What re some good ideas for cults with very niche and stupid dogmas?

It's better if the leader legitimately believes the dogma and not just using it as a money making scheme. Stuff based on misunderstandings is my usual way of doing things. Like in a sci-fi setting I did there was a cult of robots who were lead by a computer who through faulty programming believed itself to be the the Princess of Mars. They all ended up dying because of poor planning.

A cult that believes the world is carried on the back of a great cosmic whale, which is fated to do battle with a great cosmic squid at the end of time. They have a longstanding enmity with a heretical offshoot cult that is trying to summon the squid to bring about the end of the world.

A cult dedicated to setting people on fire. It began as a way for two rogues to get out of that offense on religious persecution reasons. They got out because the judge and jury were so moved by their testimony that they wanted to join. Then it got overrun by true believers

>A cult based on a god who paints, with a focus on beauty, taking an ethical system based entirely on the increase and decrease of beauty. Most of their internal struggles concern the objectivity/subjectivity of beauty and comparing who is the most beautiful among them

A cult run by a schizoid guy with eerily strong charisma. He's running a small compound which farms organic vegetables and sells microwbrewed beer to finance their operation. They're building a supercomputer cluster one PS4 at a time, trying to build a strong AI in an air-gapped installation. Should they succeed, the singularity will commence.

all races are equal, and all may become gods, if only they sacrifice themselves, and others, in holy flame

>A cult led by an autistic savant whose thing is numbers/certain number sequences (primes, fibonacci, whatever)
Cult of Kek?

The pee pee bandits. Cult dedicated to force feeding people their piss.
"You can't stop the pee pee"

Is this guy their leader?

A cult that plays good (if creepy) hard rock.

A cult that believes in the balance of all things, so much so that when too many good things happen, they commit atrocities to balance it out, and when too many bad things happen, they selflessly bring aid and order to the land.

To paraphrase a friend "sometimes I think about how modern scientists and mathematicians can get haughty up in projects that kill a lot of people, like Openhimer for example, but then I'm reminded Pythagoras had an actual math cult that actually murdered people."

Any religious dogma would appear niche, stupid, and arbitrary to the uninitiated.

Yes, we've all seen the Stonecutters episode of the Simpsons.

>fantasy setting laws caring for religious persecution

I think there was some order of Roman priests that were for some reason not allowed to ever see a table without food on it.

>What re some good ideas for cults with very niche and stupid dogmas?
Scientology.

Campaign I'm working on is a world where the sun blocked by the moon, bringing an everlasting night over the world as punishment for the sun god failing to share her thrown. Shut up, it's magic.

Over a millennia all references to the goodness of sunlight have essentially been erased and replaced with propaganda about how before the everlasting night the world was a land of fire and destruction and the people almost ceased to exist.

So now there's a group of people who are forced to worship this sun god who they have been raised their whole lives to hate so they can spread warmth and light necessary to keep society going. They hate their jobs and are seen as being punished by the ruler ship by being forced to practice magic in the name of the great destroyer.

A cult based around sub-par losers who were never good enough to be knights or wizards, and so they gather up training and arming in secrecy, before striking out at the academies, organisations and individuals that ridiculed, belittled and bullied them.

Its like the breakfast club with angst and dark arts.

A cult based around finding their equivalent of the Holy Grail.

The catch is their grail is a live, very dangerous, and very unintelligent monster. They end up being a cult of crocodile hunter style monster wrasslers, preparing for the day they can finally capture the great beast, the Alligator Made of Knives and Fire.

Feminism

A cult dedicated to winning the Village of the Year awa-...wait.

For dogma disputes, what about a dispute caused by changing the amount of fingers used in making a religious sign.
>this happened look up the Old Believers split from Russian Orthodoxy
Changed from two fingers, pointer finger straight, middle finger slightly bent into two fingers joined with thumb, held at point
>people have been killed over this

The Questing Beast of Arthurian legend?

>Shut up, it's magic.
Sounds like friendship to me.

The true form of both the micro and macrocosm(s) is/are The Sphere. Forces are exerted radially, planets and stars naturally form as spheres. The milky way is a circle. Squares, triangles, angled geometry of any kind is blasphemy, it is the False Reality, it is the prison that holds our holy Radiance (notice that Radiance implies RADIUS, which is circular or spherical). Our followers set out to extinguish the heresy of the Untrue, and so we destroy all False shapes with fervor.

All is circular. All is spherical. When we die, if we have served the Truth well, we will become hyperSpheres of infinite dimension, the one True state of ultimate bliss that one should aspire towards.

We hold all manner of Radially symmetric beings holy, and the eyes, the Spheres of Sight, are our most precious gift. We display them as our symbol and we preserve the eyes of our dead so that they may guide us.

A Cult dedicated to the worship of a dead guy. The cult is the dominant religion in the Empire and it fights viciously to expand its power. The cult is lead from a great palace in the Empire's capital. Saints and the figure of worship are sometimes reported to help the faithful.

This was in the news in Bongland today. They're all really sad that he's retiring.

My melanin enriched friend.

BÖC inspires so much of my campaign work, and it's great because no one in the group has heard any of it. I can reference Harvest of Eyes, Harvest Moon, Mistress of the Salmon Salt, or Imaginos and none of them bat and eye.

and in fact the world is carried by four elephants and a huge turtel.

Those guys could be super inefficienty... in an entertaining way.

Why would they want that? The squid guys I mean. And why would the whale guys try to prevent it if the great whale is already fated to fight the squid?

...

You mean the giraffe. Its a fucking giraffe.

>arabic writing all over the page
>monks

I know crows are cute and all that but still

An ancient Jewish guy got killed, but came back to life and will be back any day now.

>Islam/Arabs never had monks

>Sufis literally have a long ass story about birds that is an allegory for finding god

They're not really monks to be honest, although the similarities are obviously there.

The cult worships time, and believes that its passage is cyclical. They make clocks, allow them to operate for exactly one year, and then ritually destroy them, only to replace them with a new clock.

Shamelessly stolen from Stellaris

What a sweetie.

A cult that worships inaction. They see their prayers going unanswered as the most lavish reward their faith could yield.

What was will be. What will be was.

Aum Shinrikyo (sp) had several such songs, including a fun work song about the deadly nature of sarin gas.

Blue Oyster Cult

DID SOMEBODY SAY CULTS!?!

But seriously, what you want is your cult to be dedicated to one major concept. That which is part of the cult, and that which is not.

Outsiders are ignorant fools at best, unclean heretics at worst. They do not understand the grand truth of your faith, and as such should be shunned at all costs. If they (the party) should show up, your cult (if we're going full crazy) should be so violently isolationist that they kill outsiders on sight, claiming that they really aren't "people"but are demons/monsters disguised as people,which means that not only is killing strangers good, but should be done as quickly as possible.

Have them apocalyptic, christian extremist offshoot, Luddite, militant survivalists. They think the world has ended and that demons have invaded. The only thing protecting them is the words of the preacher who is teaching a rather crazy brand of Christianity. Have them think that technology is evil because it has tempted the people down the path of materialist wealth instead of devotion to The Lord so they live with a primitive existence (no electronics, no complicated machinery, nothing but simple hand tools). And since Demons could attack at any time, everyone has a gun and they're ready to use it at the first sign of trouble. Guns are okay, because they're holy weapons in service of the Lord. (Hypocrisy is wonderful for cults).

I remember that Thales sacrificed an ox after figuring out how to inscribe a right triangle in a circle, and something about the Greeks sacrificing large quantities of oxen after figuring out something about pi, but a real math cult? Really?

...

SHAI'HALUD may his passing cleanse the world!

they would deal with Dominance and submission, and would make a career of evil.

hang on, something about this seems rather familiar. Isn't there something exactly like this in real life?

YYYYYYESSSSSS!!!

The Cult of Atom.

Seventh Day Advent Hoppists.
"And now these three remain: Faith, Hop and Charity. But the greatest of these is Hop".

Cult of Luck.
So what they do is serving God of Luck. They do this by Not engaging in any actions that may disrupt random happenings as in the random events soul of the god lives. So they obsessed about doing nothing and make everyone else do nothing to extreme degree. Burning windmills that disrupt air currents. Execute cheating gamblers. Eating random mushrooms.

>A cult led by a cooking sage
I'm not going to lie, I would totally join a cult if the leaders cooking skills we literally divine.

Cult if Looking over Edges.
Like every edge you can think of. Leader was just a hippy with some mescaline and mountain cliff. Now its decayed into weirdos that walk around with razorblades and looking on things halfcovered with razors edge.

Naw I think it's from Hellsing.

cracked.com/article_20119_6-elaborate-science-experiments-done-just-hell-it.html
cracked.com/article_20313_the-6-most-baffling-science-experiments-ever-funded.html
cracked.com/article_16079_the-10-craziest-scientific-experiments-ever-conducted.html

Setting the table in the first place must have been very difficult.

Cult that worships the DM.
They help or hinder the PCs depending on their OOC actions.

A death cult built around the worship and protection of a piece of art, running directly contrary to the artists intended purpose. They carry ancient war clubs and frequently misspell words, substituting one letter for another, and retreat into the woods for religious communion

>Cooking cult
A glorious mix of just simple, down to earth people who believe they can get a closer connection to the world by cooking it's produce in interesting ways, and also eating literally everything. Mourning dead loved one? Eat them. Lost an arm? Eat it to retain your power. Hungry while out for a walk? Raw cricket.

Dont get it

Ave Nex alea, user

I once made a character in a mad max style setting that led a cult. Through a series of misunderstandings in his backstory, he believed that god talked to him through a magic 8 ball.

I had a physical magic 8 ball with me at every session that the group used to make all of our most critical decisions.

I had one cult for a game that never really got off the ground dedicated to evil as art.

They would basically take souls from people who committed evil and basically put them in special cases in their secret lair, then use those cases to relive that certain brand of evil, not unlike those Sense Stones from Planescape Torment.

They prided themselves on collecting as much unique brands of evil acts as they could. Evil done out of fear, Evil done for it's own sake, an Evil act done just to survive for another day, an Evil act done against their will, etc.

Joining the cult required first knowing about it (they're very secretive since capturing souls like that is the main way to piss off all 4 deities, when normally they spend too much time fighting each other to care about much else), and contributing a "piece" to the collection. Preferably something unique they don't already have, but they'll also accept "duplicate" pieces if it's high enough quality.

Evil otakus. I like it.

...

>A fugitive group led by a small dwarven spirit channeler. You could say, a small medium at large. Her goal is to become tall, so people no longer look down on her.
We Red Ribbon Army now?

You're both wrong. It's the Cult Imperialis

>When they complete their grand ritual, it summons Godzilla.

more like the cult of pythagoras, you meme-loving fuck

PRAISE THE /k/UBE!

...

The Flamen "The Silliest part of Ancient Rome"

I personally like to use a cult that worships an eldritch horror of coincidence. The High Priest is whoever wields the sacred Staff of the High Priest, and the staff is thrown out to a random place in the world.

>The fearsome cult of /r9k/

I'll just kill him with my Black Blade, wielded by a veteran of the psychic wars.

Hooray, another chance to re-post this!

>A cult led by an autistic savant whose thing is numbers/certain number sequences (primes, fibonacci, whatever)

This is literally what Pythagoras did.

It's not about what will happen when the squid arrives - it's about what will happen afterwards.

>kraken by china mieville?

can we make a blue oyster cult campaign setting

This. Cannot. Continue.

Or the Judas Based religion
Red Dwarf has a couple good ideas to steal

Someone probably already did it. Let's hope he's lurking in this thread.