This should have been posted two weeks ago, but it seems it never went up. Sorry about that!
SERIOUS CONTENT WARNING in this post for discussion of religiously motivated bigotry and violent, racial supremacy, eugenics, and real-life Nazism. If this post would be triggering for you, please, skip it. Your mental health is more important than any art I could produce. Take care of yourself and I’ll see you next week.
The Church of the Chosen Ones, or more properly the Kukaenguerradz (/kʌkaɪŋuːrɒd͡z/), is a Vargr supremacist religious group with significant power in some areas of the Coreward Setting. Their close ties to the government of the Society of Equals makes them particularly relevant in Uthe subsector, which I’m working on at the moment, so I wanted to build my understanding of this element of the setting with a focused post about them. In this post, I intend to introduce you to their beliefs and goals, history and structure, and purpose within Milieu XX16.
Beliefs and Goals
Their beliefs have always been described relatively simply as being that the Ancients not only created the Vargr (which is true) but that the Vargr are a successful experiment in creating a perfect species to control all of Charted Space (which is staggeringly false). It’s important to understand just why this is so false, even though much of this information cannot be proven with the methods available to Milieu XX16. In general, any assertion in Milieu XX16 about the Ancients’ intentions is at best unfounded. Even the Zhodani, who understand the Ancients better than most any other culture, can only really speak to what precisely was done by them, and not why. However, with the omniscience of an external source, we can identify three main fallacies in their statement. Firstly, the experiment in creating Vargr cannot be considered “successful” (or, for that matter, “failed”), because it was aborted partway through when the Ancients were destroyed. Secondly, the purpose of the experiment was not to create a perfect species, since the Ancients recognized that such an idea is meaningless. The most likely purpose of the experiment was to discover whether certain desirable traits of wolves would persist if the species became sophonts, though it is unclear which traits of wolves the Ancients considered particularly desirable. (What the Ancients believed was desirable and why is not particularly understandable to us.) Thirdly, the Ancients never intended for any other species to control Charted Space. After all, they achieved what they had in an attempt to control Charted Space themselves, and when they were destroyed, it was primarily because they no longer believed that even they had the right to do so. But the most important fallacy the Kukaenguerradz make here is that the Ancients are just not necessarily correct. Even if the Ancients had intended to create a “perfect species”, and they believed that they had succeeded, and intended for that species to inherit Charted Space, they would have been wrong. There is no such thing as a species which could be perfectly adapted for every situation without flaw. There are species which are almost perfectly adapted to their ecological niche, but even these have their flaws, and most of them are deep sea invertebrates, gut bacteria, crabs, plants, and other such non-sapient things. Imperialism just isn’t an ecological niche something can evolve into. And even if, somehow, by divine intervention, there existed a species flawlessly suited to take control of planets and exploit their resources, oppress or exterminate their populaces, and establish colonies upon them to control their potential for its own benefit, such a species still would not be justified in inflicting such destruction and misery upon the universe.
Despite this, the Kukaenguerradz are remarkably persuasive; it is difficult for the people of Charted Space to argue with the Ancients’ intentions when they know only that they were advanced enough to shape the worlds they live in today as gods. Veneration of the Ancients is an aspect of many Vargr religious traditions going back to the stone age, with many other Vargr religions such as Khufoezghu and some sects of Runetha include Ancient worship, and the modern scientific fascination with the Ancients’ interference on Terra work together to convince many Vargr that they should listen to what the Ancients intended.
The overarching tenets which the Kukaenguerradz derive from the belief that the Vargr are a successful experiment in creating a perfect species to control Charted Space are thus: First, and most importantly, that the Vargr can, should, and will one day control all of Charted Space in a single unified empire. There are sectarian differences in what this empire will look like and how it will be established, but all sects believe that such an empire will someday exist. Furthermore, that Vargr are a perfect life-form which is inherently superior to all other forms of life (save possibly the Ancients themselves). Thus, any Vargr life is more valuable than a non-Vargr life, and the Vargr should strive to remain exactly as the Ancients created them. Evolution, whether biological or social, is anathema to this way of life. Lastly, that personal as well as societal virtue comes from two sources–dominance and obedience to natural Vargr instinct.
While all sects of Kukaenguerradz follow these tenets in one way or another, there are at least as many disagreements as agreements on matters of doctrine, and schism has followed it through its entire history. Since the very beginning, there has been a major schism between messianic and anti-messianic Kukaenguerradz. Messianic sects believe that the Ancients or their descendants will return to establish the Vargr empire. Strict messianic sects believe that it is sacrilege or at the very least idiocy to attempt to establish the Vargr empire before they do (and may even engage in holy war against empires which try), while moderate messianic sects believe that empires not established by the Ancients are good practice but have no future. Anti-messianic sects hold that the Vargr are already capable of establishing their empire, with strict anti-messianic sects believing that the Ancients will never return as they have already done everything necessary to prepare the Vargr to conquer, and moderate sects believing that the Ancients might return but that they expect the Vargr to begin the imperial conquest on their own. Another major schism is on the treatment of non-Vargr. An extremely hard-line position holds that other sapient species are not needed within a Vargr empire, generally advocating a genocide against non-Vargr. Sects with this point of view are generally unwanted in the Coreward setting and will be pushed out by their neighbors, resorting to violence if they have to. Even Vargr supremacists who don’t value the lives of non-Vargr at all feel these extremists give them a bad name. A more common view is that non-Vargr will serve a purpose within a Vargr empire, as slaves or as second-class citizens. Some accept only other species native to Terra such as humans, believing Terra as a whole to have been chosen by the Ancients. A few radically alien-positive sects believe that it is their duty to uplift other species the way that the Ancients uplifted the Vargr. A wrinkle in all of this is the status of non-Vargr who choose to live as if they were Vargr, referred to as kengrran and often thought of as having Vargr souls in alien bodies. Some sects reject this aspect of Vargr society, others accept them as second class citizens or as full Vargr, and a few radicals even believe them to be more truly Vargr than ethnic Vargr. Almost every other point of doctrine has some disagreement–whether advanced medicine is good because it allows Vargr to survive, or bad because it attempts to supplant the perfect Vargr body, whether other religions that originated on the Vargr homeworld should be permitted as elements of Vargr culture or forbidden as threats to the church, which virtues are most important, what should be done with nonbelievers. The official position of the central authority of the Kukaenguerradz is to support as many sects as possible as long as they do not threaten the church’s existence in general.
The prevalent sects in the Society of Equals are impacted by the philosophy on which the Society itself was founded. The Society forbids any racial discrimination among Equals, meaning that any non-Vargr who pass the Equality Test must be accepted by the church, and churches that fail to do this will be dissolved. The official position of the church, then, is that only Equals are true Vargr. Vargr who are rated Unequal forfeit the right to be considered Vargr and are no better than aliens. Aliens who are rated equal are encouraged to become kengrran. The church in Society space is headed on Aegadh, a planet run under the harsh rule of a church controlled government which has colonies on several nearby worlds. Its leaders would like to control the Equality Test in order to get rid of influences both biological and social they consider to be deviating from the Ancients’ plan for the species. The leaders of the Society, in turn, would prefer to have more influence over the Kukaenguerradz and use church funds for social projects and development on Society-owned worlds. There has also been recent trouble with dhoune aligned with the Kukaenguerradz breaking Society treaties against targeting the Third Imperium because they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a human empire.
History and Structure
While the structure of the Kukaenguerradz has not been described in canon, the fact that they are specifically described as a church as opposed to other Vargr religions implies to me a Catholic-style hierarchical structure where power is delegated from a leading pack to the organizational structures of various locales until it reaches local religious leaders.
The Kukaenguerradz was spread to the Coreward setting during the reign of Gvurrdon, roughly five thousand years ago. The dhoune prince Gvurrdon believed that he was creating the empire foretold by church doctrine, and among modern messianic sects, it’s believed that the Ancients were in contact with Gvurrdon and caused his rise as a leader. (Nothing of the kind was true.) He personally funded the establishment of powerful churches on many worlds the Gvurrdon pact conquered or settled, and the policy was continued after his death until the failure of the pact some seven hundred years later.
The sects of the Kukaenguerradz which held power during the Gvurrdon pact remained in power for another several thousand years. Schisms proliferated during this time, but in general, these sects were notably highly militant and hostile to each other and and fractured powers in the area.
This meant that the area was vulnerable to conquest roughly one thousand years ago by the Julian Protectorate, a massive, militant, polity which many sects considered to be the coming of the final prophesied Vargr empire. The Julian Protectorate had its own official sects of the Kukaenguerradz, most of which were anti-messianic and took offense at the suggestion that Gvurrdon had been contacted by the Ancients. These sects were also strongly pro-human, believing that Humaniti was another successful experiment by the Ancients and that Vargr and Humaniti should share control over the perfect empire. The Julian Protectorate invested trillions of credits of resources into an attempt to standardize the culture and beliefs of the region, including establishing a single Vargr language, publishing official histories of the region leading back to its colonization by the Vargr, and exterminating and replacing problematic sects of the Kukaenguerradz. In the end, the Protectorate overextended itself and was driven out of the Coreward Setting by its populace roughly four hundred years ago.
They left behind a shattered church–some sects had maintained the same policy for four thousand years, others had deviated during the interregnum, some were installed by the Julian Protectorate, and a few had even split off after the Protectorate withdrew. Many had acquiesced to the official doctrine of the Julian Protectorate to some extent, but a few had rejected it entirely and survived the six hundred year occupation in outright rebellion. Almost all were wracked with doubts and heresies after a massive Vargr empire had been cast out in ignominious defeat. Many Vargr rejected the teaching that such an empire was the right path for Charted Space. Others coped by rediscovering pact-era messianic teachings and claiming that the Julian Protectorate had never had the approval of the Ancients. Reactionary anti-human sentiment was rife.
As new polities cropped up in the wake of the Protectorate, many of them cultivated sects of Kukaenguerradz and applied with the church leadership on Kueng, the Vargr homeworld, for their legitimacy. This is more or less a rubber stamp on the process of a church’s development, and the leadership will generally place new churches under a branch of the hierarchy which supports their particular brand of heresy. If they really can’t find an attested sect which would tolerate the new church, or if they find its doctrine genuinely harmful to the church as a whole, they return the application along with approved leadership who will bring it into line. From this point on it is the local hierarchy’s responsibility to keep churches more or less in line, which they tend to do as little of as possible, since a leadership position in the Kukaenguerradz is generally a cushy job that no one wants to risk by challenging the wrong people.
Examining Every Decision: Why Include the Church of the Chosen Ones?
Traveller, in general, tends to be strongly anti-religion. For corporate reasons, they’d rather maintain a veneer of neutrality on religion. Game Designers Workshop said, in an official statement in 2000, that they didn’t want to offend religious people by saying that the Third Imperium (and by extent the Traveller world) was atheistic or offend atheists or people of other religions by saying that it was Christian, and high-profile designers have said that they considered discussing it a waste of electrons compared to arguing about hypothetical scientific edge-cases. But for someone who recognizes social sciences as just as legit as physics and chemistry, ignoring religion in sci-fi entirely feels as short-sighted as ignoring where electricity comes from or how the killer robots are coded. It’s a luxury of primarily Western culturally Christian atheists to imagine that a society can be completely separated from the effects of its historical religion.
Looking into the Traveller canon on religion, though, is a grim exercise. There are fewer than 50 attested religions on the Traveller Wiki and most of them read like a conquistador’s diatribe upon discovering that Indigenous religions exist, with outlandish inventions of constant blood sacrifice and repression and the word cult bandied about with no understanding of its real-world implications. Many of them, we are assured, have been swept neatly away through the murder and torture of their adherents such that players need only engage with them as archaeological set dressing.
One of the few societies whose religions are explained with any degree of respect whatsoever is the Vargr. Understand that I use the word respect loosely and through gritted teeth. Much of the discussion of Vargr religion is done through the gory pulp fiction tropes of crazed cultists of mad gods, but it is at least done, and with some understanding that a culture’s religions have important information to share about that culture’s values and history. And there is at least one religion which is, painfully, realistic.
I have said before that I want to populate Milieu XX16 with some groups which are truly vile, groups which embrace philosophies which devalue life and protect oppression, and to tackle the existence of these groups with regard for the lives, though not the decisions, of the people who have joined them. This is such a group. Traveller actually does a fairly good job at showing that the Church of the Chosen Ones derived their supremacist philosophy from a reasonable, if flawed, set of observations about their world, and that that doesn’t make it alright, but it makes it understandable. It’s easy to understand why a Vargr, or even a human, might join the Church of the Chosen Ones. They seem like reasonable people. They support your reasonable local government—in fact, they think more people should be ruled by that government you support. They’re giving money to support your community’s development. They think you’re perfect. They want you to succeed. They want your community to succeed. …And they’re more or less exactly to their communities what the Nazis were to Wiemar Germany.
There was, of course, quite a bit of cleaning up to do. Firstly, the title “Church of the Chosen Ones” was a terrible in-universe term. “Church” meaning what it does is an external term to Vargr society, coming all the way from across Charted Space in the Rimward Setting. There isn’t a lot of overlap between this group and the Christian Church in any of its real-world forms, and I have a lot of reasonable dislike for Christian-specific terms being used to describe all religions. It needed a Vargr name, so Kukaenguerradz was coined–it literally translates to “Pack Based on Vargr Supremacy”, because among the small glossary of terms I have to work with are several words for that idea. I do still use “church” to describe it as an organization, because there aren’t a lot of good concise terms for that, but as a concession to that, I also gave it a Catholic-like organizational structure, albeit with a strong Vargr bent. One thing I’m still on the fence about is the fact that so far, it’s both evil and has similarities to Christianity, since I really don’t intend any offense to real Christians. As I move my worldbuilding efforts over the border into the Imperium, and later into the Rimward setting, we’ll see actual Christians in Milieu XX16, and I promise that, while I won’t erase the impact of Christian motivated imperialism, I also won’t erase the good Christianity brings to many communities. As for the fact that this religion is more or less entirely evil, stay tuned for other Vargr religions with similar origins in Ancients worship which are not, in fact, founded in racial supremacy.
Traveller religions also tend to be incredibly light on matters of actual doctrine. With the idea of the Kukaenguerradz deriving all their ideas logically from their central tenet, and a fairly clear picture of what it is that they do, this wasn’t that hard, and a lot of it falls under the umbrella of contradiction between different sects.
Part of the purpose of having so many different sects is just to let the Kukaenguerradz survive for so long on so many different worlds. Well over four thousand years is a damn long time for a religion this expansionist and hostile to survive, especially among the Vargr where empires tend to crumble quickly. Part of it is also to give myself a little fudging room when it comes to writing about the Kukaenguerradz later, so there aren’t many roles that it can’t possibly make sense to have them play on a world, from storefront churches to world-governments. But a lot of it is to make a point about how these sorts of views perpetuate themselves. They can make a huge number of exceptions and concessions to seem reasonable while they normalize underlying ideals based on bigotry and violence. They can align themselves with nation states and break themselves off from them to always appear to be on the right side of history. They can redefine the threat that they target until they find a group that no one will defend.
I also wanted to introduce the Milieu XX16 take on the Julian Protectorate here. It’s an element of the history of the Coreward Setting that will probably crop up here and there in the background, and this post felt like a good time to give a brief overview of their involvement in the culture and history of the area without belaboring a piece of set dressing I haven’t fully fleshed out yet.
All in all, the Church of the Chosen Ones is meant to feel very real, maybe too real to some, and to be a formidable enemy to players who stand up to fascism and bigotry in all its forms.