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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6779639" data-attributes="member: 2067">Epic stories are often born of the idea that those more powerful than the protagonist in the setting are wrong, or at least misguided. The cleric's free to do as they please in response. In Dark Sun, this would be the rebellious ex-slave and the loyal templar in the same party - not everyone takes kindly to a challenge to authority that gives them their power. Juicy RP stuff there, if handled with maturity. Who wins, the representatives of the corrupt current power, or the rebels who seek to overthrow them? Or do they come into harmony? Most of most campaigns aren't about one character's drive - you'll be fighting orcs alongside this atheist, battling undead, killing necromancers, slaying dragons. An evangelical cleric would take this as an opportunity to show the atheist the error of their ways; the atheist would do likewise. There's no need for this rivalry to be more intense than Gimli/Legolas for most of the campaign - it's not like one atheist PC has much of a chance of overthrowing the gods single-handedly anyway. Why WOULDN'T the cleric value another mace-arm alongside his own when crushing legions of the necromancer-king's skeleton army? The atheist hero is a hero, too, and though they might not agree on everything, they agree that a skeleton army is a Bad Thing. Letting such a valuable ally die because of blind and unthinking loyalty would be a classic Low-Wisdom move. [sblock=dragonlance diversion]It's been recurring. The character was introduced as going mad from the revelation of <a href="http://dragonlancenexus.com/lexicon/index.php?title=Cataclysm" target="_blank">what caused the Cataclysm</a> (his Hermit background's Discovery), tapping <a href="http://dragonlancenexus.com/lexicon/index.php?title=Wild_Sorcery" target="_blank">wild magic</a> because he believes that it can restore the world to its natural state before the deities came along with their mad idea of "balance." He's gone a little psychotic on the mortal followers of Takhisis (he tried to get one of them to abandon their deity and, when he discovered they were incapable of it, he bashed the dude's skull into the pavement and had a bit of a freak-out about such a horrific thing). The main reason he fights the dragonarmies is because they're trying to bring back a wicked god, and thus causing MANY gods to re-awaken, which is, in his mind, just inevitably going to result in another tragic Cataclysm. The faithful characters he travels alongside are aberrations in this age of until-recently-silent gods, and he will absolutely use their help to crush the more onerous deity first, but he knows that as long as they pursue the Balance above all, that they are more dangerous and destructive and unpredictable than he is as a wild mage. It's not what Weiss and Hickman would have you take away from the setting, but it's a perfectly valid way for a character who knows about the Cataclysm and what caused it to act - heck, canonically, it's how most people act after the Cataclysm. The return of the gods is meant to be something celebrated, but for my character, it's something terrifying - another Cataclysm in the works. My character showed zero respect to that pompous old maniac who dared think he was worthy of worship for standing by while millions were slaughtered in the name of an unnatural abomination created by an <a href="http://dragonlancenexus.com/lexicon/index.php?title=Reorx" target="_blank">overweening god of order</a>, and had a moment of crisis afterwards (as I posted about on the group's message board):[sblock=gnome alone]That old codger was there, too. An old man demanding worship, undeserving of it. Millions had died due to his actions, as well - he subscribed to the d**nable Balance, he watched the mountain fall, he had the gall to call himself a god of good as he stood by and simply watched people die. Oh, he was probably sad. Yeah. Poor baby.He approved of this action. Which meant the correct action was not this. Whatever else it was, it was not this war. The fires. The armies. Gods walking the earth. This stunk of a second cataclysm, a balancing of the scales, the blood of people a small price to pay for the gods' petty squabbles over their playground. [/sblock]Gnomes in DL owe their <a href="http://dragonlancenexus.com/lexicon/index.php?title=Gnome" target="_blank">existence</a> to the flaws in the Balance. My character is absolutely an outgrowth of that narrative. Another major theme is that the gods kill millions of innocents to restore this "Balance" that prohibits people from making any true change to the world. For a Chaotic Neutral character (who was once Chaotic Good), this accounting of the scales of good and evil is monstrous. It prohibits change and transformation. There's no hope, while powerful entities insist on it. Let good win, let evil win, just let something change, because otherwise this struggle, this war, this worship, it's all meaningless.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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