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[PopTart]

I hope people find this appropriate. It's a video about a traditional method of smelting iron from magnetite in Burkina Faso. It was forgotten for decades until it was resuscitated by a smithing family with the help of a professor in Ouagadougou. In that interim, the locals took to "melting a metal item" (scrap metal from car crashes) instead of mining and smelting ore and flux. But it looks like they remembered how to do it, and at the end they even forge some tools.

A multi-step process such as this, involving hard work, coordination, and technique must be highly ritualized to ensure standards. It makes me wonder if dwarven religion should also spring from the actual labor of the dwarfs (especially as they will be organized into work-families or guilds), rather than top-down from a selection of deities. If your fortress has a character of forging, agriculture, carpentry, etc., then this character should be reflected in the religion, at least at the "folk" level if not at the "official" (noble) level.

The gist: a process that takes your dwarfs a few seconds takes, in real life, a dozen men several days to produce 20 kg of metal goods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ

Repost this in the suggestions thread if appropriate. Thanks!

[Bumber]

Was already posted here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=155748

[PopTart]

Oops sorry about that. Anyhow, now that DF involves religion more, the documentary might help us consider how things like prayer and ritual could be integrated more meaningfully, especially because so much of the dwarfs' life and character revolves around labor.

[Urist McVoyager]

It's a good suggestion, but religion is different in DF than it is in real life. There's incontrovertible proof of deities in Dwarf Fortress. In real life, the guiding forces are subtle enough you could reasonably believe they don't exist. So you would get that bottom up religious view more readily than in a Universe where the supernatural literally is a daily thing. At that point, would you be worshiping a process you do for survival, or the monster that says if you don't worship it, it will eat you or turn you into a monster too?

[Dirst]

It's a good suggestion, but religion is different in DF than it is in real life. There's incontrovertible proof of deities in Dwarf Fortress. In real life, the guiding forces are subtle enough you could reasonably believe they don't exist. So you would get that bottom up religious view more readily than in a Universe where the supernatural literally is a daily thing. At that point, would you be worshiping a process you do for survival, or the monster that says if you don't worship it, it will eat you or turn you into a monster too?

At the risk of further derailing this thread, ancient cultures right on up to modern ones have a scientific or engineering view on processes that are perceived to be under human control and a mystical view on processes that are important to human survival yet perceived as beyond human control.  The ritual evolves from replicating things that seemed to favorably influence the outcome in the past.

The example I remember was Stone Age fishers at an atoll.  Fishing within the shallow water of the ring was a very predictable affair, and they'd developed an effecting method of poisoning the fish to maximize the yield while minimizing the effort.  This was a very matter-of-fact part of atoll life with no special religious component.  Fishing in the open ocean was fraught with peril from the weather to the unpredictable movement of the fish schools to the competing predators like sharks.  Open-water fishing was accompanied by very elaborate rituals.

While dwarven religion might be very involved with telling individuals how to live rightly, the forging process itself seem too reliable to get all mystical.  If we ever get to real tech progression, that could change.

[PopTart]

These are all good points and not a derailing!

I see the point that deities are so real in DF that no dwarf would deny them. There's no problem here, because I'm not talking about a dwarf's belief in a deity but rather who they prefer to worship, to interact with. In other words, what deity might hold more sway with a papermakers' guild or hunters' guild?

I also see the role that risk/cost should play in labor rituals. This is built into the game somewhat, in the unpredictable quality of finished goods. But real uncertainty exists more at the player level than the dwarf level. There'd have to be some mechanism for a dwarf smearing crundle nervous tissue on their skirt to affect a risky hunt or forgotten beast battle or digging around magma. Or no mechanism, but at any rate the dwarfs have to have a good reason for doing the ritual, that's a good point.

Maybe the religions will be centered merely around social control or "living rightly," but I feel like Dwarf Fortress's unique aspect in the fantasy genre is the real, "dwarfological" stuff: the labor, rocks, plants, walls, bracelets, cartilage, melody pipes, quicklime... Everything is bottom-up, almost.

[Dirst]

These are all good points and not a derailing!

I see the point that deities are so real in DF that no dwarf would deny them. There's no problem here, because I'm not talking about a dwarf's belief in a deity but rather who they prefer to worship, to interact with. In other words, what deity might hold more sway with a papermakers' guild or hunters' guild?

The gods-walk-among-us version of atheism is believing that these are powerful beings, but they are no more worthy of your worship than you are worthy of lower animal's worship.  At least that was how I roleplayed it eons ago.

I also see the role that risk/cost should play in labor rituals. This is built into the game somewhat, in the unpredictable quality of finished goods. But real uncertainty exists more at the player level than the dwarf level. There'd have to be some mechanism for a dwarf smearing crundle nervous tissue on their skirt to affect a risky hunt or forgotten beast battle or digging around magma. Or no mechanism, but at any rate the dwarfs have to have a good reason for doing the ritual, that's a good point.

Maybe the religions will be centered merely around social control or "living rightly," but I feel like Dwarf Fortress's unique aspect in the fantasy genre is the real, "dwarfological" stuff: the labor, rocks, plants, walls, bracelets, cartilage, melody pipes, quicklime... Everything is bottom-up, almost.

It'd be fun if the game kept track of peripheral behaviors around an uncertain attempt and worked out their correlation with outcomes (using Bayes theorem or similar)... stuff that's randomly correlated with success becomes "good luck" in that setting and stuff that's randomly correlated with failure becomes "bad luck" in that setting.

For extra bonus points, once these "luck" elements get noticed they confer small but real modifiers.  Placebo effect, if you will.

[PopTart]

I like this probabilistic model. Dwarfs notice what food or drink they tend to drink before a successful hunt, and then it becomes part of the hunt and even contributes to the success in "reality" through damage bonuses or something. Just to seal the deal, the player could communicate to the game that an event was "successful," or even counted as an event. This could be done at a temple through praise.

In such a model, a ritual could only arise out of something dwarfs do enough times to generate good data. For example, animal sacrifices could only become a thing if your dwarfs were already in the habit of slaughtering animals. Maybe migrants bring these tendencies into a fortress, so you're not always starting from scratch.

The fun result: rituals would be highly unpredictable. You could have dwarfs having to clean themselves with  holy horse tallow soap before every planting, or distributing (and even demanding!) crundle bone figurines of Urist McLegend before a battle, or making a particular engraving, etc. etc.