Behind the Dark Fist - Religions

Here's a blurb I wrote on the religions of Vodonispace. I'm going to  
go have breakfast before I write any more. A couple of notes first.

As I write and develop this more, I want the former Crystal Order to  
schism three ways. One sect (actually the established leadership of  
the religious underground from before the war) supports the  
Occupation, and works with the IEN and other forces from the Known  
Spheres to try and keep the peace on Vodon, and throughout the  
greater regions of the Vodoni spheres. The second sect recognizes  
that the Vodoni people have traded away one despot (Vulkaran) for  
another (in the form of the Elven Proconsul of Vodon), and so  
supports the various insurgent groups. A third religions faction are  
the sects of the Forgotten Gods, who have no actual priest powers but  
are not wanting in any way for zeal. They condemn the occupation for  
the same reasons the second sect does, but they are also opposed to  
all groups that work with the Crystal Order priests of either sect,  
because they view these priests as traitors who are satisfied with  
the return of their priestly powers and unwilling to continue the  
struggle to complete the freeing of the entire Divine Court.  
Unfortunately for these poor saps, the gods they worship were made up  
by Maeries. One idea I'm kicking around is that the Forgotten Gods  
sects are being manipulated by Tanar'ri, Baatezu or Yugoloths who are  
posing as avatars of one or more of the Forgotten Gods, but as I  
haven't gotten there yet I'm not sure what I'll do with that.

One last thing. All of the priests of the Divine Court are weakened,  
and will be for quite some time (maybe a century or more). Rather  
than Clerics, these religions can only support Shamans, who have d6  
hit dice and can only cast spells from three spheres at most. I am  
torn, therefore, in whether or not to design specialty priesthoods  
for these gods. On the one hand, it's fun to design specialty  
priesthoods... but a BTDF campaign probably wouldn't call for them  
unless they were severely de-powered.

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The Crystal Order's Preserved Scripture (that being the religious  
text that survived four centuries of Vulkaran's rule) contains  
references to and descriptions of an entire pantheon of deities who  
were worshipped by the Kathyk (predecessors of the Vodoni) prior to  
the nova that shattered their sphere. The Scripture survived despite  
the best efforts of the Enforcers, who had the ongoing task of  
discovering and destroying the hidden enclaves of believers in the  
old Gods, along with all their texts and paraphernalia.

The Crystal Order historically credits one of their most famous  
prophets with the saving of the Scripture as it now exists. In the  
second century of Vulkaran's rule, a prophet by the name of Maeries,  
at great risk to himself, went about the task of collecting and  
ordering the surviving texts that make up what is now known to the  
church of the Crystal King as the Preserved Scripture. His work is  
often criticized by historians, however, as they long suspected that  
he had filled in the gaps of what was missing in the scripture with  
his own interpretations of what was there -- and his harshest critics  
even accuse him of making up whole swaths of scripture, attributing  
things to the Crystal King that were never actually said, and even  
inventing gods that never really existed or received worship in  
Vodonispace.

The return of the Crystal King and his Divine Court following the end  
of the Vodoni War brought many of the inaccuracies of Maeries'  
scriptures to light. Most of what Maeries' critics had been saying  
was true, it turns out: Maeries saved what he could of the original  
scriptures of the Divine Court from Kathyk, but between the exodus to  
Vodon and the stamping out of the church by Vulkaran's Enforcers, so  
much was lost that the texts and parables that remained followed no  
coherent narrative thread (as they once had in the heyday of the  
church on Kathyk). If the Crystal Order was going to have anything  
tangible upon which to base their faith in the old Gods, Maeries had  
to make the texts work, and he did so by using his own words and  
ideas to bridge them together. With the gods once again restored  
after four hundred years of imprisonment, the Crystal Order is faced  
with one of its first true crises as a legitimate religious  
institution: how to reconcile Maeries' scripture -- the words and  
passages that helped the Order to endure through the reign of the  
Silver King -- with the reality of a returned and known-of Divine Court?

Some within the Order feel that a revision is long overdue, and even  
is fitting: the Vodoni people are beginning a new chapter of their  
history, and likewise their native religion has been reborn. Others  
within the Order -- those who are more conservative, traditionalist  
or even simply sentimental -- feel that the scriptures as Maeries  
wrote them were important to the faithful during Vulkaran's reign,  
and they should not be so readily discarded. The works of Maeries  
stand as a testament to his faith in the Crystal King, and therefore  
both Maeries and his work deserve to be honored.

Fixing broken scripture is just one of the problems facing the  
Crystal Order. Vulkaran's reign had united those who remained  
faithful to the religions of the Divine Court, but since the fall of  
the Empire there has been anything but unity. The religion is  
fragmented along political and sectarian lines: those members of the  
Order who support the IEN Occupation Authority, and those among the  
Order who support insurgent movements like the Neo-Imperials.

What's more, some of the gods Maeries wrote of in his Preserved  
Scripture do not appear to be part of the current pantheon. While  
most agree that Maeries probably made them up, there are some priests  
of the Order who cling to these old gods and insist that they are  
still imprisoned somewhere. They are angered at those members of the  
Order who appear content with the Gods that are there now, unable to  
understand why their brothers will not remain faithful to those who  
have yet to know freedom. These priests form a radical splinter sect  
of the Order, officially unrecognized (insofar as the Order can do  
anything official amid the chaos), that has been blamed for much of  
the religious violence in the years since Vulkaran's fall.