Worldbuilding 4g: Shucassam

It's been since February when I did the post about Muetar.  I always meant to get back around to this series within a series, but then I got pulled into other things.  However, there are a series of macrosubjects relating to culture that still need addressing where worldbuilding is concerned, and I'd be lax if I failed to do so.

With Immer we discussed the military tradition of a culture poised on the goblin frontier of Zorn; and with Muetar we discussed the manner in which tradition serves as a guiding principle underlying a culture's solidity.  Today we can talk about religion, which forms the fundamental tenets determining which characteristics and beliefs become traditions, and in turn strengthens the valuation of tradition in the minds of the people.

I know for a fact that many of my readers have chosen not to include religion in their game worlds — or they have committed to making religion an afterthought:  it's there, but the whole of it consists of occasionally performing a minor ritual and otherwise paying lip service to god who have no interest in day-to-day matters.  In many ways, this reflects the characteristic religions of high-brow classicism.  We have plain evidence of the temples, we know the Greeks and Romans performed sacrifices, and plainly religion was an important part of their lives ... but in their literature, Greco-Roman religion is a fictional shadow, at best.  The Hellenes and Italians did not commit themselves to teaching the people how to "properly" worship the gods, or condemn their fellow citizens for lapses in religious fervour, or write endless tracts nitpicking the characteristics of Zeus, Posiedon, Venus or Athena.  The Judeo-Christian Bible screeches for 700 pages about the people not obeying religious laws or keeping their pact with god, which in turn takes effort to justify god punishing the people, driving them into exile and then rescuing them again with superhuman figures.  There are no Greco-Roman equivalents to this thinking.

When the Christians first appeared in Rome, the locals shrugged their shoulders and treated them as just another cult.  Live and let live was the practice.  But the Christians weren't willing to live and let live, period.  Just like today, they made themselves an infernal pest, decrying pagans in the streets, screaming their superiority over others, insulting their neighbours and turning themselves into such hated persons that Roman audiences cheered when these arrogant, pissy, screeching bastards were thrown to the lions.  Naturally, the Christians learned zilch from this consequence, turning up the dial of hubris and self-importance to 11, calling the Romans "persecutors" [which is what the Christians did to get themselves chastised] and spinning the whole scenario into a martyrdom that's still believed, hook line and sinker, today.  After all, after the Christians won the cultural struggle, they carefully covered up their early behaviour in Rome like a poop in an apparently clean cat box.  Christians have likewise been screaming their innocence for the last 2000 years, right up to last week as evangelistic Republicans demanded to know who would think of the children in the case of Ketanji Jackson's nomination.

I know, I know.  This is the second screed I've launched against Christianity in the same number of weeks, but bear with me.  The tactic used by Christians to displace the previous existing Greco-Roman religion was REVOLUTIONARY.  It changed everything.  In the 4th and 5th centuries, Rome was definitely going down on account of the various tribal invasions from the east, but it only lasted as long as it did because of Christianity!  And when Rome did crash and burn, it was Christianity that sustained the long-standing Roman culture of laws and cultural practices.  It was Christianity that overcame and pacified the Franks, Lombards, Goths and Visigoths ... and later the Saxons and the Danes.  Christianity, as a single traditional framework, supported kings and popes in pulling Europe together and lifting them out of the Early Medieval "dark ages."  The only serious threats to Christian Europe in that period was another religion, a comparable religion structurally and economically, that exploded out of the Middle East and conquered vast regions and many distant peoples of African, European and Asiatic descent.  Without the consolidating power of Christianity, Charles Martel could never have pulled together a sufficiently sized coalition of forces to defeat the Moslems in 732.  Europe would have been overrun, converted to Islam and our history would have never been.

Depending on your point of view, that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Doesn't matter, it's what is.  My point is to demonstrate that religion is both a curse on thought and decency AND a force for defending thought and decency.  As a concept underlying world events, it's a spectacular game changer.  Deciding to empower religion in the game world provides opportunities to highlight events of great goodness and great evil.

Stepping back, however ... Shucassam.

It's clear from the layout that Shucassam is meant to be a desert country — dry, harsh, full of vast difficult to travel distances and even a border that doesn't make much sense.  The narrow string of hexes between Khuzdar and Zefnar on the Sea is clearly meant to indicate a caravan route; we wouldn't expect more than a few oases strung along that course.  At 40 miles a hex, the distance between Adeese and Zefnar is 560 miles ... 80 miles further than the distance from Riyadh to Mecca.

There's a connection between parts of the world like Shucassam and religion.  Has the reader ever contemplated how the world's Great Religions have all originated in hot, near-tropical climates?  Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and so on ... places with intensively hot climates.  The only notable exceptions is Confucianism; though arguably Protestantism, the offshoot of Christianity was definitely founded in a north temperate climate.  All the rest started where it was hot.  Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all moved north, so that they have representation in cold climates, but they started in the south.  Coincidence?

All religions are invented out of thin air ... and as such, they've used the creation out of thin air as a selling point.  It's called "having a vision."  Stuff pops into the mind, it sounds cool, has next to no connection with anything we knew before and so, must be from ... um ... a "higher power."  Yeah.  That's it.  Higher power.  Definitely not made up.

Having the time to make stuff up requires special circumstances.  For this, consider dates.  The fruit.  To grow dates, we surround them with manure in the Spring.  Camel manure works fine.  We watch for pests and diseases.  We need to keep weeds and turf away.  Camels are good for that too.  Date palms like dry soil.  Before they ripen, pluck half the fruit.  The result is nice, fat fruit.  The early dates we pluck, we plant.  That's it.  Very low effort.  One tree yields a hundred kg.

Eat a lot of dates in a very hot climate and you'll get high.  Not from alcohol, but from the sugar.  A date weighing 24 grams contains 16 grams of sugar.  100 grams of dates have 314 calories.  Dates and the date palm are mentioned in the Qur'an 22 times; dates nourish the land, dates are healthy, dates stave off the effects of poison, etc.  Mostly, dates enable people to be well nourished and sit around in a hot, hot sun and do nothing.  Nothing that is, except to think.

While cultures in the semi-tropics do suffer from a "work ethic," by Protestant standards, what they don't suffer from is a lack of food.  India does, but that's because India has so much food that it can support a billion semi-starving people.  When Siddhattha sat under his tree and invented Buddhism in the 5th century BCE., India did not have a billion people and it was drenched with food.  The land of milk and honey that produced Juddaism and the oases of Mecca and Medina that produced Islam where chock full of food.  These peoples didn't have to get up with the twilight every day and plow fields; they did not have to pick acre after acre of weeds, or struggle in the winter-time upon the harvests they made four and five months ago.  They were food-rich and time-rich ... and they dwelled in a place where moving about during the day is very, very unpleasant.  Even at night, the drop of 80 degrees fahrenheit makes life outside the tent so onerous that resting on sheepskin and woollen carpeting, where we talk and talk and talk to pass the time, seems more than practical.

Between the cities of Shucassam is nothing.  The land is hot and dry and only the very desperate spend any time in the open.  Merchants travel unmolested because who would rationally wait in this wilderness for a caravan?  To travel anywhere takes enormous amounts of time.  Time to sit, time to think, time to talk, time to consider the words of a conversation that took place weeks or months ago.  Time unending.  With nothing to do.

Getting on our knees five times a day gives a way to break up the long days.  Forcing ourselves to fast on Ramadan gives us something else to wrest our thoughts one month in the calendar.  Memorising the Qur'an seems like a thing to do rather than an impossible feat.  We, with our westernised expectations of time and activity, cannot imagine what it must be like to have this much time.

Religion is not merely giving the gods their due.  Much of religion is contemplation, deliberate asteticism, evaluation of self, the acquisition of patience and purpose, and of time — the long history of a hundred generations that lived in this same desert, in the same way that we do now, doing the same things, thinking the same things, facing the same difficulties.

This is the deeper strength of religious tradition.  Not that we obey the laws because they are moral ... but that we obey the laws because our ancestors did, and who are we to criticise our ancestors?  Without our ancestors, we wouldn't be here.  Religion binds us, not only as people living together and believing the same thing, but as generations of people who got us here.  They knew what they were doing.  They built everything we see.  Their collective wisdom far surpasses the voice of any single person alive today.  They made us.  They ARE us.

This underlying motivation potentially exists for every NPC in the game world.  It is the universal "story" that establishes the peaks and valleys of the game's narrative.  Setting a story of that kind in your game world gives depth and strength to every word an NPC speaks.  It provides argument, justification, drive and conflict between forces and entities that surround the players.  It's the wind, the sea, the land, the fabric of social discourse.

Include it.