Pantheons of Kingsland

You can learn a lot about a people from what they think their legends say about them. When it comes to Kingslanders, however, that rule doesn't hold true, mostly because their legends have an unfortunate tendency to slither through the walls at irregular intervals and eat them. This makes them an interesting edge case for memetosociologists, who use the religious constructs of Kingsland as sort of a control group with which to evaluate the beliefs of other cultures.

It is unclear to what extent Kingslander religious beliefs affect the larger questions about whether a god or gods exist, for it is a matter of documented record that Kingsland is home to many paranatural entities not found anywhere else in the world, and the alleged deities worshipped by the Kingslanders might just be bigger fish in the same pond—a sort of supernatural protection racket, if you will. Certainly some of the cultic deities—Buddy "Literally Made of Snakes" Johnson, for example—seem to fit this theory. But for others, such as Silentus or the Conjoined Abominations, it's ambiguous whether there is some external power that explains the phenomena associated with it, or whether these are just ad hoc explanations of naturally-occurring events.

The cults of Kingsland inhabit an ever-shifting political landscape, both because of constant intrigue between different cults, and because parts of Kingsland sometimes move around for no discernible reason. It is said that the cults can't offer an embrace of friendship without plunging a sacrificial dagger into your back (compare to the similar proverb about the Fractured Cities, which holds that every Hierarch's handshake is laced with contact poison). A given cult might not recognize another cult's deity as legitimate for political reasons. This means Kingsland properly has multiple pantheons, each comprising the deities of a group of allied cults.

Cultic worship in Kingsland is heavily based on sacrifice and exhortations to the deity to please, please stay the hell away. Some cults, like the Order of the Ebon Serpent, find their rituals entirely ineffective, often resulting in spillover into other countries when a divine rampage fails to recognize national borders. Other cults find they might as well not have bothered. Consider the case of Qoph, the Kingslandian cultic deity of inscrutability and becoming a hollow shell of yourself. Although Qoph's worshippers spoke of a terrible fate should his worship ever cease, the cult died out in AES 722 after a critical mass of cultists became too depressed to attend services, and so far nothing has happened. Society has progressed, the economy has industrialized, and every measurable statistic of well-being has increased. Which I suppose only goes to show that you can't take the word of crazed cultists at face value.