Yet they populate every settlement with leveled clerics in game books. The disconnect between what they write and they do I guess.
Well, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the majority of what is published is geared towards classed characters. For example, the way Faiths and Avatars was presented, only classed characters can be clergy. But in other publications it is mentioned that classed characters (clerics) make us a small part of the clergy.
Nor is it a surprise that they provide classed clerics in any temple they publish. This is undoubtedly for a lot of reasons, including providing access to healing magic for the PCs, providing for a similar or greater level NPC (D&D has never had a decent 0-level system), and also because it's just expected that they would have a class and level.
In response to your longer response to me, that's the whole beauty of the Forgotten Realms - each DM's Realms is their own. Even among the published materials there is a lot of inconsistencies and incompatibilities. In my campaign Ed Greenwood's writings are the primary source for what I use to develop my realmslore, with other primary TSR/Wizards writers just below Ed. Beneath those are the widely varying Realms supplements in quality and content, including the many things that weren't really designed for the Realms but dumped there by company policy.
We all have to pick and choose what we keep and what we throw out based on the game books. You choose to disregard (or at least downplay) Ed's approach, which is fine. The published books have all sorts of contradictions and compatibility issues. Faiths and Avatars is one of my favorite Realms supplements, and there's a lot of great stuff to work with there. I've been divided between updating Faiths and Avatars material to 5th Edition (I've created clerics of Ilmater and Bane already), to shifting to the simpler approach as it's currently presented. But it doesn't invalidate Ed's material, and it certainly can't 'supersede' a book that was released a decade later. Ed's writings are the ones that specifically speak to what the 'normal' Realmsfolk experience, rather the the implications of more game-centric books like Faiths and Avatars. The Volo's Guides are phenomenal, along with Ed's various columns in Dragon and online over the years.
One of the reasons why I love Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster's Forgotten Realms is it was the start of a process that appears to be continuing in the 5th Edition to bring the Forgotten Realms closer to it's original arc. Of course, some of us have followed TSR/Wizards away from that arc more than others. I know that as my campaign progressed into the 2nd and then 3rd editions it followed a lot of the published material very closely, trying to maintain credibility as each new book (whether Forgotten Realms or D&D rulebook) introduced more rules and such. By the 4th Edition we tried to make the 4th Edition fit our 1st-3rd Edition world, and had varying degrees of success until things sort of fell apart. The fact that the 2nd Edition made the Realms the base campaign and started tacking practically anything they could onto the Forgotten Realms (like the Mongols, Arabian Nights, and the exploration of the 'New World' with Aztec and Native Americans), and then the reverse of trying to bring all of the game worlds to a single standard concept (including planes and Deities) in the 4th Edition, it's really hard to determine what 'they' feel is the Forgotten Realms, whether referring to Deities, religion, or anything else.
The 5th Edition makes it possible to accommodate pretty much any of the options in 2nd-4th edition, but in a simpler 1st edition feel. More importantly (particularly with a few tweaks) it gets the game out of the way of the world and the story, and is a direct reversal of the prior direction.
I say this because starting in the 2nd Edition, material such as Faiths and Avatars was increasingly written with the idea that the players needed more options, more powers, etc. Rather than developing the world, or explaining how the rare classed adventuring types fit the world (they had already mentioned it), they started doing the opposite and fit the world into the game system. This is problematic when the game system changes, either with new supplements or a new edition.
As a DM I was willing to allow the players a wide latitude to use any option that interested them, but that did not change the greater world that started for me first in the pages of Dragon, and then more fully with the release of the original FR Campaign Set.
And that was all based on the premise that the vast majority of people in the world do not have a class, and live in a world as described by Ed Greenwood. A trip from a small village to a larger town is more of an event if the amount of diversity in creatures and magic increase proportionately. Certainly a native of Waterdeep is accustomed to magic use on a daily basis, the temples and clergy of many Deities preaching their 'truth' with magic to back it up, and creatures of all races and classes wandering the streets that they share with the common folk who just live there. All those wondrous things that they have heard about in stories and legends, perhaps caught a glimpse of with a small band of adventurers passing through their village, are on full display (and relatively commonplace) in a big city. But most Realmsfolk will never see all of that. The older and wiser might actively discourage their young from going to experience it (they're just stories, you'll just be copperless and struggling to survive in a place filled with thieves, beggars, and murderers).
That world makes sense to me, and that dichotomy is part of what makes the Realms fascinating. A world where high-level clerics are in every village is one where disease, poison, injury, and even death are just inconveniences and available to those with the devotion and enough coin. Price wars for spellcasting services between temples to get more worshipers from their rival temples, all sorts of possibilities arise when you ratchet up the level of magic, whether divine or arcane. Ed's novels, particularly Spellfire, present this growth extremely well. The model isn't a new one either, being pretty much the entire point of The Hobbit, just with more wizards.
I will say all this discussion makes me want to go back and read the Cleric Quintet again, though.
Ilbranteloth