Knowne Worlde

A cult-turned movement, the Purgators teach that the world did not decay through famine, plague, or war, but through thought itself. To them, every library is a mausoleum of arrogance, every machine a monument to mankind’s defiance, every scholar another hand tightening the noose around the earth’s throat. Civilization is sin accumulated. The cities choke the rivers, the learned mock the old rites, and each generation buries itself deeper beneath towers of knowledge that have failed to right the wrongs of the world.

So the Purgators burn.

Books are fed to pyres alongside their authors. Archives, universities, granaries, even entire districts are “purged” in cleansing fires meant to scour away the corruption of the present age. Ash is sacred. Smoke is prayer. To destroy is to heal.

Yet the movement is not composed solely of zealots and murderers. Many of the desperate flock willingly to their banners: peasants crushed beneath taxes, villagers poisoned by ruined soil, laborers discarded by distant lords and machinations  they cannot understand. The Purgators offer certainty in a collapsing world. No more complexity. No more endless striving. No more poisonous ambition. Only hearthfire, toil, obedience, and silence beneath the eyes of a stern but ordered cosmos.

Their ideal society is brutally simple: isolated hamlets, oral tradition, hard labor, strict morality, and absolute suspicion toward innovation. Writing itself is discouraged outside sacred texts copied under rigid supervision. Curiosity is treated as the first temptation, the spark from which all later infernos grew. Members of this belief system can be found throughout the world, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and praxis; in Sarglois, they are present but largely suppressed by the Temple and Overseer. In the frontiers of the Marchlands, entire communities may enforce such beliefs, often clashing with less orthodox neighbors.