Good, Evil, Nature, and Druids

uzirath said:

In the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, druids don't have healing spells by default (that's the core domain of clerics). But, many GMs (including me) have houseruled them back in. (I can't remember how various editions of D&D handle this and I don't have my books nearby.) I had a discussion a while back on one of the SJG forums about how one might differentiate druidic from clerical healing. One idea I was mulling was that druidic healing is more "natural," which also means that it might be a bit slower, possibly more painful, and would leave scars. Clerics, on the other hand, basically erase wounds altogether. This could create all sorts of intriguing cultural elements. In a culture where clerics abound, having scar-free skin might be a sign of the upper class. Only farmers and peasants near the wildlands would stoop to cheaper druidic healing.

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Clerical healing is based on the faith of the target, the greater their true faith, the more effective their healing and the "cleaner" the results. Clerical healing actually injures ala "inflict wounds" the unfaithful, the heretical and those faithful to gods against their own. In fact one of the best ways for the church to expunge non-believers was to simply attempt to heal them a little bit. Eventually this resulted in an oppressive and totalitarian church that went door-to-door "healing" people under the guise of "helping the poor" but was really an excuse to purge the unfaithful. By the time time the King took action, many of the high-nobles had already been exiled, killed or imprisoned in "faith camps" and the majority of the remaining population was fiercely religious, so once the King raised his hand against the Church the Church used it as an excuse to eliminate the King and his family.

Oh wait, that was the basis for my human "Empire of the Sun" Zarus worshipping empire.

Interesting note: the elves of Lorwyn(MTG setting) were a perfection-obsessed people, who used scars and physical blemishes as the basis for their caste system. Those who were too ugly were infested with a special vine that turned them into murderous puppets under the control of elf wizards. However, elite often used powerful illusion magic to make themselves appear perfect even when they were not. Via the MTG magic system they would have been using "druidic" healing.

For my homebrew cosmology clerics and druids are traditions of magic that tap into divine power sources. For druids this is nature based divine magic and may or may not involve traditions about worshiping nature gods or spirits. There are nature gods that are good and noble and ones that are evil (Take Forgotten Realms' Nobanion (the not-Aslan) or Mielikki versus Umberlee or Auril or the other Gods of Fury).

Individual druids can be good or evil and traditions can be centered on being good or evil.

In my home brew campaign, Druids are seen as heretical and have almost been eliminated. The reason they are seen as these deep-woods hermits is because they've been driven there. They organize into "circles" of otherwise independent druids, because it helps ensure they will survive--it makes it difficult to wipe out the entire group.

The heresy is that they dare teach that the god arose from and are part of the natural forces of the universe.

I also created a religion based off of Ainu arctolatry and animism beliefs and practices, also blending in practices and myths from Sami, Finns, some Native American myths, and some theories of Neanderthal bear worship. Of course I didn't worry about historic accuracy. I was making a fantasy culture where clans of were-bears were integrated into the society. Instead of Druids, I made a form of tempest cleric that integrated animistic rituals and sacrifices and saw gods as powerful beings that should be sacrificed to but they are also seen as flawed and can be argued with and even punished (e.g. by withholding sacrifice). Their power come from performing the proper rituals. I think I could have made the shamans Druids instead of modified tempest clerics.

MNblockhead said:

In my home brew campaign, Druids are seen as heretical and have almost been eliminated.

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In my homebrew campaign, I don't have Druids the class, but I do have the Shaman class that allows characters to fulfill the same role and any other animist priest or magician.

Shamans are persecuted in civilized lands to one degree or the other as a type of "Witchcraft" or "Black Magic". In less tolerant areas, they are every bit as paranoid as Northern Europe in the height of the Witch scare, with all the attendant evils there of. In more tolerant areas, Shamans are technically illegal, but as long as they keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, the local authorities tend to avoid pressing the issue. Still, you are basically without legal protection and if any thing goes wrong, and someone in the community who is popular speaks out against you, you might find yourself fleeing or confronting a lynch mob.

It really took having a Player Character in the party for a few years of play time before the players really started to see how reasonable it was that no one trusted and everyone feared Shamans (or Druids in a normal campaign). Clerics are not free agents. They are supervised by their deity and you can have reasonable assurance regarding how they are going to behave based on the personality, goals, and beliefs of the deity. It's a lot easier to regulate clergy by deciding which deities have values that are compatible with the communities values, and keeping an eye on all the others. But Shamans are free agents. They are free to form alliances with just about any spiritual power. So you have no idea what they are going to do, or how their own spiritual progress is going to evolve over time. They are only required to keep their esoteric agreements. They are not required to adhere to any systematic morality. You'll never know whether one which was hitherto a good one, will the next day decide to sell their soul to a devil in exchange for power or enter into some other sort of black agreement.

In Druidical terms, you never know whether a druid that previously was nurturing toward a community might decide the next week that the community has to be culled to maintain some strange concept of order. Druids are free agents. So long as they maintain their esoteric agreement with inhuman forces, they can do what they want.

And with respect to someone with potentially tremendous magical power, that's legitimately scary. It wasn't until the party had to confront the reality of that with one of their own that they really got it and understood that society was, if not always behaving wisely, was at least behaving reasonably.

The heresy is that they dare teach that the god arose from and are part of the natural forces of the universe.

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This, or at least a variation of it, is also a heresy in my own game - Gantroism. The general gist of the debate is did belief of the free peoples create the gods, or did the gods create the free people. There are a lot of reasons to believe the conventional accounting, the most obvious of which is some of the fairies have been around long enough to give a first hand account, but there is no really easy way to prove the conventional account since the fairies themselves could have been created (and likely were created) by the same process if Gantro was correct. Plus, the testimony of fairies is notoriously unreliable anyway. Interesting, the idea that the gods had been created by the Free Peoples rather than the other way around, did not in Gantro's mind make them less worthy of veneration. However, some of his disciples, such as Keltern, took the idea much further. The Kelternists wish to destroy the Gods by eradicating belief in them, liberating the Free People from their imprisoning belief that they are not their own masters.

Celebrim said:

In my homebrew campaign, I don't have Druids the class, but I do have the Shaman class that allows characters to fulfill the same role and any other animist priest or magician.

Shamans are persecuted in civilized lands to one degree or the other as a type of "Witchcraft" or "Black Magic". In less tolerant areas, they are every bit as paranoid as Northern Europe in the height of the Witch scare, with all the attendant evils there of. In more tolerant areas, Shamans are technically illegal, but as long as they keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, the local authorities tend to avoid pressing the issue. Still, you are basically without legal protection and if any thing goes wrong, and someone in the community who is popular speaks out against you, you might find yourself fleeing or confronting a lynch mob.

It really took having a Player Character in the party for a few years of play time before the players really started to see how reasonable it was that no one trusted and everyone feared Shamans (or Druids in a normal campaign). Clerics are not free agents. They are supervised by their deity and you can have reasonable assurance regarding how they are going to behave based on the personality, goals, and beliefs of the deity. It's a lot easier to regulate clergy by deciding which deities have values that are compatible with the communities values, and keeping an eye on all the others. But Shamans are free agents. They are free to form alliances with just about any spiritual power. So you have no idea what they are going to do, or how their own spiritual progress is going to evolve over time. They are only required to keep their esoteric agreements. They are not required to adhere to any systematic morality. You'll never know whether one which was hitherto a good one, will the next day decide to sell their soul to a devil in exchange for power or enter into some other sort of black agreement.

In Druidical terms, you never know whether a druid that previously was nurturing toward a community might decide the next week that the community has to be culled to maintain some strange concept of order. Druids are free agents. So long as they maintain their esoteric agreement with inhuman forces, they can do what they want.

And with respect to someone with potentially tremendous magical power, that's legitimately scary. It wasn't until the party had to confront the reality of that with one of their own that they really got it and understood that society was, if not always behaving wisely, was at least behaving reasonably.

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This seems no different than considerations for wizards or sorcerers or bards. They have magical power and are not constrained by a patron or predictable based on their patron.

Voadam said:

This seems no different than considerations for wizards or sorcerers or bards. They have magical power and are not constrained by a patron or predictable based on their patron.

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Well yes, spellcasters are widely distrusted by the non-magical world, because their powers are strange and dangerous. A wizard could make you believe that you've accepted coin from him when he'd only handed you a bit of tin or brass, or he could turn invisible and go about your home, or eves drop on your private affairs with his magic glass, or charm your daughter to make her believe she is in love with him, or consort with evil spirits do avenge himself on his enemies, or raise the corpse of your mother up to do his biding. In short, even in places where magic is considered a trade, it's often considered a dirty and dishonorable trade greatly to be distrusted.

In my campaign, sorcerers in many parts of the world are considered not even human, and are therefore subject to the same "free to slaughter" considerations that would generally apply to vampires, werewolves, or marauding dragons. The fact that they can perform magic without resorting to lore and study, proves that they aren't truly human, but monstrous beings with tainted blood, twisted and accursed souls, and perhaps even evil spirits in human form.

Bards have "secret colleges" because they literally have to keep their practice secret. Many people aren't even aware bards, and especially human bards exist. And, if they did, they'd probably murder them. Bards that don't keep their magic secret, have to find some socially acceptable excuse for it - which could depend on the community. ("I'm actually a fairy!", could work in some places, as it's accepted that fairies have strange magic Of course, this presumes fairies are acceptable, which in some places, they aren't.)

Wizards are acceptable in about 3/4's of the world, though there are places they are treated as evil. The reason for both are similar. Wizardly magic nearly destroyed the world in the past, but it's believed in the more tolerate regions that after that happened and the culprits slain, that the current practice of wizardly magic is the lore that the gods left alive in the world for the benefit of the free peoples, and all the really nasty stuff ("art magic") was censured and erased leaving only "spell casting" and a bit of alchemy behind. They are reasonably heavily regulated by society, social conventions, by certain cults, and by their own members. They in return also get certain social privileges - such as the right of privacy (a declared wizard may not be randomly searched in either his person or his home), and are entitled to honorifics ("His Potency, the Wizard Galforth"), and are immune to certain taxes and tolls.

Anything that increases distrust amongst the general public and especially the ruling authorities is a threat to the whole wizarding community, so it's everyone's problem. They also tend to follow an unwritten rule to not get too heavily involved in politics, because there is general belief that while the gods wouldn't intervene to stop a wizard's private affairs, if a wizard gets too public in his affairs the gods might squash him. Most wizards are also very careful about sharing their secrets for a similar reason - they are afraid the gods will see them as trying to recreate the Age of Wonders when the art mages made powerful magic ubiquitous. While there are places where the streets are lite by continual flames or have a ruling class of wizards, much of the world considers that just an invitation for disaster.

I typically start campaigns in reasonably tolerant areas of the world just because I figure players will want to play spellcasters, and players will be unused to how spellcasters are often treated. Still, there has been incidents where the player's got in trouble with the law. There was a death warrant out for a PC sorcerer for a while, which the PC only evaded when the rest of the party proved that the woman who brought the charge of witchcraft on the PC was herself actually a witch. If the authorities had known that the PC was what they were, they would have killed both of them. That PC died, but the current PC sorcerer has an Inquisition from one of the major temples chasing the PC down with a Bull of Anathema, that decrees the PC is not human. The party actually killed one of the cults "paladins" that was in the process of trying to exact said degree with extreme dispatch, and the PC cleric in the same group has been advised by their temple that they think the Bull may have merit, and the PC cleric has agreed to keep an eye on the PC and watch for signs of evil behavior. In character, there are at least two members of the PC party that if they thought the PC sorcerer was in some fashion evil, would probably try to kill him - and they are beginning to have their doubts (for perhaps very good reasons) with the party Shaman, which just sold part of her soul to Urglick the Stinking Beast in order to save the life of the "Paladin" - that would probably kill the Shaman for doing so if he knew that it was done and understood what it meant.

While druids are usually TN in the sense that their concerns are markedly different than humanity's (to include elves, dwarves, etc.), they are more likely to align with good. This is because part of being good is having concern for others. Evil is the purposeful destruction of others, so evil creatures are more likely to be the ones rampaging through the wilderness destroying things.

This doesn't mean druids won't come into conflict with good, simply that they will try to work out some compromise before using violence. This isn't due to a lack of commitment on the druids' parts, but simply good tactics. If a paladin is causing harm to the druid's charge, the druid (at least an experienced one) would approach him first and explain the situation. Good characters value all life (but they value some life forms more than others), so they would be willing to at least hear out a druid and see if there is some other way to accomplish their goals. On the flip side, evil creatures (especially Tolkien-esque orcs and the like) cause wanton destruction of nature. A smart druid will align himself--at least temporarily--with good guys to make his job easier.

Most druids see humans and the other races as part of nature. Thus they are willing to put up with a settlement causing some ecological damage much the same way they tolerate a beaver's dam and its reshaping of the environment. Where civilization and druids come into conflict is the degree to which the druids put up with civilization. There certainly are druids who focus solely on one aspect of nature (death, disease, famine, order, chaos), but these are a small minority. Druids are a great non-evil villain to have in a campaign. They provide a moral quandary when their goals are noble or at least sympathetic but their means are excessive. They also can be a good surprise for PCs--the ally from 3 or 4 sessions ago has suddenly (in the PCs' eyes) turned against them.

Celebrim said:

Finally, the Druid has become almost entirely self-referential, with the D&D class now basically being the trope definer on what it means to be a Druid.

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One can consider Gygax's favorite novels, and make reasonable guesses at how and why he wrote up various classes, spells, monsters, etc. in D&D. In the case of the Druid, I would bet long odds that Gygax was trying to write rules for the druids depicted in L. Sprague de Camp's stories about Harold Shea.

Which is to say, Gygax wrote a class and a spell list based on a few paragraphs about people whose main relevance to the plot is their interest in human sacrifice. IIRC the Harold Shea stories don't have *any* examples of druids casting spells, nor assuming animal form.

MNblockhead said:

Has anyone played druids in the historical sense?

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Here are chapters 13 and 14 of Book 6 of Caesar's history of the Gallic Wars (or rather, a translation of them into English, thus losing or warping various nuances and connotations from the original Latin). You tell me: does this match your understanding of True Neutral?

Chapter 13

Throughout all Gaul there are two orders of those men who are of any rank and dignity: for the commonality is held almost in the condition of slaves, and dares to undertake nothing of itself, and is admitted to no deliberation. The greater part, when they are pressed either by debt, or the large amount of their tributes, or the oppression of the more powerful, give themselves up in vassalage to the nobles, who possess over them the same rights without exception as masters over their slaves. But of these two orders, one is that of the Druids, the other that of the knights. The former are engaged in things sacred, conduct the public and the private sacrifices, and interpret all matters of religion. To these a large number of the young men resort for the purpose of instruction, and they [the Druids] are in great honor among them. For they determine respecting almost all controversies, public and private; and if any crime has been perpetrated, if murder has been committed, if there be any dispute about an inheritance, if any about boundaries, these same persons decide it; they decree rewards and punishments; if any one, either in a private or public capacity, has not submitted to their decision, they interdict him from the sacrifices. This among them is the most heavy punishment. Those who have been thus interdicted are esteemed in the number of the impious and the criminal: all shun them, and avoid their society and conversation, lest they receive some evil from their contact; nor is justice administered to them when seeking it, nor is any dignity bestowed on them. Over all these Druids one presides, who possesses supreme authority among them. Upon his death, if any individual among the rest is pre-eminent in dignity, he succeeds; but, if there are many equal, the election is made by the suffrages of the Druids; sometimes they even contend for the presidency with arms. These assemble at a fixed period of the year in a consecrated place in the territories of the Carnutes, which is reckoned the central region of the whole of Gaul. Hither all, who have disputes, assemble from every part, and submit to their decrees and determinations. This institution is supposed to have been devised in Britain, and to have been brought over from it into Gaul; and now those who desire to gain a more accurate knowledge of that system generally proceed thither for the purpose of studying it.

Chapter 14

The Druids do not go to war, nor pay tribute together with the rest; they have an exemption from military service and a dispensation in all matters. Induced by such great advantages, many embrace this profession of their own accord, and [many] are sent to it by their parents and relations. They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory. They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded. They likewise discuss and impart to the youth many things respecting the stars and their motion, respecting the extent of the world and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods.

(end quote from Gallic Wars)

True neutral, probably not.

But, again, in my games Druids can be any alignment.

Most likely, Druids were a religious order like any other with an emphasis on oral tradition.

"The writer Dio Chrysostom, who lived about 1,900 years ago, compared druids to the Magi and the Brahmans of India. The 'Celts appointed those whom they call druids, these also being devoted to the prophetic art and to wisdom in general,' he wrote (translation courtesy University of Chicago website)." https://www.livescience.com/45727-druids.html

A cleric class best fits the druids of history.

Shaman probably makes more sense than Druid as a name for the class, but I'm too emotionally attached to the class as it is, regardless of it having nothing to do with historical druids.