Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8053815" data-attributes="member: 5948">There's a lot about this in the old 2e cleric sourcebook Earth Air Fire and Water.According to that (largely excellent) book, there isn't really an elemental religion as such.  The elements are not worshipped by a community so much as they're bargained with, or the demands of the clerics are accepted in exchange for magical assistance.  Elemental clerics are much more inspired by anchorites or holy hermits - weird and possibly crazed people who find ecstatic inspiration in the raw wild places of pure elemental power (mountains, volcanoes, springs, wind-whipped rock spires, etc).  They bargain with the elemental spirits - power in exchange for promoting the well-being of the element and its spirits, which is normally defined as opposing defiling and the degradation of the environment.  The earth spirits want earth to be fertile and un-defiled, the water spirits want lakes and rivers, the fire spirits want grasslands and forests that can burn and be rejuvenated, etc etc.  And then there's the paraelemental spirits of silt, sun, magma, and rain who (with the obvious exception of rain) represent the actual current-day reality of Athas and grow strong from the desolation.(Yes, this interpretation obviously contradicts the portrayal of the most prominent follower of the paraelements in the setting, the sun cleric Caelum from the Prism Pentad, but since when has Athasian cosmology ever been consistent?)Anyway, this all does sound very druidic, you're 100% right, and it's a good observation about the inhuman nature of the spirits that elemental clerics deal with vs the very personalised ones that druids work..  From a social point of view, Athas generally reverses the conventional roles of druid and cleric.  Druids are 'think local' community-builders, clerics are outsider weirdos in the wilderness.Edit: and of course the niche for centralised, hierarchical religion is taken up by the templarate, and they don't look kindly on competition...</blockquote>

Verification