Dude. You cast Know Alignment. Then hit it upside the head if it's not to your liking. Or insert sharp objects and the like. You get mad powers after repeating it for a while. Then you can cast Know Alignment more times per day.
On a completely unrelated note, my paladin needs Mass Know Alignment.
I don't know. I've always found the "incontrovertible" presence of the gods to be a gold mine when I've run D&D. Sure, if your world has a single set of gods set in a single system of belief, and those gods regularly pop down to the world to throw their weight around (or, conversely, never leave Heaven, Olympus, Yu-Shan, whatever, but leave their mark through other means), it can get pretty boring. But that's also incredibly unrealistic. Fantasy settings are generally more cosmopolitan than mundane settings (no elves in the real world), so there's no reason their systems of faith shouldn't be. There should be multiple religions even within the elven community, for example
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you know that other faiths are false and other so-called priests wield witchcraft,
Well, that depends on your attitude. Only if you're a strict monotheist will you assume that other 'divine' powers must come from demons. And with so much evidence that they in fact come from equally 'good' beings (healing powers being one exapmle), why would you cleave to the idea that the god who happens to favour you is the only god?
Cruac and Theban Sorcery are good examples. And look at the work I did on Vampire -- the setting expressly doesn't explain an origin story, and leaves a lot of that open to the interpretation and storytelling of the troupe.
But what if there is some source of "power" that takes the shape that is impressed upon it by those taping into it? So the god are self evident...until a more powerful belief system overwhelms the old one.
Bah. Too much wine in me to fully flesh this out. But it's an interesting question to pose.
It's a cool consideration, and one of the things that I like about D&D 4e, if I'm remembering the detail correctly. Clerics power comes from the esteem of the congregation, as opposed to a channel between god and cleric. Now I have to go back and read that bit again to be sure I haven't garbled my details.
Even Wizards of the Coast recognises that people like you and I prefer a more "real world" approach to standard D&D gods. Eberron's deities are distant and unknowable, and several theories about what's really going on exist in the world.
Which is a cool way of handling it. I like that the gods are their but their movements are open to interpretation... but that those personified gods are still believed in to some degree. It's a lot more compelling than, say, World of Warcraft, in which the priest class is largely agnostic and exists more to cast healing spells than serve as the agents of a deity. While they're both mechanically the same, the set dressing makes a world of difference.
Yes. You get the sense that the Light, in World of Warcraft, is more like the Light Side of the Force than anything else - not really a personal deity with a will to express. Then the naaru turn up, and they're supposed to be like the embodiment of the Light - so is that literal, and the Light is a gestalt deity comprising the whole naaru population, or what?
Some of the earlier Tekumel stuff (the original swords and glory) touches on this problem in a rather interesting fashion - the gods are incontrovertibly real, and humanity is incontrovertibly inferior to them --- the gods are not only real, but basically incomprehensible. As a result, there's an open concordat that requires the worship of both the "good" and "evil" gods (another term which doesn't really map neatly in Tekumel, it doesn't have a word for it). There are openly hostile gods who are forbidden, but the reasons are lost to history, and the game gives us a fairly good rationale for why someone would worship them
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Dude. You cast Know Alignment. Then hit it upside the head if it's not to your liking. Or insert sharp objects and the like. You get mad powers after repeating it for a while. Then you can cast Know Alignment more times per day.
On a completely unrelated note, my paladin needs Mass Know Alignment.
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Well, that depends on your attitude. Only if you're a strict monotheist will you assume that other 'divine' powers must come from demons. And with so much evidence that they in fact come from equally 'good' beings (healing powers being one exapmle), why would you cleave to the idea that the god who happens to favour you is the only god?
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But what if there is some source of "power" that takes the shape that is impressed upon it by those taping into it? So the god are self evident...until a more powerful belief system overwhelms the old one.
Bah. Too much wine in me to fully flesh this out. But it's an interesting question to pose.
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In Istar's heyday the Kingpriest even persecuted Paladine-worshipping people, just becaues they worshipped a different aspect of the deity.
Not to mention the fact the the whole pantheon is prone to vanish every few decades... :-P
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