...and that took a *great* deal of work to make it into what it became, and even then we discovered the "state religions" such as Order of the Golden Feather and that sham of a religion Enweil came up with were very, very, very difficult to penetrate.
Qyrvaggism used to have a lot that it no longer does, so far as I can tell. It's somewhat disheartening to have seen such a well fleshed-out religion diminish like Qyrvaggism has.
Which reminds me of the Barony's Hörgr of Makar, which is something I've always intended to flesh out myself or come up with a replacement... maybe it's time I got around to that...
Edit: Good lord, the page still has the filler text I used when I first created it!
I've heard good things of what Qyrvaggism used to be, though I never witnessed it myself.
As for The Blood Cult, I'm proud of what I accomplished, but I lost too many core members of the team and it has now degraded to being somewhat like Qyrvaggism (mind you with a lot more developped texts and philosophies).
The mythology for the cult was part just making stuff up by myself without any debate or the like, sure. Didn't have much of a choice, though, except for our short-lived golden age we were always rather limited in membership. It did, though, result in great study of aztec mythology and society. I adapted my own version, but it has a lot of common elements with the real thing. I managed to get a certain understanding of the aztec way of life and philosophy, and therefore engineered different contexts to produce similar results. Then, a second part was just adding random elements. After all, you need a foundation to grow upon, so some aspects were chosen just for the randomness of it to eventually create interesting theological questioning and debate. For example, the Cult always proned blood sacrifices, but it was confronted with the serious question of what to make of the Servants of the Light when they showed up and started asking it. A pity the Netherworld had slain all of the other elders with whom I could have argued over this by then. Another very important factor was IG realities. Actually, it was probably the biggest factor of them all. Our myths evolved from the BT invasions, and everything caused by NPC actions on the other islands. Some myths record GM events that I believe almost everyone has already forgotten, in its own way. Other events are just straight up in the archives.
Finally, the Blood Cult lore and especially philosophy had an important chunk of deduction. Using multiple elements of lore existing from wherever and producing new knowledge from it. That's how the libraries (what's on the wiki and what was unfotunately never saved) was formed.
So what's a good religion? A well-thought of and developed religion, even if it is so marginal it has no impact on the continent? A religion with a vague concept of stars affecting your mind but has an imposing impact on the continent?
I personally feel religions aren't given the love they require. Great effort were made to make oaths matter, but nobody really bothered to try to make people care about religion. The way I see it, a lot of people, either directly or indirectly, enjoy the impacts of interesting religions on the game but since there are no game-mechanics reasoning for them to submit to one, they'll never bother participating. And for as long as so many people don't care enough to participate, religions won't become meaningful.
