Designing A Fake Cult

As I’ve said before, RPGs generally suck at portraying religion.  My quote from seven years ago is that all most RPGs give us are variations of "Bunsgrabber is the God of Partying Down.  His alignment is Chaotic Horny.  He is depicted as a young man with a great tan, wearing cutoffs of purest gold.  His priests always wear sunshades and strange caps with horizontal visors pointing backwards, and his High Temple is at the coastal fort of Lauderdale." 

Don't forget the cool outfits and at least one hot cult leader.

Then you have the bullshit concept that latter editions of D&D pushed that it's possible to be a legitimate cleric, with legitimate healing and blessing and clerical powers, just by hooking up with a "philosophical concept" – in other words, a cheapass dodge for players who wanted to have the cool powers without having to follow any of those boring roleplaying constraints, follow any doctrine or dogma they didn't write themselves, or take a stand on anything.  And this goes a fair bit back: a player in M.A.R. Barker’s campaign in the early 70s reported that how his fellow players handled the religion-soaked environment of Empire of the Petal Throne was to throw gold at the temples and otherwise ignore them.

So it was surprising when a forum thread asked how one would go about designing a fake cult in a fantasy setting, and so many of the posters reacted with shock and horror.  Impossible! they said.  Everyone would Know!  Nonsense, said I.

I don't see, for instance, a single bit of difference, observable to a casual onlooker, between a priestess waving her hands in the air, shouting "May the great god Mitra grant us light!" and the room filling with light, and a wizard dressed in clerical vestments, waving her hands in the air, shouting "May the great god Bunsgrabber grant us light!" ... and casting a light spell.  If the paradigm of the common folk is that the gods grant their priests supernatural powers, well, a wizard can wear pseudo-clerical vestments, stand in a "temple" and work supernatural powers.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to turn undead?  Easy.  "The great god Bunsgrabber is not a *weak* god, and He does not cowardly hope that the Unlife will just run away!  This is how Bunsgrabber deals with the Unlife!"  Cue fireball hitting the zombie dead center.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to heal people?  Easy.  For one, you deter the casual and the unfaithful.  "The great god Bunsgrabber is not a whore god like all the rest!  He grants healing only to His sincere worshipers!"  There in one fell swoop you take care of 90% of the supplicants.  For the handful you genuinely want to heal -- or the rich folk you want to think of themselves as True Believers -- just to make the scam look good, you invite them to drink from the Sacred Chalice upon which the Great God Bunsgrabber has breathed His mighty breath.  (Cue wind spell.)  That's the chalice you spike with a healing potion.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to raise the dead?  Easy.  You don't.  "What is this blasphemy you speak?  Do you not know that the great god Bunsgrabber has vouchsafed your beloved dead a seat on His Great Comfy Waterbed, attended by the requisite seven Angels In Spandex?  How can you be so wicked as to wish them to return to this world of suffering and pot bellies?"

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to bless people.  Hm.  Pretty much the same as clergy bless people today worldwide, however much we have no objective proof that gods exist.  Nonetheless, billions of people seek out those blessings, and believe in their efficacy when they receive them.

But, you say, won’t the other gods object?  I don’t see it, myself.  The frequently parroted shibboleth of omnipresent, interventionist deities bears surprisingly little resemblance to common gameplay, even in D&D circles. Honestly, how often have you seen gods physically appear in your own campaigns?  And in how many campaigns are there two dozen, three dozen (... more?) gods?  How many schmuck peasants keep track of them all, and how would they do so in any event?  Not like they could try to pull up an article for Bunsgrabber on Wikipedia ...

And even so, speaking of that: here’s an example IN the modern age, where factchecking is at everyone’s fingertips.  Take a look at the whole Church of Satan deal and its offshoots.  Many really do believe in them.  Yet Anton LaVey said openly in The Satanic Bible that to a degree, it was all hooey: "Satan" really didn't exist as a real being, LaVey wasn't shy about admitting it, and all the mysticism and trappings LaVey put in the book was pretty much out of his entirely defensible position that mankind has a demonstrable love for mysticism and trappings.  A philosophical concept, huh?  Guess LaVey would've made it as a D&D cleric.  But I digress ...

Nah, this'd be a slam dunk in most any realistic fantasy setting.  (And if fantasy settings were somehow immune to grifters, how do thieves manage to survive?)

Tidbits: Game Of Thrones

And in another one of my rants from the forums ...

(ForumDood: Of course, the TV version decided to at least double the apparent size of it, AND make it scalable by random men with no particular training or experience scaling sheer ice walls of ridiculous height (LOL). Of course, the TV show also likes to show impossible castle/tower/city heights of crazy exaggerated height. "The throne room is a day's climb up...")

Well, but think about it.  If you follow Game Of Thrones, you just have to take suspension of disbelief and kick it into the holler.  Railroad very obviously didn't give a damn about logistics, distances, common sense or a lot of things.  

Gives a damn about the T-shirt sales, though, I bet!

They march gigantic armies across continental distances without giving the slightest thought to how long that actually takes or the logistics train one needs.  They have twenty guys actually capture and HOLD Winterfell, even when that force could be rolled by local peasants with hunting bows and grain flails and Northerners aren't described as being cowardly bunnies.  Why the North needs to conquer King's Landing (thousands of miles from their center of supply) is never adequately explained, when they just need to hold the Neck.  There's not enough game in all that ice and snow to feed Mance Rayder's army, not by a factor of 50.  100 grain wagons a day to alleviate the hunger in King's Landing?  Never mind the distance from Dorne to KL (which makes the notion absurd on the face), a city that size polishes off five hundred tons of food per day.  (And a little slip of a 10-year-old who's just had her ribcage caved in takes out an undead giant?  The Mother of All Critical Hits, to be sure.)

And OMG, the Wall.  I would cheerfully undertake to defend the Wall with 200 guys against the massed armies of all the world.  They can starve below while we drink tea and play pinochle, because that's a formidable technical climb for expert mountaineers (and where in the merry hell did the wildlings get that expertise AND the steel crampons?), and with the level of exhaustion that would involve, one ten-year-old with a good head for heights and a baseball bat could deal with everyone who made it in a quarter-mile's worth of wall.

Sport in campaigns

(Trust me, this will get to roleplaying.  Bear with me.)

Following the exchange with one of my kind readers in the previous post ... I joined an APBA dice baseball league in 1981.  For those of you unfamiliar with such sports simulation games, there are companies – most notably APBA and Strat-O-Matic – that every year put out a set of cards, based on their private algorithms, that seek to duplicate the performances of individual players from the previous season.  This is primarily done with baseball, which lends itself well to the approach, but has been done for other sports – you use dice and charts to determine the results of individual plays.  Some play solitaire replay seasons with the original teams, but the league I was in had the players draft new teams, and we’d keep them year after year, drafting new players and holding trades and suchlike.  I took over my team in mid-season that first year after another player dropped out.

Anyway, Jim was one of the managers.  He also happened to be an Empire of the Petal Throne GM who decided to base his team on Tekumel and out of Jakalla – the so-called “Jakalla Saints” – and did a good bit of roleplaying during his games.  The crowd would chant "Vimúhla!  Vimúhla!" – the “evil” flame god of the pantheon – if a pitcher was doing poorly and about to be pulled, and instead of placing players on waivers, Jim would say that they were impaled on one of the three impaling stakes in center field, pour encourages les autres.  (M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel is not your bog-standard D&D "lawfulgood" setting, not by a long chalk.)

I was charmed – go ahead, say it, you know you want to – and the next season moved my team into one of the cities on my gameworld.  The "Warwik Dragons" were born, playing in the city's gladiatorial arena (thus insuring short porches down the foul lines).  A PC wizard begged to be added to the team's staff, so Larindo the Witherer became (then as now) the Team Necromancer, who helped out materially when I made a waiver wire pickup.  The cards were based on the previous season of play, and in 1980 J.R. Richard – a star pitcher for the Houston Astros – was having a magnificent season before he had a stroke.  He would never pitch in the majors again.  

So, while in 1981 Richard's card was excellent, we all knew he was damaged goods, and the Jakalla manager cut him during the stretch run for a prospect.  I promptly picked him up off the waiver wire.  Since Richard had been "impaled," Larindo reclaimed the body and raised him as a zombie during a gaming session (which took some doing, since creating Unlife within the kingdom's boundary was illegal) for the team.  The following quote during an APBA match was repeated down the seasons:

    JR's Zombie:  "I ... pitch ... good.  I ... live ... again?"
    Warwik Manager:  "No, sorry, J.R., you're still dead."

PCs have attended games down the years (matches are social register events), and one got singed for being too close to the edge of the outfield wall, which erupts in a sea of magical flame every time the Dragons hit a home run.  Anyway, I was in the league until 1988, when I moved out of the area ... but I did win the championship that season, with the best record in league history (50-14), averaging ten runs a game, and racking up the single most dominant game imaginable (27-0, where my starting pitcher, the aforementioned Nolan Ryan, pitched a one-hitter; those readers who are baseball-conversant will understand how mindshattering that is).

For other sports on my gameworld?  Shinny's also a popular game in winter time: in effect early pond hockey.  There’s also a sport, not for the faint of heart, played by rock trolls.  Since they’re pretty much RuneQuest trolls, they play Trollball, and at least one party has seen a Trollball match.  Freaked the party pacifist out, too, especially when one enterprising troll spiked the “ball.”  (No, I’m not explaining further – look it up!  Consider yourself warned.)

So, given that mortalkind is given to sport, I’ve done up other sports.  Village football’s a favorite, and soccer is as low-tech as it comes – one just needs goalposts and a leather ball.  Warwik City, in Byzantine fashion, has “factions” operating out of the gladiatorial arena, competing not only in arms but in racing, athletics, martial arts and, well, baseball – the standings for the combined sports are the talk of the town, as well as a major venue for betting.  The party's about to be in an area where the local popular sport is a type of polo, played on sleeths (riding lizards that pretty much have the size, configuration and gait of Star Wars taun-tauns), and using effectively lacrosse sticks. 

Heck, if we stick to Tekumel, there's a custom known as Qadàrni, where a full-scale battle is held to settle a score, satisfy a point of honor, or adjudicate an intractable dispute or legal case.  The competitors can be any entity – private individuals, clans, temples, societies, and even political polities.  Honor demands that the sides start (nominally) even, and it gains little honor if one’s forces are known to be a great deal more capable than their foes.  Cheating, treachery or otherwise dishonorable acts are not allowed.  Such a battle begins at dawn and takes one hour, or when one side is either disabled – or slain – to a man or concedes.  These matches are major spectator sports, and occasions for a great deal of gambling.

Adding sport to your setting gives just that extra bit of local color, and also serves to divide locals into factions that have nothing to do with the hoary old RPG classics of religion and race.

Tidbits III: Convert-sations

This may just be me, but I've never considered converting supplements to the system I use from a system I don’t the horrible, barely-possible chore a lot of gamers think it needs to be.

I'm not a RPG rookie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick up a game, thumb through the rules, and figure out quickly enough what means what.  "Might 80" means you're a strong dude, "6th Circle" means you can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan, "Evocation of Violet Tumescence" appears to be the system's list of temporal spells, and "21 XYW" means you're an outstanding fireballing pitcher with control issues ...

(Oh, wait, I just lapsed into APBA baseball speak.  Anyway ...)

Converting this isn't tough.  I know, in GURPS, what a strong dude looks like: he's got ST of 13-15.  I know what someone who can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan looks like; we're talking maybe 350-400 pts.  I know how to make up a wizard with a good command of temporal spells; that'd be a dozen Gate spells, say.

(Alright, I might need to take some time to replicate a 21 XYW pitcher.  Hrm.  The guy led the league in ERA that season by a giant whopping margin, as well as strikeouts/inning, but he also led the league in wild pitches by nearly twice as many as the 2nd worst.  In short, you're screwed if he hits you with a thrown missile, but he's not the most accurate guy in the world.)

I refuse, and always have refused, to worry about whether I get the equivalencies "exactly" right.  The guy who wrote the original supplement isn't running the adventure, I am.  If the original NPC could beat down three starting characters in that system 75% of the time (not that anyone's particularly run the numbers), and the eventual NPC in my system could do it 50% of the time, who's to know, and who's to care?