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Good, Evil, Nature, and Druids
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7602740" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>In my homebrew campaign, I don't have Druids the class, but I do have the Shaman class that allows characters to fulfill the same role and any other animist priest or magician.</p><p></p><p>Shamans are persecuted in civilized lands to one degree or the other as a type of "Witchcraft" or "Black Magic". In less tolerant areas, they are every bit as paranoid as Northern Europe in the height of the Witch scare, with all the attendant evils there of. In more tolerant areas, Shamans are technically illegal, but as long as they keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, the local authorities tend to avoid pressing the issue. Still, you are basically without legal protection and if any thing goes wrong, and someone in the community who is popular speaks out against you, you might find yourself fleeing or confronting a lynch mob.</p><p></p><p>It really took having a Player Character in the party for a few years of play time before the players really started to see how reasonable it was that no one trusted and everyone feared Shamans (or Druids in a normal campaign). Clerics are not free agents. They are supervised by their deity and you can have reasonable assurance regarding how they are going to behave based on the personality, goals, and beliefs of the deity. It's a lot easier to regulate clergy by deciding which deities have values that are compatible with the communities values, and keeping an eye on all the others. But Shamans are free agents. They are free to form alliances with just about any spiritual power. So you have no idea what they are going to do, or how their own spiritual progress is going to evolve over time. They are only required to keep their esoteric agreements. They are not required to adhere to any systematic morality. You'll never know whether one which was hitherto a good one, will the next day decide to sell their soul to a devil in exchange for power or enter into some other sort of black agreement. </p><p></p><p>In Druidical terms, you never know whether a druid that previously was nurturing toward a community might decide the next week that the community has to be culled to maintain some strange concept of order. Druids are free agents. So long as they maintain their esoteric agreement with inhuman forces, they can do what they want.</p><p></p><p>And with respect to someone with potentially tremendous magical power, that's legitimately scary. It wasn't until the party had to confront the reality of that with one of their own that they really got it and understood that society was, if not always behaving wisely, was at least behaving reasonably.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This, or at least a variation of it, is also a heresy in my own game - Gantroism. The general gist of the debate is did belief of the free peoples create the gods, or did the gods create the free people. There are a lot of reasons to believe the conventional accounting, the most obvious of which is some of the fairies have been around long enough to give a first hand account, but there is no really easy way to prove the conventional account since the fairies themselves could have been created (and likely were created) by the same process if Gantro was correct. Plus, the testimony of fairies is notoriously unreliable anyway. Interesting, the idea that the gods had been created by the Free Peoples rather than the other way around, did not in Gantro's mind make them less worthy of veneration. However, some of his disciples, such as Keltern, took the idea much further. The Kelternists wish to destroy the Gods by eradicating belief in them, liberating the Free People from their imprisoning belief that they are not their own masters.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7602740, member: 4937"] In my homebrew campaign, I don't have Druids the class, but I do have the Shaman class that allows characters to fulfill the same role and any other animist priest or magician. Shamans are persecuted in civilized lands to one degree or the other as a type of "Witchcraft" or "Black Magic". In less tolerant areas, they are every bit as paranoid as Northern Europe in the height of the Witch scare, with all the attendant evils there of. In more tolerant areas, Shamans are technically illegal, but as long as they keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, the local authorities tend to avoid pressing the issue. Still, you are basically without legal protection and if any thing goes wrong, and someone in the community who is popular speaks out against you, you might find yourself fleeing or confronting a lynch mob. It really took having a Player Character in the party for a few years of play time before the players really started to see how reasonable it was that no one trusted and everyone feared Shamans (or Druids in a normal campaign). Clerics are not free agents. They are supervised by their deity and you can have reasonable assurance regarding how they are going to behave based on the personality, goals, and beliefs of the deity. It's a lot easier to regulate clergy by deciding which deities have values that are compatible with the communities values, and keeping an eye on all the others. But Shamans are free agents. They are free to form alliances with just about any spiritual power. So you have no idea what they are going to do, or how their own spiritual progress is going to evolve over time. They are only required to keep their esoteric agreements. They are not required to adhere to any systematic morality. You'll never know whether one which was hitherto a good one, will the next day decide to sell their soul to a devil in exchange for power or enter into some other sort of black agreement. In Druidical terms, you never know whether a druid that previously was nurturing toward a community might decide the next week that the community has to be culled to maintain some strange concept of order. Druids are free agents. So long as they maintain their esoteric agreement with inhuman forces, they can do what they want. And with respect to someone with potentially tremendous magical power, that's legitimately scary. It wasn't until the party had to confront the reality of that with one of their own that they really got it and understood that society was, if not always behaving wisely, was at least behaving reasonably. This, or at least a variation of it, is also a heresy in my own game - Gantroism. The general gist of the debate is did belief of the free peoples create the gods, or did the gods create the free people. There are a lot of reasons to believe the conventional accounting, the most obvious of which is some of the fairies have been around long enough to give a first hand account, but there is no really easy way to prove the conventional account since the fairies themselves could have been created (and likely were created) by the same process if Gantro was correct. Plus, the testimony of fairies is notoriously unreliable anyway. Interesting, the idea that the gods had been created by the Free Peoples rather than the other way around, did not in Gantro's mind make them less worthy of veneration. However, some of his disciples, such as Keltern, took the idea much further. The Kelternists wish to destroy the Gods by eradicating belief in them, liberating the Free People from their imprisoning belief that they are not their own masters. [/QUOTE]
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