Tuesday 29 June 2021

Primordial Cleric

The other side of the coin to the Warlock. I wanted to focus in on the idea that clerics represent more of an organised religion than the individualistic bargaining of the Warlock or the looser affiliations of a Druid. 

Crafts are perhaps more suited to a cloistered monk type, but I wanted to draw on that side of things while maintaining the more heretic-smiting and miracle-performing side of things. So the result is something mashed together from those three archetypes. Let's see if it works. 


Cleric

Devotion

You are devoted to an organised faith until death, after which you hope to be rewarded. You will never receive concrete evidence that your faith is justified, but you have found some feeling or philosophy to justify your faith. 


Equipment - Choose 2

Rod: Proudly bearing your icon, inspiring the faithful and daunting your enemies. An impactful but clumsy weapon if needed. 

Sword: Highly decorative scabbard. You fight with fervent righteousness rather than martial skill.

Censer: Spreads a purifying incense or a concealing smoke. 

Ring: Your touch alone can soothe the faithful and cause sudden pain to those you deem unholy. 

Lantern: Never runs out of oil, and light intensity adjusts to your will. Holy oil is explosive in desperate situations. 

Shield: Utterly unbreakable by those that you consider to be enemies of your faith. 


Craft

Part of your worship is serving the community through your craft, and passing knowledge on to future generations. The products provide great comfort, relief, and even miraculous healing, to those that partake. 

Choose 2 for yourself, and 1 that is strictly forbidden. 

Brewing, Calligraphy, Carpentry, Horticulture, Pottery.


Icon

The symbol of your faith, which is marked on all of your personal equipment. You can mark this Icon onto products of your craft if you truly dedicate your full efforts into them. This enhances their beneficial effects further and creates a negative effect on unnatural enemies of your faith. 


Miracles

The effects of your crafts and services can seem truly miraculous, but they never appear outright magical. Effects take hold overnight when nobody is watching, or manifest through events that could be coincidence. 


Despite this subtlety, there is no upper limit to these miracles, though the will of the gods is never a reliable force. They may have other plans for you.





Services

These take an hour to prepare and the same to perform.

Judgement: You call down a condemnation of somebody that has wronged your faith. If they are present they may beg for forgiveness, which you decide whether or not to grant. Otherwise, they are considered an unholy enemy of your faith. 

Oath: One or more people make a lifelong promise, or reinforce an existing bond. Increases morale and dedication when enacting this promise.  

Prayer: You call for support in a particular course of action. If your faith is strong you will notice a guiding hand when you act in that direction. 

Consecration: A person, place or object is purged of unholy presence or sin, often through fire or water.  


Relics

Remains of the most revered martyrs of your faith. You do not wish to possess these, they belong under sacred protection.

Choose 2 that you know the location of, one safe and one not. The others are lost. 


Tome of ______: Encased in bones and lined in skin. Contains an order of service written in a mostly-forgotten dialect. When a Service is performed while reading from this book, the effects are enhanced by an order of magnitude. 

_________’s Halo: A lantern containing skull parts. When its light fills a room the walls become indestructible.

Eyes of ________: Preserved in frosted glass. If used in a Prayer ceremony, the Cleric receives visions of possible futures. 

The ________ Shroud: Rumoured to have the ability to return the dead to life.

_________ Urn: The combined ashes of martyrs slaughtered in vast numbers. Their vengeful spirits can be awoken in times when your entire faith is under threat.






8 comments:

  1. Very nice. I can imagine this as a trad-Cleric or a wandering monk. Will be interested to see how you approach monsters.

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  2. A lot of traditional cleric classes feel more like Holy-themed Warlocks than anything else. This goes the whole other way

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  3. Thanks for posting this! Inspiring as usual.

    One quick question about something that has me confused:

    The cleric "...will never receive concrete evidence that your faith is justified, but you have found some feeling or philosophy to justify your faith."

    Later on, the cleric can have a lantern that never goes out or an unbreakable shield. That seems like pretty concrete evidence of the cleric's faith! :-) What am I missing here? Is there an intent in the earlier sentence I'm not grasping?

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    1. I'd play it so that the Cleric never heard the voice of their god and never had concrete proof of their existence. In a world with magic it's always possible the Cleric is channelling magic without realising it.

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    2. Maybe the cleric doesn't know that the lantern will never go out, and that's just something the player knows? The cleric could know that the lantern is blessed, and 'feels' something special about it. Same with the shield, the cleric might not know that it is unbreakable, but they would still put their faith in the shield protecting them.

      I don't think the cleric needs to know these things for them to be true.

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    3. That part is sort of written as a contrast to the Warlock, who has various concrete bits of evidence that their Patron is a real and powerful being.

      So the Cleric will witness miracles of their god (like the Lantern never running out and the Shield never breaking) but they aren't necessarily proof that their God is behind those things. Maybe the shield is just really strong. Maybe the lamp oil is just extremely efficient, or somebody is topping it up when nobody is watching. It's not so much intended to cause the Cleric to doubt their faith, but it's more to allow outsiders to view the miracles as "probably just a coincidence".

      It's all pretty loose advice, but hopefully helps to set the tone for the Cleric's relationship with their faith.

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  4. curious what's the intended purpose of the relics if the cleric doesnt want to own them, if there's any

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    1. The intent is that you don't wish to posses them for yourself, but bring them back into sacred protection if they're lost. If they're already under protection then you might make a pilgrimage to their location and ask to make use of them without taking them for yourself.

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