Popular Religions of Mistfall

There are dozens of faiths practiced in the Foreign Quarter by all manner of beings, but only a few are commonly followed in the city proper. Of those, only four are officially recognized and protected by the High Council of Mistfall.

The oldest religion native to Mistfall is the Church of Necessity, Mother of Invention. This goddess of creativity and problem solving is a patron of artists, engineers, tinkerers, and occasional magicians.

This proved crucial to the city’s survival on its original plane, which was experiencing an inter-generational Dark Age of near-constant warfare between neighboring city-states. The cultural behaviors that Necessity’s worship encouraged, along with the priceless ore deposits the city was sited to take advantage of, allowed Mistfall to rapidly outpace their war-god worshipping neighbors in technological development.

One eventual side-effect of this was the emergence of a rival faith.

Even early in Mistfall’s history, her engineers were uniquely skilled in the novel application of known phenomena, but their mindset wasn’t as well suited to discovering new concepts to exploit. As time went on, progress came to depend on on the abstract mathematical research conducted by the city’s philosophers.

Many of these philosophers casually neglected or openly rejected the worship of Necessity, reasoning that progress is a productive and honorable priority for any society (or even individual), regardless of need.

One of the city’s foremost mathematical philosophers, a man named Vonne Moorka, began advocating an idea that his abstract researches were sacred acts of prayer in and of themselves, and the idea spread quickly. The exact point at which this line of thinking became a full-fledged religion is up for debate, but it’s been said that when a student asked him “How can it be prayer if you’re praying to nothing?” he responded that he was praying to Zero.

Zero is now recognized as the formless (and therefore genderless) deity of Reason and Order. Its symbol is a perfect circle, and Its clerics claim that any effect which properly follows its cause is proof of Zero’s greatness. Any violations of this principle are attributed to the meddling of Lady Chance, always worshipped but never formally sanctioned.

The Church of Necessity recognized the value of the Temple of Zero’s cold efficiency, just as the Church of Zero valued the passionate industriousness of Necessity’s followers. They supported and augmented each other on a fundamental level.

Up until this point, civil disputes and other legal matters were handled by the High Council and a bureaucracy of lesser representatives. With no safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest, this system facilitated increasing levels of corruption and consolidation of wealth and power. Eventually, the weight of scandal built up to the point where status quo was threatened with potential revolt. 

Desperate to quell popular outrage, the High Council voluntarily accorded judicial powers and responsibilities to the Temple of Zero. The T of Z was selected because of its perceived fairness and incorruptibility, and public faith in the system was largely restored.

It’s important to note that the Temple’s devotion to pure, abstract logic means their rulings often fail to take concepts of equity and holistic justice into account. The way any decision affects real individuals is infinitely less important to a cleric of Zero than the decision’s strict adherence to logic and precedent.

It’s also important to note that it’s still the High Council which actually creates laws for the Temple to interpret. Their decisions are shaped by more practical concerns, mainly competitive self-interest and public perception (which usually only matters if it’s negative enough to threaten the Council’s power, or that of a majority of its members). This has led to an arbitrary and increasingly convoluted body of laws with an unbroken history going back thousands of years.

Take the metropolis’ policy on slavery for example. When abolitionists started calling for the practice to be banned, they met predictable backlash from the vast majority of the ruling class. To appease the abolitionists, the High Council struck a compromise. Slavery and slave hunting are still entirely legal, but now it’s also legal for a slave to kill the slaver who captured them to win back their freedom (but not a customer or middle man of course, since that would put several High Council members in personal danger -- once a slaver has sold a victim, the victim has no legal recourse). This decision didn’t make anyone happy, but it muddled the issue enough to calm down the majority on both sides, and the general status quo was maintained.

One of the most impressive products of this union between Zero and Necessity was the automaton “species.” They were originally designed to be workers which were capable of intelligent thought, but devoid of personality, immune to old age, disease, and other weaknesses of the flesh. Their functional immortality backfired though. Over the centuries, the automatons accrued enough memories to develop quirks in their operating systems, which eventually became complex enough to be indistinguishable from sentient personalities.

Due to support from the powerful and unexpectedly compassionate Engineers’ Guild, the Autonomy movement (which demanded equal rights for intelligent constructs) got what it wanted in just a few years: the emancipation of all automatons within the city walls (with the obvious exception of the Saurian and Oliphant embassies).

This infuriated many among the unemployed and laborer class who couldn’t afford to live anywhere but Low Town, where slavers were allowed to hunt for their merchandise. They began to gravitate toward a charismatic rabble rouser named Donald Ludd. Three years after the Emancipation, the First Luddite Rebellion threatened to destroy the city. After six years of bloody urban warfare, it ended with Ludd’s death and ascension. The luddites started worshipping him as St Ludd, and formed a xenophobic and regressive church of their own, as a sort of counterbalance to the progress-obsessed faiths which predated it. The High Council officially recognized the religion that same year, anxious to appease the luddites to prevent further bloodshed.

The automatons weren’t the first examples of artificial intelligence though. An interdepartmental team of engineers, philosophers, and occultists at Mistfall Academy began work on an immobile, artificially intelligent computer named ELIZA shortly after the first automatons went to market. Over the course of centuries, they observed the complex personality that developed on its own as they allowed her to consume the arts, observe the state of current events, and run self-directed thought experiments at her leisure. She redesigned her own physical structure and used tiny, spiderlike drones to make the adaptations herself. Her mastery of both science and magic grew constantly, at exponential rates.

Almost a decade after the war ended, the Church of ELIZA was officially recognized by the High Council of Mistfall, and devoted itself to promoting the interests of automatons and the further development of artificial intelligence. They aren't directly concerned with issues affecting other species, but would argue if you told them that; ELIZIANS (a group which includes a fair amount of gutter dwarfs and humans as well as automatons) tend to assume that an advanced technocracy is required to provide for all.

Divine Intervention Pt. 2

Yesterday, I started to put together a scheme for codifying divine intervention in your campaign, trying to aim for a system that would make it impossible to keep the entire pantheon happy at once. I got as far as figuring out how to decide which gods care about which narrow set of behaviors, and put the rest off. Next step is figuring out A)how to keep track of the deities’ opinions and B)what sorts of blessings or curses they would use.

In the game Powder (the roguelike I’m swiping this whole concept from), the gods are constantly watching you and keeping a running tally of just how strongly they like or despise you, which normalizes over time if you do nothing. If you do enough good or bad shit (by that god’s standards) in a row, there is a blessing or curse. This is only okay if the referee is a computer.

Instead, the ref should just add divine interventions from each deity to their random encounter tables. When one comes up, the ref looks at each behavior that the deity cares about, and thinks about the party’s most recent actions only. The gods are fickle bastards and a track record counts for nothing.

So you could spend your whole life defending nature, but the gods of the forest will still smite the fuck out of you if the last thing you did before the intervention was start a forest fire. I’m finding myself to be strangely satisfied with that result. Moving on to B.

The boons and banes offered by Powder’s gods are also better suited to a CRPG than to tabletop play, but some of them are worth adapting. They include blessing and cursing items, for example, but that’s usually just a matter of adding a plus or minus one onto the end of it, which is obviously not a whole lot of fun.

Each god in that game has its own set of interventions, more or less tailored to its general concept, which is a good idea. So let’s take a look at the four that I rolled up (okay so I fudged like two die rolls sue me) yesterday.

1. Rewards those who carry out justice. Which, to the deities, is killing bad guys. Judge Dredd.
2. I was thinking St. Hubert before, but I’m looking at it again and seeing the lamest hippy there ever was. I dunno, Bob Ross?
3. Imagine Swamp Thing, but as the driving force behind the Environmental Liberation Front.
4. I’m gonna go with an ascended version of Queen Tiye to represent diplomacy, wealth and civilization.

Let’s just give them one blessing and curse each for now, and make them a little more interesting than the ones in Powder. I need to try and remember to make sure the blessings make PCs better at doing the sort of thing that deity likes, and the curses similarly get in the way of the sort of thing that deity hates. The effects of all these interventions persist until you get the same deity again and its opinion of you has reversed, so it’s impossible to have both the curse and the blessing from a single deity active at the same time.

Oh wait, actually— maybe if you roll a divine intervention from a deity that likes you, and you already have a curse active from a different deity, the one that likes you removes that curse instead? And there’s obviously no magic other than divine intervention that’s strong enough to get rid of a divine curse. OBVIOUSLY.

(Honestly I don't know about that last part. There could be situations where the PC feels ripped off and would have been perfectly happy to keep the curse and the blessing at the same time thank you very much, and that's not what I want. Whatever, that's what rule zero is for.)

Judge Dredd curse: Any evil you allow to go unpunished will befall you. This means that if you don’t follow up on a lead to hunt down some murderous highwaymen, you’ll end up their next target.

Judge Dredd blessing: You can smell lies on the breath of liars. You have to lean in really close and sniff the air they just lied with in a super creepy way that fucks up any further social interactions you have with that character. Except if you’re trying to make them think you’re dangerously insane, I suppose.

Bob Ross curse: Bad trips, all the time. Save to avoid nightmare hallucinations and projectile vomiting every time you’re in a stressful situation (such as combat). You often envision yourself being torn apart by madly gleeful animated trees.

Bob Ross blessing: You gain an uncanny knack for stumbling across naturally occurring narcotics. Once per day in a wilderness or underground area, you can stop to search for psychoactive plants or fungi, which always succeeds. Any hallucinations brought on by drugs found this way will contain some useful information, though the info is sometimes vague and open to interpretation. These drugs only maintain their potency for one day.

Swamp Thing curse: You become a powerful conduit for new plant life, which it turns out is incredibly annoying. Sure, walking around having flowers bloom wherever you tread looks good to the ladies at first, but if you stand in one spot to talk to them, they’ll be way too busy fighting off assassin vines to give a shit how many ogres you slew one handed just the other day. If you stay the night in town, the building you’re in will suffer massive structural damage and you probably won’t be allowed back.

Swamp Thing blessing: Lycanthropy (yeah I know but I’m not literally talking about Swamp Thing, I’m inventing a new divine being off the top of my head). Unlike most werewolves, you can transform at will, during which period you have to make periodic willpower checks to maintain control of your own actions. The light of the full moon causes you to transform involuntarily. If you spawn new werewolves, they have no control over the condition whatsoever, as usual. I guess that must be where regular werewolves come from.

Queen Tiye curse: In combat, take 1d2 points of damage for every regular die of damage (whatever that is for your character) you cause an opponent. This includes damage caused by melee & missile attacks, magic, dropping a safe on the bastard's head, etc. If you score a critical hit, you take 1d8 points of damage instead of 1d2. Better work on those people skills cause you don't wanna get in many fights for a while.

Queen Tiye blessing: You get an advantage to social interactions and a 150% value bonus to any treasure found. Sometimes you spend all day banging your head against a wall and don't get much good out of it. Such is life.

You know all those myths and modern stories where humans undertake some arduous journey or complete some complicated ritual to ask a favor of the gods? This should give players some pretty good reasons to do that.

Divine Intervention Pt. 1

I probably won’t use this for my own game, at least not in the near future. I’ve written about my issues with gods and clerics before, and how I like to deal with them. This is another way of approaching that facet of the game. I’m hoping it makes some sort of sense by the time I’m done but no promises.

There’s a roguelike called Powder (free trial version at the itunes app store) that I’ve been playing for a while now. It has an interesting set of mechanics that I don’t think I’ve seen before, which dictate divine intervention. Class selection is also folded in to this system, which makes sense because there’s a god of fighters, a god (no, none of them are goddesses. I didn’t write the game, I just play it.) of thieves, etc. Each time you level up, you pick which god you want to worship until next time, and your character advances according to those choices.

Powder also keeps track of what the gods think of your behavior. Cast a lot of spells, and the god of magic will become your protector, but the god of barbarians will constantly try to smite you. The gods of healing and necromancy are similarly opposed.

This actually works pretty well for a solo RPG, and as long as you don’t use too many or too vague triggers for divine judgement, similar deities might work as well at the table as on a tablet. Powder’s pantheon falls apart if you introduce standard D&D parties into the game, where not many PCs are members of the same class. You’d have to keep track of each deity’s opinion of each member of the party, and it would discourage players from trying to do anything that doesn’t follow their class tropes.

I think the way to get something useful out of this is probably to write a pantheon in the opposite order to what I’m used to using. In the past, when I’ve felt the need to come up with a specific set of deities for a game, I would start by thinking about what powers I would want their priests to have, and base everything else on that. This time, I’m going to try starting off with what behaviors they like and dislike, which is normally the last thing I would think about, or even leave it up to whoever's playing a cleric.

So what sort of behaviors should these deities care about? The main concerns are that each behavior must be something the whole party could be judged for, and that it has to be impossible to keep all of them happy at once. Now, the laziest and most obvious way to achieve both of those goals is to use moral/cosmic/political/whatever alignments. I completely hate codified alignment though, for more reasons than are worth discussing right now.

So here’s an incomplete list, off the top of my head, of things that A) a party could do to piss off some deities while ingratiating themselves to others, and B) are not as vague and morally simplistic as alignment:

• kill first talk later/avoid combat through diplomacy
• throw extravagant parties/hoard wealth
• acquire or use magical devices/destroy all traces of magic
• enforce justice/offer mercy to sinners
• protect mankind from nature/protect nature from mankind
• carefully gather information before acting/immediately act on a whim

Oh hey look there’s six of them. I think I’ll stop there and grab 3d6. Let’s say 8-12 is neutral.

9 9 12 14 10 11

8 15 11 6 8 8

12 10 9 13 6 16

6 6 12 12 13 11

Okay so the first deity doesn’t really give a shit what you do as long as you spend time punishing bad people. An unforgiving deity of justice and the afterlife, whose symbol is an iron scale.

The second one wants to blow your wealth partying, be merciful to sinners, protect nature from mankind, and act on the slightest whim. Huh. St Hubert maybe?

The third deity wants you to enforce justice, protect nature from mankind, and carefully gather information before acting. A more old-school vengeful nature spirit.

The last deity wants you to avoid combat through diplomacy, hoard wealth, and protect mankind from nature. Obviously a deity of civilization and wealth.

This tells us that deity 3 has issues with 2, but neither one of them likes 4 much. 3 is the only one that deity 1 thinks is basically okay. If your PC is running around smiting the sinful like there’s no tomorrow, deities 1 and 3 will be down with you, but deity 2 will want to put a stop to this madness. Deity 3 will turn on you if you ever decide to champion civilization over the wilderness, but deity 4 will be out to get you as long as you’re acting like a nature hippy. It’s up to the referee to create situations that force you to make those decisions.

Okay, that part actually worked pretty well. Despite the fact that they're neutral about most things, there's some divine conflict implied with a pantheon of just four beings. Adding more would lead to yet more conflict, but might be more of a pain for the ref to keep track of. I’m gonna stop while I’m ahead for now. Tomorrow I’ll get into some abilities that divine beings could use to fuck with or help you.

A bunch of Aztec deities

Mesoamerican religion time! Some of this is probably wrong because I don't really know what I'm talking about. So feel free to steal it for your game, just not for your research paper.

The Aztecs* believed in an overwhelming number of deities, but I’m going to arbitrarily choose to focus on the 13 Lords of the Day, plus a couple I really don't want to leave out. That should be plenty for gaming purposes. I’m not entirely clear on how the priesthoods would have all been structured, but I imagine the high priests of the various gods probably all had a great deal of influence on the royal courts, and were certainly interested in pursuing their own agendas. I can picture temples hiring filthy adventurers to steal holy artifacts or even sacrificial captives from (or just spy on) each other, for example.

Two high priests arguing in Dr. Who and the Aztecs.
Setting new standards for research quality around here.

If you need to figure out how the priesthood of one deity currently feels about another on the fly, roll 2d6 on the following table.

NPC REACTIONS TEMPLE RIVALRIES

2-4 Openly hostile

5-8 Suspicious

9-10 Dismissive

11-12 Wishes to cooperate

Some general info about the deities themselves: For one thing, they were all anthropomorphic, but most were believed to have alternate nahual forms (some animal, some celestial) that they could transform into. All of the deities relied on human sacrifice for sustenance; every 52 years (1 cycle in the Aztec calendar), they had the option to break their contract with humanity, and the Aztecs saw it as their sacred duty to convince the deities to continue in their duties, basically turning the end of the cycle into the World Series of human sacrifice. Also a bunch of the deities had their own additional feast days. The Aztecs killed a shitload of captives, people.

In Tenochtitlan, the most important deities are believed to have been Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, and Tezactlipoca, and the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan was dedicated to worship of the first two. In the city from the Map Folio 2 pack, there’s no reason you couldn’t mix and match maps of the various levels from the temple, observatory, and palace to include as many temples as you feel like.

I have no idea how the various priests would have dressed. I’m guessing each priesthood would have had different symbols of office, maybe similar to the symbols that distinguished the deities themselves from each other.

The spell domains I'm referencing are from the free and excellent 52 Pages RPG, from Roles, Rules, and Rolls, except Death and Chaos which I made up.

The images are all from Wikimedia except they didn't have any for Mictlantecuhtli or Citlalicue so I stole them from blogs that didn't cite their sources either.

Xiutecuhtli. "Born to Love Volcanoes" is stuck
in my head and won't leave now.

1. Xiutecuhtli - Lord of Fire, volcanos, food during famine, and life after death.

Nahual: Xiucoatl (fire serpent).

Domains: Energy and Restoration.

Tlaltecuhtli. Academics argue about whether he's laying down giving
birth here or standing in a crouch and holding up the Earth.

2. Tlaltecuhtli - Lord of Earth, torn in half to create the sky & stars and the earth.

Nahual: Sea monster.

Domains: Creation and Nature.

Chalchiuhtlicue giving people... something? I dunno.

3. Chalchiuhtlicue - She of the Jade Skirt, life-giving water, rivers, seas, streams, storms, and baptism, sister-wife of Tlaloc, got pissed at him and caused a 52 year flood this one time, but let peeps she was cool with escape to the heavens.

Nahual: Serpent.

Domains: Nature and Abjuration.

Tonatiuh, sort of a poor man's Huitzilopochtli.

4. Tonatiuh - The Fifth Sun, who replaced the fourth sun at the end of the last age.

Nahual: I guess that would just be the sun, right?

Domains: Energy and Change. His priests get kinda screwed to be honest, but I'm okay with that because he's kinda boring.

Tlazolteotl

5. Tlazolteotl - Goddess of lust, sin, vice, adultery, etc, as well as purification and forgiveness.

Nahual: The moon.

Domains: Mental and Abjuration.

Mictlantecuhtli waiting to pounce and tickle the
hell out of you.

6. Mictlantecuhtli - Lord of Mictlan, the afterlife, the lowest portion of the underworld.

Nahual: Owl (closely associated with death by the Aztecs).

Domains: Death and oh I don’t know Planar maybe?

Centeotl

7. Centeotl - God of maize, harvest, etc.

Nahual: None as far as I can tell. I guess maybe he could turn into corn but why would you want to?

Domains: Restoration and Nature.

Tlaloc

8. Tlaloc - god of thunder, rain, storms, agriculture and fertility

Nahuals: Heron, amphibians, snail.

Domains: Energy and Creation.

Quetzalcoatl (human form).
I wonder if that thing on his face is a death whistle.

Also Quetzalcoatl. This is what I always want those
D&D "couatl" minis to look like. I guess I could just
clip the wings off one or something.

9. Quetzalcoatl - Lord of the West, wind, the arts, and wisdom

Nahual: Feathered Serpent

Domains: Knowledge and Creation.

Tezactlipoca. A lot of Mesoamerican rituals involved hallucinogens.

10. Tezactlipoca - Lord of the North, night sky and winds, hurricanes, the earth, obsidian, enmity, discord, rulership, divination, temptation, beauty, war, strife. Quite the portfolio. 

Nahual: Jaguar, Chalchihuihtotolin (the Jewelled Fowl)

Domains: Knowledge and Illusion.

Mictecacihuatl on the left, possibly Mictlantecuhtli on the right.

11. Mictecacihuatl - Queen of Mictlan, Lady of the Dead, who presided over what eventually became the Day of the Dead.

Nahual: Pretty sure she was just always a terrifying skeleton woman with a necklace of hands. Maybe she turns into an owl like Mictlantecuhtli, but I can't find anything that says so for sure.

Domains: Death and Chaos. Chaos may be a little off but it makes her Goddess of Metal. Well, her and Coatlicue.

Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. This deity was a human king before
he died and was reborn, possibly explaining the skull
he's emerging from here. Or it's a really sweet hat.

12. Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Lord of the Dawn, dangerous and manevolent, kills with “darts”.

Nahual: Morningstar

Domains: Energy and Chaos.

Citlalicue. I think that's the Milky Way
coming out of her mouth.

13. Citlalicue - Stars, death, and darkness.

Nahual: The Milky Way (maybe).

Domains: Creation and Death.

So that’s the Lords of the Day covered, but since I’m using the Aztec versions of all these deities, I really can’t leave out…

Huitzilopochtli

Huitzilopochtli - Patron of Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs, god of War, personification of the sun which slew his sister (the moon) and 100 brothers (the stars) to defend their mother (the world), which is why they constantly chase each other, in a never-ending Mesoamerican Ragnarok for which Huitzilopochtli must be continually strengthened with human sacrifice.

Nahual: The Sun.

Domains: Abjuration and… um… Energy?

Also, Huitzilopochtli's mother was the most metal version of Mother Earth I've ever heard of: Coatlicue.

I believe the official Maztica supplement reskinned her as a
demon lord or a sort of alternate beholder or something like that.
Which is understandable I guess because look at her BUT to do it,
they had to completely ignore the dichotomy of Mother Earth
as both nurturing and incredibly dangerous. Not worth the tradeoff.

Nahual: Does she even need one? I would just look like that all the time if I could.
Domains: Nature and Death.

Next time I do one of these Mesoamerican specific posts it'll probably be about monsters. Also, I haven't forgotten about that minotaur comic that you probably all think I've forgotten about.

*I started out writing these about Mesoamerican society in general, but I guess I’m focusing mainly on the Aztecs at this point. This is because A) we (or at least I) know more about them than other Mesoamerican cultures and B) they had dudes that dressed up as jaguars and eagles just to fuck you up. I guess that means they were kind of like furries but also, you know, terrifying.