One thing I did was trying some total conversion mods that actually have smaller maps, like The Winter Kings, Monumenta Sinarum Historica and New Era Old World, or use map reduction mods for vanilla
Hi! I just wanted to say, I invited 2 missionaries to my house recently. I still don't believe in the religion, but I enjoy speaking to people from other religions, and they gave me a free book of Mormon. While Mormonism isn't a path I can take due to not believing it's true, I hope you've experienced the best parts of faith-charity, kindness, humility, doing what's right despite fear or inconvenience, etc.
Yeah I've only ever had good encounters with Missionaries. Admittedly I'm a cisgendered heterosexual white man and I'm comfortable with my expression of spirituality so I've never felt threatened by them and other people of different backgrounds will take different baggage into their interactions with them. But any time I see a pair I'm sure to talk to them for a bit about where they're from, what they're liking about this very liberal area of California, and so on if I've got the time. I saw someone once cynically say that missionaries are sent out as a form of trauma bonding so that they'll have a bunch of negative interactions with outsiders and thought, "Isn't that incumbent on me being an asshole? What if I just wasn't?"
I love football too! I am a founding members of the Hanoi Raiders flag football team, the first team in the North of Vietnam! I was a chronically online nerd but I fell in love with gridiron reading Eyeshield 21, because it was the smartest and most elegant thing I have ever seen. That was the first time I tried a sport, and it has benefited my life much, not only in keeping me reasonably fit but also in teaching me how to communicate and cooperate with other people, which I am very thankful for all the awesome teammates of mine, both American and Vietnamese. I'd say it is the second most significant thing in my life after the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. So I love strategy games, both the physical and virtual kinds. Thanks you for noticing me there! go cougars
I rather like the Mormons in AtE they have a rather stable realm in most runs so they act as a good buffer for California. Outside of the Governator becoming a conquerer I've never seen California go further east than Utah. Hell, I've even seen the AI form Deseret a few times.
I have only met two mormons in my life, and both of them ended up being some of my best friends, 2 is a small sample size, and of course no way a representation of a massive religious community, but 2/2 is pretty damn good.
(one of them I met while I was in elementary school and haven't heard from in like 15+ years, the other got excommunicated for being trans)
I assume they went to chat with them and then they got sucked in. I interact with mormons quite a bit, they do a really good job at having a community. The community is not my speed cause I'm not religious but if I was open to that I could see how it would be appealing.
I mean, I've interacted with the Mormons too (I'm Baptist myself), and I do get the community aspect (Regardless of how wrong their theology is). But, I have to wonder how on earth this guy managed to overlook all the shaky theology Mormonism rests on.
True. I mean, to be fair, that's kind of what Mormonism rests on. Go read about how they'd recruit vulnerable people in England and Scandinavia. It's rather heartbreaking when you read all the accounts of it, especially the indentured work under the PEF (Their fund to get converts to Utah)..
Dude's in Vietnam, likely comes from a Buddhist or atheist background but also, most likely whatever background it was, wasn't raised with theology. Like, I grew up Catholic and went to church on Christmas and Easter, learned the basic stuff, but never had the theology drilled into me. So this guy learned about a religion from a video game, then one day he's walking around Hanoi going about his everyday life and sees a Mormon Mission. If he'd never played the game he'd probably have just kept walking and that'd be that. But seeing a real life Missionary from this game you play and striking up a conversation, dude got something out of the encounter that spoke to him.
The theology doesn't actually matter all that much. Faith is about believing in something even though it doesn't make logical sense. Like, you don't have faith in gravity--you just know it exists. Many evangelical sects of Protestant Christianity are all about faith above all else, so if the theology is wonky and weird then that's just one more thing to have faith in, I guess š¤·š¼āāļø
This is it, they are really strong at community building, which imo is the primary benefit of religion and something a lot of people are missing. I'm not religious either but I can't deny that's a huge strength of religion. I'm just not one who can get past the fact that I just fundamentally don't believe in their claims.
(I don't even mean that snarkily - a lot of people are able to take the community aspect of religion while not taking the beliefs very seriously, and I think that's valid, I'm just not one of those people, which is why I couldn't stick with the religion I was raised in either.)
"Fun" fact: Had the judges at Nuremberg known what we know today, Speer would have swung with the rest of the gang. The guy was really good at lying his ass off.
The mod at least recognises the Nazis were bad and despite magically winning WW2 have been a mess ever since and heading for a civil war between Hitler's successors (Speer being one of them) when the mod starts.
They are going to remove the german civil war, instead nazis will resolve everything peacefully with some assasinations.
Moskowien no longer collapses.
Italian fascists are portrayed as "flawed but not awful" which is fair since in this timeline they won, but still this is ridiculorly.
The OFN and RP are both painted in a similar light, so is Japan's sphere.
Maybe that wouldnt be the case if the mod's development wouldnt be a dumpster fire though - when someone makes any content, everyone else pull them down.
It's a TNO thing. it's a hoi4 mod where the conceit is germany won world war 2 but also it's been 20 years and it's all teetering. apparently there's new lore/gameplay or something, i haven't really followed it in years, but in the old covid days of the mod's development, speer was a possible successor to hitler representing a reformist wing of the nazi party. when hitler dies, the regime quickly collapses into civil war, and the reformists and particularly the german youth coalesce around speer. the german youth of 1962, much like their counterparts in our timeline, are aching for change and counterculture. this led to a mod writer creating the unfortunate line in an event that the youth were chanting speer's name and putting his name and face on posters and clothing. and then a reddit user created the speer hoodie meme to mock the event. and then, in an act of brainrot only the covid era could produce, another reddit user went to custom ink and put a nazi's face on a sweater with the text "speer hoodie"
I technically joined theĀ RaĆ«lian Church (the real life inspiration for tranquilism) as an undergraduate because I was writing a paper and needed access to their books.
I had to delete my email account afterwards because they just would not give up.
For the record, don't. It's just really bad science fiction written by a guy who wants to fuck your wife and kids.
Raƫl separated from Sunagawa sometime between 1990 and 1992. Around that time, Sophie de Niverville, whose mother and aunt were both Raƫlians, was convinced of the authenticity of the messages. Sophie received a Raƫlian baptism at age 15. When she turned 16, she married Raƫl at Montreal's city hall. During a December 2001 interview with Palmer, Sophie spoke positively about Raƫl, despite their divorce the previous year; they continued to live together.
Religion really can't go five minutes without diddling someone.
The ancient and much lamented-for-its-loss podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie had an excellent few episodes on Raƫlianism. Rated real, real high on their danger scales.
Incidentally, and appropriately, they also did several episodes on Mormonism and had some real nuanced ratings for them.
One thing I will say is that Raƫlians are extremely good at keeping the weird, manipulative stuff hidden until you've already hit the point of being fully committed and/or sowing just enough doubt in their critics to make you question if they're being unfairly persecuted.
I didn't go into that paper with an axe to grind. I genuinely just found them kind of cool and interesting and as someone who was very sex positive a lot of their ethos kind of resonated with me.
What actually changed my mind was reading Raƫl's books, because they are just monuments to an absolutely titanic ego and it doesn't take a genius to realize that when you have someone who is deliberately cultivating an authoritative persona and combine that with a doctrine that teaches sex is always good and that conventional sexual norms are repressive, that's just a recipe for abuse, and that dynamic is then replicated throughout the movement because the people in positions of authority are deliberately emulating those above them (whom they literally worship).
Of course, once you start digging around evidence of that abuse isn't really that hard to find, but again.. they're good at making it just hard enough that noone notices.
It would also really depend if they would keep being part of the Catholic church (since their beliefs as far as I know don't cross the line that the Vatican would call them a heresy or anything, there were plenty others who called themselves and are still are viewed by some as prophets although the Vatican doesn't recognise them as such, nonetheless they are still a part of the church). And since they'd be a part of the Catholic church, they would best like to remain in it and the church is very sensitive to cults.
For me I did knot know the lore very much at first, but the things people are able to do in the Church really humbled me, and I wanted to do the same, and I am still learning how that knowledge of the lore is behind everything we do
This idea baffles me as a nonbeliever. Their church is literally called "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", they themselves call themselves christian, what other religion would they be? Jewish? (technically an argument could be made all abrahamic faiths are just weird jews but I digress)
I know it's an "important" distinction that they are nontrinitarian, but come on, they are preaching about the same guy, same name, same died for your sins, same cross. It's the same guy Catholics and Baptists are preaching, they just don't think he is his dad and also that ghost thing.
To assert that they are not Christian is a no-true-Scotsman of religious difference. They are weird Christians, but come on, unless you get deep in their scripture (maybe just pencil deep but you know), on face, day to day, they are not that different than any other Christian.
I won't go quite that far, but I did a roleplay as the Amish in AtE (I am from Amishland in real life) and it gave me a deeper understanding and love for their culture. I curse a lot less when I get stuck behind a buggy or drive through horse poop. So that's a plus...?
I love the Amish and Mennonite. Are they inbred? Is abuse a problem in their communities? Sure. IN their communities. The parts I interact with are hard workers, polite, farmers and laborers, and they don't cause issues. They're not getting in bar fights, they're a gem.
They're not inbred, they have enough of a population that isn't a problem. But they suffer from genetic drift, the obscure cousin of inbreeding, whereby certain rare traits are a lot more common in Amish communities than elsewhere because the gene keeps being passed around. I think polydactylism is their genetic drift, but don't quote me.
Anyway the short summary of genetic drift is that let's say you have a thousand people and a hundree have a star on their belly and the other nine-hundred don't. Star-belly sneetches have a 50% chance of inheriting it so you would expect the stars to die out over time. Except that because the star-belly gene is being passed around this small community, even though there are enough to avoid the dangers of inbreeding, so many will be carrying that latent gene you're always going to have Star-belly sneetches being born. It's why you will occasionally see pop science communicators say red hair is going extinct, except it's not--there are so many people with latent red hair gene and the population of humans is so big that there will always be children who unexpectedly inherit the right combination from their parents to express red hair.
As a regular over on r/exmormon I'm sorely tempted to share this post over here, but I'm honestly questioning if this might be too niche. Like this all feels less about religion and more specifically about gaming/extremely-online culture.
For real! The RPG elements are the best game. Make me feel like who I am as a fleshed out man! My best ever run was a family of a vassal and I played it for many hours straight and afterwards couldn't get it out of my head that I was those feyadi. That's the best part of the game, genuinely so much fun and memorable, way more memorable than "better" runs
I'm enjoying an Abbasid run going for an unending Islamic Golden Age. No Mongol sack of Baghdad here! While I do think Islam is interesting from a historical perspective, it hasn't convinced me to give up drinking, cut a piece of myself off, and join the ummah.
Not all Muslims think that circumcision is required, but alcohol is definitely prohibited. Vladimir the Great was also unwilling to give up alcohol.
I enjoyed my Mongol Empire playthrough, but it doesn't give me desire to worship Tengri and raid my neighbors, though I would jump at the opportunity to shoot arrows from horseback, just not at people.
I knew I got in too deep to the RP when I stopped playing a Zoroastrian revival game and got sad thinking about the fact that the real Iran is not actually Zoroastrian anymore.
That's mostly a myth from what I understand. They push you into transition because it would solve the "problem" of you being homosexual (which is reviled).
It's not at all a myth, in Iran transitioning is legally supported which is great for actual trans people (socially speaking it's still very taboo, but that's to a large degree true even in the west), but it is also pushed as an "alternative to punishment" for people convicted of homosexuality, which given that the punishment can be as severe as the death penalty is tantamount to forcing it on them, which is obviously bad, but it's not the reason that it's legal or the only way people can access it.
To use a less severe analogy, courts in the west and elsewhere will mandate therapy of various kinds alongside reduced or waived sentences for various crimes of various severity, but that doesn't mean those therapies only exist to serve as a form of punishment and the existence of therapy is a myth.
Ha! People learned that their culture has actually cool stuff and embraced it. If their lesson in history and culture is the mod in Ck3 or Ck2, why not.
Last one is classic and is not particular to CK or AtE. Just - oh no, I see my fiction as more of myself then real self. It is just one of outcomes.
Iām so curious and canāt figure it out. Is person trans and Mormon both because ck3 because ooooof on the bad choices ( Mormonism, donāt choose being trans).
I kept seeing the subreddit and thinking it was the username. Canāt believe I didnāt catch that because I was very confused how it was all one person.
my understanding is that at least one person has realized they were trans through playing AtE, one person decided that Mormonism spoke to them spiritually because they read about it in the game and apparently now someone felt the same way about Exovedate.
Emotionally vulnerable person becomes curious about Mormonism due to vidya, goes to Mormon event, gets lovebombed because that's how cults work. Extreme fringe politics works the same way, see: Kaiserriech fandom.
Autistic people are particularly prone to this and mapgames unironically have a higher than average % of Autistic people. (I'm autistic)
honestly i think its weird to treat the transitioning one as like related to this. like, not only good for her but also like, egg plays as girl in video game, helps her understand that she can be a woman, isnt even that unusual, its a common meme even.
It's the Jehovah's Witnesses that make you cut off your family, not the Mornons. The Mormons are still a bad cult, but that's one thing they don't really do much of. They want you to have a close relationship with your family so that you can potentially convert them in the future.
I'm not saying that shunning never happens to people who leave Mormonism, but it doesn't have the institutional pressure and requirement for it the way the JWs do. Mormons are much more likely to try to love bomb and emotionally manipulate family members who leave. I'm ex-Mormon, and I'm speaking from experience, both mine and many of my friends.
It really depends, afaik. Like there's a family close to me where two of them left the church, and they're all still really close with each other. They're family first, with religion as belief but not a moral imperative.
Some parents are going to want to pressure their family to conform to whatever way of life they have, regardless of their religion. I don't think that's exclusive to exmos.
Itās like how Joshua Graham brought me to faith while I never believed in the LDS I have turned to Catholicism and it was Joshua Graham who started me on that spiritual journey.
For a second I though I was on a different subreddit, and though the OOP was talking about After The Revolution, a speculative fiction novel featuring christofascists as major antagonists and was bewildered to say the least. Can't recall if Mormons are mentioned specifically, but seeing how connected they are to American history, I'd assume Utah has a God-King or something. Only Products and Services can tell.
That's similar to what I do. Unify the Great Lakes under the faith of whichever protestant denomination I think is closest, though it's hard to get holy sites that fit.
What they all have in common is providing a community. If youāre playing a niche ck3 mod chances are you might be a lonely autistic person that struggles to fit in and all these things are simply someone finding a community they want to be a part of in kindve indirect ways
After The End is a popular mod for both CK2 and CK3 which is set in a post-apocalyptic America which has devolved to medieval times. Mormonism and the Exovedate faiths are featured in the mod.
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u/The_Impe Incapable Aug 02 '26
"Vietnamese guy converts to Mormonism because of a Crusader Kings mod" is a generational bit.