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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2132965" data-attributes="member: 30001">My thesis here is that your sources are not adequate for a definition of Bardic Lore.  I quote them only to hint at the possibility of what lies underneath.  Please keep in mind that I'm taking the plainest of legendary facts and embellishing them into what I think would be the proper frame of mind with regards to making a character class that could stand it's ground with the great fighters and wizards.  I believe a healthy dose of anthropology supports my thesis, you would need to go beyond the nostalgia of medieval clergymen.   True, but I hate to see you make too much of a system of writing that was never taken seriously by druids and exists only in the form of a few tomb inscriptions.  Bardic knowledge was sacred knowledge, and to write it down was blasphemous.  It's like looking for the tenets of Christianity in pornography and trying to draw conclusions from the that.  The real direct source of bardic knowledge is verbally trasmitted, and so you don't have it.  My crazy thesis here is that only by viewing the written sources through the lense of what anthropology/comparative mythology has to say about pre-literate societies (and this term is prejudiced in assuming some sort of "progress" to writing) can you really do justice to the way that the people of the time period thought.  I think a serious attempt at a character class worthy of the name "bard" would recognize what the people who invented the term would have understood about the class.  Again - druidic knowledge is, in fact, unwritten and to the extent that it is not derived immediately from the powers granted by gods, I would argue that such knowledge is in fact BARDIC Knowledge.  An analogy is that arcane spells cast by a non-wizard are still arcane spells, and a general discussion of their capabilities is relevant to the discussion of the wizard as a character class.  "Mastery of the elements" equating with druidic power is a fantasy cliche that's on shaky ground in terms of the sources.  IMO - for the societies we're talking about, mastery of the elements means mastery of everything - we certainly don't know what powers druids would have had over the automobile or a knight in platemail for that matter.  It could be argued that the source of his elemental mastery was the poetic/bardic knowledge, and so regardless of what you might think his real character class would have been in DnD, I think he is a fair example. And so is Lugh, for that matter.  These societies we're talking about did not consider bardic lore to be the exclusively the domain of just bards.  I define bardic lore as any non-written source of knowledge - and there is a VAST amount of such information that was encoded in poetic form.  In fact, I argue that such knowledge covered the entirety of all sentient knowledge as far as these cultures were concerned.  20 YEARS of study needed to master it - according to the Greeks?  Romans?  That's not just wandering around picking up a few stray facts as 3E would suggest. Taliesin - ok - the classic legend of this bard has him shapechanging to a degree that you can only accomplish by being an 17th level WIZARD in 3E  (At one point he turns himself into a kernel of corn !!).  I think instead of "wizards" we should call them "rogues" for stealing power away from the bards.</blockquote>

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