I’ve come across a very curious website, the nature of which I don’t fully understand… Apparently it’s a role-play game of some kind, yet someone’s gone to enormous trouble and written some fascinating stuff.
Take a look for yourself and see if you can work it out…
http://wiki.white-wolf.com/camwiki/index.php?title=Koshinto#Basic_Overview
White Wolf is a role-playing game company; this site appears to be related to their game series “Vampire: The Masquerade” (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_of_the_East"this for a little more illumination).
Sorry, fixing the link…
Yes, it’s a role-playing game. The site is related to Vampire: the Requiem, rather than Vampire: the Masquerade. The reference to the Amanotsukai is to one of the published books for the game, and I wrote that part of the book. The page that you linked directly to is not my work, however.
The information is fictional background for vampires who follow a rather strange version of Shinto. It’s a horror game, so the versions of Shinto you will find there are not positive. You play the game by pretending to be the vampires, so the detail here is for people who will act the part of vampires who follow this version of Shinto. As a result, quite a lot of detail is necessary, and people who are interested in such aspects of their characters can do a lot of research and development. Of course, it’s for a game, so things get changed to make them more appropriate for the game setting.
People finding RPG sites about games set in something similar to the real world often get a bit confused; there’s not always any specific reference to the fact that this is all made up for a game.
Thanks, David, for the clarification. I had a feeling you might be involved. Whoever wrote the material seems to be surprisingly well-informed and have a visionary overview of Shinto development… I’m intrigued by who it might be…