interesting religions

so earlier today i was thinking about the left hand of darkness and how fucking cool the handdara (one of the novel’s religions) is. it draws a lot from taoism but is also its own thing and it’s idiosincratically meshed in with the world and the particular social/personal circumstances of its people.

so i wonder if are there any cool videogame religions that are not thinly veiled proxies of real-life religions (every jrpg ever) or generic cults devoted to resurrecting whatever eldritch being intends to destroy the world this time (every western rpg ever).

bonus points if the religion in question is a meaningful part of the game other than just flavor.

i’m scratching my brains pretty hard over this, if anything comes to mind i’ll post it here as well.

There’s a cult that’s a huge part of Silent Hill 1 and 3, but I’m not sure how much depth there was to it. It seemed like one of those situations where there’s a lot of muddled and poorly translated lore that you’d have to put a lot of effort into parsing. But it might just be another one of those summon-the-demon cults you mentioned.

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Night in the Woods uses the elder god cult trope in a very interesting and original way, to talk with great nuance about how older generations are duped by capital into sacrificing the futures of the younger generations.

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Morrowind springs to mind, with the Tribunal Temple and the history surrounding it being a major factor of the main quest.

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Hmm, yeah, and the personal involvement you have with a god’s resurrection, with well-sketched quests about doubt and refusal, and examining the creation of a satan-figure in the religion.

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King of Dragon Pass

I know that its almost cliche for me to invoke that game but

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KoDP is pretty much the only game to take the subject of religion and mythology seriously, the setting was created by someone who still edits a scholarly journal on Shamanism, success in the game depends entirely on understanding and interpreting myths, but those myths are also not monolithic, after all the gods came from many places and have manifested in many ways, so you will encounter people who worship the same gods by different names or sometimes people who sacrifice to gods that are ostensibly the same as yours but the myths are all different…

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I think the Hammerites from Thief aren’t just “Fantasy World Christians” despite a lot of the similarities. Specifically they don’t believe their God created them, just enabled them to be civilized via technology, IIRC.

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The religiosity in Arcanum is cool because the myths that form the basis of the main religion on the continent is explicitly false and its the best plot twist/subversion in what was up to that point a standard “follow the prophesy” plot.

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Oh this is the perfect thread to post this video I watched the other day.

It’s not a gaming channel, btw, it’s a guy who’s a religious studies PhD who posts non-sectarian videos about religion.

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Also I just thought of certain “god games” like Black and White and From Dust where you do the usual god game stuff but the characters in the game react to you as if you’re literally a god.

I don’t know if that quite qualifies as “religion” though.

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let me tell you about a podcast called NO R–

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just kidding not even Tulpa will ever see this .txt

Morrowind doesn’t even have one interesting religion, it has three major ones which are themselves split into sects and minor weird ones besides, none of which are directly comparable to any realworld religion.

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don’t worry I’m already applying some King of Dragon Pass logic to the various religions introduced into the game.

so even beyond your extensive obsessions the players in our game have to deal with MY obsessions with making religion too complex. I have an entire .txt file dedicated to various contradictory beliefs about Irtia (and you just got one of those beliefs in the latest episode!)

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This is great. I wish more media would do this so it wouldn’t be so difficult to teach people about what religion actually is.

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getting people to let go of the monotheistic traditions of singular canon rather than a rhizomatic multiplicity is very difficult but its impossible to talk about most of the religions in the world before one moves past that.

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Monotheistic religions are a lot like this too, though, if it’s possible to look at them without forcing any kind of interior, sectarian perspective. Even if you have a very contemporary, “Many ways of worshipping the same God” type of view on it, there’s still the underlying assumption that this kind of unity is somehow important or good.

Anyway this thread is cool! Many of the examples given seem like they’ve had a lot of thought put into them

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Well, yeah, and reading about the way a monotheistic religion developed out of a constant syncretistic process is super fascinating

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With most people no longer having much contact with religion in their daily life, people instead get their ideas about religion from the media. And what draws the most attention there are the controversial simplistic views of religion, and everyone still expressing nuance and the real reasons to value religion are too boring to go viral.

It’s similar to what happened to unions. First they collapsed, then later the simple-minded caricatures of their critics came to dominate the public’s conception of what a union is. (Also a subject of interest to Le Guin… this makes me sad that she’s no longer around, I wonder how well her way of seeing will persist in SF moving forward.)

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