What is The Light?

You know the "cosmology" of darkest dungeon is a kind of curious thing that I've always had a bit of trouble puzzling out.

The general theme of the game is that lovecraftian thing where humanity is hopelessly small in the face of the incomprehensible horrors of the uncaring universe, but then there's also classes that explicitly invoke holy powers that incur buffs and things in the game that directly imply the existence of a higher power willing to directly assist humans in their struggles.

>Eberron

the silver flame is basically this

My personal fan theory that it was somehow the Heart fucking with humanity just to inspire hope so it can crush them harder.

>who is Pelor
He fits the definition in that he’s a generic good guy light god.

Except why would the Heart allow itself to be 'killed'? It's implied that while 'killing' the heart is only a setback, it's still a bad thing for it because it slows down it's process of consumption, although this big assumption on my part is all that supports my theory in the spoiler above.

True, my theory leaves a huge gap in the end of the game. I've chalked it up, at times,
to arrogance, or the theme of inevitability.
I like the latter because it reinforces that nothing you do matters, you might defeat the heart now, but eventually it will succeed.

You know how the eldritch monsters have cultists that worship them for power?

The Light is like that. Its just an eldritch monster that doesn't like the other eldritch monsters very much. Its not on our side, its just against the same enemies as we are.

Hm, is this now A Darkest Dungeon Lore thread?

Could be, being that The Light of DD is pretty interesting.
It should stay open to any discussion regarding the OP though.

I've always wanted to make a campaign/system that attempts to capture the feel of DD

In Warcraft, The Light is some sort of energy field which all living beings emit and can be channeled if you know how. It does not have any tenants beyond that you believe in it, so you can use The Light to whatever ends you want.

Fundamentally, light is something which we associate with safety and warmth, two things which our ancestors needed for survival. I think that is why it's a concept associated with holy, pure or good things. If a god is the embodiment of the concept of light, then they have to be good too if we follow this line of thinking. The tenants of a light based religion could simply be an extension of these needs. There are safety in numbers, so you should convert as many people as possible. Since there are safety in numbers, you need to be concerned about the rest of your community and help each other in times of need. There is a need for safety from supernatural threats or perils towards the soul, so The Light becomes a safeguard against the unwholesome things which wander around in the darkness just beyond the light.

Wouldn't the Light merely be a temporary way to stave off the ever encroaching Dark, which one might assume is the natural state of existence and from which all else came? Curious that man would rather sit by the Light rather than in the Dark's cold comforting embrace.

Now that's some good shit.
The Light is community, warmth, and love for one another.
Naturally, being a self-serving prick, public menace, or uncooperative shit goes against what the Light means to people. Meaning a list of sins is easy to come, and is a religion that demands self sacrifice, cooperation, and humility.
But what's the drawback?

Whenever pressed, I use "The Holy/Golden Light" as a gestalt being slammed together by the goodwill of every sentient being in the world/universe. A conglomerate of everyone's desire to do a good deed of any size regardless of the cost. Like if you or I were to find ourselves face to face with it, it may look like a shiny golden version of you. If I'm a greedy scumbag in the vein of Ebenezer Scrooge with only a small desire for good it would be small, like a puppet-sized me, whereas if you yourself are a goody-two-shoes, it may be a giant Wizard-of-Oz-Head size projection. The physical representation of Neutral Good, or, The "I don't want to get into a moral argument that takes up the majority of our time and only succeeds in getting everyone pissed off so this is the generic good alignment that the generic paladins and clerics prescribe to so we don't have to deal with anyone trying to be That Guy and force the paladin into falling because one of us is an angsty semi-nihilist" God. As long as the person using it truly believes in themselves of their actions and honestly feels what they're doing is ultimately right, it just works. If I want to have a more complex or rigid faith, I make up a more specific God and leave The Holy Light as more of a natural law or force of the world.

>But what's the drawback?

This is where I'm having trouble with it in my own setting. A light based religion has a number of cliches it can fall into which I'm sure we've all seen at some point or another.
>The religion loses its way from its original tenets
>The religion becomes overzealous in enforcing its tenets
>The religion becomes the governing body of the nation, enabling rampant corruption and economic subterfuge
>The god of light becomes arrogant and their standards of good behaviour become unrealistic

>As long as the person using it truly believes in themselves of their actions and honestly feels what they're doing is ultimately right, it just works.
That's exactly how the Light functions in Warcraft. You can use it even while doing some obscenely terrible stuff, so long as you tick those prerequisites, you're golden, quite literally.

just have it so the light cannot be used to harm, only restore, cleanse, ward, and protect

I remember the old series of threads were Veeky Forums created a grimdark wargame setting, the crusading God of Light devoted to destroying the corrupt material world so it could be remade into an infinite realm of eternal, pure light was pretty interesting.

The soul is like water; there is no soul
The soul is like fire; the soul is transient
The soul is like light; it is imperfect

In the dark there is self, in the dark there is permanence and in the dark is perfection. And in the fullness of time all things shall return to the dark.

But honestly, those are good cliches.
An obvious drawback you didn't mention is that while you and I may think those are good morals to live by, some people through personal choice or suffering they've endured think "Fuck other people, I'm living for me." and might view The Light as airy-fairy bullshit, or a fancy set of shackles to limit one's free will.
While discussing a different context, brings up a good point about the Light, if the prereqs to use it, channel it, or revel in it's blessings are too light, bad things happen.

One might say "If you go against what the light means, you get smited and the light burns you up next time you try channeling it" but that itself snags on the question "What is the Light" and such a thing happening suggests that the light is a conscious thing.
Methinks to have a good, defined version of The Light in a setting, it would have to tie into the creation myth of the setting and be nailed down early on and what it can and cannot do.

Dithmenos, pls go and stay go

>He thinks the dark will preserve him.
Fucking heretic.

Of course, user.

All things begin in darkness, and all so end. A man is no different. Darkness sprouts within him, it grows, and consumes him. Such is its nature. In the end, every man returns to the darkness whence he came. Darkness is his true essence.

>So, Veeky Forums, what do you think the Light SHOULD be? What it's powers, laws, tenants, and limitations are? From where does it flow, and what are it's effects on the world, it's worshipers, and it's prophets?

A stand-in for Christianity. But don't just blatantly call it Christiantity because that triggers a lot of fedora-clad neckbeards.

>He thinks illusion can uplift him
There is no power who is a real power who has not conquered suffering and no power greater than any power that has conquered suffering. To extinguish the fires of the passions should be the searcher's first and foremost goal. In truth there is no hell, no power and no heaven. All these things are illusory, unsatisfactory and shall pass away in the fullness of time.

See, why can these things never be stand-ins for Zoroastrianism or Sikhism or, heck, Shinto or something?

Why is it always nondemoninational-but-slightly-Catholic-flavored Christianity with the serial numbers filed off?

There is actually quite a lot of Japanese media that plays with traditional Shinto beliefs.

However, as for the other stuff: there simply aren't as many Iranian and Indian artists because they are poor and there works aren't translated to English.

>Why is it always nondemoninational-but-slightly-Catholic-flavored Christianity with the serial numbers filed off?

Because that's what most people are familiar with.

I did my D&D religions where light = bliss and darkness = terror.
Super easy to understand.

>So, Veeky Forums, what do you think the Light SHOULD be?
Whatever makes it not fucking dark. The Sun, Torches, Campfires, glowsticks and Neon Lights are all holy, because they let us fucking see and scares away the things that creep around in the dark.

Eastern religions are much harder to adapted because of their abstract nature. Stories of western Heros often involved overcoming some sort of physical trail or obstacle that can be killed or removed with the help of divine inspiration. The man over came the trail but God is assumed to have helped in an indirect way. In contrast eastern religions have characters the have philosophical trails that involve exploration of the self. These stories are interesting but not super fun for running campaigns on. I mean who wants to play a game where you have to walk across the content to talk to three people, that all tell you the meaning of life is something different, just so you can find out life is meaning less and you wasted your time seeking foolish human desires such as meaning?

The light is an old pervy man in a horse.

He goes by ezalor but tends to forget it

>Who is Rama?
>Who is Sun Goku?

What if the sun was actually a living god entity?

As funny as your post was, it inspired me.

>Worshippers of the Dark and other assorted Heretics often mutilate or remove their eyes in a variety of rituals meant to prepare them for "The World Without Light"
>For a while, zealots of the light would cover their eyes or in extreme cases mutilate them in a sign of self-depreciation, reasoning often being that they did not deserve to witness the beauty of the Light.
>This practice however, was eventually deemed heretical due to the similarity of the practices.

That's my game setting. There was once one sun god like entity. It was a beacon of light that shifted and pulled the endless chaos into order and form. Ironically, in the shadows of its own creations, chaos still thrived. Its works unmaid as soon as is gaze shifted.

To fight this tide, the being spilt itself into thousands upon thousands of stars. Each star then began the process of creation, with its brethren to watch over each other's creations. But even the watchful eyes of innumerable stars could not gaze into every dark crevass.

The stars made one final split. A small fraction apiece, giving the first spark of true life. The soul. Each being created with a will, and the ability to stave off the abyss. At least, that was the hope.

What if "The Light" was a cabal of gods who are more or less benevolent towards humanity and are mystically empowering themselves by concealing/abandoning their identities and operating only as part of the gestalt whole that is The Light?

>Game of thrones

What the fuck is "the Light" or equivalent in Game of Thrones? There are plenty of religions and gods, but no generic good guy ones that I recall.

Mostly the Lord of light and his cult

The Red God is neutral at the very best. He provides shadowy assassins at the cost of human sacrifice by burning. The only thing it has going for it is alternative is that The Great Other is a thousand times worse.

Life, creation, creativity.

Darkness is usually defined as destruction, death, the end, there as the light typically is always symbolic of the continuation.

Sol Invictus is the one true answer.

I made this and started to work on art assets and then I had to get surgery done because of a back injury and never did pick it back up.

I think the Ancestor was actually be literal here. "The Light" IS the promise of safety, it is the giver of hope. Hope, of course, won't stop a blade. But it allows you to do so yourself. "God helps those who help themselves" and all that. That would be pretty thematic for the setting, the only source of good in the world is utterly powerless...depending on how you look at it.

I think the Ancestor was actually being literal here. "The Light" IS the promise of safety, it is the giver of hope. Hope, of course, won't stop a blade. But it allows you to do so yourself. "God helps those who help themselves" and all that. That would be pretty thematic for the setting, the only source of good in the world is utterly powerless...depending on how you look at it.

Lord of Light is very far from "THE Light". For starters, he has an actual name, and it's R'hllor. It's also not a generic religion - it works on burnings and prophecies. Temple of R'hllor also has a slave army.

Look at this heathen, probably didn't even burn anyone in his life

>What is the light?
It's literally light. People often forget how people born before electricity would live in darkness with terrible methods of illunination. The light is literally a holy thing that drives away the night time, feeds plants, helps you find your way.

Creatures of the darkness are terrified of the light, even being destroyed by pure sunlight. In my setting, the reason there are dungeons is because they spontaneously grow in darkness, old cellars stretching into corridors and monsters forming and spawning and breeding. The light is what stops this, it's literally a battle of light vs darkness.

I hadn't considered tying it into my setting this much, but this thread gave me some ideas, thanks OP.

Fear not the dark, my friend.

And let the feast, begin.

yeah as other posters pointed out you're actually pretty off-base with that one.

The lord of light in asoiaf is more of a god of fire than generic wow-tier holy light Catholicism expy. His servants are cruel and largely feared because they burn people alive to fuel black magic. Hardly what I'd call "The Light."

What in the fuck are you doing?
Stahp.

Weird triple-postings aside, I like that idea. If you have it within your heart to risk your hide for your fellow man in the name of the Light, you can channel it to perform miracles.
Break with faith and act immorally and you lose it. Y'know, the Paladin thing.

One of the religions in my game is the Candle in the Storm, which is in large part light-focused. But ultimately, the light is an incomplete credo that only functions as a complement to the other parts of the religion.

Adherents of the Candle in the Storm divide the world into two parts, the Candle, and the Storm. The Candle is the light of civilisation flickering in the dark of the wilderness. It focuses on the sanctity of hearth and home, the power of the community, and the importance of accumulating knowledge and wisdom. Powerful devotees can manifest it directly as light and fire.

But the other aspect of the philosophy is just as important; the Storm is the wild, untamed world just outside the firelight, where the elements rage and rule. The Storm teaches that the strength of the community is founded on the strength of the individual, and that individual and community both only survive and grow stronger through struggle. Powerful devotees can manifest this through invocations of wind, thunder, lighting, and rain, as well as through communion with the spirits of the wild places.

While the Candle represents all of the good things that make human life more than the savage existence of an animal, the Storm is the tempering force you must constantly push back and test yourself against in order to let civilisation exist at all. So while adherents of the philosophy might focus on one or the other, every member strives to balance them. Even the bookish scholars who keep their culture's greatest libraries try to train with weapons and wayfinding to a minimum of proficiency, and even the coarsest, wildest hunters and warriors who spend weeks at a time away from civilisation try to read a minimum of scholarly texts to improve their minds.

Sounds very House of Leaves.

The Light is what most people think when they think of The Force. It's this ever present psychic energy field that is at once sentient and silent, capable of performing miracles for those with the will and focus to draw on it. It intervenes rarely, and is linked to all life.
The Darkness is like the Dark Side: fueled by hatred and the lure of quick power.

>His servants are cruel
>Implying Thoros is cruel
>Implying Moqorro is cruel
>Implying Melisandre is cruel

You’re mostly talking entirely about Warcraft here since most settings actually just use deities, straight-up.
“The Light” in Warcraft is a philosophical concept of the inner goodness and decency of humanity and willpower can grant you strength, using by Alliance priests and paladins and such.

That said, The Light is basically about internal confidence in what you are doing as being the best thing for the collective people, so a bad person who genuinely thinks 100% that he is doing the right thing not just for himself but for many others can tap into and use The Light. This is actually rarer then you might think, because true zealots who get nothing whatsoever out of their crusades are relatively rare, and a lot of people who abuse religious stuff like that simply make excuses to themselves later. To use The Light you have to believe without faltering and with no negative emotions (as in you can’t just be doing it for revenge) that you are correct in your actions, which means if there’s a nasty irrational genocidal guy who can use The Light then he is quite likely just a few steps from being totally insane since he believes in his actions 100% and is not making any internal justifications at all, he’s just THAT fucking committed.

Wrong! Kingdom Hearts is light!

What are some Holidays that worshippers of The Light enjoy?
Also what the fuck is all saints day from DD?
inb4 depends on the setting

Light represents surety. it removes the uncertainty of the dark. We can perceive what is. It allows us to understand the world around us, and gives it form. Without light, nothing is concrete, in some ways nothing exists because for us reality is perception based.

The Light is often equated with The Sun, greatest source of light. The Sun, in addition to providing light, sustains crops and gives life to the earth. Even before we understood photosynthesis, people more or less sussed out that sun = things grow. Therefore the Sun came to be equated with birth, sustenance, growth, life.

So the light gives us life. It gives us food. It provides for us, and it defines the world in which we live. Why wouldn't you worship it as a God?

Name one setting, then.

>Also what the fuck is all saints day from DD?
I'm guessing the DD-verse saints are just people who accomplished great things with/in the name of the Light.

Don't slander your prince like that, peasant.

The Light began as a being of Illumination. Before it, man stumbled in the darkness, groping and fumbling, and could not see truth even if it was in front of him.

Then The Light came, and it taught man what is and what is not, what was truth and what was not truth.

And yet, some still seek The Darkness, for while light reveals, darkness hides, and some would prefer comfortable lies to painful truth. In this way, we see the coward and the liar as shadows, desperately seeking refuge from The Light.

And one day, may we be able to walk into the light without shame, and to do so let us act thusly:

We will not lie, even if the truth is painful.

We shall not kill or destroy without a valid reason.

We shall not take joy in another's pain, but strive to be fair and just.

We shall not judge how one is born, but how one acts.

We shall understand blind obedience causes one to stumble, a true disciple asks and seeks truth.

*We shall not engage in sorcery nor alchemy, and accept the world as it is.

*Revised after the illumination and fasting of St. Brian. The new code is thus:

When we use sorcery and alchemy, we shall not proclaim ourselves gods, but humble students of The Light, and never fall to the dread and loathsome thing that is Diabolism.

We shall respect pleasures of the flesh to be done with consent between those of age, and shall condemn the rapist and the child-luster.

We shall not take what is not ours, nor use force to claim unearned spoils.

We shall respect every seventh day of the week by showing kindness to our loved ones and the animals that abide by us.

So if the sun god split himself into a million fragments to make star gods, does that mean it's always night in your setting?

"All Saints Day" is described as a holiday. The event of which is represented in the pic related of But what is it?

Is there any setting where "the light" is actually the evil one, and well known to be evil by the general population?

The only time I have actually seen "The Light" being evil, and not just followers of it being assholes was in fact in one of the weirder seasons of the Yu-gi-oh anime as a kid.
Light wanted to destroy all darkness because "Hey, darkness is bad" and didn't seem to either realize or care that all dark being destroyed would fuck the world up or something like that.

best Light imo is glorantha's which is just Fire stripped of its heat. You can gain it by giving up your own fire or by meditating for decades at a time. While it has a lot of the same things going on elsewhere in the thread, Light isn't automatically good and one of the most evil Chaos gods uses Light to Illuminate your soul and turn you into a psychopath.

The same "problem" exists with the Occultist, whose power is more directly from the Heart. I'm pretty sure that Heart = Light is a valid theory, and the flagellant, nay, the entire faith being masochistic and suffering focused reinforces that

"All Saints Day" is an existing event IRL. It's sorta like day of the dead, at places where it's celebrated, with the more religious types praying to the saints, and everyone visiting family graves to light candles and stuff. It's held sometime around Halloween.

The One, also known as the form of the good. It is the purest essence of being that gives reality to all things, and which all things are a flawed reflection of; even the gods themselves are just aspects of this single perfect unity. For more information, check out Plato's dialogues and Plotinus' Enneads.

My church stand in is half hinduist and worshipping a dude everyone knows is a normal human that achieved godhood by kicking ass. Is that good enough?

It's not really well known, but WoW seems to be trying to steer in that direction.
But I think it's more common to have the light be villanious in secret, where it is very authoritorian and bent on ruling the world. The church hiding a greater truth about the setting is also a thing I believe.

>tfw the light is just another force bent on world domination, but has already won.

It's the day before Halloween, at least in Germany.

>But I think it's more common to have the light be villanious in secret
Yeah, it's pretty common when played like that, I just think it would be interesting to play with the concept and make "the light" overtly bad to the point where folk worship "the darkness" which is actually fairly benevolent.
Closest I've seen is Hollow Knight where "the light" is trying to reduce all bug kind to mindless animals.

Isn't that Dark Souls?

Jesus.

midichlorians.

I usually go with Platonism. I have a particular preference for settings with an ancient or classical flavor.

No, Dark Souls has it reversed, with darkness being unthinking, unfeeling, personality-less bliss, and light bringing disparity to it.

Basically, if you like being a thinking-feeling actual human being instead of a mindless zombie, you want the Light to exist.

Actually, I just remembered a setting. Andor's Trail is a mobile game where dominant religion for where the players live is the Shadow. The light isn't overtly a villain, but seems to be another religion that's hostile to the shadow and it's followers.
Sadly it's just depicted as a normal church.

I mean I like to avoid Good Light in my settings, but it's usually up to the players' decision which side is better.
The light is authoritarian and fatalistic, but it is assuring and reliable. A paladin that invokes the Light to hold the line while his comrades flee will. not. fall. But his life will be consumed and his body crumble as soon as the power surge is over.
Meanwhile, the dark is fickle and possesive, but also caring and accepting. A theoretical dark paladin won't die, he could be turned to mush and the dark still wouldn't let go of him. He'll rip and tear his way out of any situation, consuming the souls of his enemies for energy. But the thing that comes out won't be quite human anymore.

That's not even remotely close to Dark Souls. The simple version is that the Flame is dying and humanity is used as a fuel to keep it going just a bit longer.
While humans are aligned to the dark in this setting, humanity as we know it only came to happen after the primal things were imbued with fire.

warcraft

A nice twist is using "The Light" as a generic eldritch god.
It grants knowledge beyond time, space and dimensions. Accelerating growth in specific areas like magic, technology and whathaveyou.

The caveat is that it's edging ever closer to the world and it's mostly just preparing the world to be devoured.
>Resistance cults whom can se the light for what it truly is will be the defacto terrorists of the setting and be branded the bad guys by the church and general populace.

>The light blinds its followers, figuratively.
>For maximum hard-mode; The concept of darkness itself is evil. Letting your torches go out is considered a sin.

I've tinkered with a setting like that. Light is dangerous and corruptive, and its worshipers form a cult. It comes from Heaven, a place of light and fire where worshipers of Light go, and is represented by fiery angels of terrifying beauty. It's opposed by Void, an all-consuming things that occasionally spawns demons which are nearly as dangerous as angels, but more subtle. Humanity is naturally somewhere in the middle, coming from the sea of spirits and flowing into the afterlife. Mages are generally regarded with suspicion, because to learn and use magic, you have to consult grimoires, which requires light, even if it's usually no more than a candle(and, to be fair, lightbringers have more than their fair share of mages). Most of humanity spends their entire days in darkness, so when they see even a dim light, it can be quite wondrous and terrifying experience.

It's a big deal in Wheel of Time.

There are people who were only exposed to WoW and Star Wars and think this is how all fantasy looks like

The Light in Warcraft is a primordial form of magic, with elementals and what not. The Light itself is merely a form of magic, but it's unique in the distinction that you have to believe that you yourself are using it for good. You become unable to use it if you don't think this yourself, which also leads to 100% evil people using the Light as long as they believe that they are good. The Light is also the opposite of Shadow, and Shadow is what animates the Undead, so therefore the Light is by far the most harmful magic an Undead can experience. Undead can use the light, but it feels to them as if burning alive whenever invoking it. Light also rejuvenates their dead flesh after a lot of use, so it's not only painful, but they also regain feeling in their body. They can feel maggots burrowing through their arm, spiders gnawing on their brain, smell their own rot, etcetera. Since it is also a force of magic, there are sentient Light elementals made up out crystalized Light.

That's the Warcraft Light at least.

If anyone here's read the Mignolaverse, I'd compare the Light to Vril if it is a force, or, if it truly has a personification, to Shonchin and Oannes: it teaches those who follow it how to wield power, not through pacts with outer beings (like the Occultist), but by channeling the secret fire of the Universe that chases away the dark; even if it only burns for a time, and the dark is far older and endless.

Duh. Because medieval fantasy's roots are in Arthurian knights and Charlemagne's paladins.

Hollow Knight?

Less well known, but definitivly Evil.
>The paladins of Light are secretly blackguards.

In the Scion role-playing game by White Wolf, one of the Titans (asshole ubergods who manifest various primal concepts) is Aten, the Lord of Light: unlike the other Titans, which have multiple avatars, Aten is singular, and embodies cold, inhuman purity: he desires burn away the World of Men and leave behind only a realm of perfect symmetry, unceasing light, and hollow shells eternally chanting praise unto Aten.

Yeah. Who the fuck has heard of the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Aeneid?