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Old 01-05-2019, 11:53 AM   #1977
William
 
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Let's start off 2019 with a bit of freaky extra-gory cult practices, shall we?

Quote:
Originally Posted by nytimes
Archaeologists in Mexico say they have found the first temple dedicated to a deity called the Flayed Lord, an important god in the Aztec Empire whose worshipers were said to wear the skin of sacrificial victims.

... two stone skulls and a stone torso that had an extra hand hanging off its left arm. Scientists said the extra hand suggested the god was wearing the remains of a sacrificial victim.
Verbal accounts of the religion's activities come at the time of the Spanish invasion from the Aztecs, who were in turn speaking about a group that had existed centuries earlier, so, of course, take with a grain of political/historical salt - but the presence of physical artifacts makes the group's nature plausible. Use for lots of purposes:

* generic reason for a dungeon dive: the group has been legally sentenced to collective execution, and you're here to clear the temple out with prejudicial force / the big sacrificial summoning is happening soon and you need to get in, free a bunch of prisoners, and stop the Evil High Priest and his guardian Boss Fight Monster.

* Iconography of a background cult in your fantasy world with a fertility purpose (as the article suggests): yes, their price is high, but they're effective. Would you rather lose a few healthy virgins selected by lot from the outlying villages, or the entire country to famine and drought? Or: look, they lost the war and they got kicked out of the good farming country. If they're going to survive out here, the local god demands sacrifices...

* Turns out the group is being historically slandered. The skins are just good quality corpses they purchase on the market. They're necromancers or shapeshifters with every right to be there and they offer useful services to buyers.
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