The Heretic King and The Sun Faith

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Aten_disk.jpg

The Three Lands have two major faiths: the Spirit Way, which reveres the ancestors and a number of gods, and the Sun Faith, which is monotheistic and came from the East. After the horrors of the Long War, few in the Three Lands today want to think of the Sixth Kingdom as having been the source of the faith of light and truth. But the faith's roots go back to one pharaoh of the Sixth Kingdom.

The so-called Heretic King recognized the existence of the one true god. He represented this god using the Aten sun disk, whose ray-hands gently reach down to touch and bless the life of this world. The Heretic King banned the worship of the many beast-headed gods of the Sixth Kingdom, thereby earning the hatred of their entrenched temple bureaucracies.

The Heretic King built his own temple city in the desert, where he could seek refuge from priestly conspiracies and build the New Faith. In time, this was the Heretic King's undoing, as his royal, sun-drenched isolation gave room for the priests to sow rebellions -  which in time grew unchecked throughout his empire.

When the end came, it was swift. A few of the Heretic King's generals escaped West into the Three Lands. They spread the Sun Faith to the people of the Three Lands. At least one general went even further, using a gate to bring the Sun Faith to the now-lost realm of Bensalem. The Kirsi in particular embraced this faith and made it their own. They became evangelists to the other lands and people in the West and South.

In time, the lands and people of the Sixth Kingdom fell into the darkness of the Eternal Ones. Had they listened to their Heretic King, everything would have been different.

The Three Lands, the Kirsi, and the Sixth Kingdom are part of the default setting of Kevin Crawford's medieval African pastiche RPG, Spears of the Dawn. This post expands on that setting  for use with both Everway and Spears of the Dawn, and was written to comply with  the non-commercial usage guidelines on the Sine-Nomine blog. Bensalem is a realm created for Everway, and is already included in The Everwayan's Creative Commons license.