Lets talk about cults and other kinds of religious adversaries,

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>>51824035 The nature of the cult is essentially that they believe their god created humanity and that humanity is great and nearly perfect. Gods of other races, jealous of this creation and fearful that Humans would reign supreme, attacked and weakened the god of Man, keeping him from protecting them and crippling humanity. They now believe that they must oust non-humans from human lands and establish this faith throughout humankind, as the power of their worship will restore their god to power.

My plan is to have the cult focus mostly on raiding villages of Kingdom B, taking civilians, forcing them to convert, brainwashing or killing resisters. The secondary goal is to bait Kingdom B into attacking Kingdom A. Kingdom A believes that it can win such a war, and the king is a member of this cult and makes no genuine efforts to stop it. Nearby Kingdom C is heavily non-interventionalist, and so A believes that he is playing the long game, and can conquer them eventually after B. Naturally, a group of adventurers would seek to stop this, if not just because the cultists they encounter are real dicks.

Regardless of whether or not this cult's story of their god is real, the true faithful seem to see certain dread boons. They grow in stature, and become sometimes obscenely difficult to kill. There are stories circulating that even if you manage to fell a champion, their priests will resurrect him, the warrior becoming more like an automaton with every rising. This is seen as the greatest sacrifice for the faith, giving up your own humanity that salvation might be spread to the others.

So, any cult stories?

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One desperate bump before I give up on my thread

I got nothing, but I need some inspiration since I'd like to insert a cult in my future games, so I'll bump hoping for some more.

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There's some kind of lovecraftian gribbly horror from beyond spacetime which has spent all of recorded history lying comatose.

When it wakes up, it'll destroy the world.

When someone is killed in a specific ritual, all the remaining time which they would have otherwise lived is added onto the amount of time before the abomination's hibernation ends.

People figured this out and decided that a few victims dying as sacrifices is better than total obliteration. Hence, cultists.

>>51824035
I've got a few different cults in the game I'm running. One worships nanotechnological necromancy. The other worships lizardlike aliens as gods that will reincarnate their loyal servants as lizard aliens.

They're both disruptive to the crashed human society because they offer alternatives to the necessarily harsh rule to survive on an alien world with limited resources. The harsh rule has become stagnant, so they're trying to maintain their power too.

Presentation wise I think having the cult be understandably appealing in some ways, but also horrible and strange in others is key. Offering a better world to people with little is a popular religious move. Also having some people who are true believers and some who are riding them to power adds contrast and highlights what faith can be.

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>>51828577
>semi-good cult

How do you even address this? Do it to criminals scheduled to be executed? Or would the time they would have otherwise lived only count the time until they would've been executed normally?

>>51828751
>Presentation wise I think having the cult be understandably appealing in some ways, but also horrible and strange in others is key. Offering a better world to people with little is a popular religious move.

I'd been shallow in my thinking and had disregarded this. Perhaps my cult can first seek struggling humans and offer them gifts.

>>51824035
I ran a game where the cult was a state sanctioned church that's purpose was to slay a massively, MASSIVELY, powerful Lich Paladin that was hibernating.

The reason they wanted it dead was because the Lich Paladin was basically listening to the song of a dorment star, which in the setting, all stars were sleeping Eldrich esk gods who were dead or dying. And with the paladin listening to this song, he was inviting all the dreams of his sleeping God into the waking world. Shenanigans ensued.

It got super culty at the top as the secret of their leader was that he was once a companion of the lich Paladin, along with one other character that served as a campaign hook for the players, as well as mover and shaker behind the scenes. Both of which were centuries old and like the lich Paladin, and had attained demigod hood, so the Church Cultist leader had his own weird freaky deaky cult following for being a waking Eldrich god. It basically played out to what would happen if a Knight, Wizard and Rogue archetypical group because Demigods.

That was a fun game.

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>>51828752
The longer they would have lived = the more they'd be worth as sacrifices. So unfortunately, babies are best. Hence the "semi" part of "good cult." Extremely "semi."

Rather than being evil cult versus good cult I've grown fond of the idea of basically the Old ways versus the new reformed way.

This idea came to me when I was looking into the conflict of the Ecclisarchy between Goge Vandire and Sebastion Thor which makes me want to run a Dark Heresy game involving the Temple Tendency.

That said, for my own setting there was a religion that was "reformed" after the various tribes were united and their religious beliefs codified to not include blood sacrifices emphasisng personal sacrifice and what not but there are still villages out there that, when times get tough, think that maybe the gods will be pleased if they sacrifice something more than their time and energy.

>>51829039
Well you could just kill like twenty criminals, or is there a necessary cooldown on the ritual?

>>51828962
It sounds fun. How did the Paladin become a lich?

>>51828577
That image is magnificent.

>>51828577
>>51829039

The thing is that sounds like it'd be too easy to game. One baby would give you enough juice for 40 years if we really want to lowball it, so it would end up as one cult lady doing pregnancy duty every couple of decades.

You either need to harshen the exchange rate to something like 1 life = 1 day, or make the sacrifices require some really picky criteria like having lots of potential or some weird birth defect.

Personally I like the idea of cultists using ritual sacrifice to create their own god to save them from the evils of the world without realizing their new gestalt god only gives a shit about its own power and pushes the cult to ramp up their sacrifices.