[Icelander]

Originally Posted by a humble lich

My feeling was a lot of traditions of witchcraft were remnants of older traditional religions. Nearly everyone would say that they were Muslim or Christian, but that didn't necessarily mean that they didn't also believe in various older beliefs. And if things were really important you might visit the Ju-ju man for help, or to curse an enemy.

Yes, indeed. Fortunately for my world-building, this describes the worldview of a great number of people who live in or near the Vile Vortices in the setting.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

I think to a large part that is true in much of the world, a lot of European witchcraft was probably remnants of pre-Christian beliefs.

In the early Christian era in many European countries, I agree that there were plenty of pre-Christian beliefs that were persecuted as heresy or witchcraft. However, how long these beliefs endured and to what extent witch hunts in later eras represented the same social factors as lead to modern Satanic panics or false allegations of child abuse, are questions that have bedeviled many researchers.

Suffice it to say that I regard any theories of the survival of any kind of organised witchcraft in Europe from pre-Christian times until the founding of Gardnerian Wicca as a religious belief without convincing evidence. Anthropologists proposing it are generally not practicing a science or doing scholarly research, they are expounding a personal belief and cherry-picking examples in an unscientific manner to support it.

Ironically, my setting features supernatural phenomena and magic, but is extremely skeptical about anthropological and sociological phenomena which seem to fly in the face of observed evidence, where allegedly ancient traditions are often more or less invented out of whole cloth by one or more people for nationalistic, political or religious purposes.

There will be plenty of magical traditions in my setting which work and which are based on rituals and lore from people who lived while magic was apparently active in the world before, so in the 19th century and earlier. However, a lot of these traditions will either be fairly recent inventions and syncretizations, in that they date to founders in the historical records, or they will be modern reconstructions from ancient sources, not something which has survived uninterrupted at all.

The important exceptions are real-world religions which include mystical traditions and ritual magic as part of its teachings and demonstrably have been passed on in recognizable form from a time when magic appeared to work and are still practiced in that way in the modern world.

Even then, many traditions will have seen changes and apparently minor alterations to languages or ceremonies from those current centuries ago to those used today, so even once magic started working in the 1980s, magical practitioners in these traditions may have had to work at reconstructing working rituals from altered forms that evolved during the 20th century.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

Honestly, not very**. Generally, most volunteers I know tend to be fairly secular. However, that could change if there was fairly clear evidence, or there were stories that people discussed often and fearfully, or there were stories told by other volunteers.

Before 2000, the evidence would be mostly what anyone interested in the occult in our world can find today. By 2005, anyone working in a Vile Vortex would hear about plenty of 'evidence', in the form of local people who had witnessed supernatural phenomena and absolutely believed that they were a major threat to their health and safety. The belief might be even stronger than in our world and there would be any number of unexplained deaths and disappearance, but as for actual evidence, little enough that doesn't exist in our world. By 2010, most people who had worked alongside locals anywhere near such Vile Vortices would have heard the same stories.

In the year 2018, when my game is set, the Vile Vortices, their environs and many smaller hot spots around the world are so dangerous to humans that it doesn't seem possible that the supernatural is still secret. But, with the existence of the Facade, the overwhelming majority of secular, materialistic people can manage to find a 'mundane' explanation for any statistical anomaly and mostly do not regard the testimony of people from developing countries as any kind of evidence of witchcraft or supernatural phenomena.

Even other Westerners who've lived in such areas are regarded as suspect witnesses, unless they have physical evidence to back up their claims, which they inevitably never do. It seems that the supernatural itself and/or the mysterious effect of the Facade somehow resists scientific analysis and incontrovertible evidence.

Video and photos have technical issues and are invariably ruled fakes by experts (influenced by the Facade) when someone manages to get any footage at all. Remains of monsters and humans with supernatural abilities are ruled animal carcasses (with various diseases as appropriate) and normal human bodies. Magical effects either do not happen in the presence of skeptics with technological measuring devices or they interfere with the devices if they do.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

I agree. Since it is a tight-knit group, people tell a lot of stories. Once a couple people who are otherwise credible had experience with the supernatural, the story will quickly spread to other volunteers. That then makes the other volunteers more likely to believe other supernatural stories.

Do the former volunteer remain tight-knit for many years after their stints?

Are you active in any formal or informal way with the Peace Corps or with groups of people who have reunions or other social events, now that it's a decade since you volunteered?

Are many other people?

I'm looking for how much people stay in touch and remain close to other Peace Corps volunteers once they've finished their volunteer service and started a life where they probably have careers and families that may not connect to their experiences with the Peace Corps.

If there are some form of alumni social groups and networks, proposing that former Peace Corps volunteers can be classed as a cohesive, if informal, group of occult-aware people becomes much more plausible.

Otherwise, former Peace Corps volunteers who've seen something that convinced them of the reality of the paranormal might be equally or more likely to turn to family, friends, their local priest, mental health professionals or any of the sources of support and advice that an ordinary person who experienced the same thing (albeit possibly at home, rather than abroad) might speak with about it.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

Finally, I meant to say that there are other similar organizations to Peace Corps. In my (limited) experience, these groups are typically smaller, tend to live in less rural locations, don't stay in country as long, and don't have as much language training as Peace Corps***. But they take non-Americans, and those volunteers could easily become part of the Peace Corps network.

*** Not intended to slight those other organizations at all, and they have a lot of other advantages in the real world, but they are maybe not as interesting from a hidden magic perspective.

One of my players spent part of his childhood in Tanzania, while his parents were there in some similar capacity. I do not actually recall which organisation they were with, but I know that his father was an engineer who was there building infrastructure, digging wells, etc.