A Point on Cults

[Chamomile]

If your cult's master scheme is to make mad dosh and isn't relying on a dark god to provide it...In what way are they meaningfully a cult and not just a criminal conspiracy?

[virgil]

Dark robes and/or masks?

[Zaranthan]

In much the same way as any cult here on non-magical Earth is a cult.

If you wanted to magic it up, the organization could be centered around a charismatic charlatan who knows that the government runs on brevet levels, so if he can disrupt the Feast of Spring, that power is literally up for grabs.

Or, maybe the world is more like Exalted, where armies are just magic items you have to provide food and shelter for, so if you can get X number of people to call you Boss, you BECOME the powerful entity that makes the cult a real power base.

[Orion]

There would seem to be a relatively fine line between 'cults', as Orion describes them above, and interest groups.

I should probably clarify that I wasn't offering a definition of "cult," but rather a taxonomy. There's some requirement totally extraneous to my list that makes a cult a cult rather than simply a school, a conspiracy, a rebellion, or a racket. It's very hard to pin down what that is, but at the very minimum I would say that a cult has some kind of philosophical or theological teachings and that the leaders are almost always believed to have special knowledge that the lowest tiers don't.

It's also worth mentioning that I focused my write-up on secret cults, because they are so prominent in fantasy and mythos storytelling. Real cults tend to secret-ive rather than outright secret. I think my write-up probably covers them too, but I haven't thought about it carefully. Also, in historical settings, there have been things called cults that weren't big on secrecy at all. They'd get a very different write-up.