious islands among their queer monsters and unnatural folk twisted by demoniac revels and infernal pacts.
The Isles of Sorcery
The Isles of Sorcery begin a week or so of sailing south of the coast of the Churchlands, extending in a long and broad arc to the southeast on a scale resembling the Malay Archipelago. In the Churchlands knowledge of them is rare, save among the halflings and those who take passage with them to such strange ports. All know that the arcanists fleeing the purges settled on the islands, and their harbors shelter both massive halfling ships that call in the Churchlands and those of unsaved human corsairs who on occasion reach godly shores and raid for slaves.
The Churchlanders once attempted to conquer the isles and end the scourge of wizardry for all time, but their galleys were unfit for the long passage and foundered in storms, fell to raiders, or arrived only to find mountainous tropical islands that could not have been more hostile to their preferred tactics, except for the magically-adept islanders who met them.
The logistics and disunity at home forced the Great Church allow the Crusade to end after five years of generally disastrous campaigning, but an exchange of goods opened. From the islands come cotton, spices, fine hardwoods, and silks for which the Churchlands aristocracy has an endless appetite. Only the cotton is grown in the Churchlands, and even there only in the southerly island domains of the Republic of Todary, creating a rich demand for costly luxuries that is met by largely halfling ships which ply the waters with ease and, doubtless, some species of unnatural art to tame the wind and catch it in their sails.
Human Ethnicities in the Churchlands
The concerns mentioned about paralleling real-world ethnicities and applying D&D traits to them remain. It’s difficult, to say the least, to imagine a human ethnicity that doesn’t at least suggest a real world group and that can make even simply a bit stereotypical description problematic, let alone an outright unflattering one. In addition some real world parallels are necessary just as guideposts to get the idea across. But I’ve given it a shot anyway.
I don’t think I’ve named any of these groups after a real-world group, but if I have I’d like to know so I can change it.
The Churchlands comprise four or five distinct ethnicities, each with its own folkways, history, lands, and so forth. In the past distinctions between these groups were of great import but since the era of the Demon War, roughly seven hundred years ago, those distinctions have faded considerably as matters of concern. They’re still around, and most people who have traveled much would have a set of stereotypes in mind about any given group as well as a consciousness of being of their own, but it’s largely fallen out of the category of things that people kill each other over. In lands traditionally heavily populated by one group or another, many forms of legal discrimination may persist.
The populations have also diffused a bit and people of mixed heritage are very common in the aristocracy thanks to political marriages and everywhere when multiple groups come in close contact. Theologically, the various kinds of human are considered indistinguishable. A person is a person.
The Todarese
The Todarese are tall and inclined towards olive skin, curly hair, and dark eyes. Once looked down upon as backwater swamp dwellers, through much ingenuity, hard work, and flexibility, they have remade themselves a rich and powerful republic (The Republic of Todary, in fact) that boasts the Churchlands’ best galleys and only maritime domain, having long ago expanded to the islands near to their coastal homes where they hold slaves who work their silver mines and cotton fields.
These islands cling near to the coast and stretch for a short ways around the edge of the Giants’ Wall. Those nearest the Churchlands proper are relatively flat and low, allowing the Churchlands its only domestic supply of cotton while those further abroad are more mountainous, though thankfully not giant-infested, and house the silver mines.
The Todarese are pious supporters of the Great Church, but their support is complicated by their equally enthuasiastic (and within the Churchlands, unique) practice of slavery. The Great Church holds that man cannot hold man as slave, because man is the gods’ chosen creature. To hold a slave thus slights the gods. But a convict, the Todary maintain, is not a slave and that what others call slaves are in fact merely convicts serving out their time in labor. At every birth to an enslaved person, the child is duly convicted of violating an ancient Todarese law that forbade the original inhabitants of their island possessions from trespass on the land of the Republic. Thus in fact no slavery goes on at all.
However, in deference to the sensibilities of the mainland, the Todarese do not make a point to practice slavery outside their islands. There are no formal slave markets or plantations on the mainland, though Todarese nobility and affluent merchants may maintain a few household slaves in the way that their neighbors would keep servants.
The Todarese are mostly confined to their Republic and its surrounds in the southeast of the Churchlands, but as fortune has favored the Republic or turned against it groups of Todarese have moved with the Republic and remained when it departed, making them a significant minority in neighboring lands and, through commercial connections, in cities along the Churchlands’ inland waterways and, to a lesser degree, landbound trade routes.
The origins of the Todarese are obscure, with some legends holding that the gods rescued them from the Isles of Sorcery long ago, this explaining their bravery at sea. Others maintain they came from some inconceivable place beyond even the Isles, or along the Great Escarpment that runs south of the Great Desert, though none know any Todarese that still live in such a place today.
The Kative
The Kative originate, so their myths say, to the east of the Giants’ Wall. In those days, the Great Desert was a fertile plain where they ruled cruelly for centuries until their diabolism got the best of them and the resulting cataclysm destroyed their lands.Only a fragment of a fragment survived the passage through the Giants’ Wall, but undeterred they established a series of new realms in the east of the Churchlands, dominating the then swamp-dwelling Todary and others whilst they feuded with the elves who in those days lived in the forests to their north and west.
The Kative resisted the Great Church with great violence, persecuting its missionaries and scoffing at its most sacred doctrines. They clung to their wizardry and demonic masters, who were as beloved by their lords as they were hated by Kative and non-Kative peasants alike.
Then came the Demon War. The giants and the Nether Winter brought ruin over the Kative lands. Chastened, they threw themselves at the mercy of the Great Church. The Kative cast out their wizards and repented their ways. But after the conclusion of the Demon War, the Inquisition descended on them in a fierce vengeance that often came to resemble open warfare. The lords did nothing to protect the common folk, and often informed on one another to spare themselves and what remained of their sovereignty from the Empire and the Inquisition’s wrath.
As a result, the Kative came to be a fearful, secretive people. They huddle in small villages and give strangersno welcome. Their lords are more cosmopolitan, which does little to endear them to their subjects. Peasant revolt is less frequent in Kative lands, but when it arises it comes suddenly and with tremendous violence.
The average Kative believes wholeheartedly in the Great Church and its dogmas. The reality of demons and the workings of dark forces cannot be denied, as everyone has a story of what happened in the Demon War of the purges thereafter. But the Kative hold to superstitions far beyond the ability of the Great Church to ward away. Each home has a collection of amulets, fetishes, and other things to turn away the evil eye, the demons, and the rest of the powers of darkness. The particulars vary from place to place and family to family, but some are nigh-universal: Do not go alone into wild places. Never leave a body dead but always bury it at once so no demons possess it. Never speak of the darkness without spitting.
Alongside the Church’s roving priests and inquisitors, the Kative rely on theirown homegrown mystics. These crones, childless, barren, without kin, live alone and serve as midwives, herbalists, and curse-breakers for their communities. They profess belief in the Church, but their ways are not the same. The Kative will not betray a crone to the Church, but will also do nothing to defend one. As such their lives are lived on the edge, always under suspicion.
Wooden structures and corners are much disliked by the Kative. Wood is the home of evil spirits and must be purified by carvings and blessings before use in homes, though furniture and wooden implements aside housing arouse no objection. The Kative will not willingly sleep in a structure with no stone in its walls, though as much as a single cornerstone can suffice. Likewise corners can be tolerated if they are properly treated with further carvings and blessings. Kative stonework operates without permanent wooden support wherever possible. Carvings, often grotesque, are used to further ward away dark forces. Kative masons and stonecarvers, if they can be persuaded to carve more than traditional grotesques, are much in demand across the Churchlands. The orderof the Builder of Walls is very strong in Kative lands, which in turn helps ensure the Kative a prominent place in the Church hierarchy, and masons’ guilds can sometimes defy the power of lords.
The Kative work the land, but many also work quarries that provide the rock for their famous stonemasons. They breed massive horses and oxen to further support their famous trade.
Physically, the Kative tend towards shortness. Generally pale of skin, they share with their Todary neighbors an inclination to dark hair but among the Kative it runs straight more often than curled. Occasional Kative are born with physical oddities, called “witch marks”, “demon brands”, and a dozen other terms. They may be as simple as an oddly shaped and prominent birthmark, but more often hint at something worse: unnaturally white hair and pure black eyes with reds instead of whites, six fingers or toes. Possessing one sort of mark is unfortunate and taken as a sign of bad luck for its bearer, who will sometimes be given to the Church as an infant so that repeated blessings and a holy life can guard against the stain of wickedness upon them.
However in no case is a single mark a sign of inherent sinfulness or reason to shun a person in itself. Two or more marks together, by contrast, results in merciful Kative parents exposing the infant or abandoning it on a road for travelers who might wish to take it in. Those so marked who grow to maturity in Kative lands are forced to live on the very margins of society, scapegoated, shunned, and restricted to the most unpleasant and unrewarding of tasks. Many refuse to accept their lot in life and instead take up lives of crime or simply flee Kative lands, which serves to confirm to the Kative that they were really up to no good to begin with.
Marked children are born to all classes of Kative, and even to those of mixed-descent who have significant Kative heritage. However while those born to the peasantry suffer the fates described previously, those born to noble houses tend to simply disappear. Any noble miscarriage or stillbirth among the Kative aristocracy is presumed by the general populace to have been a marked child exposed, drowned, or otherwise disposed of. Rumors persist that particularly oppressive Kative lords raise broods of marked children as loyal bastards who carry out dark deeds for their noble parents.
Sepulchrave’s Tales of Wyre over on the ENWorld boards, which are down and thus I can’t presently link to.
Piratecat’s Story Hour from the same place.
ENWorld being up for the moment, these are henceforth linkified.
Let this be a shinning example of why we should not force people to strictly stay on topic.
Of course there is a point where all of that can turn into one player having lots of fun and everybody else just sitting around…
Agreed. Then again, you have the stereotypical thief player who pick pockets everyone in town and frequently runs off by himself to re-appropriate goods. Disruptive player is disruptive.
The last Cleric I played, I was actively trying to convert one of the PCs. The GM said if I got him to convert I would get a huge bonus of XP. I was just enjoying the challenge. I was trying not to be annoying about it. It was not something I mentioned every session. But I did point out whose grace it was that allowed me to heal my injured companion.
Which also, of course, raises issues of the difference between a cleric and a paladin.
Agreed again. Back in OD&D I never understood the Cleric until I learned of the Templars. Why does a priest of peace walk around in full plate whacking people with a warhammer?
My inclination for years now has been to take the cleric as a priest first and a warrior maybe never, but I haven't done a lot of rules tinkering on it.
I believe the problem is making the Cleric realistic (Yeah, I know…that is why I scoff everytime someone wants to play the 'realism' card) you run the risk of making the Cleric unfun. Let's be honest, D&D is about the killing things and taking their stuff. If you regulate the Cleric to actually just being about whatever his god's portfolio is concerned with, the Cleric becomes a fifth wheel. Heaven help you if you take away Cure Light Wounds from the Cleric of the god of infectious diseases.
"Gosh Samnell, your fairly clear analog to Christianity is full of baby-eating villains and not a single decent human being in sight. What does that say to us?"
I understand your problem selling that to your average gamer.
We can just write orcs and goblins off as subhuman, morally or otherwise.
This is something I have questioned since I began playing way back in…oh…eighty something. There have always been 'good' orcs in my campaigns. Or, at least, orcs just trying to live their own lives until humans start encroaching on their lands. But I guess that would not be very 'realistic' would it?
Very interesting Sam. Have you decided what to do with Dwarves yet? Do the Todarese have a love for wagons with over-sized wheels and flags that symbolize rebellion?
One of the benefits of using a skill-based system is I do not have to try and shoehorn a particular class into my world. I don't need a Cleric. Priests can be priests and are not forced to be combat medics. For players who want to be the party healer, there are plenty of options available to them: medical skill and other sources of magic since 'healing' is not restricted to 'divine' magic.
Moving away from D&D, I am also not constrained by Alignment, although I am intrigued by how you have handled it here.
Just throwing that out there. I am sure everyone is well aware of my preferences.
Churchlands
Since you are stealing liberally from medieval Christianity here, why not steal one more thing? Holy Roman Empire -> Holy [insert name here] Empire Want to stretch it a little further so it is not so obvious? Divine [insert name here] Empire, Blessed [insert name here] Empire, High [insert name here] Empire You get the idea.
I believe you mentioned that the Great Church tries to stay out of politics, but I am not sure that is possible. Unless you come up with a stroke of genius like the divine rule of kings, you are going to have the nagging problem of where does your allegiance lie? With your king or with the gods? The nobles will want one thing and the priests will want another.
I imagine this would be a difficult campaign for anyone wanting to play a Druid, Sorcerer or Wizard. Is the same true for Bards and Rangers?
Agreed. Then again, you have the stereotypical thief player who pick pockets everyone in town and frequently runs off by himself to re-appropriate goods. Disruptive player is disruptive.
Of course there is a point where all of that can turn into one player having lots of fun and everybody else just sitting around…
Absolutely. There’s certainly a place where sort of solo-PC traits are non-obnoxious and not deliberately keyed to screw things up, but they always create logistics problems. Which sucks when there’s a good, compelling reason for a PC to do something like this that isn’t just spotlight hogging, but time’s a cruel master.
My inclination for years now has been to take the cleric as a priest first and a warrior maybe never, but I haven't done a lot of rules tinkering on it.I believe the problem is making the Cleric realistic (Yeah, I know…that is why I scoff everytime someone wants to play the 'realism' card) you run the risk of making the Cleric unfun. Let's be honest, D&D is about the killing things and taking their stuff. If you regulate the Cleric to actually just being about whatever his god's portfolio is concerned with, the Cleric becomes a fifth wheel. Heaven help you if you take away Cure Light Wounds from the Cleric of the god of infectious diseases.
I try to use the word verisimilitude, but it’s longer to type and I forget. :)
I’m imagining the non-warrior cleric as most similar, rules-wise, to a wizard. Little to no armor or weaponry, intellectual skill set. Still lots of diverse spell choices. You’re right that taking away cure light wounds is really going to mess things up. The game needs healing to run smoothly.
Lots of people don’t want to play clerics even now when they’re kind of do anything machines. I’m not really sure what the solution is, but I would like there to be a distinction between the kind of play and in-world stuff that a paladin does (as a holy warrior sort) and what a cleric does (as a holy …something that depends on the patron and so forth). As I’m thinking on it, I guess what I would like is clerics that are god-specific to a greater degree than just domain selection and suggests, while still maintaining the class’s vital roles in the game and not being totally straightjacketed into something else.
That’s probably an impossible demand, but maybe not. With my single religion it makes good sense that most clerics would partake of a unified pool of gameplay tropes and cant one way or another based on patron. The Church as a whole is about fighting evil, demons, and so forth. I still don’t think they should all be heavily armored combat monkeys, but acknowledge that’s what most people would play regardless.
I guess I’m thinking of a scheme like this:
1) Priests are all individuals who have holy orders, the majority of whom work as religious professionals.
2) Of those priests a certain set (percentage undetermined at present) are blessed with the power to work divine miracles.
3) Of those priests, some by their nature, habits, particular practices, and so forth, are simply unsuited to adventuring and thus not PC material.
4) Other than the previous, some priests are adventure-friendly PC material but they come in several types that include both a fairly traditional armor-wearing backup fighter with lots of spells and others that skew more to a wizard sort of in back buffing and blasting role.
The first two points are world stuff that doesn’t need rules to handle. The third isn’t relevant since the game is about adventurers killing things and taking their stuff.
"Gosh Samnell, your fairly clear analog to Christianity is full of baby-eating villains and not a single decent human being in sight. What does that say to us?"I understand your problem selling that to your average gamer.
I know the Great Church is not coming off very well in the setting material to date. Part of that is certainly my own biases, to acknowledge the elephant in the room. But my actual goal is to make the religious situation more ambiguous beneath the surface.
The Church believes it’s extremely clearcut. They are the white hats and if you are not with them, you are some kind of evil. And when talking about some of their ancient competitors, they were right. They included typical D&D evil religions that sacrifice babies, have ritual rape on altars, and so forth.
Of course the Great Church has the dark side of religion in it too. It is a hegemonic faith that doesn’t take kindly to any kind of competition, does police heresy aggressively, and does have a record of persecuting the innocent along with the guilty. One of my themes in the design is that everyone's fecal matter is odiferous.
This is something I have questioned since I began playing way back in…oh…eighty something. There have always been 'good' orcs in my campaigns. Or, at least, orcs just trying to live their own lives until humans start encroaching on their lands. But I guess that would not be very 'realistic' would it?
Heh. I’ve gone both ways with the issue, depending on how I felt about the typical tropes at the time. I meant we could write orcs off, since they’re a pure fiction, in a way that we wouldn’t be comfortable writing off, say, a regular human ethnic group. Writing off one of those is a lot like writing off people in the real world.
I’m not always comfortable with “evil” races on a personal level, but I’m far from comfortable with killing people and stealing their stuff too. There’s a constantly shifting frontier between “this is fine because it’s all make-believe” and “I don’t even want to pretend to be part of this because doing it for fun is a little sickening.”
Very interesting Sam. Have you decided what to do with Dwarves yet?
I have two different ideas, which might be different kinds of dwarves and both of which exist only as archived IM conversations right now. The first would be that they live across the sea to the northwest of the Churchlands, where they’re embattled foes of some kind of cold-themed fey. (The latter might also be reavers who sometimes raid the north coast of the Churchlands.) The second, more vaguely, is that they live in the mountains on the far side of the Great Desert. In either case, I was thinking that they’re not very unified politically but rather are fragmented by the natural isolation of their delves and political considerations related to the houses headed by sacred, mummified kings.
In any case, that does rather put them off-stage. The Churchlands are extremely humanocentric by design. I’m not sure how appealing that is to players in general, but it’s a ball I decided to play with to help make humans more diverse and also emphasize differences between them and their non-human neighbors.
Do the Todarese have a love for wagons with over-sized wheels and flags that symbolize rebellion?
That one took me a moment. “What do wagons have to do w- Oh!”
I have a writeup of the Republic that I haven’t posted yet, among other things that could use some refining prior to posting, but no special love of monster wagons (not even the fire-breathing kind!) or Todary Power banners. :) Well no more so on the banners than would be typical for the period I’m stealing ideas from. In several senses the Todary are the odd men out of the Churchlands’ humans.
Moving away from D&D, I am also not constrained by Alignment, although I am intrigued by how you have handled it here.Just throwing that out there. I am sure everyone is well aware of my preferences.
I'm not sure I would even give the gods of the Great Church alignments. My feelings about it as a game construct amount to alignment being useful shorthand. As it implicates the world, in that there is some kind of quantifiable transcended good and evil, as if they were properties like temperature or mass, I'm less sanguine. I like more room for ambiguity than is implied in the system, and prefer more culturally-bound mores.
The Churchlands is a D&D (or PF) setting more or less out of inertia. I set out to create a pseudoeuropean pseudomedieval fantasy with the mind to using it with a bunch of primarily D&D players. So naturally it's D&D. I cold easily see recasting it as a Mutants & Masterminds setting. I'm not up on GURPs or Hero, but I think it would be pretty convertible in a macro sense. I'm writing more setting text than rules, ultimately.
Since you are stealing liberally from medieval Christianity here, why not steal one more thing? Holy Roman Empire -> Holy [insert name here] Empire Want to stretch it a little further so it is not so obvious? Divine [insert name here] Empire, Blessed [insert name here] Empire, High [insert name here] Empire You get the idea.
Oooooooh. Blessed. I like that one. :)
I believe you mentioned that the Great Church tries to stay out of politics, but I am not sure that is possible. Unless you come up with a stroke of genius like the divine rule of kings, you are going to have the nagging problem of where does your allegiance lie? With your king or with the gods? The nobles will want one thing and the priests will want another.
You’re right. I think that line is the result of me writing too much in one sitting and letting my mind wander. Bad Samnell; no cookie.
Of course the Church meddles in politics. It’s an extremely political organization and much of its hierarchy is from noble stock. But I think I can save both concepts with some political doubletalk.
The Church, officially, doesn’t have politics. It’s directed Heavenward and concerned with souls, heresy, and the like. Politics is worldly. However, the Church has come into possession of many fiefs, political privileges, and so forth. There are more than a few prince-bishops, earls palatine, and so forth. In their right as holders of these fiefs Churchmen function similarly to lay nobility. Bishops have led armies in battle and laid sieges and do maintain their own forces. They retain knights, guards, and all of that in addition to the Church’s own sacred armed forces. The office of Prince-Bishop or whatever and its rights and properties are held concurrently with being the bishop, but not identically to being the bishop.
Protecting a bishop’s fief (secularly speaking, not his bishopric which is different though generally overlapping) is a lay duty. It’s not about the gods or religion per se, but it is about protecting the Church, its privileges, prerogatives, incomes, and so forth. Without those, the Church would cease to be and man would be lost and prey to heresy, diabolism, and the like.
So the Church is officially apolitical, but practically functions like a collection of regular political entities. I should probably try to knock something together about regular politics to help clear things up and establish the ambiguity more thoroughly. ;)
I imagine this would be a difficult campaign for anyone wanting to play a Druid, Sorcerer or Wizard. Is the same true for Bards and Rangers?
One of the design goals is for the Churchlands to be a little binding and restricting. But that said I don’t want it to be completely smothering. Sometimes flavor is in what’s excluded, but I don’t want to throw out everything and play (or even design really) a game that amounts to revolting peasants being slaughtered by knights, rinse and repeat. I created a little bit of cultural space for a certain type of druid or sorcerer in the Kative writeup with the crones. My intention is that there are similar, sort of under the table ways that older traditions and the like coexist with Church orthodoxy.
Of course players could play a heretic too. They’d have to be careful and dodge the Inquisition, but it can be done. Espeically in the North where the Church isn’t very densely spread and wilderness is available, there’s room for druids of the Old Faith and the like to hide out, even if they’re generally known to the locals:
“Loric the wild man practices the Old Ways. You must be careful and not anger him, but he can help you with your problem. Do not speak of it, but do as he says and you will be well. Remember that when the priest comes in the fall and spring he will not be found.”
Things would be harder in areas where the Church is thick on the ground, but it can be fun to play an outlaw. Most Churchlanders tend to see heresy and diabolism, etc, as something other people do. When the Inquisition is around, they might point to someone in the next village over but wouldn’t necessarily think to turn in their own Lorics:
“Mother Darna will break the curse for you. She is not like Mother Celeste in the valley. She dances naked under the old oak and makes the grain die.”
But then in the valley:
“They have Mother Darna on the mountain who I saw fornicate with a devil in the wood last year at midwinter, though I dared not speak before for fear of her revenge.”
I understand that this dynamic actually played out in medieval Europe. Many places had a local sort of anti-witch specialist who knew charms and amulets to protect you from evil magic. (This is the original meaning of the term witch doctor.) The next village over, they were convinced the same person actually was working all the evil magic against them. The next village of course had its own anti-witch specialist who used traditional folk magic and the like to fight off the evil eye.
They would be liminal figures, outsiders always to the broader community. But especially in areas not served much by the Great Church’s priests they might have an important role, with elements of being the devil you know and a sort of conspiratorial sense that “our” guy knows secret, extra-effective ways to protect us that those other guys do not know. They just have to disappear when the parish priest rides into town. Living a bit outside town (not so far as to be greatly more dangerous than usual, but far enough that one’s out of eyesight and thus out of mind) could go a long ways. In more populated areas, such a figure might be hidden by family, friends, or grateful clients.
I don’t think one could pull off a wizard without some hard work justifying it, since wizardry is learned and its implements are so obvious. But sorcerers could try subterfuge or being witch doctors, as could druids. My inclination is that rangers who do cast spells probably fit into a wild man of the woods archetype (sharing with druids some) but their magic is minor enough that most people could just miss it. It would be tied to the Old Faith, but with their not being major casters it would be much easier to pass and good woodsmen and huntsmen are of much use to the nobility on top of that.
Bards I’m not sure about. They’re arcane in game terms, but their magic isn’t heavy on the demon-calling, blasting, and such that would be arcane to Churchlanders who don’t get to read the SRD. Bardic magic would come across as especially inspiring songs and epics. Yeah, actually that could really work: It’s not seen as magical at all, just uplifting and inspiring of great deeds. It makes the space for bards pretty big without diluting flavor too.
So I guess it breaks down to:
Wizard: Extremely hard, definitely a fugitive. Maybe with a noble sponsor who hides him in a wizard hole when the priests come by.
Sorcerer, Druid: Difficult, but possible with care and understanding companions. Can have role in communities.
Ranger: Very possible, just requires a little bit of care. Definite role in communities.
Bard: Very possible, requires still less care. Accepted, even prestigious, role in communities.
Most Churchlander Bards probably would not know they were doing magic. These are just inspiring stories, songs, and so on handed down through the generations. After all, the only magic most Churchlanders are likely to recognize as such as invocations of the divine, which are essentially prayers, and when does a bard call on the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak? Rather he sings a song that prompts you to new heights of speed (haste), sings a devastatingly dissonant note (sound burst), plays so well you can't help but take up a jig (irresistible dance). There are still a few problem spells, but those can be "forbidden songs" that apprentices are told about in hushed tones and warned never to sing with their heart in it.
This is the only formal nation writeup I currently have. I really ought to do more of those. Todary is fairly atypical of known human civilization, so it's a pretty bad example to have around but for whatever reason it's the realm that got written up two years ago. :)
That I much expanded it tonight is probably just because I'm weird.
The Republic of Todary
With its capital Todary, the canal-laden Perfumed City, the Republic is the great exception to the general politics of the Churchlands. The Todarese, who predominate in the Republic and maintain a near-monopoly on positions of influence therein, eschew hereditary monarchy. Instead the Republic's Court of Masques, the Perfumed City's aristocracy, pick the His Serenity, the Elective Prince of Todary for life from among their members.
The Masques are more than an electoral body and collectively write the Republic's laws, though they depend on the Prince to see those laws are carried out. The Prince of course depends on them for his own election and continued authority in a complicated political dance that can shift suddenly and, on occasion, with violence. The Prince, after all, serves for life.
Numbering roughly three hundred, the Masques are officially a secret body. The identity of the person behind the mask is a state secret to ensure that they make laws for the general good of the Republic instead of bowing to political pressure. Members appear for official functions rarely, always in groups of at least ten, and always garbed in identical dark blue robes and red masks that conceal their entire face. (The identities of many Masques are an open secret, but rarely are more than half of them known to the general public.) The Masques likewise do not confer publicly as a group. Deliberations are held privately and only for election of the Prince does the entire court assemble in plenary session. The Masques solemnly, silently cast their vote for Prince by selecting between colored beads that represent the candidates. During the voting none of the court speak, progressing in order of seniority to draw forth the proper bead, hold it up before the gaze of their fellows and a small assemblage of dignitaries and officials, and then cast the bead on the floor and crush it to signify the finality of the decision. On election, the Prince steps forward and becomes Prince in the act of removing his mask, which he then destroys.
By law, the support of a majority of Masques is all that a candidate needs to become Prince. But to show the unity of the Republic to its enemies, and even its common citizens, every Masque votes identically save for one symbolic dissenter who affirms that the Masques support but shall not be dominated. The way in which the Masques debate and write ordinary laws of the Republic is a secret known only to them.
The Masques and the Prince rule the Perfumed City directly, albeit with the aid of the normal state bureaucracy. But the mainland Republic beyond the city's immediate area is broken up into a series of fiefs much like the rest of the Churchlands, which become part of the Republic by swearing fealty to it and can depart it by breaking their oaths and swearing to another...if they dare.
In the days of the Demon War, the Perfumed City was barely more than a backwater city-state kept safe in its twisting swamps from foreign foes but isolated and impoverished by the same. Ties of blood and history bound the aristocracy, such as it was at the time, to the Todarese of the nearby islands. All were fisherfolk scratching out a miserable living in small boats and often prey to slavers from the Isles of Sorcery. Over time the fishermen established guilds the regular the fishery (largely who could fish where) that grew into would-be militias.
Then, fifty years after the Demon War, silver was discovered on one of the islands. The news reached Todary's guilds and they acted quickly, knowing that they outnumbered the people of any tiny fishing village. They sailed a small fleet of fishing boats with all the able-bodied men they could scratch together and seized the village nearest the silver. With brutality learned fighting slavers, they enslaved their cousins and discretely imported mining experts from elsewhere to establish an operation. Purely by coincidence, all those experts met unfortunate accidents whilst returning from their work to the mainland on Todarese fishing boats.
The Todary guilds used their newfound wealth to buy autonomy, and then finally sovereignty for their city-state. The silver paid for better, bigger ships and expanded operations. This naturally led to prospecting and exploration on the other mountainous islands near to the original strike, and the Todarese repeated the process. As the islands were little known and little considered by the rest of the Churchlands, in addition to their close proximity, the Perfumed City has few ready and able to contest their claims until dominance had already been won. What impoverished nobility remained on the islands threw their lot with the mainlanders for promises of great wealth and a place in the new order.
Despite early incursions by other realms, the Republic used its surplus of fishing vessels and the skill in handling them to sneak aboard and burn war galleys in the night, massacre sleeping soldiers and rowers, and generally make it more trouble than it was worth to the landbound nobility to press spurious claims to the islands until the Crusade was called against the Isles of Sorcery, when as the most convenient port, the Perfumed City grew fat off the shipbuilding custom and was ideally positioned to enjoy the fruits of the new trade in islander luxuries. Wealth bought a great deal of legitimacy, even to a republic. Fear of its growing wealth and influence in turn became one of the many reasons crusading ardor faded away.
But by then the Perfumed City, if rough and a bit rude, had risen to be a commercial power that turned its attentions landward. Hiring mercenaries, the Republic secured the City's landward approaches and this in turn grew into campaigns against local nobles, many of whom quickly gave way before bribes and threats. Within a century and a half the Republic was a great power in the southeast known for its glassblowing, silversmithing, and other fine artisans who had preferred access to materials from beyond the sea.
In the centuries since, the Republic's fortunes have changed many times. Twice widespread slave revolts have threatened its domination of the insular Todarese and the silver trade, as well as the newer cotton trade, and no less than four times the Republic's mainland territory has been reduced almost back to its original limits, most recently two hundred years ago. But since then the Republic has dutifully built itself back up. While not quite matching its strength and holdings at its apogee, the Perfumed City remains the paramount power of the southeast, the largest city in the Churchlands, and a center not just of trade but also art and religion.
The Great Church in the Republic is dominated by the See of Todary, its famous basilica decorated with fine mosaics. The basilica once specially honored the original patron saint of the city, St. Arilus. Arilus famously confounded demons of the sea, exorcising many and dispersing storms they called to wreck the coast. So great was the demonic consternation that Dagon himself rose from his watery domain and seized Arilus in his claws. But such was the purity of the saint's heartsblood that Dagon could not abide its touch and fled in agony and terror.
However at its apogee, the Republic's army sacked the Free City of Chorune, at the time its arch-rival. Chorune housed the bones of no less than St. Rydian Dragonslayer himself. The Republic seized the relics and brought them back in triumph to what was then St. Arilus's Basilica. The Prince and the Masques paid honor to St. Arilus and reverently touched the vial of glowing blood that never dried when the saint's shroud was burned and instead was brought forth from his pyre. They prayed solemnly, thanking the gods for St. Arilus and his sacrifice. The Prince rose then and proclaimed before the altar his endless devotion to Arilus and his cult. He swore on the heartsblood that rebuked Dagon that never would the Perfumed City forget Arilus, so great and righteous and holy was he that St. Rydian himself would have missed Arilus at the Field of Woe when he struck down the Prince of Wrath's dragon and they slew one another. He openly wept in memory of Arilus's martyrdom.
The next day the basilica was re-dedicated to St. Rydian and his relics were installed with great fanfare. A new statue of Rydian and the dragon slaying one another, Rydian in the purest gold-veined marble and the dragon to be carved of a black wood from the Isles of Sorcery, was commissioned at incredible expense, to be gilded and bedecked with gems and precious stones. Lesser statues of the Twelve Companions would follow to accompany their leader.
Once the new statues were completed, workmen arrived to remove Arilus and his heartsblood to a separate shrine. They found the heartsblood gone, its space in Arilus's chest filled by a featureless orb of white stone. The saint's face, once beatific even at the moment of death, was now twisted in sorrow. When news of this got out, the Perfumed City rioted. His Serenity dispatched the guard to quell the riots and then retired to his chambers, where he put out his own eyes, strangled himself with a white cord, thrust a dagger through his own chest at least a dozen times, and then threw himself into a filth-laden canal where his body was feasted on by eels.
The Masques acted with admirable speed, electing a new Prince who declared a month of mourning and repentance. The old Prince's family took extremely public penances. But the blood did not return. St. Arilus's statue became something of a national embarrassment and was relocated several times, each time provoking a new stream of pilgrims who pricked their chests, rubbed their fingers across the wound, and touched their blood to the white orb in Arilus's chest, which remained ever pristine white, until the statue was finally relocated to an obscure chapel where it remains to this day. In the intervening three hundred years, Arilus's legend lives on in hushed tones but few continue to make pilgrimages to venerate him. The old generations who knew Arilus well passed away and his memory faded.
Chorune, meanwhile, has never forgotten or forgiven and yearly makes a formal demand that the stolen bones of St. Rydian be returned to their rightful home.
However at its apogee, the Republic's army sacked the Free City of Chorune, at the time its arch-rival.
Did I really just write a free city as the arch-rival of a powerful republic at its height? That makes no damned sense.
Chorune's a Grand Duchy. Really ought to write it up.
Absolutely. There’s certainly a place where sort of solo-PC traits are non-obnoxious and not deliberately keyed to screw things up, but they always create logistics problems.
An excellent example is likely to come to a head in my next Exalted game. One of the PCs re-appropriated goods from my character and my character found out about it. I can not see my character trusting the other PC, and if he can not trust her, there is no point in continuing as allies. I am curious to see how the other player and the GM responds.
On Clerics…I would be tempted to treat Clerics and Paladins as largely the same. Holy warriors tasked with protecting the faithful. Priests should probably not be Clerics and priests should make poor PCs without very good reason.
One of my themes in the design is that everyone's fecal matter is odiferous.
Religion is always a touchy subject. That is quite likely why it has become little more than a cardboard background in D&D.
I find your setting material interesting, not so much for the obvious analogies, but exactly because of the gray areas. For me, that is verisimilitude. The world is not black and white. More than some cinematic ability I have probably seen a thousand times in countless movies, trying to qualify everyone into 12 or so clearly defined alignments breaks verisimilitude into so many little pieces I might as well be playing monopoly.
…but I’m far from comfortable with killing people and stealing their stuff too.
And here is where my drama queen flag flies. I can not help but wonder, "What's my motivation?" Because they are different does not work well in my Fantasy any more than it works in my real life.
The Masques…
I like this. So much opportunity for intrigue.
Absolutely. There’s certainly a place where sort of solo-PC traits are non-obnoxious and not deliberately keyed to screw things up, but they always create logistics problems.An excellent example is likely to come to a head in my next Exalted game. One of the PCs re-appropriated goods from my character and my character found out about it. I can not see my character trusting the other PC, and if he can not trust her, there is no point in continuing as allies. I am curious to see how the other player and the GM responds.
Which is a completely reasonable conclusion. I generally tell my players that I'm not going to lean on them really heavily to hammer square pegs into round holes, socially speaking. (Helping them get a concept together that works, is effective, and has stuff to do in the world is a different story.) I'll let them play, usually anyway, evils and neutrals in addition to goodly types but it's up to them to reach an accord with the other PCs. So far it's worked out fairly well, but most of my players have been playing together for years anyway so they're pretty used to each other.
On Clerics…I would be tempted to treat Clerics and Paladins as largely the same. Holy warriors tasked with protecting the faithful. Priests should probably not be Clerics and priests should make poor PCs without very good reason.
I suppose a lot would depend on the commonality of both in the world. If genuine miracle workers are rare, it makes sense that there's little distinction between them and they occupy just the more particular, adventure-friendly niches. But if spellcasting clerics are quite common one would expect them to fill more diverse roles.
And I've still to decide. Part of me thinks that the average parish priest should not be a caster, or should be a very meager one. But the bishops and highers-up make a bit more sense to me as casters of some kind. It fits into the idea that power in the Church is divinely approved-of and its officials have extra holy legitimacy. Theologically all priests would have power to work wonders in the gods’ names, but only some of them can carry off spells like we’d usually see.
Not that bishops and higher are the only ones who can cast spells, though. That would be lame and pretty much rule out PC Great Church clerics. I’m thinking that some subset of all priests can cast. Everybody uses the same prayers, but they “work” especially well for the casters. A lot of regular religious duties involve prayers that have little to no effect that one can see. Blessing space, etc, doesn’t mean it starts to glow and angels come out to sing about it. Whether those work or not, in the game terms sense, is not information readily available to the average guy. They’re believed to work, and their being used might give the feeling that they’ve worked just out of the faith of the observers.
There would of course be a theology around when differences become apparent. If Father Barnabas’s healing prayer gives you peace of mind and hope, but Father Edward’s prayer seals up your wound right in front of you in the course of six seconds, then they know it. I don’t want to make every first level cleric or paladin into a saint. I could, I suppose, but it kind of cheapens the idea of sainthood and I’d prefer my saints to skew more towards great heroes of the faith like Rydian and Arilus from past posts. It should be something that religious adventurers would have as a goal maybe, not something they got on ordination.
It wouldn’t be just one theological reason, of course. Maybe the gods’ said no to the prayer for an inscrutable reason of their own. Maybe the beneficiary isn’t sufficiently righteous. He’s sinned and is in denial. Maybe demons are interfering. Maybe faith is weak, either the priest’s or the target’s. All the previous assume that the big and flashy outcome is the norm, though. I’m not sure I want that, but it’s easy enough to flip the explanations: Only some are pure and righteous enough to fully channel the grace of the gods.
I like the last one more. Divines who can cast like the PC classes cast are in a minority. They’re probably more common in the Inquisition and, if politically inclined, further up in the hierarchy. Of course they’re also at higher risk of being accused of diabolism since if they start doing wrong and keep showing off their powers, we know where those powers really came from!
Other Great Church divines might have limited abilities in spellcasting. I’ve already written some genuine magical effects into some of the practices of the orders and I don’t want that to imply that those guys are all casters but for some reason the other guys aren’t. I also want to maintain the idea that things like holy ground have more than merely theological significance. It should, at the least, make life more difficult for evil outsiders, arcanists, maybe non-believers, etc.
But this magic would be a long, ceremonial affair. There would be ritual purifications of the casters, lots of preparation, blessings in advance, and so on. Then probably a bishop and a dozen or so priests (maybe more) pray and perform rituals for hours to do something like consecrate a cathedral. It’s expensive, slow, and demanding. Not something a PC would be doing for fifteen minutes in the morning. But at the end, I do want that to really work. It lets me give desecrating altars and such real teeth too.
Some heretics would say that this ceremonial magic is proof that the power comes from within, not the gods. Orthodoxy might answer back that the power of faith is the power of the gods, which the strength of their faith allows them to channel. Others, clearly confused by demons, would declare that orthodoxy actually draws on the demonic powers it claims to battle in order to work this magic. Or maybe the quick and dirty adventuring-style magic is demonic. Or both! Sins for everyone. :)
I find your setting material interesting, not so much for the obvious analogies, but exactly because of the gray areas. For me, that is verisimilitude. The world is not black and white. More than some cinematic ability I have probably seen a thousand times in countless movies, trying to qualify everyone into 12 or so clearly defined alignments breaks verisimilitude into so many little pieces I might as well be playing monopoly.
I don’t think I mentioned it before, but the Great Church’s gods are not meant to have alignments. They also don’t manifest in the world as anything beyond omens and occasional signs. In myth they might have done so, but for some reason they now act through mortals. Actual angelic visitation is rare too, but Church myth is full of unseen and disguised angels protecting the faithful. The pantheon might even not be real at all, in the sense that D&D gods are usually real.
High-level divine divinations like commune would be rare, but known of. The Great Church maintains that these spells address not the gods themselves, which would be a little bit too much like calling the old man out, but rather call upon celestial servants the gods have appointed the task of guiding mortals. These are named, unique sorts of outsiders. Bob the Seraph of Truth or something like that. (The Great Church has an extensive angelology, and demonology too for that matter.) Depending on what one was asking about, one would address a particular one. Asking different celestials about topics that fall under the remit of both might produce contradictory answers.
And when communes are used, the answer comes mentally. No booming voice others can hear, except maybe in extraordinary cases like when a saint phones home. As such, communes are very deniable. Even if you make the prayer in public at the altar in a cathedral and under a magical compulsion to speak only the truth, swearing on relics, and so forth, it’s still not hard to say that you’ve misunderstood or actually contacted someone or something else.
Customarily, when a commune is used one asks one question less than one can get out of the spell per the rules to give Heaven a chance to say something to you while you’re saying things to them. Most of the time there is no further communication. Other times, one gets a sort of wordless sense of affirmation or disapproval. Sometimes a prophecy is spoken or a quest given.
And here is where my drama queen flag flies. I can not help but wonder, "What's my motivation?" Because they are different does not work well in my Fantasy any more than it works in my real life.
And that’s a totally fair question. Excepting things like demons I usually try to give a reason why my parties would want to go molest the goblins, orcs, and so forth. They’ve been raiding, kidnapped someone, stole something, etc. I’ve yet to actually use a traditional orc horde, but if I did it would probably result from overpopulation.
I like this. So much opportunity for intrigue.Samnell wrote:
The Masques…
Yeah. Republican politics are notorious for skullduggery. Not that the other Churchlanders are much better, of course. Intriguing Todarese are just a popular stereotype that has some basis in truth. Other realms are more strictly feudal, so who should be in charge is officially and legally a given. (Not that they actually behave this way.) In the Republic anybody could be in charge and it could change daily. Of course that must be the result of all kinds of scheming. The fact that the Republic owes its basic success to commerce instead of warfare also raises a lot of suspicions.
All the previous assume that the big and flashy outcome is the norm, though.
Yeah, you have yourself a bit of a contradiction there. D&D is high fantasy, medieval Earth, not so much.
But this magic would be a long, ceremonial affair.
It really sounds like you are aiming for more of a sword and sorcery feel, at least my understanding of the genre. I think that is going to prove consistently difficult with D&D. The system just has so many assumption woven into its very fabric. Gimping casters is going to have ripple affects into other aspects of the game. I would not be the least bit surprised if no one wanted to play a caster in your setting.
I hope you understand I am saying that as I believe to be constructive criticism, not "ZOMG SAM HATES TEH WISSARDZZZ HIS GAME SUCKETH!" I really like the setting. I think it would work better in a system that does not lean so heavily on flashy, powerful and consistent magic.
Excepting things like demons I usually try to give a reason why my parties would want to go molest the goblins, orcs, and so forth.
I do too. What I enjoy even more is when the heroic party heroically shows up at the Orc camp ready to put to sword and collect XP, they find Orc families just trying to survive, raiding for food because the humans slaughtered all the buffalo…er…I mean all the Orc's usual food supply. The PCs quickly find that while the Orcs are initially hostile, they are open to negotiation. They have families too, after all.
Toss in a little Orc pup that comes running up to the PCs and begs them in broken Common not to kill papa.
All the previous assume that the big and flashy outcome is the norm, though.Yeah, you have yourself a bit of a contradiction there. D&D is high fantasy, medieval Earth, not so much.
That's true, but big and flashy can be scaled. Eberron is (or was last time I looked) an extremely flashy setting where even having levels in a PC class puts you well on your way to being a legend. I think a lot can be handled by managing expectations for how common PC classes (and in this case, the cleric class) really are. Most cathedrals might have one or two genuine casters (maybe more in a monastic setting) and lots of experts with profession (priest). The numbers can slide around to taste. Initially I thought I'd just go with every ordained priest having a cleric level but that conflicts with the other idea I like that the average parish priest is of peasant stock himself and maybe semi-literate.
I don't know which of these I really prefer, but even ignoring the game's presumption that all PCs save barbarians are literate (which is trivial to do) to me the cleric and paladin classes imply a fair deal of specialized training, theological and otherwise. The conflict actually short-circuited several efforts last night to write a post about who becomes a priest, how priests are organized, and so forth. I could write it with semi-literate circuit-riders and parish priests who got a smattering of training heavy on rote memorization of prayers, or I could write it with a more typical seminary graduates but I couldn't find a way to hammer in both satisfactorily. Obviously there are class distinctions, and things would be different if a would-be priest showed genuine game terms divine powers, but it wasn't all fitting together for me. Something I need to think on more, and make up my mind about.
But this magic would be a long, ceremonial affair.It really sounds like you are aiming for more of a sword and sorcery feel, at least my understanding of the genre. I think that is going to prove consistently difficult with D&D. The system just has so many assumption woven into its very fabric. Gimping casters is going to have ripple affects into other aspects of the game. I would not be the least bit surprised if no one wanted to play a caster in your setting.
I hope you understand I am saying that as I believe to be constructive criticism, not "ZOMG SAM HATES TEH WISSARDZZZ HIS GAME SUCKETH!" I really like the setting. I think it would work better in a system that does not lean so heavily on flashy, powerful and consistent magic.
I understand where you're coming from. The long, ceremonial stuff is for NPCs who can't normally cast real spells. It's meant as a kind of halfway house to let general rituals have real game effects where it's important, a plot device buff for NPCs rather than a nerf for PC clerics who would keep using the PRD rules.
The Church is, per its own dogma and history, dedicated to fighting supernatural evil. Demons are real and have been known to show up in the world. They prey on human ambition and weakness, get more and more influence, and then claim souls, etc. The story of the Demon War is meant to be relatively straight history. So it stands to reason that cathedrals and the like are built with some sort of standard anti-demon wards, which would be included in their dedication in the same place as, and probably a part of, the kinds of dedicatory prayers that most organized religions have for creating sacred spaces. If they were not it would be strange. If they were and then those wards didn't work at all, then it would be the kind of non-ambiguous “you're wrong about your most important doctrines” thing that I'd prefer to avoid.
The Church needs to be wrong about some things but also right about others. As I wrote previously, some of the religions it supplanted really were typical D&D evil cults with human sacrifices, demon worship, and the like. Others were politically or theologically inconvenient competitors who aside being in the way of the Church's dominance were perfectly good, perhaps even saintly religions. (And some where in between, of course.) I want to maintain that duality. It's got the good of religion, both in our secular sense that it gives people comfort and fun rituals and the like and in the game sense that it applies boot leather to demonic posterior and so forth. I think without that, the Church can easily turn into a kind of one note wrong about everything false religion.
Potentially the Churchlands could be a low arcane, high divine magic setting. Or it could be low both. I haven't really made a firm decision. Lately I've been skewing low, but I don't deny I have a strong taste for the fantastic. Eyeballing it I think raising the dead should be a rare thing that you're supposed to get hierarchy approval for even if you're capable of it, and usually the work of saints on the make, but magic less flashy than that could easily fit in. Most of it would be too expensive for the peasantry anyway. (The Church wouldn't “charge” but would “accept offerings”.)
Excepting things like demons I usually try to give a reason why my parties would want to go molest the goblins, orcs, and so forth.I do too. What I enjoy even more is when the heroic party heroically shows up at the Orc camp ready to put to sword and collect XP, they find Orc families just trying to survive, raiding for food because the humans slaughtered all the buffalo…er…I mean all the Orc's usual food supply. The PCs quickly find that while the Orcs are initially hostile, they are open to negotiation. They have families too, after all.
Toss in a little Orc pup that comes running up to the PCs and begs them in broken Common not to kill papa.
My guys once spent the better part of a month arguing over what to do with orc women and children. It was great at first, but it slowly became clear everyone was getting pissed off and no one was going to back down or change positions. My enjoyment of the dilemma followed roughly the same arc. I was having fun watching, then got bored, then wanted to just move on. I don't remember how it was finally resolved but I think I more or less said I wasn't going to ding anybody's status with their gods for it so let's leave behind what's become a deeply unfun argument and get back to killing cultists.
It probably would have played out differently around a table where the discussion could have taken fifteen minutes and everybody saw everyone else getting bored. In a PBEM people who are bored tend to just stop posting and leave it to the guys who are still interested or feel obligated by their concept to keep on with it. It's a lot less visible than Steve and Nate getting up and going to fetch snacks for ten minutes because the fridge is more entertaining.
A similar thing came up recently, but only with a single guy and one who was an adult evil cultist. Most of the party wanted to just execute him, even though they came on him sleeping and the rest of his cult had committed suicide. But they weren't entirely sure. They had an NPC with them who was a low-ranking member of the government (pseudoegyptian nation, he's a priest) so they finally consulted him. He's lawful good, but this cultist was absolutely guilty of partaking forbidden rites and trying to destroy the nation, albeit remotely. I don't normally have NPCs solve problems for the party, but since they asked and it's something that he ought to have an opinion about, he told them that summary execution would be fine, since he had committed a capital crime, but it would be a sin to do it before questioning him about the extent of the cult's activities.
It didn't have the same moral and RP depth, to be sure, but everybody was a lot less irritated. Not perfect by any stretch, but everybody kept having fun.
I’ve kicked it around some more and I think that maintaining the stereotype of the semi-literate parish priest is probably a bit too much into historicism and not enough fun, especially considering most of my prior Churchlands writing and thinking assumed a relative commonality of divine magic. So I’m leaning towards most ordained priests have some, if limited, spellcasting ability. It’s more D&Dish, but that’s not a huge objection considering all the ambiguities I’ve built in and intend to persist with in dealing with the true cosmology and nature of the various divinities. I should probably collect those up into a post at some point.
The Great Church
Organization
The Supreme Patriarch
The Supreme Patriarch, the Voice of Heaven, the Architect of Men, etc, heads the Great Church. His titles are many and diverse, some being honors granted by past Emperors and other secular patrons while others go back to the days before the Great Church when they were held by various leaders in the prior religions. Through succession to these titles, the Supreme Patriarch maintains his claim as the one true and legitimate leader of the faith (, continuing the tradition of the original visionary who led the churches to unity and truth. They became one in his person and remain one in his person today.
The Supreme Patriarch is considerably more than first among equals within the Church hierarchy, though how much more remains a matter of theological debate. In the past, the Great Church has called ecumenical councils to formalize doctrines, answer heresies, and solve disputes. Does the Supreme Patriarch have the authority to overrule these bodies and their creeds? Do they instead limit him? Would a sitting council have superior authority over the sitting Supreme Patriarch? These remain open questions, as is whether or not a collection of high churchmen has the authority to call a council without the Supreme Patriarch’s blessing and consent.
The Supreme Patriarch has his seat in the Holy City (name needed), the site of the second church ever devoted to the reverence of the gods in the true and proper fashion. The first, the Martyred Cathedral, was destroyed by the forces of the netherworld long ago. The Holy City is both the center of Great Church administration and the center of the Supreme Patriarch’s temporal power. Surrounding it are numerous feudalities donated, deeded, or otherwise acquired by the Supreme Patriarchs of centuries past. Each is ruled by an exarch appointed by the Supreme Patriarch in his right, and they together are distinct from other counties palatine and price-bishoprics throughout the Empire in that they attach to the office of the Supreme Patriarch itself rather than to that of a lesser official.
The position of most Supreme Patriarchs is that the unity and conformity of the Church and obedience to it is necessary for salvation, else one shall be cast into the utter dark, tormented in fires that burn with flesh for fuel, and so forth. To this point, the position is generally accepted dogma. The corollary that most Supreme Patriarchs draw from this is that the unity of the Church is incarnate in their office and person. Therefore obedience and submission to the Church is identical to obedience and submission to the Supreme Patriarch. Those who resist the Supreme Patriarch’s power are in rebellion against Heaven itself and its hosts are turned against them. To defy is heresy and sin, putting oneself in the place of the gods’ appointed lord of the world. As the most definitive statement of the doctrine holds:
To say that this vision of Patriarchal authority is contested would be a grave understatement. No Supreme Patriarch has ever become the effective feudal overlord of all the Churchlands, or even just the Blessed Empire. (However powerful Supreme Patriarchs have in the past brought low powerful secular lords. The reverse is also true, but the Great Church is less interested in noting it.) Not even among the clergy is this vision necessarily the norm.
The Supreme Patriarch is always both a priest and a bishop, elected for life. How he (or rarely she) is elected has varied over time, though the method has been largely settled for the past few centuries. On the death of the sitting Supreme Patriarch, the synod of Patriarchs gathers in the Holy City and from among their own number candidates are nominated. There can be as many candidates as there are Patriarchs, or as few as one. The college of cardinals, which has also gathered in the Holy City in the mean time, then selects among those candidates.
Immediately answering to the Supreme Patriarch are the Patriarchs. These include the heads of each monastic order (each of whom is generally better known by the title they have in their right as head of their order), Patriarchs of certain theologically important sees, as well as those who serve as primates of major provinces of the Church, and a few great officers of the Church such as the High Inquisitor. Their exact duties vary greatly depending on their office, but each is inherently a cardinal in addition.
The office of cardinal is a specific dignity that generally accompanies another office and in itself only entitles one to vote in elections for the Supreme Patriarch. Aside the Patriarchs, who become cardinals inherent in their offices, the Supreme Patriarch appoints cardinals as he will. By convention most archbishops are cardinals, as are prince-bihsops and counts palatine, but the remainder of the cardinalate is subject to the Supreme Patriarch’s discretion. On occasion non-Churchmen have been named cardinals but this is rare and considered very irregular. On average there are around a hundred to a hundred and fifty cardinals, but in the past the number has contracted to as few as fifty and as many as three hundred.
Ten Patriarchs oversee the great provinces of the Church, which comprehend the entirety of the Blessed Empire. Each patriarch has considerable power within his own domain and is concurrently an archbishop of its most important see. This archbishopric often commands a worldly principality in addition, but this is not a rule and much subject to the vicissitudes of politics. The office of patriarch and archbishop are historically bound together. The Patriarch of Chorune, for example, is thus always and inevitable the Archbishop of Chorune. However the influence, wealth, and might of temporal sees attached to other bishoprics and archbishoprics can make it difficult to tell who really has superior authority at any given time. Many Patriarchs have seen their temporal sees wither while those of their theoretical subordinates have waxed and the consequent effects on their practical authority can be considerable. Those with little real authority often become absentees and spend most of their time in the Holy City or elsewhere.
Secular Patriarchs are theoretically chosen by the Supreme Patriarch, but in practice political considerations dominate and more than one high nobleman has managed to secure the practical ability to veto, nominate, or otherwise greatly influence the choices.
Provincial Patriarchs are unique to the Blessed Empire. In the Marches they do not exist.
Beneath the Patriarchs within the Empire and along side them without are a collection of bishops and archbishops. The distinction between the two is not in itself hierarchical, but rather historical. Historically important sees are generally archbishoprics and those of lesser import are mere bishoprics. The practical difference between the two is minuscule, and the historical distinctions between sees can be centuries out of date.
Whatever the title, any city worthy of the name will have one such prince of the Church headquartered at a cathedral. Most cathedrals are centuries old and the work of decades, surrounded by a precinct that will include a school (mostly for wealthy burghers’ children, nobility hiring tutors), an orphanage, housing for the local priests, and on occasion hospitals, shrines, and so forth. The agglomeration collectively is termed a college or chapter and its permanent residents are canons. The great majority of priests are trained in these colleges prior to their ordination, though some have access to the Churchlands’ four or five universities.
A bishop, arch- or otherwise, has direct supervisory and regulatory authority over his see and all the priests within. (His or her authority over monastic communities within is more complicated.) He is responsible for their ordination and has the power to excommunicate and lay interdicts within his remit. Anathemas have been pronounced in the past, but this authority has generally ascended up the hierarchy over the centuries. Bishops are the arbiters of canon law for the see. Their rulings and decisions can be appealed to the Holy City, but this is an expensive and slow process generally only open to the wealthy and well-connected.
The appointment of bishops is an intensely political process that is in theory in the hands of the Supreme Patriarch but in practice depends enormously on local secular politics, the politics of the cathedral chapters, the opinions of clergy in adjacent sees, and so forth. Many nobility consider it their right to nominate bishops for sees within their authority, relations and family confessors being strongly preferred. The Church disagrees, but must often bow to the local realities.
Serving the bishops, and reporting more or less directly to them, are ordinary priests. These priests share a rank and theoretically only seniority distinguishes them. In practice the canons of the cathedral are the most esteemed. Following them, in old and large cities, would be the priests of various subsidiary churches within the city walls. Outside the city are parish priests and, in sparsely populated areas, circuit-riders. Priests who attach themselves to noble houses may come from any group and are thus difficult to classify.
The process of becoming a priest is difficult. One must be free to devote several years to study, often three to five. One must be, or become, literate. One must of course be a member of the Church in good standing. All but the last requirement effectively restrict the clergy to the ranks of burghers and better, though exceptional peasants might be able to win a patron who will help them with expenses and provide the proper introductions. Ultimately most ordinary priests come not from the ranks of the affluent, but from those raised in Church orphanages or taken in by individual clergy. These orphans may rise high, especially if they make the right connections, but the heights of the Church are dominated by noble scions who did not stand to inherit much, if anything, from their parents and thus chose the Church as their means of advancement.
Some fruits of insomnia.
Now that I’ve made up my mind that divine magic is relatively common, I may as well hash out details, both in the world sense and so far as it matters for the rules.
There are, broadly speaking, four kinds of religion in the Churchlands. The dominant one is the Great Church and it’s traditionally theistic, revering a closed pantheon of known deities as a collective. That’s orthodoxy.
The second group is, from the Great Church perspective, heretics. They agree with much or the Great Church paradigm, but differ on some important points. Perhaps they add more gods, subtract a few, rearrange the relationships between them, etc. Included also here are people adhering or trying to adhere to understandings of Great Church deities that antedate the Great Church and its vision of the gods. That can involve more traditional sacrifice-oriented worship, holding that their god or gods are not really a part of the pantheon and have their own independent thing, and so forth.
To draw an analogy, heretics are visibly parts of the same religious family in the sense that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are all obviously related religions. For some species of heretic the distinction can be a split as close as, say, the Anglican/Catholic or the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox split. For others it’s more like the difference between Christianity and Islam. Yet they share a great deal.
The third group is infidels, who do not accept the Great Church’s paradigm. It includes those who reject the divinity of the Church’s gods in favor of others, those who reverse the roles of the Great Church’s pantheon and the religions it suppressed (“You’re not the good ones; we are!”), and generally speaking any theistic religion which rejects the Great Church’s orthodoxy more or less entirely. This can involve both the exclusive worship of pre-consolidation deities and things like demon cults.
For all the above three groups, working divine magic involves acts of invocation which name the powers being invoked and call on them to act through the caster. Spells are in effect intercessory prayers, spoken customarily in the liturgical language. They are usually learned by rote, which makes them available even to those who don’t speak the liturgical language, and also entail certain mental exercises one performs in the casting. But customary is not necessarily mandatory. Longer, more flowery, and much more theatrical versions of the same prayers are used, to the same effect, for ceremonial occasions. They’re just not as practical when you wake find an incubus waiting for you in bed or a balor has his whip tied around your throat.
The last group is technically a sort of infidel, since it doesn’t fit the Great Church’s orthodoxy at all, but it’s effectively different enough to deserve its own mention. The Old Faith is more or less druidry in all its faces. It might or might not involve gods in the theistic sense, but in general is animist is calling on the spirits that inhabit everything from the smallest blade of grass to the spirit of the world itself. In a sense, everything has a soul or god or some sort of mystical essence inherent in the thing. (Hence the Church’s condemnation of the million pagan gods of heathenry.) The druid would call on that, with the understanding varying depending on the druid and the subject. For the others above, they are always calling on a higher power and making obeisance to it in exchange for it using its powers through them. A druid might do anything from giving orders to directly coercing to begging in supplication. The theology is on its surface similar, but it presupposes a rather different worldview and understanding of the divine than the others have.
The distinction between fiendish potentates, overthrown or suppressed divinities, ancestor spirits, elementals, and the like is extremely weak and largely academic. What the Great Church calls something like the Demon Queen of Whores could be a goddess of romantic love, beauty, and inspiration to her devotees. She might be known to the Old Faith, after a fashion, as a queen of the fey or a spirit of butterflies and rainbows. Which one of these views is correct, in the objective sense? One, the other, both, neither, and I mean all of those. :)
Those who come back from the afterlife do not remember their time there. Actually visiting the afterlife is not practically possible, as people who can pull off a plane shift are rare in the Churchlands. Having the ability and actually going there would be rather hubristic in most contexts, unless one has an invitation. The Old Faith doesn’t have a firm concept of an otherworldly afterlife at all, but rather a kind of spirit world that overlaps and imbues this world.
Views of Divine Magic
Divine magic comes from the true gods of the Great Church…if you follow the Great Church. If you do not and you still have divine magic, you don’t really have divine magic. Rather you have some kind of pagan or infernal imitation of it since the Great Church views followers of all other gods as mistaken at best and often outright evil. Unless it’s done in the name of their gods, it logically can’t be the real thing as only their gods are real.
Needless to say followers of other religious traditions, or even heretical traditions that split off from the Great Church orthodoxy, disagree entirely. Adherents of the Old Faith will tell you that they call on the spirits of the land, of the elements, of the sky and stars, of the sea, and so forth. For heretics, they are the True Faith and the Church is the heresy…if they maintain the concept of heresy. Generally speaking, the theistic religions take themselves as agents, servants, or clients of their gods. The Old Faith animists tend more towards the concept of partners and peers, expecting of course that they shall continue on as spirit beings in this world themselves.
These views are somewhat particular to Churchlander humans. Other races (halflings, elves, others) and other human cultures (the “Wicked Men of the Isles”, wizards of many cultures) would not necessarily fit into the scheme. But then they might too. I’ve sussed out a fair bit of the halfling worldview, yet to be posted, and a little of the elven and they’re deliberately geared differently. (Though writing this now I realize they have some interesting similarities to one another; I have to think about that some more.)
For all of these guys, divine magic works. If they say the prayers and believe them, or beseech the spirits, etc, in the proper manner then they get the effect they want in return. An orthodox priest of the Great Church and a priest of Dagon can cast the same cure light wounds and heal the same amount of damage. They can also use Holy Word to ruin one another’s days.
To get a bit gamey for a moment, I can easily see divine casters who get their spells exclusively from cleric or paladin levels, the same who only get them from a prestige class like Thrall of X, or those who get them from ever weirder places like a base class I dimly recall from Green Ronin’s Book of Fiends as all coexisting and representing different sorts of religious traditions. I haven’t flavor-texted at that idea yet, but it seems to fit with where I’m going. You could even have both a cleric and a thrall of Dagon or whoever coexist, though probably not in the same cult.
So how do they interact when a cleric of the Great Church casts Detect Evil on a cleric of Dagon who just drowned a few babies, desecrated a church, and kicked a poodle on the way out the door? The Dagonite detects as Evil, since he’s an infidel who has whored himself out to a false demon god. He’s Evil for all purposes of that priest’s magic at the very least until he repents, atones, accepts penance, gets baptized, etc. The same thing is true if the Dagonite only gives a portion of his catch back to the sea and prays to Dagon to save the drowning.
The other way around? That depends on the individual Dagonite (or anybody else) and their cult/church/whatever’s opinion of the Great Church. If this Dagonite believes that the Great Church took his innocent god of the seas and its gods dragged him up, mutilated him, cast him into the Great Desert, and then genocided away his ancient co-religionists, then that priest detects as Evil and is in for a world of pain from the Dagonite’s Holy Word. For adherents to hierarchical religions with sanctified leaderships, like the Great Church has, the hierarchy’s opinion is binding when officially given. Those without such religious overhead depend more on their personal theologies.
Both parties in the battle of course have all the evidence given to them by the gods’ themselves, through their unerring divine power, that they are in the right and the other guy is in the wrong.
If our same Great Church inquisitor cast the same detect evil on a heretic who different from the Church on some point of important dogma that the Church had anathematized in the act of proclaiming the orthodoxy, our heretic is in the same position as the Dagonite. Depending on his own theology, he might or might not be able to fight back just as effectively as the Dagonite can. (Excommunication would turn you Neutral, unless you were anathematized in addition.)
So you’re with us, whoever we are, or you’re against us, whoever we are. Except when you’re not. To the Great Church, only humans are ensouled and favored by the gods. No non-human can ever detect as good. Instead the spell would just fail or give no result. This is true whether the halfling is a mass murderer and serial rapist, or a saintly fellow who wouldn’t harm a fly. An unbaptized human who hasn’t committed himself to or done anything that the Church considers evil would detect as Neutral, even if he’s spent his whole life as saintly as any conventional paladin. An ordained priest, unless he’s gone and converted to some other religion or heretical belief, will always detect as Good. Even if he’s just massacred a whole village full of the children of heretics. A devout, baptized layperson would detect the same way, with the same caveats. Though of course the Good in our layperson would not be as strong as the Good in the priest.
So plane shift, raise dead, and the like are rare. But the clerics aren’t idiots. They can cast commune and resolve this! And they do, though communes are not customarily addressed to the god itself. Rather intercessory saints and angels answer them. Addressing a god directly in a commune, at least in orthodoxy and beliefs influenced by it, would be blasphemous as it would involve uttering the personal name of the deity for reason other than to impart it to a new priest on ordination. Then it would also invite the deity to speak its true voice in your head, and that voice is so pure, righteous, and potent that no mortal flesh can withstand it.
You have to go through the bureaucracy, and those angels and saints are charged with and created to serve in specific roles. The Seraph of Holy War does not have the same perspective as the Saint of Arches or the Cherub of Indoor Plumbing. They will each answer according to their natures. Those answers are silently imparted to your head, not visible or audible to anybody else. So even if they are perfect and right, and you phoned the right extension in the home office, answers given in communes can be easily ignored or dismissed. The caster misunderstood, asked the wrong angel, is lying, or mad, the prayer was intercepted and a false response given, etc.
This is not as true for those outside the Great Church. It depends on the divinities and the worldview, but some of them will answer direct questions honestly and truthfully. Some of them are even omniscient as the usual D&D gods are and can give you pretty accurate answers. But those answers are still bound up in their particular theologies. No one gets off scot-free.
I hope that’s all clear as mud, but you can still get where I’m coming from. :)
I so want to play a Cleric of a heretical cult. A noble who appears to be in good standing of the Great Church.
I so want to play a Cleric of a heretical cult. A noble who appears to be in good standing of the Great Church.
I haven't developed them, but there are some recurring heresies, or I guess themes of heresy. I ought to sit down and do out a basic sketch of what the Great Church’s theology proper actually is, since it would be the natural place to start developing major heresies.
Tentatively one believes in a sort of mystical self-strengthening through allowing demons to tempt you up close and personal. The idea is that you can say you're against the forces of the netherworld but that's easy, like being against burning kittens. Phoning them up, inviting them over, and THEN resisting successfully is True Spirituality (TM). Anybody can pass on the picture of a hot incubus that you see in some folio. When that same hot incubus is in the bed sucking your toes and trying to find where you're ticklish? Call it mortification of the spirit to reach a greater level of holiness. Of course some fall in the quest, but greater levels of sanctity aren’t for everybody.
Something like affirming the rest of the Great Church’s dogmas but thinking arcane magic is unobjectionable would be a heresy too. Maybe some of them even have a god of magic knocking around. Or believing that halflings have souls and should be evangelized, or have certain true insights into the divine. There’s a lot of concept space here.
There would be one or more sorts of paganist heresies that see the gods (really need to write up some more) in a more nature-oriented aspect. The Builder could be a mountain god or an earth god, for example. The Opener of Ways is almost a nature god already, what with being a psychopomp. He could easily become a sort of winter or autumn figure, maybe even an elf king sort that leads a wild hunt and represents predation or battle instead of passing into the afterlife.
Schismatics are of course heretics by nature, and might trace themselves to a disputed election or be the descendents of a losing party when the method to elect the Supreme Patriarch changed. Maybe they think only a church council could change the method for electing the Supreme, so the post has been vacant or occupied by some kind of thrall to demons ever since.
Plus the usual stuff based on different readings of the canon, or slightly different canons. “No, the work ended here and what comes after is a corruption introduced in later times. It is not the word of the gods.” “By all the saints, this heretic owns a copy of the Corpus Pseudoareopagiticum! Burn them immediately.”
I did not mean to send you into yet another fit of 'must finish world'. I was just thinking there is so much opportunity for intrigue within the Great Church (I am a drama queen after all).
I was thinking of a cult that believes some/one of the gods from the Old Faith still exists and works through the Great Church. Or even something more mundane like a Schismatic. In fact, the idea that demihumans do have souls would be something right up my ally.
I did not mean to send you into yet another fit of 'must finish world'.
Worry not; I don't feel like I'm being cajoled and I don't take the posts as assignments. I'm having fun. :)
I was just thinking there is so much opportunity for intrigue within the Great Church (I am a drama queen after all).
One of the ideas in the background when I write for the setting is to make it a big awful mess that creates its own plots for me. I have trouble creating fresh plots, at least the layered, involved kind, just out of nowhere. Too many moving parts. Letting the world dynamics carry some of that load is very helpful for how my mind works.
I was thinking of a cult that believes some/one of the gods from the Old Faith still exists and works through the Great Church. Or even something more mundane like a Schismatic. In fact, the idea that demihumans do have souls would be something right up my ally.
All three could coexist in a single heresy, however much such might produce bricks in Inquisition privies.
Letting the world dynamics carry some of that load is very helpful for how my mind works.
You should get your players to carry some of that load as well. Backgrounds. Use them. Something else I recently saw suggested was to ask each of your players to give you one or two things they would like to see in the game. It can be as big, small, simple or complicated as they want. Something like, "I would like to create something like a light saber"
I had a player in a Fantasy campaign that was still high on Star Wars and wanted to create something similar to Jedi in my world.
All three could coexist in a single heresy, however much such might produce bricks in Inquisition privies.
One would think any heresy would produce aforementioned bricks. Although, I suppose, the size of the brick would increase when the heresy was committed by someone of standing within the Great Church.
You should get your players to carry some of that load as well. Backgrounds. Use them. Something else I recently saw suggested was to ask each of your players to give you one or two things they would like to see in the game. It can be as big, small, simple or complicated as they want. Something like, "I would like to create something like a light saber"
Sure, but it's a lot harder to give that kind of satisfaction in a PBEM unless the goals are awfully small. I've tried, but sometimes I get back answers like "I want to found an order of knighthood and build an enormous temple to my god."
I can appreciate the ambition, but both are involved, complicated goals that would take a while in realtime and it's much harder to service them usefully in a PBEM where they might get fluffed up once or twice a month unless they're already the focus of the game. The impact of ten minutes in person is usually higher than that of two or three emails a month.
It probably doesn't help that I tend to lean on modules and thus have to wrap things around that skeleton, but I've found that when I go without things get ambiguous and confusing pretty quickly. I've done it three times, once going all the way to the lengths of trying to create the whole game of the interactions between the party and a group of defined antagonists on the fly, and all three times the party ended up confused and directionless.
I can't really blame the players, though. Part of it is just PBEMing, where most posts are done on a few minutes' thought in between doing other things. It's easy to get confused or lose the plot. One of my guys has told me he views plot as sort of a luxury in PBEMs and just tries to take the fun as it comes. I don't think that's unfair, since I've been guilty too. One of my current two PBEM characters has a personality, but his motivation amounts to testing his skills against what comes. He ends up as more of a rules exercise. I like him, and my DM is far from awful, but the role-playing feedback loop is harder to sustain.
All three could coexist in a single heresy, however much such might produce bricks in Inquisition privies.One would think any heresy would produce aforementioned bricks. Although, I suppose, the size of the brick would increase when the heresy was committed by someone of standing within the Great Church.
Certainly. It's a scale thing. Being off on one or two points is a problem, and the Inquisition is there to fix it. Being off on a pile of major points all at once and together comes across as a more serious attempt to corrupt the Church. Being off on them and being a priest is still more serious: "You should know better! People trust you with their souls and you're leading them into threefold sin!"
I guess a good analogy would be some kind of serious crime committed by an ordinary person vs. one committed by law enforcement (and there have been Inquisitors who went rogue) or someone in political leadership.
I keep forgetting you are thinking PBEM with all of this. I concede it is much easier to make background meaningful when your player bugs you every week when is he going to meet Master Windu.
You and I seem to agree there are greater and lesser evils. I am not so sure it is quite that blurry for religious zealots. Dare I mention the WBC?
The entire point of my afore mentioned character would be that he would be in a world of hurt if anyone uncovered his 'dark' secret.
Fifth Column¹!
¹V reference in case you do not follow.
I keep forgetting you are thinking PBEM with all of this. I concede it is much easier to make background meaningful when your player bugs you every week when is he going to meet Master Windu.
That's ok. I often forget other people don't have my logistics issues. I tried playing live with real fleshly people with bodily functions and faces and such once for about eight months.
It went poorly. A friend volunteered me to DM and I agreed thinking that this was a new group forming. It turned out to be an old group that had just temporarily broken up when their old DM had to take a break. So extra rough for a social phobic like me with, let's be honest, limited people skills. :) We switched DMs after about six weeks. (They told me it had happened after they decided. Thanks guys. I would have stepped aside if asked.)
The new guy was a kill 'em all by DM fiat sort. No adventure was complete without an instant-kill, no save death trap. Often without any reason given. (It was more common to just hear "Ok, you're dead." without a reason than with it.) I was kind of rolling with it, if unhappily, until things started getting more punitive and it became clear the DM just didn't want to deal with anything over 9th level PCs. Everybody managed to die before then. Then he decided since we didn't know how to play to live, anybody who died started over at first level. I protested on the grounds that the other guys were still roughly ninth level. He insisted that he could handle it and if we were smart, so could we. Nevermind the minimum damage on a 3.0 ninth or tenth level fireball being enough to roast most 3.0 first level PCs regardless of save. He invited his wife to chew me out at length when I posted a list of reasons the first level among the ninths was a poor idea.
But I was ready to give it a few more sessions and see if I was wrong because I chose to ignore all the other flack I was getting, reaching the point where most of my characters died by concept. ("You're a halfling? Well the bad guy didn't like your last halfling so now there's a genocide against them." I suffocated in a bounty hunter's bag of holding, which would have been funny if it was an isolated thing. I was up to bringing two or three backup PCs and the guy who came in with me was in the same boat.) So when rescheduling the weekly sessions to accommodate those of us going to college in the fall, they deliberately picked the one night me and guy I knew had a night class. We weren't told until he'd killed both of our PCs, again, had us reaching for our backups, and then said, "I don't know why you guys are even bothering since we're going to meet on Thursdays from now on."
Well yeah, now that he said something.
If any of this sounds familiar it's because the other guy who joined the group with me posted the story on ENWorld in 2002. I did like two of the guys, but one was best friends with the killer DM so I wasn't going to get anywhere on that front despite his being a nice guy I saw for years after at the town bookstore. The other got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of the game.
Aside that, all my in-person gaming has been one-on-one affairs or close enough (briefly two players and one DM) that it didn't matter. I'm not eager to try again, not that I have a lot of chance in a small town in the Midwest to begin with.
You and I seem to agree there are greater and lesser evils. I am not so sure it is quite that blurry for religious zealots. Dare I mention the WBC?
I can think of a lot of real world examples of an inability to appreciate magnitudes of offenses. Sometimes it makes a little sense if we're talking about really fundamental human rights stuff. In the Inquisition I think it would depend. Some heresy would be worse than others, but it would all still be very bad, and the political dynamics would probably mean that the more people knew the more draconian things would have to be. Otherwise they're sending a message that heterodoxy is ok and to the Great Church that's an existential threat.
The default position is probably to burn first and ask questions later, but there would be decent inquisitors who try to talk people down or watch them and investigate for a long time before moving too. Just killing everyone is wasteful if most of them are dupes or low-level nobodies. The Inquisition really wants to get to the heart of the matter.
Doubts expressed in a fictionalized way ("A person might say that...") would probably be acceptable of a priest who kept his nose clean and took pains to color within the lines in public. I have in the back of my mind dim memories of an objection a monk made to Anselm's ontological argument. Obviously he didn't want to say it was a bad argument or at all dodgy, since the conclusion was that the god they shared really did exist. So he phrased his objection as coming from a fool, which would be another way around it.
Public preaching, recruiting followers, writing things down and letting them be circulated, especially in a modern language, would be a very different matter even if one encountered a rather open-minded inquisitor who would rather spend his time killing demons than policing priests.
As a matter of policy, at the very least all supernatural evils are the same. Anything to do with demons, arcane magic, and the like would be equally unacceptable to the point that it probably makes a lot of inquisition detective work a bit harder. They don't preserve writings of their foes or anything like that, and so would be left with oral histories of their seniors and lots of on the job training, plus lots of mostly-wrong witch hunting books and heresiology written by anyone from an actual inquisitor in the field to stuff transcribed from an anchorite rambling in his cell.
Heresy would probably be suspected from the start of having demonic authorship and the hierarchy wouldn't think less of an Inquisitor who proceeded on that assumption, but there would be more room for individuals to be more tolerant.
The entire point of my afore mentioned character would be that he would be in a world of hurt if anyone uncovered his 'dark' secret.
He would be. I don't want to portray the Inquisition as just a bunch of Taliban fanatics, though that's certainly a lot of them. I have it in mind that in an actual game set in the Churchlands there should be room to color outside the lines and if nothing else give party members legitimate ways to be both relatively devout followers of the major religion and coexist with those who differ. But of course nowhere near so much room as to let someone think it's ok.
It occurs to me that I have experienced this dynamic in my own life, though in retrospect the analogy is obvious. There are places on the fringes of society, even in the most Churchiest areas, where heretics could covertly gather and discuss amongst themselves. But the risk of discovery would be constant and finding a group of heretics is way worse than finding one. Heretics who do have regular meeting places are probably dependent on sympathetic nobles or local gangsters to keep the authorities away. (Family ties, especially among the nobility, can go a long ways. Bringing shame on the family can complicate its political fortunes. Almost everything about the nobility runs on family ties and personal connections.) A lot can go on privately in a noble's household before the Inquisition knocks down the door.
Fifth Column¹!¹V reference in case you do not follow.
I've only seen the first four episodes of the new series from last year, plus a half-watched one from tonight. I didn't like how unambiguously evil the aliens were and would have preferred more depth. But I guess it's a reimagining of an equally black and white show from the 80s so that's par for the course.
The eye candy was also slated heavily towards tastes other than mine, but I'm used to that.
It went poorly.
Holy crap! I thought I had experienced some bad groups.
I don't want to portray the Inquisition as just a bunch of Taliban fanatics, though that's certainly a lot of them.
I did not get that impression. Obviously, the fanatical ones are the ones everyone talks about and fears. I assumed that most members of the Great Church love their children just like everyone else and likely have their own sympathies and prejudices.
The eye candy was also slated heavily towards tastes other than mine, but I'm used to that.
I find Morena Baccarin quite attractive and enjoyed her in Firefly. Her acting in V is stiff at best and I would like to lay most of that at the feet of the writers for the show. However, looking back, maybe I was cutting her too much slack in Firefly because of the surrounding talent. Her character is so two dimensional it hurts. When will science fiction writers learn to be consistent with logical, non-emotional characters?
Elizabeth Mitchell is also attractive in an unusual way. Her character also feels too flimsy to be real. Her on and off motherhood feels like more plot manipulation than organic. This also diminishes her appeal for me.
Laura Vandervoort is completely meh for me. I understand that many males may find her very appealing. I am just not overly fond of the stereotypical blonde hair, blue eyes (despite Elizabeth's appeal).
I find Morris Chestnut attractive. I do not know if he is your 'type' and they certainly do not flaunt his attributes like they do Lauras.
Charles Mesure has, in my opinion, the most interesting character, but he is not what I would consider 'attractive'. I would certainly give him some charisma, but that takes longer to shine through. You just do not get that immediate, "Oh hello!" response.
I didn't like how unambiguously evil the aliens were and would have preferred more depth.
That's it! You hit upon why I find the show so blah. I was trying to pin it down last night after they went on this 'it's all about the soul' thing. I was thinking it was because of its obvious religious sympathy and 'technology is bad' theme. However, I think you are right. The villains are so vile as to be unbelievable. "Oh look! Our villain is pretty…but EVIL" Yawn. Been there. Done that.
Caprica had a lot of religious undertones and the re-occuring theme that man, through technology, will be his own undoing. But it was good. V is…meh…at best. I just can not bring myself to care about the characters. The villains belong in a comic book where we accept that despite them being far superior our own resilience will win the day. Gah! It just makes the villains look incompetent.
I don't want to portray the Inquisition as just a bunch of Taliban fanatics, though that's certainly a lot of them.I did not get that impression. Obviously, the fanatical ones are the ones everyone talks about and fears. I assumed that most members of the Great Church love their children just like everyone else and likely have their own sympathies and prejudices.
Certainly they do. The Inquisition tends to attract the more militant crusader types, while the sorts who want to help people through difficult times are left laboring elsewhere. I imagine that some
circuit-riding priests know that the villages they serve have some kind of traditional curse-breakers, cunning folk, druids a few miles off into the woods, and so forth and just don't mention it to their superiors as long as things seem relatively harmless.Of course the hierarchy is not dominated by broad-minded priests with their focus on pastoral care, as advancement requires a lot of energy devoted to making the right connections.
The eye candy was also slated heavily towards tastes other than mine, but I'm used to that.I find Morena Baccarin quite attractive and enjoyed her in Firefly. Her acting in V is stiff at best and I would like to lay most of that at the feet of the writers for the show. However, looking back, maybe I was cutting her too much slack in Firefly because of the surrounding talent. Her character is so two dimensional it hurts. When will science fiction writers learn to be consistent with logical, non-emotional characters?
I can appreciate that the show is giving some of its cheesecake allowance to someone who isn't a traditional transparent-skinned blonde stick figure, though Baccarin isn't very far off Hollywood's ideal body type at all. I haven't watched the show enough to really have an opinion on her acting. I skipped Firefly so I can't say from there.
So far as non-emotional, logical characters go I think a lot of writers labor under some very strange ideas about what being logical entails. Apparently its main use is to make one an unimaginative, amoral ass. I quite like Spock, as he's described. He's a guy who has labored hard to clarify his thinking and set aside his biases in favor of dispassionate examination. Who could object to that? But in practice this resulted in him picking the more callous and more brutal of two options whenever the dilemma arose.
Elizabeth Mitchell is also attractive in an unusual way. Her character also feels too flimsy to be real. Her on and off motherhood feels like more plot manipulation than organic. This also diminishes her appeal for me.
She played what I thought was one of the more believable, less idiotic characters on Lost. Granted that's not saying much on a show that included Jack and Locke and a writers' room that thought Jack was a logical, stable type for three years despite his messianic delusions and general weirdness.
The early promos heavily featured her and her son and I started watching thinking that this would be a show with a lot to do about parenthood and parent-child relationships. I knew I was wrong two episodes in, which was disappointing since I tend to prefer those kinds of dramatic focus points in my genre fiction. Most romance will always be straight and thus a bit academic to me, and I'm not a father myself, but I trained to be a teacher and I'm extremely close to my own parents. I wouldn't say Logan Huffman is a great actor, not that he was hired to be, but they set up a decent dramatic well to partake of to help humanize the show's conflict...and then didn't do much with it. Maybe there was more in the last 3/4 of the first season, but by then I'd given up.
I actually watched last night's episode because I turned on the wrong channel and lost track of time. I meant to be watching Parenthood, which has those layered parent-child relationships in abundance. Not
that it doesn't have its own raft of issues, of course.
I find Morris Chestnut attractive. I do not know if he is your 'type' and they certainly do not flaunt his attributes like they do Lauras.
Not exactly. He's not ugly by any means, but he's a bit too muscled for me. I don't need my guys to be stick figures but once they get very bulgey about the limbs it makes them seem more brutish to me. To a certain degree, I think I just see the generic male silhouette in media (a bit chesty, obvious muscles, big shoulders) as a bit stale. I read that they actually made the actors on The Next Generation wore
muscle suits under their space tights to achieve the look. To me that's the male version of the blonde clothes rack with blue eyes.Not that my interests have to be male clothes racks, but my happy middle is closer to the skinny, svelte end than the bodybuilder end.
Charles Mesure has, in my opinion, the most interesting character, but he is not what I would consider 'attractive'. I would certainly give him some charisma, but that takes longer to shine through. You just do not get that immediate, "Oh hello!" response.
I'm out of my depth. I looked him up and still can't place him. Must be because I've only seen five episodes. :)
I didn't like how unambiguously evil the aliens were and would have preferred more depth.That's it! You hit upon why I find the show so blah. I was trying to pin it down last night after they went on this 'it's all about the soul' thing. I was thinking it was because of its obvious religious
sympathy and 'technology is bad' theme. However, I think you are right. The villains are so vile as to be unbelievable. "Oh look! Our villain is pretty…but EVIL" Yawn. Been there. Done that.
My biases being what they are, I'm very disinclined to cut a show slack when it starts getting into the whole religion good, science bad angle or the faith good, reason bad angle. Science fiction has an amazing history of making science the sort of thing you'd only be interested in if you were the kind of guy who boils little puppies alive. But if it's not too heavy-handed and the story is reasonably good I can set it aside. I like the new Doctor Who, and it's pretty much the story of a traveling wizard who claims he's a kind of scientist. I liked a lot of the new Battlestar Galactica, until it became obvious they were just making it up as they went and then they all shot their brains off into the sun. I could have handled the show ending with the fleet committing mass suicide, if they were honest about it. But they cheated and it really bugged the hell out of me.
My hope for V was that even if the aliens were meant to be the clear bad guys there would be some kind of constructive engagement with them. You can see how a person in the world might think they were decent, but in what I saw the only main character who really thought that was an idiot teenager. By contrast the priest and FBI agent come off as wild xenophobes, the former more worried about his business interests being threatened than anything else. And then the show makes them right in the most glaring, obvious ways. I really wanted to see the otherness of the aliens played up for a season or so as we slowly find out that they're creepy and then have their being evil, if they had to be, a major revelation rather than something we know by the end of the pilot.
I didn't mind that in the show's universe the soul exists. Knowing that, the immediate reaction for the Vs made perfectly good sense: let's set out to analyze it. But I doubt the show is going to follow
through. Instead we're going to find out souls are magic, yet again, and somehow unknowable despite apparently everyone agreeing that they exist and thus knowing them anyways. It's a cheap cheat. Now if the show decides that the soul is some part of the brain and the Vs can reconfigure it or whatever, that would present a much more interesting situation. Babylon 5 effectively did that with souls and I appreciated the effort to make sense, but Straczynski's an atheist so he probably came at it from a similar angle to mine.
Bah, my linebreaks got all screwed up when I copied and pasted from the browser into notepad to write half the post, then did the same back. Sorry about that.
I can't express enough how much I've enjoyed reading this thread. Thanks for sharing this stuff with us.
A question: How patriarchal are the Churchlands? What is the general status of women in society? Having the high muckety-mucks of the Church actually referred to as "Patriarchs" implies a male-dominated hierarchy (even though I know you mention a few female Supreme Patriarchs.) Is the title supposed to infer and reinforce that, or is that incidental? The Builder seems to be the most active/influential deity, and has a very fatherly/masculine vibe to him, but the presence of the genderless Sublime Thought and the Three-Eyed Queen (along with whomever else you haven't shared with us yet) indicates that the religion acknowledges the divinity of non-males. Do they accordingly grant non-male mortals equal respect as males, or is this inverted (especially with the ultra-creepy Undying Anchorites representing the gender-neutral deity)? Like the old-school Christian idea of Mary being beloved because of her role as Jesus's mom, but men are still in charge because God's a guy and Peter was the first Pope and the Bible says so? (Or something. I hope you get what I'm saying there. Also, not trying to offend Christians.)
Just curious on what your thoughts are about this. I'm sure you're no stranger to the intricacies and interaction of gender- and sex-based language, religious thought, politics, and social roles :)
The Deep Blue Sea in Folklore
Churchlanders, especially those who live inland, harbor deep misgivings about the sea. All know it to be full of strange creatures more monster than animal, things with tentacles and staring lidless eyes. Huge leviathans rest uneasily in its endless depths. The sea is a living thing as much as a place, and a living thing inimical to godly men. From it come gigantic storms that lash the coasts, and even weather that would be merely unpleasant on land can swamp ships, turn them over, and kill all within. Sky can become sea and sea can become sky. In the ocean there is evil and madness, endless peril.
Worse still, going to sea changes you. Everybody knows that the Todary are queer and they ply the seas only to travel between nearby islands. It’s made them strange, and the far-sailing halflings are downright perverse in their cursed, contrary natures and diminutive form. They were men once, the stories say. But now they are something soulless, more animal than person however hidden they might be in cunning skins and the forms of men, betrayed by their ears and their strange markings and colors.
From the sea come the wicked men of the Isles of Sorcery, ever come to enslave and take their victims back to some unimaginable place where false gods and demons rule openly, consorting with wizards and their strange, blasphemous ways. If with different colors, they too like the halflings are addled and taken from the natural tones of flesh and hair.
Once the Great Church tried to reach across the waves, but it came to ruin and those who went and returned came with the strangeness of the sea upon them. They brought gifts from cloaked demon masters who wooed them with fine mantles, too fine in fact, and wood from trees watered in the blood of the righteous with branches that were swarms of snakes.
To this day the dark wizards, sorcerer-kings the lot, send tremendous storms that wrack the Todarese lands and sometimes other coasts and the Church speaks no more of bringing the truth to those far shores beyond the circles of the world. Something, the old folk say, was found there that man was not to know lest it rip his soul from his body. When the diabolists fled with their strange ways, it is no accident that they fled to the isles for the sea is the hinterland of hell itself.
Along the coasts fisherfolk ply their trade, eating things best left untouched but even they dare not venture from sight of shore for the sure knowledge they would be forever lost, or changed and made less than human.
The Deep Blue Sea outside of Folklore
Churchlanders have several reasons, aside their stories, to be extremely wary of the open sea. Pirates, some halfling, some from the Sorcerous Isles, and some other things entirely ply its waters. Slavers, almost never halflings, do sail into hidden coves at night and make off with the unwary to sell in the isles. On occasion whole seaside villages have vanished.
Those Churchlanders do ply the sea often return with strange ideas and ways otherwise unknown on godly shores. They do not fit into Churchlands society well at all, being neither noble nor serf, townsman nor farmer. Like sailors of any era, they can come into port ready to raise hell and not all of them behave themselves. Their places are in the roughest parts of port cities and on their ships they mix with ungodly, perverse people. They go to places that are genuinely terrifying, where the Great Church itself no longer seeks to spread.
Moreover, any Churchlander who has seen a ship of the isles or the halflings in port (though peaceful trade with the humans of the isles is quite rare) can tell at a glance how very different it is. Churchlanders build small, light ships for fishing that rarely go much beyond an overgrown rowboat with a simple sail and rigging. For war they build galleys crewed by teams of rowers. Neither is well-suited to plying the open ocean and both are designed with the expectation of mooring in sight of land every night. Actually sleeping on board, which some fisherfolk and galley crews do from time to time, produces strange dreams and horrible nightmares. The pitching of the boat itself can be enough to make many Churchlanders sick. The Todarese are somewhat braver, but even they stay close to shore and have more reason than most to fear the strange men of the sea due to their being the most convenient victims of slave raids.
The halflings and the people of the isles operate a totally different sort of ship with many sails, complicated rigging, and the like that makes a Churchlander dizzy just to think about. How such ships manage the changing winds and return time and time again to the same ports is something that has baffled Churchlander scholars, even among the best and brightest.
Something about going to sea is just fundamentally, on a gut level, wrong. It’s not like the still freshwater you can drink and see across. The disorientation and confusion of it can be genuinely maddening, which explains why the halflings are so skilled and the people of the isles so wicked.
And that’s before one takes into account the sea monsters, storms, and the like which do seem to afflict Churchlander ships much more and more intensely than they do the ships of others. All of it adds up to keep Churchlands seamanship at a rudimentary, fearful level compared to their contemporaries.
I can't express enough how much I've enjoyed reading this thread. Thanks for sharing this stuff with us.
You're very welcome. I'm still a bit amazed (and tickled!) that other people find this stuff interesting. There's still more to come, though now that I've blown through most of my old notes it will probably come in smaller doses.
A question: How patriarchal are the Churchlands? What is the general status of women in society?
The short answer is that they’re less than their historical inspirations but more than we’d like. The plan, to the degree that I’ve got one, is for around half the Great Church’s deities to be female and for most of them to have priesthoods that are if not exclusively female than at least largely so.
I’ve got a bad habit of slipping into andronormative writing when I’m thinking in an old-timey sort of way and trying to imagine how the Churchlanders would phrase things too. It’s definitely not helping.
The general normative position is that most women are supposed to be housewives and mothers, but women who are not are not necessarily stigmatized. (Well unless they also start acting like they might be into some heresy or paganism or whatever. That’s different and women living independently are probably at higher risk for such accusations.) I mean to write up several paths for women to advance and have influence, success, and the like in their own right but my thoughts on it are still pretty undeveloped.
I’ve put off an article on the typical Churchlands aristocracy and nobility because most of it is extremely feudal and probably stuff we all know already, but my intention when I get there is for most titles (the rules vary for each title and fief, with some being right in letters patent and others coming out of customs and private house law while still others are influenced by Blessed-Empire wide or general Marcher laws) have at least a method for women to succeed to them but some will be exclusively male and others exclusively female. There’s also a midrange option where a title can come to the gender other than specified, but there’s no mechanism for determining which of multiple other-gendered heirs would have precedence. In those cases the title can fall into abeyance until those lines are extinct and we’re down to one candidate again or become easy prey for avaricious neighbors since technically “no one” owns it at the moment.
Yes, it’s meant to be a horrible mess. :)
Culturally the Kative are fairly patriarchal and the Todarese rather more egalitarian. The Cyrry (not written up yet, but I’m pretty sure that’s their name) are somewhere in between and a yet-unnamed fourth culture would be planned as more matriarchal.
Having the high muckety-mucks of the Church actually referred to as "Patriarchs" implies a male-dominated hierarchy (even though I know you mention a few female Supreme Patriarchs.) Is the title supposed to infer and reinforce that, or is that incidental?
The title would flip to Supreme Matriarch in the event of a female officeholder, and the regular Patriarchs would be regular Matriarchs. Succession to various Church titles can be complicated by their attached secular fiefs, which might have male-only or female-only rules that would kick the wealth and influence that come with the fiefs off to someone else or leave the position open if someone of the “wrong” gender took the associated Church position.
Separately I’m not totally happy with those titles as named, but I’m bad at naming stuff. I don’t want to just call the head of the Church the Pope because it feels a bit artless. I'm sure someone from an Eastern Orthodox background feels the same way about Patriarch, of course. :)
The Builder seems to be the most active/influential deity, and has a very fatherly/masculine vibe to him, but the presence of the genderless Sublime Thought and the Three-Eyed Queen (along with whomever else you haven't shared with us yet) indicates that the religion acknowledges the divinity of non-males.
The other gods haven’t really been written yet, even in my notes. I know I want more, though. (In my head there’s some kind of Goddess of Homes and Hearth and a potentially female war deity.) The Builder is meant to be the sort of King of Heaven guy in themes, if not theology, and most prominent of the Great Church deities. He might be on his way to being a monotheistic god. Certainly there’s no cultural aversion to female divinity in itself.
Do they accordingly grant non-male mortals equal respect as males, or is this inverted (especially with the ultra-creepy Undying Anchorites representing the gender-neutral deity)? Like the old-school Christian idea of Mary being beloved because of her role as Jesus's mom, but men are still in charge because God's a guy and Peter was the first Pope and the Bible says so? (Or something. I hope you get what I'm saying there. Also, not trying to offend Christians.)
Martin Luther described Mary as something like a sack that once held some saffron: it smelled nice, but it was still just a sack. He was objecting to what he saw as Catholicism’s too-generous treatment of her. Ouch.
I’m thinking that gender roles skew mostly cultural rather than religious per se. Of course they’re sacralized within the cultures and the Church probably inherits much of its default positions from the culture most influential in its founding (the aforementioned and still unwritten Cyrry) but there isn’t in itself a theological objection to a woman being in charge. Yes some of the gods are guys but some are also women and those gods aren’t loser nobody gods you can just ignore. The Three-Eyed Queen might sound like she’s just a soul scanner sitting on a throne but she is not a goddess to be trifled with and you can believe that aggravating her is going to ding you with a big pile of sin.
Those creepy Anchorites have traditional genders and inherited personal names that have become titles that go along with them. Each anchorite picks a successor according to certain historical preferences, which reflect subtly different roles, but the criteria are intended to be a bit strange and very esoteric. I have it in mind that two to four of the anchorites always pick the other gender for their successor and thus alternate. Whether or not gender matters once one has inherited the office is the kind of thing that the Thought’s monastics probably spend a lot of time thinking about.
Now that I’m thinking on it I think I’ve stacked the deck a little bit against myself in that I’ve ruled out fertility gods as being too naturey for the Great Church’s “civilized” ethos. Where are most of the female depictions of divinity? Especially as a positive and potent force? Fertility goddesses, but the Earth Mother is the kind of thing the Great Church would not like one bit.
Still I got a little bit of fertility in with the Three-Eyed Queen. If neither of us notifies the Inquisition I’m sure it’ll be fine. :)
Just curious on what your thoughts are about this. I'm sure you're no stranger to the intricacies and interaction of gender- and sex-based language, religious thought, politics, and social roles :)
It’s hard. I struggle with it in my own life, being raised in a rather patriarchal family that has become less so over time. Certainly it’s rough to draw inspiration from the real world and its extremely patriarchal (and heteronormative) past, especially with an intention to keep some of the unpleasant bits, and still create something that doesn’t come off as a sexist male power fantasy.
I’m always debating how icky something can or should be, since I want verisimilitude but I don’t want to also just import every damned thing that we suffer with on top of all the wild fantasy problems. To some degree, we game to get away from that stuff and that’s not a totally unreasonable desire.
Years ago I was on a mailing list with a guy who explained sexuality in genre fiction and gaming, separating two particular methods. The first was the Gay Utopia, where nobody cares and homosexuality is completely interchangeable with heterosexuality so far as the cultures and people we meet are concerned. That sounds great, when can we move there?
But he noticed at the time that this depiction usually came from straight creators. Some of that’s understandable, since most people are straight. Certainly much of it must come from at least a halfway decent place, since it would be far easier to pretend we didn’t exist than to take the time to write about how we do and everyone is cool with it. It does, however, carry a sort of tinge of being there and taken care of so now the creator need not deal with it and can be a bit inauthentic. Does it matter if there are gay characters if nobody notices or cares? At some point it becomes purely cosmetic, which is so different from how my life actually runs that it might as well be on the same level as hurling fireballs and teleporting, or for that matter from not acknowledging us at all.
By contrast he’d noticed that gay creators tended to write situations more rooted in contemporary reality where some characters were fine with it, others leery, and others deeply opposed. That’s our lives, so it stands to reason. But dealing with the issue as a controversy requires that we deal with the controversy. This of course means the author has to take sides, or at least have characters take sides. That means the reader has to deal with it, and many genre readers can get pretty hostile about what they consider real world politics getting into their fantasy.
I’m personally rather cavalier about those sensibilities because firstly I’m a genuine gay person who is writing mostly for himself and a presumed gaming audience that’s mostly my buddies for years now. But there’s more than just that.
My own development and understanding of the issues is deeply informed by reading Mercedes Lackey in the tenth grade and, forgive me, Anne Rice about the same time. (I’ve done much less, less than I really ought to have, reading of formal writing on gender and sexuality issues.) Both dealt very frankly with male-male affection and Lackey gave me my first real idea of what being gay actually entailed. Granted Rice’s gay-ish characters were bisexual porcelain statues that drank blood and to my recollection never encountered serious prejudice, but you get the idea. Both, naturally, seemed very novel to me at the time but not at all foreign. I think the two had a major impact on how I came to see genre fiction.
Not that everything reflects my personal kinks, of course. I’ve tried to mix things I like with things that I rather dislike aesthetically so that cultures and races I’m writing don’t turn into my personal pornography. :)
Overall though, yeah, I’m trying to include more diversity in a lot of things. I want the setting to feel pseudohistorical and pseudoeuropean (at least for the Churchlands proper, the Isles of Sorcery are more tropical and weird) but not just be Europe in drag. Fantasy is a distant place where they do things differently. But my inspirations and my inclinations do not get along well sometimes and often need a bit of smoothing out.
On naming the churchlands…
Blessed Aquitaini Empire?
I have always just liked the name Aquatain.
Given that The Builder was the one that started unifying the church, maybe Architect or Grand Architect instead of Patriarch?
On naming the churchlands…
Blessed Aquitaini Empire?
I have always just liked the name Aquatain.
That's not bad. The Empire would be the Blesssed Aquitaini Empire and the subcontinent could be Aquitain or Aquitainia or something like that.
Given that The Builder was the one that started unifying the church, maybe Architect or Grand Architect instead of Patriarch?
Decent. Architect something, or something (Ecumenical? Catholic is out for obvious reasons.) Architect to make it sound like more than just the Builder's church after it ate the others, but that does sound like the right tree to be barking up.
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Just a short note to say that I'm definitely enjoying reading this thread with the minefield of ideas and conceptuals!
Although I am looking forward to the notes regarding Halflings & the Sea, two of my favourite themes in fantasy! By halflings, I mean, the not-so-portly 3rd ed.-pathfindery /kender /Athasian kin.
But everything else about the sea -made of WIN! :D
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ps: Charles Mesure is frigging hot!- since I saw him as Archangel Michael on Xena: WP!
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Just a short note to say that I'm definitely enjoying reading this thread with the minefield of ideas and conceptuals!
Thanks!
Feel free to yoink anything you like. I stole the lion's share of it myself. :)
Although I am looking forward to the notes regarding Halflings & the Sea, two of my favourite themes in fantasy! By halflings, I mean, the not-so-portly 3rd ed.-pathfindery /kender /Athasian kin.
My halfling have the 3e/PF body type, more sexy Elijah Wood halflings than tubby 19th century politicians. They're all about the sea and sailing, even up to having a rather watery religion.
And they're forthcoming. I've been busy over the weekend and distracted by other topics (fiddling with a space for "wild men" along the margins of society), but you should see a halfling post in the next few days.
But everything else about the sea -made of WIN! :D
I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote the post, but I did nearly drown once as a child. Maybe that played into seeing a big body of water as a sanity-shattering mass of chaos. I still can't swim and I live half a mile from Lake Huron. It'll probably kill me someday. :)
Thanks!Feel free to yoink anything you like. I stole the lion's share of it myself. :)
Rowr! I get to yoink you? Yea!
My halfling have the 3e/PF body type, more sexy Elijah Wood halflings than tubby 19th century politicians. They're all about the sea and sailing, even up to having a rather watery religion.And they're forthcoming. I've been busy over the weekend and distracted by other topics (fiddling with a space for "wild men" along the margins of society), but you should see a halfling post in the next few days.
Certainly there's no rush to read them. Its your work and I'm just a patient reader waiting on this side of the internets. Take your time with your 'wild men' till your thoroughly sated, as they should be taken. :D
Hooray for sexy halflings! It does seem apropos to a sea-faring culture of sun and sails, rigging and rope, wind, waves and elemental exposure. Have I mentioned sexy tanned skin yet?
A 'watery' religion ... deific-estic beliefs or closer to philosophical life approach (shintoism/east asian)?
I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote the post, but I did nearly drown once as a child. Maybe that played into seeing a big body of water as a sanity-shattering mass of chaos. I still can't swim and I live half a mile from Lake Huron. It'll probably kill me someday. :)
A decade ago, when traveling the mid-West: I recall standing alone at the end of a wooden pier in the gray chill of Fall, watching the rippled black waves and shock white crests slam across and splinter into fine sprays against my face. It was both violent and calm to watch the flat expanse of gray sky and turbulent lake waters. The memory is still exhilirating! but very personal I doubt a good swimmer will do well in the unforgiving frigid currents.
And don't say what will kill you one day ... it saddens me :( I'm real sensitive that way.
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Certainly there's no rush to read them. Its your work and I'm just a patient reader waiting on this side of the internets. Take your time with your 'wild men' till your thoroughly sated, as they should be taken. :D
I don't feel like I'm missing deadlines. Just a new idea jumped to the front of the line and disrupted plans. :)
A decade ago, when traveling the mid-West: I recall standing alone at the end of a wooden pier in the gray chill of Fall, watching the rippled black waves and shock white crests slam across and splinter into fine sprays against my face. It was both violent and calm to watch the flat expanse of gray sky and turbulent lake waters. The memory is still exhilirating! but very personal I doubt a good swimmer will do well in the unforgiving frigid currents.
Especially when the lake freezes. But if it makes you feel better, the water of Lake Huron has only touched my skin in the course of entering my digestive system or showering for the past fifteen years or so. Maybe longer. I can't remember the last time I was actually in the lake. I was briefly on a teacher's sailboat in 2001 and suppose I probably took some spray then. I haven't even been in a swimming pool since the mid-90s.
Anyway, halfling post to follow.
This is naturally going to focus on halflings who visit the Churchlands heavily and how they behave there, rather than how they might interact with other cultures elsewhere. Be advised that this gets a bit Freudian at points.
Halflings
Most Churchlanders (Aquitainians? Aquitaini? Aquitainii?) would never see a halfling, but all know a great deal about them. They are soulless, child stealing half-humans. Their nature is perverse and contrary to all godly ways, if not quite outright evil. Worse, their nature and ways corrupt kidnapped children and slowly transforms them into halflings. Even adults who go forth on their ships can return changed in strange ways. Land-dwelling halflings, a distinct minority, thus live on a razor’s edge. Perversity itself is not a cause for violence or expulsion in ordinary times, and as they are without souls charges of heresy or infidelity do not necessarily apply. But they are extremely vulnerable to scapegoating in hard times.
Halflings do not think of themselves as halflings, or as cursed. What are they half of? Not humans, who are obviously twice the size they ought to be. Cursed? What would the human gods have to do with them? They are emphatically not human. Though they will use the term with humans, halflings refer to themselves as the Free People.
Physical Description
Halflings are fair of skin but that skin bears many natural markings, usually geometric in nature, in greens and blues, or more rarely reds and oranges. The markings run very strongly in families and generally occur all in one color. Most common on the face and chest, these markings are usually symmetrical. As signs of their heritage, halflings are quite proud of the markings and abhor tattooing as obscuring or distracting from them. For personal decoration they instead practice piercing, sometimes in considerable abundance.
Halflings generally have blue or green eyes, much as a human might, but their hair ranges in wild colors natural to no human known in the Churchlands. Worn long and often shaggy by men and women alike, halflings sport such exotic hair colors as purple (bright and dark), green (usually bright, rarely dark), white, and even a dark shade of pink. Substantial minorities of halflings possess two of these colors in a single head of hair, but more than two is unheard of. Ordinary black, brown, red, and yellow hair is virtually unknown, except when achieved by artifice. Aside the tops of their heads, halflings are not at all hirsute and the halfling that can grow even faint whiskers is an extreme oddity.
Halfing are, by human standards, very short indeed but maintain healthy proportions and tend towards willowy builds. Few are obviously muscular, but those who are tend to be surprisingly strong for their size.
Halfling Dress
How halflings dress depends greatly on where they are. The stereotypical halfling national dress is light in color, often coordinated with the color of the halfling’s hair. It comprises a very loose shirt worn open for both sexes, though often worn closed in colder weather and rather tight hose. Unlike the Churchlander nobility, elaborately stuffed and adorned codpieces are not in fashion. However, considering the relative heights involved halflings who encounter a nobleman dressed in the highest fashion find this particular quirk of human costume absolutely hilarious.
All the previous holds true on land. A halfling stepping on board ship will immediately remove the top, symbolically shedding the bonds of the land and returning to the role of a Free Person. Though few Churchlanders ever observe it taking place, halflings outside sight of land shed the rest as well save for what’s needed for practical purposes. Harnesses to carry tools or other useful equipment are fairly common, but seen as tools themselves and set aside when the work that required them is completed.
Halfling Lands
Halflings claim no homeland save their enormous ships and the open sea. A halfling at sea is home and one on land is abroad. But in the past significant landed settlements dotted the southern coast of Aquitain (still playing with the name). These settlements are now long abandoned, evacuated or exterminated during the Great Church’s ascendancy when a less numerous and obviously cursed race’s presence became a handy pretext for violence.
Which is not to say that no halflings live their lives on land. Their own independent communities are long gone, but most port cities sport a halfling ghetto. Walled in and small, the ghetto gates are locked at night to keep the halflings in and the possessions, and children, of their human neighbors out. The humans do their best to keep the ghettos small to discourage settlement, but as dealings with halflings generally take place outside the ghetto in human-scaled buildings their idea of how much space is too little for a halfling is rather approximate.
Halfling ghettos are natural first choices when anti-halfling fervor touches off, and as such the halflings who live therein often have several secret means to escape when dark days come. But a city with a burned ghetto has trouble attracting halfling trade, even if it is a very great and significant port. To restore the trade can require long years and conspicuous reparations. Many ghettos therefore enjoy some protection from the local burghers and aristocracy.
Halfling Culture
Halflings have a strong aversion to the bonds of landed creatures and the contrast between bonded land, defined by obligation and imposition, and free ships is a major feature of their culture. The land is a fixed, dead thing that kills the spirits of those who live there too long and makes them into fixed, dead people. The sea is changeable, alive, and welcomes them in their ships. The sea is a place of liberation, where bonds are cast off. As such a halfling will go to great lengths to die at sea and ensure burial there. Even if it requires a hasty midnight escape from the ghetto to wade in the filthy harbor, a halfling will go to considerable lengths to ensure a child is born in the sea as well.
A single captain, who holds authority by raw force of personality, governs a halfling ship. On ship, the captain’s word is law. However, captains are rather easy to depose and frequently change if a voyage is not as profitable as hoped or some misfortune befalls. Likewise they are easy to restore, as they rise and fall by acclamation. As a result, dictatorial captains do not last long and in practice a captain is generally more of a first among equals and often governs by consensus. The captain’s laws end with the captain’s tenure, save for commercial arrangements. These must be honored to preserve the reputation of the ship and its crew for future business.
Halfling society is extremely democratic and egalitarian. Every ship is sovereign and the crew is the only unit of social organization recognized. Halflings do not practice marriage, monogamy, or even assert personal property rights. The crew holds all possessions in common, this attitude helping give birth to stereotypes about the race’s proclivity for larceny. The Free People are quite aware that other races do not share their attitudes about property, but this is a landed thing and not their own. They thus generally care only enough to keep to petty theft whilst in port.
The halfling family is, broadly speaking, the crew. Rearing children is a communal responsibility. Considering long stretches of close quarters on board, halflings breed within their own bloodlines more often than other races. Romances and sex between crewmates warrants no particular notice, and none at all of no children are produced. The only opprobrium such children face is a strong encouragement not to have further children. If the product of such a union commences one, that is finally enough to earn the community’s ire.
Each crew handles it differently, but exile to the land for the couple and their progeny is not uncommon and the descendants of such pairings form a significant part of the permanent population of halfling ghettos. Those born to such castaways are often strangely malformed of body or mind, being simple, mad, feeble, strangely colored (for halflings), and so on. When not mentally crippled, some show a strong talent for the arcane arts, which can greatly complicate their lives in Aquatain.
Couplings with members of another crew are a normal, and often anticipated, feature of two crews meeting. Any issues of such unions are members of the mother’s crew. Changing ships on account of such a pairing is considered eccentric in the extreme and a father who does so is unlikely to receive a warm welcome or to part his natal crew amicably.
Halfling Spirituality
The halflings are the Free People and the sea is freedom. They are one with the sea and it is one with them. It lives inside their hearts and calls to them. Their souls rise from it and return to it when their lives are over, melding seamlessly as do two drops of water. Their inner lives are focused on liberation, the state of being free from the bonds and obligations of land. Slavery of any kind is utterly anathema to them.
The Free People live their lives on ships, which mediate between them and the sea and maintain them on the doorstep of absolute liberation. Their rolling decks transmit the sea’s motion and thus mediate between it and the Free People, who are both of both. The Sea is Mother and the Ship is Father, thus all halfling ships are “he”. The two in unity symbolically give birth to them. As Mother and Father are different, but also the same, so are the halfling sexes different but the same. Any halfling of either sex can rise to prominence, become a captain, have great deeds recognized, and so forth.
Halfling religious life has a powerful aversion to asceticism. Life is to be enjoyed and lived to its fullest. Indulgence, and overindulgence, is common. The sea gives endlessly, but may also take away. It would be unkind and thoughtless to not appreciate the gifts and allow memory of them and hope for more in the future to brighten lean times.
The Free People see the proceeds of their trade as Mother’s and Father’s gifts to them. If it is in the sea or carried upon the sea, it is for them to enjoy. This can include acts of piracy against other races, but the thought of stealing from another halfling crew is utterly abhorrent. Halflings are all children of Mother and Father. Other crews may compete and one or the other may prevail, but no Free Person should ever do harm to another or allow harm to be done if it can be helped. Every Free Person should witness harm being done to another and do what can be done to ensure that wrongs are righted, or failing that revenged.
Halflings eat freely of the fruits of the sea, seeing them as gifts from Mother’s body to nourish them. Most ships will at least carry a fishing net or two to supplement their supplies, and some manage subsistence living purely on their catches. Anything from the sea may be eaten, provided it’s not poisonous, and doing so is in itself a sacred act. The great exception is marine mammals, who the halflings long ago saw breathe air as they do and thus must be children of Mother and Father. To do harm to them would be like doing harm to a halfling, and so whenever fishing is done halflings stand ready with sharp knives to cut their kin free from the nets.
When a crew grows too large for its ship, this is a cause for great celebration. Word will spread and several crews will come together, far from the eyes of unfriendly humans to build a new ship in an isolated cove. Few of these exist within the Churchlands, but they are more common in the Isles of Sorcery. There the Free People cut each plank and assemble every piece of the new ship according to many lifetimes’ of experience. Each nail, bought from the landed, is specially blessed as it is hammered into place. The act of building a new ship is a kind of festival and work of prayer all in one, the shaping of a new Father to couple endlessly with Mother as their own does.
Upon completion, the new ship is blessed many times over. An old man and an old woman, both near to the end of life, volunteer to help bless the ship. They and the work are celebrated at great length, involving the consumption enormous amounts of alcohol and other intoxicants. At the end of the feast, which is timed to coincide with the tide coming in as Mother reaches for her new mate, every halfling present pricks a finger and bleeds a drop or two into a wooden cup and all assembled happily board the new ship where more prayers are said and the blood in the wooden cup is mixed with heroic and extremely potent quantities of special drugs. All save those who have chosen to join the new ship depart. The old man and old woman consume the mixture and couple on deck, becoming Mother and Father to christen the ship before the drugs overcome them in a final moment of ecstasy.
The Gift of Passage
The Free People believe in the liberating power of the sea and that they are the special children of Mother and Father. But they do not believe that the blessing belongs to them alone. Landed people can feel the call, though being landed confuses it greatly. Passage board ship must thus be given to all who beg it, so long as the request is sincere and presents no great danger to the ship or crew. However a person who can clearly pay or is otherwise not in desperate straits can be required to work off the passage. The captain, in conjunction with the crew, makes these determinations.
Stealing Human (and other) Children
Halflings do not recognize human families as such. The concept is very strange to them. If a human child requests the gift of passage it is very likely to be given, provided the child doesn’t arrive with adults in hot pursuit. Once the ship has sailed, it has sailed even if the child has second thoughts. On occasion it has been given to those trying to escape an arranged marriage, or simply the law, as well. Should a Free Person request the gift, it simply cannot be denied.
Receiving the Gift of Passage is not the same as becoming a member of the crew. However attractive the halfling lifestyle may be to some humans, actually joining the crew is not an option. A passenger is taken to the next port of call, or to one requested if it’s along the ship’s planned route. That is the end of matters and the crew has done all that is required of it.
Except when it’s not. On rare occasions, especially when the passenger is very young, badly hurt, or fleeing something especially horrific to halfling eyes, the Free People believe that they may have found a lost halfling soul trapped by the land like a tidal pool. Such a person may remain on board ship for a length of time, until the crew knows him or her and they can be sure of their initial feelings.
If the consensus of the crew is that they have a lost halfling on their hands, the lost soul can be welcome on board indefinitely. Typically after two or three years, in which time the crew will do their best to avoid problematic ports for their charge, and hide the charge otherwise, the lost soul can be offered the chance for freedom. By this time enough should be known about the crew that the lost soul can make an informed decision.
If it’s what the castaway wants, the ship will sail far out of sight of any land and distant from normal shipping routes. Along the way the castaway receives as much education in the ways and beliefs of the Free People as can be managed. On arrival at a spot that the crew feels is the right place, the castaway is told the consequences of the choice. To be freed is to give oneself to the sea and be born again. The path is not safe, for as the sea gives the sea can take away. At the very least, the castaway must truly believe that he or she should have been born a halfling and believe and live as they do. If the castaway is sure of this and willing to risk death, then the Free People will ritually clean the castaway’s body with every member of the crew taking a hand in the work. The Free People then tie the castaway’s limbs tightly together and dock the castaway’s ears into something resembling the shape of a Free Person’s ears. Those closest to the castaway among the crew will carve markings similar to their own into the castaway’s skin and then rub salt, mixed with small quantities of their own blood, into the castaway’s wounds.
Then the crew gives the castaway their blessings and a substantial portion of alcohol. By tradition nothing can be done to ease the pain of the ceremony before this and the castaway’s cries, common even to the most committed, generally cause true grief among the crew too. In theory the alcohol is freely taken but more often it’s poured down the castaway’s screaming throat until the castaway mercifully loses consciousness.
The unconscious castaway is then weighed down with whatever is convenient and hurled into the sea. This is the end for many castaways. The crew waits, sober and somber, for seven days. If the Mother recognizes the lost soul and accepts its return, the sea will bubble with foam and a whale will rise up from the depths, showering the ship with spray and bearing the castaway on its back, reformed into the shape of a halfling youth. For those who are quite young, the age of the new body is the rough equivalent of that of their old in the halfling lifecycle. For those of more advanced years, rebirth makes them into a halfling aged fifteen or sixteen. This amounts to a few years prior to puberty in the halfling lifecycle.
These reborn Free People carry the markings given to them upon their skin as natural halfling marks and generally bear a strong resemblance to members of the crew, enough so that a halfling who did not know about the castaway’s past would have trouble telling the difference. However those who knew the castaway before rebirth can easily recognize the reborn halfling.
For the reborn, only faint memories from their old life remains. In the presence of someone who their old self knew might recognize them, they will feel varying degrees of unease. Outright fear is not rare, especially if the person is in a position of authority. In a weaker sense, this extends to whatever port they came aboard at and a slight distrust towards those of their former race. Those reborn as children often forget that they were reborn at all, and halfling culture frowns on speaking of it to those who have forgotten. Best they forget their troubles and enjoy their liberation to the fullest.
Halflings and Magic
Halflings practice arcane spellcasting and have no objection to it whatsoever, though they keep their appreciation of it secret from Churchlanders. Though not every crew has a sorcerer or wizard on board, having one is considered good luck. If one reveals such an ability when requesting the Gift of Passage, payment is generally waived in favor of a promise to defend the ship if required.
The Free People do not have a strong wizarding tradition, though wizards are far from unknown. More common are sorcerers. A female sorcerer is a great asset to the crew and would be encouraged to have many children. A male sorcerer, by contrast, is very interesting to other crews who would often like to have their own arcane lineage. Many male sorcerers enjoy the attention.
The Free People see magic in general, making little distinction between arcane and divine, as having a sidereal aspect. It derives from the stars that guide them across the open ocean, spells becoming secret ways of constellations or the moon. Among crews with a longstanding spellcasting tradition, the stars and moon can take a place as sort of junior partners aside the Mother and Father in their religious life.
Halflings do not have a formal role of priest, but spellcasters can occupy a similar social niche as wise people to consult and who should be listened closely to. If so inclined, those with such talents have an easy time convincing crews to accept their leadership. When partaking of important ceremonies or festivals, a spellcaster may be called upon to help officiate and further solemnize events, but the absence of one is not a serious lack.
What with the free-loving, child-stealing pirate sea hippies out of the way, time for something completely different. :)
Once again this is meant to be inspired by, but not a recreation of, real-world groups. Eventually there should be one or two more major human ethnicities in Aquitain, and perhaps a fringe-dwelling group or two.
The Cyrry
The Cyrry, noble and commoner a like, will gladly tell any who would listen that they are the truest, purest, original inhabitants of Aquitain. The gods’ placed them here and declared all between the mountains and the seas to be theirs to rule. Theirs are the godliest ways. Theirs are the most righteous and pure. Their fashions, their horseflesh, their lands, all are simply the best. There is no culture like theirs. There are no serfs like theirs. There are no nobles or churchmen like theirs. The Kative, Todarese, and the rest, every one of them lives on Cyrry patrimony. They are interlopers and though the Cyrry accept them as guests, they should be grateful and give proper respect to their betters.
The Cyrry are a fair people, their skin not quite so pale as the Kative nor so dark as the Todarese and running more to the pinkish. Freckles are common in children but generally fade with age. Cyrry commonly have yellow or red hair, which hangs straight. Brown and black hair, or hair that is rather curly, are seen as signs of foreign blood.
A considerable amount of folklore distinguishes between the Red Cyrry and Yellow Cyrry. Traditionally red is the color of the nobility and associated with purity, righteousness, bravery, and passion in general. Yellow Cyrry, by contrast, are solid, dependable, and forthright. Red hair is somewhat more common, though far from universal, among the nobility and the highest reaches of the Cyrry aristocracy prefer red mates despite both colors being somewhat common in any given family line.
Yellow or Red, Cyrry of substance take great stock in the length and styling of men’s hair. Length is preferred and hair is customarily decorated with ribbons, red being preferred for formal occasions and white for mourning. Women, by contrast, have the opposite standard. A noblewoman will have her head shaved. Commoner women do their best, but it’s far harder for them to find the time to keep their scalps clean. The Cyrry view women with long hair, though not those who merely lack the ability to keep their heads carefully shaved and thus have short locks, as rather mannish and are rarely shy about saying so.
Beards are forbidden to commoners by strict sumptuary laws, though long sideburns or scraggly whiskers that obviously do not pass for a beard may be overlooked. The nobility take great care to style their beards in addition to their hair, decorating them with jewelry in the form of hanging ornaments and even small bells, though rarely ribbons, as they would use in the hair atop their heads. Beards and moustaches are often waxed into points or artistic swoops and curls in which ride tiny galleys, birds, and other fanciful bits of jewelry.
In the past sumptuary laws also regulated how long a beard could be for a noble of particular standing, as well as what decoration it could bear, down to numbers and sizes of bells and points, but these restrictions have largely faded into customary trends save when attending very high or very traditional nobility. A Cyrry man, noble or otherwise, who is incapable of growing at least some whiskers, is often scorned as unmanly and weak. He may even be disinherited for his faults. Cyrry noblewomen include a small false beard as a part of their formalwear, an adornment likewise forbidden to commoners.
The Cyrry lands, collectively called the Cyrrinais, are in the southwest and south-central portion of the Churchlands, forming a substantial portion of the Blessed Empire’s heartlands. Among them the Great Church first gained wide popularity and noble favor and as such the Church inherited much of Cyrry culture and norms. In its early days the Great Church was often seen as the Church of the Cyrry. It now retains Old Low Cyrry as its liturgical language, but centuries of intermixing and infusion of clergy and theologians of other cultures have reduced Cyrry dominance to a slight overrepresentation in the church’s hierarchy. (Old Low Cyrry is the Cyrry tongue as spoken in the low-lying central portion of the Churchlands, roughly a thousand years ago. To modern Cyrry-speakers, Low and High alike, it sounds like it proper language but understanding more than random words requires education.)
The Cyrrinais Proper extends only to the bounds of the Blessed Empire, with the marches beyond being termed Far Cyrrinais to distinguish them. Comprised mostly of level farmland with occasional swamps and scattered forest, the land is exceptionally fertile and generally ideal terrain for horses, for which the Cyrry are known. When a Churchlander wants a swift steed and money is not a concern, he looks for Cyrry stock. Those seeking raw power or imposing size, by contrast, seek Kative draft animals. Far Cyrrinais is considerably more rugged than Cyrrinais Proper, but its nobility are wealthier thanks to their mines in the Builder’s Arm. The language of Far Cyrrinais, High Cyrry, is somewhat different from that of Cyrrinais Proper, Low Cyrry, but with effort speakers can understand one another.
The Cyrry, as befitting their historical role in the Church’s formative years, are generally more fastidious and observant of Church doctrine. Of the Churchlands cultures, the Church has permeated the Cyrry to the greatest degree. Circuit-riding priests are unheard of outside mining camps and most Cyrry peasants live within walking distance of a chapel or church, which they are expected to attend regularly. Failure to attend can bring fines, a mob of aggravated neighbors who seize the miscreant and physically haul him to services, or accusation of heresy or more serious sins.
The Cyrry form an especially conservative contingent in the hierarchy and are particularly convinced of their own righteousness. A minority, albeit a significant one, can become stiff-necked when a non-Cyrry Supreme Patriarch is elected. As a whole the Cyrry tend to be rather possessive of the Great Church, seeing it, as they do Aquitain, as their institution in which others are merely guests. Though strictly correct about respecting the offices of non-Cyrry churchmen, they find ways to make it known that they do not respect non-Cyrry holders of those offices at all.
The Cyrry hold women in low esteem. A Cyrry woman cannot expect to inherit unless she is a widow who lacks male children, though she may continue her husband’s trade after he dies. Her dowry is not her own but becomes a part of her husband’s wealth. She can only come to own land or property by right of surviving a husband who did, and should she remarry all that is hers becomes her husband’s. A Cyrry woman would not go away from home unaccompanied, either by a large group of other women or by a single man. Unmarried women of age, who are few, are expected to take holy orders and join a convent which they are unlikely to leave for long and where few can expect visitors. More scandalously, some reject their upbringing entirely and join instead the orders of the Red Goddess*. These women effectively cease to be Cyrry in the eyes of their fellows, who may offer condolences to their relations on hearing the news. However most Cyrry women marry the man their father has made an agreement with very shortly after menarche. Marriage before is rare but not unheard of.
The Cyrry are great believers in learning and their nobility are conspicuous patrons of the arts, employing many court bards, painters, illuminators, scribes, and the like. They place high esteem upon literacy and expect their well-born not just to be able to read and write but also to be familiar with Great Church doctrine, history, and capable of reciting poetry. In cooperation with the Great Church, they endow and maintain several universities to which ambitious nobles are expected to go in addition to the clergymen chiefly trained therein. Nobles are not, however, expected to graduate. One goes, learns for a year or so, and then returns to the normal course of one’s life unless one plans to enter the Church.
*The Red Goddess, yet unwritten, is the Great Church’s deity of war and beauty.
This is naturally going to focus on halflings who visit the Churchlands heavily and how they behave there, rather than how they might interact with other cultures elsewhere. Be advised that this gets a bit Freudian at points.
Halflings
Most Churchlanders (Aquitainians? Aquitaini? Aquitainii?) would never see a halfling, but all know a great deal about them. They are soulless, child stealing half-humans. Their nature is perverse and contrary to all godly ways,...
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(note: My english may be a little wrong sometimes. Not my first language.)---
On Naming
"Aqui" has some language referencing to "eagle", no?
Perhaps Aquilancea -Roughly assumed symbolism to "Spear of the Eagle"
So the people can be called ; "Aqullan", or to some other cultures, a derogatory "Lancea's"
Or Nouns: methodical arrangement is ordo -inis; a command is iussum. Verbs: to arrange is ordinare, componere, digerere or disponere; to give a command is iubere, imperare or edicere.
So. Aquilusso ... ?
Or something .... :p
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On Halflings
If halflings were referred to without souls by Churchlanders and cannot be charged on heresy ... are intelligent animals under the sam classification? Do they believe animals have souls, or if intelligent beats are monsters ... then halflings are monsters, if of a smaller variant :D ?
The facial and chest markings remind me of the islander polynesian / Maori tattoos of identity. Fun, fun!
And I think its hilarious to be a Free Person to walk amongst humans staring at ... enhanced fashionable codpieces! TeehEE!
Given how small Free People ghetto's are by human standard, they should be luxuriously spacious as a plot of land for the communities, as long as the waters are open to them. Hooray! Neener on the humans!
As for offspring.
Of a coupling onboard produces a child, then its one more raised crew members. So this child would be say, uhmmm first waves . But these children are discouraged from producing more offspring by the same ships crew (hence the second wave). So I would hazard a guess, first wave children are VERY encouraged to have offspring with other crewmates of other ships (families) - which is more common anyways :p
I'm loving the idea of freedom/possession/kinship philosophy and spirituality fo the Free Peoples. As well as the communal celebration of building a new ship by various crews of others.
Although the idea of an old man and old woman seems a little strict but I understand the symbolism of the Mother & the Father. The concepts seem strong for spiritual significance but in practice- since its more symbolic, an elder pairing (of any gender combination) could serve; they are already paired in spirit in conjunction with the union of the Mother Sea reaching for the Father Ship. The elder pair coupling on the ship is symbolic but unnecessary for practical reasons such as, to produce offspring, the act more powerful that its result
Mother and Father are not rigidly defined concepts in a symbolic sense for me as I felt as a Free People, even concepts rise and ebb, ever-changing in form but constant in presence.
Totally loving "The Gift of Passage"! as well as the Gift of rebirth, when a lost Free Person is found. The preparation ceremony is robust, emphatically bonding and wonderfully ritualistic!
I read that they will wait for seven days for the castaway to resurface. Perhaps something more along the duration of a single phase the moon? (thats is if the tides of the world still follow the phases of the moon) By our current standard, a rough approximate of a week, is equal to a new moon to a half moon. Or a half moon to a full moon. They could typically by 4 phases tat includes the Waning and Waxing phases. I may be a little nit-picky and I apologize :p
Just thought that though numbers and counting may be important to any culture, rituals benefit more when the numbers are tied to conferred worldly meaning.
It is mentioned early that children born of castaways (landbound) or ghetto-kin, often malformed, and if not mentally crippled, show strong talent for the arcane arts (which will complicate their lives in human lands).
Later in the copy, Sorcerers enjoy some notoriety and fame amongst seafaring crew families. Does this mean, that the offspring of such castaways may enjoy some freedom of stigma from the Free Peoples if they have the knack for magic (arcane or divine).
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The boards just ate this. Good thing I wrote it in Word.
(note: My english may be a little wrong sometimes. Not my first language.)
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I’m positive it’s better than my French, which was just enough to get me around Paris for a day, or my smattering of German. :)
On Naming"Aqui" has some language referencing to "eagle", no?
Perhaps Aquilancea -Roughly assumed symbolism to "Spear of the Eagle"
So the people can be called ; "Aqullan", or to some other cultures, a derogatory "Lancea's"Or Nouns: methodical arrangement is ordo -inis; a command is iussum. Verbs: to arrange is ordinare, componere, digerere or disponere; to give a command is iubere, imperare or edicere.
So. Aquilusso ... ?
Or something .... :p
I hadn’t thought much about the meanings, to be honest. :) I misread CourtFool’s suggestion of Aquatain as on Aquitaine, a historical region of France. I like the sound of either, but obviously don’t want to just steal the name outright since it spoils the illusion a bit, like calling the place New York or Canada.
Wikipedia (and roughly a minute later a friend who took Latin in school) tells me that aquila is Latin for eagle. Maybe something that references the span between the eagle’s wings, figuratively referring to the area between the mountains as a kind of eagle-heights. A Latinate name sounds right for the region, certainly.
On HalflingsIf halflings were referred to without souls by Churchlanders and cannot be charged on heresy ... are intelligent animals under the sam classification? Do they believe animals have souls, or if intelligent beats are monsters ... then halflings are monsters, if of a smaller variant :D ?
I think that intelligent animals, at least on the level of human intelligence, are pretty much unknown to the Churchlanders. An actual talking animal would probably be seen as possessed. Some animals are more cunning or wise than others, certainly, but the Churchlander view of animals is limited to “good for eating”, “good for work”, and “not good for eating” in various combinations. Something that’s more monstrous would probably be presumed no good for eating and too dangerous for work, but potentially fun to kill.
The facial and chest markings remind me of the islander polynesian / Maori tattoos of identity. Fun, fun!
I hadn’t thought of those specifically, but was aware of the practice when writing so I’ll claim it. :) The immediate reference was more to an anime I watched a few years ago where most of the characters, who were actually residents of a fictional fantasy-themed MMO, sported patches of generally pastel color on their faces.
I suppose what I’ve heard referred to as Exalted’s panda people probably played a role too. Also I had a halfling sailor created prior to seeing the anime who had markings on his body, and purple hair, as a result of the magical experiments done on him. I hadn’t thought of either of the last two while writing the halflings up. Clearly my brain is up to things behind my back.
And I think its hilarious to be a Free Person to walk amongst humans staring at ... enhanced fashionable codpieces! TeehEE!
Codpieces got so elaborate in Europe that one would think they were just a story made up by modern people to make fun of their ancestors. Imagine enormous things big enough to have pockets inside, sometimes shaped like the heads of birds. Bells hang from them. Wikipedia has a picture of one that’s shaped like a man’s face projecting outwards, which is so strange to me that I almost want to write an analytical paper on it.
Given how small Free People ghetto's are by human standard, they should be luxuriously spacious as a plot of land for the communities, as long as the waters are open to them. Hooray! Neener on the humans!
You would think it really obvious, but yeah. The humans thought something along the lines that the halflings are small, so put them in a small area and don’t think much more about it. They largely missed how much smaller halflings really are. This one I was really thinking about (it was bound to happen eventually!) and it comes from two places:
1) I’ve watched documentaries on real life people of exceptionally small stature (down to two feet, which is shorter than the minimum height of a D&D halfling) and it really is astounding just how small and out of scale they can be for a world built for the rest of us.
2) American slaveholders were sometimes astonished and mystified by how their slaves took to stories of Moses far more than those of Jesus. Talk about missing the obvious.
As for offspring.
Of a coupling onboard produces a child, then its one more raised crew members. So this child would be say, uhmmm first waves . But these children are discouraged from producing more offspring by the same ships crew (hence the second wave). So I would hazard a guess, first wave children are VERY encouraged to have offspring with other crewmates of other ships (families) - which is more common anyways :p
That's right. It’s their version of the incest taboo. A little bit isn’t hurting anybody, but a lot really does. We’re all inbred, ultimately, but I’ve read the genes get scrambled around enough that one’s third cousin is about as different from you as any random person on the street so it ceases to be a medical concern then. That’s fortunate because your third cousin is someone who shares at most a great-great-grandparent with you. Who but a dedicated genealogist would know if someone was his or her third cousin? Given the mortality of the period I’m drawing inspiration from, knowing even one’s grandparents would be fairly rare and great-grandparents unheard of among races with lifespans similar to those of humans.
They don’t know the issues in terms of genetics, of course. They just know from experience that the more you have kids with your own, the greater your chances are they come out somehow “wrong”. Over time they’ve worked out a rule of thumb that one generation is fine, but two is not. That’s deliberately a bit conservative considering that a crew isn’t necessarily all blood relations, but in halfling culture they’re treated that way and the culture makes the rules per its own standards.
Although the idea of an old man and old woman seems a little strict but I understand the symbolism of the Mother & the Father. The concepts seem strong for spiritual significance but in practice- since its more symbolic, an elder pairing (of any gender combination) could serve; they are already paired in spirit in conjunction with the union of the Mother Sea reaching for the Father Ship. The elder pair coupling on the ship is symbolic but unnecessary for practical reasons such as, to produce offspring, the act more powerful that its result
Mother and Father are not rigidly defined concepts in a symbolic sense for me as I felt as a Free People, even concepts rise and ebb, ever-changing in form but constant in presence.
In the absence of a willing or available oldster of one sex, both could be the same sex. (The halflings would not force someone into the role, as that would amount to killing a Free Person.) That’s something I ought to have thought of since the halflings are sexually quite flexible and being I’m a genuine gay person and all.
Separately I’m not completely settled on the whole Mother-Father system. The liberation stuff is all how I want it but the pantheon, such as it is, seems a little small. They should probably have personifications of winds and stars too. With just the two divinities, or sort of divinities, it doesn’t feel busy or messy enough for a realistic religion unless the dualism is the whole point. I’ll have to think more on it.
Totally loving "The Gift of Passage"! as well as the Gift of rebirth, when a lost Free Person is found. The preparation ceremony is robust, emphatically bonding and wonderfully ritualistic!
Thanks. :) The Gift of Passage I liberated fully from Robert Jordan’s sea folk and thus can’t fairly take credit for, but the rebirth stuff is my own take on rites of passage, initiation, and things like becoming a blood brother or elf friend sort.
I thought about it a lot, trying to put myself in the halflings’ skins and figure out from their end how they would handle things. Taking someone on to live in a radically different lifestyle that will involve them being in very close quarters with you, for life, isn’t a light and casual thing. You’d want to know them really well, and be sure they know really well what they’re getting into. Beyond the religious implications of entering into the sacred space and joining in the sacred bonds and all, this is a person you have to put up with for the rest of both your lives.
I read that they will wait for seven days for the castaway to resurface. Perhaps something more along the duration of a single phase the moon? (thats is if the tides of the world still follow the phases of the moon) By our current standard, a rough approximate of a week, is equal to a new moon to a half moon. Or a half moon to a full moon. They could typically by 4 phases tat includes the Waning and Waxing phases. I may be a little nit-picky and I apologize :p
Just thought that though numbers and counting may be important to any culture, rituals benefit more when the numbers are tied to conferred worldly meaning.
Nitpicking nothing, that’s better than seven days! For a seafaring culture, where people would be on watch at all hours regardless, a single day should not be such a religiously significant element. The week is also arbitrary. A moon cycle makes much more sense. Say they do the ritual and dunk you on the new moon and then wait until the full moon’s light touches the ship. If you’re not up by then, you’re not coming up. Rebirth isn’t easy.
I don’t think the interval is completely fixed on the end of the person going through rebirth, though. Some come up in short order; some take the full time. There’s probably no standard for how long it “should” take and so different crews would hold different beliefs about the significance of the time. To some those who are in the longest have most fully accepted their halfling nature. To others it’s those who soaked the least. Still a Free Person is a Free Person. Taking the unfavored length of time might get you some teasing, but it doesn’t make you less a halfling.
It is mentioned early that children born of castaways (landbound) or ghetto-kin, often malformed, and if not mentally crippled, show strong talent for the arcane arts (which will complicate their lives in human lands).
Later in the copy, Sorcerers enjoy some notoriety and fame amongst seafaring crew families. Does this mean, that the offspring of such castaways may enjoy some freedom of stigma from the Free Peoples if they have the knack for magic (arcane or divine).
I’d meant that the landbound were generally the ancestors of those cast out for inbreeding and inbreeding has the aforementioned consequences, but now that you’ve said it I do like the idea that being landbound is somehow “wrong” and leads to “wrong” halflings in itself, hence all the need to get a pregnant mother out on the water before she gives birth. Nitpicking nothing, you’re being a considerable help Aikuchi.
Having a knack for magic would be a good way to get on a new ship. A crew in the know wouldn’t take you, most likely, unless they were rather hard up. They know you’re unclean and it’s their way to cast you out upon the land. A different crew would be a different matter, as they might not know if you didn’t bear obvious signs, and halflings do vary. Some with the knack appear entirely normal, but those with obvious deformities would face prejudice even with their magical gifts. That’s not to say they could never be accepted, but it would be a lot harder for them. The Free People don’t have quite the theological emphasis that the Churchlanders place on being of ideal form, but they would have superstitions about keeping someone who was badly disabled or hideously disfigured on board.
Being a Halfling is contagious. Classic.
Going along with the piratical theme, perhaps there are different leaders aboard a ship. The captain is leader during the voyage; the quartermaster taking over in port. A quartermaster being someone good with numbers who can keep count of every grain in the storehouse. While a captain needs to be good with people, keep everyone sufficiently motivated and keep disputes from endangering the mission.
I would drop the Halflings not eating sea mammals. It just makes them too enlightened in my opinion.
Have to go, so I have not finished reading, but I want to post this.
Being a Halfling is contagious. Classic.
They really do steal human children! :) It's just that the human children are usually runaways who confess a good reason for having run. And the ones lucky enough to find a welcoming crew, of course. Standards for what counts as a good enough excuse to keep someone on board and get to know them with an eye to possibly offering rebirth would vary, both based on the personalities involved and things like available space.
Going along with the piratical theme, perhaps there are different leaders aboard a ship. The captain is leader during the voyage; the quartermaster taking over in port. A quartermaster being someone good with numbers who can keep count of every grain in the storehouse. While a captain needs to be good with people, keep everyone sufficiently motivated and keep disputes from endangering the mission.
That's a good idea. I'm not very nautical myself so I kind of passed over the details, but there would have to be other authority figures to keep the business organized. Not a full naval rank system, certainly, but a quartermaster is just common sense. Naturally there would be watch leaders too for when the captain is sleeping.
I would drop the Halflings not eating sea mammals. It just makes them too enlightened in my opinion.
I wondered about that myself. I wanted to give them some kind of sacred animal that made sense and there are thematic parallels, but it is a little modern. Melville wastes most of a chapter in Moby Dick (ok he wastes most of most chapters, but this specific chapter...) on how whales are properly fish, no matter what some biologist might say.
Hm. Maybe a catch of a dolphin or whatever requires special acts of thanksgiving like pouring alcohol into the sea.
Have to go, so I have not finished reading, but I want to post this.
I don’t mind; quality feedback is worth waiting for. :)