I’ve watched a caravan arrive and leave an entirely new festival in its wake. Traders bring household idols as casually as they bring spices, sailors mix sea hymns with mountain chants, and newly married families negotiate whose ancestral spirits get the corner altar. The result is a tapestry where foreign gods earn local nicknames, rituals blend like dialects, and theological arguments evolve faster than I can archive them. You can watch those shifts ripple across the travelogue in Altars of the World.

Syncretism isn’t just pious curiosity; it’s survival. Conquered peoples rename enemy gods to fit their cosmology, philosophers weave disparate myths into grand theories, and mystery cults cherry-pick whatever symbolism resonates. For every fusion, though, a purist movement rises, claiming to guard untainted truth. They launch reforms, burn imported icons, or retreat into isolation to preserve what they believe the gods entrusted to them.

This motion ensures no belief system stays still. When I build cultures, I give them fault lines where outside influence can pry, and I let characters wrestle with mixed inheritances: a soldier who prays to the conqueror’s war god, a scholar who sees unity in contradictory myths, or a zealot who refuses to compromise even as their city changes around them. Those clashes often trigger the political crackdowns in Faith Under Pressure.