Moving on from what
has kept me from posting yesterday… More culture creation! This is the last installment of the culture
miniseries because for the most part everything that is important to the
identities of planets and national bodies are involved in these three parts and
the rest is just minor variations from those themes.
For the universe of
40k a large part of the Religious parts are already developed for you in the
worship of the God-Emperor. I don't
think I will talk about designing a religion now because that is something that
I could spend probably a dozen posts working on because of everything that goes
into it, so here I will just have the minor pieces that can make your
particular sect different from other groups that also worship your religion. For 40k think of the different forms of
worship that appear throughout all the Black Library books, for instance in
Gaunt's Ghosts the ayatani and those types of priests worship in their purpose
for traveling, all sorts of different space marine chapters have different
rites and rituals that they must go through under the guidance of their
specific chaplains.
The purpose for
writing out the minute details of the religion where other people have not
developed is to have another source of inspiration for character development,
tension within the party or with the antagonist, back story, side quests, the
whole deal. A big part of creating a
planet is how everything builds upon itself so that once you actually begin the
process of designing it the whole thing starts to come together in a natural
order and you won't ever have to worry about running out of inspiration while
writing the story or adding background to your campaign because you already did
all the real work in the creation phase of things.
Keeping in mind the
worship of the God-Emperor there is still a lot that can be changed about it
while maintaining that religious identity.
Adding details for methods of worship or themes of doctrine can really
make things interesting in how people interact with each other when some people
who are not from the area would normally think that is heresy but everyone else
is telling him he is wrong. If this
planet is for a role playing game then you are making something that your
players could potentially run with in ways that you had not imagined, and
because of how religion oftentimes defines characters this would assist new
players who don't know where to start with character creation and veteran
players who now have some new thing to play with.
How religion
oftentimes develops is based on current events, geography, ecosystems, all that
stuff that you already worked on in designing your planet! Drastic circumstances are generally the only
things that change religions significantly, though the tone of a religion may
alter if people in general have been prosperous for a very long time, but for
the most time things have to be negative for any significant shift. War is a big one, and it is important if the
people following the religion have been on the winning side or the losing for
how the long time of war has changed things.
Plague, famine, natural disasters, all these could make a religion turn
into one of suffering and how to suffer is to be holy or that the Emperor has
punished us for our sins and though we are not worthy we seek your blessing and
yadda yadda yadda. Incorporating other
cultures, races, or even aliens (who of course have been approved by the
Administratum and Ordos Xenos) can alter a lot as well as new ideas are brought
into the melting pot and what seems compatible with current philosophies are
added and those that aren't (even those that were native ideas before the
newcomers arrived) are tossed out and forgotten. Worse, these ideas might be considered heresy
and the worst of punishments meted out upon those that follow the old order and
not the new one.
Perhaps the most
significant aspect of Religious culture on a planet is how it inspires
characters/politicians/citizens to go to war over their ideals and if they
think their beliefs are being trampled upon or if their mandates require
another culture to be brought into the fold… even if that means they must all
die since none of them will willingly convert.
I dare say that my readers are smart enough that I don't need to mention
all the things that are affected by a religious war, most of which I've already
discussed in either this post or in others.
For example on the
jungle planet war has been an important part of the identity of the planet,
specifically the conflict with the Dark Eldar and then the Eldar. The massive slaughter by the Dark Eldar could
have made the religion take a dark turn (if it is possible for the religion of
the God-Emperor to become grimmer) with ideas of punishment or righteous
vengeance becoming a big part in popular beliefs. Themes of spreading the light to other races
and casting out the unjust could be attributed to the war with the Eldar and
what the Imperium saw largely as a successful conflict. Particular traditions unique to the planet
could involve collecting five large bugs that are each the size of a hand,
mashing them all up with some sort of stick in a wooden bowl, and drawing the
gore-mush into an aquila upon the foreheads of the worshippers in
attendance. There could be a song about
how endless labor for the good of the Imperium in the Emperors name will in the
end be for the good and that despite all the sin which everyone is submerged
within they are able to be blessed by the judgment of the Emperor when they die
if they have worked hard enough.
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