Clerics in your game

[bestialwarlust]

How do you handle clerics in your game? Do you use the class and spell list as is so that a cleric of Zeus and a cleric of Harvey the god of pizza are all the same? Do you customize the spell list and clerics for your gods?

[Deleted]

In my game, there are few clerics outside The Church.

The Amazon Women have a version of Cleric that worships Athena, may wield spears and swords, and rarely heal menfolk. They have no power over the Undead, however.

Northmen have Godi as their Warrior Priests.

Easterners have Monks and Sohei as their Holy Warriors.

Everyone else uses Druids as their Warrior Priests.

[bestialwarlust]

Cool so in a way you have customized the cleric class to fit within cultures. So while to Amazonian may be the same. They are still different compared to the Godi if not in mechanics at least in role play,

[Deleted]

Right. I have broken down character class depending on Race/Culture. For instance, the racial differences between a Celt and a Northman, physically, are slight; but their cultures are different. A Fighting Man is a Fighting Man, but different cultures would have produced different classes - particularly the religious classes.

[robkuntz]

I pretty much detail everything as different as noted by cultures, gods, proclivities and this gets influenced by history (ascending or descending civilization/culture) and power struggles--waning or ascending--of the gods, etc. It's very granular and the land masses, huge open territories, tend to influence this as well, as very inculcated systems and beliefs arise that are then promoted over huge swaths of time, thus making most every world/area facet compelling compared to other strains happening elsewhere.

[captaincrumbcake]

In my Lost Lands campaign that I am designing here in this forum, I have created a situation where the deities of humans (human clerics) have withdrawn Their favors to the mortals; thus, clergy has no spell casting powers at all, and serve more in the traditional--guiding/inspirational--role similar to (most) modern religions. The deities of dwarfs, elves, etc., however, have not fully done the same, and thus the clergy of these races retain some spell-casting abilities; they are not, however, effective when applied to members of other races.

[tetramorph]

All cool stuff.

You guys know I do the whole fantastical Christendom thing.

Law = what supports civilization, provision and safety for the free races (elves, dwarves, men, etc.).

Playing clerics are really knights of a religious (which is to say, monastic) order. Not the generic "cleric" that means priest, minister, imam, whatever.

So the church of law is the only lawful organization that has PC "Clerics." The nation of law is wandering nomads and dervishes. They have clerics but not "clerics." And then there is the temple of law in the holy Axis Mundi city of Salem. They have a LOT of priests, but not "clerics."

Far away in the mighty Middle Kingdom and on the Island of the Empire of the Sun they also have various factions that support the Law of Heaven with sages and priests, but not "clerics," again, in the Religious Order of Knighthood sense. That is a church of law kind of thing.

Hope that helps for whatever it is worth!

[monk]

On my Lost Continent, we've sort of dumped clerics. I have a player who ran multiple clerics across two campaigns for several years and finally we both decided that the "favors from the gods" thing didn't really work for us. There are cults and there are monastic communities, both of which can perform some high level clerical magic by conducting long rituals (for resurrection, curse removal, etc.), but no PC clerics. Cure Light Wounds and other basic clerical spells just went onto the MU spell list and the availability of alchemical potions for healing increased. This has worked for us, but maybe only because of the particular setting.

If we were to use clerics again, I'd probably customize heavily, making them explicitly witch doctors, eastern type monks, western type monks, druids, etc.

[robkuntz]

Yeah. My world has really sparsely organized religions. It's more like folks want to worship the Elemental "gods"/powers/entities (thus false religions spring up here or there)) but the elements are mostly indifferent to it. There are some exceptions to this, but on the mainstay, no "real" organized religion.

[Deleted]

I also typically use a fantastical Christendom, but in my clerics are employed as the standard clergy. This means that clerics can't simply gain levels, they usually have to be ordained into a higher position, and with the new vocation comes its general responsibilities; this puts adventuring clerics at a higher premium as levels increase. There is also another class, the holy-man, who is basically a magic-user who gets clerical spells and uses the cleric experience table (but still keeps the magic-user spell progression and hit dice). Depending on the religious order involved, the class rules will change: only one type of class may be allowed, or one may be secular and the other monastic, or they may be freely mixed, etc.

Clerics of various heresies or other religions—related or unrelated to the lawful church—do exist, but while running my game I never had to go beyond handling them individually, case by case.

I'm currently writing up a brief for a campaign I'd like to run in the future, and this one will have no clerics. Instead, magic-users have open access to all spell lists (but not turning). There is no distinction between a magician, scholar, alchemist or priest, they've all had the same training. However, the ability to turn undead is instead given to elves (although I haven't decided whether elves are scary NPCs only).

[ffilz]

I use the spells as per Men & Magic. Clerics choose a god from Supplement IV.

Pretty much the way we played back in the day.

[robkuntz]

Yeah, Odin was my favorite then. I had some pretty keen things happening with the Lovecraftian/CAS stuff too; Temple of the Latter Day Elder Ones and tie-ins to ancient gods long lost in the Lost City of the Elders. Strange, eldritch and misbegotten stuff, and their priests.

With Kalibruhn (the former was Greyhawk) things got to be my own. Expediency does have its advantages.

[Von]

For me the Cleric class denotes membership in the Church of Ancestors, in some form or another: the spells available to Clerics (and, by extension, Paladins) are those befitting that faith and the powers relating to undead (as altered by alignment) reflect their Church's position on matters Ancestral quite nicely anyway.

Druids (and, by extension, Rangers) occupy that pantheon-worshipping niche and are committed to the pantheon as a whole: they may prefer one facet over another but I expect that to be expressed through their choice of spells to memorise rather than something they do in the expectation of bonuses and book-keeping. The 'priest of Great Blah, god of mumbo-jumbo and jam-makers' approach didn't sit too well with me even before it became a matter of picking bonus spells and domain powers and all that rot.