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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celisasu" data-source="post: 5321983" data-attributes="member: 90537">Despite the silence from my end for the last two months I've been prodding away slowly at this.  Our previous game ended unexpectedly and the players asked me to run a Scales of War campaign so I've been doing stuff with that first.  Anyways I have done some other stuff with this.  For this post I'm going to take a bit of a look at the dominant dualistic religion that I mentioned in the first post. But first a brief addition of the Dark Sun races.  Thri-kreen: These don't exist as a character race.  I actually see some potential for them as an NPC race though so as a default I assume that they do exist in the world.    Muls:   Seeing how they got the same stat bonuses that I was using for the modified goliaths, I'm just treating them as a varient of the goliaths.  You can pick either race for the purposes of feats, powers, bonuses, etc but in the campaign they're just considered the exact same species.  It's only for mechanics that they differ.    The dualistic faith:Nobody knows when or how this faith became as large and influential as it has.  If you ask most people they'll just shrug and say it's always been that way.  There are many subsects of the faith although most of them acknowledge the other sects as being of value.  It probably helps that since there are actual divine casters in multiple sects it's hard to say that your sect is the one true path.  Of course there are extremist sects that say that the divine casters who aren't part of their sect are actually cultists or the like.  And seeing how the extremist groups have just as high a chance as any other of having someone granted gifts by their gods, nobody really knows what standards are granted.  They don't really have a name for their religion just calling it The Faith. One absolute that all the sects hold to is their belief in The Prophecy.  Once per year someone will speak of a vision of the future.  This vision might be in the near future or the distant future.  None know for sure.  These tend to leave little to interpetation.  They aren't riddles.  They're statements of what is to come although although the timing can seem vague as they tend to be visions where the person stating the prophecy is seeing some event from the eyes of someone at the event in question.  It's easy to tell when someone is having a true vision as when it happens their eyes become a pale silver and they seem to lose all awareness of anything other than the vision which can be as short as a few seconds to as long as a week or more.  When the vision ends, their sight returns to normal as do their eyes.  The church tries to record the visions each year, but as they have no idea who will be blessed with a vision many years they never know what vision was recieved.  Then it becomes a matter of sorting out claims of people who say they had a vision but can't offer proof other than the claims of those around them.  One commen disagreement of the sects is which visions are true visions and many sects have variants in their holy books based on these. The proliferation of different generally non-combative sects means that The Faith is large and influential on a local level but tends not to wield larger amounts of influence as no one sect dominates more than one city and most cities have multiple competing sects.  The Faith as a whole is tolerant of the spirit worshippers and like most groups in the world reacts quickly and brutally towards any confirmed cult activity.  Due to how dispersed the faith is, how unconcerned the two entities that it worships are, and the fairly high tolerance of differences it allows, it's prone to infiltration by people seeking political power without truly believing and by the cults. For physical structures the faith favors small shrines over grand cathedrals for the most part but their are some noticable exceptions.  Most major cities have at least one large cathedral and pretty much all cities have multiple small churches and shrines.  The cathedrals are without exception shows by the city of their support for the faith.  They're mostly unnecessary as the faith favors silent prayer and discussion of the Prophecies on an individual level to figure out their meanings as opposed to structured sermons.  In fact the religion doesn't have a moral code as such, instead strongly encouraging people to learn and reason for themselves.  It's as much a philosophy as a religion.      On spirit worship: A very informal system, those who worship the spirits tend to be a varied group.  Some believe that you have to pay homage to the spirits of anything you interact with while others see it more as a negotation to give the spirits what they want in return for something you want.   The beliefs tend to be more commen among tribal cultures or in small towns than in the cities where the Faith and cults have pretty much edged them out by making spirit worship seem like some sort of backwater primitive belief.  Of course even in the cities it's more commen than most realize as many people who supposedly don't believe at all might offer brief thanks to a water spirit for helping them avoid dehydration or to a weapon spirit for the shedding of blood or the like.   There are no churches or the like for this belief.  Just a few informal shrines made by individual practicioners on the behalf of whatever spirit they might worship.  These tend to fall into disrepair quickly being seen more as temporary things than permanent monuments.  Spirit worshippers are hostile to the cultists like most others, seeing them as servants of things that are inemical to the continued balanced existance of the universe.  They see the two entities worshipped by the Faith as just being exceptionally strong spirits(usually ones of prophecy or balance) but not ones any more or less deserving of worship than the weaker spirits.It'd theoretically be easy to infiltrate the spirit worshippers but why bother?  They're so individualistic that no real power could be achieved.     The cults: The only defining trait of these is their worship of an entity that is somehow damaging to the world.  They're all secretive, all dangerous, and all eventually lead to death and madness although how it manifests varies greatly.  They're all horribly violent to anyone and anything that doesn't worship their specific entity including other cults and they're constantly playing a mad dance between one another that is probably the only reason they aren't even more powerful than they already are.  One cult might pretend to be a club for wealthy merchants while another is a gathering of the poor seeking power against the people who oppress them.  Of course if they overthrow those who keep them down, they'll be just as bad if not worse.   People first join for many reasons.  Perhaps they're filled with hate towards a group.  Maybe they've given in to despair at the unfairness of life.  Maybe they just want power.  Eventually though they all become slaves to the things that grant their desires, without ever even realizing it.   Cults have a tendancy to burn brightly but breifly.  They rise, burn themselves out in a plan that eventually goes wrong when they reveal themselves or another cult reveals them, and then get crushed.  A few survivors go elsewhere and start the whole process again.  The most dangerous are the rare few that actually achieve a level of self control.  These can influence massive areas with small numbers. Obviously they have no openly displayed churches, but they have a tendancy towards secret, frequently grandoise temples in out of the way locations.  Small shrines at their worshippers homes are frequent too.</blockquote>

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