The Urban Druid

Actually, I really should have posted this back on Wednesday, but I was busy all week, and didn't have time to work on it. I'm writing this article to be fairly edition neutral, but it's most strongly influenced by material from 2e and 3e.

Everyone's heard at least rumors of the infamous Shadow Druids, the sub-circle of druids who hate civilization and want to destroy it and everything associated with it. But the druidic faith is broad and exists throughout the whole world, and within it are many variations that mirror the diversity of nature herself. And that variation has given rise to the Urban Druid.

Now many would say this is a contradiction, but it isn't, for even in the grandest cities of the world, the druid can have a place. Just as bees construct hives, humans build cities, and the Urban Druid recognizes this as part of humanity's nature. For the Urban Druid, it is important for city dwellers to understand how to live in harmony with nature, as harmony is one of the elements of the druid's neutrality.

The Urban Druid's personal circle is based in or very close to the city she serves. Often this will be a park of some sort in the city. In this park is the sacred grove which is at the center of the druid's faith. The most traditional druids naturally prefer a circle of grand oak trees where they carefully cultivate the mistletoe needed for their rituals (special care must be taken since druids are aware that mistletoe is a parasite, and a city park will not by its nature have a very large stand of trees), maintain scrying pools of pristine water, and offer sanctuary to some of the wildlife that makes the city their home. Not all Urban Druids will have a grove such as this, after all the grove must exist in harmony with the local ecology and a druid knows better than to force oak trees to grow in a desert.

Since many traditional druids find cities to be uncomfortable, the Urban Druid will often recruit new members of the circle from the city's population. Generally, orphaned street urchins who show promise tend to be favored, as merchants and craftsmen wish to see their children inherit the family business and aristocrats are grooming their children to walk through the halls of power. No one will object to a druid taking an orphan under her wing, and in most cases orphans are invisible and no one even notices. However, in some cases a wealthier parent who is sympathetic or friendly to the Urban Druid may ask her to train a younger child in the ways of the druid.

The Urban Druid takes unto herself the following responsibilities in her city:

She cares for the local wildlife. Most cities have some wild animals in them. Although these animals are almost never very large, there are still feral dogs and cats, squirrels, rabbits, bats, pigeons, crows, and over birds, and various insects, spiders and other arthropods. The Urban Druid will try to prevent these animals from being abused or treated cruelly. However, the Urban Druid does recognize that some animals like rats, fleas, or cockroaches can be health hazards and pests to the city's inhabitant and assists in keeping their numbers down without causing undue harm.

She educates the inhabitants of the city about the natural world. After all, one who is ignorant of nature cannot fully respect or appreciate her.

She offers healing to those in need. This is not done in competition with the clerics of the city's churches and temples, but to complement them. Where a cleric might ask for a donation for his services to maintain his church, the druid has less need for money and may give her services as a charity to those who are in need. If an epidemic plague strikes the city, she assists the local clerics in fighting it by using remove disease. She also uses her healing abilities to act as a veterinarian in the city, caring not just for the wild animals but domestic beasts of burden and even pets.

She helps to keep the city's population fed by preventing the spoilage of food. When food rots, it's wasted, people go hungry and more pristine land is wasted to make up for the difference. (See the slow rot spell from the 2e book Tome of Magic for applications to produce, a DM could create a similar spell that works for meat.)

She keeps an eye on the weather. The city's ruler and merchants may very well be concerned about the weather conditions and how it will affect the city and trade. She uses control weather, control winds, and control water to protect the city from the most harmful storms, winds, tornados, or floods. She does not prevent normal precipitation, only limits weather and weather affects that would be harmful to the city and its inhabitants.

She fights pollution. She tries to prevent garbage and waste from getting out of control (the decompose spell from the 2e Priest's Spell Compendium is very useful here; it reduces any organic material to compost). She also tries to prevent the city's sewers from polluting the local water supply. Some Urban Druids have worked with the local wizards' guilds to produce sluices for the sewers which affect the water passing through them with a continual purify food and drink spell.

The Urban Druid prefers to work with a city's rulers instead of against them. Wiser rulers who see the benefits that the Urban Druid can provide will respect the druid's views. The Urban Druid will not attack a ruler that opposes her except as a last resort, since the rulers will often retaliate against the druid's sacred grove. The Urban Druid also doesn't punish the entire city if the problem is only a single autocratic ruler, she sees no reason to cause mass destruction and harm innocents when a creeping doom in the ruler's bedchamber works just as well. When facing popular opposition in a more democratic-minded city however, the Urban Druid will summon elementals, cast earthquakes and call up storms of vengeance to display her wrath and demonstrate the awesome power of nature. Such destruction is only used as a last resort or in retaliation for the destruction of her sacred grove, since rebuilding the city will mean trees cut down for timber, rocks quarried for building stone and so on. The Urban Druid knows better than to invite further natural destruction by wantonly laying a city to waste.

You'll want to read the Urban Druid article from Dragon Magazine #317. It was so good that it was included in the Dragon Compendium.

I love the urban druid. Urban Druids have all of the social skills and K:local, K:nobility, & K:history. They also get at 1st level +2 with Gather Information and K:local checks with City sense, along with adding his wisdom bonus to Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Intimidate, and +2 to all Will saves while in a favored city. And they get good "manipulate people" and "find things" spells that bards normally get instead of affecting plants & animals. But I also recommend mixing in the urban-themed spells listed in Races of Destiny. Playing an urban druid in a city would be as awesome as playing a druid in a pure wilderness campaign.

Have the force that the urban druid taps and reveres be the "spirit of the city" that is created from communal subconsious minds of the people.

My urban druid of the city of Caludron had an animated caludron as her "animal companion". I created some custom "Summon [urban] ally" spells for her that includes animated objects, domesticated animals, and "the town guard". She cast her spells by saying "spirit of Caludron, grant your caretaker the power to...[blah blah blah]". This character fits so well with Shackled City.

I honestly can't see much point in an urban druid unless you have cities as an ecological niche. That is, metropolises large enough that animals can live in them as a separate environment. Most fantasy cities are nowhere large enough for this.

Even large fantasy cities like Greyhawk and Waterdeep are just barely large enough for urban druids.

On the other hand, places like Sigil could certainly have urban druids. Look at Shadowrun for more inspiration of urban shamanism.

The beginning of the Dragon Magazine article explains well what the point of an urban druid is. The "unnatural city" is actually a naturally-occuring superorganism.

The frenzied surge of a riot, the stately presence of a cathedral, the constant vigilance of the city watch, the slow decay of worm-eaten waterfront buildings—to most, these things are nothing more than the results of civilization, but to a rare few, they represent something more. To these few, the milling of pedestrians in a busy marketplace are akin to the industry of an ant colony. The towering statues erected to honor bygone dynasties are as pure as the mightiest redwood tree. The cobblestone and dirt streets are arteries of life. To these few, civilization represents a powerful force in and of itself, opposed to but not necessarily in conflict with nature. Just as nature has those who venerate and worship its purity and strength, so does the city have its faithful. They tend to be solitary and introverted, despite living in urban environments. They are physically alone but spiritually connected to the secret voices of the city itself. They are the urban druids.

The urban druid knows that each city is, after a fashion, a living organism. Each city has its own personality, its own joys, and its own nightmares. The presence of its citizens are its voice, and the memories of its dead are its soul. The buildings are its bones, the streets its veins, and the protective walls its skin. Its eyes are the market, and its ears the port. Urban druids draw their power from the city and return it ten fold with devotion and faith.

Click to expand...

Ayn Rand would have been an urban druid if Earth was a D&D world. She worshiped skyscrapers as the pinnacle of achievement by man and was spiritually invigorated when in New York City.

I have a dream of playing a kobold urban druid in 4e. He'd take as many beast powers as possible, and spend most of his time in the shape of a giant rat.

Had a unique urban druid home brew from 2e

I had an urban druid, NPC in a great city back into 2e days. Though he wasn't like you're describing, more like a shadow druid, who came to the city to cause disharmony, but was caught and imprisoned. While in prison he lost his mind somewhat, when he was released he became a homeless wino (good berry wine).

Wandering through the alleys mumbling to himself, being very anti-social. He was friend to the homeless, vermin: fleas, rats, feral dogs and cats, and pigeons though any wildlife in the city. He promoted overgrowth in abandoned lots, abandoned buildings and dwelt within a wall enclosed canal system in the city. He also ventured into the sewers.

I enjoyed playing him as an NPC (I was DM), sometimes he'd attack parties, but sometimes he would provide aid to them. I think this guy is more believeable than a harmonious urban druid.

GP

Whimsical said:

You'll want to read the Urban Druid article from Dragon Magazine #317. It was so good that it was included in the Dragon Compendium.

I love the urban druid. Urban Druids have all of the social skills and K:local, K:nobility, & K:history. They also get at 1st level +2 with Gather Information and K:local checks with City sense, along with adding his wisdom bonus to Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Intimidate, and +2 to all Will saves while in a favored city. And they get good "manipulate people" and "find things" spells that bards normally get instead of affecting plants & animals. But I also recommend mixing in the urban-themed spells listed in Races of Destiny. Playing an urban druid in a city would be as awesome as playing a druid in a pure wilderness campaign.

Have the force that the urban druid taps and reveres be the "spirit of the city" that is created from communal subconsious minds of the people.

Click to expand...

Well, my concept isn't going that far with it to where it's almost a new class. It's more a matter of trying to use the traditional D&D druid in cities in a way that makes sense. The 3e rules for generating NPCs for communities includes druids in cities, and as I was working on campaign development, I felt that this was a result that I needed to make some sense of, because often the D&D druid and cities don't tend to mix. The same could be said of rangers to some extent as well, but I'm a bit less worried about them, since it's just easier to assume that instead of a traditional forest protector that the class was back before 2e, a ranger in an urban setting could be something like a bounty hunter. The last "wild" race, the barbarian, needed no such thought, since the archtypical barbarian, Conan, spent plenty of time causing trouble in cities.

The superorganism is only a small part of my concept. It's more a matter of the druid recognizing that technology and city building is natural to humans as eusocial behavior is to bees, ants, termites, and mole rats, except that humans also exihibit far more individuality. Instead of fighting the city, seeing it as an enemy to be destroyed with storms, earthquakes, and swarms of elementals, the druid tries to minimize the destructive impact of a city on the rest of the natural world. The druid needs a reason to actually exist in the city long enough to be considered a permanent resident.

Starfox said:

I honestly can't see much point in an urban druid unless you have cities as an ecological niche. That is, metropolises large enough that animals can live in them as a separate environment. Most fantasy cities are nowhere large enough for this.

Even large fantasy cities like Greyhawk and Waterdeep are just barely large enough for urban druids.

Click to expand...

Well, even Greyhawk and Waterdeep are constructed on the model of the medieval European city, and I'm trying to move away from closely adhering to a medieval Europe archetype in my campaigns. For one, I felt it restrictive, and creating a world were the cultures are have distinct and seperate analogue to real world cultures like the Realms do (I think early D&D worlds were emulating Howard's Hyborean Age here), is something I want to avoid. For one, it makes it harder to use ideas from books like Oriental Adventures in the main campaign when stuff is split up. I don't want to end up running seperate campaigns to use the stuff or never use it at all.

Secondly, historic and low-magic analogues just don't make sense in D&D to me any more. There's too much magic in the game to not take any of it into account. I'm not even talking some Monty Haul high-magic munchkin fest here, even a low-key campaign uses enough magic that campaign development should take it into account. When players put together a D&D party, they try to make sure there's at least one cleric and one wizard. The party will probably find at least a half-dozen magic weapons of at least +1. There'll be plenty of potions and scrolls lying around. And then there's whatever random magic items turn up. That's not even counting whether or not there are magic stores. There's no way that very basic stuff can exist like it does in a normal campaign if magic is supposed to be special and rare.

So I came up with these ideas on the udrban druid as a way of trying to make sense of the magic. Just as Eberron (or the various) homebrews take into account that continual flame should logically replace torches in a fantasy city, I'm thinking of how a druid's spells could change the ecological impact of a city on the natural world.

You know, I'm probably channeling some of my views on environmental issues here too. I've seen players do that from time to time with druids, often they have some crazy radical environmentalist druid who goes berserk at the sign of civilization. Here though I'm thinking up a druid that's into conservation and sustainability instead.

I had a player play an Urban Druid in a 3.5 Forgotten Realms Campaign I DM'ed. Her character was specialized in things from the sewers, which fit right in with the 7 Charisma she rolled. Let's just say personal hygiene wasn't high on her list of life's necessities.

She was a lot of fun.

I've always liked Urban Druids, I usually take a lot of references from The Pagans in the Thief series. Many of them live within The City and their beliefs give them a very Druid like feeling.

Though, usually with my Urban Druids they take a darker tone, less living with nature, more dissecting/controlling it. This is a reason for the urban environment the nature there is controlled and segregated, a perfect test subject. They are the type to have mutated venus flytraps coiled around abandoned alleyways, or have huge dire rats as guard dogs, etc.