I'm going to start posting the answers to the prompts that we used in our games using Urazya as a setting. I'd love to see other people post their creations as well; this could be a rich vein to mine, with lots of sharing, borrowing, and remixing. If you do post some of your stuff, link me to it, please! Maybe we could even get a public wiki going. Let a thousand Urazyas bloom and all that.
17. Name and describe three religious faiths vying for spiritual supremacy in Urazya.
Continuing with this one, Our Lady of the Drowned here, and now:
- According to the Book of Thorns, in the beginning a singular god created the cosmos and mankind. When his creation grew corrupt, the god clothed his divinity in mortal flesh to walk the world and take its sins upon himself.
- While traveling through Urazya spreading his creed and offering redemption, the now-mortal god was captured by unbelievers, tortured on a breaking wheel, and left to die alone and unaided in a vast desert wasteland.
- A band of his faithful, thirteen in number, recovered his remains. Their gospels in the Book of Thorns agree that the wounds on the body of their incarnate god leaked radiant, holy light.
- Since the god had perished while in mortal form, he was truly dead. He would henceforth be known only as the Broken God. Any previous name ascribed to him has been erased by the devouring winds of time.
- The skeletal corpse of the Broken God was preserved as an object of worship within the Cathedral of Penance in the coastal town of Saltmire, where it has been decorated with finery, gold, and precious gems.
- The dissipation of divine power is a slow process. Though the Broken God is deceased, his body continues to emanate magic in the form of sacred radiation. Those who come to worship the remains of the Broken God are bathed in its divine field, and some find themselves imbued with a portion of the god’s power.
- Belief in the ideals of self-sacrifice and righteous living symbolized by the Broken God is widespread throughout Urazya. Adherents of the Church of Aeonian Requiem, as the Broken God’s faith has come to be called, often consider it a holy duty to make a pilgrimage to Saltmire to be in the presence of their decaying deity.
- The commandments of Church of Aeonian Requiem are exacting, expecting chastity, honesty, and commitment to stoically facing inevitable suffering. Members of the Church are shared a revilement of demonic and diabolic forces; these are regarded as manifestations of the sins for which the Broken God sacrificed himself in the attempt to purge evil from the world.
- The rites of the Church frequently involve bloodletting, flagellation, fasting, and the donning of grotesque ceremonial masks made of iron.
- Martyrdom, particularly death via the breaking wheel, is considered to be a favored death that ensures entrance into heaven. Witch-finders, inquisitors, and paladins of the Church are zealots who relish the thought of dying in their god’s name.
