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Thaluikhain
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Currently reading Sea of Death, which has the Eilserv Drow Clan worshipping/serving Grazz't, who now I think of it, is a good choice for a Drow deity, being a pointed eared black skinned evil person that likes sexy ladies.

I don't know anything about elven grammar in D&D, but would it work to take "Grazz't" and stick some more letters on, and say that the name "Grazz'thaer" or something is based on the root "Grazz't"?
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Post by Foxwarrior »

You mean, something like Grazz't Do'Urden?
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Post by Username17 »

SeekritLurker wrote: (Purely as an aside, a bunch of orcs/half-orcs who worship Gruumsh as a localized rebellion/guerilla faction against the Fiend Lords is my jam, and I might use that myself someday.)

And I'd be tempted to use House Nycaloth for the Drow.
So where I was at was actually as having some of the more common evil gods simply show up in the ranks of the Fiend Lords, because I don't want to go through the whole Pathfinder bullshit about the difference between an Archdevil and a God that happens to live in Baator. I just genuinely don't care, and also I want both Erythnul and Asmodeus equally on the chopping block for potential final bosses. And the whole idea of gods being bigger and more important than Demon Princes is just fucking weird - is anyone really prepared to say that Laduguer has more pizzazz than Mamon? That Ramenos is a bigger deal than Demogorgon? You probably have to google those "gods" and you almost certainly don't have to google those Fiend Lords.

Anyway, the main list I have for the Fiend Lords who have been overthrown/changed sides are:

Asmodeus (Humans)
Baalphegor (Halflings)
Belial (Elves)
Graz'zt (Drow)
Demogorgon (Lizardfolk)
Dispater (Halflings)
Erythnul (Elves)
Gruumsh (Orcs)
Jubilex (Gnomes)
Hextor (Orcs)
Lolth (Drow)
Malcanthet (Humans)
Mamon (Dwarves)
Queen of Air and Darkness (Gnomes)
Sess'innek (Lizardfolk)
Tiamat (Kobolds)

With a bunch of the planet still under the control of various other Fiend Lords, including Orcus still having a big necropolis out in the desert.

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Post by DrPraetor »

FrankTrollman wrote: Asmodeus (Humans)
Baalphegor (Halflings)
Belial (Elves)
Graz'zt (Drow)
Demogorgon (Lizardfolk)
Dispater (Halflings)
Erythnul (Elves)
Gruumsh (Orcs)
Jubilex (Gnomes)
Hextor (Orcs)
Lolth (Drow)
Malcanthet (Humans)
Mamon (Dwarves)
Queen of Air and Darkness (Gnomes)
Sess'innek (Lizardfolk)
Tiamat (Kobolds)

With a bunch of the planet still under the control of various other Fiend Lords, including Orcus still having a big necropolis out in the desert.

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Mephistopheles (Thri-Kreen)?

What if some little kid wants to play an ice wielding insect fiend? Are you going to say no?
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Post by Wiseman »

Don't the Kobolds already have Kurtlemak? If your including underwater races, there's Sekolah and Dagon for the Sahuagin.

Other notes, Beezlebub/Baalzebub could work for the dwarves. Dispater also kind of fits them better than halflings. And in his place you could give Pazuzu to the halflings.

Anthraxus could function for Thri-Kreen.
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Post by Koumei »

Pretty sure Pazuzu is the Patron Saint of Gnolls.
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Post by Voss »

Koumei wrote:Pretty sure Pazuzu is the Patron Saint of Gnolls.
In D&D? No. Pazuzu is lord of evil flying creatures. Yeenoghu is the gnoll one. Though Orcus would work perfectly well instead
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Post by nockermensch »

Koumei wrote:Pretty sure Pazuzu is the Patron Saint of Gnolls.
https://youtu.be/33fzB8762cU
The Patron Saint of Gnolls is the Grim Reaper. Also, gnolls are weak to sonic damage in my group's games because this very music video.
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Post by Koumei »

Voss wrote:
Koumei wrote:Pretty sure Pazuzu is the Patron Saint of Gnolls.
In D&D? No. Pazuzu is lord of evil flying creatures. Yeenoghu is the gnoll one. Though Orcus would work perfectly well instead
Oh right, evil flying creatures. I remember the names of these things, and one or two traits, then I forget which creatures have which traits and which are CE or LE. Admittedly that's more memory than I dedicate to Laduger and Baghtru.
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Post by Username17 »

DrPraetor wrote:
Mephistopheles (Thri-Kreen)?

What if some little kid wants to play an ice wielding insect fiend? Are you going to say no?
That is a compelling argument. I had a vaguely Australian area that was kinda-Darksun/Dune and kinda Aztlan where people didn't have metalwork and it wasn't actually part of the Coalition that had mostly liberated itself from the Fiend Lords. And I keep vacillating between having it still be under Fiendish domination and having it be a "New World" where the Fiend Lords hadn't even known about it and it has its own unrelated evils running around.

The underground area there has all the non-metalworking underdark civilizations: Troglodytes, Grimlocks, Ilithid. They can jolly well have fiendish leadership (or in the case of the Ilithids: allies), but they are plenty bad enough to just be assholes on their own with completely homegrown monsters. I hadn't really settled on what's on the surface, but the local humans are presumably Fremen Azurin who use blue soulfire and bug carapaces instead of having mastered iron. That would be a good place for Thri-Kreen, since of course Thri-Kreen have a solid pedigree of getting by without access to metal weapons. And yes, having them in an area dominated by the Xixecal would be very thematic.
Nockermensch wrote:The Patron Saint of Gnolls is the Grim Reaper.
You know I was going to have their local fiend lords be Yeenoghu and some rando beastman type, but that's a way better reference. Yeenoghu and Grim Reaper it is.

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Post by virgil »

FrankTrollman wrote:So where I was at was actually as having some of the more common evil gods simply show up in the ranks of the Fiend Lords, because I don't want to go through the whole Pathfinder bullshit about the difference between an Archdevil and a God that happens to live in Baator. I just genuinely don't care, and also I want both Erythnul and Asmodeus equally on the chopping block for potential final bosses.
Does this mean taking inspiration from the Immortals rules? From what I recall, there wasn't a meaningful difference between an immortal and a god.
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:So where I was at was actually as having some of the more common evil gods simply show up in the ranks of the Fiend Lords, because I don't want to go through the whole Pathfinder bullshit about the difference between an Archdevil and a God that happens to live in Baator. I just genuinely don't care, and also I want both Erythnul and Asmodeus equally on the chopping block for potential final bosses.
Does this mean taking inspiration from the Immortals rules? From what I recall, there wasn't a meaningful difference between an immortal and a god.
Also AD&D. Really, D&D has jumped back and forth between what - if anything - the difference between something that was really powerful and something that was a "god" actually was. Recall that in the first presentations, there was no connections at all between the Cleric class (which was a sort of vampire hunter dude) and the gods (which were generally boss monsters you'd encounter at the end of adventures). Recall that there seriously wasn't even a Pelor to pray to until 1983, with Dungeons and Dragons bumbling along just fine without a generic god to grant generic Cleric spells for nine fucking years.

The whole idea of gods actually granting spells in a direct and meaningful way to their Clerics came about in a very roundabout fashion. We had Clerics (that you play), and we had Gods (that you stab in the tits), and then people asked if they could swap some powers and spells around if their Cleric was worshipping some specific God or another. And once the answer to that was "yes" people started to ask the next question, which was what happened to the priests of Blibdoolpoolp after you stab her in the tits? And that went into all kinds of bullshit minutiae about what spells gods could and could not grant and whether worshiping better gods made you better (it did, because fuck you for wanting anything remotely game balanced), and that created a gold rush of specialty priests with a few entire priesthoods being created purely to give sweet deals to player characters (see: Elistraee in 2nd edition, also Ukko in first).

Honestly, fuck all this shit. There should just be a couple of different caster classes and being a Priest should just be a feat that lets you banish spirits and outsiders. The priests of Lolth shoot black bolts of soul flaying because they take the fucking Necromancer class and that is what they do. The priests of some Fire God of the week get to take some Fire Mage class and burn the shit out of things.

And whether or not the fallen angel or giant toad monster or shiny fucking rock you are the high priest of has been stabbed in the face or not should have absolutely fuck-all to do with whether you can cast level appropriate spells. Because casting level appropriate spells is an absolute prerequisite for things being remotely game balanced.

So yeah, by all means stab the Queen of Air and Darkness in the tits. And the Svirfneblin demon priests will probably have their morale break, but they won't specifically become powerless at that point. Because their powers come from their levels in relevant character classes, not from her personal generosity. She's the fucking Queen of Air and Darkness, she doesn't have any generosity.

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Post by DrPraetor »

FrankTrollman wrote:Honestly, fuck all this shit. There should just be a couple of different caster classes and being a Priest should just be a feat that lets you banish spirits and outsiders.
I think there's enough conceptual room for a Priest class, who specializes in dealing with spirits and outsiders - but it would be the Sinister Priest who makes the peasantry pay to exorcise spirits he himself summons, rather than specifically a member of some pseudo-catholic hierarchy.
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Post by nockermensch »

FrankTrollman wrote:Honestly, fuck all this shit. There should just be a couple of different caster classes and being a Priest should just be a feat that lets you banish spirits and outsiders. The priests of Lolth shoot black bolts of soul flaying because they take the fucking Necromancer class and that is what they do. The priests of some Fire God of the week get to take some Fire Mage class and burn the shit out of things.
FrankTrollman also wrote:The Cleric's spell list is full of niche spells. That's what the spell list is. And giving them a couple of bonus spells known is not going to address this. You're never going to choose find the path or legend lore if you have to choose it several adventures in advance. (source)
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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:
So yeah, by all means stab the Queen of Air and Darkness in the tits. And the Svirfneblin demon priests will probably have their morale break, but they won't specifically become powerless at that point. Because their powers come from their levels in relevant character classes, not from her personal generosity. She's the fucking Queen of Air and Darkness, she doesn't have any generosity.

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You could also tie clerics even more closely to their gods, and make them direct agents who must do the will of their patron.

The fucking Queen of Air and Darkness gives you the spells that she wants you to have so that you can do the job she wants you do do. That might mean lightning bolt so that he can zap that fucker that she wants zapped, that might be Legend Lor so that you can lore that legend that she wants lored. But the point being that being a cleric would mean having a boss who is a ready source of missions, rather than just having a vague code of conduct.

In this conception, Clerics are basically the Blues Brothers.

"We're on a mission from Lolth."
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Post by OgreBattle »

So what's life like, is it any worse than regular Forgotten Realms.
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Post by DSMatticus »

nockermensch wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Honestly, fuck all this shit. There should just be a couple of different caster classes and being a Priest should just be a feat that lets you banish spirits and outsiders. The priests of Lolth shoot black bolts of soul flaying because they take the fucking Necromancer class and that is what they do. The priests of some Fire God of the week get to take some Fire Mage class and burn the shit out of things.
FrankTrollman also wrote:The Cleric's spell list is full of niche spells. That's what the spell list is. And giving them a couple of bonus spells known is not going to address this. You're never going to choose find the path or legend lore if you have to choose it several adventures in advance. (source)
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

The former is a hypothetical D&D set-up in which the cleric class doesn't exist because it's an in-universe job title and if you run around shooting fire out of your hands in the name of the One True God Burnasaurus Rex it's because you're a fire mage and if you wanted to you could also shoot fire out of your hands in the name of 420 blaze it or the name of fuck it, why not?

The latter is a discussion about how giving the existing cleric class fixed spells known isn't a satisfactory solution to the cleric/druid/wizard problem because the cleric spell list is full of fiddly situational bullshit someone might spend one of their daily slots on as needed but would never spend one of their limited and valuable spells known on.
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Post by Orca »

hyzmarca wrote:You could also tie clerics even more closely to their gods, and make them direct agents who must do the will of their patron.
Been there, done that. The result seems to be that no one wants to play the cleric. The possible risks of weaselling out of jobs are obvious enough that people don't try consciously, but they may forget (or 'forget') until it's too late.
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:So what's life like, is it any worse than regular Forgotten Realms.
I'm honestly not sure what life is like in the Forgotten Realms. While a really stupendous amount of ink has been spent on Faerun, the actual amount of information available about what people eat, how long do people work, what is the typical income of a rando baker, and so on is not satisfactorily addressed in any edition. You have evil nations, but since the brass tacks of what people actually live like and live on has not been defined in the good and evil nations, I have actually no idea whether you are actually morally in the right or wrong to stop the spread of the Zhentarim way of life.

Forgotten Realms countries are very small by modern standards and modestly large by medieval standards. With most countries being listed as being between one and five million people, Thay is about 14 or 1500s England - but of course nothing in the Forgotten Realms is as populous as France from the same period.

All this is a rather long walk to get to my main point, which is that the purpose of this setting, like Earthdawn before it, is to create reasons for D&D tropes to be present. So there are a lot of civilized regions that have been cut off until quite recently because of Fiend Lord domination, and there are a lot of cities and villages that are occupied by evil dudes that you can go liberate. You're in the expansion phase of a Reconquista, so you have lots of places you can explore and overthrow the local leadership.

As for real-life comparisons, I was thinking that you're looking at Renaissance or early Industrial Revolution. The population is exploding rapidly, travel and communication is exploding rapidly, art and science are flourishing, but it's all starting from a relatively depressed state.

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Post by SeekritLurker »

FrankTrollman wrote:
SeekritLurker wrote: (Purely as an aside, a bunch of orcs/half-orcs who worship Gruumsh as a localized rebellion/guerilla faction against the Fiend Lords is my jam, and I might use that myself someday.)

And I'd be tempted to use House Nycaloth for the Drow.
So where I was at was actually as having some of the more common evil gods simply show up in the ranks of the Fiend Lords, because I don't want to go through the whole Pathfinder bullshit about the difference between an Archdevil and a God that happens to live in Baator. I just genuinely don't care, and also I want both Erythnul and Asmodeus equally on the chopping block for potential final bosses. And the whole idea of gods being bigger and more important than Demon Princes is just fucking weird - is anyone really prepared to say that Laduguer has more pizzazz than Mamon? That Ramenos is a bigger deal than Demogorgon? You probably have to google those "gods" and you almost certainly don't have to google those Fiend Lords.



With a bunch of the planet still under the control of various other Fiend Lords, including Orcus still having a big necropolis out in the desert.

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Agreed - the difference between arch-devils and gods should be one of team colors, not game statistics. I was thinking more in the realm of factionalism - some of the standard evil gods being on Team Fiend makes a lot of sense. Hextor would be utterly willing to serve Team Fiend. Nerull is cool being bros with Orcus.

I was just thinking also of small isolated bands of fanatics worshiping their racial creator gods. It's tough going from the head of the pantheon to being second banana.

So, you have Gruumshite guerillas out in the badlands, who the PCs can work with and then go at cross-purposes with - muhajadeen allies of convenience who will be happy to kill you after they've defeated their most pressing threat. The faith of Yondalla has been basically stamped out, but there's a secret network still devoted to her aspect as Dalla Thun, Halfling goddess of revenge. Because bands of fanatics and/or secret cults devoted to a different sort of evil than the big bads of the setting are awesome.
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Post by Mord »

hyzmarca wrote: You could also tie clerics even more closely to their gods, and make them direct agents who must do the will of their patron.

The fucking Queen of Air and Darkness gives you the spells that she wants you to have so that you can do the job she wants you do do. That might mean lightning bolt so that he can zap that fucker that she wants zapped, that might be Legend Lor so that you can lore that legend that she wants lored. But the point being that being a cleric would mean having a boss who is a ready source of missions, rather than just having a vague code of conduct.

In this conception, Clerics are basically the Blues Brothers.

"We're on a mission from Lolth."
I'm presently a fan of the idea that being the Chosen of a given deity gives you access to their domain spells, regardless of your actual character class. Whether your class is Wizard, Fighter, or Rogue, you might spend a Feat to be the Chosen of Lolth and get her associated domain spells as bonus spells. If you sufficiently piss off Lolth, you might lose access to those goodies until you do an Atonement. You should be able to rededicate yourself to a different deity by doing some kind of quest, just in case your goals no longer align with Lolth's but you don't want to have wasted the feat.

That makes Paladins work out better than than their current write-up, at least for what I want to do with them. Wizards and Fighters who burned a feat to be the Chosen of a compatible deity who are still useful (at least, as useful as a vanilla Wizard or Fighter) even if they're currently on the outs with their deity make a lot more sense to me than having Clerics and Paladins as separate classes.
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Post by Username17 »

The entire Arcane/Divine magic split was a shit idea and it hasn't gotten any better since it was retconned into AD&D in the 80s. Priests of Nerull should be Necromancers. Priests of Crom should be Berserkers. Priests of Mielikki should be Druids. There is no reason or benefit for there being a generic priest class that does all three of those things.

But equally there's no reason to give out domain packages to any character of whatever class. Domain packages are just a thing that can and will be optimized. Which equally means that they are a choice that can be made badly, and will be by lots and lots of players.

Consider the issue where being a worshipper of Crom gets you the War domain and being a worshipper of Meilikki gets you the Plant domain. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. But now consider the actual in-game effects of that on a character that is a Ranger. Imagine for the moment that being a Ranger doesn't synergize very well with the Plant domain because your basic Ranger magic can already do most of what you care about. Now imagine that the War domain synergizes very well with being a Ranger because the battle buffs stack with the Ranger shooty stabby techniques. I think we can all imagine such a reality, because that's pretty much how 3rd edition worked. The result of that is that while being a Ranger of Mielikki is reasonably generic and obvious and is encouraged in the fiction, it's a terrible choice. Being a Ranger of Mielikki instead of being a Ranger of Crom is the wrong choice. That's terribad.

But here's the thing: if the obvious choice from the in-world fluff was the right choice and the oddball choice was the wrong choice, that would still be terrible. If you're going to give players an option, that option shouldn't be fucking awful. Because fucking obviously.

The simple reality is that "patron god" just shouldn't be a min/max option at all. No one should pick a favored deity for game mechanical reasons, which means that your character's favorite deity really shouldn't have concrete game mechanical effects at all.

Which brings us back to what being a Priest should be about: which is a very basic package of banishment techniques and absolutely nothing else. Priests of Nerull are Necromancers, but they use exactly the same Necromancer class as the Necromancers that aren't Priests of Nerull. Any more meaning you ascribe to being a Priest or a Priest of Nerull specifically just makes the game worse. It makes there be more game mechanical choices, but most of those choices are fake. And it turns what should be a strictly flavor consideration of what god your character likes the most and turns it into a min/max choice that has right and wrong answers. That was a step back in 1980, and the only way to salvage it is to erase it.

---
seekritlurker wrote:I was just thinking also of small isolated bands of fanatics worshiping their racial creator gods. It's tough going from the head of the pantheon to being second banana.
The path I was thinking of involved a bunch of the evil racial gods like Gruumsh, Lolth, Yeenoghu, Blibdoolpoolp and Sekolah simply being Fiend Lords who ended up with a chunk of the planet after the Fiendish invasion. The next part was where Lolth went and joined the uprising in exchange for her servants getting to keep their wealth and power after the liberation. I went with that because Drow who don't worship an evil giant spider aren't very interesting at all.

But there's no particular reason it couldn't be repeated several times. If Gruumsh also betrayed the other Fiends because he'd rather lead the Orcs than be Orcus' bitch, that would make sense. Although the mental picture I did have was a big battle at the gates of Mordor type deal where the Orc assassins took out the demon generals of the Orc side and then the Orcish armies jumped on their own fiendish overseers while the Dwarven army looked on in bewilderment. No particular reason that had to have been a Vecna-inspired plot against Hextor and Gruumsh rather than a Gruumsh inspired plot against Hextor.

In any case, I do really like the idea of various Goblins using the term "Maglubyeti" to refer to any of the free Goblinoids and "Hruggeki" to refer to any of the Goblinoids that follow the Fiend Lords. Mostly because I really like saying "Maglubyeti" and "Hruggeki" in the accent of the Fallen from Diablo II.

But yes, evil cults that aren't specifically aligned with the Fiend Lords and thus could fight with or against the player characters on any given day are useful. Animosity between groups matters if both groups are in the coalition or both groups are out of the coalition. So groups that hate both the coalition and the Fiend Lords have a clear benefit for the plot. Aboleths and Ilithid, for example, are good "third teams".

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Post by nockermensch »

DSMatticus wrote:I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

The former is a hypothetical D&D set-up in which the cleric class doesn't exist because it's an in-universe job title and if you run around shooting fire out of your hands in the name of the One True God Burnasaurus Rex it's because you're a fire mage and if you wanted to you could also shoot fire out of your hands in the name of 420 blaze it or the name of fuck it, why not?

The latter is a discussion about how giving the existing cleric class fixed spells known isn't a satisfactory solution to the cleric/druid/wizard problem because the cleric spell list is full of fiddly situational bullshit someone might spend one of their daily slots on as needed but would never spend one of their limited and valuable spells known on.
The point is that in the hypothetical set-up, don't we still need a "healer", "white mage", or whatever class that has a list full of mostly healing/buffing/debuffing magics, but also the kind of situational magic like "Augury" or "Find the Path"? I can imagine the typical classes for the clerics of Vecna or Lolth (Necromancers and Summoners, respectively). But what's the typical holy folk of Lathander, Pelor or Yondalla even are?


Possible solution for this problem without requiring a cleric: Identify the spells that are kind of offensive to fill space in a "spells known" list and transform them in rituals that anyone can learn (balance this with long casting times / whatever).

Alternative solution: Boring utility magic is the province of NPC-tier mage wrights, acolytes, or whatever. PCs are expected to just buy scrolls or potions of these, as needed.

However, this still doesn't fully resolve the problem. While mostly everybody agrees that the best healer is a wand of lesser vigor, there may be a legitimate need for casting stuff like Death Ward, Remove Paralysis or Remove Fear sometimes. And also stuff like a proper "Heal" when you're mid level, was just ganked by a closet troll and need to be back into fighting shape right now. So what do?
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Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

There's some tension there, because on the one hand, people will both want to play their ranger to type and worship Ehlonna, and they'll also want to play their ranger against type and worship Boccob. On the other hand, while you're right that simply checking the Boccob box and getting minor magic is bad, people do want secret rites and societies devoted to Boccob that they can join.

Except that they don't because D&D polytheism is pretty silly.

So we should revere-engineer this from what we want:
[*] We want mendicant friars.
[*] We want (pseudo?)religious monastic orders of warriors and/or mages with matching outfits.
[*] We want hospitalier orders from which the PCs can buy healing and which are the red cross when that comes up.
[*] We want grand setpiece temples, decorated with the infinite budget of our imagination, where a red-robed high priest eats a bull heart at the climax of the ceremony.

Only that last one really requires something we'd recognize as a religion. For the others, they can have patron saints and generic non-denominational holy men wandering the countryside or being anchorites without needing any theology at all.

This is a good policy because then you have a game-world which is essentially lacking in theological assertions to which real world players might take for some reason exception. It also fits with the Lord of the Rings source material, which in spite of Tolkien's supposed monotheistic background argle-bargle includes no organized religion whatever. Temples are either devoted to placating demon lords, or to venerating some holy man or hero whom you expect to protect you from the demon lords (or who left behind teachings which you follow for the same purpose.)

If you want to ground this in sociology, you can point out that with demon lords stomping around giving orders, the notion of worshiping some remote celestial divinity just seemed silly to all concerned. There are holy men, which status would be attributed to some ill-defined notion of kismet or karma.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

nockermensch wrote: But what's the typical holy folk of Lathander, Pelor or Yondalla even are?
Paladin would be a fine fit if you're keeping that class around. One of the side bennies of getting rid of the all-in-one cleric is that Paladin concept of being a heavily armored energy channeler could actually be halfway distinctive for a change. Even as a young man I thought it was sort of dumb how you can't really tell apart a Lawful Good Cleric from a Paladin or Fighter-Cleric multiclass without knowing the math or spell lists like the back of your hand.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sat Feb 24, 2018 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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