and if we stat them can we eat them
 |
| Vlad Ogorodnyk |
so . . . the Author's notes for the first trade of DIE
(which
is fantastic, by the way - the D&D cartoon extrapolated to real
life : do they ever get home? and then when they do will they get
sucked back in?)
(
. . . fantastic . . . ha ha . . .)
pointed
out how weird Clerics in D&D are, particularly at low levels :
these small scale, almost clerical
(in
a bureaucratic sense, ha ha again. endless ha has. ha ha's
built on a superstructure of ha has . . .)
miracles
on order.
Gillen
solves this by emphasizing a more adversarial (or transactional)
relationship : Gods as bound demons. Cleric as demonologist. Or
warlocks for you modernistic 5e types. Or the god is the warlock in a pact with the PC for you post-modernistic e5 types.
this
is a fine dynamic, but I think loses something
(unrepentant
cleric player talking here : to me, as a kid, in a lot of ways
Deities and Demigods WAS D&D - and a curse upon your house
whoever walked away with my copy containing the Lovecraft/Melniboné
stuff)
 |
| Erol Otis por obvio |
howsabout we, instead of approaching the problem of all these Acolytes are wandering around a mysto Sears catalogue ordering the daily Cure Light Wounds as some kind of cosmological bug
(that
breaks into absurdity as soon as you extrapolate it out to a larger
scale and there’s thousands upon thousands of cats calling on tech
support at whatever particular high temple),
howsabout
we look at it as a feature
mainly,
yon old, "How are the Humies, weak and hairless, able to at long
last conquer the world?"
(vs
all these elder and Eldar races)
 |
| Theodor Kittelsen |
What if the humans are God conduits? What if every one is a kind of rudimentary saint? In a way that other critters can't sniff at.
instead
of the default class for a young fellow of "dungeoneering
ambition" being fighter ("just out of the army gov'ner,
looking for a bit of action : yeah I'll go take that coin out of the
wizard's fountain ") maybe almost everyone you see is some sort
of 0 level cleric . . .
most
people don't get much past the cantrip-ized versions of the 1st level
spells : if someone is sick, maybe you light a cistern to the Holy
Virgin Neutron Star Mother : CLW (level 0 version).
You
get that chill from passing someone who is actual a dead person and
whose soul is filled with the Coldness of yon dark and slimy Negative
Material Plane : make the sign of the Tooth Shark and it's P fro E
(level 0 version).
the
effects aren't that much : it's more part of a fundamental part of
the human experience - what one, as a human in these cultures where
BIG MAGIC does exist out there, does.
A
person whose connection to the godhead is more profound will be
promptly hoovered up by organized groups as particularly "favored"
by the gods and trained up to 1st level, or perhaps they
are just better energy conduits and will get there by misadventure.
(or, considering that all the other hominid types don't have that advanced access : a lot the hoovering maybe by the other races : what's the deal with the goblins always leaving bundles of screaming mudstraw in babies' cribs anyway? well, how else are they gonna have a tete-a-tete with Maglubiyet if they don't have a manchild to do the conversing?)
 |
| PJ Lynch |
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