WHAT R THE 0 LEVEL HUMANS?

 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 1^st 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