Thank you! Despite appearances, Black Sword Hack is still ongoing, albeit infrequently. I had a bit of a mental block setting up the next adventure and just wasn’t happy with what I thought should happen next but I figured it out eventually and am finishing up the next episode alongside the fourth installment of These Darkened Places.
Thank you! I'm itching to play, too, currently aiming to wrap up the building in another 2-3 videos, create a party and then venture forth (somewhere in January).
Great world building, love it! What of the old deity wants those globules of god-invested amber, building up enough to reform itself fully? Given the people of the city a reason to risk life and limb to get at the stuff..
Oh, huh! Interesting. So far I've not had Shiga on the radar as a potential driving force behind the Rhun Kel expansion and put it more into the purview of the city's ruling factions and their controlling entity in the shadows. Shiga being somehow diminished and seeking to reform fully is certainly an intriguing idea. We'll see. I'm planning to consolidate all the god talk and the ideas it sparked and develop the cosmology and theology aspects of the world somewhere down the line, I expect two episodes from now (once the dungeon is hopefully mostly done).
A few thoughts I had after watching: 1.) What if the reason that Southfall is sending this expedition into the peninsula now is because they fear that the Empire to the North is starting to become to powerful for their traditional ways of maintaining independence to handle? Hence their hope that the mutative qualities of God-Sap might provide them with a new weapon or resource to beat this stronger rival back and keep Southfall independent as it always has been. 2.) For the vice that Shiga embraces, I'm thinking that drugs is a good fit. Stimulants to excite particularly stab-happy murder-cultists, hallucinogens that some faithful use to try and commune with their god, and sedatives which some believe allow those who take them to slip into "the peaceful dark." 3.) Perhaps because of the nature of its existence, the Swarm Dragon sees itself as particularly blessed by Shiga. It wants to bring back the worship of the old gods, but most of the old gods are dead. Therefore, Shiga must have gifted the Swarm Dragon with this power because Shiga wants it to ascend to divinity itself and join Shiga as a peer, as the first new god to join the pantheon of the Old Gods in countless years. (Whether this is actually what Shiga wants, or if Shiga is even involved at all, is of course unknown at this point.)
I like it! There's also room to combine the "god-sap" and the drug use maybe, considering the state religion could probably cook up some wild stuff with it for their ritualistic intoxication sessions. Beyond that, while I'm sure they now have their uses for the sappy substance, what I was mainly wondering about was how they knew about it or found it in the first place. I could imagine that the "first expedition" from whatever faction discovered it 100+ years ago is involved somehow, maybe coming through the city before never being seen again and then a century later a weirdly mutated survivor shambles into town? Something like that might work, now that I type it out lol. As for the swarm-dragon, the whole divinity ascension angle certainly seems like a good fit, the only slight issue I have with it is that the Rhun Kel lich already seems to want the same, so maybe some diversification in our villainous scoundrels and their motives is good, too!
Shiga could be a god of sloth and sleep, based off the vibes. Things that might be removed from dreams, or rather nightmares, as a primordial human experience. Their followers may reject a conventional social order of "hard work" being turned into a virtue.
I like this quite a lot, thank you! Sleep being somewhat death-adjacent in mythology certainly helps and we could work in the drug aspect suggested in another comment via a soporific or hallucinogenic that's consumed ritualistically (and perhaps to keep the following nice and docile, too). I also like the hard work rejection aspect and one thing it makes me think of is that perhaps Shiga is somewhat multi-faceted and your vices and virtues depend on your allotted role in society, e.g. hard work is a vice for an upper strata (the "Worshipful Indolence" or some such) while the unwashed masses aren't quite "enlightened enough" to stop hustling yet, but to alleviate their lot they're invited to partake in drug use (the "Blessed Stupor", something of the sort - just making up stuff as I type here). Mainly thinking this due to the religion being dominant and nation-wide and dictating the social order, so encouraging hard work rejection probably works better if it's reserved for the higher-ups. This'd also facilitate bringing in the "wealth expectation" aspect through some dynamic where you can gain upwards mobility and wealth by some nefarious engagements with the temple (or something like a "lottery" the religion holds once a year where you can win riches but might just as easily "win" being ritually sacrificed). This is giving me all sorts of food for thought, much obliged!
That's almost a no contest. For world building, the most flexible resource tends to be Kevin Crawford's "Without Number" series, whether (sci-)fantasy, space sci-fi or cyberpunk, the tools are brilliant. The free version already covers a lot of ground but I always encourage getting the full (paid) content package if it's affordable. It's worth it and the author certainly earned the support. Alongside that, the Tome of Adventure Design is a powerhouse to generate all sorts of hooks, antagonists, places and miscellanea. There isn't much that you can't cover between these two when it comes to setting creation. I may revise my stance once I get the Tome of Worldbuilding and the accompanying Nomicon (for name generation) into my hands. They sound insanely promising and will probably synergize greatly with the Tome of Adventure Design. That's not to take away from Stars/Worlds/Cities Without Number though. They do the job pretty much on their own. The only little gap in most of these books is naming things, so that'll always have to come down to whichever resource you prefer to find good sounding words to use. I feel like the Nomicon will close that gap for good though. We'll see!
@killtenratsrpg thank you for your in-depth answer. I really enjoy all of your series so far. Black Sworf Hack is my favorite, but Shadowdark looks promising.
I also appreciate this information. I'm really interested in getting into solo play. So far I've been hitting a lot of creative walls with the limited resources at my disposal currently. But looking forward to getting better more creative and collecting new books in the future . Solo play is such a fun concept for stress relief and building a stronger mind, I love the idea of getting lost in your own worlds. Video games can be cool too but then you are at the mercy of a screen and someone else's mind. 😅
@@paulramos6767 Honestly, limited resources aren't a bad place to come from initially. Solo play quickly gets overwhelming and can lead to horrendous analysis paralysis. My recommendation in general would be to start small, maybe with Ironsworn (if a Powered by the Apocalypse game is palatable) or a free toolkit like Basic Fantasy RPG (which gives you all the rules and monsters you can ask for), a free GM emulator (perhaps something like Just One Torch) and a worldbuilding toolkit if needed (again, preferably free, so the Worlds Without Number "light" version would be my go to). I already filmed an episode of a "how to get into solo roleplaying" series using these exact tools but I wasn't happy with it, so I scrapped it. But the tools are great, I just wasn't happy with my presentation of them. Maybe I'll give it another try some time early next year.
@@killtenratsrpg Thank you ! Ya iron sworn does look like it has some fun rules . Also I understand where you are coming from with the analysis paralysis lol. But that all sounds like a great place to start . Excited to check out those options.
Great video as always! The swarm dragon particularly was my favorite bit that came up. On another note, are you putting the BSH campaign on a hiatus or are you going to go back and forth between this and that campaign once the World Building here is done?
Thank you! BSH it's not quite on hiatus but it does take a back seat going forward, so I'll make more when I get around to it (which should be once or twice a month). With the closing of the leviathan adventure I was a bit unhappy with what I initially thought the next adventure would be but I recently had an idea how to make things more interesting, so I'll forge ahead and release another episode soon and another after the 2-3 weeks later. They'll keep coming but it'll be a bit of a trickle!
@@killtenratsrpg Cool! I got a little worried there, cause I'm really liking that series. But I know how it can feel when you come across some sort of adventure in solo, due to dice shenanigans, that isn't particularly interesting to you and you gotta find ways to make it so.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it! I'm having a blast with the system and the narrative so I'm not quite at a point yet where I'm fine letting it rest. It'll probably be a while. I'm planning to switch over to Tales of Argosa at some point to keep things fresh but retaining the characters and setting, so we'll see how that goes! In this particular case it wasn't even dice shenanigans that was putting me off, it was the opposite. I had made up my mind that it's clear where the story will go next based on where we left off post leviathan but I didn't really like that trajectory at all so I was casting around for a way to bring the dice back in a mix it up and I found one, even if it's a little bit a of reach into the old deus ex machina closet. But it fixes my little quibble with the campaign and now I'm itching to go again!
@@killtenratsrpg Never played Tales of Argosa. I did a solo one shot with the BSH and I really liked it. Although, the kind of game/settings I love is akin to Dark Souls and Elden Ring? Dark Fantasy + High Power? And that is a little hard to come by in my experience for some reason. On another note, this is a totally unrelated question. Do you think you'll ever go back to more narrative games? Ironsworn and their family of games and such? I love those game to play coop funny enough.
I backed the Kickstarter and looked through an early PDF draft, looks like a promising sword and sorcery system with similar systems to the BSH, just a little more fleshed out maybe. I'm curious. It looked like it could be a good fit for a campaign handover. As for Souls/Elden Ring... yeah, that's just insanely hard to replicate. Vermis I and II hit the right vibes but they're not really playable TTRPG books (even though I've seen people play them), more like inspiration sources. If there's an adaptation out there that actually manages to codify the overall weirdness of Miyazaki's output into an actual system of rules, I haven't found it yet. Narrative games will always be a contender, even if they're not actively running alongside my current campaigns right now. I've been eyeing Elegy (the White Wolf style Ironsworn hack) for a while, I've wrestled with a setting for a Starforged space opera for a bit but given up as too ambitious currently (it might happen later down the line though) and if the recent Tomkin Press newsletter timeline is somewhat reflective of what'll happen, we might see an Ironsworn 2nd edition in 2028 and I doubt I'll ignore that. I also doubt it'll take me that long to run a narrative game again though. We'll see!
Perhaps it is just a coincidence of what I have come across so far, but it's interesting how it seems that the majority of RPG games intended for solo play, seem to always be centered around dark fantasy ? BTW, when are you going to film a campaign of you paying Bone and Shadow ?!?!
I wonder whether the dark fantasy slant is an expression of the turn fantasy in general has taken post ascension of Warhammer, George R. R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and such. Games intended specifically for solo play are a comparatively recent thing as far as them reaching a wider audience is concerned, so maybe it's just a side-effect of their age and the grimdarkification of fantasy in general? I don't personally mind at all, I struggle to play anything that isn't dark fantasy and always have, so I'm all in on this trend! As for Bone and Shadow, that's a fairly definitive "never", considering that the author is no longer in control of the product and the current publisher seemingly isn't treating it particularly kindly. The spirit of the game lives on in Ker Nethalas and Broken Shores by the same author and I feel like I'd be doing him and myself a disservice playing the older game instead of the more refined iterations on the concept.
@@killtenratsrpg oh ok I haven't done more research on it but noticed the website always says unavailable.i would totally be interested in trying out the newer version of it though. That was the first solo game I ever seen a video about and got me jazzed about solo play to begin with. Well that and also my cousin gave me some pathfinder files that included some solo adventures; which I still havent got around to playing hahaha.
@@paulramos6767 I didn't really know about any of the Bone and Shadow circumstances either, I just heard it directly from the author. The print edition is definitely difficult to come by and there's even some shenanigans with the PDF version on DTRPG where the publisher makes an older, less complete variant available. All in all somewhat unfortunate, it's a great game!
Shiga wants what every other diety in the prime materium wants: to win a wager of arbitrary score keeping over the other dieties active on the plane. The Primary Characters should be aligned with Shiga's biggest rival, or should be chosen as "neutral arbiters" by the plurality of dieties. The choices and activities of the PCs should be the basis of scores won and lost by the dieties. And so manifests the Faction Turn from WWN?
That's a neat premise for a campaign for sure. I'm not sure how much I want to put the narrative focus of the campaign on the gods though (at least directly). The notion that Shiga is looking to win the game of cosmic chess and score points is certainly a valid one, though. I'm not opposed to having this type of "god variant" in the world but I'm leaning more towards the (comparatively) new pantheon leaning this way, while Shiga as the lone remnant of the old paradigm is more abstract and less personalized. I've had an idea or three sparked by the combined creativity in the comments on this video that'll probably allow me to develop the cosmology and theology of this world about two episodes down the line, so we'll see how it all comes together! In any case, thank you for the food for thought! And faction turn, oh boy - that's something I always wanted to incorporate and perhaps now is the time. But it's a bit daunting. I'll need to re-read it and decide.
Might be low hanging fruit, but the idea that came to me for the vice would be gambling, with the religion having a lottery system that can result in financial gain or death. Perhaps the net worth of one individual being dispersed among a group of winners, and the individual being sacrificed.
Hah! Interesting. I had a similar thought the other day, sparked by another comment in this section, regarding the wealth expectation being tied to some sort of lottery where you might gain instant upward mobility but just as easily lose it all or end up with some severe obligation (e.g. go forth and kill this king) or simply sacrificed. I feel like it'll make an appearance, even if gambling isn't perhaps the god's main focus but more of an expression of the religion's approach in general.
Loving this setting creation series! 😃
Thank you! I’m going to need to build another villain soon by the looks of it so Realm Fables is going to see some action again, too!
this is very relaxing. and its great to have you back. you are a great creator/player. loved your black sword hack series.
Thank you! Despite appearances, Black Sword Hack is still ongoing, albeit infrequently. I had a bit of a mental block setting up the next adventure and just wasn’t happy with what I thought should happen next but I figured it out eventually and am finishing up the next episode alongside the fourth installment of These Darkened Places.
@killtenratsrpg awesome!
It's a nice world-building, can't wait for actual play.
Thank you! I'm itching to play, too, currently aiming to wrap up the building in another 2-3 videos, create a party and then venture forth (somewhere in January).
Great world building, love it! What of the old deity wants those globules of god-invested amber, building up enough to reform itself fully? Given the people of the city a reason to risk life and limb to get at the stuff..
Oh, huh! Interesting. So far I've not had Shiga on the radar as a potential driving force behind the Rhun Kel expansion and put it more into the purview of the city's ruling factions and their controlling entity in the shadows. Shiga being somehow diminished and seeking to reform fully is certainly an intriguing idea. We'll see. I'm planning to consolidate all the god talk and the ideas it sparked and develop the cosmology and theology aspects of the world somewhere down the line, I expect two episodes from now (once the dungeon is hopefully mostly done).
A few thoughts I had after watching:
1.) What if the reason that Southfall is sending this expedition into the peninsula now is because they fear that the Empire to the North is starting to become to powerful for their traditional ways of maintaining independence to handle? Hence their hope that the mutative qualities of God-Sap might provide them with a new weapon or resource to beat this stronger rival back and keep Southfall independent as it always has been.
2.) For the vice that Shiga embraces, I'm thinking that drugs is a good fit. Stimulants to excite particularly stab-happy murder-cultists, hallucinogens that some faithful use to try and commune with their god, and sedatives which some believe allow those who take them to slip into "the peaceful dark."
3.) Perhaps because of the nature of its existence, the Swarm Dragon sees itself as particularly blessed by Shiga. It wants to bring back the worship of the old gods, but most of the old gods are dead. Therefore, Shiga must have gifted the Swarm Dragon with this power because Shiga wants it to ascend to divinity itself and join Shiga as a peer, as the first new god to join the pantheon of the Old Gods in countless years. (Whether this is actually what Shiga wants, or if Shiga is even involved at all, is of course unknown at this point.)
I like it! There's also room to combine the "god-sap" and the drug use maybe, considering the state religion could probably cook up some wild stuff with it for their ritualistic intoxication sessions. Beyond that, while I'm sure they now have their uses for the sappy substance, what I was mainly wondering about was how they knew about it or found it in the first place. I could imagine that the "first expedition" from whatever faction discovered it 100+ years ago is involved somehow, maybe coming through the city before never being seen again and then a century later a weirdly mutated survivor shambles into town? Something like that might work, now that I type it out lol.
As for the swarm-dragon, the whole divinity ascension angle certainly seems like a good fit, the only slight issue I have with it is that the Rhun Kel lich already seems to want the same, so maybe some diversification in our villainous scoundrels and their motives is good, too!
Shiga could be a god of sloth and sleep, based off the vibes. Things that might be removed from dreams, or rather nightmares, as a primordial human experience.
Their followers may reject a conventional social order of "hard work" being turned into a virtue.
I like this quite a lot, thank you! Sleep being somewhat death-adjacent in mythology certainly helps and we could work in the drug aspect suggested in another comment via a soporific or hallucinogenic that's consumed ritualistically (and perhaps to keep the following nice and docile, too).
I also like the hard work rejection aspect and one thing it makes me think of is that perhaps Shiga is somewhat multi-faceted and your vices and virtues depend on your allotted role in society, e.g. hard work is a vice for an upper strata (the "Worshipful Indolence" or some such) while the unwashed masses aren't quite "enlightened enough" to stop hustling yet, but to alleviate their lot they're invited to partake in drug use (the "Blessed Stupor", something of the sort - just making up stuff as I type here).
Mainly thinking this due to the religion being dominant and nation-wide and dictating the social order, so encouraging hard work rejection probably works better if it's reserved for the higher-ups.
This'd also facilitate bringing in the "wealth expectation" aspect through some dynamic where you can gain upwards mobility and wealth by some nefarious engagements with the temple (or something like a "lottery" the religion holds once a year where you can win riches but might just as easily "win" being ritually sacrificed).
This is giving me all sorts of food for thought, much obliged!
You have an impressive amount of world-building tools, books and tables. Which one would you suggest to start with?
That's almost a no contest. For world building, the most flexible resource tends to be Kevin Crawford's "Without Number" series, whether (sci-)fantasy, space sci-fi or cyberpunk, the tools are brilliant. The free version already covers a lot of ground but I always encourage getting the full (paid) content package if it's affordable. It's worth it and the author certainly earned the support. Alongside that, the Tome of Adventure Design is a powerhouse to generate all sorts of hooks, antagonists, places and miscellanea. There isn't much that you can't cover between these two when it comes to setting creation.
I may revise my stance once I get the Tome of Worldbuilding and the accompanying Nomicon (for name generation) into my hands. They sound insanely promising and will probably synergize greatly with the Tome of Adventure Design.
That's not to take away from Stars/Worlds/Cities Without Number though. They do the job pretty much on their own.
The only little gap in most of these books is naming things, so that'll always have to come down to whichever resource you prefer to find good sounding words to use. I feel like the Nomicon will close that gap for good though. We'll see!
@killtenratsrpg thank you for your in-depth answer. I really enjoy all of your series so far. Black Sworf Hack is my favorite, but Shadowdark looks promising.
I also appreciate this information. I'm really interested in getting into solo play. So far I've been hitting a lot of creative walls with the limited resources at my disposal currently. But looking forward to getting better more creative and collecting new books in the future . Solo play is such a fun concept for stress relief and building a stronger mind, I love the idea of getting lost in your own worlds. Video games can be cool too but then you are at the mercy of a screen and someone else's mind. 😅
@@paulramos6767 Honestly, limited resources aren't a bad place to come from initially. Solo play quickly gets overwhelming and can lead to horrendous analysis paralysis. My recommendation in general would be to start small, maybe with Ironsworn (if a Powered by the Apocalypse game is palatable) or a free toolkit like Basic Fantasy RPG (which gives you all the rules and monsters you can ask for), a free GM emulator (perhaps something like Just One Torch) and a worldbuilding toolkit if needed (again, preferably free, so the Worlds Without Number "light" version would be my go to).
I already filmed an episode of a "how to get into solo roleplaying" series using these exact tools but I wasn't happy with it, so I scrapped it. But the tools are great, I just wasn't happy with my presentation of them. Maybe I'll give it another try some time early next year.
@@killtenratsrpg Thank you ! Ya iron sworn does look like it has some fun rules . Also I understand where you are coming from with the analysis paralysis lol. But that all sounds like a great place to start . Excited to check out those options.
Great video as always! The swarm dragon particularly was my favorite bit that came up.
On another note, are you putting the BSH campaign on a hiatus or are you going to go back and forth between this and that campaign once the World Building here is done?
Thank you! BSH it's not quite on hiatus but it does take a back seat going forward, so I'll make more when I get around to it (which should be once or twice a month). With the closing of the leviathan adventure I was a bit unhappy with what I initially thought the next adventure would be but I recently had an idea how to make things more interesting, so I'll forge ahead and release another episode soon and another after the 2-3 weeks later. They'll keep coming but it'll be a bit of a trickle!
@@killtenratsrpg Cool! I got a little worried there, cause I'm really liking that series. But I know how it can feel when you come across some sort of adventure in solo, due to dice shenanigans, that isn't particularly interesting to you and you gotta find ways to make it so.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it! I'm having a blast with the system and the narrative so I'm not quite at a point yet where I'm fine letting it rest. It'll probably be a while. I'm planning to switch over to Tales of Argosa at some point to keep things fresh but retaining the characters and setting, so we'll see how that goes!
In this particular case it wasn't even dice shenanigans that was putting me off, it was the opposite. I had made up my mind that it's clear where the story will go next based on where we left off post leviathan but I didn't really like that trajectory at all so I was casting around for a way to bring the dice back in a mix it up and I found one, even if it's a little bit a of reach into the old deus ex machina closet. But it fixes my little quibble with the campaign and now I'm itching to go again!
@@killtenratsrpg Never played Tales of Argosa. I did a solo one shot with the BSH and I really liked it. Although, the kind of game/settings I love is akin to Dark Souls and Elden Ring? Dark Fantasy + High Power? And that is a little hard to come by in my experience for some reason.
On another note, this is a totally unrelated question. Do you think you'll ever go back to more narrative games? Ironsworn and their family of games and such? I love those game to play coop funny enough.
I backed the Kickstarter and looked through an early PDF draft, looks like a promising sword and sorcery system with similar systems to the BSH, just a little more fleshed out maybe. I'm curious. It looked like it could be a good fit for a campaign handover. As for Souls/Elden Ring... yeah, that's just insanely hard to replicate. Vermis I and II hit the right vibes but they're not really playable TTRPG books (even though I've seen people play them), more like inspiration sources. If there's an adaptation out there that actually manages to codify the overall weirdness of Miyazaki's output into an actual system of rules, I haven't found it yet.
Narrative games will always be a contender, even if they're not actively running alongside my current campaigns right now. I've been eyeing Elegy (the White Wolf style Ironsworn hack) for a while, I've wrestled with a setting for a Starforged space opera for a bit but given up as too ambitious currently (it might happen later down the line though) and if the recent Tomkin Press newsletter timeline is somewhat reflective of what'll happen, we might see an Ironsworn 2nd edition in 2028 and I doubt I'll ignore that. I also doubt it'll take me that long to run a narrative game again though. We'll see!
Perhaps it is just a coincidence of what I have come across so far, but it's interesting how it seems that the majority of RPG games intended for solo play, seem to always be centered around dark fantasy ? BTW, when are you going to film a campaign of you paying Bone and Shadow ?!?!
I wonder whether the dark fantasy slant is an expression of the turn fantasy in general has taken post ascension of Warhammer, George R. R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and such. Games intended specifically for solo play are a comparatively recent thing as far as them reaching a wider audience is concerned, so maybe it's just a side-effect of their age and the grimdarkification of fantasy in general? I don't personally mind at all, I struggle to play anything that isn't dark fantasy and always have, so I'm all in on this trend!
As for Bone and Shadow, that's a fairly definitive "never", considering that the author is no longer in control of the product and the current publisher seemingly isn't treating it particularly kindly. The spirit of the game lives on in Ker Nethalas and Broken Shores by the same author and I feel like I'd be doing him and myself a disservice playing the older game instead of the more refined iterations on the concept.
@@killtenratsrpg oh ok I haven't done more research on it but noticed the website always says unavailable.i would totally be interested in trying out the newer version of it though. That was the first solo game I ever seen a video about and got me jazzed about solo play to begin with. Well that and also my cousin gave me some pathfinder files that included some solo adventures; which I still havent got around to playing hahaha.
@@paulramos6767 I didn't really know about any of the Bone and Shadow circumstances either, I just heard it directly from the author. The print edition is definitely difficult to come by and there's even some shenanigans with the PDF version on DTRPG where the publisher makes an older, less complete variant available. All in all somewhat unfortunate, it's a great game!
Shiga wants what every other diety in the prime materium wants: to win a wager of arbitrary score keeping over the other dieties active on the plane.
The Primary Characters should be aligned with Shiga's biggest rival, or should be chosen as "neutral arbiters" by the plurality of dieties. The choices and activities of the PCs should be the basis of scores won and lost by the dieties.
And so manifests the Faction Turn from WWN?
That's a neat premise for a campaign for sure. I'm not sure how much I want to put the narrative focus of the campaign on the gods though (at least directly). The notion that Shiga is looking to win the game of cosmic chess and score points is certainly a valid one, though.
I'm not opposed to having this type of "god variant" in the world but I'm leaning more towards the (comparatively) new pantheon leaning this way, while Shiga as the lone remnant of the old paradigm is more abstract and less personalized.
I've had an idea or three sparked by the combined creativity in the comments on this video that'll probably allow me to develop the cosmology and theology of this world about two episodes down the line, so we'll see how it all comes together!
In any case, thank you for the food for thought! And faction turn, oh boy - that's something I always wanted to incorporate and perhaps now is the time. But it's a bit daunting. I'll need to re-read it and decide.
Might be low hanging fruit, but the idea that came to me for the vice would be gambling, with the religion having a lottery system that can result in financial gain or death. Perhaps the net worth of one individual being dispersed among a group of winners, and the individual being sacrificed.
Hah! Interesting. I had a similar thought the other day, sparked by another comment in this section, regarding the wealth expectation being tied to some sort of lottery where you might gain instant upward mobility but just as easily lose it all or end up with some severe obligation (e.g. go forth and kill this king) or simply sacrificed. I feel like it'll make an appearance, even if gambling isn't perhaps the god's main focus but more of an expression of the religion's approach in general.