The experiment has failed. Only one person took part and posted a response, Lord Lycanthrope, and he is to be commended for his thoughtful work. I see no reason to continue with the plan I laid out last month, especially as it does not seem to have been well received by my readers. Thus, a change of plans is called for. The setting or technique a month style seems to hold the most attention (at least according to the number of people who read this column) and that is what I will stick with. Yeah, yeah, a format change to boost readership is a hackneyed approach, what's next, guest stars? A very special A Bit of History?

Religion is a factor that is all too often given the short end of the stick in RPGs of all types. It is nearly absent from Sci-Fi games, rarely appears in historical games, gets treated as either a useless belief or a super power in horror games, and gets twisted all around in fantasy games. How many fantasy settings put forth a pantheon or two of deities with little regard to how they developed of why someone worships them? True, there are some well thought out and detailed examples out there, but most are copies of Ancient Greco-Roman faiths merged with Medieval Catholicism, or a mixture of animism and shamanism. The primary question, at least from a functionalist perspective, is what do the followers of a religion get out of it? From a historical perspective, what were its origins? How did the faith develop and evolve over the years?

We will start by using an example form my own Gamma World (2010) campaign. When I set down to design the campaign, I first consulted with my players and sought their input. They wanted Vincennes, Indiana (where we all live) to feature in the game, at least at the start. Second, they wanted to mix D&D 4e with Gamma World , creating a post-apocalyptic setting with a touch of fantasy adventure. With these parameters I got to work, and here is one of the historically tied items that came out.

Clark Triumphant

Since one of the players rolled up a hawkoid and wanted to play a warpreist, a local religion was called for. The group consists of a mix of religious views, including Catholicism, Evangelical Christian, Atheists, Agnostics, and Asatru. Experience in past historical and modern games had shown me that not everyone was comfortable with extant faiths featuring prominently in the game. I also wanted to avoid any arguments over which religion would survive The Big Mistake. Thus we needed a new religion, and had the whole of multiple universes to work with. Looking at the anthropology of religion, and rereading some of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ,I decided that the dominate religion in the area would be based around tales told of folk heroes, tales told around the campfires after civilization fell apart. These stories would likely be retellings of pre-collapse civilization's greatest heroes, action movie stars (after all, the names of the parts they played may be forgotten, but Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al will be remembered). Imagine Star Wars being retold for generations by people who never saw the films. Add in that all the other action movies would eventually start to drift together, and you have an mélange of heroes, adventures, and stories.

Next, I needed to bring some order to this cacophony of heroic actions. Vincennes is home to the George Rogers Clark memorial, a massive structure dedicated to the memory of the man who defeated the British in the Ohio Country during the American War of Independence. This building is a huge stone rotunda in the neo-classical style, decorated on the inside with larger than life murals depicting George Rogers Clark's triumphing over the British and Nature. Thus, the Cult of Clark Triumphant is born, as the descendents of the survivors look upon a heroic figure whose exploits were so amazing, he is the only one that the Ancients chose to build a temple to (it must be a temple, its bigger than anything the survivors could build). In time all the other action heroes were conflated into Clark Triumphant, or appear as secondary characters in his adventures. A religion dedicated to heroic ideals is born, and our warpriest has not just a faith to role-play, but one with a bit of history. Here are some of the things I came up with about Clark Triumphant:

• Slew the evil King George and thus became King of America.
• Invented the gun, displaying it to the people and exclaiming, "This is my BOOM stick!"
• Went back in time to save Saint Connor, and then kill him, and will be back.
• Destroyed the Death Star.
• Killed Darth Vader the Fat in the Temple of Doom.
• Melted the face of many Nazi's with his breath.
• Taught Saint Kirk how to pick up women.
• Was betrayed by his right hand man, LBJ, and exiled to a village of the elderly. There he witnessed the second coming of the King of Rocks and together he and Elvis defeated a terror from beyond time and space.
• Killed aliens in the jungle and later on the moon, aided by Saint Ventura the Bald and Saint Ripley.
• Slew a million porkers in the Bay of Pigs.
• Shot Liberty Valance.
• Killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.
• Wandered the earth after forgetting his name, during which time he saved many towns from bandits.
• Once saw a million faces and rocked them all.
• Lead the fleet of the twelve colonies to a shining planet called Earth.
• Alongside Saint Elliot, cleaned up the town of Tombstone.
• Pushed Saint King across the finish line to win the Piston Cup.
• Taught Saint Lucas the Force.
• Built a bridge over the River Kwai.
• Had many companions, but the best was Saint Rose.
• He pitied the fools.
• Found Nemo.
• He went forward and prospered.

As you can see, it gets a little silly. For Gamma World this is part of the fun, other, more serious games would want to use slightly different parameters to maintain theme and mood. Start with a core premise, in this case that people would tell stories around campfires. Refine the idea, what stories in particular? What purpose in a culture does these stories fill? With Clark Triumphant they began as entertainment, but eventually evolved into teaching life lessons or explaining why things are the way they are. Once you begin adding supernatural or moralistic themes to the stories, they begin to become religion. In effect, the stories of Die Hard, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and others become the new gospel, the gospel of Clark Triumphant, a being of supernatural abilities who triumphs over evil in all its myriad forms. He doesn't promise to make it rain or drive away disease, but instead offers to fill men's souls with divine strength in order to overcome the terrors of the post-apocalyptic world. In the words of His Holy Greatness, "Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted." The heroes of our game aspire to be those few men who, under the bold leadership of their god, effect great things.

This technique isn't just for post-apocalyptic games, but for any game where the world is not brand new. It is a lot like playing the game of telephone (which asks the question, what did kids play before telephone; telegraph, semaphore, heliograph, yelling really loud form far away). When writing your history, consider how stories change, evolve, and conflate in the telling. In the above example, what began as a few survivors reminiscing around campfires (did you see Terminator 2 ), evolves in the telling through the generations. In your own campaign, the same thing may happen with tales of lost heroes, ancient artifacts, the long past 20th century, or even the adventures of a previous group of PCs.

Next month we look at Caesar's Gallic Campaign and give three min-settings to use it with in A Feast for Eagles, a Feast for Crows. Until then, pass on a bit of history to the next generation, and see how it changes.

Once again, I have a shameless plug. The fine folks at Steve Jackson Games and Pyramid Magazine have seen fit to publish another of my Roma Universalis articles, "Moondragons and Stranger Things" in issue 3-28 Monsters in Space. If you are looking for my Pathfinder RPG adventure from Frog God Games Vengeance of the Long Serpent at the time of this writing it has been delayed at the publisher. Soon, I promise, soon.