Driuds: Too Much Metal

I guess it would be up to the player on how strict the Druid is adhearing to his beliefs. A hardcore druid would probably never use steel or even an ironwood spell, i.m.o.

"I don't like steel"=druid
I always found the 100%-no-metal thing to be a bit of a stretch. How do you make sickles without metal? Does the ban cover flint, and how durable were flint sickles in real life? And stone isn't very practical. Bone? But then you'd have to get that from animals.

Hmm. Druidic sacrifice seems to have been by drowning or hanging, so I guess you could make them from human bones afterwards. Julius Caesar made the claim that they only sacrificed criminals, so it might not even be, umm, criminal.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

You have to understand Druidism in terms of general animism. In point of fact we don't actually know anything about Druidism because it left zero trust worthy historical records and pretty much everything that everyone thinks they know about it is the product of some much much later invention. We do know abit about general animism because in some places it survived to modern times, and we know something of the sort of animism that must have existed in Europe before it became polytheistic (and latter monotheistic). We don't however even actually know to what extent ancient druidism was animistic, and its entirely possible it was a more modern sort of polytheism with an emphasis on 'big gods' rather than 'small' ones. We just don't know.

But in terms of the 'don't use metal' prohibition, it makes sense if you look at the world in animistic terms. The the animist everything in the world is magical. Things don't fall because of gravity, but because it is the nature of earth spirits to pull things to the ground. The wind doesn't blow because of temperature differentials but because wind spirits push it. We in the modern world look at everything as being governed by shared laws that effect everything. The animist does see any shared laws, and instead sees everything as acting according to internal spirits. Rocks are rock like because a rock spirit makes them that way. Apples are sweet because they have 'appleness', not because they have sugar. And so forth.

Under this view of the world, it is possible to see metal as inherently evil. Animists tend to percieve metal as 'dead rock', or maybe more accurately as 'undead rock', where the spirit in the rock is killed by the fire and beating that is applied to it. It gains its power and strength by being dead and sharing its 'deadness' with other things. That's why metal is so useful for killing things. Thus, iron, which is the most clearly 'unnatural' metal is percieved as being deadly to spirits (like faeries) by virtue of its lack of internal magic and the deadness it carries.

D&D in 3e screwed this up completely. 'Cold forged iron' is ordinary hammer tempered steel. Most metal swords not made of special materials would qualify. But the 3e designers didn't understand the term of artl, and so invented this special class of metal called 'cold forged' that was created by a highly magical process in a highly magical place. This utterly inverts the mythology, making the metal dangerous to spirits by virtue of its magical nature rather than by virtue of its unmagical nature.

In modern terms, the closest you can get to this is certain strands of the environmental movement, which personify 'Earth' and see the natural world as being inherently good and technology that disrupts the natural state of the world as being inherently bad.

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that since we actually know nothing (and I do mean nothing) about real druids, it's highly likely that once again what we think of Druids is being colored by modern perceptions. The northern Reinnasance created most of what we know about Druids whole cloth to be exemplary of the sort of enlightened natural philosophers they wanted to be and to be a nationalistic and ethnic counterpart to the ancient Greeks and Romans claimed in southern Europe. The druid got dug up again and reimagined in the 19th century. The modern neo-pagan and environmental movements do much the same sort of invention to suit their own causes and things that they want to believe about their heritage. It's a blank slate.
 

I always found the 100%-no-metal thing to be a bit of a stretch. How do you make sickles without metal? Does the ban cover flint, and how durable were flint sickles in real life? And stone isn't very practical. Bone? But then you'd have to get that from animals.

You have to keep in mind that animism is usually associated with stone age or copper age societies. You also have to keep in mind that the whole thing with sickles was invented in the 16th century some 1500 years after the religion was effectively extinct.

Animistic societies are typically stone age or copper age. They are familiar with the sorts of metals that are occasionally naturally occuring - chiefly gold and copper. If they make metal implements then its gold and copper that they chiefly use. Towards the end of animism you might see silver and bronze, but iron in particular is never naturally occuring in the environment.

So along comes this polytheistic bronze age or iron age culture with its helms and swords, and its got armor that makes it practically immune to your attacks and soliders that seem more like machines than animals and weapons that seem to be uncannily dangerous. Naturally, your animistic priesthood freaks out and declares all this new fangled stuff like organized religion, ritual monarchies, written literature, wheels, and iron 'evil' and typically ends up in a losing guerrilla war with the more advanced society - ei the last vestiges of the priesthood are hiding in the forest somewhere. Meanwhile, the polytheistic society writes this wonderful heroic literature celebrating the fact that a single soldier (clad in the latest armor) is capable of defeating many (unarmored) evil warriors from the evil (stone age) society. The same sort of thing happens a few centuries later when steel is invented.
 


Huh. That I did not realize.

Most people don't. And in particular most people that think they are 'druids' are pretty willfully blind to that.

Everything that you think you know about druids - the pointy hats, the robes, the beards, the sickles, the holly, the horns on their head, the astronomy, their belief system - is pretty much nothing but propaganda from the Reinnaisance era. It was just made up. It was some Northern European scholars jealous of the Southern Europeans who were celebrating their Greek and Roman heritage say, "Oh yeah, well we had some pretty cool ancestors too. See.. there were these Druids...and they were really into math and astronomy and...".

Stonehenge? Not druids. The Stonehenge culture is about much older than Druidism as Druids were older than 16th century Dutch and English. The connection with druidism was invented to make plausible Druids as these philosopher astronomers who were doing these remarkable engineering projects.

Everything else you think you know about Druids is probably just D&D. D&D popularized the notion of 'druid' to the extent that modern Druid religious groups started including it as a check box on forms for why you wanted to convert to druidism.

Now, I'm not saying that everything that is believed about druids is implausible. The best surviving document we have about them is Julius Caesar's propaganda peice justifying his invasion of Gaul and celebrating himself, and its possible that not everything in the document is as wrong, ignorant and outright decietful as the rest of it. And if that's the case then there are hints that something like the mythology around them that has been invented might have existed. But really, its all just speculation based on those vague hints in some very limited and very questionable documents. And to the extent that you take those hints as being truthful reporting, then you have to at least consider that Druidic worship might have involved alot of human sacrifice - a feature of the religion that most later writers wanted to excise for their own propaganda purposes.
 

I guess this is the one that really sticks in my craw. In the eyes of a druid, either steel is evil/bad enviromentally or its not.

I guess it would be up to the player on how strict the Druid is adhearing to his beliefs. A hardcore druid would probably never use steel or even an ironwood spell, i.m.o.

"I don't like steel"=druid
"Nature is o.k. with a little steel"=ranger (Again, my opinion)

Thanks to all who answered.

I usually have it break down one of three ways:

The druid thinks all metal is bad. Refined metal should be returned to a natural state ASAP -- typical methods include casting into the sea, corrosion and scattering, etc.

The druid thinks the refining is bad, but now that the deed is done, it cannot be undone without further harm. Current refined metal is a resource and should be kept in use and recycled as long as possible.

The druid thinks refining can be bad, but is a necessary evil for the culture. The druid works with the mining/refining industry to minimise the toll on the environment and promotes reuse/rcycling over new extraction.
 

The way I always envisioned it was that the refined metals interfered with the natural magics of the Druid. A druid might be able to work their magic around a small quantity of metal, but larger quantities become too much of an impediment.

Worse than metal are plastics. Even a tiny amount screws up the Druid's magic. And don't even get me started about artificial colors, sweeteners and preservatives.
 

Diamond Cross was talking about making a vampire druid in his thread.

Now this thread is turning into a robot druid.

Maybe I should make a thread about playing a zombie druid?

Nah. :)

Zombie cyborg druids who sacrifice Romans to the sun using paired scimitars while singing Black Sabbath.
 

Bone? But then you'd have to get that from animals.

So? Why would our fantasy druids object to killing animals? Animals getting killed by predators is all a part of life, and man is another predator. Unless the druid is completely anti-human, he's going to accept that humans hunt animals to survive and engage in that practice himself. And after he's killed that deer he's going to use all parts of the buffalo, I mean deer, including the bones.

(Yes, D&D druids are probably more distant from historical druids then any other class, and that's saying a lot.)
 

I just can't see metal as unnatural.

I can understand it might not mesh with magic in some ways, or restriction motions for casting (but that's what still spell is for), but metal comes from the earth through natural processes.

So I just can not see metal as unnatural. The undead are unnatural. Metal is not.
 

Remove ads

Top