Thanks! I'm beginning to put the pieces together here.
Is there a formal tenet of the church of the Divine Order, such as rules of conduct, or commandments? Do they have the promise of an afterlife, with a background threat of eternal damnation? (There is evidently a Hall of Echoes, but what else do they have?)
The idea of an old, sidelined nobility and/or priesthood is intriguing. It would open possibilities of a manysided powerstruggle beetween the old and the new, now that the Divine is out of commission.
Yes, I was actually hoping we'd get to see what the state of things was in the familiar eastern regions of Ferol, Rivertown and Verdistis in Divinity II, but new places are always nice too. Maybe there still is entrenched nobility, maybe it's pretty much the same as in the west, we can only guess, since there aren't too many clues in Div II. I could definitely see power struggles arising because of it though.
Well, I'm mainly going from my memory of Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, but I would be willing to bet the transition from the Church of the seven gods to the Order of the Divine was pretty smooth, because the latter is the natural progression of the former. It's similar to the messiah coming back and ushering in a new era, except in this case, the messiah only half succeeded in his task.
Actually, now that I think about it, the hero in all the Divinity games always seems to fail spectacularly in the end. It's refreshing and frustrating all at once.
Now, the following is based off of what Zix-Zax the imp historian tells you in Divine Divinity: Chaos was first, a primal void, blackness, darkness, basically all that is metaphysically and philosophically negative. The Seven Gods came next, and crafted the worlds, life, and the Seven intelligent races: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Imps, Lizards, Orcs, and Wizards. Naturally, Lord Chaos hates this, and constantly works to destroy all creation.
So what you have is not so much a Christian-style religion of an omnipotent creator, sin, salvation, afterlife and punishment/reward, but instead a kind of Manichean duality of the opposing forces of chaos vs. creation. I don't remember any kind of moral codes from the Churches in Divine Divinity, beyond sort of universals like "don't steal" and "don't pee in the sacramental wine." They were very much focused on the prophecy of Reuben Ferol that the Divine One would appear in darkest times. All the races recognized and we were willing to submit to this prophecy, despite their cultural differences (some needed more persuading than others).
One thing I notice each of the seven races tended to worship its own patron god (e.g., the dwarves would praise Duna, etc.) And, they all had their own specific forms of worship and culture of course. I remember it being a very odd rarity to find a dwarven priest, for example, but they had an absolute King. Side note: There was so much more politics and culture to absorb in the first game, all other things aside.
Once the Divine took over, all you really learn about the Divine Order from Beyond Divinity is that he creates an Order of Paladins whose jobs it is to eradicate the Black Ring, necromancers, witches, and the like. It seems like it was designed to preside over war-like times.
Beyond that, I can't add much else that you couldn't learn from Divinity II, since I'm currently still working on the FOV campaign on my first playthrough. The Hall of Echoes is completely new to Divinity II. There were ghosts in the first two games but anyone could see and talk to them, and no mention of an afterlife.
