Why Do Primordials Have So Many Cults?
Header Art: Princes of the Apocalypse by Wizards of the Coast
Why does it seem as if only primordials and ancient elder beings have cults doing tasks for them? Deities of the outer planes, who control heavens and hells, all have clerics and churches to help them out, but they are rarely the victims of an adventuring group’s wrath. So what makes primordials, and various powerful beings like fiends, elder evils, and more, just so focused on making cults?
Note: Cults and religion can be a touchy subject for many. I just want to make it perfectly clear that my discussion of cults and religions in this post, and in others on this site, are strictly focused on them inside of a Role-Playing Game. I am making no statements on real world religions or cults.
Cults and Religions
For many, there might be some confusion between the actual differences of cults and religions. If you go by definitions, the main difference comes from cults being made up of a smaller group of people who worship a person, object, or idea that isn’t very well known or popular. Typically, people associate sinister or strange intentions with cults, even if they are only worshiping a turnip that demands they do nothing but grow more turnips. Religions, on the other hand, have been around for a long time and are largely recognized by the populace at large, even if not everyone follows that religion. Typically their teachings and worship are open to the public and anyone can decide to join the religion and its followers, or find more information to satisfy their curiosity.
What this means is that cults are shrouded in mystery. Their focus may be off-putting or completely secretive to outsiders, and they are going to have a smaller number of members. Religions will typically have been around for longer, or it could be that if a cult has been around for decades, it is different versions of it that pop up, and then its members are scattered or destroyed routinely when the cult starts trying to fulfill their strange or secretive goals. In this situation, cults may eventually turn into a religion if given enough time, their members grow, and many of their teachings become more widely accepted by the public. To that end, it would require the cult to reveal several, though not all, of their secrets or make their messaging more appetizing to people.
Elder Evils, Fiends, Gods, Primordials
There are a wide variety of powerful beings that might call for mortals to bring about their will on the material plane. Entities like gods, who reside on the outer planes in a typical cosmology, often are the ones with religions - those who follow these gods are often accepted by the populace at large, even if they happen to be evil-aligned. While people, and governments, may not exactly sanction doing evil things - their temples might still be found throughout the lands.
Other entities are not so lucky, potentially because their relationship to a mortal’s soul is disconnected. Demon princes and devil lords gain no real power from a soul beyond being able to bargain for it. Elder evils have no connection to the soul beyond wanting to devour the multiverse. Primordials are the gods of elements, they are matter over belief, and so to them, the soul offers no benefit to them as it is not an element they can control. As for gods, they have a great desire for souls because it is what gives them power. When a mortal worships a god, they gain power from it. When a mortal’s soul travels and lives out its existence on the outer planes, it becomes part of the plane, further granting gods who reside on that plane ever greater powers.
The outer planes are planes of pure belief and faith. They rely solely on mortals believing and offering up mental energies in the form of worship to them. In contrast, the inner planes are planes of elemental matter. They require no belief as everything within the planes is tangible and physically felt, providing all the evidence one needs that can be held, felt, interacted with, and manipulated.
The Primordial Cult
Following a primordial doesn’t require belief, because if you can touch earth, you know that it is real. Primordials can operate with actual acts and visible manipulations because they don’t rely on their believers having faith in them. Instead, they can act and cause direct events. For many, this very real act of power is the evidence they need to believe in a higher power, even if they don’t realize exactly what that power wants from them. This style of acting is true for all other deities, they can act in the world because they aren’t confined to their followers having faith.
For this reason, cults sprout up and membership is quick to follow because there is evidence that there is a very real, very powerful being at the center of this fellowship. The powerful being can extend its very real power to members of its cult without first having to win over the faith and belief that the gods of the outer planes have to contend with. Primordials can personally interact with mortals on the material plane, though a few are locked away, which makes their interactions a bit harder to deal with. Gods, on the other hand, have their metaphysical hands tied - in some worlds they may have been locked out, only able to interact through their clerics.
Focused
Cults are going to be singularly focused, focused on accomplishing whatever task the primordial at the center of their cult wants. This could be a release from being imprisoned, finding a powerful artifact that will unlock the primordial’s power, or defeating an ancient enemy that threatens the primordial’s rise. The cults aren’t focused on other things, not concerning themselves with having widespread appeal, not because they hate a crowd but because the primordial has no need for more followers than what is necessary.
For gods, they need more worshipers, as the more worshipers they have, the stronger they become. A primordial does not gain additional strength from worshipers, but from the element that they are. So long as they are surrounded by their matter, their material, the purest form of such that they can find, they gain power from it. They don’t rely on faith and worship because they are beings of evidence through matter. If they had more worshipers spread out across the world, it would divert their attention and diffuse their focus. They have no need for missionaries to spread their name as they only want enough members to guarantee their success for their focus. To have more than that would split their focus, making it harder to get their tasks done.
Evil Deeds
It’s not that every cult out there is evil, just the ones that adventuring parties are likely to run into. Not every primordial wants to destroy the world or remake it as a new version of their element, some are quite peaceful and only wish to ensure that the matter that they are apart of remains pure - like how a primordial of water would want to keep the waterways throughout the multiverse clean from chemicals or material that would destroy it. Unfortunately for all primordials, or other beings, trying to start a cult, few people are going to share the same interests.
Those who are interested in joining a cult are often tasked with doing a lot more than a religion would ask of them. This is partly because there are so few members of the cult, but also because the leader of the cult isn’t interested in followers for the sake of followers. This means that if they want to attract members, they need to have very good reasons, have similar interests, and provide some sort of reward for work, like money, magic, or power over others.
Those who are most likely to join a cult focused on foul tasks do so because it allows them to give into their evil nature. They can commit evil deeds, and the primordial who provides the focus to the cult doesn’t care so long as the cult continues working towards its ultimate goal. It isn’t picky about what its members do so long as they continue working towards the goal, and the primordial continues to give them more magic, money, or power the closer they get to the goal line. Once they cross that goal line, though, the primordial is more than willing to kill everyone, or at least those who cause too many problems, as it doesn’t need them anymore until it decides its next goal.
Internal Conflict
Within the ranks of a primordial’s cult are followers who have few qualms about causing trouble and devastation. Members are constantly vying against each other, hoping to remove rivals and gain ever greater power over other members. While religions have clear structures, and the priests are expected to behave in a certain way, cults may not have such rigid structures. A primordial promises power to its followers, but that doesn’t mean it gives them a system to organize themselves. Instead, it lets them figure out how they want to set it up. This can cause quite a complicated structure where the strong lead, no matter how unqualified they are for the position.
Due to this unstable organizational structure within the cult, it can be easy to cause it to collapse or face unstable membership numbers. If killing the officers above you is rewarded with promotions and more power from the primordial, the number of followers can quickly dwindle to only a handful of strong members that are spending more time plotting to kill their rivals than on accomplishing the primordial’s plans. On the other hand, if there is a rigid structure for the organization, while it can be handy to keep members from killing each other, it also means that it is slower as there are strict ways of handling decisions within the organization and it begins getting bloated.
Religions, on the other hand, typically lean towards having a heavily bloated organization that makes accomplishing very specific goals difficult. It requires hundreds of members to act in sync, while a cult that only has a few dozen members can quickly move or accomplish simple tasks, even if half of the members are planning on killing the other half of the members.
External Conflict
A primordial’s cult is often at odds with the rest of the world, largely because their organization is wrapped in strangeness and secrets. They don’t offer explanations for what they are doing and it causes havoc - especially as their ultimate plans will end up causing destruction. To this end, they are often attacked and wiped out by adventurers.
Due to their smaller numbers, they have an easier time avoiding notice for a while, but because they have such small numbers, it’s easy for them to be overwhelmed by opposition. If they lose a dozen members, that could be a sizable portion of their cult wiped out, which endangers the mission set to them by their primordial. It is often of the utmost importance that if they are detected by a village, traveling merchant, or someone who could share sightings of them, that they eliminate them to keep them from sharing what they’ve seen. This will eventually attract the attention of local authorities, but in the short run it allows them to operate within the shadows.
If the cult can move fast enough to accomplish their goals, than they are willing to run risks where they end up committing atrocities. This only goes to paint them in an even worse light than others cults get, causing adventurers to descend upon them like locusts.
Like what we are doing here?
Support us on Patreon!
You’ll get early access to deep dives, our Homebrew Hoard, Monster Thursdays, and more!
Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on everything we talk about!
