By religion I'm not talking directly about magic. I'm talking about the rituals and stuff dwarves do in general daily life. What I don't want to see is a room where dwarves spend five minutes a week in on their knees and nothing else. There are so many different possible religious rituals and just having a daily sermon or personal prayer session is just boring.
It'd be fairly interesting if each deity had a semi-randomly generated set of religious practices for the dwarves to follow.
Possible rituals could involve:
animal sacrifces [leaving sapients for the goblins]
Some people might find this a bit immoral I guess. But thats probably just a more modern view. each deity could prefer different animals depending on the spheres. earth might prefer underground unimals, agriculture might not even need animals and just take an offering of grain, etc. If most people don't want it in the game the tamer view of preparing meat so that it suits religious deitary requirements would be fine.
semi-random deitary requirements.
can you imagine putting food through the dwarf fortress generator.new religion section of the thoughts and preferences: "he is not allowed to eat beasts of the air or sea becuase they do not live on or under the earth". his is miserable. he slept in a legendary bedroom lately. he ate food taboo to his deity recently. he was annoyed by flied recently.
sacred symbols/animals/etc.
holy days/ religious festival
maybe with randomly generated rules specific to that day say as special deitary requirements [fasting, no meat, no grain based, etc.] or specific animals needing to be sacrificed, etc. maybe they get the day off of work of they'll be seriosly unhappy.
What would make stuff like this very interesting is that dwarves are polytheists but focus on a small number of deities with differeing levels of faith. So each dwarf would obey the differing rules and requirements differently. The most religious would rather end up dead or insane rather than disobay the rules while the fairly religious would get unhappy if forced to break the rules while the least fervent worshippers wouldn't really care to do much more than the basic of worship.
Other things that could be considered are the fact that religious areas could be considered rooms designated from alters. Maybe noblemen might require a personal chapel if they are really religious while the rest of the fortress would make do with varying qualities of communal temples for sermons and things. Very similar to how a dinining room works I guess.
New noble positions would obviously be things like priests. Though maybe any highly skilled dwarf could take their place if they are not available. Possible dedicated religious skills could involve knowledge of scriptures, meditation, etc.
Maybe different religions could have randomly generated symbols that priests can bless. Doors that ward off evil, holy ale, etc.
Okay, I'm starting to ramble on a bit. I guess thats just because of the huge numbers of possiblilities for this sort of thing. I guess I'll stop now.
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Topic: make religion a deep, dynamic system (Read 549 times)