[ATU] Rohan

[Agemegos]

I worked up the planet Rohan for a play-on-forum campaign in my not-really-a-Traveller-universe. I thought of re-working this to fit the OTU and giving it a definite place there, and offering it to JTAS. But it is way too long, and would be even longer by the time I added adventure seeds &c.

Anyway, I thought you might want to take a look.

[thrash]

I take it you've considered and rejected working it up as a Space Atlas submission for e23?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by thrash

I take it you've considered and rejected working it up as a Space Atlas submission for e23?

Yeah. I'm still some way off making submissions for e23.

[Pomphis]

I hope you will do it some time in the future. I liked both the masks and the way the league is set up. Different but plausible.

[Agemegos]

The editors will probably reckon that the masks make it too like Fiobrachne in GURPS Space Atlas 4, and that I should come up with something more original.

The brief is already pretty long for its purpose. If I had more room to describe the States I'd make them a bit more varied, with some monarchies descended from progress lord despotisms, and some descended from nomad leaderships. I'd also have one populist dictatorship in a small state.

[combatmedic]

Interesting...

What religion[s] are present?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Interesting...

What religion[s] are present?

On Rohan?

The several functions of religion are split up among different things. The social functions of a church, for example, belong on Rohan to affinities. Other functions of religion are served by fanatical adherence to sporting franchises, personal counselling, group activities such as ecstatic dancing, tantric drumming, etc. etc. Belief in the supernatural as such is not very common in Flat Black: people turn elsewhere for comfort, certainty, purpose, and ecstatic experiences. Non-theistic religions and moral philosophies such as Neostoicism, Neoplatonism, NeoarchaeoConfucianism, Zen and neo-Hinayana Buddhism, Marxism, and Jungian Type Theory have adherents, but none is very influential.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

On Rohan?

The several functions of religion are split up among different things. The social functions of a church, for example, belong on Rohan to affinities. Other functions of religion are served by fanatical adherence to sporting franchises, personal counselling, group activities such as ecstatic dancing, tantric drumming, etc. etc. Belief in the supernatural as such is not very common in Flat Black: people turn elsewhere for comfort, certainty, purpose, and ecstatic experiences. Non-theistic religions and moral philosophies such as Stoicism, Neoplatonism, NeoarchaeoConfucianism, Zen and neo-Hinayana Buddhism, Marxism, and Jungian Type Theory have adherents, but none is very influential.

So they have religions, but mostly not ones with a personal god[or gods]. How did that change come about? Just a general decline in faith in supernatural gencies? Implications of some kind of Grand Unified Theory? Earth getting blown up and people losing faith in a just God?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

So they have religions, but mostly not ones with a personal god[or gods]. How did that change come about? Just a general decline in faith in supernatural gencies? Implications of some kind of Grand Unified Theory? Earth getting blown up and people losing faith in a just God?

To some extent advances in cosmology and biology undermined the idea of a supernatural creator. Rather more importantly advances in neurology, psychology, and artificial intelligence undermined the idea of an immaterial and especially of an eternal soul. Most important there were a couple of centuries on Earth during which advanced transport and communications gave lots of people first-hand experience of the variety of religious faith. It sank in that other people believed totally different things for pretty much the same reasons, and this undermined the concept of the "religious magisterium" or the "religious way of knowing". It became obvious that tradition, authority, and "revelation" were not ways of reaching truth but of reaching an unfounded sense of certainty.

But people still had the needs that religions had supplied.

So people tended to turn to non-religious activities (such as singing, dancing, drumming, running, screaming at hockey matches...) that put them into altered mental states, to sources of certainty and comfort that claimed a materialistic basis (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Objectivism...), and to religions or moral philosophies that [can be revised to] claim no supernatural basis of belief.

Which is not to say that traditional religions vanished away. They still have adherents, and not all are ignorant or savages. Theistic religions just aren't anything like as as common as they were a thousand years ago.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

To some extent advances in cosmology and biology undermined the idea of a supernatural creator. Rather more importantly advances in neurology, psychology, and artificial intelligence undermined the idea of an immaterial and especially of an eternal soul. Most important there were a couple of centuries on Earth during which advanced transport and communications gave lots of people first-hand experience of the variety of religious faith. It sank in that other people believed totally different things for pretty much the same reasons, and this undermined the concept of the "religious magisterium" or the "religious way of knowing". It became obvious that tradition, authority, and "revelation" were not ways of reaching truth but of reaching an unfounded sense of certainty.

But people still had the needs that religions had supplied.

So people tended to turn to non-religious activities (such as singing, dancing, drumming, running, screaming at hockey matches...) that put them into altered mental states, to sources of certainty and comfort that claimed a materialistic basis (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Objectivism...), and to religions or moral philosophies that [can be revised to] claim no supernatural basis of belief.

Which is not to say that traditional religions vanished away. They still have adherents, and not all are ignorant or savages. Theistic religions just aren't anything like as as common as they were a thousand years ago.

A thousand years is a long time for cultures to change. I like your approach.