Wanted some feedback on the Boristi Church. I won't comment on the History but concentrate on what the Borists are like. Here goes my impression:
The Tapping of Chaos is a bit of a sideshow IMO. People's attitudes to Tapping have varied so much over the years (The Rokari used to Tap Peasants!) that I think the Squids^H^H^H^H^H^H Boristi have a much stronger connection with Chaos than merely Tapping it. For all we know, Tapping Riddlers and Krjalki may have been standard practice by the Armies of the West during the Chaos Wars.
IMO The Squids believe that Man was once Perfect but has been corrupted by Chaos. They have these nice charts of how the Runes correspond to each organ of the human body and all that like Fire is for the brain etc. They hold that Solace can only be achieved by the Tapping of the Chaos that dwells within the Human Body, Heart and Mind. Once purified, Solace is more readily attainable.
So the average Boristi goes to his Priest to be Shriven (a lesser version of Tap) of his past sins of the year. Slightly Painful but that's nothing compared to the Bliss of Solace so It's All in a Good Cause. Now the Priest by using the Shriving Spell has accumulated all the bad stigma that formerly was attached to his flock. So what can he do? Shriving himself wouldn't work for he merely accumulates the bad stigma again. Tapping himself would be more effective in ridding him of the bad stigma but it has undesriable side effects. So what the Borist Priest does is that he *creates* a chaotic being like a Gorp so that all the bad stigma that he has contained is now in the gorp. Thus both he and his flock can now attain Solace.
Of course a Borist Priest gets a bit tired of having to expend permanent POW in creating all these creatures. So what is generally done is that when a familiar is created, it is enchanted so that it becomes a Chaos Sink. Any Chaos Stigma a Borist Priest acquires in the course of his duty is shunted of into his Familiar. Over a period of time, the Familiar acquires Chaos Features. Thus if the Familiar was a Puddy Cat at the time of its creation, it could be a exploding gorp by the time the Borist Priest has reached Magus level.
So when a Priest is near Death, he generaly orders his familiar into a Catatomb (which Borin is famous for) where it is bricked up. The Knights of Borin generally practice against these creatures for the fight against Gbaji's inevitable return (as per your suggestion). However when an enemy army besieges Borin, somehow the Beasties manage to escape their prisons and find themselves in the enemy camp. That is the main reason why the City of Borin has been a refuge against persecution.
This solves the major problem IMO as to why the commoners follow the Borist Heresy and why Tapping of Chaos becomes an important dogma for the Boristi without it looking like a kludged obscure philosophical point. As for the Borist Attitudes to Chaos, I guess it's more like 'Our Creatures may be Chaos Slime, but they're *Our* Chaos Slime' mixed in with some prophecies about when Gbaji is defeated again, all Chaos will be removed from the universe...
Hope this helps.
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