TheUnspoken Pact
When a cleric enters Ravenloft from another world, she immediately feels a hollowness slip into her heart, a void that the strength and compassion of her deity once filled. Although clerics continue to receive the blessings of their divine patrons, they no longer feel their gods at their side. This absence often causes clerics new to the Land of Mists to suffer crises of faith or pass through periods of deep depression.
For natives of the Land of Mists, this remoteness is perfectly normal; they expect the gods to be distant and inscrutable as a matter of common sense. Some clerics in Ravenloft claim to be the direct vessel of their respective deities, but these folk are widely regarded as madmen and false messiahs.
Without the gods' watchful eyes to monitor all that is said and done in their name, many imported religions experience a "theological shift." As godly legends are passed from one mortal to another, religious teachings often adapt to their new homelands, or even evolve to suit the specific needs of powerful clerics. Tales even exist of clerics who betrayed the core beliefs of their faith yet kept their divine powers. As an example, rumors insist that the grand religion of the Shadowlands, dedicated to the neutral good deity Belenus, is actually steeped in evil practices.
Why are the gods withdrawn? Why do they watch in silence as mortals slowly twist their teachings' It may be that the Dark Powers intervene between a deity and its faithful, warping the flow of divine magic. Ravenloft's theologians have identified one belief that appears in many forms, across many faiths. This belief, which strains mortal comprehension, claims that the gods respect an unspoken pact with the faceless masters of Ravenloft. The gods are not to directly interfere in the ways of Ravenloft's mortals, and the Dark Powers are not to meddle in the ways of the gods. Of course, these collected slivers of a legend fail to explain how the Dark Powers could enforce this pact — surely they are not as powerful as the combined might of all the gods of the worlds.
One final theory is even more extreme. It holds that the Dark Powers have severed their realm from
the ministrations of the gods entirely. According to this theory, when mortals in the Land of Mists pray t
their gods, it is the Dark Powers that reply. Some madmen and heretics claim that a few gods worshipped
in Ravenloft — gods who continue to answer the prayers of their clerics — are long since dead. They even
insist that some of these gods simply do not exist and never did.
