does your fantasy setting have schisms? or just cults from the religion that later got a big following and became a major religion
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does your fantasy setting have schisms?
does your fantasy setting have schisms? or just cults from the religion that later got a big following and became a major religion
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reminder a heretic posted cringe so bad it ruined everything for everyone forever.
Also Jean should not be on that list b*gundians aren't the pope, they are scum
The Church reversed Jeanne's conviction and posthumously excommunicated her judge.
Church fell for the French propaganda. Jeanne was a witch and got what she deserved
Shut up Nigel
>Rulers of England thought of England as nothing more than a base from which to take over France
>Rulers of France didn't think of England at all
seethe harder, Brit
>seethe harder, Brit
Why would they seethe? France only exists because Anglos gave it back to them. For free, at that.
Wut?
Legitimately funny when you realize King Richard spent 90% of his life outside of England and used the entire country to fund his armies despite being some kind of national hero.
And the rulers of France were a Germanic tribe ruling over Celtic Gauls (who they renamed after themselves). Identifying with a royal family is cringe and gets you nowhere
Magic isn't real, moron.
Interesting that the most successful, influential, and powerful people both historically and today all disagree with you though, isn't it? I think, basically, that you have an emotional understanding of magic which makes you treat it as woo-woo nonsense, whereas everyone who seriously believes in and practices magic, to include the vast majority of all human elites, correctly understand that magic is simply the means by which change is affected in the world. Consider: what is a song, indeed, what is music?
Most normies grew up with the Harry Potter flashy magics. They never consider invisible powers and demons of light who deny the Son of God..Sadly anti-magic isn't very popular.
>Source: Magical dreams
have a nice day angloid
Has the Saxon race fallen so far as to associate itself with the execution of a woman for the crime of wearing pants while riding in a warzone?
Pretty sure it's just an English version. French thing. And to be fair, the French are usually on the wrong side of those.
It's SAINT Jeanna of Arc, thank you very much. I may be new but the Catholic Church shapes up to be the true Church by merit of continued attacks by all media in every nation, including supposedly conservative Christian nations. This explains israelites quietly and secretly converting to Catholicism once their Moshiach was presented. You will never guess who it is.
The best part is they documented it. The other faiths don't document their shortcomings.
Gnostics are great material for villains. "Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears" is just old school evil.
>Gnostics are great material for villains.
They're also great material for protagonists, or for that old wise mentor, but a zoomie trad-cat wouldn't realize that.
It's also worth pointing out that "Gnostics" can mean anything from wacky israeli cults (Sethians, probably Mandeans, the only extant one) to basically Eastern Orthodox with edgier theology (Marcionites).
No. When gods actively manifest in mortal realm and can explicitly spell what is their will there's little room for any alternative interpretations.
>posthumously excommunicated
it just keeps happening
>gods are just high lvl npcs that can be killed
frick off lol
piss off, I said no such thing
You said it if I said you said it homosexual. I'm the main character on Ganker, b***h. I'm so fresh, you can suck my nuts.
I'm the MC of the Ganker 1v1 me.
It was really just more of a political statement, 'don't be corrupt like this guy.' He'd already been shrieking in hell for decades by that point.
Throwing corpses in the river and expropriating the property of his family is based.
>No. When gods actively manifest in mortal realm and can explicitly spell what is their will there's little room for any alternative interpretations.
Then they're demons and you must destroy them.
Materialism has no place in a game with literal fireballs conjured by human hands.
Both of you are wrong, there is no meaningful difference between a powerful deity and a weak deity, insofar as the question of theism and atheism is concerned. No being becomes or can be a god without the worship of another party who has decided to treat them that way. Without this component there is nothing godly about the magical creator being or any given powerful sky wizard, and there is no way to inherently compel it from others. There are no beings which can be understood as "objective" gods, whether in Exalted, Forgotten Realms, Golarion, or any other fantasy setting. Similarly, if the rabbi yeshua ben yosef and a legion of angels suddenly appeared on earth, that would also not be "proof" of the existence of god, merely proof of the existence of magical israeli zombies and powerful nonhuman creatures. Even if the homosexual yahweh, master of all israelites, appeared across the skies of the planet and started thunderbolting people straight to hell, it would not be proof of divinity, only of powerful beings and some kind of afterlife. Understand this is also true of beings like Pelor and Lolth.
>No being becomes or can be a god without the worship of another party who has decided to treat them that way.
and tree falling in the middle of the woods makes no sound, huh?
What that means, anon, is that godhood is subjective. You make a choice to worship a thing for a given reason, the divinity of your god is not something that objectively defines some aspect of the universe, only your subjective interpretation of it.
You are beholden to israeli notions of power and authority, so that you will always worship whatever seems "strongest", because you simply fear for the consequences of not doing so. This is one reason I would never treat some homosexualy foreskin-hungry israeli phantom as a god.
You're mixing up the Man who will burn the LGBTQ and the Great Awakening with the metzitzah bpeh men who wrote a book about 8 genders and how it's okay to rape a little girl because she's three years or less.
>n-no you see, we good goyim are heckin based!!
Do not try to change the subject, israelite worshiper, this is not an argument about how acceptable your slavish devotion to hostile parasites and constant 5th column treachery against white civilization is (and you do not want to have that argument anyway), it's an argument about how regardless of how "real" any given cosmic being is, it still isn't proof of god. There can be no "proof of god" as gods only exist in the minds of their worshipers, being a title they give to them signifying their worship.
Yes. My future brother in Christ, the billionaires are building bunkers deep underground while telling you how super bad and totally evil the destroyer of this gay ass earth will be. Spoilers: He'll burn this gay moronic world and they'll try to leave with a dick-shaped rocket called space sex or something of that idea.
If the name of Yeshua ben Elohim can make magic disappear, demon scream out of a fear of hellfire, and extraterrestrials run away in terror, I'll take that as a good enough sign that He's God and all the small letter g gods are demons who pretend to be extraterrestrials.
>israeli zombie
Holy frick
This really is the grognard board. How old are you, 60?
>posthumously excommunicated
Dying doesn't free you from the binds of the Church. Dude's in the afterlife and just got barred from receiving the Eucharist.
Pope could have just acknowledged the problems and not been a gay lmao
>What is the Counsel of Trent and the Counter Reformation
Obviously problems with corruption and absentee bishops is worth shattering 1000 years of unity and killing about 1/3 the population of Germany over.
Your exploitative "unity" can lick my ass.
>Says people deep in the interior of Christendom who don't border racial and religious enemies. Then have the nerve to denounce the people fighting to defend them.
Yeah the Venetians were a real threat, butthole.
>killing about 1/3 the population of Germany over.
I mean, you are saying that like it wasn't fricking awesome.
Affix 'Saint' to that name
Because Christ promised the Gates of Hell wouldn't prevail against His Church, not that every mortal man in it would be a paragon of virtue.
>reminder a heretic posted cringe so bad it ruined everything for everyone forever.
???
You mean Luther?
Can I please have some historical context on this?
Honestly from what I've heard from former seminarians it's probably not historical, there's literally gangs of gay/pedo bishops active right now.
>active now
Always has been anon
>Digging up the corpse of the previous Pope and making "him" stand trial for "his" crimes
It has schisms, heresies and different philosophies within a religion. As it shuold.
The one big one is whether the actions of your previous life affect your position in this one. The orthodoxy says it does and that’s why peasants should obey nobles and slaves obey masters: those born into a higher station are innately better people than those born into lower stations, since only the most righteous would get reincarnated as a duke or prince and only the most wicked and craven be born misshapen, sickly, or destitute. Reformationists argue that there is no correlation, that the will of God is for people to learn something each cycle and thus the soul needs fresh experiences from all walks of life.
Originally this was a purely academic debate between cloistered monks over a few lines of text in an obscure scripture, but after a minor rebellion grew into a massive movement, some firebrands started preaching their version to the rebels (who obviously resonated with their message of rulers not being innately superior) and now there’s a full blown schism.
In my headcanon, sure. Does it actually come up in the game? I'm lucky if my players actually remember the names/domains of the chief gods.
>confusing Luther and his followers in Europe with amerifat “Christians”
lol, lmao even
cope
Yeah, American Protestants were much less violent and mentally ill than continental ones.
Smart people are smart because their brains run faster. This often causes depression because they can't make happy chemicals as fast as they use them. Ritualistic religion helps them learn to slow their brains down naturally, which is why smart people like High-Church things. Dumb people need exciting flashy things to feel happiness because they need to be stimulated to use the happy chemicals fast enough to feel them, hence coliseums, rock concerts, mega churches, etc.
Okay, is there any source for that brain tidbit? Because if true, it’s giving me some ideas.
>giving the Pope money so he can tell Jesus to ignore my sins is a sign of high intelligence, actually
He never said that
>Catolic saint
>Heretic
Anglo hands have made that wojak shitpost
The Imperial Faith for my !UK setting has an undead queen who acts as an envoy and representative to the fey gods of the island nation.
The faith only came into being several centuries prior after an invasion of the island was repelled and the king promoted the worship of his wife as chosen by the gods which only amplified after his sister had her assassinated thinking she was trying to trick her brother.
In essence, it's a coalition and standardizing of all the various local faiths to promote certain rituals and holidays and assert that the Queen is the one true ruler of the nation as decreed by the fey gods and her worship grants them the fey gods blessings and power.
Those that were not on board were driven out of the country or killed and some went underground trying to retain the practice of their old faith and overthrow the kingdom.
Sounds extraordinarily Top Hat anon, you taking players?
Not from Ganker.
fair enough
>Not from Ganker
Oof, that burns.
Kinda. The main gods of the setting have an unsteady truce going, to the point where most people view them as a cohesive unit, but they all would very much like to destroy each other and take over everything. Inside the individual cults, schisms are rarer, although different sects are isolated to the point of near-complete independence, so they don't always get along.
Rome considers Eastern Orthodox schismatics, not heretics.
Funny enough there were several Lutheran attempts at unification but the EO basically told them their theology sucked.
For the actual question, I've had heresies but not schisms. The latter sounds neat now that I think about it, like having a large cult unilaterally declare a branch "is erroneously outside our hierarchy, but their practices are still technically proper." Sounds like a fun source of conflict.
That's fricking moronic of them since they are the ones who added their fanfiction "filioque" to the Nicocene creed.
Luther should not be that calm.
t. Lutheran
No but that is a good idea. A good ol schism in a faction.
You could literally make it a central focus of the campaign. Kingdom falls into civil war and all that, making the players have to navigate which side is the side they should support
How can the church ever say they have infallible backing of God when this greasy meatball sucked his way up to the big boy chair and turned the Vatican into a pleasure palace?
God was Horny on Main
There is church and there is church. Differentiate the two. Also free will. Also he was not a monster he's depicted as, but if you believe propaganda about him yours is the hopeless case.
yes, they are literally called "the heliocentrics" and "the Gnostics".
I think you can guess what they are all about.
that think at the bottom looks like its getting the entire underworld force inside his ass
Basically. he is.
Uh it's a bit of a combination of various mythologies. So basically, i'm just gonna greentext this
>cealestis and tenebrea is in the void
>the stoirming energies between them create Manus, who decides that Tenebrea is below and Cealestis is above.
>the storm rages on and wounds Manus, from a wound in his head he bleeds into caelestis and hence cometh Alron, from the wound on his crotch he bleeds into Tenebrea from whence cometh Waltan and from the wound in his middle he bleeds on himself from wence cometh the four goddessess.
>waltan is chaotic and bad and attempts to destroy Manus, Alron does nothign because action is beneath him but when he sees that teh goddesses are threatened he decides that action is correct when done with right reason.
>Waltan brings THE DRAGON out of Tenebrea and thogether they cast Alron down. Manus meanwhile curls up into a ball to protect his daughters whom he loves.
>in Tenebrae the tears of Alron freeze and become the angels who convince him to get it together and fight back.
>At this point, Waltan and THE DRAGON are tearing Manus apart and Waltan kicks out his left eye from inside his skull so he can let THE DRAGON inside
>Alron grabs a bone from Manus, the bacculum, using it as a club and with the angels he splits the dragon in twain. One part of the dragon is sent to caelestis where it recieves reason and becomes an ally of Alron.
>they chase off Waltan and Alron marries the 4 goddesses, each of which held on to one pieve of Manus, with which they make Eorden. Thus Alron becomes king of Eorden. (The eyes of Manus are set in the sky, being the sun and the moon. The stars are the homes of the angels and the planets are moving strongholds belonging to the lesser gods, the grandchildren of Alron)
Naturally, Waltan comes back later.
>Waltan takes the seeds of chaos out of Tenebrae and with a host of fiends and the other half of THE DRAGON he enters throug hthe underworld
>cont
>The 4 harbringers, Waltan's answer to the horsemen of the apocalypse, break the pillars of the world, causing massive earthquakes, tsunamis and the rising and sinking of continents.
>There is a great war between the forces of chaos and order
>The two dragons wrestle and the good dragon suplexes the bad dragon so hard that the good dragoin is lodged in the crust of the earth, becoming metal, and the bad dragon goes back to tenebrae
>waltan is defeated and Alron puts him at the bottom of the underworld and puts the world crust on top of him
>he then sets the world spinning like a giant grinding mill and slowly crushes Waltan into tiny pieces
>these pieces have become alien godling known as "dungeon masters" that roam about the underworld where they make strange labyrinthine compunds with wodnrous magic and treasure...and danger.
uh dunno what more to say. oh, Ashodel and Naraka are the only other planes where the positive energie from tenebrea clash with the negative energies of caelestis and vice versa on the other side.What is within These realms are entirely unknown and they are mostly theoretical, made up by wizards and scries with too much interest in mathematics.
I write too much. My players wont read most of it. I do not blame them.
oh frick, I should mention the gnostics again.
The gnostics believe that Waltan is the true lord of Eorden and that Alron's domain is purely spiritual.
Unlike the misguided heliocentrics the Sacrum Authority (ie: the church) has a "shoot on sight" policy for gnostics.
So they can just kill someone on the spot if they claim that they’re a heretic?
Same way you could in europe in the 15th century. You do that you get a secular police investigation. Usually you have to arrest the heretic and prove their heresy. Of course, the testimony of a cleric is considered to be very solid...
They really rigged things, huh?
yeah it wasn't great.
That cosmology image interests me greatly. Care to explain it in more detail? Did you invent it, or does it come from somewhere else?
How do schisms work in a setting where the gods are real and can just tell their followers what they want? I can see people deciding they don't want to worship a certain god anymore and worship someone else, but 2 different groups worshiping the same god but being in conflict over religious principles doesn't work if the god can just say which side is correct.
Like, if Jesus came down from the Heavens and just told everyone that the Catholic Church is right, the Protestant churches would have a hard time justifying their continued existence.
Gods are real and can tell people what to do does not mean the Gods DO tell people exactly what to do in unambiguous and uniform ways.
Seems like kind of a cop-out, why wouldn't they? If they care enough to want people to worship them, why wouldn't they make sure there are no major doctrine disputes amongst his followers? Why not smite "heretics"?
Not all fantasy Gods are just superheroes with some sort of "Divine Domain" stapled on. Heck, it's not even the case for all D&D settings as you can see with Eberron, where the existence of Gods is subject of constant debate because there's no definitive proof they exist or are anything more than vague cosmic forces without sentience.
You are so dumb you hurt others with your idiotic questions. There are no "real gods" in fantasy, there are powerful beings, some of which are worshiped as gods. They do sometimes preach their shitty uninformed opinions as literal truth to their followers and this almost always reveals both themselves and their followers to be stupid and/or insane. These beings do not have special knowledge about the world, they do not have any fricking idea what moral truth is, and the ones who might have an inkling are wise enough to shut the frick up and let other people figure things out too.
But, more importantly, in most fantasy settings, these beings are NOT the subject of religious worship. There may a cult following which prays to them specifically, but the religion, the belief system and rituals and theology and dogma, is something authored by a given church or its founders. Originally, cosmic Law was what formed the basis of "lawful religions", not the panoply of extraplanar superheroes and monsters who people call gods. Lastly, frick off, the Athar have existed for longer than you've been alive, fantasy atheism is very easy to understand and does not at all conflict with any established facts in any fantasy universe.
that must be the most moronic bait in this whole thread
So surely it's trivial for you to rebut it, right?
I will bite it
For starters what defines what is a "real God" in a fantasy word is the author and therefore, setting dependent, as well what is truth and what it's know by the follower of said god and that gods knowledge about moral truth, if those are even a thing on the setting
> these beings are NOT the subject of religious worship.
they literally are
>the belief system and rituals and theology and dogma, is something authored by a given church or its founders.
first that depends on the setting
second, that irrelevant for it being religious worship or not
>Originally, cosmic Law was what formed the basis of "lawful religions"
that not a thing in most fantasy settings
>not the panoply of extraplanar superheroes and monsters who people call gods.
in many setting the gods and the things they did are the bases of the religions and again, those beings are gods
I wont lose more of my time with this as you have no arguments but baseless affirmations and definitions take out of your ass
The funniest part is that D&D does actually have a One True Capital-G God that pre-dates the entire setting and time itself. It's not Ao or Io or whatever, and it's not a 'it's the DM' joke; it never had a name because there was no need for such a thing when it was all that existed. It divided itself to permit the universe to exist, as its very nature was one of absoluteness and therefore nothing could exist outside of it. The whole of reality came out of it.
It's very much like the Christian God in many ways, while also thoroughly permeating every aspect of reality much like an omniversial Shinto kami. It's still semi-aware and experiencing the universe as a part of itself, and while it does not answer direct calls for discourse or conversation and keeps no cohort of divine messengers, you can pray to it and it will grant you divine spells.
It's called The Oversoul by the few that know about it, and you can read about it in Dragon Magazine 350, page 88.
This becomes extremely interesting when you line these pieces up with the story of Atropus from Elder Evils. It tells about almost identical events but with a different focus. The one true progenitor consciousness destroyed itself as an act of love, expressed as permitting the universe to be created. But by doing so, it also created an undead echo of that primordial entity that retains the memories but none of the goodwill, divinity, or love of that God. It regrets having given itself away and now travels the cosmos consuming entire worlds to try and put the genie back in the bottle, wanting to re-consume all of reality in the hopes of becoming what it used to be.
>The funniest part is that D&D does actually have a One True Capital-G God
No it doesn't
>muh oversoul!
still setting specific and not a thing in the majority of D&D settings
Seethe. Both the Oversoul and Atropus are entirely setting-agnostic standalone content and makes no mention of any particular locale or crystal sphere or even plane outside of some suggestions on how different settings might react to Atropus. It's universally present.
You are making a assumption that Gods are remotely Human, actually care for worship of their followers and have the power to just smite people.
In reality, what can be classified as God can range from really powerful people to cosmic forces beyond power of mortals.
If author says that no, in his world, Gods have clear, hard, limitations and can't just smite everyone when their feel like it, then that's how it works and heresies and theological schism make sense, it's no different from saying that I have Dragons in my game setting.
Hovewer, if Gods cleary have the power and genuine and lasting interest in mortals actions then it becomes a problem to justifie.
God of War has every right and reason not to care how Humans fight and wage war as long as there fighting and war, but people who choose him as their patron, absolutely can have concept like "Honor" or "proper fighting", influenced by culture from which they come from. Hovewer, if that God has very much Human concept of Honor, then it makes less sense for people to honor him differently.
And of course, religion doesn't even need proper Deity or group of them and instead be based upon things like ancestor worship or concepts like Saṃsāra.
It's only "cop-out" if you don't know how to do basic writing and explain things in your setting.
>Like, if Jesus came down from the Heavens and just told everyone that the Catholic Church is right, the Protestant churches would have a hard time justifying their continued existence.
I, for one; would assume he's just sticking up for Peter.
>Like, if Jesus came down from the Heavens and just told everyone that the Catholic Church is right, the Protestant churches would have a hard time justifying their continued existence.
Most likely most people would deny he is Jesus ro say he's the anti-christ.
How would he prove the truth?
People really like to gloss over how the Orthodox Church sperged the frick out over non-traditional denominations to the point that it fricked the Byzzies over because those groups decided cooperating with Muslims was better than being persecuted by Constantinople.
>It's another topic that actually applies to my setting but I know its just another bumpgay thread and nobody in here will actually read what I say.
I know that feel. Also my ideas are probably cringe and people probably ignore them because of that.
Same bro. I used to love these threads until one day I took a step back and was like "wait a minute, this is just a bunch of people posting their own shit with no discussion". I mean, look at it.
I rarely post, but inenjoy reading other people shit. Bit youbmust make it short.
>campaign at the moment is based around a big bad who is so schizophrenic he accepts any and all schisms to his grand ideology and encourages holy wars between people for the sake of refining the religious craft
>but it's from an established setting (exalted) and not homebrew so that means most d&donkeys will be repulsed by it
Is Bishop's at it, again?
I mostly play The Dark Eye, every other official module seems to revolve around some kind of schism.
I stole an idea from here where my setting's not!Christianity is divided across two faiths of dwarvish and elvish expression where dwarves are iconoclasts and orthodox, they don't like graven images and they have a very rigid set of rules for how to worship and how to express your faith. Temples have precise measurements and there are only a few approved symbols and a specific limit to how many you should carry because faith is for the gods, not for you. These are generally followed by races with a more conservative or structured culture.
Elves on the other hand love images and symbols, they make statues and portraits of the divines and the saints. Their temples are big and bold and grand. Their priests have all sorts of decorations. Gods gave mortals the ability to produce art so they celebrate these gifts by really really expressing themselves. These are liked by races who emphasize individuality and freedom.
It would almost be an ok idea if it didn't have all that blue-hair, freakshit dwarf and elf garbage in it.
Jesus was a limp dick homosexual that robbed a temple and disrupted a religious festival and got executed for it.
He came back. And then He promised to literally destroy the Earth. Where did your superhero movies get that idea from? Islam and its steady state universe? Buddhism and its cyclical model? Why are billionaires building bunkers and investing money in FTL rockets?
His partners in crime realized that with their conman ringleader publicly executed at one of the largest religious celebrations in the region that news was going to spread over the region as the pilgrims returned home. Their grift was at an end, so they cooked up a story about how he totally came back and yeah, his body disappeared and everything, and of course they were the only once who could corroborate that. And he told them to head out and spread his word and for only 8 easy payments of 29.99+room and board for a month you can be guaranteed a first-class ticket to fluffy cloud land.
For the great reward of torture and death a ragtag group of commoners overwhelmed two trained soldiers and made 500 people rather die than say they didn't see a crucified man walk around and talk to them and touch His gaping wounds. Don't forget nobody knew suffocating to death fills your ribcage with fluid.
With a word as vague as "knower" you can make them anything. Heck, the Elder Scrolls is directly tied to the idea that the protagonist can cheat metaphysics by realizing how the world works. Genshin Impact is all about taking a fight to God because He said "no breaking the rules please" and that entailed leaving the world.
>With a word as vague as "knower" you can make them anything.
Well, it's a bit more specific than that. Gnosis is different from mundane knowledge, and the idea of special, salvific knowledge isn't altogether unaccpeptable among the Orthodox, although there's a distinguish between "proper gnosis" and "false gnosis" or "heretical gnosis", with 2nd century cults usually attributed to the latter. AFAIK, Hindus have a similar idea, which even shares the root - jnani. Plato obviously has similar themes, with the material, outward world being but a mere projection of the immanent Truth, Beauty and Goodness, reflected through a ladder of multiplying ideas.
But, coming back to the topic of /tg/, the best way to portray Gnostic stand-ins as amoral from the point of view of society at large - after all, their values are completely different - but not capital E Evil, for desire of understanding is usually contrary to the desire of domination and control. In terms of dogshit that is DnD alignment, they'd be Neutral with an agenda.
Except many actual gnostic societies have been nothing more than israeli pedophile cabals, which treat the nature of the world as fallen to excuse their horrific crimes against the rest of us. The Nephandi in WoD, to bring this to an actual /tg/ related topic, are a great example of incredibly evil gnostics. They rape and murder children, engage in cannibalism, foster racial conflicts, loot the economy while perverting the financial system to promote suffering even more than greed. Honestly it's shocking that WoD got away with making Nephandi and related israeli gnostic cult types (Baali, BSD, essentially every Descension-aligned faction) just behave exactly as they do in reality. But I guess they throw in some loxist tropes like trying to claim that it's just vague "rich white people" doing it, and it's still relatively obscure. Still pretty crazy that it exists.
>many actual gnostic societies
I'm only aware of one that made it to the present day, the Mandeans, and in terms of praxis, they look like a mix of Zoroastrians (must be born into a cult; cannot convert, apostates are lost forever), Biblical Judaism (they venerate the prophets and One God) and Christianity (it took Europeans a while to figure it's John the Baptist and not Christ they believe to be a Messiah). Must do ritual cleansing in a river frequently; violence is forbidden, so how they've managed to survive in Muslim Middle East for two millenia is indeed a mystery, although it's possible that, since they weren't starting violent rebellions, most Muslim rulers forgot they exist at all. Certainly not the orgiastic sect you're describing.
Marcion, who gets shoehorned into Gnosticism sometimes even though some argue he was more of a proto-Orthodox who happened to be in severe disagreement with other proto-Orthodox, made the need to draw the line between the new religion - Christianity - and Judaism, emphasize that they have NOTHING in common and that israelites and the being they worship are metaphysically evil. And, as far as I know, most "later day Gnostics", even though they didn't always refer to themselves by that name - Cathars, or nominally Catholic/Orthodox scholars with interest in Greek philosophy, Corpus Hermeticum and the idea of Prisca Theologia - were at least mildly antisemitic.
I don't know why you're confusing Kaballah Judaism, which was indeed influenced by Greek Neo-Platonic thought, with Christian heresies - only because the latter (and mainstream Christianity itself) were also influenced by the same philosophy?
The only sect which was called Gnostic and remotely fits your description would be Sethites/Sethians, and they were short-lived and not very prominent. The rest of it reads more like Aztec pagan religion or some utterly deranged Chabad Lubavitch stuff.
>you see if you just pretend all the gnostic societies aren't gnostics then you can call them pacifists!
>all the gnostic societies aren't gnostics
Name one. Mandeans certainly don't fit your description, neither do Cathars, even though, all the slander aside, there's little reason to doubt they weren't authority respecters, so portraying them as lawless and godless anarchists is only slander by undue magnification, not chutzpah.
Your fandom is stupid and the only cure is suicide.
Because they're afraid of the people who will actually kill them, the other players in the great game.
>robbed a temple
Actual Sword & Sorcery protag!? What a chad.
yes, mine does.
Does YOURS OP? You have a setting right? You're not just flooding the board with regurgitated slop are you?
ITT: tradcat zoomies having no answer to who those "Gnostics" they rail against are, for the umpteenth time.
Not really because religions/cults in my setting are focused in orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy
They have different philosophic schools that keep b***hing at each other though
>They have different philosophic schools that keep b***hing at each other though
Ah, but you repeat yourself.
No because the philosophy schools are separate from the religions/cults
Sounds woke. have a nice day.
In the history of the dominant empire of the setting, a Buddha-like figure emerged and gathered a massive following thanks to his teachings. The emperor's son proceeded to spend several years travelling alongside this prophet as his disciple, until the death of his father. When the emperor died and the son was due to inherit, he turned on the prophet and ordered him executed. He proceeded to push his own interpretation of the prophet's teachings as the state religion when he became emperor, while outlawing the man's original teachings.
Hundreds of years later, that emperor's interpretation of the prophet's teachings remain the dominant religion of the empire, but after centuries of massive expansion, the empire adopted an attitude of religious tolerance in order to increase the likelihood of freshly conquered territories accepting the imperial yoke with as little rebellion as possible. This has led to a resurgence of the prophet's original teachings, albeit with an anti-establishment leaning that frames the emperor's son as a fool who learned all of the wrong lessons from his teacher. Whenever there is discontent in the regions of the empire that adhere to imperial culture and follow the imperial faith, this old-and-new interpretation of the prophet's teaching spreads like a disease among the disaffected.
But as it is a D&D setting, priests of both doctrines are capable of wielding divine power, lending both of them some sort of legitimacy. In the end, this dissenting sect of the imperial faith is just another factor that adds to the image of the empire's instability and forces the players of the campaign, which is based in one of the empire's many provinces, to ponder just how long the empire will keep on standing and whether they should continue to support it or turn against it.
If the gods concretely exist in a fantasy setting, as they usually do, wouldn’t it make schisms less common, since the gods can just clear things up? And how does the presence of real gods affect religion in general in your fantasy settings?
Some gods might encourage schisms to see what mortals come up with to earn their respect.
reddit meme
What are some more obscure religious schisms from real life that are useful examples that we can base our own ok besides that period where we had three popes at once?
When a bunch of people were killed because they thought you should need to be sapient to be able to accept Christ. Also I think there was a bunch of killing over going to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.
>Also I think there was a bunch of killing over going to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.
People actually killed each other over something as silly as that?
Look up the history of the Seventh Day Adventists, as well as how the Eastern Orthodox church does things. There's actual biblical scripture about which day to worship on (tl;dr- Saturday for israelites, Sunday for most branches of Christianity, and both for a very few branches of Christianity), so of course different people have gotten things so twisted they thought it was okay to kill people over it.
Ahmadis
>I'm the guy
>It's blasphemy to say you're the guy
>is of sufficient character he is not killed for it, dies of old age with a following
>without the charismatic leader, friction sets in between them and the traditional muslims
>and also some friction with the Christians because this sect believes Jesus just swooned in the cave for 3 days then ended up going to Kashmir.
My setting is apocalyptic in the proper sense- there's not going to be a "post-apocalypse", the afterlife has already crumbled apart and merged with the other planes of existence into one big gestalt abstraction of reality.
So basically, religious schisms are obsolete. Any population big enough to have a schism has bigger problems to worry about, like the infinite horde of giants bringing about the meat death of the universe.
I tried to play a Luther-esque priest boy but, the DM ended up making him Jesus and he became a god in the setting. Wasn't what I expected but, I ended up loving that character very much
what about schisms before protestants?
In your book, how far divided can two sides of a religious schism get before they become two separate religions instead of two denominations of the same one, and has that ever happened in your settings?
In my setting the primary religion reveres the elements and views the rulers of the elemental realms as gods. I've been debating whether to have a singular religion that worships all four equally, or separate faiths for each one, but this thread made me consider doing both via a schism in the original church, could that work, and what would you suggest for each new division?