(Crusades Worldbuilding) Shadowlands?

[nick_crenshaw]

So in a world that has both faux Christianity and faux Islam or some sort of syncretism both what are some ways to insert something like Rokugan's Shadowlands so I can have something similar to the Crusades without have the religious war part? Also any any help with a Christian/Islamic faith would be lovely.

[brian 333]

I advise staying away from real world religions in gaming. Even creating a new one from a real world religion template may create issues you never considered and are ill prepared to deal with.

What you want is two religions which have similar roots, so they have enough commonality that the differences appear small to outsiders, but with apparently cosmetic differences that make them mutually exclusive to their adherents.

Proposal: The Father of Man.

Call him anything. Let's use Pepaola for a placeholder. Pepaola comes from prehistory as a paternal guide and guardian. He gave fire to his children, and the horse. With these his children flourished and spread from the savannah to all the world. Those who still live by the old ways have a hundred languages and a hundred names for the Father Deity, with Pepaola being the one used by one faction in our opposed religions.

The other faction calls him Paol, and has given him a wife and family. They are sedentary farmers rather than nomadic hunter/gatherers, and specialize in their jobs, so naturally the gods do as well, with farmers, miners, smiths, and weavers among the pantheon. (In modern times, the nomads have adopted some of these, usually in more generic roles, while their 'improved' gods have migrated back into the sedentary cultures.) In the last few thousand years the sedentary folk have created cities, abandoned them, created more, had them wiped out, and so on, so that ruins are everywhere and forgotten in time.

The nomads seek to guide the sedentary folk to a life in tune with the Father's wishes while the city dwellers seek to 'educate' their ignorant cousins in the culture and sophistication toward which the Father seeks to guide them.

Both sides crusade, one to erase the blot of civilization, the other to reduce the ignorance and savagery of their country cousins. Whether razing cities and carrying the young away to lead more virtuous lives, or whether wiping out the warriors and enslaving the rest of the tribe so their children will learn culture and respect, each side is convinced of their divine mandate to do horrible things for a good cause.

And outsiders who do comparative religious studies seem to discover that the moral values and societal expectations on both sides are so similar, they are hard pressed to find any real values differences between the two.