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I’d like to say I wrote this one with noble intentions. But the main intention was “save me from badly worldbuild religions.” This is a personal thing for me.
As a youth I was fascinated by theology. When tested for career inclinations, Minister was in my top five. I probably would have ended up a Unitarian Minister under different conditions.
Theology is amazing, and is really a broad wrapper on a variety of things. It encompasses vast pantheons of gods and cultural traditions. It can be about powerful psychological and mystical processes and practices. In the end, it’s about humanity’s place in the universe and trying to make sense of it all. Well, that, and the legions of a-holes that often mess it up.
You can imagine why I took to it. It was probably one of the reasons I did a BS in Psychology.
But also I would see religions created in fiction and RPGs and they could be as fascinating as our world’s – or they could be derived from our world in obvious and unoriginal ways. One of my pet peeves about fictional worlds is when it’s clear that parts of our world were dropped into something not our world. I saw it too much.
I also get why it happens. We want our fictional religions to be relatable. We might not know how to make interesting fictional religion. We’re used to others “lifting and dropping” our world into other worlds. Also how many people really are interested in theology or get much exposure to it.
So? I wrote a book on it.
As much as I got annoyed by badly made fictional religions, I knew why they happened. I also had that theology interest so I could make a series of questions to help people.
It’s a weird thing really. Annoyed by something, then realizing why it happened, then trying to solve for it. But it looks like a book people responded to, and I’m glad I could help them out.
Steven Savage