divinities in Emirikol

[subplotkudzu]

Just in case someone decides to play a cleric (stranger things have happened).


To keep things simple we have 4 elemental gods, ancestor worship and worshiping the spirits off the emperors. Plus, the Chaos Cults, but those are some of the bad guys. Here are the spheres by deity, and no, I'm not adding any new ones.

ancestors: Animal, Knowledge, Luck, Plant
emperors: Law, Good, Protection, War
chaos: Chaos, Destruction, Evil, War
air: Air, Knowledge, Magic, Travel
earth: Earth, Plant, Protection, Strength
fire: Fire, Healing, Sun, Trickery
water: Death, Trickery, Travel, Water

As you can see, the fire and water gods both have a touch of Chaos with the Trickery sphere. Fire as an element is favored for its purifying aspects, while the imperial culture practices water burial whenever possible - it's got a lot of rivers and spread across a lot of islands. That means a lot of travel is by boat, so the Travel sphere is related to both air and water.

Ancestor worship is the oldest of the clerical religions (there's nature worship too, but that's all druid), and therefore has the spheres most needed for farmers and animal owners, with the bonus of asking questions of ones ancestors. The emperors' spirits are the strongest force of stability in the world, but have some muscle flexing in their War sphere. And they are at war with Chaos.

I ended up putting Magic under air in part because I didn't have anywhere else to put it, but the concept of magical words, plus the need to travel to learn works for me. The earth spheres were chosen just to be solid and dependable, and to have farmers who weren't ancestor worshipers.

I don't intend to use a Undead (or elementals) in this game, because a class of monsters that are immune to critical hits and sneak attacks doesn't work for a swashbuckler concept. This will make Clerics less useful as a design feature, especially stripped of their heavy armor, so they might get some other bennie - either Turning energy will have other uses or I'll expand their weapon list to include at least some swords. Or both.

Comments

[ladegard.livejournal.com]

Just an idea, but in Sue's game, she has been known to use a variant of the channeling rules from Defenders of the Faith and allow turning uses to power deity-appropriate magical effects. This included things like being able to find and travel the road of Faerie, being able to find water or being able to light fires no matter how bad the conditions, a cleric of a mystery cult who, when traveling, would be remembered as a 'cleric of XXX' but not specifically as himself except to those who knew him or specifically were looking for him, and a paladin who could surrender himself to his deity and be rapidly traveled to places his goddess wanted him be, albeit without knowing where he was going or what was happening there.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

The Defenders of the Faith aspects were pretty much what I was thinking of - I'm just not sure how campaign specific I want the options to be, and how much they should be a Feat Sink.

One thing I'm sure of is I don't want them to have combat/fencing applications. Other stuff, like boosting saving throws, boosting diplomacy, sense motive or intimidate, etc. (as well as the cool 'light fire under any conditions') might be on the table. I'll probably end up asking any player who picks a cleric what his 'faith trick' is as a start.