Priests, Spirits and Gods

[Devour]

Basically, the simple idea of this is give a religious aspect to the Hearthlands, with a combination of the building of places of worship on select spots, gods requiring their worshippers and priests ( more so to the priests, to give it a bit of a negative ) to do things or lose favour and a tradition focused around the respect of spirits.

Spirits
My first idea is the introduction of "spirits", creatures that give help to people who respect them and hindrance to those that don't, similar to those of Slavic myth and legend.

For example, domovoi, house spirits, would be pleased with a nice bit of house keeping, but extremely displeased with the usual way people leave their houses in, at the moment. ( I'm not entirely certain how to implement this, maybe via there being a limit on how many containers / objects you can have in a house, and going over that limit makes it untidy? ) If it is pleased, the domovoi would defend the house from intruders, drop off low value objects you have requested it find ( "Domovoi, find me some milk!" ) and tidy up the house to its pleasing. If upset, the domovoi could cause damage to the owner, mess around objects and throw up objects in the house. To please it, you could give it milk and honey or whatever the like.

Another example would be a water spirit, dumping things in the water would cause it to get angry, but leaving the water alone would only NOT make it angry. There would of course be no need to have a positive to every negative. Restrictions are always fun.

To drive them out, you would probably have to get have to get someone with a skill / the knowledge to perform a ritual to drive them out, and maybe have this skill be the precursor to becoming a member of the priestly profession, as you'd be on the road to understanding the ( hopefully ) complex patterns of hearthling religion. I could imagine fighting the spirit ( as in, physically ) would be possible, but much more difficult than following the usual traditional banishment methods.

ALSO, a system similar to Dungeon Master would be interesting, where, if you fulfill a set of conditions, a spirit finds its way to the area and takes up residence there. All of these rituals would preferably not be COMPLETELY obvious to the players, and trial and error would be the easiest way to get about it, maybe with clues in the forms of objects most thrown about ( in the example of the Domovoi ).

Gods
For the gods, I'd suggest something similar to the Slavic pantheon, or the Gloranthan one ( From games such as RuneQuest, King of Dragon Pass and Quest for Glory. Also, to be honest, you could gain a HELL of a lot from this setting, as it's just beautiful. ), as they match the flavour of the game almost exactly. These gods should likely have some sort of individual belief system, and players / villages should view it as necessary to try and respect all of them ( even if they have a "main" one which they dedicate their main temples to ). A person who worships a main god ( I.E. let's say a god of valour ) should have to stick to their code of tenets, in this case not attacking someone unless they have a weapon or you are attacked first. Priests should probably have to stick to these tenets even more rigidly, in this case HAVING to attack anyone they seem who has a weapon and is not a worshipper of the same god as them, regardless of the consequences. Not doing this could result in the god's displeasure, with curses or the like.

The temples could be built by anyone ( maybe costing more / rarer materials the bigger the temple, which in turn produces more power for the priest to give out blessings with ), although I think it would be a good idea to allow the biggest temples to only be built on certain points in the game, that would likely become highly contested, and fought over by members of their cults. A system similar to the current town chieftain / lawspeaker one could be put in place for temples, but make it considerably less rigid, and allow more fluidity and the possibility for priests of the cult to vote one of their own to the head of the church.

These temples could be worshipped at, funding the ability of the priest, and giving the person worshipped there a minor blessing. Non-worship would lead to the degradation of the church, possible inhabitation by creatures unwanted and the priest being cursed by his god for neglect.

Priests
Of course, priests themselves would get many bonuses from this, such as the ability for the priests to bless items, bless / curse people or bless / curse areas with non-obvious ( preferably, anyway ) effects, such as rain, prosperity, desertification on terrain or famine on people ( eg. extremely hungry until the person eats much more than they normally would ).

Priests themselves would have extremely strict restrictions on them, like the example before or - in the case of a bovine diety - no usage of anything involving the murder or exploitation of cows. I should hope that this would lead to less people being interested in becoming a deity's priest, and more interested in just being a general worshipper of the gods.

Another suggestion to this would be to have "champions" of the gods, non-priestly servants who push the god's agenda, but are possibly less bound to the tenets of the faith, in favour of a higher requirement on conquering / building temples to their god.

( This has a new thread due to Jackard's eternal support, because he loves me! )

[kimya]

sounds interesting
i like the idea of the house spirit, thats cool!

[Jackard]

it also sounds vaguely familiar

[Devour]

it also sounds vaguely familiar

I did admit I got it from Slavic mythology.

Man, reading is not a strong suit to some. =(

[sabinati]

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1597
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1631
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2065

[Devour]

http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1597
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1631
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2065

...I had not seen these.

Me and Loftar / Jorb are on the same wavelength. ._.