The world has three faiths: inter merata licilus, banoinimh, and joruverism. A character without a faith may join any one of them. Joining is not a menu you can revisit: the only way out is conversion to the faith of your country's king or to its declared state religion, when either differs from yours.
A child is born into a faith: that of the parent whose house they join (the mother in a matrilineal marriage, otherwise the father), or the other parent's when that parent holds none. A child of two parents without a faith is born without one. So an heir born into the world often comes to you already holding a faith, and joining is closed to them; conversion is their only way out of it.
Two names still carry their recorded meanings. Inter merata licilus means children of the light and is pictured through a crimson-accented mountain cathedral facing the dawn. Banoinimh means white thought and is pictured as a quiet pale-stone sanctuary among golden grass, an ancient tree and still water. No meaning was recovered for joruverism; its blue, mist-bound cliff observatory deliberately leaves that tradition enigmatic rather than filling the gap with an invented answer. These places are the faiths' visual character, not holy sites that grant a bonus or add another rule.
Once each world day, a follower may spread in the region where they stand. It costs 5 health. The ordinary spread adds one standing; a religious leader or the region's archprelate has a base of two, followers of the local owner's state religion add two more, a sermon the region's archprelate preached earlier that day adds one to every spread of their faith there, religion traits add their amount, and every relic the preacher holds adds its spread power. Being both leader and local archprelate still gives one base of two, not two offices added together.
Every day, every positive standing loses max(1, floor(2%)). This gives sustained
preaching a ceiling—roughly the daily addition divided by 0.02—and makes abandoned
standing eventually disappear. A tied highest standing has no leading faith.
Thirty successful spreads complete a run and mint 50 gold, the same as a run of training pays. The archive paid ten times the training reward here; a run of preaching now pays what a run of training does, and is chosen for the standing it builds. The faith takes its tax percentage and the preacher receives the rest. There is also a one-in-a- hundred chance that a completed run grants the pious trait, worth another one standing on later spreads.
A scriptorium binds paper into books, and a book is left in a region for a faith. A preacher wins ground; a book keeps it after the preacher has gone.
Leaving one. A follower may leave one book from their own store in the region where they stand, for their own faith, for 5 health. There is no daily limit, and it is not the day's spread: you may leave three books and still preach. Books in a market offer are not in your store and cannot be left. A book may be left where your faith has no standing yet. Once left it is spent and cannot be taken back. You will find it on your faith's page, under "Spread the faith".
The stock. Each faith keeps a count of books in each region. It belongs to the faith, not to whoever left them: it does not move, convert or die with them. It is public, like standing: select a region on the map to see every faith's books there.
What a book does. Each book protects 5 standing from the daily decay.
The decay falls only on the part of a standing above 5 × books, with the
minimum loss of one applied to that part:
| standing | books | protected | the next day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | 8 | 40 | 40, nothing falls |
| 250 | 10 | 50 | 246, two per cent of the 200 above |
| 52 | 10 | 50 | 51, the minimum loss on the 2 above |
So a standing above its protection still sinks toward the protected amount and stops there. Books never raise a standing: a faith with books and no standing still has no standing. A lone follower adding one a day cannot plant a faith on bare ground (one is added and one is lost), but with a single book left they can: the standing climbs to 5 and holds.
Books rot. Each day, after the decay, every book in a region is lost with a chance of 5 in 1,000 if the region's weather is dry and 50 in 1,000 if it is wet. Snowfall counts as wet. A book protects on the day it rots, since the decay counted it first. From the rain in each climate, a book lasts about:
| climate | wet days | mean life |
|---|---|---|
| desert | 5% | ~140 days |
| mountain | 20% | ~70 |
| mediterranean | 27% | ~55 |
| savanna | 37% | ~45 |
| temperate | 50% | ~36 |
| sea | 55% | ~33 |
| tropical | 80% | ~24 |
Dry land keeps scripture. The chronicle records when the last book of a faith in a region has rotted, and nothing else about books.
Where the archive's book went. The archive's book added two to one spread and was gone. That term is not kept: a spread neither uses nor counts a book. The book returned as a region stock instead, so one good has one use.
A follower may found an ordinary or secret religious order for 500 gold and belongs to at most one order. Ordinary orders are public; a secret order is visible only to its members. Members may donate gold to the order, but it cannot return to a purse. Its owner nominates a member from the roll and commits order treasury as irreversible backing, which moves into the faith treasury.
An order is entered by asking at its door. A follower of its faith asks to join; the owner admits or refuses them; a member may leave at any time and the owner never may. The Orders tab is a page for one order: yours, or, reached from the Rankings by its name, any you may know of. The card is the order (its faith, its owner, its treasury, its backing and its nominee), your standing in it, and, for a member, the roll and the donate box; the owner's column is where the nominee is backed and where those who have asked to join are admitted or refused. Asking and leaving are in the card's header, and founding one is offered in place of the card while you belong to none. A reader with no faith may read an ordinary order's page and do nothing on it.
When a faith has no leader, its orders form a conclave. Only a nominee who has taken the vow may be nominated or seated, and a eunuch who has not vowed is no exception. The uniquely most-backed vowed nominee becomes leader; a tie or no backing leaves the chair empty. The winner is paid nothing. Leadership lasts for life. A new reign restores its one tax change and one crusade proclamation. A leader seated before the vow was asked of the chair holds it for life like any other.
The leader may set a public message, set the tax once in the reign, and spend 500 gold of the faith's treasury to combat heresy in a region, deleting every competing standing there. Where an archprelate of another faith sits, their faith is only halved, not deleted; a third faith there is deleted as usual.
Every office of the church (a nomination, the chair, an archprelate's see) is for those who have taken the vow. Any follower of a faith who is 20 or older may take it, from the Faith page, once. It is permanent: nothing lifts it, and it survives a change of faith.
A vowed character will never have children of their own and may never marry. A marriage they are in ends the moment they vow. Their spouse is not asked, keeps their own fertility, and is free to marry again at once; the children of the marriage keep their parents and their house. The house's tree shows the marriage as ended by a vow rather than by a death, and marks the vower as never to marry. The vow and the dissolution are recorded in the logs of the people concerned, not as the world's news.
What the vow does not cost is worth saying. Your estate passes to your next character whoever they are, so the vow takes no wealth from your line, only the children who would have carried your titles and your house forward. Nor does it forbid adoption: a vowed character may still take in an heir, and an offer to adopt made before the vow stands.
A eunuch may marry, and is not thereby fit for office: castration is not a vow. A eunuch who wants office takes the vow like anyone else, and it ends their marriage like anyone's.
A council may declare one of the three faiths as its country's state religion. When that law resolves, the country pays the faith its current tax in gold; if the country cannot pay, the law does not take effect. Followers spreading in ground owned by a country of their faith gain the state-faith bonus described above.
Once per reign, a leader may proclaim a crusade against one country. A country whose state religion is that faith may then declare war on the target despite a non-aggression accord. This does not cancel the accord, grant a combat bonus, or end an already-declared war when the crusade ends. A crusade proclaimed, ended by its leader, or ended by the leader's death is recorded in the world's chronicle, naming the faith and the country.
During the crusade, a follower may buy a claim on a duchy in the target country when its living holder follows another faith and is not the buyer. The price is the faith's tax in gold, paid into its treasury. The claim survives the crusade and later conversions and presses like any other claim.
A child who loses the last of their parents before the age of 18 is an orphan, and carries the orphan trait for life; a child adopted by somebody unmarried has one parent, and losing them is losing all. If they follow a faith at that moment, that faith takes them in: they are a ward of its orphanage until their eighteenth birthday, and every faith's wards are listed on the religion page for anyone to read.
A child who follows no faith is taken in by the region they are standing in when they are orphaned. The faith with the greatest standing there takes them; if several faiths share the greatest standing, chance picks one of those, and if no faith has any standing there, chance picks among all three. The child follows that faith from then on, and the chronicle says whether the region's leading faith took them in or chance did.
Custody is fixed at the moment of orphaning: a ward who converts stays in the first faith's orphanage. Some orphans carry the trait with no ward at all, because they were orphaned before faithless children were taken in; such an orphan who later joins a faith is not taken in. On the birthday that makes a ward 18, the wardship ends and the trait remains.
Nothing else changes for an orphan. They keep their house, their titles and claims, their citizenship and their place in any succession, and if somebody named them heir they are heir still.
The leader of a warding faith may make one of its wards a eunuch, for 50 gold from the faith's treasury (the archive's 5, rescaled with every gold amount). The act is confirmed before it happens and cannot be undone. A eunuch can never have children: a marriage with a eunuch on either side is infertile, whatever fertility traits either spouse carries. That is all it takes away. A eunuch keeps every title, every claim, their house, their right to inherit and any heirship they were named to, so a line that runs through them ends with them rather than passing them over. This is the point of the act, and a leader may use it on a ward whose house would rather they did not. The ward's present faith is not asked; only the orphanage they are in.
The trait is universal. A eunuch who converts is still a eunuch, and carries no mark of which faith made them one. Each act is recorded in the world's chronicle, naming the leader, the ward and the faith. After each act there is a 5% chance that the leader gains the terrible trait; a leader who already has it is not rolled for again.
The archive also made the ward the leader's personal vassal. That is not restored: this world stores no personal liege (a duke's liege is whoever holds the crown over the duchy's ground, and nobody else has one), so there is nothing for the act to write.
A leader may appoint an archprelate to a region their faith uniquely leads. The appointee must follow the leader's faith and must have taken the vow. The archive asked for a eunuch; a eunuch may marry, so the vow is the gate now, and a eunuch takes it like anyone else. A vower who converts may be appointed by their new faith's leader. A leader may not appoint themselves: the see is a second person's career. One character holds at most one see, and archprelates appointed before the vow was asked keep their office until it ends.
The office ends on the holder's death, on revocation by their leader, the moment they convert to another faith, or when a conclave seats them as leader.
A see is contested before it is lost. When the faith stops uniquely leading the region, a tie included, the see is contested for 7 world days. If the faith leads there again within that time the contest ends and the office is kept; if not, it ends. Nobody else may be appointed to a contested see. The chronicle records the contest, the see held, and every ending with its reason.
A see shields its faith. When another faith's leader combats heresy in the region, the archprelate's faith is halved rather than deleted.
The archprelate spreads with a base of two in their see, and once a world day, standing in it, may perform one office act for 5 health, beside their own spread:
An act may be performed while the see is contested; that is what the contest is for. Acts are not recorded in the chronicle.
The recovered precedence ladder ranks an archprelate beside a duke and a religious leader beside a king. That rank is currently inert: this world has no personal fealty rule that reads it.
The world holds fifteen relics, and there will never be a sixteenth. Each has a name, a description, and a small bonus: some add spread power to preaching, some add strength in war, and a few do both. The largest of them adds two spread or five strength; most add one or two. Five also serve the hunt (see hunting): the Wolf-Tooth Torc and the Spearhead of Saint Vael add 20 to a strike at a monster, and the Horn of the Last Stand, the Banner of the Seven Roads and the Stoneheart Talisman add 10.
Every relic is either held by one character or hidden in one region. The catalogue on the Faith page lists all fifteen for anybody to read, with the name of whoever holds each one. What it does not show, to anybody, is where a lost relic lies. A lost relic is lost.
The one way to find a relic is to search for it, and you search the ground you are standing on. An expedition costs 10 gold (the archive's 1, rescaled with every gold amount) and 10 health, and each character may launch one per world day. It is offered on the Faith page and on the map, in the panel of the region you stand in and no other.
An accepted expedition spends both costs and the day whether or not it finds anything. A refused one, for the day already spent, for too little gold or too little health, spends nothing. Once accepted, the search succeeds one time in five, and a success takes one relic hidden in that region and puts it in your hands. If the roll succeeds and nothing is hidden where you stand, the answer is the same as a failed roll: you found nothing. A failed search does not tell you whether the region was empty, and the world's chronicle never records one. A discovery is recorded, publicly, naming the relic and the finder.
When a relic returns to the world it is hidden again in a region chosen at random, with every region equally likely, and it stays there until somebody finds it. More than one relic can lie in one region.
While you hold a relic, its spread power is added to every spread you make and its strength is added to your strength in war: to the preview of a swing and to the swing itself, on a front and in a resistance, armed or unarmed. Several relics stack, each bonus summed on its own. A relic's hunt bonus is added to a strike at a monster and never to war, and its strength never reaches a hunt. Your trained strength is untouched: what training built is yours, and what a relic lends leaves with it. A relic advances no training reward and counts for nothing in a duel, which is fought on prestige alone.
A relic is property, and passes as property does. When its holder dies it rests with their estate, granting nothing, until that player's next character comes into the estate and inherits every relic with it. A character nobody plays has no heir for the estate to reach, so their relics return to the world at once, each to a new hiding place. The chronicle says which relic was lost and with whose death, and not where it went.
The archive had a second way to make a eunuch: castrating a prisoner
(rankings.php:1698-1713). There is no imprisonment in this world, so that route
is absent; the orphanage is the only one.