Need Help With Church Structure and Causes/Repercussions of Recent Change

[Vrock_Summoner]

I'm making a sort of "Ancient Egypt meets D&D-flavored high fantasy" setting for eventual use in a Play-by-Post game, and I know that in order to get the feeling right, I'm going to need to integrate the gods and church/religion fairly well into society as a whole. I also don't want to butcher this into merely "Egypt copypaste with Greyhawk slapped in liberally," though, and the needs of a game are obviously different from the needs of society, so I want to integrate the most flavorful parts of Egyptian religious structure into something that feels right in high-fantasy D&D. Problem is, I've never actually built a church structure for a setting before, much less tried to incorporate elements of a real-world society into it, so I need some help coming up with good ways to mix "high fantasy religious institution that isn't actively obtrusive to adventurer Clerics" with "Egyptian culture dynamic." I feel like I'm getting the cosmological and mechanical parts of it down (oh my word, Deities and Demigods is a fantastic book for setting-building) but I can't really figure out how to build the society and mundane church. The only hard requirements on this is that I want the pharaoh to be the High Priest of Re-Horahkty and for the other High Priests to be both church and state leaders in the main part of the setting, perhaps because the Godsmoot is making me giddy about a "centralized group of High Priests" idea.

Additionally, there's one thing I wanted to do to increase potential conflict in the setting and simultaneously open up more character options, but I don't know how it would happen or the exact repercussions of it happening, which admittedly is probably because I don't have that church structure down yet. This thing that I want to do is having some recent event (probably a cosmologically significant one, but maybe it can just be politically significant if we spin it right) result in either all of the aberrant gods or just Set getting spots in the church. I want it to be a source of conflict while allowing PC Clerics worshiping one of those gods (or just Set) without requiring "hide it or be publicly declared an outlaw and hunted down," though flaunting it can still create enemies.

You wonderful people have some good ideas for me?

[Creed]

I would start with "What gods are the most important in my setting?"

To clarify, there are a fair deal of Egyptian Gods (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_gods_and_goddesses). Do they all need to be in the setting? Probably. But do we have to flesh out the theological structure of the Cult of Serket? Probably not right off the bat, unless one of the PC's want's to play a Priest of Serket. So, first off, just nail down a handful of gods and goddesses that will be the primary pantheon of worship. Note that these don't necessarily have to be the same gods as the ones that really were top-tier in ancient Egypt, one of the beautiful things about world design is that you can, if you want to, move domains and roles around to make the deities of this setting more interesting (doing this also makes it seem less of a fresh coat of paint on the Greyhawk pantheon, and more like an elective pantheon you're choosing to use instead).


That, I think, would be a good place to start. Now, what level of input are you looking to us for? Do you want us to just throw out ideas left and right, so you can get your mind turning on certain ideas and do the actual structuring out yourself? Or are you looking for help from the community to source organizational details of the religion, wholesale?


Dig the idea, keep thinking up cool stuff!

[weaseldust]

I was going to type a long and uncertain post on what I remembered about Egyptian priests and temples, but the Wikipedia page on Egyptian Temples is very good, so just look at that.

I would suggest keeping the idea that priests are separate from the community and bound to temples, a bit like medieval monks, but also have significant political power as major landowners. Ordinary people were forbidden from the most sacred parts of temples, but the priests interacted with them and relayed their prayers to the gods. (If you want to play this up in a way that didn't really happen in our history, you could have the entire western bank of the river belong to the priests and their temples, and the eastern bank be the side everyone else lives on, though temples would need power over the settlements near them on the east bank in order to feed themselves, since priests didn't work in the fields like medieval monks did.) Religious processions were a very striking and colourful part of the religion, so I'd suggest keeping them too.

On including Set, you could just have the pharaoh order him to be (re-)admitted to the pantheon. Pharaohs were notorious religious meddlers. Perhaps this one married a foreign woman who worships Set? (Perhaps most worshipers of Set are outsiders - that would provide for some tension.) Or he bargained some power or miracle from Set on the understanding he would provide Set with temples and worshipers? Or he has some physical deformity typically associated with Set and is trying to make it socially acceptable by fiat?

Another idea that occurred to me is that the temple of Set could have lain derelict for a couple of thousand years before suddenly showing signs of miraculous activity. Blood spurting from the ground, people nearby healing from apparently-mortal injuries, a permanent sandstorm - that kind of thing. Ordinary people could well start to worship him again, especially if he seemed to be answering prayers. Alternatively, some Egyptian temples had oracles. Perhaps all the oracles suddenly started receiving messages from Set, and he then developed a popular following based on that?

A third approach - Egypt went through a couple of periods of foreign occupation, so perhaps Set is an old god that was actually phased out under the oppressors, with the cooperation of the priesthood because they never liked him anyway and the new pantheon is associated with a kinder and more rationalistic religion. His worship would be like a kind of Egyptian neo-paganism, with a bad reputation because the priesthood thought they'd got over that superstitious stuff, and perhaps because it's associated with rabid Egyptian nationalism.

(I just looked this up and the Hyksos actually promoted Set when they invaded. So you could have Set's re-admission being a direct result of foreign occupation instead.)

A fourth approach - Egypt had a major North-South divide, sometimes actually splitting in two, and Set was associated with the South, so perhaps he has been re-admitted because the South broke away and are reforming their religion to distinguish themselves from the North. It could be a priest rival to the pharaoh who rules the Southern part, since the high priests did have enough power to basically do just that when the kingdom was in anarchy.

A fifth approach - Set was associated with the desert, so perhaps he is being worshiped because the desert is expanding, starting to encroach on the fertile land, and none of the accepted gods seem able to stop it.

[LordotTrinkets]

What ho! Self-proclaimed mythologist here to provide some advice.

The first thing to note is the nature in which Egyptians made their gods and how they evolved over time. To summarize, any given god started out as the local god of a particular town, usually as the embodiment of farming and always considered the ultimate sovereign of the community. When wars broke out, the gods of both groups were said to also be warring and victory was taken as a sign that one god won. After this comes a period of narrative re-writing, new god adopts the old one or sometimes 'absorbs' the old one into himself, stories about the gods are changed to reflect the new dominance, even the genesis accounts are rewritten so that the winning god is on top. Religion was as much a political tool to the Egyptians as it was a worldview.

With this in mind, as mentioned by Weaseldust, I would suggest that the major conflict arise as a major theological dispute that naturally has intense political backgrounds. Perhaps a new empire has been made and people are resisting the radical changes to the stories, such as (to play off of what Weaseldust said) making Set a good guy or even have it be that Set was a good guy until the narrative changed to him being an arch-deicidal monster.

[Mith]

If I recall correctly, Set was the war god of the Lower Egypt, while Horus was the war god of the Upper. The difference was that in Horus' case, you asked for his blessing to aid you. In Set's case, you asked for him to curse your enemies. Just for some ideas on styles for the War Priests.

As for potential political reasons, how about a while after unification of Upper and lower Egypt, the desert starts expanding, which is used by the surviving cult of Set to start to expand in political power. The destroyed temples of Set are rising out of the sands, jackals are being heard calling at night, the moon shines blood red. You can have fun with that.

Or if you want to go eldrich horror style, have Apophis start gaining influence, which will force Set and Horus to work together.