Oh, look, I missed a thing ~ I've adapted the list of God Views from The World Builder's Guidebook to account for more theologies than listed, and to flatten out the curve to remove that system's monotheism-is-better-than-primitive-polytheism-but-not-better-than-agnosticism-and-atheism-is-best bullshit. But it's been a year since I last looked at it, and I forgot to do that >.< Anyway, rather than going back and redoing everything, I'll just start rolling 1d20 to determine the God View of all subsequent religions.
I roll a 12 on the 1d20 roll, so this next religion is a remote monotheism. Somewhere between the reluctant God of the Lost Secrets of the Rose Brothers and the watchmaker God of complete deism, the number of times God has involved Themself with the world is, according to this religion, very small. Another 12, on 2d6+1 this time, tells us that the Spiritual Aim of this religion is to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of the past, possibly specifically the stories of the few times God (or mebbe Hermachis of the Horizon) has deigned to interact with the world.
What if this was a descendant of the Rose Brothers? Going from a dedication to developing new tech and shifting paradigms and transforming a futureshocked society into something once more unrecognizable to a disillusionment with the idea that people can actually come up with new ideas that quickly (think the original hullabaloo around the iPhone turning into the humdrum banality of yet another minutely-different iProduct)? And then that disillusionment grasping for a straw of hope and becoming ever-more-desperate to remember those times ~ the Gutenberg Bible, the assembly line, et cetera ~ when the new idea really did change something? A desperation that metastasizes into hope and history?
2d6+5 gives us 14, which in turn gives us a Devotion Required that only occurs once in a worshipper's life, just once sometime before dying. That kind of makes me think of the hajj, and I could justify that within the bounds of the Rose Brothers turned historians idea. It would be a pilgrimmage to the site of some major paradigm shift ~ to see the first printing press or the city where agriculture was invented or Charles Babbage's workshop or whatever. But I think, instead, it would make more sense as the religion calling on its members to, once in their life, erect or enact some grand monument to a technological revolution or to some invention that changed everything. These are the people who fund musea and install statues and host grand virtual historical recreations and write epic poetry. The more religious people in this faith spend much of their lives and money on these testaments.
Organizational Structure is determined by a 2d6+7 roll of 9 (yep, rolled a 2). We continue the tradition of Isheean religions involving great variation amongst its subgroups, as this one has a loose hierarchy that leaves most decisions up to individual worshippers. There are higher clergy, but they exist to enable learning and the creation of monuments, not to lead or dictate. They are librarians and teachers and financiers and the people who introduce you to the people you need to know. Another 9 (this time much more predictable, as it's a 2d6+2 roll) tells us, sensibly, that services consist of communal teaching with only limited ritual. When a worshipper completes their monument, they host an unveiling ceremony with a little ritual and a lot more teaching and spreading of knowledge about the innovation at hand.
OK, now this result takes me aback a bit. These faithful are zealous proselytes. That part makes some sense: driven to ensure that the galaxy remembers the past, they have a habit to (at the least) go off on rants about various moments in history when an invention transformed the way people interacted and behaved. That part isn't surprising, but the fact that the religion is intolerant of other sophont races is (2 on 2d6-2). Let's call them a human religion, cuz that's fun. Turns out that these qweens are rather speciesist, insisting that human are the only species with plastic enough neural structures to experience such dramatic shifts in their thinking. Against the evidence of history, they like to claim that other sophont species had a much more gradual and hidebound path of development and that, since entering the galactic community, humans have been responsible for all technological advancement. What jerks! But it does let me show that racism/speciesism can be subtle, it can be nonviolent (which doesn't make it any less dangerous), and it can present itself as something that people could admire, like a commitment to learning and teaching.
This intolerance of other species has worked to limit the size of the religion, which rolled a 7 on 3d6-2 for its size. That's tens of millions, and random.org tells us that it's specifically 69,207,559 sophonts. Significantly more than all of Ishee, still. Rolling for a random percentage of the remaining Isheean population, I get 9.4%, which comes out to 1,506,003 Isheeans. Most of those will be in the Guild-State, obviously (at least with the current religious makeup of the planet). As an interesting demographic thought (it's way too early in the process to do this kind of demographic work), the Guild-State has about 38.5% of the Isheean population. 0.094 divided by that percentage comes out to about 25% (roughly) of the Guild-State following this religion, which is a significant number. If the other percentages carry over appropriately, then the Guild-State would also be (all percentages approximate at the moment) 23% atheist/agnostic/non-religious/other, 36% Liberty Fellowship, and 2% Beaumonters. When I do get down to that kind of work, though, I think the Associationists would cluster in the Consular Marches, being more representative of galactic culture than Isheean, resulting in fewer of them in the Guild-State.
So, this significant religion, what's it called? Let's roll that dWikipedia! We're just gonna steal that village's name directly and call it Azeyrenawt.
The religious landcape of Ishee so far:
4,966,607 sophonts (31% of the population) atheist/agnostic/non-religious/other
7,690,230 sophonts (48%) Liberty Fellowship of Spirit-Listeners (known as Fellows, Associationists, or Listeners)
6 sophonts (essentially 0%) Lost Secrets of the Rose Brothers (generally just called gerontocrats or old fogies)
429,593 sophonts (app. 2.7%) Beaumont Cosmological Computing System (generally called Beaumonters, Algorithmists, or Systemites)
1,506,003 sophonts (9.4%) Azeyrenawt (generally called Azeyrenawti)
1,428,915 sophonts (app. 8.9%) not yet accounted for
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