D&D 5E Was Tempest an odd choice for PC-centric domain?

[Li Shenron]

Tempest clearly shows that the Death domain excuse is just a cheesy excuse, that's for sure.

Maybe they decided for one chapter in the DMG called "Evil campaigns options" and needed as much stuff as possible to make it meaty: a couple of subclasses, a clerical domain, a bunch of spells/feats/magic items.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe they decided for one chapter in the DMG called "Evil campaigns options" and needed as much stuff as possible to make it meaty: a couple of subclasses, a clerical domain, a bunch of spells/feats/magic items.

That is plausible. A bad and retro idea, I think, but plausible. I can't think of a single WotC supplement which ever dealt with Evil/darkness well, except maaaaaaaaybe Heroes of Shadow or whatever it was called for 4E. At least TSR/2E had the Necromancer's Handbook and the like.

 

[AmmiPierce]

Where's the MAGIC domain? Man, but I hate D&D's insistence on dividing arcane and divine magic, to the point where they won't even allow Clerics of a god of magic! (For now, anyway.)

I was pretty disappointed when I saw Hecate described as 'goddess of magic and the moon' and that her domains were trickery and knowledge. I'll guess I'll add a magic domain to my projects pile with Thief/Acrobat, though nailing down the domain spells for it will be difficult.

 

[Vanye]

I was pretty disappointed when I saw Hecate described as 'goddess of magic and the moon' and that her domains were trickery and knowledge. I'll guess I'll add a magic domain to my projects pile with Thief/Acrobat, though nailing down the domain spells for it will be difficult.

Well, based on what I know of Her, those are appropriate domains for her. If there was something that involved travel, that would also be appropriate...

 

[Andor]

I was pretty disappointed when I saw Hecate described as 'goddess of magic and the moon' and that her domains were trickery and knowledge. I'll guess I'll add a magic domain to my projects pile with Thief/Acrobat, though nailing down the domain spells for it will be difficult.

Wouldn't a follower of the God of Magic be a wizard? With the Acolyte background if devout.

 

[the Jester]

First of all, I'll agree that Tempest seems like a weird choice, given how few non-evil deities in the book appear to offer it. Going through my homebrewed pantheon, only one- the Sea Queen- out of 22 deities seemed at all a fit for it.

That is plausible. A bad and retro idea, I think, but plausible. I can't think of a single WotC supplement which ever dealt with Evil/darkness well, except maaaaaaaaybe Heroes of Shadow or whatever it was called for 4E. At least TSR/2E had the Necromancer's Handbook and the like.

You forgot the Book of Vile Darkness! Both for 3e and 4e, though the 4e version really disappointed me- it was not very vile at all, just standard evil.

 

[steeldragons]

I was similarly shocked by the lack of Magic as a starting domain. But I guess I can see a couple of reasons.

1) They want things to be distinctive. Making a "Magic Domain Cleric" might be a bit too similar to just playing a Wizard/Sorcerer/Warlock PC. Since they want people diving into the material they are presenting, best to leave a specifically
"[Arcane] Magic" domain for future supplements.

2) If looking at and trying to evoke ideas for characters from real world mythologies, there aren't really "Magic" deities. Magic was something that any/all gods and immortal beings had/could do. "Magic" -as in pure/literal sorcery- is a subset of most portfolios, like for Isis or Loki, or their worship gets/got ascribed to "witchcraft" somewhere along the way, a la Hecate or Cernunnos. Where Hecate is primarily known as goddess of the "Crossroads" and Cernunnos was kinda a "Nature/Fertility[as in the Fertilzer]" god. The Knights Templar alleged worship of Baphomet.

Looking then at descriptions of mythic "magic-users", one can see they really DO fall into the realms of Knowledge and Trickery. "Sorcery" or "Witchcraft" in most myth boils well down, in D&D terms, to Illusion and Transmutation. Changing one thing into another is both miraculous/magical and fooling/tricking others, whether it is "real transformation" of simply making others believe they're seeing one thing instead of another. Merlin, Circe, the Egyptian sorcerers of Exodus [changing their staves to snakes], area all, basically illusionists and transmuters...with some enchantment thrown in (usually on female characters).

So, yeah...having "Magic Deities" use Knowledge and Trickery makes a TON of sense to me. Though I agree, somewhere down the line, a specifically "Arcane Magic" domain is surely in the works.

As for the question posed by the thread, I think [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION] has the right of it...it's more a poor name choice [assuming that the more "actiony/dynamic" name is "poor"] than anything else. 1) Not the first time WotC has gone really wrong with naming and 2) whoever noted blaming the success of Marvel's Thor-Avengers series, I am sure, had more than a passing influence on the decision to include the Tempest domain (if not the specific name).

Also, as noted above [sorry I'm not looking up whom], the Sky deity is one of the most universal ideals of world religions/mythologies. Across the globe and civilizations for as long as humans have formulated mythologies/religion. Obviously, whoever is "controlling" or "watching from" the sky has some major pull in the universe and we had better do whatever we have to make them happy...for nice weather, for rain when we need it, to stop raining when we don't, for good sailing, and amillion other reasons...everybody looked up and begged/supplicated/sacrificed to/prayed to the "Sky -[usually for some reason]- Father.." Using real world mythologies or homebrewing your own pantheon, the big[gest] cheese, "king of the gods", "Father of all Creation", "The Maker of Rain", "The Immovable Star", and yeah, "the Storm/Thunder/Gale Lord" [or Queen/Mother/Lady] would all have access to the "Tempest" Domain for its control of weather and meterological (if not cosmological) phenomenon.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You forgot the Book of Vile Darkness! Both for 3e and 4e, though the 4e version really disappointed me- it was not very vile at all, just standard evil.

Gosh, I totally did not!

The 3E BoVD is the perfect example "not getting" Evil. Let's be clear, I don't need evil to be banal or at real-world levels of unpleasantness, but it should be something recognisable, something genuinely scary/hair-raising, and not something that not just ridiculous or laughable or Snidely Whiplash. The BoVD, unfortunately, was about as scary as a particularly weak Halloween costume, and indeed, the whole thing was mustache-twirling, over-the-top, makes-no-sense, Black Metal ridiculousness of the worst kind, which associated a lot of stuff that isn't inherently evil (rather, stuff that's deviant from the norm or mainstream, and certainly CHAOTIC in D&D terms, but not Evil) with stuff that actually is Evil for purely stylistic "WOO HAIL SATAN 1980s-STYLE" reasons, and just seemed like a giant bad joke. It was in no way "mature", in no way scary, and in no way informative or inspiring. The 2E Book of Villains had a zillion times more insight into Evil and how to use it appropriately.

I mean seriously, if you write a book on Evil for D&D, and more than a quarter of that book seems like it could be called "Black Metal" or resembles trashy 1980s views of Satanism, you're doing something very very wrong. And with the BoVD, I'm not sure even a quarter of the book DIDN'T seem like that!

Sorry, I probably seem mean, but really, it's like, to me, when your vision of Evil is 1980s Metal Band "Evil", not, y'know, Sauron (who was much more restrained that the BoVD), or Morning Light Mountain (holy crap A for evil there, from SF but would fit right into fantasy), Utuk'ku or Prince Regal or some Fantasy Pol Pot or the like, that's not really cutting it. I mean, yeah, there's movie Thulsa Doom, who is basically in charge of a 1980s Metal Band of Evil, but he should be a fraction of what's going on, not the core.

At least it's not QUITE as awful as the BoED, so there's that going for it, because ludicrous as it is, it actually commits, whereas the BoED was just rather half-hearted.

 

[KarinsDad]

I think that it would be easy to add Tempest to some of the various Nature gods.

In Forgotten Realms, Silvanus is the god of wild nature. A storm sounds fairly wild. Just give Nature and Tempest to Silvanus.