I’m hopefully going to be DMing a D&D (3e) campaign soon, and I’m creating my own campaign setting (I’ll go into more detail if it would help … or if I need to bounce ideas off of someone). However, one area that’s giving me a lot more trouble than it should is creation of something for clerics to draw power from.
A few things: I don’t like having a jumble of loosely connected gods or gods that casually interact with mortals (eg. the gods of the Forgotten Realms). I prefer deities that are more impersonal and aren’t so obvious in how they influence mortal affairs. I don’t like the idea of priests drawing power from simple ideology (“I’m a priest of Good.”), but I don’t mind and actually rather like priests tapping power from extraplanar sources (eg. clerics tapping the elemental spheres in the Dark Sun setting or perhaps being granted spells by powerful extraplanar beings). I’m pretty ambivalent when it comes to racial deities like Moradin and Corellon Larethian.
So, any help in creating a semi-coherent explanation for what the heck powers a cleric’s spells would be greatly appreciated. Ideally, I’d like to try to include most of the domains outlined in the Player’s Handbook (I don’t want my players to feel like they’re being screwed out of options).
As a sidenote, does anyone know of any good gaming message boards where I can get more in-depth with this stuff? You guys are great, but I don’t know how much you’ll want to put up with me.