God of Animals
God of Death
God of Justice
God of Life and Healing
God of Music
God of Sky
God of Thieves
God of Trickery/Fortune
God of War
God of the Wild
Many religions have splinter sects whose rituals differ from the orthodoxy. Often times, powerful and influential members of the religion create these sects. For a truly unique character, consider tailoring your worship with one of the practices below as you grow in your religion — make sure you give your GM a heads up; schisms in religions could make for a memorable end game to a long running campaign!
Through the gift of Nature, peoples have thrived beyond what they could do alone with the help of animals. As guardians and household companions, animals are the reason people have moved from hunters to civilized farmers and traders.
As a member of this sect: You are required to keep a minimum of four pets with you at all times. If harmed while under your care, this serious offense against your god demands increased tithing or the taking on of additional pets.
As a former member of this sect: After years of suffocating yourself with smelly, shedding animals, you avoid large groups of them at all costs. You never take a familiar, and you are critical to those who do. You avoid herds on the farm in favor of the crowds of the city.
Mortals may not determine the flow or direction of death’s eternal river, for only the gods command such dominion.
As a member of this sect: When anyone dies, you forbid him or her from medical treatment for at least a day, assuming the recently deceased is in communion with the god of death. A healer of this sect freely offers healing spells to the living, but refuses to resurrect or raise the dead.
As a former member of this sect: You have watched too many people die while a healer was nearby, waiting for their ‘judgment.’ You defend life passionately, putting yourself in harm’s way to protect an ally. Whenever a comrade falls in combat, you drop everything to bind their wounds to keep them from moving to their ‘communion.’
Laws make the world a livable place, free from mad brutality and anarchy. However, laws themselves are merely man’s flawed reflection of Heaven’s Ordained Creed. Members of this sect attack the law to make it stronger. They continuously argue the merits and flaws of all governmental regulations, championing simultaneously the absolute rule of the nobility and the freedoms of the poor.
As a member of this sect: You are the truest and most absolute of Devil’s Advocates, for it is only by your constant challenging of rules that Law becomes worthy of the title, ever both strong and supple. You will argue, with righteous fervor, the morality of any regulation at any time. Your fellow party members may dread bringing you into contact with any civilization, where you will obsessively pursue loopholes in the law and argue loudly with constables in the streets.
As a former member of this sect: Yours was a life of constant, beleaguered harassment and imprisonment, aggressively fighting tooth and nail against every governing body you encountered. In places where free speech saw suppression, you wore a mask and vandalized temples. In places where free speech was encouraged, you stood in the streets and screamed obscenities against the king. Now, you want nothing more than simply to be left alone.
The beautiful majesty of mortal existence is defined by the knowledge that all life must end. Who better understands the wonder and grandeur of life than one who has seen death? The clergy of this splinter faith must personally perform one justifiable execution or mercy killing every year.
As a member of this sect: You care for the sick, the injured and the dying; as a Hospitaler, your faith demands always that you “first, do no harm.” However, your enemy is not Death itself, as all lives softly fade into the dark in their appropriate time, and your holy duty is to guide dying souls into the embrace of life’s end. Whether the lives you end are those ordained by the church, by time, by fate, or by chance, it only matters that you be there.
As a former member of this sect: Although you may have saved hundreds more, you have still snuffed out dozens upon dozens of lives, slitting throats and holding heads under water until the shaking stopped, all to better understand and appreciate the mystical connection between those cosmic opposites: Life and Death. Through it all, you learned only one thing — it is only a cruel and hateful god who would force you to kill.
The god of music smiles upon those who practice clamorous dissonance, for only in wild surges of sonic madness will music be reborn ever vital. The chaotic, atonal sounds created by the devout of this sect ring harshly in the ears of those cultured in civilized modes of music. Loud, raucous noises bolster this sect’s young followers, creating an adrenaline rush that better focuses their power against those that oppose them.
As a member of this sect: The risk of deafness runs high in this sect, as the practice of loud, chaotic music is necessary to augment your magic. You dislike all forms of subterfuge in combat, charging headlong at full volume into the fray. You appreciate tones and melodies of traditional music, but give glory to your god with off-key, ambiguous chords and improbable harmonic inflections.
As a former member of this sect: Having spent so much time engaging in music bearing no rhyme or reason, you crave structure. You seek to create entirely new forms of music and institute schools of innovative musical theory. This sect reverently views members who depart to create new music as merely following a natural progression of worship, likened to a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly.
The overreaching god of the sky sees and knows all things, but your mountain-haunting splinter sect seeks to reach the god physically and touch the clouds, his cloak, literally. They practice starvation to reach an extreme physical lightness, believing that in the holiest of states, it is possible to subsist on air alone. Some of the devout signify their willingness to attempt direct communication with their god by participating in a solemn festival where they submit to the holy catapult and shoot themselves directly at the clouds. None has yet succeeded in touching them, but the bones of the holy litter the valley below.
As a member of this sect: You preach to others against eating, and given a choice, always push for adventures in the mountains. Your companions are terrified to bring you to inns for fear you will harangue people at dinner, preaching that holiness is found in hunger. You claim you are “humbly, not yet light enough to reach for the god’s cloak,” but assure everyone that you will get there soon enough.
As a former member of this sect: You never want to go up a mountain again. Paranoid that rail-thin men planning to toss you over a cliff are never far behind, you eat yourself to distraction at every turn, spending much of your hard-earned money on food. You even hoard food on adventures. Nothing you do, however, seems to make you any fatter.
Most gods and goddesses of the thieving arts extol the trickster, the clever ones, the pranksters, and the daring. This sect takes a darker path, for what could be a more complete theft than the theft of life?
As a member of this sect: Once a year, you sneak off from your party and burglarize a household, brutally slaying all its inhabitants in their sleep. Should you fail in your holy effort and wake one of the victims, the ceremony ends abruptly, and you must flee and then re-attempt the act at a different location forty days later, repeating the heinous crime until successful. Sect members wear a sash mark for each successful ceremony, and owe unquestioning obedience to any member with more sash marks than they, even if the cult brethren is younger or otherwise less senior than the thief in question. It is imperative that no member of your adventuring group learns of your activities, although you are always looking to recruit new devotees for the sect. Of course, you are also very proud of your decorative sash, but refuse to explain it—or your many odd contacts throughout the cities of the land.
As a former member of this sect: You deeply regret your many murders. Your sleepless nights are filled with memories of brutalities past, and you are convinced that lawmen throughout the lands yet seek you. Still, you keep your sash, unable to dispose of something so dark and so holy, but you fear the day a fellow sash holder recognizes you, almost as much as you fear that the children you spared will hunt you as adults and cut you down as you deserve.
The Universe depends on randomness to grow; anything that stays the same for long is open to rot and decay. Members of this sect must stir up life around them to keep things fresh and interesting.
As a member of this sect: Your practice mandates you spread the word of randomness and chaos. Monthly, as part of your religion, you must attempt to steal something from a friend or loved one and hold onto it until they realize it is missing. Should they then approach you over the matter, you hand back the item, pronouncing, “My God takes and she gives. Know ye that life is as capricious!”
As a former member of this sect: You are generally trusting of people but highly suspicious of religious figures, as your former sect members have driven you crazy in the past by stealing your most precious items from you! Any religious folk, especially party members, who show you kindness, must be planning to ‘teach’ you.
You must maintain a state of readiness for war at all times, for the act of war alone gives your god strength. If battles erupt in your area, you must find a way to participate on one side or the other, mustering as many armed and ready followers as can be convinced to participate in glorious battle. The cause need not be just, only bloody and thorough.
As a member of this sect: Upon entering a new area or city, you immediately begin searching for local conflicts. If you can find a way to push one of those conflicts over the brink so that open battle results, you will do so. You constantly train with weapons and in small unit tactics. Others may mistake your willingness to train them as devotion to a cause, only to be disappointed when you leave them with no instructions beyond “go bash some heads.”
As a former member of this sect: You are a peace-loving person. You seek to mediate and reduce strife wherever you go, actively seeking chances to act as an ambassador or intermediary in order for warring sides to communicate safely. You realize that weakness can bring on conflict, so, in some situations, you may still train some locals in the art of self-defense, tempering your knowledge by extolling the virtues of peace and comparing the art of preparing for war to locking your doors and windows at night.
Humans are animals, tied to the cycle of the seasons and the whirl of life and death in the same way as the trees, the stars, the rivers, or the beasts of the fields. Members of this sect view the creation of mines, cities, and fortresses as a natural extension of humanity’s instincts. They encourage human fertility, crop production, hunting, and fishing.
As a member of this sect: You guide and tend to humans as a shepherd guides and tends to the sheep. You watch for monsters and signs of evil magic as a shepherd might watch for wolves. You care for children and the elderly, and help to provide for your flock as best you are able. However, you are not one of them. You must always remember that humans are merely animals, and as such, they are occasionally very foolish and dangerous.
There are two roads from this faith as a former member of this sect: the Humanist and the Universalist. The Humanist chooses to become part of his own flock, to give up his godlike overview of civilization and to dwell among the people. Conversely, the Universalist seeks a greater balance with the Endless Scream of the Wild, abandoning his delicately balanced position of observation and authority over the affairs of humans to seek better understanding of some other species, or perhaps even the weave of the universe itself.