Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 2: Warrior Nun Areala

[Advance warning: this post will probably be of interest to no-one but myself and a handful of pop culture historians.]

Researching my post on Shi involved a bit of reading around it, into the weird, spine-twisting world of 1990s 'bad girl' comic books. It didn't take long for another one to catch my attention - in this case Shi's close contemporary in the surprisingly crowded field of 'fanservicey 1990s comic book Catholic martial artist superheroines', namely Warrior Nun Areala. I promptly read something like one hundred issues worth of nunsploitation superheroics, and now stagger back to report my findings. 

Anti-Pope Sixtus VI, punching through walls one-handed like a total boss.

Shi and WNA debuted in the same year, 1994, and in many ways they are mirror images. Both are drawn in manga-influenced styles, and both are action heroines in revealing outfits who jump around a lot while hitting people with swords. Both flirt with 'bad girl' iconography, while actually depicting their heroines as completely morally upright and sexually chaste. But whereas Shi was an Asian heroine created by a white American artist fascinated by Japanese Buddhism, Areala was a white heroine created by a Taiwanese-American artist fascinated by Roman Catholicism; and while Shi had aspirations to artistry, sophistication, and moral seriousness, WNA was gleefully trashy from the outset. Ana angsts endlessly over how to reconcile her violence with her religious morality. Areala just yells 'HAIL MARY!' and then beats everyone up. 

Here’s the concept: it’s the eleventh century, and Vikings are ravaging Europe. Belatedly noticing that the warriors she watches over spend most of their time brutalising helpless civilians, the Valkyrie Auria has an ‘are we the baddies?’ identity crisis and converts to Roman Catholicism. She then spots an unarmed nun being pursued by Vikings, and merges her spirit with her own, creating a new, composite, superpowered being: Warrior Nun Areala. Areala slaughters the Vikings, achieves sainthood, and proceeds to found a secret order of all-female Catholic demon-hunters, the Warrior Nuns.

The story then cuts forward to the 1990s, by which point there has been no noticeable demonic activity for decades and the Warrior Nuns are viewed as something of an obsolete embarrassment by the Vatican. Newly-qualified Warrior Nun Shannon Masters is sent out to New York… just in time for a demonic invasion of the city led by an immortal ancient Roman Satanist arms dealer named Julius Salvius, who plans to use his army of cyber-demons to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Shannon tries to stop him and gets splattered, but as she lies dying she has a vision in which Saint Areala merges with her, healing her wounds and granting her superhuman prowess. (Oddly enough, the Trinitarian echoes here – Areala as Mother, Shannon as Daughter, Auria as Holy Valkyrie Spirit – are never discussed or explored.) Declaring herself to be Warrior Nun Areala reborn, Shannon proceeds to defeat Julius and saves the world. Then she hangs around in New York to beat down any other demons who turn up.

This concept could have been used as the basis for a serviceable urban fantasy series, and indeed several subsequent writers tried to use it to tell 'serious' urban fantasy stories, usually with poor results. But Dunn's original series leans deeply into high camp. Shannon is trained by a cyborg nun named Mother Superion. Her nun-fu fighting style involves yelling things like 'VIRGIN KICK!' and 'ROSARY ATTACK!' while hitting people. (And, yes, her rosary beads explode on impact.) Her original Warrior Nun costume has three cleavage windows. (It gradually became more sensible over time.) At one point she is attacked by a wooden golem who communicates entirely in anagrams of 'Warrior Nun Areala', and who thus lurches around saying things like 'WAR AURA, LEARN IRON' and 'I RAN A RUNE WAR'. The colours are bright and the visuals are cartoonish and the whole thing has a slightly amateurish air that reassuringly implies no-one involved in the comic was taking things too seriously. And the characters communicate in 'dialogue' like this:

"YOU STUPID NUNS! AGAIN I WIN! YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT THE FORCES OF HELL! HA! HA! HA! HA!"

(And then his plane explodes.)

It's also obvious that Ben Dunn is a massive D&D nerd. Demons answer to 'lord Orcus', describe inferior demons as 'low-level lemures', refer casually to conflicts between 'demons' and 'devils', and describe Earth as being on 'the Prime Material Plane'. One character is referred to as 'a level 5 Magic Priest', who went missing while 'battling a type 7 demon'. At one point, the demon princess Lillith is even attacked by an armoured Catholic priest who introduces himself as 'THE CLERIC!' (She kills him one panel later.) 

Even though Shi was a higher-profile property at the time, WNA had a lot more comics - 120ish vs 65ish over the same ten-year period - probably because Ben Dunn's Antarctic Press was a much more efficient comic-producing company than Billy Tucci's Crusade Fine Arts, which seems to have existed in a perpetual state of crisis. These are mostly filled with inconsequential adventures, and endless spin-off mini-series about minor characters: Shotgun Mary, Lillith, Dei, Crimson Nun, Silver Cross, Serina, The Redeemers, etc, etc, etc. As with Shi, however, the core narrative is contained in just a few issues: Warrior Nun 1-3 (1994), Rituals 1-6 (1995), Resurrection 1-3 (1998), and finally issues 9-12 of Warrior Nun series 3 (1999). Those sixteen issues tell Shannon's actual story, although frustratingly it cuts off just before reaching its climax: the next issue, Warrior Nun 3:13, time-jumps forwards to introduce a new, younger, Buffy-inspired heroine, leaving the original story unresolved. (Maybe it got wrapped up in series 4? I couldn't find those.) 

Considered as a stand-alone sequence of sixteen issues, I felt that there was a lot to like about the core story of Warrior Nun. The first twelve, by Ben Dunn, are lurid and campy and fun, fully self-aware of their own silliness: it was only when people tried to take it seriously that the whole thing went off the rails. Both Barry Lyga's Warrior Nun series (1997) and Steve Englehart's Warrior Nun: Scorpio Rose miniseries (1996) tried to use WNA to directly tackle serious themes of institutionalised sexism, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia within the Catholic church, a task to which it was wildly unsuited. They were meant to be character-driven stories about faith and doubt, but Shannon herself is essentially a non-character: her whole personality boils down to 'be good' and 'serve the church', and whenever they come into conflict the first one always wins. Her backstory is like that of every D&D character irritated at having to waste time on background that could be better spent adventuring: 'I'm an orphan who was raised by paladins to be a paladin so now I'm a paladin. Motivation: be a paladin. Personality: Lawful Good. Now where's the dungeon entrance?'

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a non-character if you're in the right kind of story. Secondary series protagonist Shotgun Mary exemplifies this: she's an ex-nun with a motorbike and a shotgun who rides around America shooting demons in the face. That's it: that's her entire life. Some of the Shotgun Mary stories are almost abstract in their pure simplicity: cultists do cultist stuff until the demons show up, and then the demons do demon stuff until Shotgun Mary shows up, and then Shotgun Mary shoots everyone in the face and the story ends. (It appears to be a fundamental law of the Warrior Nun universe that all problems can be solved by Shotgun Mary shooting them in the face.) It's more like a dance than a story. And because of that absolute simplicity, when a complication is added - as with the rather touching revelation of Mary's homosexuality in Shotgun Mary: Blood Lore (1997) - it can actually work. Whereas the writers who worked on WNA in 1996-9 kept trying to write about Shannon as though she was an actual character, and she just wasn't, and it never really came together. 

Ideologically, WNA clearly wanted to have its communion wafer and eat it, too. In one sense, Shannon is an exemplar of 1990s 'Girl Power' pop-feminism: heroic, capable, near-invincible in battle, and frequently shown to be right while her male superiors are wrong. At the same time, she's a 'good girl' who willingly subordinates herself to patriarchal religious authority, and never objects to the assortment of ridiculous stripper costumes she's asked to wear in the line of duty. (It's Mother Superion, not Shannon, who ultimately insists on a more sensible design.) Like the Paladin Girls of whom she is, in a sense, an early example, she's sexy without being sexually threatening, empowered without being confrontational. (Compare and contrast the Ghost comics written in the same period, whose 'feminist avenger' rhetoric deliberately set out to alienate parts of its male readership.) Shannon's secretly in love with a priest, Father Crowe, but they're both sworn to celibacy, and both much too moral to dream of breaking their vows. Judging from their letters columns, other contemporary comic books featuring 'strong female characters' - Shi, for example, or Ghost, or Kabuki - were extremely proud of the fact that they had female readers who identified with the pain and anger of their heroines. I'm not sure that WNA had any female readers at all.

What could possibly have driven them all away?

Religion-wise, Dunn took flak from both sides: Catholics wrote in to complain that he was sexualising and trivialising something holy, while atheists and neopagans expressed disgust at his depiction of Catholic militant orders as heroic rather than villainous. Certainly Dunn's portrayal of the Catholic church was much more positive than that of most other comic books of the era: Magdalena and Witchblade, for example, mostly depicted it as a nest of intolerant fanatics and loopy demon cultists. Maybe he absorbed something other than an epic-level nun fetish from his days as a Catholic schoolboy after all...

The most remarkable part of the series came in 2000, when Chris Allen took over as both writer and artist on the main book for four highly impressive issues. Abruptly the story swerves into operatic grandeur, as Satan comes to Earth, Shannon renounces the church, Father Crowe confesses his love, and Auria's opposite number - the demonic valkyrie Nebelhexa - manipulates the franchise's greatest villains into breaking open the hidden vaults where the first Pope is locked away, crazed and immortal, deliberately written out of history by his successors. (The true original Pope turns out to be a black man, in a fairly obvious but still effective metaphor for the erasure of black experience from Eurocentric histories.) After dozens of issues worth of plate-spinning, Allen pulls all the narrative triggers at once, and it briefly looks as though the whole franchise is actually going to grow up. Sadly, the series got yanked out from under him and soft-rebooted back into perpetual adolescence before he'd even finished his narrative arc. 

Thinking about why Allen's arc worked for me when Englehart and Lyga's didn't, I concluded that it came back to the difference between working with a concept and working against it. If your form is something that tends naturally towards absurdism, like a nunsploitation superhero comic or the average D&D adventure, then suddenly asking your audience to take it completely seriously usually won't work, because the premise is at least somewhat inherently ridiculous. But if you just keep turning up the dramatic volume, then such stories can often attain a level of weight and significance of their own accord. Shannon, like many D&D PCs, has virtually no inner life: she relates to the world purely through action, and as a result she is fundamentally ill-adapted to stories about psychological complexity. What she can do is grand gestures: doomed final stands, dramatic renunciations of allegiance, declarations of secret love. Comic books thrive off that sort of thing. So do D&D campaigns.

I haven't seen the recent Netflix adaptation. The 2019 comic book miniseries was pretty good, though!

Local gods and the spiritual technology of rulership

There's a legend about the Battle of Brunanburh, at which King Aethelstan confronted the allied kings of Scotland, Dublin, and Strathclyde in 937 AD. Before the battle, one of Aethelstan's soldiers was lying sick: he happened to be a Devonshire man, so in his sickness he prayed to his local saint, the martyr St Nectan, to heal him. That night he had a vision of St Nectan, and in the morning the sickness was gone and he was well enough to fight.

The interesting bit isn't the healing: it's what happened next. The Devon man told everyone about his miraculous recovery, and soon word reached King Aethelstan. Aethelstan was understandably nervous about the coming battle, so he asked the soldier which saint it was who had proven so receptive to his prayers. The soldier told him about Saint Nectan, and assured him that Nectan was always swift to intercede on behalf of those who had faith in him. Aethelstan prayed to St Nectan, won the battle, and was a generous donor to the cult of the saint thereafter.

Just think for a moment about what this sequence of events implies about Aethelstan's mindset. He's king of a sparsely-populated nation made up of hundreds of scattered communities, each with their own local shrines and saints and martyrs and holy wells, most of which have never been heard of by anyone outside their local area. He takes it as given that these saints are capable of interceding with God on his behalf, and that some of them are more likely to do so than others, but crucially he doesn't know which ones. The obscure hermit-saint revered in some provincial village might turn out to be exactly the guy you need to pray to in order to resolve a major national crisis. Working out who to pray to under which circumstances isn't a matter of set dogma, established long ago and handed down by recognised authorities: instead, it's a work in progress, to be figured out by trial and error. Building up a working knowledge of all your national saints, and cultivating suitable relations with their respective cults, becomes a potentially important element of kingship. 

This is a mindset that would, I think, have made intuitive sense to the Tengriist and Shamanistic cultures in the history of Central Asia, for whom the question 'which spirits have authority here?' was one that every nomadic people had to confront regularly as they roamed from place to place. It would have made sense to the Romans, for whom working out which set of local gods to buy off was an integral part of the process of conquest. It is, however, a mindset that seems to be very rare in D&D and associated games, where most fantasy religions seem to have completely codified understandings of the sacred rather than the more experimental approaches that have historically been so commonplace. This strikes me as a bit of a pity - there's so much more gaming potential in the latter!

Imagine if, instead of being a fully worked-out institutional religion like counter-reformation-era Catholicism, your cleric's faith was something closer to Aethelstan's version of Christianity, a hacky work-in-progress always subject to revision based on the latest discoveries. A huge amount of your adventuring could be motivated simply by the desire to learn more about different local gods or saints or spirits, which you would do by visiting lots of different shrines and making lots of different offerings just to find out which ones work best. In a world where most people stick close to home, worshipping their local gods, an adventuring cleric who's been all over the place could become a real asset simply because of their breadth of spiritual experience. ('Actually, my liege, over the mountains they have a saint that they pray to in exactly this sort of situation...') 

Probably the easiest way to represent this mechanically would be to have knowledge of certain spiritual practises grant access to new cleric spells. In most cases these spells might only be available to clerics who'd actually gone to the trouble of visiting whatever remote shrine they are associated with, but sometimes just knowing the name and rituals of the associated god or saint might be enough. Imagine the prestige to be gained in being the cleric who brings such knowledge back to their cult centre and thus unlocks a new spell not just for themselves, but for their entire religion!

And it works for quest-givers, too. Obviously every ruler is going to want to have the latest, sweetest spiritual technology on their side. Obviously they'll want to aggressively investigate rumours of holy sites, obscure shrines, sacred springs, and so on, in the hope of giving themselves and their clergy an edge over their rivals. Everyone knows about all the most famous gods and saints, so they just cancel out: the real advantage is to be gained from being the first one in on a hot new discovery, and they're almost always going to come from way out in the hinterlands, or someone would know about them already. Of course it's going to fall to your party to make the long, dangerous journey through the wilderness to the half-ruined shrine of some obscure local spirit or hermit, so that your cleric can check whether they have enough spiritual mojo to be worth adding to the national liturgy.

Just think of the adventure opportunities!

1d10 local god adventure opportunities

1. The king wants to develop a new industry, but because it's not been historically practiced in his kingdom he doesn't know who the appropriate gods/saints/spirits are who oversee these things. Your job is to go to some foreign land where this trade is already established and surreptitiously steal all their knowledge about how best to honour, petition, and placate the relevant spiritual beings, all without giving away the secret of the king's economic plans. You'll get a bonus if you can learn the secret rites their guildsmen carry out behind closed doors!
2. In your grandfather's day there was a weird old hermit living in the mountains. Now people are claiming to see him in their dreams and there are rumours of miracles occurring near the remote cave where he once lived. Your job is to get out there, try to work out if he really has become a legitimate god/saint/spirit, and - if he has - find some way to integrate him into the local religion. (Maybe a shrine could be built in his cave? Or maybe you could find his bones and take them to the local temple as holy relics?)
3. The king is trying to integrate a recently-conquered frontier region into his kingdom, and he needs someone to do a spiritual survey. Your job is to roam from shrine to shrine among a resentful and rebellious population, cataloguing their local gods/saints/spirits and working out which of them, if any, might be worth adding to the national cult. 
4. Old chronicles speak of a god/saint/spirit who once bestowed powerful blessings upon their worshippers, but its cult centre has long since fallen into ruin, and no-one remembers the rites by which it was once honoured. Might there be something out there worth salvaging? You'll have to voyage though the wilderness to its abandoned shrine and start making experimental offerings to find out!
5. The king has a major project planned and he needs as much sacred mojo as possible. Your job is to visit the shrines of the relevant gods/saints/spirits, obtain their sacred items and holy relics by whatever means necessary, and bring them to the capital to ensure the project's success. Naturally, you can expect the locals to violently resist the removal of their treasures.
6. As 5, but from the other side. A bunch of thugs with a royal warrant just rode into your local shrine and carried off the relics of your local god/saint/spirit to the capital, claiming that the king needs them more than you do! Now your community looks to you to steal them back, and to establish a new, secret shrine where they can be safely kept in future.
7. The king is planning to hold a major religious festival to bring the blessings of heaven upon his newly-built navy. It's going to cost him a fortune, and he needs to be sure that he's getting the maximum bang for his buck. Your job is to roam the remote storm-wracked islands and pirate-haunted headlands where all the best gods/saints/spirits of the sea seem to have their shrines, and find out which ones are most worth honouring in the festivities. Expect every single priest you meet to try to hustle you about this.
8. There's been a disaster - but all the priests insist that they've been carrying out their ceremonies perfectly! Clearly some unknown god/saint/spirit is offended - but which one? Your job is to divine which obscure spiritual entity has been neglected, make a pilgrimage to their remote place of power, and make whatever offerings they require in order to slake their wrath before the kingdom suffers even further calamities.
9. Sometimes the god/saint/spirit you need to pray to has their holiest shrine in a really inconvenient place, like the other side of a monster-haunted wilderness or the middle of an enemy kingdom. Your job is to undertake the perilous journey there to make offerings on behalf of your king, so that he can win their favour for his latest scheme.
10. Out in the wilderness the remains of some forgotten shrine to a god/saint/spirit have been discovered, but no-one recognises the names carved on its ancient stone. Is it holy or unholy? Does power still reside here, and if so, is there enough of it to make it worth re-establishing whatever vanished cult once built this place? Best do your research first: trial-and-error offerings may risk causing offence that your kingdom can ill afford...

Evil, be thou my good: the cult of the Wicked King

Decades have passed since anyone anyone last saw him, and yet his face is everywhere. His statues loom on every corner. His tower blocks out the sun. His soldiers plunder you. His ministers lie to you. His secret police spy on you. His tyranny is in the air and the earth and the water. It hovers, unseen, between person and person, ruining and infecting everything, withholding you even from those whom you most yearn to love. It poisons you and it sickens you, reducing you to a mockery of the person you could have been. It deforms your personality. It withers up you soul. It breaks your heart.

He has not been officially deified. In the city's gilded temples, hireling priests offer up thanks to heaven each morning and evening for being allowed to live under a ruler so wise, so holy, so enlightened - but while they pray for him, for his health and his longevity and the continuation of his rule, they do not pray to him. Officially, he is no more and no less than the very best of mortal kings.

He has not been officially deified - but people pray to him anyway, just as one might pray to any other evil spirit of the land. Spare me, they whisper, before they sleep. Spare me just one more night. Spare my parents. Spare my children. Take my neighbours, if you must take someone. I will make you a bargain. I will make you an offering. I will be loud in my praise of your wisdom. I will burn sweet incense at your statue's foot. I will inform on the old woman for her seditious gossip at sundown. Only spare me, O king, O destroyer. Only spare me yet another day.

In the streets, superstitions about the Wicked King grow like weeds, and the people regard his agents less as members of mortal institutions than as a race of folk devils to be evaded through luck and guile. If you eat while standing in the shadow of his tower, they say, the secret police will come for you within a fortnight. Scatter rice from a third-story window and the wrath of the King will be averted. Whisper the name of your worst enemy three times while facing the tower at midnight, and the secret police will come and take them away - unless they've hung a polished brass mirror on their door, in which case they'll come for you instead. Faced with the apparently random predations of the city's government, such petty rituals help the people to feel that they wield at least some measure of control over their own destiny. And who is to say that there is not some truth behind some of them? No-one, after all, really knows what it is that watches the city through the eyes of the king's statue network, or upon what principle his minions decide which luckless souls will be dragged away, wailing, into the night.

So the people pray to the king. They make offerings to him. Some of them even maintain sad little shrines to him in the darkened corners of their homes. But a few go further. In the dark of the night, they slink out and abase themselves before his statues. They croon songs of worship into their cold ears of stone. They sprinkle the dust around their feet with the warm blood of sacrifices. They join the cult of the Wicked King.

The cult has existed for decades, now, ever since the people of the city began to grope around for some explanation of what had happened to them. In its most popular form, it teaches that the king is a kind of prophet, whose actions must be understood as coded or symbolic teachings. His power and immortality are signs of his semi-divine nature. His destruction of the city's name, his withdrawal from the sight of the people, and his refusal to proclaim his own divine status are understood as acts of negative mysticism, designed to encode the truth that real power and identity are to be found not in the outward world of appearances, but in some secret and numinous realm beyond them, hidden as the king himself is hidden, immortal as he is immortal. Some cultists think that his cruelty is a sign that the moral law is a lie, too. Others believe that he is punishing the city for its sins. Others still maintain that the body is the soul's prison, and that unleashing a gang of masked murderers to brutalise his people is the king's rather roundabout way of teaching them not to place too much value on physical things.

But these are rationalisations, and the true reasons that people are drawn to the cult of the Wicked King are the reasons that people are always drawn to power. Ambition: if I sacrifice enough to the king then he is sure to bring about my promotion. Desperation: if I pray hard enough to the king then maybe the secret police will bring my sister back. Justification: I'm not just a cruel and selfish person! I'm following the secret teachings of the king! And, perhaps most commonly of all, sheer exhausted frustration. Faced with the endless opacity of the city's government bureaucracy, the transparent injustice of its laws, the arbitrary depredations of its security services, and the spiritual inadequacy of its state religion, it it understandable that many people become desperate for even the illusion of having a hotline to the top.

The cult of the Wicked King is something of a wild card in ATWC. It's extremely disorganised and decentralised: a shifting web of solitary practitioners, semi-formal congregations, and splinter groups following individual teachers and interpreters of its makeshift theology. Doctrines vary widely from one cult member to the next: all that they really have in common is the belief that the Wicked King really does want his people to worship him and will reward them for it, despite the claims of the Ministry of Religion to the contrary. (Indeed, some of them see the Ministry of Religion as an actively malevolent force, keeping the truth from the people for evil reasons of their own.) They exist in something of a legal limbo, discouraged but not technically illegal: and the secret police, in particular, tend to regard the cult's activities with something resembling indulgence, a fact which discourages the other branches of the city's government from attempting to crack down on them too harshly.

The informal patron of the cult is Alisher the Just, the current Minister of the Heavens, who is himself a secret cultist of the Wicked King. Leading teachers of the cult's esoteric doctrines sometimes find themselves summoned for discreet meetings with the minister, who believes that proper worship of the king will help accelerate his personal advancement, and doesn't care how many human sacrifices he has to preside over in order to bring this about. PCs who oppose the Wicked King could easily find themselves targeted by vigilante cultists eager to win his favour by defeating them. But crafty PCs might also be able to turn the cult's beliefs to their own advantage, especially as it includes many people who would be willing to risk their lives for a chance to meet the king face to face.

To see who leads the local cultists, roll 1d20:

1. Broken-hearted old man furtively burning offerings in front of a statue at midnight in the hope of getting his children back.
2. Psychotic serial killer using the 'need' to offer human sacrifices to the king as an excuse for murders he would totally have carried out anyway. 
3. Ambitious young member of a local merchant house, who attributes his recent run of good fortune in business to the favour of the Wicked King. 
4. Anxious band of low-level bureaucrats praying for promotions and the horrible deaths of their managers. 
5. Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist determined to reveal the truths that the Ministry of Religion is deliberately concealing.
6. Ageing debauchee who has seized upon the doctrines of the cult as 'proof' that nothing is true and everything is permitted. 
7. Opium-addled visionary so lost in speculation that he has managed to convince himself (and his followers) that right is wrong, freedom is slavery, and war is peace.
8. Loyal retainer from one of the Cobweb families, trying to win the favour of the king for his masters, and bring down his wrath upon their rivals.
9. Small-time gangster who regards the cult and its practises purely as a form of practical street magic, and is entirely indifferent to their spiritual or political content.
10. Eccentric clockworker convinced that the city's government is deliberately refusing to recognise the value of her inventions, and that the king would acknowledge her genius at once if only she could get his attention.
11. Twitchy teenage street kid. Her adventurous older brother set out years ago on a do-or-die mission to discover what was really at the top of the king's tower. She still hopes against hope that he made it, and is now living some kind of life of splendour with the Wicked King himself. 
12. Profoundly damaged Murder Harlot who joined the cult semi-ironically years ago, and has long since lost track of which parts of its doctrine she does or doesn't 'really' believe.
13. Secret revolutionary who infiltrated the cult on behalf of the Red Brotherhood and ended up rising to become its local leader.
14. Semi-secret neighbourhood congregation who believe that regular worship of the king helps to avert the attentions of the secret police.
15. Member of a Labyrinth Doctrine mystery cult, who regards the Wicked King as an ascended and enlightened figure, and creeps up out of the Maze by night to participate in his worship.
16. Self-proclaimed prophet, deranged but charismatic, who sees the king's face in her nightly nightmare-visions and now seeks to share her incoherent revelations with the world.
17. Steel Aspirant convinced that only the Wicked King knows where the Cogwheel Sage is really hiding.
18. Fantatical ascetic, consumed with self-hatred, who insists that the king's tyranny constitutes a form of divine collective punishment upon a city that richly deserves it.
19. Master mason who has spent his entire working life maintaining and repairing the statue network, and is now convinced that the statues are whispering to him when no-one else is looking.
20. Air Corps gyrocopter pilot who has flown close to the top of the King's Tower on several occasions, and is convinced that she heard someone in there screaming for help. She has concluded that the king is being held prisoner by his own government, and is plotting a daring rescue mission, for which she is certain that the grateful king will reward her lavishly.

We dance for the spirits and yet they are not appeased.

These are Tsam dancers.

The Tsam or Cham ceremony is a ritual of Tibetan origin, in which masked performers enact symbolic dances in order to spiritually purify themselves and the surrounding environment. Like much of Tibetan Buddhism, it bears a strong resemblance to the indigenous shamanic traditions which were incorporated into local Buddhist practise: and it may have been this shamanic heritage which helped it to catch on in Mongolia, where Buddhist monks began performing Tsam dances of their own in the eighteenth century. To a population familiar with Tegriist shamanism, with its use of ritual masks and dances, it probably seemed logical that Buddhist clergy might also achieve their spiritual objectives by putting on masks and dancing: and the Mongolian Tsam rituals quickly became even more elaborate than their Tibetan originals.

The setting of ATWC is mostly pegged to the seventeenth century, which is before the flowering of Mongolian Tsam traditions: and in any case, I'm extremely wary of turning real religious ceremonies into gaming fodder. Still, I like the idea of the having something similar to the Tsam ritual - let's call it the Great Spirit Dance - as an exciting new ceremonial technique, knowledge of which is just starting to filter into the steppe khanates from some half-legendary mountain kingdom in the south. For the steppe peoples, the Great Spirit Dance is still something daring and experimental and dangerously foreign, which many people have heard of but which very few actually know how to carry out. As such, the performance of such dances is only likely to be attempted by the truly adventurous - or the truly desperate.

Here's how it's supposed to work: through ritual supplications, powerful spirits are drawn down into the masks, which become their temporary homes. The ritualists then don the masks and perform their ceremonial dances, symbolically enacting the cosmic order of the universe. The spirits inhabiting the dancers are reminded of their place within the cosmic system, and at the end of the dance they depart from the bodies of the ritualists in a state of harmonious contentment, meaning that the chances of them deciding to unleash plagues and famines and other disasters upon the people will be drastically reduced in the year to come. They might still do those things, of course: but if they do, it's likely to be because they have a good reason for it, rather than just because they woke up feeling spiteful that day.

Here's the harmless way to get it wrong: if you mess up the construction of the masks, or the initial ritual preparations, the spirits won't be called down into the performers. You can still do the dances, and if your human audience is paying attention to the symbolism they might even learn some useful religious lessons - but the spirits won't be influenced, because the spirits won't have turned up. As a result, they'll be no more or less likely to send a murrain on your cattle than they would be in any other year.

Here's the really dangerous way to get it wrong: if you get the ritual masks and preparations right, but then mess up the dance, then the spirits will arrive... but they won't leave. You've called them here, into your masks and your bodies, and you're dancing for them... but the dance isn't telling them anything, or at least not anything that makes proper sense. They get confused. They get frustrated. They won't let you stop dancing. They won't let you take the mask off. They want you to do it right.

Thus it sometimes happens that travellers on the steppe chance across a ragged band of dancers, arrayed in the tattered remains of once-fantastical costumes, leaping and stomping their way across the empty lands. Their huge, heavy masks sway and nod to the beat of inaudible music, and through their open mouths can be glimpsed the wild eyes of the dancers, spirit-ridden, gleaming, and crazed. They move in great wheeling circles, their feet tracing intricate mandalas across the featureless grasslands of the steppe. They never eat. They never sleep. They never stop.

It's best to avoid them, which is easily done on horseback: they move faster than any man, but never in straight lines, so a horse will always outdistance them over time. But if they come upon you by surprise - if they burst upon your camp during the night, for example, for their dance continues in darkness just as it does in light - then almost anything could happen. To determine the disposition of the spirits, roll 1d6:

1. The spirits want you to join the dance. They will each grab one dance-partner and whirl them away, carrying them off over the steppe for 2d20 hours before releasing them and pirouetting off. If resisted they will become forcible, first grabbing and grappling, then escalating to actual violence. They'll dance with unconscious bodies or lifeless corpses if they have to. 
2. The spirits want musical accompaniment. For 1d6 hours, they demand that you play for them, with whatever instruments you have available: if no-one has any musical instruments, then they'll accept beatboxing and drumming on nearby objects instead. They're not picky about performance quality, but will grow agitated and violent if you can't keep the beat.
3. The spirits want new bodies: these ones are becoming quite worn out. They will try to grab victims and force their masks over their heads, using whatever degree of force is necessary to do so. Anyone who has such a spirit-mask forced over their head must pass a WILL save each round or suffer spirit possession. The mask's previous wearer will be freed from the spirit's influence once the new victim has been possessed, but they will be in a terrible physical condition, and will die in 1d6 hours unless they receive immediate care. 
4. The spirits want an audience. You have to sit and watch them for 2d12 hours, cheering and applauding whenever any of them does anything especially athletic: after this time is up, they bow and dance away. They will use force, and if necessary violence, to compel continued attention. 
5. The spirits have questions, and they want you to answer them. The imperfect symbolism of their dance has puzzled them rather than placated them, and now they surge towards you, roaring out theological queries like challenges: 'What is the nature of heaven? What is the purpose of suffering? Of what essence are the Men of Bone and Iron? What is the true homeland of the soul?' If your answers are good enough to give them something to think about, they'll whirl away and dance around contemplatively in a circle for a while, giving you a chance to leave. (For these purposes, clever-sounding wordplay is just as good as something genuinely profound.) If they receive obviously unsatisfactory answers, or no answers at all, they will become frustrated and attack.
6. The spirits believe they are engaged in a ceremonial re-enactment of some primordial battle... and that you are the enemy. They attack furiously, yelling out the names of antique war-gods as battle-cries, and forcing their luckless hosts to fight until they have been hacked to twitching pieces.

PCs confronted with such possessed individuals may try to free them by pulling their masks off, but these unfortunates are not so easily saved: while the spirit rides them, the mask is effectively their actual head, and cannot be removed by any means short of amputation. (The exception is if the spirits themselves will it - see 3, above.) Aside from killing them, there is only one way to end their possession, which is to identify what is wrong with their dance and then demonstrate to them how it should actually be completed: if this is accomplished, then the spirits will be satisfied and depart, and their hosts may yet be saved with the aid of prompt medical attention. (They will remember their possession only as a blurred and interminable dream.) For anyone other than a Spirit Dance expert, understanding the flaw in the dance's symbolism requires a 1d6 x 10 minutes of close observation, a specialised religious education, and successful Intelligence check; demonstrating what the correct version should look like requires a great sense of rhythm, 3d6 minutes of dancing, and a successful Dexterity check. Both are likely to be challenging under combat conditions.

• Possessed Dancer: AC 15 (superhuman agility), 3 HD, AB +3, damage 1d4+3 (inhumanly strong kicks and punches) or grapple, FORT 8, REF 8, WILL 8, morale 12.  Possessed dancers are immune to all mortal magic, as well as to fear, exhaustion, and pain. They can never stop dancing for any reason until they are either cut to pieces or freed from the spirits that drive them. 

Cults, cultists and D&D

This came up in response to my recent post on mapping generic OSR-land. When I drew the map, I covered it with cults until I started running out of map-space to put them in. Gus L's comment, on the associated G+ thread? 'Needs more cults.'

Why do we love cults and cultists so much? There are at least ten really obvious reasons:

1. Tradition. Evil cults have always been a big part of D&D: as Gus L recently reminded us, Temple of the Frog is all about invading a cult temple, and that has a decent claim to be the first D&D adventure module ever printed. Other highly influential early D&D adventures, such as B4 The Lost City and N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, also prominently featured weird cults. 
2. Influence. Evil cultists are the default enemies in both Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which have both been enormously influential on subsequent weird fantasy gaming. And they got the idea from weird fiction authors like Lovecraft and Howard, who also used a lot of cults as antagonists. 
3. Moral clarity. It might not be OK to kill the barbarian just for being a barbarian, or the orc just for being an orc - but if someone voluntarily chose to join the cult of Skull-Fang The Planet-Fucker, then that's on them. When you stab them to death in mid-ritual, you can legitimately say they had it coming. 
4. Dungeon-Friendliness. 'It's an ancient tomb' is probably still the number one explanation for why an underground complex full of monsters, magic, and treasure is lying around in the middle of nowhere: but if 'it's a cult temple' isn't number two, then I'd bet it's pretty close. Cultists need somewhere to gather in secret; they need somewhere to perform their horrible rituals; they need somewhere to store their mundane and magical treasures; and they probably have both the motivation and the ability to create traps and summon monsters to protect themselves. Instant dungeon. 
5. Appropriate Scale, Disproportionate Influence. If the city is being openly ruled by the Dark Warlord of Woe, then it's often going to be pretty tricky for the PCs to meaningfully take him on: storming his fortress, or fighting his entire army, are going to be beyond the capacities of most D&D groups. But if it's being ruled secretly, from behind the scenes, by the cult of the Dark Sorcerer of Shadows, then saving it is totally within the reach of a party of 4-6 homicidal lunatics. Those 20 soldiers you just hacked down are probably less than 1% of the Warlord's army, but those 20 cultists you just slaughtered might well be the Sorcerer's entire cult.
6. Easy Excuse for Magic and Monsters. Why can the cult champion vomit rivers of boiling blood at his enemies? Because he's a cultist. Why can't the party wizard learn to do that? Because they haven't devoted their life and their sanity to Skull-Fang the Planet-Fucker. 'It's a gift from their dark patron!' is effectively an open excuse for giving your cultists anything from minor mutations to demonic guardians to actual world-ending powers.
7. Scalability. Directly linked to 6, above. Unless there are whole armies of them, then 'drive off the goblins' is always going to be a low-level adventure. But 'destroy the cult' could easily be an appropriate job for level 1 novices or level 10 champions, depending on just how much evil mojo they possess.
8. Easy Excuse For Violence. I personally hate enemies that attack on sight and fight to the death, especially if they're supposed to be intelligent humans. But if you really want some, then 'they're cultists' is a pretty good excuse. They attack on sight and fight to the death because they know that, if they don't, Skull-Fang will eat their souls.
9. Cultists Love MacGuffins. The rituals and requirements of cults are so arbitrary that it's very easy to hang adventures around them. Why do your PCs have to defend the Jewelled Skull? Because the cult it's sacred to will do anything to regain it. Why do they have to retrieve the Ebon Dagger? Because the cult can't summon their monster-god without it. And so on.
10. Easy Excuse For a Final Boss Fight. If you attack an army, then it's usually going to hit back immediately, with as much force as it can muster. But if you attack a cult temple, then there's an inbuilt excuse for the GM to save the worst until last. It's only when you finally breach the Inner Sanctum that the High Priest, enthroned in his place of power, is able and willing to summon the Horror From Beyond. And you have an easy excuse for making it a load-bearing boss, too: of course the rest of the cult will scatter when you hack their god to bits right in front of them!

Cultists, in other words, are easy to build D&D adventures around... maybe too easy. They're a narrative shortcut, a way to explain why the otherwise extremely unlikely combination of elements which constitute a generic D&D scenario should exist in the same place at the same time. But the shortcut only works if you assume the existence of a very odd bunch of people, namely the kind of people willing to behave like cultists in D&D adventures. Why, exactly, is Patricia the Priestess willing to sit in a dark room for twenty-four hours a day, on the off-chance some intruders wander in for her to stab with a sacrificial dagger? Because she's a cultist. OK. But why is she a cultist? What can possibly have happened to her to make her decide that signing her soul away to Skull-Fang the Planet-Fucker would be a good idea?

A lot of adventures gloss over this stuff, and clearly expect the PCs to find it unremarkable that some random cult leader was able to round up ten, or twenty, or a hundred people from the surrounding community who were so impressionable or crazy or desperate that they were willing to act as his personal cultist army. And I'd buy that if the cult activities were a bit less extreme: if all that most of the cultists were expected to do was wear big robes, chant creepy prayers, and maybe intimidate people who persisted in asking awkward questions about exactly what happens at the old standing stones on the night of the new moon. But most D&D cults are hardcore, and expect their cultists to demonstrate fanatical loyalty even when their own lives and/or souls are on the line. Where is your average dark magician supposed to find dozens or hundreds of people like that?

(Lovecraft himself isn't very helpful on this topic, because - like many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - he saw socially deviant behaviour like crime and cultishness as being basically genetic. If you have the wrong heritage, then you'll just naturally gravitate towards worshiping giant tentacle monsters. It's probably fairly obvious why that's a line of explanation I'm reluctant to make too much use of, though...)

I've often found myself thinking about this as I read D&D adventures, and Warhammer adventures and, perhaps above all, Call of Cthulhu adventures. Who are these people? Why do they do these things? Call of Cthulhu had a standard way of dodging this question, in the form of its concept of 'cultist-level insanity': Cthulhu Mythos cultists had Sanity scores of 0, indicating that their minds had been so shredded by exposure to supernatural forces that acting like cultists was now the only thing they were capable of. But that always struck me as a bit of a cop-out answer, especially as they often didn't seem all that mad in other respects: no delusional or irrational behaviour, just a rewrite of their life-goals to read 'summon Cthulhu at all costs'. 'They're all mind-controlled or possessed' is even more of a cop-out: at that point you're not really dealing with people, just with zombies who happen to still be technically alive. In fact, mind-controlled cultists come closer to the original zombie myths of Haiti than any modern-day undead shambler.

If they're not mindless drones, though, then why do they do all this D&D cultist stuff? Brainwashing? Fear? Drugs? Desperation? Greed? Are they upholding an old family tradition? Do they think the ends justify the means? Do they have some kind of value-system so bizarre that they believe what they're doing is actually a good thing? Are they just hopelessly devoted to their leader, driven by the deluded conviction that if they just kill one more person, then their sexy, charismatic Dark Master will finally give them the attention and recognition they deserve? Whatever it is, it must be something pretty powerful, or they wouldn't be sitting in an underground temple someplace waiting for the PCs to break in and kill them all.

Regular readers of this blog will already have guessed where I'm going with this. Cultists who are cultists because they're cultists are narratively convenient, but they're also kinda boring: they can't be bribed or intimidated or reasoned with, so the only way to deal with them is through yet another commando raid on yet another evil temple. But if the cult leader has to rely on more mundane means to keep his followers in line, then the PCs can disrupt or exploit them: they can steal the drugs he has them hooked on, or engineer a situation that will shatter his illusion of omnipotence, or offer his desperate followers some kind of hope for the future that doesn't involve feeding people to demons.

I understand that sometimes the whole reason you're using cultists in your adventure is precisely because you want antagonists who are basically human zombies - foes who have organisation and intelligence and whatnot, but who will never say or think anything other than 'Die, infidel, in the name of the Planet-Fucker!' But if you're not, you can still get all the advantages listed above while still making them into actual people - with the added advantage of helping to differentiate each cult from the last one. A personality cult built around an charismatic leader and his adoring devotees is going to be very different from a conspiracy of ambitious, amoral individuals who worship demons as a get-rich-quick scheme, and is open to very different kinds of solutions, whereas yet another bunch of robe-wearing, dagger-waving lunatics is only going to be differentiated from the last lot by the exact kind of magic and monsters they have in their inevitable Evil Temple.

In my current Team Tsathogga game, the PCs basically are cult leaders, and it's been fascinating for me to watch the various schemes they use to impose and shore up their made-up religious authority. There's some good drama right there. Might as well use it, right?

Gilded shells: state religion in the Wicked City.

Before the rise of the Wicked King, a dozen faiths competed for believers in the streets of what is now the Wicked City; but the state religion was a faith called the Way of Light. The common people favoured it because of the emphasis it placed on the practise of charity. The professional classes favoured it because it asserted that knowledge and wisdom were holy, and great respect were due to those who possessed them. The kings favoured it because it taught the duty of submission to worldly authority. Cheap little idols of its deified founder-prophet, the Full Moon Sage, could be found in the majority of the city's homes and businesses. The priests of the Way of Light grew rich upon the donations lavished upon them by rich and poor alike, and their temples increased steadily in magnificence and splendour.

The Way of Light remains the city's state religion today; but, like so much else within the domains of the Wicked King, it is now little more than a hollow shell of what it once was. The priests still preach loudly of the importance of charity, and collect regular 'charitable' tithes from the people, but none of the funds ever seem to go anywhere except into their temple coffers. They sermonise interminably on the holy duty of submission to worldly authority, no matter how tyrannical that authority may happen to be. They are still very keen on the sacred importance of knowledge, especially the kind of highly technical knowledge which might assist the city's government in the development of new weapons systems. The importance of wisdom seems to have been forgotten somewhere along the way.

Barely anyone keeps idols of the Full Moon Sage in their homes any more. For them, her image has been irrevocably tainted by its association with the hated regime which rules over them: a regime which has turned her church into simply another system for indoctrination and the extraction of taxes. Regular purges of the clergy by the Secret Police have served to eliminate almost all the real believers, ensuring that her current priesthood consists largely of people who bought their way in because they thought that the embezzlement opportunities offered by their new clerical ranks looked like a sound financial investment. Their huge, gaudy temples stand empty, abandoned by the crowds that once flocked to them on every feast day and fast day. The idea that anyone might go to them for actual spiritual guidance would be viewed by most of the city's inhabitants as little more than a bad joke.

With their distinctive white robes and ritual talismans, priests of the Way of Light are a highly visible presence in the city, rich in wealth and influence despite their total lack of moral authority. Most of them have accepted, willingly or otherwise, that their only real role is to serve the city's government, and to provide a show of spiritual authority to support its rule; those who still maintain an interest in actual religion are heavily encouraged to lose themselves in abstruse theological speculation, which the elders of the church consider to be a harmless, if pointless, form of recreation. The priests do a very good line in spectacular displays, and they are excellent at staging processions, rituals, grand public ceremonies, acts of penance, 'miracles', and the occasional auto da fe. They have splendid costumes, sonorous chants, stately ritual dramas, and stirring sacred music suitable for any occasion. It just doesn't really mean anything any more.

To find out what the priests are up to in the local temple, roll 1d20:

1. Preaching to an audience of bored dignitaries about how obedience to the state is their sacred duty, because earthly rulers are appointed by the will of heaven.
2. Arguing with one another about whether it was the substance or the essence of the Full Moon Sage which was altered when she attained divinity.
3. Taking advantage of the fact that this is a holy day, when every respectable citizen in this part of the city needs to show their face in the temple, to harvest 'donations' from their captive audience. 
4. Frantically denouncing one another's doctrinal irregularities in front of a masked and impassive squadron of visiting secret policemen.
5. Doing their accounts.
6. Staging a magnificent ritual drama, involving complex music, dance, and use of spectacular masks and constumes. (2d3 Murder Harlots are in the audience taking notes, as they intend to stage an obscene and blasphemous version of the same drama the following night.)
7. Embezzling the charitable donations.
8. Ritually scourging and humiliating a terrified 'blasphemer' as a public demonstration of their power.
9. Engaging in theological debate with a priest of a rival religion, and losing badly.
10. Communicating to one another, in hushed whispers, the esoteric doctrine of the Four Eclipsed Sisters, who died so that the Full Moon Sage might attain enlightenment, and will one day return in secret to judge the world for its crimes.
11. Seeking 'visionary revelations' (i.e. getting stoned) with the assistance of an impressive array of opiates.
12. Carrying out creepy rituals designed to terrify new initiates into obedience. Darkness, masks, flames, blades, blood, chanting men in black robes - the works. 
13. Drumming up custom for the miracle-working shrine inside the temple.
14. Plotting how to frame someone they don't like for blasphemy so that they can confiscate his estate.
15. Dabbling in dangerous occult practises. 
16. Engaging in half-hearted acts of meditation and asceticism.
17. Weeping quietly.
18. Trying to persuade passers-by to buy their cheap talismans and idols of the Full Moon Sage for good luck.
19. Actually reading the scriptures for once, and getting increasingly worried by what they find in them.
20. Secretly running an illicit school for local children, teaching them the actual doctrines of the Way of Light in order to keep some remnant of the true faith alive for future generations.

Religions of the Great Road

As I've mentioned before, one of the things that interests me about Central Asia is the diversity of its religious traditions. Judiasm and Christianity came into the region from the west, Zoroastrianism and Islam from the south, and Buddhism from the east, and all five of these religions interacted in various different ways with the Tengriist and shamanic practises indigenous to the area, giving rise to regional variants such as Tibetan Bon, Khazar Judiasm, and Nestorian Christianity. The extremely mobile nature of missionary groups and nomad communities mean that you end up with situations like nomad communities in south-west Russia professing spiritual allegiance to the Tibetan Dalai Lama (Kalmyk Buddhism), or Zoroastrian sects which were persecuted into near-oblivion in their native Iran going on to become the state religion of distant empires in the far-off Tarim Basin (Uyghur Manicheanism).

I think that trying to represent any of these directly in a non-historical D&D game would be a terrible idea; but the basic concept that this is a region where faiths from far-off empires compete and intermingle and develop into forms which would probably seem very strange to their distant (or extinct) religious authorities is one that I think has a lot of potential. Here, then, are a handy set of tables for determining the religious beliefs of any random traveller or community your PCs might happen to encounter along the length of the Great Road:

What is the religion called? (roll 1d20 on each table)

1. The Path...
2. The Way...
3. The Church...
4. The Temple...
5. The Fellowship...
6. The Adherents...
7. The Doctrine...
8. The People...
9. The Children...
10. The Disciples...
11. The Followers...
12. The Students...
13. The Order...
14. The Brotherhood...
15. The Acolytes...
16. The Apostles...
17. The Seekers...
18. The Upholders...
19. The Defenders...
20. The Soldiers...

1. ...of Holy Righteousness.
2. ...of the Seven Sages.
3. ...of the Great Revelation.
4. ...of the Divine Law.
5. ...of Heavenly Light.
6. ...of the Word of God.
7. ...of the Ultimate Truth.
8. ...of the Eightfold Glories.
9. ...of the Supreme Prophet.
10. ...of the Universal King / Queen.
11. ...of the Sun and Moon.
12. ...of the Fourteen Stars.
13. ...of Enlightenment.
14. ...of Eternity.
15. ...of the Transcendent Lord / Lady.
16. ...of the Infinite Emperor / Empress.
17. ...of the Master / Mistress of Heaven.
18. ...of the Secret Treasures of Holiness.
19. ...of the Sacred Masters.
20. ...of the Ancient Code. 

(NB: faiths whose name share the same 'of'' component are probably offshoots of the same religion, albeit possibly very distantly related ones. You have no idea how much the Children of Holy Righteousness and the Disciples of Holy Righteousness hate each other...)

Where did this religion come from originally? (roll 1d3)

1. The distant east.
2. The distant west.
3. The distant south. 

How is this religion regarded in its far-off homeland? (roll 1d6)

1. It's the state religion, and you occasionally get encouraging letters from your distant religious authorities, praising you for keeping the true faith alive in foreign lands.
2. It's a heretical variant of the state religion, and you occasionally get visited by disapproving missionaries telling you that your doctrines are riddled with errors and you should really adopt the official theological line.
3. It's a variant of the state religion which, while not strictly heretical, would seem deeply odd and unfamiliar to the official religious authorities. You occasionally get visited by missionaries who try to convert you to a religion that you already believe in, which is embarrassing for everyone involved. 
4. It's a minority sect, marginal and grudgingly tolerated. The trade networks that communities like yours have established along the Great Road play an important part in keeping the religion alive.
5. It's been outlawed, and only lives on in hiding. Religious refugees sometimes arrive in your community seeking shelter, bringing with them horrific tales of persecution. 
6. It was persecuted into oblivion and is now extinct in its homeland, living on only in communities like yours. 

What does this religion worship? (roll 1d8)

1. One god or goddess (equal chance of each). All other 'gods' are false.
2. One god or goddess (equal chance of each). Other gods are probably real too, we just don't worship them.
3. One god or goddess (equal chance of each) served by a whole host of lesser divinities, who may or may not actually just be the personified aspects of the godhead. (It's complicated.)
4. A dualistic religion with two divinities, both of which are revered equally as king or queen of one half of reality.
5. A dualistic religion with two divinities, of whom one is revered and worshipped, and the other is reviled and (when necessary) placated.
6. A full-blown polytheism which recognises dozens or hundreds of divinities.
7. A remote and abstract godhead who is best contacted through prayers directed to the deified saints and prophets of the past. 
8. In theory, it doesn't really 'worship' anything: it just conveys the moral, mystical, and philosophical teachings of its founders. In practise, most of its followers worship its founders as though they were divinities.

What are this religion's core beliefs? (roll 1d20 1d4 times)

1. That all the world's problems are due to the failure of the people to follow the Divine Law.
2. That this world is a place in which we are spiritually and morally tested, to determine our fitness for heaven.
3. That if only the Reign of the Faithful could be instituted everywhere, then everything would be perfect!
4. That we are being justly punished for the sins of our ancestors.
5. That we just have to keep the faith until the prophecies are fulfilled. 
6. That the material world is an illusion, and we must learn to transcend it.
7. That we will be rewarded with wealth and power and empire if we obey the will of heaven,
8. That this world is ruled by the powers of evil, and we must keep ourselves as pure and separate from its wickedness as possible.
9. That worldly pleasures are sinful and asceticism is the path to holiness.
10. That we must be kind to the unfortunate.
11. That we must punish the sinful.
12. That only those who follow our specific creed can possibly be saved.
13. That all sin really comes from ignorance.
14. That sin weighs down the soul, keeping it trapped within material reality.
15. That we must destroy the enemies of our faith by any means necessary.
16. That the correct performance of the sacred rituals and liturgies is of the utmost importance.
17. That we must behave with scrupulous fairness and justice in all matters.
18. That we must respect the social order, which represents the will of heaven.
19. That we should treat all people as equals, regardless of social divisions.
20. That the End of Days is upon us, and we must prepare ourselves for the final battle of good and evil! 

What are this religion's social institutions? (roll 1d20 1d4 times)

1. Every faithful household maintains a small family shrine within its dwelling-place.
2. The faith's most devout members are encouraged to become monks or nuns, who lead lives of celibate asceticism.
3. The faith maintains a complex ritual calendar, which the faithful are expected to observe exactly.
4. The faith is built around the teachings contained in its holy book, and the faithful are expected to memorise as much of it as possible.
5. Due to the syncretic fusion of its teachings with the shamanic traditions of the area, the faith is actually mostly concerned with the management of troublesome spirits.
6. Devout followers of the faith are encouraged to undertake pilgrimages to sacred sites in its distant homeland whenever possible.
7. The faith prizes education, and its members often become doctors, lawyers, or scholars.
8. The faith prizes military achievements, and its members are famous warriors.
9. The faith practises ancestor worship, and requires its members to show proper reverence to the spirits and graves of their ancestors.
10. The faith places a strong emphasis on the practise of silent meditation. Its holiest ceremonies are very quiet and very serious.
11. The faith places a strong emphasis on the practise of ecstatic prayer. Its holiest ceremonies are loud and exuberant affairs, full of people singing, dancing, falling into trances, and speaking in tongues.
12. The faith has exacting ritual purity requirements, which its followers are expected to observe scrupulously (although many of them don't). 
13. The religious life of the faith is built around a handful of large temple-monasteries, where all religious and ceremonial activities are concentrated.
14. The faith is radically decentralised, with small community congregations gathered in local shrines serving as the main centres of religious life.
15. The faith places a strong emphasis on the importance of public charity, and its wealthier members are expected to make ostentatious displays of generosity.
16. The faith features a strong cult of the saints, with prayers believed to be much more efficacious if they are uttered within shrines in which holy men and women are buried.
17. The faith strongly encourages its followers to fatalistically resign themselves to the will of heaven. 
18. The faith strongly encourages its followers to actively strive to make the world a better and holier place.
19. The faith includes strong elements of folk magic, with the faithful encouraged to wear charms and talismans for good luck and to utter hymns and incantations to protect themselves from evil.
20. The faith includes a strong esoteric element; its teachings are revealed to the faithful step by step as they rise through the levels of initiation, and are never supposed to be shared with outsiders at all. 

(NB: If a religion is regarded as heretical in its distant homeland, it's usually because it has the same social institutions but differs in one or more core beliefs. If it's regarded as orthodox but odd, it's usually because it has the same core beliefs but differs in one or more social institutions!)

Halloween zombie-movie rambling: the Resident Evil films and the struggle to escape Saṃsāra

[Fair warning: insofar as they have plots to spoil, this post contains spoilers for all five Resident Evil films. And, no, I don't really think the Resident Evil films are metaphors for Buddhist theology...]

Let me start by stating the obvious: the five Resident Evil movies are not good films. The first one was a serviceable Aliens pastiche. The second one was a rubbish zombie movie. The third one was a rubbish post-apocalyptic action movie. The fourth one was just rubbish. The fifth one was totally incoherent. I tremble to think what the sixth one is going to be like when it comes out in January.

And just how much sillier are Jovovich's increasingly-ridiculous costumes going to get?

They're not good films. But they are increasingly strange films. Driven by their own near-total lack of new ideas, they fill their run-time by endlessly repeating themselves, like a rambling drunk launching into the same anecdote for the third time in two hours. As their plots become ever more nonsensical - why is Red Queen now trying to kill the world, exactly? - they increasingly dissolve into a kind of impressionistic collage, in which the same handful of scenes are endlessly repeated. Alice wakes up naked in a strange place. A team of friends delve into a labyrinthine underground facility. A band of survivors is whittled down, one by one. A grid of lasers hurtles down a corridor. Alice befriends a little girl. Alice gains new powers. Alice loses new powers. The Red Queen threatens people over a speaker system. Alice loses her memories. Alice battles a near-unkillable monster. Alice is carried off by masked men, unconscious. And then, at the start of the next film, Alice wakes up naked, in a strange place...

These films make aggressively clear that the viewer isn't supposed to be looking for a deeper meaning in all this. These are exactly what they appear to be: big, stupid action movies whose appeal depends almost entirely on the opportunities they offer to watch Milla Jovovich put on fetish outfits and shoot zombies in the head. But as their internal logic disintegrates under the force of too many plot twists and too much repetition, I find it increasingly appealing to try to make sense of them in other ways, especially as their actual plot - if they can even be said to have a plot at this stage - is so clearly no longer up to the job!

So let's ignore the increasingly unconvincing attempts of the films to pretend that the scenes they show us can be connected together into a single coherent narrative, and look at the scenes themselves. One very strong repeating pattern in the films is death and rebirth. It's not just that people constantly die and then come back as zombies, or that Alice experiences a long sequence of symbolic deaths and rebirths as she endlessly whacks her head on things and wakes up in new places, sometimes in womb-like fluid bubbles, usually in white, hospital-like environments, and usually naked. It's also that Alice, and later other people, keep getting cloned and killed, only to be cloned again.

Alice discovers hundreds of her own clones waiting to be sent to their deaths in Resident Evil 3.

Alice sends her own clones to their deaths in Resident Evil 4. 

Resident Evil 5: Alice discovers everyone else is being mass-produced and repeatedly sent to their own deaths, as well.

The villain of the third film, Dr Isaacs, repeatedly runs clones of Alice through a kind of 'greatest hits' version of the first film; each time a clone dies, he reloads the set-up with a new one and starts again. (Just like a Resident Evil video game, geddit?) In the fourth film, Alice sacrifices a whole army of her own clones to take out an enemy stronghold. (This is probably a joke about the ease of using CGI graphics to copy-paste duplicates of the same figure onscreen.) In the fifth film, it turns out that virtually the whole cast of the first film (including Alice) were almost certainly clones right from the beginning: the Red Queen has been mass-producing copies of all of them in an underwater base, in order to run staged 'zombie outbreak' scenarios over and over again, in giant bio-domes that look like cities but are actually just Truman Show-style stage sets. (Just like the Resident Evil film series, geddit?) The more of them I watched, the more I started to feel that under the surface of these loud, dumb action movies there was some kind of almost Buddhistic meditation on life, death, and rebirth - entirely unintended by their creators, no doubt, but reaching out from between all the zombies and explosions, none the less...

Bear with me, here.

Alice's interminable travails, I would suggest, reflect what it is like to be stuck in what the Indian religions call saṃsāra: a cyclical world of life, death, and rebirth, characterised by continual change and pain. At the micro-level (of any one incarnation, or of any one film) her actions seem to have meaning, value, purpose: there is an evil to be fought, a person to be saved, an obstacle to be overcome, a clear and determinate goal towards which she can and must advance. The further one zooms out, however, the clearer it becomes that all this sound and fury doesn't really add up to anything, and that instead of advancing towards something, she's just wandering around in circles - which, Wikipedia tells me, is more-or-less what the word saṃsāra literally means. Her world never changes: there's always another underground labyrinth, another wave of zombies, another sneering villain, another mega-monster. She is born and reborn many times, in many places, sometimes more powerful and sometimes less, but it never makes any fundamental difference. She always just ends up in some damn corridor kicking zombies in the head. 

(Is it too fanciful to suggest a resemblance between the omnipresent logo of the Umbrella Corporation and the Buddhist Wheel of Life, which rolls our souls from one incarnation to the next? They certainly keep reincarnating Alice...)

Umbrella Corporation logo.

Wheel of Life.

This cyclical world is characterised by duhkha, suffering. Everywhere she goes, Alice sees a world dominated by violence, death, hunger, and pain. With each incarnation, more and more of the world is taken over by zombies, animalistic beings driven purely by their own insatiable desires. (Or is it just that people increasingly look like zombies to her increasingly rebirth-weary eyes?) But it is also a world of māyā, illusion, in which virtually nothing is 'really' real. Alice begins to realise this as early as the first film, when she takes off her wedding ring and sees that it has 'property of the Umbrella Corporation' engraved inside it; by the fifth film she has come to realise that the world she inhabits is literally a series of stage-sets. After waking up naked and amnesiac for the first time (or is it the first time?) at the start of the first film, she finds a handwritten note on her dresser: on this day all your dreams come true. (Perhaps the films are her trauma-dreams: Freud noted a hundred years ago that people who had suffered traumas tended to experience recurring nightmares in which those traumas were repeatedly replayed, albeit often in coded or symbolic forms, and he would have had a field day with all the weird injections that Alice keeps being subjected to.) Is any of this more than a dream, or an illusion, or a pantomime? Is anything?

Stuck in this illusion-world of pointless suffering, Alice's lives start to look increasingly meaningless. Dr Isaacs runs eighty-seven successive incarnations of her through a deathtrapped murder-maze, each of them waking, struggling, and dying without ever having any idea what their lives are supposed to be about or why nothing that is happening to them makes any sense. (Just like you and me, right?) Not that Alice herself proves to be a better task-master: under her leadership her clones die in droves, using the deaths of their 'sisters' as excuses for cheap quips, not even pretending to care whether they live or die. The Red Queen repeatedly manufactures whole communities of born-to-die victims, each provided with only the most basic memories and personality (just like minor characters in films, geddit?) - just enough to equip them to play their part in staged zombie-outbeak scenarios that last for no more than a few hours at most (which is roughly the length of a zombie movie, geddit?). Adopting a child refugee from one of these fake, doomed worlds, Alice insists that the girl's false memories matter because 'they're real to her': implicitly she's also talking about why her own memories matter, given that by this point she must have worked out that the chances of her not being a clone as well are slim-to-nil. But her actions belie her words: Alice and her comrades go on to blow up the whole clone storage facility, with countless thousands of clones inside it, demonstrating very clearly that they actually don't consider their fake lives and fake memories to have any real value. It that because they have, nihilistically, come to much the same conclusion about their own lives, as well?

Mass grave of dead Alice-clones from Resident Evil 3.

This being an action movie franchise, Alice responds to all this death and pointlessness by fighting. Punch the monsters, shoot the zombies, blow up the underground bases... as though victory was simply a matter of racking up a sufficient kill-count. The films tell us that this is the right and heroic thing to do, but what they actually show us is that it's almost totally counter-productive: the only thing her violence ever grants her access to is yet more violence. She gets an army of her own clones, hundreds of new incarnations which she could devote to any end she chooses, and what does she do? Throws their lives away in yet more warfare. She discovers the means to repopulate the zombie-ravaged world with effectively-real people, and she blows it up in the hope of taking the Red Queen down with it. Her reincarnations are locked into a degenerating downward spiral which any Buddhist could have seen coming from the start, a cycle which threatens to drag her down below the level of the human and into the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. (Maybe she's there already. Maybe that's why she's always surrounded by ravenous zombies.) You can't shoot your way out of saṃsāra. 

So what should she have done? Well, one possible answer is that she could have taken the hint from her name. (Her name is also obviously fake, by the way: other people keep referring to her, not as Alice, but as 'Project Alice', though she never seems to grasp what this implies.) There was another Alice who went down a rabbit-hole and met a Red Queen. (Every single Resident Evil film includes a sequence in which the characters go down a long, long shaft into the depths of the earth... and, yes, I know the Red Queen isn't the same person as the Queen of Hearts) That Alice also found herself in a world that made no sense, ruled over by tyranny and death ('Off with their heads!'); but instead of just fighting it, she tried to understand it, pursuing the nonsense-logic of its inhabitants to its logically illogical conclusions. As a result, she was able to attain a kind of transcendence, seeing through its basically illusionary nature ('You're nothing but a pack of cards!') and ascending (literally - she grows two miles high) into a higher level of reality. Her Resident Evil namesake does not seem to be on track for any similar kind of spiritual progress.

Another Alice, attaining something resembling enlightenment.

The start of the first film isn't really the start of the story. Before Alice wakes up, amnesiac, naked, and alone, she's already lived at least one previous existence as Umbrella's head of security; very possibly she has lived many, many more times before that one. The slate is never wiped clean, even though her memory often is: she's always neck-deep in karma, enduring the consequences of her previous actions, even when she has no idea what those actions might have been. Almost no-one in these films really stays dead: they come back as zombies, or as clones, or they just straight-up regenerate and pick themselves back up off the floor, confirming yet again that the present can never truly rid itself of the weight of the past. The sixth film is supposed to be the last one, and so I guess it'll have to offer some kind of attempt at narrative resolution. But the franchise being what it is, that resolution is probably just going to be an even bigger explosion, probably with Alice waking up in yet another symbolic rebirth on the other side of it; and unless she can change her ways, I fear that, on some level, she really is going to be stuck with her hordes of hungry ghosts forever.