Clerics without gods = huh?!

[Psion]

Personally, I explicitly disallow "godless clerics" per se. It may just be a setting thing, but in my campaign, divine power by definition flows from divinity. You may not know the name of the source of your power, and countless demigods exist that could grant any pair of non-mutually exclusive domains you care to name, but in the end, all divine power much come from a source of some sort, with its own identity.

 

[Sagan Darkside]

If you go with "their strength of faith grants miracles", how can you have faith in Strength, Celerity, etc?

A clan of artic barbarians lives outside contact with most other civilizations. Every capable person must carry their weight in responsibilities or the whole group could suffer due to it.

Such conditions has developed a culture that celebrates and treasures strength. All childhood games are based around moving/throwing heavy weights. However- weakness is hated. Those who can not carry their own weight are shunned by the society and forced to leave.

The elderly, at first for the sake of their own survival, began to take the role of healers and educators. Over time, with oral tradition, they formed a religion that has allowed them to tap into divine powers. It has allowed the society to flourish- allowing not only access to powers to fight back the dark and cold, but a role for those not physically strong enough to contribute to the clan.

As for celerity- I can picture in my mind a race of gnomes that lived in a jungle with a lot of big fast predators. They learned that being fleet of foot was the only way to survive.

I could picture another alternative where a society centered around competition (Olympic/Gladitorial-like level) would develop cults around the philosophies of strength and speed.

Turning undead could be a special ability of a few domains.

I would say make it the domain power of the Good domain. It has a useless power at the moment.

SD

 

[WayneLigon]

Three things come to mind:

1. The cleric gains his power through belief in his pantheon as a whole, rather than selecting one particular deity to worship. I'd say in that case, he should be limited to Domains actually available to that pantheon. (For instance, in my Ashara campaign, no god has - or even could have - access to the Magic domain, so no 'generalist' cleric could take it).

2. The cleric gains his power from the many, many attendent spirits any pantheon is going to have. Thus he can pick and choose what powers he chooses to manifest. In some ways this is almost like Druidic magic. This is what I use in my current campaigns.

3. It's a mechanism for use when you simply don't have a group of gods made up, and someone wants to play a cleric.

I've always seen cleric as channels. It has nothing to do with their force of will; they are a mere conduit for their god, who uses them to work his terrestrial Will. So, yeah, there has to be something 'behind' them granting them power.

 

[HellHound]

(just edited my earlier reply, adding the Oki-Pa ceremony as an example)

 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Personally, I explicitly disallow "godless clerics" per se. It may just be a setting thing, but in my campaign, divine power by definition flows from divinity. You may not know the name of the source of your power, and countless demigods exist that could grant any pair of non-mutually exclusive domains you care to name, but in the end, all divine power much come from a source of some sort, with its own identity.

That makes sense, were i running in a campaign that had all the bases covered like that, or if it just didn't seem apropriate i would disallow the option too.

Would you allow/or play such a cleric in a setting that was appropriate though?

 

[Sixchan]

I've always taken it that Godless Clerics believe in the power of their Domains (You can believe that Strength is the most important aspect of life, for example) and Gods that agree with you give you your powers. For instance, if you had a Realms Generic Cleric that believed in the Power of Creation, then Selune, Gond and all other deities related to creation are granting you your powers.

 

[Ace]

In at least one of my campaign I don't have gawds in the D&D context.

I have a sort of deistic "blind watchmaker" creative force. Clerics can tap that force and gain shape the magic into spells

Works fine, though all clerics in that campaign must be good aligned.

 

[Guilt Puppy]

For a recent one-shot, the plot ended up demanding godless clerics... The gods themselves had been essentially negated, and had no literal involvement in the world (BTW, it wasn't another free-the-gods or stop-the-evil-people-from-freeing-the-gods scenario... it was just a side-effect). People still worshiped gods and got spells, but these spells were not actually granted by the gods, just a side-effect of the worship... Tapping into Divine Energies or what have you.

I ruled that clerics could just grab any two domains, and come up with a god of their own (characters didn't have backgrounds -- specifically couldn't, again, part of the plot) to worship. While in principle this made sense to me, in practice it caused some problems of its own.

While I have no objection to godless clerics with regard to versimilitude, they do seem to create some role-playing problems... First, picking any two domains tends to lead to min-maxing, and while you can still do this to a certain degree with standard gods, you still end up being tied to that religion, and having these tenets to follow. From my own experience as a player, this is a good thing -- keeps the character interesting, gives me material to work with in terms of personality. Once you reduce it to domains, it just gets nebulous -- here's this devoted, faithful character, but you're really not sure as to what... Makes it harder to roleplay, which cuts a big limb off the game.

So while I'd still allow godless clerics in the future, I'd still require a very clear idea of what principles they're worshiping, and what ideals they have to go along with it.

 

[Psion]

Would you allow/or play such a cleric in a setting that was appropriate though?

To answer your question differently, I wouldn't embrace such a concept. AFIAC, the divide between divine and arcane magic is troublesome enough as it is; AFAIAC, if you want the divide to be compelling, you have to have it represent something. And that something is the existence of a discrete being/source/concept that provides the power. Those who draw their powers without the benefit of some sort of divinity are, AFAIAC, arcane spellcasters by definition.

 

[Aitch Eye]

In my wife's world, there's just one pervasive divine force, and the individual gods are just ways people interact with it. While we haven't dealt specifically with godless clerics as presented in the PHB (though they're available), one of the characters is a gnome cleric, and it's been made clear that while the gnomes have a god ("The Path"), they don't actually worship it. Given that it's the ring that remained after the Earth's moon was destroyed in a cataclysm, I can't really picture it granting spells because it's particularly sympatico with gnomes, or even being self-aware. And the religions of the world all work just as well even when their mythologies are mutually exclusive (such the forests being sacred to Artemis, the domain of Corellon, or all the trees themselves being minor deities), so I'm not sure what level of separate existence any of the deities actually have, if any.

In that setting, it's easy to see someone believing strongly enough in, say, the power of positive thinking being able to channel divine powers. Or someone being able to grant their followers the ability to win friends and influence people.