This is one of my unwritten essays!

Here’s the synopsis.

Religion is bullshit. That, I think, is a key intended “fruitful void” of the game. The game SAYS how important religion is. But the god’s are totally not real.

You can see it in the ridiculous nature of the religious schism between Raven and Wyrm. It’s a flat out “tastes great / less filling” “green vs purple” set up. They present it very seriously rather than satirically, because people take it seriously and people die over it. But it’s nonsense. In fact, in my preferred setting variant (that I’ll probably wind up using) this distinction arose organically as part of the 250 year Blood Mist isolation and was projected back via made up history. It was never actually a thing.

You can also see it in the utter absence of clerics as a class. There’s magic, there’s sources of magic, there’s no actual divine source of magic. It’s just bullshit.

You can see it in the Dwarves. Their religion is literally about building the world bigger so they can reach the sun. Really? Over 1200 years of recorded Raven Land history there’s no mention of that at all. There’s no story where an army marched across a plain full of pillars one year and came back 10 years later to find the plain had become a giant hill built atop those pillars by industrious dwarves. There’s no mention of how, after the blood mist, an entire Forest is now a mountain range, and it’s raw bare rock because with the elves largely withdrawn there’s no one to make the woods grow…because that’s the mythical division of labor right? There’s no adventure sites that lead down into the Earth that depict onion like layers of successive ages of the world built up, and then covered over as the dwarves make the world bigger. There’s none of that, right? But there is a mention of the primitive proto-dwarves (dwelvers?) who live deeper and are revered as ancestors. Huge is just as much a bullshit made up god as all the others.

And I so dig that. I mean, it’s kind of hard to have actual religious conflict in a fantasy game where the gods are literally real. I mean, no faith is required to worship a diety when the game gives you their AC and HP and what spells they can cast. But in FL…there are no literally real gods. There’s just myth, and the problems people create for each other when they fight over whose myth is better.

The game could have given hierarchies and ceremonies and tenets and stuff to flesh out the 3 competing human churches. But I kind of dig that it didn’t. Because eventually it will come up. Exactly what are the holy sacrements of the Congregation of the Serpent? Do people get married by Rust Priests in the Rust Church? At some point that will matter if you play long enough, right?

And what will drive home the idea that “religion is bullshit” more, than when you just make that shit up on the fly…exactly like (IMO the game is saying) any religion did.

As for the map. That’s easy. There’s a whole pre blood mist history of war and crusade and invasion. There’d have been maps aplenty. Campaign maps, tapestries hanging in halls, atlases. Lots of them. Some would survive.

It would have been nice if the player facing map was more rustic with distorted distances and more precision around Alderstone and less in the unconquered east. More like a period map than a game map. It would have nice if there were differences between the maps; maybe some rivers that changed course, almost certainly a lot of very expanded forests…that would have been a super cool bit of extra effort. But it’s understandable why they didn’t bother.