Cults

Yeah. The two big ones are Christianity and Islam. They hate each other and there's a dozen flavors of each that all hate each other nearly as much.

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I saw a pict from another thread and read up on it.

These cargo cults are very interesting.

Due to WWII their island was used as a military FOB. They ended up believing that the cargo often air dropped to their island was gifts from gods. They practice religious ceremonies which involve mimicking the soldiers and the various gear that the soldiers were equipped with in an attempt to please the gods who would, in theory, bring/gift them with more of the holy technology.

Boggles the mind how isolated indigenous people can be. How many civilizations have been hidden even to this day...

I keked at that. +1

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The Church of Gnarly Negativity. A religion of evil that appeals to the youth lead by seven powerful warlocks, know collectively as the Sinister Ministers, who promote being rude and disrespecting the environment.

The Vanuatu islands are full of tiny populations that worship the US military.

My setting has a cult called the pidgeons. They wear dark robes and carry really pointy and evil looking over designed weapons but are actually somber fellows who just want to help defend innocent people. They believe they have greater power in defending life because taking life is easier, and that the human race has a duty to clean itself of those in power.

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>Boomhauer still in the truck

Boomhauer is the kind of guy who would roll with weird space military people.

The Nature Goddess is a benevolent deity, responsible nature and for the Cycle of life, death and reincarnation.

She looks like a dwarf milf holding wheat and gemstones, and the curves of a paleolithic fertility statue.

The Fraternity of the Great Wheel murders people in her name, those that they judge to waste their present encarnations or even to cause more harm than good to others. That way these souls gain a second chance to do better.

So they kill evildoers, but they also kill people who do nothing worthwhile like freeloaders and hobos.

Kinda. A cultish gathering of aristocraty type individuals who enjoy evil, but more in the sense of it being art, they like to appreciate the truly heinous acts more than actually doing them.

So they gather souls of people who have committed evil and lock them into glass cases of sorts, where they can use some magical devices to view/relive the evil acts.

Admission into said cult requires the recruit bring a new soul that could be considered a worthy addition to their collection. They accept many, and enjoy unique acts and situations that those acts were committed in.

For example, evil done out of necessity(like stealing bread to feed your family), an innocent person forced to commit an evil act against their will, an evil act done while thinking it was a good act, a truly evil person doing something cruel for it's own sake(like killing a person for no reason than to see them die), etc.

They stay hidden because souls are a big part of the setting, and deities gain power as they collect the souls of their followers, so trapping souls like this is hugely taboo for all the gods, good and evil.

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kek

We have the Cult of the First Flame.

Problem is, when any of it's members start talking about it, they catch spontaneously catch fire and

I have a monotheist, Not-Christian necromancer cult, that believes that it's their moral duty to reanimate the corpses of dead evildoers.
The main argument for them is that necromancy has to have been created for a reason, and they believe that reason is to give sinners a "second chance" at reaching a good afterlife. It is, after all, what you do on the mortal plane that decides what happens after your death, and necromancy can let a sinner who has had his soul brought back from the abyss reform and become virtuous.
They also practice willing necromancy to a certain extent, where important teachers and cult leader may stay behind in the mortal plane for a few years to guide their successors or teach the new generation, but it's not common to stay around for much longer than that.

A cult of the goddess of magic. She was separated into multiple parts and sealed away on other planes.

The only reason she created a cult at all was to give her the ability to influence the material plane to her liking. She provides the setting with its Weave, and the one thing she has never compromised on is providing magic as she is requested, regardless of what she thinks of the person or their beliefs.

Her true desire is to reverse the use of Vancian spellcasting and the system of divine referendum. Divine referendum basically means that the gods are only allowed to influence the Material Plane as much as mortals support their philosophy and efforts. She believes in freedom over anything else, so she ended up taking backlash from people who believe that her choices are harming others.

Before being sealed, she was requested to please just provide magic and stop messing with civilization pretty please. However, she doesn't understand why mortals are allowed to use whatever powers they obtain with relative impunity while she, who is naturally powerful, isn't allowed to do things on the Material Plane unless others approve. After all, it's her home as well, right?

After about 5000 years of unsuccessfully attempting to convert people into reversing the judgement, she eventually generated a cult where the gimmick was that she would fulfill people's desires if they worshiped her. Of course, things started to go downhill after some of the desires ended up killing people or wreaking havoc. Other churches and philosophies began to decry her as feeding into the worst parts of mortal nature and encouraging laziness and vice.

Eventually, she just gave up on trying to be a good guy altogether and attempted to force a reset by starting the apocolypse. It failed, which is how she got sealed away.

Yeah, it's a basic messianic resurrection like personality cult.

They took over a suburb complex outside of a city. Its like a stepford wives thing. They have police but they are actually cult things in cop uniforms. Everyone is in the cult and the houses in the center are the 'elite'

Their leader boasts that he is an alien and he has access to a healing gel under the suburb. There is actually an alien base under the neighborhood but he is just some jerk. He actually didn't even found the cult, just took it over by ousting the old leader, who was the quest giver.

The party, of course shoots the current leader in the middle of a demonstration and the town is now turning into The Truman Show on bathsalts. People are running out of houses with guns out while others are blocking the roads out with her cars.

Really not a good situation considering how they took the bus there.

Various cults exist to honor and in some cases even directly serve fallen angels / demons / discarded saints, and then there is a "cult" that is in fact the true religion that worships the true light and rejects God as the demiurge (based on gnostic teachings, which are the reality of the setting). All of these are persecuted viciously by the neo-Roman-Catholic-Church of Cool Technology Jesus (who is actually Da Vinci and the Christ kind of mixed together in their writings) and are functionally just an enormous militant cult that hoarded all the technology in the post-apocalypse.

I love cults and often have 'every' major religion in the setting being a localized, specific, or personal cult to the player characters.

Yep, not!cult-of-narsie.