I've only read a few pages, so forgive me if I've missed something, but who or what created this world? Does no one in the world know? To have religions that are fragmented when gods are real begs explanation; ignorance of the gods serves nicely, but I'm not certain if that's your intent.

Your material continues to shine, Pseudophedrine. I particularly like the Star Heralds.

On another note, are you making any effort to collate your work? It would benefit the setting immensely if all the entries could be compiled into a single document, perhaps with an accompanying map.

Quote from: EngineI've only read a few pages, so forgive me if I've missed something, but who or what created this world? Does no one in the world know? To have religions that are fragmented when gods are real begs explanation; ignorance of the gods serves nicely, but I'm not certain if that's your intent.

It's unclear whether the gods are real or not in the setting as written. They do not appear directly, and no one receives any magical powers from them. Various omens and phenomena are attributed to their acts, but it's not as if anyone actually sees say, the Stone Pack pull down cows out of the sky. Religions rely on the same sort of mechanisms that they do / did in real life during the classical era.

As for the creation of the world, there are many competing myths. Edit: I'm unconcerned with laying them all out just because it won't really be the sort of thing my PCs will care about.

Quote from: DrewYour material continues to shine, Pseudophedrine. I particularly like the Star Heralds.

On another note, are you making any effort to collate your work? It would benefit the setting immensely if all the entries could be compiled into a single document, perhaps with an accompanying map.

I'm going to once I've got enough material. I'll collect it either as a word document or a .pdf and offer it for free, probably through a torrent.

Quote from: SpikeIndeed the exact opposite.  In fact, I first heard that quality regarding religions  from a Japanese woman talking about asian cultures with regards to Bhuddism, Shintoism (notable for being one of the oldest living religions, primative and animistic) and... of course, Confusionism, which I mentioned earlier.

The Earliest myths we have regale us with tales of how the world and the Gods came to be, discuss where man came from in most cases, and in a few  cases (this being the exception rather than the rule) how the world will end.

The Olympians had Hades to send their souls to. Warriors got Valhalla in the north.  Should we discuss Babylonian myth? Is THAT going to be old enough to satisfy you that this is a characteristic of all religions? Maybe I should mention that the Etruscan Death God is one of the few we have any knowledge of.

How ancient do you want me to go?  Hittite? I've got a book or two on the subject.

What about Aztecs? They thought the Gods needed blood to keep the universe spinning. What about the Egyptians with their eight Souls and elaborate tombs to ensure a good afterlife?

This is the primary purpose of faith: To answer the unanswerable question of 'what happens after?'.

NOT a christian invention at all.


If that STILL ain't ancient enough for you, I got a 200,000 year old fertility statue that should trump anything you care to bring to the table.

The fundamental source of our disagreement here seems to be whether or not myths are themselves religious activities. I don't see them as religious / cultic activities per se, and that's why I'm excluding them from the sphere of cultic practice. Even when they deal with the gods and the afterlife, in fact. They form part of the culture's cosmology, not its cultic practices.

A similar comparison from the modern era would be our belief in the Big Bang, which is a belief about the origin of the world that isn't religious in itself.

Quote from: beejazzI'd go with letting each character with a given power source recharge one of their powers once per day. So you'd have lesser and greater power source areas. Lesser would let you recharge an encounter power once per day. Greater would let you recharge a daily power once per day.

Yes, I think that idea's much simpler. I'm stealing it!

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI'm going to once I've got enough material. I'll collect it either as a word document or a .pdf and offer it for free, probably through a torrent.

Nice. A snazzy looking .pdf with well drawn map would be preferable, but whatever you can manage.

Quote from: DrewNice. A snazzy looking .pdf with well drawn map would be preferable, but whatever you can manage.

My computer skills extend to a plain .txt file with a hand drawn map mailed out to anyone who wants one, but I'm totally willing to give a finished and complete file, with a scanned copy of a hand-drawn map (maybe a couple) to someone who wants to convert it to a *.pdf for me. The only catch is that I can't pay them anything but respect.

Prior to... lets say the Enlightenment, the seperation between religion and culture was more or less non-existent.  In many parts of the world this remains more or less the truth even today.  This is why, say, most Japanese don't really respond clearly when asked what their 'religion' is, with an exception of Christian Japanese. They don't view buddism and shintoism as two seperate faiths as clearly as the West does. As I recall beginnings (weddings, births and so forth) are predominately Shinto rituals while Endings (deaths etc...) are the purview of the Buddists. A given monestary or shrine will be one faith or the other but might still have trappings of the other.

This is the reason Confusionism, a purely cultural artefact, gets a pass on lacking spiritual aspects while still getting to be labeled a Religion by some scholars.

The Myths of a people are the primary means of transmitting faith and culture from antiquity. What we know of most 'pagan' faiths comes from the myths we inherited from them.

True, this hardly gives us a firm grasp on the details of a given 'faiths' set of  rituals. Studying the Illiad may not tell you how to properly placate Posideon before he floods your village (then again, it might...) but it will certainly tell you who Posideon is and why he needs to be placated...  in fact it is by studying the Illiad we get clues to the role of the Neriad Themis in pre-Olympiad Greece, rather than simply being a minor character (the mother of Achellies) we can learn that at one time she was a potent Goddess in her own right, staving off a revolt of three Olympians against Zeus, which gives us the vital clues needed to look for other evidence of the cult of Themis (which apparently did exist and may have been a female only mystery cult in its later incarnations...)

More to the point, if the body of myth suggests that the dead go to (lets stick with Greek here...) Hades, then the fact that it is myth does not change the fact that the local belief structure/religion tells us that the souls of the dead go to Hades.  There is not a clean line between myth and religion.

To bring it back to the modern age: We tend to believe that the souls of sinners go to hell and 'burn in a lake of fire'. We believe, as a people, that Satan/the Devil is a fallen angel, ruler of hell and the Prince of Lies. This is myth. Its also a part of our religious structure, seperate from the doctrines and traditions of any given church.  The belief or lack of belief in Satan as the prince of Lies does not affect the Mass significantly.  

Noticed there is a third page, but I'm out of time for hte moment...

Once again, you're still relying on monotheism, and the more structured intellectual system of Buddhism there. I'm using ancient paganism/polytheism as my models.

The myths and legends do explain the existence of the gods, but they are not religious in the sense we use that term, just as they weren't "religious" for the Greeks. By that, I mean that one is not required to believe in their literal truth to worship the gods - correct performance of rites and rituals is more important than accepting propositions as true or false.

As an example of this from real history, Aeschylus was not charged with blasphemy for depicting the gods as cruel, capricious and somewhat contemptible in his plays (Prometheus Bound, for example, hardly portrays Zeus in a positive light), but he was fined for blasphemy for allegedly depicting a part of the Eleusinian rites in one of his plays. Aristophanes jokes about possibly getting in trouble for showing the sacred and secret rites of the women of Athens, while otherwise portraying the gods as monstrous twits.

Similarly, with the early Christians (and previously, with the Jews), the problem was not in believing that there was only one god and so on, but in failing to perform the rites of the Imperial Cult because of that belief.

In the ancient world, the kinds of metaphysical and cosmological speculation that we traditionally think of as religious were simply philosophical. The origin of the world, what happened after death, etc. had simple mythical explanations and more complicated philosophical explanations, but neither were "religious" as we use the term, and there was no third category of especially "religious" explanations. To worship Zeus properly didn't mean you had to accept the existence of Hades, the war between the Titans and the gods, and so on (and we know many Greeks didn't, finding their folk conceptions of the gods unjust and disturbingly capricious upon reflection). Proper worship of Zeus meant correctly performing rituals.

Places to Go, Things to Kill:

The Dreaming Tree

Deep in the penninsular swamps, there is a great tree the local halfling tribes worship as the Taru Bolar - the Dreaming Tree. Anyone who travels too close to it notices the world become more dreamlike and surreal, tinged with bright colours that shift and fade, vine and leaf motifs that curl and wind unnaturally across the surfaces of things and a sharp earthy odour that pervades the air. Eventually, they begin to feel tired, their eyes droop, and they collapse into sleep. Left to lay too long, their dreams join the tree's, their bodies die, and they wander as dream-shades under its canopy.

A careful shaman can travel only into the edge of the dream, and then only briefly, and can learn much, for the tree is very ancient and very wise, but if he goes too far forward, or stays too long, he too will become a dream-shade.

I don't think we'll make any progress on the religious discussion, You think I'm caught up in strictly monothesistic thought and I think you're missing my point utterly, so lets let it go.

As for your dreaming tree: I'm thinking of the Aspen, though not a marsh tree but specifically it's nature as a sort of Superorganism, where all the trees in an area share one root mass, being essentially One Tree made up of many stems.  Pando, in Utah, is a single tree covering Hectacres, weighing an estimated 6600 tons.

Now: Whats to stop the dreaming tree from being something similar, though more mythical/spiritual.

Another take on such things might be the Orson Scot Card Xenocide example of 'Father Trees', where the trees themselves are the adult life cycle of sentient (or in this case possibly presentient) mammalians... Possibly halflings in this case. The Tree (s) are actually sentient thinking beings and the strange effects are a result of the telepathic/magical communication (through the Dreaming Lands?) of the various Father Trees in the swamp... with the singular Tree being the oldest and largest Tree, the nexus of the effect.

Just Ideas.

Good ones though. The aspen idea is pretty cool, and could be easily adapted. Instead of being physically joined though, the dreaming trees are all connected through the dream, with dream-roots shooting from one to the other. Cut the roots, and that tree's power diminishes drastically, letting the clever deal with it longer before they're lost to its dream.

Argh, I tried to write this four times now over the past few days, but shoddy AOL websites always make my browser crash before I post it.

Here's the cut-down, somewhat frustrated version:

People in Dwer Tor wear clothing that's a mixture of Greek and Indian styles. Rich people wear dhotis, togas, saris and chitons. Poor people wear lungis, loinclothes, the salwar kameez, kurtas, choli-lehngas and the like. Clothing is loose, made of light materials and in light colours due to the generally warm climate. In wet months, linen cloaks become ubiquitous. Clothing is pinned or folded into place, with few seams or buttons. Accessories like hats and gloves are uncommon. Helots may not wear clothing that has been dyed, except for bleached fabrics. Optimates and thaumates may wear what they please. Slaves are issued black loinclothes and cloaks to distinguish them easily from the rest of the population.

Ordinary dress in the Orthocracy is a tunic and breeches or a kilt. Sherwanis, cloaks and full kilts are worn in colder weather or on formal occasions. Accessories like gloves, hats and sashes are common, with a complicated colour and pattern scheme for each indicating one's allegiances within the city. Priests, gnostics and other scholars wear double-breasted cassocks and achkans, with whatever other paraphernalia their cult demands. Plain grey and brown are not used as colours of allegiance, and so are worn by those who wish to keep their allegiances privately.

The (somewhat) colder weather encourages heavier fabrics, but the superior technology of the Orthocracy allows finer weaves and better sewn clothing to be produced than in Dwer Tor.

The Kadiz nomads and the Hill Elves wear the same sorts of clothing as one another, as described earlier in the thread. Clothing is mostly variations of brown and grey, except for the intricate patterns of black and white found on garments and banners indicating clan affiliation.

Hobgoblins tend to wear burlap and canvas kurtas or bodysuits underneath boiled leather and wool over-clothing. Designs are commonly engraved or painted on the over-clothing according to the rank, wealth and history of the goblin in question.

Another starting setting:

Stoneshore

A small (pop. 1000) but important trading post along the Little Road River. Stoneshore's distinctive feature is a kilometre of stone-lined docks cut into the jungle. It lays several hours west of the Drop, the last falls in the Little Road before the ocean and the furthest inland that ships can come before they must be unloaded. It is a colony of Dwer Tor, established several hundred years ago.

Demographics:

About 10% eladrin, 10% dwarf, 10% human (mostly Salt Men), 65% halfing, and 5% other (dragonborn, tieflings, drow, elves). The dwarves and eladrin are split between the thaumate and optimate classes. There are approximately 100 slaves (10% of the population), with the rest of the population being helots and foreigners.

Layout:

Stoneshore is on the northern shore of the Little Road. The docks, warehouses and foreigners' quarters are nearest to the river. The notable landmark in this part of town is the watch-tower, with its attached slave barracks. A firebreak separates this part of the town from the rest.

The rest of the town is oriented towards the farms that checker the surrounding jungle. Three roads run out of the town. Two (East Rice Road and West Rice Road) run a few miles out to where the jungle becomes swamp and have stone platforms sunk into the water for halfling swamp barges to dock. The third, Porter's Road, runs along the shore to the Drop. Each road forms a break in the palisade that protects the "real" town from tribes of jungle halflings.

Less than a half-day's walk through the jungle and swamp is the ruins of a temple dedicated to an unremembered god. The upper layers and outer buildings of the temple compound supplied the stone used to build Stoneshore's docks, but the sacred bastion lays in a collapsed heap of rubble. The Emerald Sign has forbidden the helots from tampering with what remains, but rumours circulate that if one presses one's ear up against the stones that remain, one can hear... scratching, as if something was trying to dig its way out. At least two other temples of similar design can be found further out, but their remote location prevents casual exploration by the villagers.

The south shore (about 5km from the north shore) hides at least one bandit camp, but is thickly forested and rarely explored. It is also a popular place to unload smuggled cargo before properly docking on the north shore.

Society:

The optimates are split amongst several merchant families with a rump of civil administrators. The Tekton family of dwarves is the largest and most powerful of them through their control of the slave-porters. Their blue-checked banner  leads most processions upriver to the Drop. Rumours circulate that some of the poorer families sponsor bandit raids on these processions. The town's watch, a small professional unit, is composed of the third sons, bastards and other pariahs of the optimates.

The thaumates of Stone Shore are mostly members of technical professions related to the ship and rice trade, but there is a small ecclesia of infernal-pact Warlocks, the Emerald Sign, who study the nearby temples and who keep the festival calendar.

The helots are mostly rice farmers, petty merchants and servants. In times of trouble, they form the militia, under the guidance of the town watch. They are members of the Stoneshore deme and so all are referred to as [name] Stoneshore in formal circumstances.

The slaves of Stoneshore are mostly criminals and captured members of the hostile jungle halfling tribes. They are rented en masse by the Governor to the Tekton family to use as cargo porters, traditional slave work that the helots find demeaning.

The foreigners in Stoneshore are diverse. Many are strange Salt Men, who come in ocean-going ships and bring spices, silk, unfamiliar animals and other wonders. The rest are a mixture of mercenaries, explorers, exiles and other troublemakers who've decided to lose themselves at the ends of the earth.