Design and Development: Spirits

In my last post I mentioned that clerics and druids gain their abilities (from spell casting to turning the undead to shapeshifting) through power given to them by the gods and spirits. This power actually comes out of the being's very essence and thus each mortal he blesses with these abilities makes him weaker (albeit in very small amounts).

I spoke at some length why the deities are very careful with this and why not every holy man has clerical powers, but how about druids?

Like the gods, spirits have to give up their own power in order to fuel a druid, thus, only the more powerful spirits would ever think of offering their patronage to druids. Also like the gods, spirits wish to better their station and look for an opportunity to do so. While spirits do not wish to destroy one another in order to take over (a trait spirits contribute to gods as "picking up from simple mortals"), they are as ambitious as any living creature. Spirits exist in a strict hierarchy, everyone has their place and knows who lords over them and who serves under them. The spirits also place the gods in this hierarchy (and not at the top), for in their minds, the gods are just another form of spirit. The gods pay little attention to their place in the order however. The hierarchy is a complex thing, with much crossover between various groups (a tree spirit, for instance, has a place among other spirits of trees, nature spirits, and spirits of living things, among others) and various positions among the spiritual ladder in each one. A spirit would always like to climb up one of those ladders when possible. A forest spirit, as it grows in power, may become the spirit of a grove, and possible the spirit of a whole forest and with enough effort, the spirit of all natural thing on an island.

A spirit climbs this ladder by... well, that's why this is a Design and Development feature and not a Musing. I'm not entirely sure how spirits rise in the hierarchy, though I know why they do not. They don't destroy each other, for if you killed the spirit of a tree, that tree would die. Even if a greater spirit could "consume" a lesser one, then that tree would lose its individual spirit, something the spirits would never think of doing.

So, a few ideas: Perhaps lesser spirits are required to swear allegiance to more powerful ones, via some ancient unbreakable eldritch pact. Perhaps it is similar to a blood bond in White Wolf's Vampire games, where a spirit is injected with some a great spirit's essence and then becomes its thrall. Perhaps a greater spirit, as it grows in power, increases in size, a metaphysical web spreading from it that enthralls all lesser spirits of similar type within its grasp.

Any of those sound good? Ideas of your own?