Need D&D priesthood ideas.

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.

This may be considered a hijack but I’m merely making a suggestion.

I created a world where there was a big magical catastrophe which thrust the world into an ice age. The nature of the magical catastrophe created a barrier between the inner and outer planes that was unbreachable by most anything. Gods starved being cut off from their followers while the people of this world returned to barbarism over the chilly millennia and nature worship since the inner planes (fire, water, air, ooze, ash, etc) were more powerful and infinitely more pragmatic than having a god of compassion, healing or some other existential nonsense.

The only gods which survived this catastrophe were the ones who were on this world while it occurred and they’ve mostly devolved into being racial gods rather than representing virtues or morals. The only known god who has remained a god in their classical sense was the dwarven god who hid himself under a mountain out of despair because he was too late to stop the catastrophe.

I would like to suggest an orcish god of healing, especially with orcish priests of this god of healing. Just think of the fun as your weary travellers happen upon an orcish town seeking succor and the folks at the temple immediately engage the process of bleeding them, lopping off bits and urinating in wounds.

As for sites on the internet, I haven’t found any that were any good, original or coherent. I just use my feeble imagination.

Link the various gods with the 4 mystic elements instead of good or evil.

I think you can figure this out.

Already planned to, but that still leaves a lot of domains unused. I’m also considering a quartet of “deities” based on the four seasons, with domain assignments roughly corresponding to some aspect of each season (healing for spring, a time of regrowth; sun for summer, for obvious reasons; etc.) That gives a total of eight sources for priesthoods and covers most domains, so I’ll probably go with this option unless somebody knocks my socks off with a better idea.

I’m not sure what tone was intended here, so I’ll avoid further comment.

You could use deities linked to the Zodiacal signs; you can find lists of what attributes the standard Western or Eastern ones have pretty easily, or you could design your own for the campaign. Since the Western zodiacal signs all have elemental and seasonal attributions, you could pretty easily link them to the ideas you have already, if you wanted. And twelve is more than enough for each one to have a unique primary sphere and get most of them covered.

Incidentally, even though it’s not a D&D book, you might find GURPS Religions helpful for these sorts of things, with samples of different sorts of pantheons and temples. (Of course, I’m biased; I’m primarily a GURPS GM.)

www.rpg.net has a decent board–for the most part, it hasn’t made me feel that I need to fail a language test in order to join in.

Didn’t Michael Moorcock already do this?

A radical idea for D&D I know. So we have this one all powerful deity which pretty much everybody in the country worships. The church has different orders within the Church that have their own beliefs and function. Kind of like the different orders found in Catholocism. You’d have Clerics with different abilities/spells even though they technically worship the same god.

Marc

If you have a diety who is usually unresponsive, you should probably limit certain spells. Otherwise, people will always have the exact canon; the clerics actually go off and ask when there is a real question.

No offense was intend, & I apologise for my badly phrased remark. :frowning:

Please accept my apology, I was trying to give you space in your campaign. No insult intended, I swear.
Also, consider the Chinese system of 5 or more elements. Leaves room for druids.

Or borrow some ideas from Magic The Gathering™ . Most of your players will kown a little about it, & the paintings on the cards will inpire your subconscious to new ideas. One pantheon from each suit of cards in the game.

And don’t forget demigods & saints–you can pick a major god/goddess for each element as a “Zeus” figure, a major/minor deity as their spouce, & an array of demigods/saints for other functions to fill in the domain gaps. No separate temples or priesthoods, but the status of the deity would determine the level of available spells.

There was a Priests Handbook for an earlier edition of AD&D that included a Faith of Man religion. This centered around the idea that Humans are not merely perfectable, they can become demi-gods, or even gods, by achieving “perfection” in a given field. These priests had some spells, but could also use better weapons, & could raise their ability scores with experience. Hunt around for a cheap used copy on Amazon for details.

I have a lawful neutral paladin, whos order I created, in a game right now. His order is based on the ancient Chinese beaurocracy (though not set in an oriental world). Their whole mission is secularism. They see all gods as agents of chaos. Even the so-called lawful ones end up upsetting the status quo when they start medling in the affairs of men. They are expert administrators. They work their way into the administration of a city / country and then use their worldly power to thwart the gods and their representatives at ever turn making no distinction between deities. By the time they are established no one is willing to try and dislodge them. The economy invariably improves greatly under their management and as much as people like their gods they love their money even more. This is especially true of kings who get to collect taxes on all that lovely wealth.

They do however have a source of power, based in collective magic generated by members through a sort of “secular prayer”. Each member contributes a little of themselves to the order on a daily basis. The input averages more than the output and so this creates an ever growing resivoir of power for the “priests” and “paladins” of the order to call on.

They follow the general pattern of religious organisations (priestly types and paladin types) deliberately to cast doubt on whether the “real” religions are dispensing a gods power or just using smoke and mirrors. “Look I can heal with out a gods help. So what makes you think a god helped him?”

The only priest I ever played in my years of gamimng was a character done in fun but never taken too seriously. Perhaps the idea will inspire you.
Linus Aloishous VanPelt- Priest of The great Pumkin.

Like MGibson, I like the idea of the monotheistic world where the “religions” are really orders of one religion. Like if the god is “Bob”, there’s Bob the Healer, Bob the Devourer, etc…

One idea a friend of mine and I played was a priest of the god of ancestors, and his brother and protector, the paladin. They had tattoos running down their bodies representing the deeds of their forefathers, and the more researched or legendary the family was the longer the tattoos. Their names were based on the “Son of” motif, but carried out a few generations. (e.g. Thren au Dohi au Woohoun = Thren, son of Dohi, son of Woohoun) And that would be an abrievated name used among regular folk, but the true name would include all the ancestors as far back as they knew.

Instead of calling on a particular god to cast a spell, he would call the spirit of a particular ancestor who was connected in some way with the sphere of the spell…

This sounds way cool, actually. (Er, monotheism, not calling your god “Bob”.) Just like in the real world, different sects, although worshipping the same god, could disagree on exactly how he (or she!) is to be worshipped. Room for lots of conflict and holy wars.

Blasphemer! J.R. “Bob” Dobbs will sick the X-ists on you for that!

The Lord Robert shall surely smite thee, heretic!

Apology accepted, Bosda; I was probably overreacting. And thanks for the new ideas! One of my players had actually commented that my ideas reminded him of the setup in Magic: The Gathering. At the moment, I’m working with the elements from Legend of the Five Rings: Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Void. I’m not sure what the traditional Chinese elements are, though (I want to say wood and steel are two of them?).

The way I’ve got it worked out so far, you can choose to be a priest of one of the five elements listed above. If you go with one of the four, for lack of a better term, “basic” elements, you have access to the domain associated with that element, plus one of three others particular to that sphere, which are as follows:

Earth - Strength, Protection, or Knowledge.
Fire - Sun, War, or Destruction.
Air - Travel, Trickery, or Luck.
Water - Healing, Plant, or Animal.

Void - Since there’s no “void” domain, clerics of the void get access to the Magic domain, plus their choice of Knowledge, Luck, or Death. (I wanted to avoid overlap, but I’ve at least minimized it.)

Additionally, a cleric of any sphere may elect to take an alignment domain (Law, Chaos, Good, or Evil) instead of choosing from the list above.

Comments? Suggestions?

I do like the idea of the Faith of Man, though. I’ll have to check that out. It might make for a good enemy for the PCs, as would Degrance’s secular paladins. Ancestor worship sounds pretty cool too, though I’d have to rework it a bit to fit in with 3e rules.

And thanks for the board suggestion, Drastic; I’m glad to hear that there’s a place (aside from this board, of course) that I can read without seeing stuff like “lol drizzt is teh s uck.”

Oh good heavens, why think of the classical western elements when there are the Chinese elements of wood, fire, earth, water and metal all of which interact with each other and stuff.

Yet another possibility: Maybe the priests themselves don’t know what the source of their power is? Or rather, each priest (or each order) does “know”, but is sure that every other priest/order’s ideas of it are full of hooey.

“Yeah, those Elbonismists may claim that they’re getting their powers from the spirits of their ancestors, but any enlightened Wackoist knows that they’re really just drawing on the Principle of Fire.” Et cetera.

The various GURPS sourcebooks generally make wonderful resources no matter what system you actually use, and GURPS Religion is currently in print. It would at least be worth leafing through at your hobby/game store until they remind you this isn’t a library…