Introducing "the Ring"

[Olligarchy]

Zoroastrianism has nothing at all to do with Catholicism. It's a much, much older religion with its roots in ancient Iran, and it predates even Judaism by a fair margin.
#GodofNitpicking

[TetNak]

Hmmm.

I must have mis-remembered. I was under the impression it came out of Catholicism and was brutally wiped out by the fun loving Pope lovers.

[Olligarchy]

That's Catharism. They even had a swanky crusade to put it out.

It was fun for the whole Faith.

[TetNak]

Ah.

Anyways, basically you get the gist.

[Muskrat]

Yeah, you're thinking of Catharism, which was actually part of a much older lineage of religious belief called Gnosticism, which developed during the first century AD and came in pagan, Jewish and Christian varieties, as well as independent religions like Manichaeism. It's not clear to me that the Cathars even thought of themselves as Christian. Certainly, the Jewish and Christian varieties of Gnosticism are often pretty far from what we think of those religions as today. In Christian Gnosticism, the Fall happened not in the Garden of Eden, but with the creation of the material world, which Gnostics (of all religions) believed is an evil prison and that the goal of religious life is to free the spark of the divine in oneself so it can escape the material world. (This differs from orthodox Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which sees the world as God's creation and therefore fundamentally good, if corrupted by human sin.) In Christian Gnosticism, the creator deity of the Old Testament was at best incompetent and at worst a cruel tyrant deliberately imprisoning souls. The serpent in the Garden of Eden was a benevolent force, a manifestation of the higher, loving New Testament God, who let Adam and Eve know the truth of their imprisonment. The New Testament God manifest in Jesus was continuing the work of the serpent, letting people know how they could free themselves from the material world. Jesus himself had no physical body and was not truly crucified--those were all an illusion and Jesus was a being of pure spirit. Many Gnostics believed that not everyone has a soul and therefore only a minority of people could be saved, while others were without free will and innately sinful.

I might be interested, depending on the system and details about the campaign.