Building Religions 13: Scripture

Building Religions 13: Scripture

There comes a time for most worldbuilders when they want to drop a passage from a sacred text into their world. It could be a bit of flavour text to open a chapter, an account of some significant myth, or the ever-popular prophecy fortelling the rise of dark forces, but whichever way you decide to use it, it's good to have a general understanding of how scripture is and how it works.

Building Religions 12: New Religious Movements

Building Religions 12: New Religious Movements

Whether you're writing about a secretive order pursuing occult mysteries, the disciples of a modern-day prophet, or a utopian quest to found New Jerusalem on Mars, you have to ask yourself what kinds of forces can work to usher in a new form of religion. There's an abundance of literature out there on new religious movements, whether cataloguing their varieties or exploring their social and historical causes, and I'm not going to try to present a complete summary of the scholarship. Instead, I'd like to offer a short list of possible reasons for a religion to come into being.