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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9430031" data-attributes="member: 907">The game has gone a bit back-and-forth on the topic. I'm not sure how things were in 1e, but I'm pretty sure core 2e assumed gods, even if it offered the possibility of ignoring the actual divinities and just have clerics of Good and Evil if you didn't want to bother with that. The Complete Priest's Handbook introduced the possibility of getting priest magic from Forces and Philosophies instead of just Gods, leaving things mostly open but having some of its priesthoods specified as being dedicated to a Force (e.g. Nature) or philosophy (e.g. Divinity of Man). Different settings took things in different directions – I believe FR required an actual deity to power priest spells (so if your god died, as they so often do in FR, you were SOL unless you could join up with another one), while Planescape definitely had priests of philosophies and forces around, and Dark Sun had its priests powered by elemental planes (either directly or via some intermediary).Core 3e got us back to Clerics as opposed to Priests, and was open to the possibility of clerics getting power from forces and ideas. 3e FR then said "We're not having any of that, here you still need gods" while Eberron went in a whole different direction, with distant and possibly non-existent deities and plenty of philosophies (Blood of Vol, Dreaming Dark, Path of Light) and forces (the Silver Flame). 4e even went a step further and said that the core thing that enabled divine magic was investiture – once initiated, you could not lose that ability, so groups with this ability were pretty careful whom they invested with it.With 5.0, the pendulum swung back the other way. There's nothing in the PHB cleric description that implies that a cleric could get their powers from anyone other than a god. There's a nod to how Eberron works in the appendix providing domains for lists of gods, but that's it. So it's nice to see that 5.5 returns things to how it used to be.</blockquote>

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