Religion, Alignments, and Miracles
Contents
Religion[edit]
The Imperial Cult[edit]
The only faith sanctioned by the Obelisk is the worship of the Nameless Emperor as a living god of order and justice. The Imperial Cult is generally paid only lip-service in hinterlands like Istagat and Padash, but thrives in more central regions, where key figures in the nobility are involved.
Pre-Imperial Faiths[edit]
Records from before the Founding indicate a variety of pantheons were worshiped in various regions; the Imperial Cult has been very effective in stamping out most records and memories of these gods.
Ogre Paganism[edit]
The nomadic ogre tribes make nods to the Imperial Cult but in truth enact rituals of their own based not around gods, but around archetypes, what they call the Eight Perfect Lives. Cultural exchange as the ogres move has leaked these ideas into many rural regions, though often in a misunderstood or corrupted form.
The Blood Tree (Wood Elves)[edit]
While technically a religion that holds that all sentient creatures are connected, these beliefs pass under the Obelisk radar as they are mostly expressed as categories of personalities. Wood elves believe that they themselves are each predestined to be one of three types:
Roots - The scholars, the leaders, the entrepreneurs. The steady, down-to-earth folk meant to ground their whole culture and give it order.
Branches - The workers, the families, the glue of their society.
Leaves - The fighters, the adventurers. Those that bring chaos to their society and (they believe) keep them more interesting than other races of elf.
The blood (sap) of the tree feeds all its people and keeps them connected. This is a spiritual concept that can be acted out by simply sharing stories and drink around a fire.
There is also the concept which holds that each wood elf has an aspect of all three parts of the blood tree inside him or her, where the roots are the superego, the branches are the ego, and the leaves are the id.
In this theology, other races are seen as woodland animals. The insects bring rot and disease. The birds bring songs and life from outside their tree.
A certain sect holds that the outsiders that bring a positive influence are necessary to the blood tree's very existence, and that in practical terms, this means that wood elves have a little human in them from generations before recorded history. This is not a popular theory.
Alignment[edit]
The available alignments are based on the ogren rituals of the Eight Perfect Lives.
- Student: "humble seeker"
- Teacher: "bearer of truths"
- Warrior: "lives by the blade"
- Saint: "who perseveres"
- Master: "perfection of art"
- Scholar: "delver of mysteries"
- Victor: "in service to a cause"
- Glory: "a name remembered"
