I just started with warmachine and read the lore. I'm a little confused with menoth

I just started with warmachine and read the lore. I'm a little confused with menoth.

At first he and his guys seem to be decent people. Protect people from barbarians and monsters. But in modern times they are suddenly fanatical assholes. What went wrong?

>At first he and his guys seem to be decent people.

Menoth has always been Lawful Neutral. He doesn't care whether people follow him out of love or fear, so long as they do. Originally he was the only 'civilised' religion around, so while his laws might have been harsh, people were mostly happy to follow them. You had groups like the Paladins of the Wall acting as noble champions and saviors of the people. But when Morrow and Thamar came on the scene, offering people faiths that rewarded kindness and independence respectively, Menoth's priests had to use harsher means to keep people on what they saw as the true path.

Because Menoth is not there to please you. He's the creator and you serve him or die.

Or at least that's their version of the story.

Just look at how Islam went from teaching some tribals basics of civilization like laws and hygiene to what it is now.

Their marketing agency came up with a new slogan:

Burn the Heritic!

So, there's a lot of history here.

First and foremost, Menoth is a LN god, and he's also a big picture god. Menoth is in charge of the entire world, and tends to not pay much attention to the details. He gave man the ability to build walls and granted them powers so long as they obeyed him, giving them the ability to enforce law on what was the chaos of Cain, because Menoth hates the fuck out of the Wurm and when he's not doing big god things, he's doing whatever he can to fight him.

So this lasted for thousands of years, with Menoth not really paying attention to humanity except when they didn't do what he told them too.

But then some incidents happened. First and foremost, the twins of Morrow and Thamar ascended to become gods in their own right. What exactly happened next is unknown, but we'll talk about that later. What's important here is that the Menite religion refused to accept them as being actual gods, and started burning followers of either one whenever they found them.

So you've got religious hatred for a while, but then the Orgoth show up. Humans themselves(and with references to a creator god that is basically confirmed to be Menoth as well), they very swiftly conquered all of humanity, and started a little religious hatred themselves, murdering any priest that attempted to defy them or basically do anything to subvert rule.

The Menite response to this was to basically just hole up in their churches and try and ride it out.

However, Morrow(NG) expounded a belief in sacrifice of the self for the benefit of others, so his priests were actively resisting the rule of the Orgoth, and Thamar did something mighty mysterious that granted humans inborn magical ability(up until now, the only ways to wield magic were to be a priest to to make pacts with Infernals), which gave them the ability to resist the Orgoth's rule.

Following some innovation as well(Warcaster talent started here, and the original warjacks followed) after a pretty long stretch the Iron Kingdoms managed to finally kick out the Orgoth.

So, now the Menite religion was kind of in a bind. They were still the most powerful, but the fact that they'd by and large done dick to help defeat the Orgoth while the upstart gods and their priests had been doing everything they could meant that people started converting, so they really ramped up their religious hatred. However, it wasn't going so well, so at this point the Menoth clery agreed to meet with the Morrowan high priest.

Now, this is where fluff splits, so I'm going to tell you the old(and I think better) version. See, the Scrutators(Menite priest-torturers) had no intention of actually doing this. Instead, they sent one of their number to assassinate the high priest. This went as intended, but then a few things happened very quickly.

1. One of Morrows angels(not exactly, but close) showed up to pick up the priests soul and murder the Scrutator.

2. Said Scrutator turned out to be a worshipper of Thamar, who showed up to claim her own faithful.

I don't think I've talked about Thamar yet, but she's a NE deity that puts forth the belief of bettering oneself, even at the cost of others. This doesn't mean her followers are always evil, but they tend to be, and they also tend to be willing to do anything to gain power, even if it's necromancy or pacts with Infernals. So they tend to get hunted quite a bit.

So, now the Menite priesthood were really in a bind. They'd been caught red handed being dicks, their priest caste responsible for ferretting out heresy and corruption had a heretic in it, and they'd just got front row seats to the existence of the twins as being actual gods.

So, they had to concede a bit. This is where I come back to the mysterious thing I talked about earlier. See, no one knows exactly what happened between the Twins and Menoth when they ascended, beyond the fact that they clearly didn't get destroyed.

The running theory is that Morrow proposed a deal: Menoth was primarily occupied with running the world and fighting the Wurm, and he, as always, didn't have much care for humans. Morrow(and Thamar, likely just to avoid having to fight) promised to focus on humanity and only humanity, and made a pact to always regard Menoth as the highest deity and creator of man.

And this pact holds, to a degree. Every church of Morrow features in some way a shrine or other object that notes that Menoth is the highest god and the creator of man. Thamar has no such thing, but she's not exactly much about churches, formal priesthoods, and her followers tend to get hunted by everyone else anyways.

So, now we move into the more modern times of the setting. Worship of Morrow keeps surging, while Menoth is on the wane, mostly because the Menite religion is an absolute dick to it's followers(The rise of the Scrutators, a LE portion of the LN religion, does not help with this) and Morrow is not, by and large. So the Menites, who for almost all of their time as a religion have been focused on fighting Wurm cultists(even during the purges before, it was sort of a secondary thing) begin to rail against the Morrowan faith. They allege that Morrow and his priests are only following the letter of the pact, not the actual spirit, and seek to overtake him as the central god.

So the Menites start to get pretty peeved about this, and eventually try and start a civil war inside Cygnar. I'm a bit rusty about this potion of the timeline, but as I remember it, this goes pretty god damn badly. for them. So the Cyngar king, who is a Morrowan, decides to in a sense forgive them for this, and creates the PoM, a place where Menithes can practice their faith. However, it's in a desert with very little in the way of natural resources(at first glance), and they have a huge number of rules that prevent them from having things like a standing army and the like. Basically, think an Indian reservation, except they deserved it.

And the Menite priesthood agrees to this and almost immediately begins to work at subverting it. They spend several hundred years building up their region, helped along by the discovery of oil and mines of previous gems for wealth. They make several theological advancements in regards to technology as well, essentially coming up with a way to accept the use of warjacks and arcane powers(which were regarded as heretical to use, and left them majorly outclassed in the combat before).

So cut forward for a couple hundred years(I think, again, rusty) and the PoM has been spending all this time building up for another technical civil war(even though, at this point, the two regions are practically different countries).

They finally make their move, and that's when we get into straight up modern history. Lot of shit happens here, back and forth, but right now the PoM can be regarded as it's own Iron Kingdom, who's goal is to spread the word of Menoth as the dominant(and only) religion of man again, strictly by force.

And it's once again worth noting that Menoth doesn't care much at all about this whole situation. He's taken a semi active role with Harby and the Avatar, but even both of them have been more occupied with stopping bigger threats then they have been with fighting the crusades(well, until recently).

And that's the basic history of Menoth and his followers. There's some more specifics to a lot of this, so take it more as a general overview, and remember I could be remembering some shit wrong.