In the convocation of Malqort, the Caliphate of Azithan, known to it's neighbors as the Necromancer Kingdom
You are a priest, a holder of Lifeless and leader of the Faithful. You receive prayers from Faithful, and those prayers mend and hold together your Lifeless. The major prayer services are a few hours a week, more like four hours a week than forty. When your Faithful pass, they may willingly choose to become a Lifeless. When you pass, you may become a honored Spirit.
By law and custom, you must provide sufficient to your followers that they be able to live without additional work. That is, you've got to give them a minimum basic income.
Some questions! I'd like to know your thoughts on the following:
1. What do you give your followers?
2. How do you compete with other priests for your followers?
3. Some basic structures include: roads, protected tenements, temples, and farms. What other structures do you produce?
4. Each of these is associated with a basic economic activity: road construction, city building, praying, farming. What other basic economic activities do your Lifeless do?
5. Other priests are your competition, sure, but also your comrades, allies, and colleagues. What binds you together to prevent bloodshed and maintain something like a democracy?
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2: More appealing doctrine! Particularly, as society and technology advance, and the Caliphate catapults from tribal nomads to post-scarcity urbanism, there's a surreal level of tension between those who want the meaning and anchoring of strict, proscriptive liturgy, and those who want a religion that grows naturally from the self-actualizing situation of their daily lives. There is a constant competition to bring forth a "Spirit of the Desert" that both satisfies the grim and dedicated elders and attracts the creative, metropolitan youth.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, it feels like you missed a word here "By law and custom, you must provide sufficient to your followers that they be able to live without additional work." I can get the jist from context, but...
ReplyDeleteSecond, I'm not sure if you are asking for /me/ as a priest, or for ideas as to what the answers are for /all/ priests... so I'm going to go with me because I don't want to make to many presumptions about your world.
1. Primarily, peace of mind. A competent local priest is there to make sure everything is running well, and so long as they are doing a good job the populace knows they will be cared for. I'd provide council, either directly in areas I know of or by ensuring experts in areas I did not know were made available to my flock.
2. By working to make sure my flock has a good standard of living. Making sure the farms are productive, the lands are kept safe. Actively court people that would improve the status of your area, such as skilled workers or entertainers.
3. Walls as a basic means of defense. Aqueducts and/or wells. Bridges and tunnels in ares where the terrain .
4. Sanitation work, this could be complex like creating sewers, or simple like just collecting peoples filth and garbage.
5. Trade, mutual self interest/self destruction. It's fine to compete for favor, but when you start going to war with each other all you end up doing is killing off the people you need to have providing you prayers.
How did i forget keeping the streets clean. That's important, and for sure the cities of the Convocation are clean. During the night, bands of Lifeless sweep the streets and remove filth. There's minimal poop everywhere, which is a real leg up over other renaissance and medieval cities!
ReplyDeleteSo, Matt Johnson you are the sort of priest who provides council. Nice. You seem a reasonable priest. Follow up question: What is your area missing that your followers seek from others?
Tony Lower-Basch That reminds me of my youth, where baptist ministers brought out the guitars, basketball courts, and weeks away from home. It didn't work out well for them, but, their religion doesn't raise the dead as a matter of course.
ReplyDeleteWho does the work of emotional support, counseling, and rites of passage (births, adulthood, marriage, death, etc)? Performing these services for 300-500 people is easily a 40-hour workweek.
ReplyDeleteIt's a balancing act... but I feel like you could get players talking about the religion as if "priest" were more than a character class, and that would be a good thing.
ReplyDeleteTwo priests arguing whether it is more important to act to give charity when the opportunity arises, or to arrange a better outcome for society at large? That's fun stuff... and can be grounded as easily as "this sick person needs my help, but I'm hurrying to run a prayer meeting that will (indirectly) feed a dozen people. What choice does my religion (and perhaps my God) call me to make?"
Josh Roby I imagine different priests specialize in different aspects, right. Plus, helpers. Not everyone who works for The Church is going to be a priest, and a lot of those can provide assistance with a lot of issues, too.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch Yep! When this was first two characters in a dungeon world game, I tried to angle for such problems. Instead, of course, it become fireball the problems into nothingness.
ReplyDeleteLe sigh. That's what happens when Hack and Slash is a basic move, but there's not one for teleological argumentation.
William Nichols I suspect those priest specialists and "helpers" have titles and a hierarchy. Just sayin. ;)
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Josh Roby. And this is government, so it's also super official. But it's also community building, so it's unofficial.
ReplyDeleteIn the church I grew up in (baptist), there was a notion of deacon or "lay ministers", who did a bit of the low hanging work and left the hard stuff (hospital visits, omg) to the trained priests.
I imagine there are dozens of titles, a multiple treed hierarchy constantly reinventing itself. Because while you've absolutely got to keep Lifeless to be a powerful priest, you've also absolutely got to keep people happily praying at your sites.
Nitty gritty: do you have to be present at the prayer services to receive prayer power? Is that prayer power once collected transferable?
ReplyDeleteTell me what you're thinking, Josh Roby. I'm fascinated.
ReplyDeleteI know what I'm thinking: If you've got to be there to receive it, then you've got to be there, which is kinda the intended purpose. That this goes to a person, not just a place. As for transferability, I think yes as well: so you can have a priest whose real good at milking the prayer power, and another one whose real good at keeping Lifeless in her head and they can team up.
ReplyDeleteAlso, theft. Absolutely theft.
Okay, serious question with maybe-dystopian implications: people pray in (at least) three modes ... (1) grateful prayers to feel closer to a divinity that strikes them as praise-worthy, (2) desperate, painful prayer to wrestle with the notion of divinity in a world that is unjust and in which goodness seems remote and incomprehensible, (3) well, we're praying now, so I'll mouth the right words at the right times.
ReplyDeleteLike... I stand and quietly sing along with the national anthem, but some days it's with easy, sunny pride, sometimes it's a dark defiant insistence, and sometimes it's just "before the first pitch is too soon for a hot dog, right?"
Do those differences matter to the faith-energy? Like... do the spiritual lives of the faithful impact the governments bottom line? And if so, what are the priests motivated to make their followers feel?
Ahhh. Yes. Tony Lower-Basch, I hoped someone would ask that.
ReplyDeleteShort answer: Yes, it matters.
Folks with diseases pass on their lethargy to the Lifeless.
Folks who're angry and resentful pass on their consternation to the Lifeless.
Folks who are in pain make the Lifeless distracted, taking up more mental space in the priest's mind.
Folks who are uneducated make the Lifeless dumb.
And folks who're happy, well-fed, largely pain free, and educated? Not only are the lifeless easier to work with, but can also take up less mental space for the priest meaning she can hold more.
While I've no doubt you're quite capable of making that a dystopia ... the desire is not that. It's still better to have people pray than not, as the energy is valuable but it is more valuable if folks are in good shape.
Okay, got it. I'd recommend, in service of "not-dystopia" that the prayers of one whose faith has been (and perhaps continues to be) tested are somehow worth having in a way beyond/other-than the prayers of somebody who has never had to wrestle with hard questions.
ReplyDeleteThat strikes me as subtly different than the educated/uneducated divide. And these questions are likely unclear enough in the fictional world that people argue about it and put their money where their mouth is: "Fearful, obedient parishioners make for careful, diligent Lifeless, young man. Do not let your weakness lead you to treat your faithful too gently."
Tony Lower-Basch Nice. Do I sense some jewish sentiment in your suggestion?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols "What is your area missing that your followers seek from others?"
ReplyDeleteProbably my area lacks a certain... fervor. My outlook is very focused on the people, and being accepting, but that sort of thing ends up with also being tolerant of deviation from the standard. In a system where people's feelings about the prayers matter as much as the prayers themselves that could be a problem. People who view themselves as traditionalists may go looking for priests who tow a stricter line. Though accepting those on the fringe has it's own benefits, as it can be an untapped resource.
(and man, i kind of feel like my own anti/non religious nature is a disservice here. I mean I was technicality raised Catholic but I've been rejecting it so long that this all seems mildly silly and ludicrous....)
William Nichols: I dunno! I'm mostly working from a personal distaste for systems that promote narrow unquestioning "education" in support of rigid social order. It could certainly be argued that disdain is a Jewish sentiment, but I feel like that's sweeping an awful lot of Jewish authoritarian religious threads under the rug.
ReplyDeleteoh, probably! My understanding of judaism is fairly limited.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, yeah. I like it. The more you question and wrestle with your faith the more ... resilient ... are the lifeless. Maybe they can be more readily transferred, or used for a higher variety of jobs. Whatever.
Matt Johnson Indeed, my own non-religion shows in this occasionally. While this for sure has priests, you've probably noticed there's never a mention of a deity.
ReplyDeleteAnd for sure catholicism would seem a lot less silly if the eucharist turned to meat, right?
William Nichols I'm thinking hierarchy and power. Because if any functionary can harvest prayers and then hand off that power to a bishop along with ten other functionaries, then the bishops that never have to deal with the little people and the little problems of their little lives will be the ones driving armies of lifeless around.
ReplyDeleteAnd then you start getting bishops who demand more and more power from their inferior priests, and withhold all those services and construction from the congregations who are "holding out" on them.
And then you get the well-established, settled, and advantaged congregations, which put out all that nice, stable, contented, and educated prayer-power getting all the goods while the newer, recently-converted, immigrant communities get short shrift.
That's definetly a problem, Josh Roby. If, though, I'm the local priest I can start just holding onto the prauyer power and not giving it to the jerk of a bishop, right?
ReplyDeleteThat is, bootstrap my own little part of the world.
Wellll... when one out of ten subordinates of a feudal leader say "Screw off!" the leader calls in the other nine, and says "You can have his stuff, all I want is his head."
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, you can totally have a system in which the local priest has all the power, and the titular head is in a serious servant-leader sort of position, but I'm not sure that feudal-age terms like "bishop" are going to make it intuitive for people to understand that.