Converting dwarves to pray to certain deitys

[Nark]

Hey all,

I've been trying to make a fort where it essentially becomes a death worshiping cult but I'm no dwarves actually worship the death deity in the fort.

The only temple I've created for them is to the god of death and got a couple of good bards in there but the bards never seem to actually preform songs for worship (which I thought might help with conversions). Even forcing the entire fortress into the temple using a barrow and leaving them there for a month+ with food and drink resulted in no worshipers and I didn't notice any performances either.

Does anyone know a way to start getting your dwarves to convert to a desired religion?
TYIA

[Dain_Ironfoot]

I was just wondering the same thing... started reading the wiki for dwarf fortress (check it out) and it looks like once you make a temple and increase its value enough you will get an option to elect a Priest which will convert your dwarves to the desired religion. Hope that helps, make sure to refer to the wiki for better details. I'm not sure of all of this since I just started reading it.

Here's a good place to start: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Religion

Edit: So far what I've found out from trying to upgrade my temple is that you need 10 worshippers to be able to have a Priest. Other than that, I'm guessing your only other option is to have a Prophet visitor come that converts dwarves into followers of certain religions, I think, which would just be by luck and chance.

[Helios]

Originally posted by Nark:

Hey all,

I've been trying to make a fort where it essentially becomes a death worshiping cult but I'm no dwarves actually worship the death deity in the fort.

The only temple I've created for them is to the god of death and got a couple of good bards in there but the bards never seem to actually preform songs for worship (which I thought might help with conversions). Even forcing the entire fortress into the temple using a barrow and leaving them there for a month+ with food and drink resulted in no worshipers and I didn't notice any performances either.

Does anyone know a way to start getting your dwarves to convert to a desired religion?
TYIA

there is a setting (think game difficult) how many members you need to form a temple so look at the yellow religions in the menue where to choose a new temple area and look how many workshippers you have that workship the deathgod and change it to that example i have around 90 dwarves workshipping odsod bonedeath but there are only around 25 in 2 religions that workship them.

[Dain_Ironfoot]

Originally posted by Helios:

Originally posted by Nark:

Hey all,

I've been trying to make a fort where it essentially becomes a death worshiping cult but I'm no dwarves actually worship the death deity in the fort.

The only temple I've created for them is to the god of death and got a couple of good bards in there but the bards never seem to actually preform songs for worship (which I thought might help with conversions). Even forcing the entire fortress into the temple using a barrow and leaving them there for a month+ with food and drink resulted in no worshipers and I didn't notice any performances either.

Does anyone know a way to start getting your dwarves to convert to a desired religion?
TYIA

there is a setting (think game difficult) how many members you need to form a temple so look at the yellow religions in the menue where to choose a new temple area and look how many workshippers you have that workship the deathgod and change it to that example i have around 90 dwarves workshipping odsod bonedeath but there are only around 25 in 2 religions that workship them.

Ah, I see he might be able to adjust those settings, like "Priesthood unit count"... but it still looks like you would need at least 1 follower. If so, that might do the trick.

[Bralbaard]

Dwarves are not being converted during the game as far as I'm aware. They stick with whatever religion they worship now.

[Nark]

Originally posted by Dain_Ironfoot:

I was just wondering the same thing... started reading the wiki for dwarf fortress (check it out) and it looks like once you make a temple and increase its value enough you will get an option to elect a Priest which will convert your dwarves to the desired religion. Hope that helps, make sure to refer to the wiki for better details. I'm not sure of all of this since I just started reading it.

Here's a good place to start: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Religion

Edit: So far what I've found out from trying to upgrade my temple is that you need 10 worshippers to be able to have a Priest. Other than that, I'm guessing your only other option is to have a Prophet visitor come that converts dwarves into followers of certain religions, I think, which would just be by luck and chance.

Yeah I ran into the same issue with not being able to setup the preisthood without anyone actually worshiping the god.

I also checked the wiki before asking here. Wiki is so damn good for this game!

Originally posted by Helios:

there is a setting (think game difficult) how many members you need to form a temple so look at the yellow religions in the menue where to choose a new temple area and look how many workshippers you have that workship the deathgod and change it to that example i have around 90 dwarves workshipping odsod bonedeath but there are only around 25 in 2 religions that workship them.

Ohhh okay, I'll have a look. I don't think there are any established faiths for the death god in my world but I'll have a deeper look into that side of it tonight.

Thanks heaps for the replies guys! If I manage to get it working I'll let you know how I did it :)

[Nark]

Update on what I've found:

After trying for around 5+ hours I'm starting to think it's not possible. I'm 4 years into the fort and still only have 1 worshiper (which showed up through migration) for either of the deities I would like to promote and still no requests for the priesthood.

Turned the priesthood and temple difficulty settings all down to 1 and they seem to still not make requests for temples unless there is 10 or more in a religion (possibly bugged?). I've got 1 worshiper of both the death based deities and created a temple for them both but no religion is getting established and no priesthood is getting requested.

Thanks to not being able to setup a priest to convert people to worship death from the beginning it seems like it's basically RNG from migrants and world gen if you'll actually get anyone that worships the deity you want and if a religion actually gets established.

I also tried some out of the box things like putting corpses all over the fort and exposing the dwarves to heaps of death and carnage hoping they might have a traumatic experience to make them worship death but no luck on that end either.

About to just open the fort up and leave it running to wait for most of them to get slaughtered to see if that makes them see how great death is, but it's most likely going to end up being a "fun" stress relief for me after the failure.

[Grumpulus]

Having general worshipers of a god doesn't get you temples - you need 'organized churches' - they're listed in yellow.
Unfortunately I've never seen an 'organized' religion spawn - but in theory....

people have applied SCIENCE! here... the way it used to work (and I don't know if this is still true) but children inherit the pantheon of their mother, plus one more god.

But - theoretically - dwarfs can have a religious experience and pick up religion if a forgotten beast makes an impression (usually a bad one - do they make good ones?). For example, if you build a statue of a FB it generally has spheres it's associated with (caverns seems popular) which suggests that somewhere someone may well be worshiping it. Perhaps if one comes that's in the death sphere and you fed it a couple hundred cages of captured elves...
i dont see how that gets you an organized church but, meh, they're elves... worth a shot.

What I have had is a start where 6 of the 7 dwarves were already part of a single organized religion - and the vast majority of migrants were as well. So - along those lines - maybe pick a starting dwarven civilization that has necromancers. It'll probably end badly - but it would maybe get you your death cult.

Some folks have tried 'monastery challenges' in the past - limiting size... bouncing anyone that isnt 'part of the church'... and if you get an actual church you like at start you can eventually make it work - i think you'd have to inspect their 'relationships' and prevent anyone joining that had a relationship with a deity other than the one you're after. That's tough because it's rare to find dwarves with single god relationships as it is - much less the one you want. It would probably be a long process.

Something like a decade ago Toady chimed in on the religion thing
as per toady: RELIGION_SPHERE lists the spheres that must be covered in some way by your pantheon.

So in theory you could edit the dwarf raws...
change it to RELIGION_SPHERE:DEATH:512
and it would make all gods gods of death...
I have a feeling that might really screw up your civ gen... but it might be funny.
(mess with raws at your own risk...)

[DoubleG]

I noticed that if you make the dwarfs lives really horrible. All work, no play. Constant suffering and torment from overwork and corpses etc. They do tend to gravitate towards praying to gods of decay etc if their life is bad.

I had a fort where almost the entire fort refused to lkeave the temple of some random goblin deity of torment and decay I accidently gave a temple too. None of them worshiped him directly but they spent all their time in their praying for suffering to afflict them, which I obliged.

[Smurf-O-Pax]

Make a Refuse Stockpile and a Corpse one in a main traffic area. I basically had this because i didnt know about this forbid refuse in your main stockpile thing. My dwarves had so many thoughts about death and decay that after a while the whole fortress was worshipping a Death god. Had this happening in every Fort until i stopped using refuse in my main Stockpile and rub the corpses in their face as often as possible ^^. Miasma also helps :)

[Nark]

Originally posted by Grumpulus:

Having general worshipers of a god doesn't get you temples - you need 'organized churches' - they're listed in yellow.
Unfortunately I've never seen an 'organized' religion spawn - but in theory....

people have applied SCIENCE! here... the way it used to work (and I don't know if this is still true) but children inherit the pantheon of their mother, plus one more god.

But - theoretically - dwarfs can have a religious experience and pick up religion if a forgotten beast makes an impression (usually a bad one - do they make good ones?). For example, if you build a statue of a FB it generally has spheres it's associated with (caverns seems popular) which suggests that somewhere someone may well be worshiping it. Perhaps if one comes that's in the death sphere and you fed it a couple hundred cages of captured elves...
i dont see how that gets you an organized church but, meh, they're elves... worth a shot.

What I have had is a start where 6 of the 7 dwarves were already part of a single organized religion - and the vast majority of migrants were as well. So - along those lines - maybe pick a starting dwarven civilization that has necromancers. It'll probably end badly - but it would maybe get you your death cult.

Some folks have tried 'monastery challenges' in the past - limiting size... bouncing anyone that isnt 'part of the church'... and if you get an actual church you like at start you can eventually make it work - i think you'd have to inspect their 'relationships' and prevent anyone joining that had a relationship with a deity other than the one you're after. That's tough because it's rare to find dwarves with single god relationships as it is - much less the one you want. It would probably be a long process.

Something like a decade ago Toady chimed in on the religion thing
as per toady: RELIGION_SPHERE lists the spheres that must be covered in some way by your pantheon.

So in theory you could edit the dwarf raws...
change it to RELIGION_SPHERE:DEATH:512
and it would make all gods gods of death...
I have a feeling that might really screw up your civ gen... but it might be funny.
(mess with raws at your own risk...)

Thanks heaps for the details post Grumpulus!

Yeah I started to realize that about needing an established religion during this fort, did not know that they can't just spawn though which is a bit disappointing.
I feel like the first option you should get instead of a bard is some form of priest which spreads the word of the temples god and gets you more followers, or make it so bards actually help with converting people to worship the deity. Then once you have enough followers (~10-20 or so) a religion can be founded/spawns.

The FB idea sounds amazing I gotta say haha I'm going to keep an eye out for one on my next attempt to see if I can make something happen with that for sure!

I was hoping I could do it without having to get into editing the game files but from what you're saying it sounds like it's not really possible unless world gen and migration smiles upon you :(

[Nark]

Originally posted by Smurf-O-Pax:

Make a Refuse Stockpile and a Corpse one in a main traffic area. I basically had this because i didnt know about this forbid refuse in your main stockpile thing. My dwarves had so many thoughts about death and decay that after a while the whole fortress was worshipping a Death god. Had this happening in every Fort until i stopped using refuse in my main Stockpile and rub the corpses in their face as often as possible ^^. Miasma also helps :)

Hmmm okay, I'll have to give that another go. I tried this in my fort as mention and had corpse stockpiles all over the place but it didn't seem to do anything - I keep just getting "Seen XYZs corpse and felt nothing" for everyone in the fort. Left it like that for a year or so before just letting some gobbos come through and slaughter 90% of the fort and then left them like that for another year with corpses all over the fort but still didn't have anyone start worshiping death :(

Might try it again but make it like that from embark and see how it goes, cheers dude

Originally posted by DoubleG:

I noticed that if you make the dwarfs lives really horrible. All work, no play. Constant suffering and torment from overwork and corpses etc. They do tend to gravitate towards praying to gods of decay etc if their life is bad.

I had a fort where almost the entire fort refused to lkeave the temple of some random goblin deity of torment and decay I accidently gave a temple too. None of them worshiped him directly but they spent all their time in their praying for suffering to afflict them, which I obliged.

Might try this in conjunction with corpses everywhere and see if that does the trick. I'm glad you gave your dwarves what they wanted though, truly a benevolent leader haha