Design and Development: Cleric Training

During the construction of my MegaDungeon Campaign I made a reference to the fact that clerics were, at one time, trained by just one faith/religion/order. Later other faiths saw this training and its effectiveness and copied the style or converted trainers to teach clerics of their own. This helps explain away the fact that all clerics, regardless of faith or religion, have the same abilities and spells.

This concept actually works well in Deminar's atheistic to have everything explained and making sense. So, should we "steal" (being a loose sense of the word, since it's already my idea) this concept for Deminar or something simliar?

Musing: Religion Part 2

One of the common misconceptions (or, indeed concepts if written into the setting) is that every holy man is a cleric or a druid. Every temple you wander into, the head priest is a cleric of some level, often with lower level cleric apprentices. I like to call this the Forgotten Realms syndrome. Deminar is simply not designed that way.

From a game perspective, I've already mentioned my belief that an adventurer should be rare, in order to maintain the uniqueness the player's feel when their characters interact with the world. How special are you when you're one adventurer among a countless horde after all?

Within the world, it wouldn't make a lot of sense either. Unlike the arcane spellcasting of a magic-user that manipulates the very building blocks of creation, divine spellcasters are fueled by the gods themselves (or from various patron spirits amongst the druids). A god has to sacrifice a bit of his own power to give a cleric the ability to cast spells or turn the undead and, despite the power of the gods, their power is finite. Every bit of power given to a patron on Deminar is power that the god no longer has at his disposal to fight off rival gods. The gods are locked in a power struggle, and a god that does not have enough worshipers or who foolishly expends his power on both planar and mortal followers risks having his domain taken over by a lesser god or having his domain absorbed by another major god. Because of this, a god can't simply gift every being that prays to him with power. On the other hand, gods receive their power from mortal worshipers as well as the souls of those faithful that pas beyond mortal life. What better way to convert followers then to show a god's power through a mortal vessel (since no god can directly influence the mortal world)? Like any power struggle, this is a delicate balancing act between attracting more followers through displays of faith and power and holding onto enough power to protect their position.

This is why clerics are more then simply undead hunters, they are also traveling emissaries of their faith. They are divinely appointed to spread the good name (or vengeful wrath) of their god, converting new followers through awe or fear. A cleric who forsakes this duty soon finds himself without his abilities, as even the smallest bit of a god's power is precious and the deity is always looking for the most effective way to use it.

Musing: Religion Part 1

There are two major forms of religion on the Bluestone Isles, druidism and deity worship. Both are intrinsically linked to one another, but the separation of ideology between them means they will forever be at odds.

Druidism is the belief that everything has a spirit, be it a living creature, inanimate matter, or a concept or idea. The spirit may be a part of something (the souls of all living things) or the spirit could be a guardian and caretaker of it (like the spirit of a river or the spirit of war), but it a force possessed by all things. The ultimate testament to the faith is the Druid, someone who can commune with spirits to obtain an array of powers and abilities.

Deity worship, on the other hand, is the belief that the powerful beings worshiped as gods created the world and everything that exists on it. They created all living things, set about the laws that make the world work, and developed every concept from love to war. When a soul dies, it travels to the plane of the god that the being worshiped and who's tenets it lived by the most, or the plane of the god that is most befitting the being's punishment, if it worshiped no god or violated his god's tenets. The ultimate expression of the power that the gods wield is that of the Cleric, someone who can focus the very power of the gods into a variety of spells and the ability to drive away the undead.

Both religions have many ties to one another, those that worship the gods very much believe in the souls that exist in them, while the druids cannot deny the power of the gods, nor their duty to claim the souls of those beings that die. However, their are core differences in their beliefs that have stopped the two from ever existing fully entwined.

While practitioners of druidism believe in the gods, they do not believe the gods created all that is. The gods are simply a group of spirits, powerful indeed, but not even the top of the spirit hierarchy. While their positions are important, their are things that have existed long before they did and play a much more important role in the world.

Those that worship the deities see the gods as the ultimate powers in existence, and that everything that is, is because of them. Also, these worshipers do not believe that everything has a spirit, certainly not non-living things and concepts. More extreme believers (but not the followers of all gods) do not even believe that unintelligent living things (such as many monsters, beasts of burdens, and wildlife) have souls and the most extreme do not even think that all intelligent species (their enemies in particular) have souls, so killing these beings is not any worse then cutting down a tree.

So who is right? Are the gods supreme beings that created all that exists and have the power to destroy it on a whim? Or are they simply just part of a larger spiritual hierarchy that has always been and always will be? These questions ensure that while the two religious ideologies may not always be at one another throats, they will never truly get along.

Design and Development: Clerics: The Last Word

So, after running a few ideas back and forth, I think we have the definitive version of the Deminar Cleric (all ideas subject to change), so let's take a look at it:

The Cleric is a tool of the god he worships, more accurately, a weapon. While his purpose does, partially, revolve around converting others to his religion, that's nothing that a priest or particularly devout layperson could do. The cleric has a much more defined warrior purpose in life.

A cleric delves dungeons and braves the wilderness to protect devout citizens from monsters, secure ancient relics and sites important to his god, and, most importantly, to destroy undead in all their forms. Undead are an anathema to the gods, a violation of the natural order, denying a soul its rightful rest, whether accidentally or in an attempt at immortality. Clerics, above all else, seek to destroy undead, mostly undead with souls, the soulless ones are not as big a deal, but still a violation of natural order.

All clerics use blunt weapons, not because of some religious doctrine, but because it's the most effective against undead. Things that don't bleed out or have living vital organs to pierce are only best destroyed when crushed to bits. It's not that they can't use other weapons, it's that they aren't trained to use other weapons. After all, all adventurers are trained before they go out into their first dungeon as level 1, 0 XP fresh meat (Something that's not talked about much, but think about it, you can't just be a farmer one day, then go off and be a fighter the next, properly knowing how to fight using a bastard sword without cutting your own leg off, every adventurer has training in his specific class, don't let people tell you otherwise). Nontraining results, mechanically, in being unable to use other weapons (rather then some clunky penalty for weapons, remember, this is LL, a model of B/X, nice and simple rules now). But, to keep clerics diverse, all receive training in their gods favored weapon (or possible weapons, TBD), a weapon that best represents the god and his ideals.

Turning the Undead, this falls into the very reason a cleric is out and about, getting rid of the Undead. Turning the undead, as the rules write it, seems to be a manifestation of power that sorta erupts around the cleric and can take down or make run any number of undead critters around him. To me, I picture it as a glow that either comes from above or from within the cleric and then suddenly radiates outwards, washing everything in the room with its light. What is it? It's the divine "fuel" that the gods give to clerics to cast their spells, just in raw form, it's divinity made manifest, in a way. It doesn't affect living things because they belong in the divine order, but unliving things, that's another story. Undead with souls run or are disintegrated as they are faced with the realization that they do not belong in the natural order, they are either made afraid or consumed by pure divine energy. Soulless undead are another story, why do they "run" or blow up? Well, soulless undead are made either by arcane or divine magic, they are fueled by that magic to operate and follow their last order, so the divine energy shorts out that magic fuel, either short circuiting their order and causing them to wander aimlessly instead of attack (i.e. the running) or sever their magical connection and cause them to crumble.

Now, clerics also get magic, and they all have access to the same spells, so why is that? Well, it's just a matter of the passage of time and the codifying of things. All gods provide is the divine fuel to cast a spell, it is up to the cleric to shape it and then make it work. So, over the many centuries and millennium that this has been going on, a certain set of spells has been codified and used again and again. Thus, as a cleric goes through training, he learns of the spells his masters know, who got them from their masters, who got them from there masters, and so on. What is taught, is what is learned, and any cleric going to learn about spells are going to see relatively the same things. Original or offbeat spells can still be found, be they released in a supplement by us down the road, they are just comparatively rare. There is already some division anyway, between the lawful and chaotic gods with the reversible spells, and, like Favored Weapons, we'll probably throw in a spell or two special to each god (maybe one per level, like domains?) to separate each cleric based on who he actually worships (something not really touched in LL and even B/X in order to stay setting neutral, understandably)

So there it is, all the mysteries of the clerics special abilities and restrictions explained! If I missed anything, drop a comment about it, if not, maybe someday soon another Design & Development post about another rule fitting in with a setting will come along.

Design and Development: Cleric, Part 2

There seems to be a reasonable agreement that Undead within Deminar are seen as a bad thing amongst the gods, whether the god is full of purity and good or hatred and evil. The idea is, the undead deny souls from going to a god, and all the gods want souls to help fuel their huge domain spanning cold war that's been going on forever.
Because of this, the cleric was born, he's the ultimate anti-undead solider. While indeed, part of his job is to convert the faithless to his god or delving into dungeon to recover artifacts important to their god or even to stop various evils (or goods) from doing things against a god's faithful (i.e. justify a cleric adventuring into dungeon that aren't mainly undead places), their primary goal is to root out and destroy undead. This is something that all the gods, despite their ideological differences in a lot of things, thinks is a good thing. This also builds up an overall world concept that people who either craft the undead or seek to become them (as liches and what have you) are almost universally despised, due to the overall agreement that the undead are going against the gods.
This is why clerics are mainly trained to use blunt weapons (most effective against dead flesh) and why all clerics can turn undead through their faith.
This still brings up a few things left to wrap our heads around though. Namely, a couple of spells in a cleric's arsenal. Those being Animate Dead and Raise Dead/Resurrection.

Raise Dead and its sister spell Resurrection bring a dead person back to life, in essence putting a soul back in a corpse and letting him fight another day. This denies a soul to a god, which, as we talked about above, is bad. In a cleric's point of view, and indeed all intelligent worshiping species, that's also denying a person his rightful place in the afterlife (which isn't a skewed and wrong look at things, but, as I mentioned in the post below, is how people think). The counter to this, I believe, is that both are fairly high level spells, so the gods only grant that ability to clerics who would use it responsibly, those that weight out the factors of if being denied a chance to go to the afterlife right away is worth coming back again. Thus, I see those spells as being used rarely, and also, it has a nice built in time factor, that represents only having so much time to do so before the soul makes it to the god's domain and gets converted into "soulstuff" and not be able to retain its memories of life. Sometimes a spell just falls into world design properly.

The bigger problem is Animate Dead, as it does exactly the opposite of what clerics do, it creates undead, rather then destroys them. Now, you can argue that, since it only creates Skeletons and Zombies, that it's just making soulless undead and therefore no soul is being denied its place. And that's a good point, soulless undead are probably not as reviled as those that still have the soul trapped on Deminar (whether purposely or not), but then, why does Turn Undead work on the soulless undead to begin with? Again, I wouldn't want to get rid of this spell, so to keep the AEC as whole as possible, but its inclusion brings a few speedbumps into the thinking of how a cleric works.

And that brings up the Turn Undead affecting soulless undead issue. If the idea is that the undead are repulsed and sometimes vaporized under the presence of such faith that is basically calling out how out of order being undead is, soulless undead wouldn't really be bothered, since they don't have thoughts. The other alternative could be that Turn Undead works by disrupting whatever energy creates/sustains undead in the first place, whether soulless or not. But then, if it is that, almost, scientific approach, how come only clerics can access it? Questions, questions.

So, agree/disagree on Raise Dead? Ideas for why Animate Dead is clerical spell canon? How about that Turn Undead problem?

Design and Development: Clerics, Part 1

This is the idea that originally sparked this whole series of subheadings:

The cleric has some interesting rules that, at times, can be challenging to explain from an "in universe" perspective.

The actual casting of Divine Spells and where they come from pretty much is already explained (though it's sure to get a detailed examination within the published material), as it comes from the deities themselves, fueled by the cleric's god, allowing the cleric to perform miracles to prove the god's existence and potentially convert the nonbelievers. Atleast, that's a quick stripped down view at it.

However, there are other rulings about the class that bring up some interesting questions:

Clerics can't use bladed weapons: We all know clerics can't use weapons with an edge, the rule's been around forever. Supposedly it comes from a edict made to questing priests during the Crusades and adopted into the D&D mythos as talked about here (where he also goes on to debunk the legend). Now, while I'm not in favor of stripping what is a iconic rule about the cleric. It brings up the question within the world of Deminar, why can't clerics use bladed weapons? Obviously they did not have any Christian Crusades into the Holy Land, so what is it? The AEC states, "Strict holy doctrine prevents clerics from using any
cutting or impaling weapons," but that's not a real answer. Is it due to ancient pacts with the gods in exchange for divine casting abilities, is it part of a strict code of ethics about drawing blood held throughout all churches? Does it have anything to do with the actually casting of divine magic in the first place?

Turn Undead: All clerics can Turn Undead in LL/AEC rules, stating, "The cleric is able to call upon the name and power of his deity to repel, and even destroy, undead." Again, the question is why? I think it's because there's an assumption that most clerics within a group are worshiping a just god, one that supports freedom, life, good, flowers, etc. and that undead are a sort of abomination on the natural order of things. However, why do clerics of evil gods have the same ability? Later D&D rules add things like the ability to control undead if you're evil and some such, but again, we're trying to use the standard rulings as much as possible to make it a setting that doesn't require a lot of rules changes to run (and therefore be more accessible). So again, I'll pose the question of why? Is it because undead trap souls, therefore denying a god the ability to have it to build his domain (something all gods, good or evil, lawful or chaotic, want)? That doesn't explain away skeletons and zombies and other "soulless" undead though. Is it that this setting has no "God of Undeath" and it's against the natural order to all gods, where raising the dead isn't a matter of good or evil, lawful or chaotic, but rather a violation of the universal order of how things work, and therefore every god grants his vessels the ability to repulse and destroy them? And why does it just make undead run away at some points and at others flat out destroy them? Does the "holy power" just not have the same amount of juice all the time, so the some undead flee from the potential harmful power (a sort of unnatural instinct, like being born knowing that you probably shouldn't touch fire)?

All Clerics Get the Same Spells: This might be the only ability that gets some tweaking in Deminar. As I'm playing around with the concept in my head of each god having a small handful of specific spells that only clerics of their doctrine get. However, the "core set" of spells still remains the same, and while the reversal of certain spells into "good" and "evil" forms can help explain away some of it based on what god a cleric worships, there still seems to be a lot of uniform spells across the board. Is it another godly pact, where everyone got together and said, "well, to play fair, we should all grant our followers similar spells so that one doesn't have a clear advantage over another?" Does it have to do with the nature of divine spell casting itself, whereas although the gods grant the ability to manipulate magic, a cleric can still only access the energy of magic in a limited number of ways? Or, is it something that comes down from generations of religious codifying, where clerics throughout the ages slowly began whittling down their spells to a unified set of tested and true versions?

So, interesting things to look at and ponder the "why" factor from within the workings of the world itself. I look forward to any comments and thoughts on the matter, discussion is encouraged, but play nice!

Musing: Gods

Since this version of Deminar is much the same version of Deminar we wrote a while ago, just advanced (both in timeline and depth), the same ideals we had for deities are going to carry forward from the previous edition.
Yes, the setting has gods, we're not trying to break the mold so much and say, "people worship stuff, but there might not actually be gods, man we're deep!" There is indeed a pantheon out there that watches over Deminar, provides clerics with spells, and sits around waiting for the souls of the faithful to come to their planes in death.
However, there isn't a lot of gods, not like Forgotten Realms where every race and culture has their own pantheon (last I checked, I believe FR has 13,571 official gods, all with stats so you can kill them to fulfill some ego filled power trip), but a more respectable number of gods watching over what goes on among the floating islands. Of course, if you went about asking the various species and cultures and islands about the gods they worship and compile a list of everyone's responses, you'd find out hundreds of gods are being worshiped on a daily basis.
How is that possible? Well, remember that many of these islands have not had contact with one another in generations and even among species that intermingle with one another (and the vast majority don't), each species has its own culture and beliefs. What this boils down to is that different groups are worshiping the same gods under different aliases. A God of War may be worshiped under one name by the goblins, but something entirely different by humans and something entirely different by another clan of goblins on another island. Some might worship the valor and chivalrous aspects of war as one deity and the vicious conquering bloodthirsty aspect as another, even though its the same being. Religious wars are fought over the exact same god, hundreds have died that way, yet, the gods don't go about correcting everyone about it.
Why? Well, a few reasons, first, they've taken a more passive approach to Deminar, they don't go traipsing about in person on the islands (FR, looking at you kid!), and they're not big into the divine intervention all the time. They made a pact with one another not to get involved personally due to events in the long past that I may get around to discussing at some point. Second, a religious war fought between two sides of the same god sends all the faithful to the same god, and for the gods, the more souls you get to go to your domain, the better, though you also need to be careful to keep worshipers alive as well, again, for reasons best left for another post.
The gods are very standoffish in a lot of things, they do provide power to their clerics in return for said clerics spreading the word about them and gaining more worshipers, advertising is important down on the islands, but the gods are actually currently more concerned with what's going on within their own domains.

Also, our gods will never have stats, you can't kill them like you can a monster, by reducing their hp to 0, but you can get rid of them. Also, everyone has the potential to become a god, everyone, and this was long before 4th Edition came up with that Epic Destiny.

There really needs to be a second post about how the gods and afterlife work, I'll have to remember that!

Musing: Cleric Spells

So while I just mentioned that part of LL rules system is that all clerics have the same spells, and while the most current version of D&D comes close to that (saved by feats that give access to special prayers based on the god you pick), most fantasy systems usually give each cleric some difference depending on the god they follow.

So, the thought just popped into my head, do we add a new rules system that give clerics something extra based on their worship? And if not, how do you explain, in universe, why all clerics have access to the same spells, regardless of the deity they swear fealty too.

Hmmm, something to ponder