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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5149516" data-attributes="member: 4937">As for the bard's flavor, read the Kalevala.  It's pretty clear that the D&D Bard is meant to be Väinämöinen.   In the Kalevala, everyone is pretty much terrified of Väinämöinen singing, because he has the ability to 'sing you into the ground', meaning literally that he asks the ground to swallow you up and the earth, moved by the power of his voice, gladly does so.  The problem here is that we don't have that sort of tradition of sacred song in the modern world.  When we think of singing, we think of pop stars, not sacred music and chants.  So when the average player imagines a bard, the whole idea seems sort of silly.   But no one in the Kalevala finds Väinämöinen silly at all.  He's terrifying, because he knows the sacred words that give him power over spirits.Interestingly to me, we don't find the idea that someone can read from a book and gain the power of mind over matter to be 'silly'.  We live in a world of written tradition were the knowledge of books gives one arcane understanding and power not available to everyone.  So no one finds the Wizard funny.  The Bard comes from a world of oral tradition, where the memory of words gives one power and understanding.  Lacking a strong oral tradition, the Bard lacks mythic resonance and is relegated to comic relief - a jester.For the longest time I thought I was going to write the Bard out of existance in my homebrew, but the Bard ended up tougher than I thought it would be.   In my world, there is a traditional lost golden age of magic - the time of the Art Mages - when the gods freely shared magical lore with mortals.  The art mages managed to make every mundane act magical.  So, for example, carpenters performed carpentry magic, stone masons performed masonry magic, and painters performed painting magic.  After mortals misused their knowledge, the Gods destroyed all the learning of the great Art schools, leaving mortals with only scattered fragmentary knowledge.  That knowledge became what is no known as Wizardry, which preserves just a single narrow branch of the boundless former lore.   But then, having written that, I realized that Bards fit in well after all, as they maintained there own narrow art magic tradition that some how escaped the iconoclasm.   And the existance of bards lets me hint that perhaps other things may have escaped the gods attention or been allowed to persist out there.  It's not a thread I've ever had a chance to follow up on, but its a nice dangling hook for a campaign secret.</blockquote>

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