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[mickel]

Exactly. This is called superstition, and eventually it goes on long enough to be institutionalised, and then it becomes religion.

In game terms, religions might pop up in about the same way that engravers get ideas for new engravings. You know, elephants stomp on some dwarves, and you get lots of engravings of elephants stomping dwarves.

Obviously the game records dwarves being stomped, and these records are obviously a source of inspiration to the dwarves.

A source of superstition (and prejudice, and actual understanding for that matter) is if event A is frequently observed to happen after even B, and the funny religions would occur if the dwarves jumped to conclusions. ("The last two times that we threw a party at the well, elephants came and stomped several of us to death... The parties must anger the well-gods, and the elephants must be their messengers!")

[Albert the Absentminded]

"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is deliberate."

In the complete absence of religion, you can expect to see many tiny superstitions spring up. Wait long enough and they become folklore, and people will develop counters to them. One possibility is for everyone to become a minor 'wizard', skilled in the lore that will avert the bad luck of the area and attact the good.

On the other hand, it may be that they recruit their own unseen beings to protect them from hostile influences. Ghosts, genius loci, fantastic creatures, are all possibilities, in different proportions.

Example: To protect yourself from life's daily annoyances, you invoke your honored ancestors (and make sure they are kept fed and so on). But for big things? Well, if you have an ancestor who specializes in a specific big thing that's all well and good, but otherwise you have to decide if you want to risk invoking the dragons. (Kind of a Far East theme, I guess.)

The ghosts of powerful families might be revered by subordinate families, leading to situations where an entire city reveres, and eventually worships, the ghosts, or perhaps _a_ ghost, of a particular clan. The current ruler might literally be descended from a god merely because the ancestor in question has since been deified.

(If the family is cast down the god might not be happy with the usurpers. Depends on the personality of the god in question.)

The precise effects depend on whether the ghosts are real, in-game, or powerless superstition. When magic is added, real life experience becomes less relevent. (And the Judeo-Christian tradition, if it got its start this way, had matured into a moralist movement by the time Noah fled the flooding of his homeland. Forget 4,000 years old: Without a God as depicted in the Bible to supply the moral demands, the tradition could be 10,000 years old or older. So it's a lousy source of inspiration for early, primitive religious development.)

In any event, once cities have their gods, it becomes possible for them to group together in pantheons. Especially if one city demonstrates supremecy over the others - that god/goddess is likely to get status as the father/mother figure, and other deities get to either marry or be adopted by the newly crowned ruler deity. New stories will be made to honor the deities, telling how the leader is responsible for the Bad Old Days ending - proud deities might be pleased by the flattery, and after enough time most would grow to believe the legends of their heroic pasts.

This gets you the Chinese Celestial Hierarchy, or the Greek Pantheon. Or the Egyption Pantheon. Or the Celts, possibly. The Aztecs were on there way there as well, although the dominant Mexica nation had only had a couple of centuries to rewrite history.

-Albert

[ September 02, 2007: Message edited by: Albert the Absentminded ]