Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Cults for Beginners

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're going to start a cult.  But first, a quick discussion about work-life balance.

Slightly Too Much Information

We here at Vagrant Dog Productions believe that our work is valuable and important.  We also believe that having time off from work is valuable and important, which is why most of the staff here got to take a vacation recently.  Because we tend to work right up to deadlines instead of building a backlog of work, this resulted in a gap of about two weeks for this feature and The Magic of Magicbuilding.

We won't be apologizing for that.  We will, however, warn our dedicated readers that this will happen again.  Probably in October; like seven people are going on a cruise in October. 

Because you lovely people don't need to know what we're doing with our personal lives, we don't intend to change our current stance.  We do acknowledge that some people might get upset at the sudden lack of timely updates after six months of not missing a day, so we'll let you know now that, for the forseeable future, Vagrant Dog Productions will be giving its staff two vacations a year.  These will be the only times that we don't regularly update, so if a Wednesday rolls around but we don't put up a post about some mild detail of worldbuilding, you can safely assume that the time has come.

Cool?  Cool.

What We Have So Far

Last time we talked worldbuilding was a little bit ago, so let's work through what we have.

Floating in a creative void is a world, about ten times the radius of Earth and about one-tenth the gravity.  It is orbited by three satellites:  The Lantern, which looks an awful lot like a moon-sized sun; a moon we've been calling the "blue" moon; and a similar moon we've been calling the "red" moon.  Day-night cycles and lunar cycles conspire to create a roughly 40-hour day and a 4-day week, meaning that overall the length of a week is actually pretty close to Earth's, even if the rest of the pattern differs.

Our world is dominated by oceans, just as on Earth.  On our world, the oceans are even more dangerous, with much larger tides and much more complicated (thanks to three satellites) tidal patterns.  Weather, however, is much milder and significantly more regular, to the point that long periods of time are calculated by tallying the number of times The Blanket, a near-permanent mild storm the size of a continent, has passed by (it circumnavigates the planet roughly every four months).  Fog banks roll inland daily, and almost every day sees mild rain in the afternoon.

There are four continents, but we've focused on one in particular.  This particular continent is "average" for our world, with a landmass equal to all of Earth's landmasses combined... times 25.  An inland see splits the continent up into smaller regions that are still individually larger than Earth.  Low gravity, consistent rain patterns, and topography conspire to create unique biomes, such as mountains that are more than 20 km tall, which can be walked up due to the comparatively minor slope, ravines with permanent fog, chaotic intertidal zones, megasavannas that stretch tens of thousands of kilometers, and hyperforests that grow trees almost a kilometer in height with branches the length of a football field.  The skies have birds ranging from normal sizes to massive manta-shaped sky whales.  The trees are home to a wide variety of gliding animals.  The ground is dominated by creatures that leap or crawl.

Living in these lands are three different intelligent species.  Nu humans, native to the megasavannas, look more or less like us, though their calloused feet develop tread-like patterns to help with friction, and their eyes are notably larger.  They are still persistence predators, though they are more known for their incredible success with ranged attacks.  A species we've been calling "furries" live in the hyperforests, resembling a cross between red pandas, flying squirrels, and humanoids.  They're nocturnal, quiet, communal, and most skilled at ambush tactics.  The third we call "scalies," and they live in one of the most dangerous regions on the planet- the intertidal zone, home to crawling creatures the size of giant squids who can outpace a horse.  They resemble humanoid marine iguanas and have developed a blend of gladiator and surfer culture, with the collected females watching as popular males challenge, trick, and kill those same massive crawling predators.

For purposes of looking at how civilizations develop, we've focused on one area in particular, a place we've called The Hill.  It sits near the strait that connects the Inland Sea to the Outer Ocean, and features a comparatively small grove of massive trees on one side, the ever-deadly beach on the other, and a single long, rolling hill in the middle.  The three species have found that cooperation is beneficial and that they don't have much to fight over, and over time, they've started developing a city-state on and near The Hill.  When we left off, they had built massive sloped, glazed walls to keep monsters, leaping animals, and crawling creatures at bay, and the city itself consisted of clusters of buildings ringing and climbing several of the larger trees.

Oh!  And magic is a thing.  Can't forget that.

Cults:  The Laziest Scientists

Last time, we walked through the difference between religion and mythology, and hopefully, we helped instill the idea that they work together.  Mythology seeks to answer questions about why things are as they are, often by telling stories that explain how they happened.  Religion is a set of beliefs that both incorporates those stories and provides a structure that theoretically allows its faithful to interact with the divine, and practically teaches its faithful how to interact with each other.  If you look at it sideways, religion is in fact similar to science- both attempt to use a system of rules and stories told by those who came before us to explain reality.

This week, we're going to walk through the formation of a cult.  We should note beforehand, though, that we don't have a lot of respect for cults.  If religion is like the odd cousin of science, then cults are that cousin's lazy, self-centered little brother.  Called upon to answer literally any question, the cult is likely to say, "It was me, I did it," then roll over and go back to sleep.

If you were ever curious, this is how a cult forms in the real world:

1. A crisis occurs.  A large number of people are rendered vulnerable and desperate.  Maybe a natural disaster hits, maybe an economic downturn creates a bunch of jobless angry folk.  The important thing is that the people are scared, they want answers, and they want them now.
2. A big mouth appears.  Someone claims they have the answers the others seek.  Whether they do is actually beside the point; the important thing is that, during a moment of uncertainty, they project certainty.  It helps if they're naturally charismatic, and just stupid enough to believe the things they claim.
3. A grand spectacle occurs.  People love a show.  The easiest possible spectacle is to predict an event and have it come to pass, but there have been cult leaders who were never right once and still got people to follow them, so success and accuracy are not important here.  Getting denounced or persecuted by those in power also creates a strong "underdog" vibe, which will not only work as a spectacle but allow the big mouth to claim that any inaccuracies were caused by interference from "the man," something the desperate are already inclined to believe due to the failure of authority figures to handle the crisis from Step 1 in a way that helped them.
4. A bandwagon forms.  The big mouth calls for others to gather and, in so many words, do his/her bidding.  Sufficiently moved people do as asked.  From here support tends to snowball, as others look at the growing numbers and feel pressured to join them.
5. Gatekeeping corrals the faithful.  Once large enough to become organized, a cult will take various steps to solidify its power.  One universal step is employing various methods to make it nigh-impossible for someone to leave once they've joined the cult.  Loyalty is enforced, and various forms of fear keeps people from simply walking away.
6. Once the lynchpin is removed, the cult collapses.  The last key indicator that you're dealing with a cult of personality is seeing what happens when the big mouth is removed from the cult.  There are a couple of ways to remove them, but death is by far the most straightforward.  If the cult disintegrates without their leader's constant presence, you have your answer.

We don't have to go through all of those steps to create a cult.  However, we can use those steps to figure out what questions need to be answered when we make it.  We'll go ahead and lay out those questions, as well as some sample answers:

  Who's in charge?  Our cult's founder and leader is a male scalie.  He's already genetically predisposed to spectacles, thanks to his people's culture.  For some added realism, we'll say that he decided to start his cult because he was a failure in the normal method of getting a crowd for his people; maybe he's a smaller, scrawnier version of your typical scalie.

  What crisis did they exploit?  Monsters and magic are both real in our world, and they are by far the most dangerous things outside of the oceans.  It makes sense that a cult would form in the wake of a monster attack; in fact, a benign version of this would be termed "hero worship."  So:  our scalie finds themselves in the middle of a monster attack.  A group of people is in danger.  Circumstance or plan, the scalie saves these people (or appears to save them, which works out to the same thing), takes full credit, and convinces the people that he is special.  The cult grows from there.

  What does the cult do?  For this to be a cult, there needs to be organization, and it needs to be driven by the scalie himself.  If he's not driving, we're talking about a fan club, not a cult.  Our scalie hero directs the adoration he feels he deserves toward himself, encouraging his followers to worship him.  He attempts other heroic moments, again either circumstantially or planned, but with the intent of growing his followers rather than saving people.  Once he has enough people following him, he starts trying to turn their worship into real power.  At this point, the hero's fan club is using intimidation and maybe even real violence to get him what he wants.

  What does the cult believe?  The cult believes, regardless of his official track record, that the scalie hero is the greatest monster slayer of the age.  Great as he is, he could be capable of doing even more, with your support.  Or, to put a more dangerous spin on it, if you aren't supporting the hero, you're actively keeping him from saving the world. Why would you keep him from saving the world?

And just like that, we have a cult.  You can add details as you wish, but we've got the framework down already- a cult leader, the moment they seized to create the cult, why it's a cult (both stories told about the leader and a structure that enforces behavior) and what the cult's goals are.  The rest is more or less window dressing.

Conclusion

Next week, we'll be continuing the process of creating types of religions and religious movements.  Of course, we'll also be extolling the praises of our scalie hero.  After all, to do anything else would be blasphemy.