I was thinking rituals should be short term events that would be easy to include within the (soon to be) existing framework, so I am hesitant at the notion of having these ideas under the "ritual" umbrella.
However, no religion would be complete without laws and directives. A new umbrella is in order.
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Practices would be a set of requirements and restrictions that a believer adheres to. They, like song, dance, and rituals, would be spread through the knowledge system and it is the priests responsibility to teach the faithful. Possibilities include sacred or unclean animals, vegetables, and minerals; specific garments or ornaments; and forbidden jobs, all with a possible temporal component.
For ease of programming and comprehension, practices should be all be negative ("don't do this"). Even requirements to wear specific clothes should be considered this way ("never stop wearing your socks"). This is in contrast to rituals, which are strictly positive ("do this").
For balance and realism, an individual's adherence to practices are dependent on the individual's personality traits and the adherence of other individuals to the practice (including those outside of the faith). This will lead to an all-or-nothing deal, with small or diverse forts rarely adhering to practices and large or homogeneous forts often adhering to them.
In order to generate self-consistent rituals and practices, religions should generate a set of sacred and unclean objects to use in rituals. These objects must be available to the entity that founds the religion.
In case more !!fun!! is required, religious individuals (mainly nobles) may wish to impose practices onto others. Normally this would only cause a few problems (perhaps if a dwarf's favorite beer is banned), but if a ritual of a different religion requires the donning of a banned garment, there could be resentment towards those who mandated the practice. If this happens too much, there could be spirals in the future.
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Looking back, this practices framework only covers one of LMeire's ideas.
Possible solutions to the other 3:
1) Have an ever-burning flame be associated with a temple. Perhaps when the noble priest demands the temple, he or she could demand some specific furniture to be placed inside before satisfied.
3) According to the randomly generated values of the priest, he could mandate expeditions to retrieve the artifacts. This should be very simple with the World-Gen Artifact framework.
4) When a religious noble is randomly generated, one of the options may be a required ritual every so often.
To sum up ideas so far:
* Religions are dedicated to a random subset of gods within a pantheon
* Religions randomly choose objects available to the parent entity to be sacred or unclean
* Rituals (positive) and Practices (negative) are procedurally generated pieces of knowledge associated with a single religion
* Rituals are group actions that often require specific materials or locations
* Practices are sets of banned actions
* Religious nobles are associated with a single religion and exist to spread the knowledge of Rituals and Practices, conduct rituals, and make demands on the behalf of the religion
* Religious nobles may have procedural elements to differentiate religions
* Religious noble positions are automatically created and filled for a fortress with a high enough population of a single religion
* Temples can be dedicated to a single god, a single religion, the gods of a specific sphere, an entire pantheon, or general worship
* As a religion grows, religious nobles will demand a temple dedicated specifically to their religion, and later, to individual gods of that religion
* Temples must have specific furniture before the religious nobles are satisfied
* Religious nobles will demand materials associated with rituals
* Particularly faithful nobles may impose practices on others