ZEITGEIST 4E divine power and Zeitgeist

I am starting a 4E campaign of Zeitgeist, and I am having some trouble with characters that use the divine as source of power. The chapters on religion in the campaign guide are somewhat vague, with many religions being more like ideologies. That doesn't fit too well with a D&D cleric or paladin receiving spells from his god.

Two specific questions I have are:

1. How would I handle Channel Divinity feats for a cleric in Zeitgeist if his religion is something like "The Clergy" or "The Old Faith". Where exactly would the divine power of such a cleric come from?
2. What would be a suitable religion for a paladin from Risur, if I want to create some bond between the order of the paladin and the royal house of Risur?

Think of the Clergy as being like the Catholic Church, with gods instead of saints. There are a lot of saints people revere, but a few folks are particularly devoted to one; it would be the same with gods in the Clergy. For the Old Faith, it's similar but much less structured. Every town or region might claim its own gods from folklore, and a lot of them might have gotten bundled together over the years through syncretism. We intentionally did not provide a list of gods because both PF and 4e came with their own god lists, and we figured why fight against that. Use whatever names you want for the gods. he

Mind you, no one in several thousand years has actually seen a god, and it's fair for people to question whether they even exist. Maybe the power of divine casters is drawn from the shared faith of millions of believers. Maybe there actually are gods out there trying to help common people on this small world as best they can. Maybe it's just the same energy arcane casters use, but divine casters fool themselves into thinking it's holy.


There is no 'royal house' in Risur, because the monarchy is not hereditary. Rather, each monarch picks a successor he thinks is of merit. The family of the monarch becomes nobility.

In any case, if you want a paladin with ties to the monarchy, there's a position known as the Green Knight, which is tasked as the royal bodyguard. Since the kings and queens themselves tend to be pretty bad-ass, the bodyguards are very elite. It is said there can only be one green knight at a time, but due to a cleverly-worded pact with the Unseen Court many years ago, whoever holds that title cannot die unless the sun is out. Perhaps one of the former knights founded an order of paladins. They could revere whatever god or gods you want, but it would probably be a Risuri god of the Old Faith, not one from the Clergy.

Thank you for providing a Word of God on this!

RangerWickett said:

It is said there can only be one green knight at a time, but due to a cleverly-worded pact with the Unseen Court many years ago, whoever holds that title cannot die unless the sun is out.

Click to expand...

Do you mind sharing the wording?

In my personal fanon clerics of Zeitgeist are mix of:
-people with personal powers of arcane and psionic nature (who personally believe them to be granted by their faith) - Olivia Sacredote and her "voices of angels" should be from this group;
-higher heirarchs and godhands, who draw power from the collective conscious belief (like Risuri monach and, I suppose, Nicodemus), 'faith made flesh/power';
-regular people, for which the religion is just a belief which helps coping with the world.

For what it's worth, in my campaign I required all PCs who have a divine power source to be adherents of the Clergy. Particularly religious followers of the Old Faith got steered toward primal power sources, instead.

This doesn't reflect on the validity of the faiths, but is rather an attempt to make the different religions/cultures look and feel different from one another. A defender/healer/striker team of Risuri traditionalists would be a Warden, a Shaman, and a Barbarian, while an equivalent team from Crisillyer would be a Paladin, a Cleric, and an Avenger.

I love the idea that the Clergy is "divine" and the Old Faith is "primal", I'll use that as a house rule.

I was considering another house rule: Not using the D&D alignment system at all. I don't want the conflicts between the various Zeitgeist ideologies to be boiled down to a simplistic good vs. evil story.

I did the exact same thing - alignment is not a thing in my campaign, and things like "detect evil" go right out the window. Everything is cast in shades of gray, which makes the constantly-shifting relationships the party has developed with groups like the family, the fey terrorists, and the Risuri aristocracy much more nuanced.

(I use The Wire for my main inspiration: no one is all good or all bad, and decision points almost never have a right answer.)