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Many of us can agree that exploring outside your comfort zone is a good thing. I'd like to hear your stories and your general advice. Did you experience successes, or would you have considered your adventures into the "unknown" to be failures? If you're someone who prefers to stick with what you know, in what ways would you like to explore your limits? It's been a bit since I've really challenged myself, so I decided to take a leap into the (mostly) unknown. Recently I watched a documentary on the Quiverfull movement. (For those who don't know, it's an extreme conservative Christian denomination that believes children are a gift from God and reproduction should be frequent. Purity and submission to authority are also huge components, and just about every other Christian is like "wtf?" about it. It's pretty much what the Duggars believe, though I think they claim to not follow it.) From that, I decided to make a character who was a part of a Quiverfull family, and then I decided to open it up for all my members if they wanted to join. I'm not certain I've ever taken on a character who has such a significant mental impediment. I've played characters who have had anxiety or other mental disorders, but nobody who is so utterly brainwashed that he/she can't function normally while at the same time looks like he/she functions normally. It's such a complex range of emotions to be battling what one is taught to believe is right with what the character feels, the whole time knowing that any thought out of line could be a straight ticket to eternal damnation, thus resulting in suppression of emotion and guilt. I'm sure that many of us can sympathize with conflicts between what's "right" and what "feels right" within our worlds, but these particular characters will have to struggle with natural desires and thoughts. The hardest part, I think, is portraying it realistically. Making it convincing. The few times that I've seen people play super religious characters, they seem to be reduced to a caricature of what society tell us a super religious person looks like. So my goal is to make something that really portrays the psychological reasons for living this lifestyle while not blatantly relating everything back to "I have to do this because God will punish me." That's what's going to challenge me the most.

I understand that not all the characters are religious. However, if a religion is mentioned in a character's bio, one should use it at least a little - even if it means to highlight that he has evolved and doesn't believe anymore, and that his current beliefs aren't the same with the ones he was taught in childhood. Not to have it written in the bio, then act as if it was never mentioned. Why bother then to mention it in the first place? This is twice as valid when it is about somebody hiding his religion. There might be the desire to blend in, to seem unconspicuous and to deliberately not show any trace of the hidden religion. It makes perfect sense - but in the character's thoughts, there has to be this deliberate choice; an inner conflict, from time to time, between what he had been taught initially and what he has to do now. Or minor, delicate little things which still pertain to the hidden religion, even if they can't be directly traced to it. For example, there are two NPCs, one muslim, one Jewish - in a time where Inquisition still existed and... burned. The muslim one still believes in Allah as he had been taught, just that he can't say it in the open. He doesn't pray all 5 times a day, at least not visibly, but he surely says the prayer in his mind when he can. He gets up earlier than the others he lives with, for the ritual ablutions. This means he is cleaner than others, and a little teased for it, but nobody makes the connection between a strange (for that time) desire for cleanliness and religion. He does abstain from eating pork as much as possible; but when he crossed the sea (and not as a passenger) to the colonies, he had to eat what the others did. Salt pork and hard tack was the general menu. As he is isolated from any other Muslims, he doesn't keep any holidays because nobody can tell him when they are (moon-based religious calendar). The Jewish is a sailor; again, he does abstain from eating pork as much as possible; but when at sea, he can't. He eats with the others, so the notions of kashrut had to be forgotten. Even so, I think he'd never mix dairy and meat at the same meal, and he'd prefer drinking strong drinks or ale instead of wine (which, according to kashrut, is sacred and should have been only grown and harvested by Jews according to kashrut provisions). He also doesn't gamble, because he remembers from his bar mitzvah (the only torah studies he had ever done) that it is forbidden. He doesn't know much more than the basics about his own religion, so other precepts he might infringe in good conscience, without knowing. He also tried to avoid medical control aboard the ship whenever he could. At the transfer to a new ship he couldn't anymore, so he trembled what would happen when the doctor would discover the pledge of Abraham carved in his flesh. Fortunately for him, that particular doctor didn't care and didn't report. These aren't much. Just little details to flesh up more a character over time - and taking into account that these are NPCs, even more than needed. But still something to make the characters more rounded and more believable. I wished others would do the same. The Jewish sailor's sister never had a moment of thinking about God, of conflicting thoughts or anything. My Catholic characters, more or less believers, show their religious thoughts (or contempt towards them, for one who doesn't believe anymore). There is one who was once Catholic but turned Anglican because it was bad for business to be Catholic. He isn't much religious of any nature, still there are some inner conflicts within him between what he had learnt in his first school years with the monks and what he is doing now. My point is that if you gave your character a religion, show it a little in his thoughts, deeds or habits.