[Discuss] Death Cult of the Snake Goddess (Feature request: heresy)

[Anthony Cerqueira]

On 3/21/07, Gabriel <mail.to.gabriel at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the staples of religious politics in fantasy literature is the
> infiltration of the True Faith by demon-worshiping heretics. I think it'd be
> very interesting to explore the possibility of professing one religion while
> actually espousing a different one.
>
> A heretic priest, while preaching, could spread heresy among the commoners
> while appearing to promote the true faith; the commoners he converts might
> be displayed as faithful to the main religion on most reports, while
> providing power to the heretic cult rather than to their ostensible
> religion.
>
> Heretics might be able work to to defile shrines and temples of other
> faiths, again with no visible changes except that their power and influence
> is invisibly redirected. They might also be able to build hidden shrines of
> their own which are only displayed to heretics or if found through
> deliberate searches.
>
> Priests of the true faiths should be able to spend time (and gold?) in
> efforts to uncover heresy, detect whether a temple has been defiled, etc,
> and there should be an increasing chance for a heresy to be automatically
> revealed anyway as it becomes more popular. A revealed heresy would become
> an ordinary religion in that region, with followership and shrines displayed
> normally. Some mechanism for identifying heretic nobles should be designed
> which addresses the needs of both the loyal clergy and the heretics,
> possibly based on a duel-like inquisition/debate function between the
> heretic and the investigator.
>
> Would there be any interest in such a feature? Would it be entirely
> impractical to code, or unbalancing to existing gameplay? It seems to me
> that this might be one way to let people establish a new foothold for
> religions other than the state-sponsored faith, and address some of the
> concerns raised in LilWolf's "Religion isn't fun" thread.
>
>
>
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This sounds interesting indeed, though I'm not totally sure about the
details of such a thing.