[Homebrew] In a godless campaign what do you with clerics?

[Blue]

Original Dark Sun didn't remove clerics, but it made them dependent on pacts with elements (whether in the abstract or personified as some form of elemental lord) rather than worship of a deity, and replaced the spheres that normally controlled access to priest magic with elementally themed ones. 4e Dark Sun did remove clerics, but by that point the shaman class had been added to the game as a primal-powered leader serving the role of elemental priest.

Thanks for the reminder, I misremembered. It's been a good number of years. I thought they had removed them completely.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Try this:

Magic exists in this universe because thought is able alter nature. Wizards have learned to manipulating this by using words and gestures to focus thought into specific shapes that have a specific effect upon the universe.

However, as a side effect of this, simply believing something to be the case, if you believe it hard enough, can also change the universe to conform to those beliefs. If you believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that uncle Fred's old slippers enable you to walk on water, then the universe will adjust to make it true. Thus someone who believes unshakably in their relgion (which may or may not be true - there is no evidence either way) will be able to cast divine spells. However, a madman who believes unshakably that keeping earwax in a jar gives him special powers will also be able to cast divine spells. In this world the insane are confined to highly secure asylums, watched over by wizards.

Thus, player character clerics (etc) can believe in whatever they like, so long as they believe in something. But they run the risk of being locked up for it.

Why are there no gods?

Works both ways: why have gods?
But if you need a reason, it is to make the setting feel different and it gives players the freedom to create clerics (etc) without being tied to any particular belief system (something that I find makes cleric a very unpopular class amongst the groups I play in).

Is it cut off from the greater D&D multiverse?

What happens if a plane-shifting cleric goes there

There is no greater D&D multiverse. It doesn't exist. If there are any worlds beyond this one, they are not those.

Are there secret sects of (heretical?) clerics that worship some gods?

There are people who worship gods. Some of them are clerics. But there is no evidence that the gods are real.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

....things can be changed for a campaign or homebrew setting, by the DM no less, without hurting internal consistency. These alterations may not be coherent with default D&D but as long as they are applied consistently throughout the whole creation process, you have internal consistency.

Then we have almost perfect agreement. Talking about internal consistency and using concepts in ways that make sense for the setting is really what this is about.

A very basic question might be:

a) When you say that it is a "godless campaign" do you mean that you are simply redefining what is traditionally considered a "god" in a D&D campaign world, or do you really mean that there is no external source of power which people connect to in order to perform magic? The former, which is what Darksun, Lankhmar, and Eberron do in one form or another requires almost now changes in the game at all. Whether a deity is a personal being, a collection of spirits, or an impersonal source of power doesn't really matter to the system. It only really matters when we want to call out each source of magic as having different abilities, cultural distinctions, and differences in relationship between the caster and the source of power. That is, we might want both shamans and clerics in the setting if we want to say that those are different things.

The latter though, where we completely remove divine sources of power from the lore of the setting, might be best served by mechanical changes to deal with the healing problem. If we say that there is no source of divine power, but healing can be done by basically arcane means, we might want to look at customizing classes in more ways than just fluff to truly capture the flavor of the setting. Aes Sedai for example aren't simply just refluffed clerics. On the other hand, something like Game of Thrones might well be served by only having clerics and getting rid of other sources of power - any wizard is just a cleric of some sort, and in that case we might need new clerical archetypes.

 

[Oofta]

I suspect the OP stopped paying attention to this thread a long time ago.

But for myself a world without gods could go several ways.

1. People still believe in gods, there are still clerics and all other divine spell casters. Spells aren't powered by gods, they're powered by [insert fluff here].
2. People still believe in gods and other planar beings step in to fill the role.
3. People still believe in gods but there are no clerics, only priests that cannot manipulate magic. Other classes can still cast "divine" spells but they don't receive their power from gods. [insert fluff about whether they believe they receive their power from the gods].
4. There are no divine spells. Bards can still heal, but that's about it.

If I were to do a world without gods it wouldn't have other planes of existance at all. No fey, no devils or demons (although I'd probably still use them and change the fluff). If you just have other planar beings stepping in to the role of the gods, I don't see how that is different than just changing the label of the gods from deities to planar beings.

So if I were to ban all divine magic I'd probably just pick a handful of spells like cure wounds and allow them to be cast like any other spells.

But we have to start with a goal first. Were there once gods and clerics but they no longer answer prayers like the old DragonLance novels? Were there ever clerics, or do people never think to question why priests can't cast spells? Are there clerics, but some of them acknowledge that there aren't any gods?

Lots of possible stories there, but without a goal it's hard to have a starting point.

 

[Laurefindel]

There is a huge difference between acknowledging that (as you call it) fluff or flavor or (as others might call it) meaning can be changed. But that is a giant, massive difference between that and, say, the repeated refrain some people have that flavor and fluff don't matter, because it's all mechanics.

I wholeheartedly agree with that.

It didn't come out as clear because my focus was on fluff/mechanics detachment, but I didn't mean to undermine or neglect the importance of fluff. Without it, things become meaningless as you say. I was advocating for the position that the meaning of a class or concept can be changed to fit the themes of a setting/campaign, not ignored.

What I call "fluff" is essential to the types of campaign i like to play, and internal consistency is a must. Only, and that is indeed my opinion, I believe that the classes, as they are presented in the PHB, can exist with a different fluff than that for which they were originally designed. Including meta-concepts like divine vs arcane magic.

Then we have almost perfect agreement. Talking about internal consistency and using concepts in ways that make sense for the setting is really what this is about.

A very basic question might be ...(snip)

Well, I think I might be more liberal than you when it comes to re-skinning or re-fluffing, but I agree with most of your post. I think the no-god situation can be implemented in many ways, and other than me expressing a preference for one over the others, all are probably just as valid.

For for me it ultimately boils down to one factor: do I want to mess with the mechanics of D&D or not. Coming up with new classes, new archetypes, and new rules, is a fun hobby. I enjoy the process just as much as playing it, but there are other times where simplicity wins.

Here in this tread, the simplest solution in my mind was to leave everything as it is and change the meaning of divine vs arcane to fit a no-outside-power campaign.

'findel

 

[Celebrim]

Well, I think I might be more liberal than you when it comes to re-skinning or re-fluffing, but I agree with most of your post.

I'm very liberal about re-skinning or re-fluffing, but there is one peeve that I have that I'm very strict about. I believe for each different source of magical power, a different class (or subclass) is required to capture in mechanics that the flavor implies. It may be true that there are a huge variety of ways to re-skin the source of a particular classes powers without changing the mechanics of the class, but the implication of what I just stated is that everyone using the same source of power has the same basic mechanics. Thus, what I would totally not be on board is saying that both clerics and wizards utilize the same basic source of magic. That in my mind is utter nonsense, because regardless of where you think the power comes from quite clearly the two classes work in different ways and each can do certain things that the other cannot. If in the setting you said that they actually had the same source of power, then they should be no more different from each other than Evokers and Illusionists - a different specialty perhaps but using a unified mechanic. And the implication of that is ultimately, that the two classes should share the same master spell list even if different individuals prefer to learn some spells over others.

So what I really would like to hear is what sources of magical power are going away. So far as I can tell, when the OP says that it is a "godless campaign" he really only means he doesn't want Thor or Zeus, which potentially means he doesn't really need to change anything, but just re-skin his world's theology into something he's comfortable with - say an impersonal supernatural force like 'The Force' or some other impersonal deity.

 

[Yunru]

Like I said, you want to debate that, lets do it somewhere else.

To nitpick, he's right on that one. Faith specifically requires a lack of proof.

 

[CleverNickName]

If there aren't any gods, maybe you could bring back those old "spheres of influence" for clerics to draw power from. I don't have the books with me, but I think the BECM rules used this idea. Sphere of Life, Sphere of Death, Sphere of Entropy, and Sphere of, um, Funyuns. I think. Not sure about that last one.

 

[CAFRedblade]

As mentioned above, no Gods, no Religion, or both? People like to believe in things. So, maybe philosophies are more dominant, creeds, and ideologies.
Eberron has pantheons that people believe in, but no actual (like walking avatars) manifestations of the Gods. Divine powers work, mostly on the belief of the individual it would seem.
There are powerful entities, and even one has spawned a religion (The Silver Flame) if you believe some of the histories and lore regarding the religion.

Dark Sun is a setting that killed the gods, yet Religion (worship) survived in belief of the divine attributes of the Dragon Kings.