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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1961251" data-attributes="member: 7240">Hey Jeff! Nice to be cited so many times in the opening post in a thread. I hear you regarding not messing with the core of D&D but instead creating stuff that fits with it. That's actually my usual mode of operation when I work with D20 -- the 13th century game I'm doing right now is kind of a departure. I think Emiricol has hit the nail on the head here: what you are looking for is an intermediation paradigm. If you want to have one god while maintaining the clerical spell system, the sensible thing to do is to adopt demonic magic. When I use the term "demonic," I'm using it in its pre-Christian neutrality. Magic in the Hellenistic/Roman world was overwhelmingly demonic and it is into this system that Christianity was first established. Judaism had already adapted its monotheism to this environment with some quite interesting results. Essentially, in both the Christian and Hellenized Judaic systems as well as monotheistic Greek philosophies like Platonism, there was a remote unknowable, unreachable, all-powerful perfect God. This God was too perfect, incomprehensible and all-encompassing to interact directly with the corrupt physical world. Thus, the only way God could act in the world was through intermediaries. These intermediaries were called "daemons" by the Greeks -- they went by such names as angels, demons and powers. Sometimes these things were visible, sometimes invisible. Sometimes these things were hypostasized individuals ie. humans who were invested by God with some part of himself. This was how many early Christians comprehended Christ and some of his Gnostic successors like Simon Magus. These people had been given God's powers or God's crown, bridging the mortal world with the godhead. Saint Augustine understood the pagan gods as demons and helped to create our Christian understanding of demons: angels who had been given a task to do by god but had rebelled and done something else with the power with which god invested them. It is into this environment that the Cult of Saints emerged: the Platonic idea that one could pray to God through one of his agents was Christianized. What is interesting in the cult of saints is that unlike hypostasized individuals like the Samaritans' Moses, the Gnostic Christ or Simon Magus, the nature of the saints remained purely human. They were simply good intermediaries because they sat near to God's right hand in heaven.So, now down to game terms, here are a number of options for intermediaries:(a) Saints: This is a pretty easy Christian ripoff to perform. Clerics pray to God through saints and the merits of the saints ensure that God hears and responds to their prayer. Saints often have portfolios (e.g. St. Christopher: travel), allowing them to map even more easily to pagan divinities and to the domains list.(b) Angels/Demons: The cleric is associated with an angel or demon. Clerics pray to the angel/demon to intervene on their behalf and the angel/demon uses the powers god has delegated him to do so. As with saints, angels often have portfolios (e.g. Michael: war).(c) Hypostasized Individuals: This is great if you have a god-emperor type entity in your campaign, essentially a permanently souped-up kind of pope who is partly united with the godhead, combining in hypostasis both a human and a divine nature. I think this would be by far the most fun, especially because it is not such a well-beaten path and therefore allows for more creativity. Still, I can't imagine more than about 3 of these guys in a world so you would probably still need to supplement them with saints and angels.Hope this helps!</blockquote>

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