OSR Interesting Replacements for Turn Undead?

[aco175]

A similar case is St. Amaro the Navigator. His clerics explore the seas and bring Scripture and word of the Church to foreign lands. I'm toying with some ability to influence things like the Event/Encounter/Navigation roll when seaborne, but that seems a little drab for a special clerical power.

They could bring in fog that obscures or cause the moon to shine brightly. Something that allows ships to see better at night or allow a ship to sneak past something. It would have other uses as well for the party in certain situations. Even creating wind could do all sorts of things.

 

[haakon1]

I created a modified version of the Pathfinder 1 healing ability as a 3.5e Feat.

Healing Burst: Convert a Turn Undead attempt into a burst of Positive Energy. All living creatures within 30 ft. regain 1 hit point per caster level. All undead creatures lose the same.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I created a modified version of the Pathfinder 1 healing ability as a 3.5e Feat.

Healing Burst: Convert a Turn Undead attempt into a burst of Positive Energy. All living creatures within 30 ft. regain 1 hit point per caster level. All undead creatures lose the same.

The original version of the Sacred Healing feat* in 3.5Ed did something similar, but the healing was equivalent to the Fast Healing feat and didn’t harm the undead. I found it to be VERY powerful- because of multiclassing, my Geomancer couldn’t Turn Undead very well, but he could use the feat to heal the party (and allied NPCs) of light damage very effectively without burning spells. Count the squares/hexes in a 30’ radius and you’ll see why.






* there’s another feat published later that had the same name. According to WotC, it was NOT intended to be a re-write of the original, but a completely unrelated feat. Alas, they never published that errata- I found out by contacting them.

 

[haakon1]

The original version of the Sacred Healing feat* in 3.5Ed did something similar, but the healing was equivalent to the Fast Healing feat and didn’t harm the undead. I found it to be VERY powerful- because of multiclassing, my Geomancer couldn’t Turn Undead very well, but he could use the feat to heal the party (and allied NPCs) of light damage very effectively without burning spells. Count the squares/hexes in a 30’ radius and you’ll see why.

It does feel powerful, but some why’s as the “designer”:
1) Some kind of mass healing that doesn’t use spells is nice to extend the time between sleeping in 3.5e/make a longer story or one not allowing breaks more viable. The Pathfinder 1e version is good for that, but too powerful. I thought I had tuned it down enough, but perhaps not.

How would you turn it down? 1 hp/2 divine caster levels? 1d6/4 cl?

2) I don’t want Fast Healing, as it’s a pain to track it.

3) I like that in PF1, at least with my cleric in Kingmaker, turn could be used this way or as a mild area effect on undead. At Paizocon once, I saw a PC undead not be able to heal from CLW and get damaged by it, and I think “burst of positive energy” doing both effects is fun/feels right story-wise.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It does feel powerful, but some why’s as the “designer”:
1) Some kind of mass healing that doesn’t use spells is nice to extend the time between sleeping in 3.5e/make a longer story or one not allowing breaks more viable. The Pathfinder 1e version is good for that, but too powerful. I thought I had tuned it down enough, but perhaps not.

How would you turn it down? 1 hp/2 divine caster levels? 1d6/4 cl?

2) I don’t want Fast Healing, as it’s a pain to track it.

3) I like that in PF1, at least with my cleric in Kingmaker, turn could be used this way or as a mild area effect on undead. At Paizocon once, I saw a PC undead not be able to heal from CLW and get damaged by it, and I think “burst of positive energy” doing both effects is fun/feels right story-wise.

First, correcting myself: the original version of Sacred Healing functioned thusly:

“You can spend a turn attempt as a full-round action to grant Fast Healing 3 to all living creatures within a 60-ft. burst.

The fast healing lasts for a number of rounds equal to 1 + your Cha modifier (minimum 1 round).”

Because it’s not channeling Positive or Negative energy, it has no other effects on undead, etc.- it’s just accelerating the target’s natural healing, and does not actually regenerate or re-attach limbs. It does auto-stabilize, though.

In addition, since it heals EVERY creature in its area, you really can’t use it during combat. Therefore, you’re only casting it on non-combat time, meaning you almost never need to track it unless you burn the Turn right before foes are close enough to engage in melee. So all you do is total up the number of rounds it lasts multiplied by the healing per round and you’ll know how much each creature heals. It’s a nonvariable number you can just write down on your character sheet.

Second, I don’t think the healing the living + damaging the undead is the way to go. It seems like a minor variation on the original, and not all that different from the mass cure spells.

And toning it down isn’t necessary, IMHO. You’re burning a scarce resource.

 

[RealAlHazred]

And toning it down isn’t necessary, IMHO. You’re burning a scarce resource.

Actually, in B/X clerics can try to turn as much as they like.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Actually, in B/X clerics can try to turn as much as they like.

Apologies- I missed that part of your original post!

 

[Staffan]

First, correcting myself: the original version of Sacred Healing functioned thusly:

“You can spend a turn attempt as a full-round action to grant Fast Healing 3 to all living creatures within a 60-ft. burst.

The fast healing lasts for a number of rounds equal to 1 + your Cha modifier (minimum 1 round).”

That's precisely the kind of thing I warned against. Healing is universally useful, and it's not good to be able to turn what's normally a niche ability into a universally useful one. Well, not unless your goal is a strict power increase for the class in question.

As for the ubiquity of turn/command undead among clerics, even those that seemingly doesn't have anything to do with undead, I think it's part of a thing I'm really not particularly happy with regarding D&D's standard treatment of gods and their clergy which is their attempt to be universally applicable religions. I'll use the Forgotten Realms as an example here, but AFAIK Greyhawk works similarly, and it's pretty much the D&D default (and it has also spread to Golarion/Pathfinder).

Take someone who worships Sune, the goddess of love and beauty. They are expected to take care of their looks, to help others do the same, to support couples in love (including supporting marriages for love over those for duty), create or commission works of art, and so on. And if you're a good enough Sune worshiper, after you die your soul will end up in Sune's planar domain.

Or take someone who worships Helm, god of guardians. They are charged with, well, guarding things. I imagine it also includes building defensive works. At the end of the day, if you are a worshiper of Helm and stayed at your post when told to, Helm will claim your soul in the afterlife.

Or maybe you worship Gond, god of crafts and invention. You'll probably work in a crafting profession, where you will seek mastery of your craft and hopefully invent new imrovements of it. And in the end, Gond will take you to the great workshop in the sky.

The common thread there is that even laity is expected to have a single patron deity, and mostly forsake all others. Maybe the Helmite will give an offering to Sune when wooing a person to whom they are attracted, and the Gondsman might pray to Helm to help defend their workshop if they're being robbed, but overall they are expected to pray to and sacrifice to one god, and in the end go to that god's afterlife.

It is that connection to the afterlife that makes clerics good at dealing with undead. All gods have an interest in seeing that the afterlife runs properly, and undead interfere with that.

 

[Alzrius]

It might be worth taking a look at Pathfinder's variant channeling abilities, which function as thematic replacements for the typical "burst healing/harming" that became standard for Pathfinder clerics.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's precisely the kind of thing I warned against. Healing is universally useful, and it's not good to be able to turn what's normally a niche ability into a universally useful one.

Welllll…yes and no.

While it’s true the feat takes a niche ability into something universally useful, how useful it is really depends on the character and campaign.

For a full cleric in an undead heavy campaign, this feat isn’t going to see much use. It’s more important to have a powerful tool against undead than provide healing for the masses.

For a character like a paladin whose Turning ability lags behind a cleric’s and becomes less useful over time, this feat lets the ability continue to benefit the party.

The same goes for a campaign in which undead are rare or absent. The niche ability being nullified gets redeemed.

This was all true for my geomancer in a campaign centered on RttToEE. Because of the dearth of undead and the multiclassing requirements to become a geomancer, the character’s ability to Turn Undead would normally be as useful as Swiss-cheese umbrella. The few undead we encountered were either low level threats that didn’t warrant burning a Turn or too powerful for that character’s Turn to affect.