First cult problems.

For quite some time, we didn’t envision the cultists as part of the milieu of Arkerra at all, much less the major force for evil they became. As I said yesterday, they were just something we dropped in because Phil didn’t want to do the Sphinx thing.

Phil is the gamer and I am not, so I’m not gonna risk embarrassing myself by spouting off too much about cultists in World of Warcraft or Skyrim. But I’ve always thought it was funny how… conveniently labeled they were? Like, cults in our modern, civilized world tend to go by names like “Happy Science,” “Raelism,” “Scientology,” or “MAGA” and at least conceal some of their dark nature from some of the public, and most of their low-level recruits, with a flood of lies. “Cult” is what other people call them. But in WoW, the official monikers are things like “Death Cultist” and “Cult of the Damned.”

So maybe that’s the inspiration for how “on message” all these guys seem to be. There’s never any Cultist saying “Yeah, I just think we need to disrupt the system a little bit to make it stronger… you don’t believe we actually MEAN all that stuff about ending the world, do you? That’s just to freak out the mundanes.”