JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Priest core class that harkens to 2nd edition's Sphere use.
Priest of the Celestial Spheres
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JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Priest? Cleric? What's the difference?
Priest of the Celestial Spheres
Classes of Legend
Written by Ari Marmell
Published by LionsdenPress
www.lionsdenpress.com
39 black and white pages
The cleric is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a thing partially inspired by religious knights, but moves well beyond them with spellcasting abilities that have continued to creep up to the wizard in terms of spell level and power. Add in a dash of weapon use and access to almost every type of armor and shield, and you’ve got a class with a heck of a punch.
There are many alternatives out there, ranging from cloistered clerics who tend to the flock to using the NPC expert class with specific skills selected to mimic the field that a priest should know about.
The Priest of the Celestial Spheres presents another take on the class, this one in part inspired by the old spheres from the previous editions. I’m ashamed to say this because I owned almost every second edition module and sourcebook, but I don’t remember how spheres used to work for priests. I remember the Complete Cleric’s Handbook being one of the worst of the old series and that I was very pleased with the Faiths and Pantheons series for the Forgotten Realms, but outside that, I’m drawing a blank.
In some ways this let’s me see the new product with clear vision and not be blinded by nostalgia. Looking at the base bones, I don’t see a ton of differences. Same hit dice (d8), good fort and will saves, and spellcasting up to ninth level, with spells being memorized ahead of time, but with no limit in spells known, unlike a wizard. For weapons and armor, it is simple weapons and all armor types along with shields. They don’t mention the tower shield as being something that the priest is not skilled in, but my default assumption is that they don’t get it.
They do get more skill points (four per level) and their skill selection, based on their spheres, can be quite different. It’s in terms of spell selection that things get interesting. Each priest gains access to three major spheres and two minor spheres. Each sphere has it’s own special power and spell list. The spheres special power takes up a number of slots of your “special” uses ability. It replaces the generic turning, but turning is one of the special abilities you can gain. Minor spheres only allow spell selection up to fourth level. Priests also gain access to a “Universe” listing.
When spells are listed on two spheres that the caster has, he casts those spells at plus two levels. Good deal, but still limiting on the spell selection.
Let’s say I wanted to update my priest of Tempus, Werthic. He now has strength and war as his domains and runs around using two battle-axes. He gets the strength boost ability and the weapon focus with the battle-axe.
Looking over the sample list of concept deities, I see war has the following spheres as major; Fire, Protection, War, and the following as minor: lies, life and death. Not sure I agree with that, but I can see where the author is coming from.
Since there is no strength sphere, I decide I’ll go with well, all three major, and life and death as minor. Looking at the sample list, I notice that most of the deity concepts don’t offer more than three major spheres and several only have two minor ones. This limits the utility of choice if you’re limited to the god’s concept and could probably be fleshed out a little more with more spheres.
Anyway, looking at the spheres I selected, brother Werthic gets the following now: Well, the first thing, is that there appears to be Fire and Flame spheres, but only Flame sphere has a listing of spells. I hope that we’ll get that fixed. Well, again, let’s see. From flame, he gets the power to turn water creatures as undead. For protection, he can create a protective ward, granting a bonus to a creature’s saving throw. For war, free martial proficiency if the deity wields a martial weapon, and the ability to smite.
For the minors, death gives him a supernatural death touch attack. You roll 1d6 per level and if you do more than the target his hit points, it dies. Life on the other hand, lets your turn undead. Looking at that, you’d think death would let you dominate them, but that ability is for the undead sphere.
In terms of spells, well, the cure spells aren’t on the universal list. The universal list has many utility spells, some which look like they’d be on other lists, and often are. Good for that plus two bonus I mentioned earlier. However, the lack of clerical healing at higher levels could be a major pain. War on the other hand, has some specific stuff that showcases how to inflict some buff on yourself to inflict pain on your enemies. For example, good old Righteous Might as a 5th level spell or Bull’s Strength as a 2nd spell. While the fire sphere does give you good old Wall of Fire, it doesn’t give you the famed fireball. Ah well, win some and lose some.
Looking over it, I’d keep Werthic as a cleric. The turning water creatures are definitely not part of his make up. The loss of the weapon focus ability stings. The protective ward is okay but not great. The big loss comes in the spells. If the priest class had the ability to spontaneously cast any spell he knew like a sorcerer, I can see it making up for the lose, but the limited amount of spells, and the sometimes strange benefits of the powers, are off. For example, why wouldn’t a flame sphere give you the ability to say, burn something? Perhaps the spheres need to let the user select from multiple powers once their picked or something, but I don’t see the spheres as being a big player selling point as much as a GM selling point.
A GM easily customizing the spheres to fit a particular campaign style.
In addition to the class and spheres, the author has included some new crunch for the reader to play with. This includes new feats to augment the spheres, and new spells to increase the number of spells from the standard PHB.
The sphere feats range from giving you more blessings per day, to giving your spells an effective bump in their DC saving throws via Sphere Focus. Spontaneous Sphere let you select one of your spheres and swap out prepared spells automatically for those on the sphere. Useful but it also takes up some of your blessings. It makes sense as each sphere level tends to have more than one spell, giving the caster more flexibility, but still puts the priest behidn the cleric in terms of utility.
Spells vary. Some of them seem like variants from the core book. For example, Death Link allows you to create a link between two creatures. One of them takes half the damage of the other. A variant of an existing cleric spell no? False death reminds me of the old Feign Death spell. Some are mass effecting, like Halt Undead, which makes them exactly like the standard spell, only mass.
Overall, it’s a good selection of spells and helps insure that the spheres aren’t completely overshadowed by the standard domains.
In terms of layout, it’s a crisp and clean product sized to be able for reading on your screen. That’s good and it’s bad. Good because it saves your eyes and makes reading through this a pleasant experience. Bad because it’s taken through all the way. For example, when looking at the summary spells, which are broken down by sphere and level, it takes up a lot of room. Some might even call it padding.I think that the Player’s Handbook’s layout, in terms of size, should be used in order to not have pages and pages of summary information spaced out so much. It makes using multiple spheres a page turning experience.
In terms of art, it’s a let down. It’s now that the piece by Beth is bad. No, it’s a solid piece. It’s that it looks like a wizard, down to the beard, staff, and robe. While the name priest indicates a robed man, a priest who can wear full plate and possibly swing a greatsword if his deity wields one would be a little more common as opposed to a robed priest and a staff. What’s worse for me is that there is no other art. I like PDF’s, but feel that too often, just because they’re PDFs, they don’t go that extra mile in presentation.
There are some odd choices when it comes to table placement. For example, on page five, while talking about the priest’s class skills, the table for class skills by domain cuts off the base class skills, forcing you to flip between pages. On page nine, it happens again, this time when starting the spell lists; we get a table of deities and their spheres. It doesn’t effect the file, merely the readability.
The writing is crisp and clear, and outside of the fire/flame bit in the sphere details, seems free of obscure references.
The book has a few bookmarks, much like the table of contents and makes navigation easy.
So in summary, things I don’t like.
*Lack of art.
*Needs more spheres (should be at least as many as there are domains)
*Sphere abilities need more flexibility.
*Deities need more sphere selections
*Needs some magic items to augment priests specifically.
Things I like
*Feats and spells lend great customization to priest.
*Spells have conversion notes for wizards and other spellcasters.
*Writing is smooth and entertaining.
*Product is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes.
Overall, I can see a GM wanting to initiate this change of class in his campaign. If you’re looking for some more options for divine spellcasters, the priest may be for you. The spells and feats allow a bit of customization, especially in original pantheon creation.
I can see an alternative Player’s Handbook style book with new core classes including this as it’s answer to the standard cleric. I just don’t see it replacing the cleric in my campaign anytime too soon.
Priest of the Celestial Spheres
Classes of Legend
Written by Ari Marmell
Published by LionsdenPress
www.lionsdenpress.com
39 black and white pages
The cleric is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a thing partially inspired by religious knights, but moves well beyond them with spellcasting abilities that have continued to creep up to the wizard in terms of spell level and power. Add in a dash of weapon use and access to almost every type of armor and shield, and you’ve got a class with a heck of a punch.
There are many alternatives out there, ranging from cloistered clerics who tend to the flock to using the NPC expert class with specific skills selected to mimic the field that a priest should know about.
The Priest of the Celestial Spheres presents another take on the class, this one in part inspired by the old spheres from the previous editions. I’m ashamed to say this because I owned almost every second edition module and sourcebook, but I don’t remember how spheres used to work for priests. I remember the Complete Cleric’s Handbook being one of the worst of the old series and that I was very pleased with the Faiths and Pantheons series for the Forgotten Realms, but outside that, I’m drawing a blank.
In some ways this let’s me see the new product with clear vision and not be blinded by nostalgia. Looking at the base bones, I don’t see a ton of differences. Same hit dice (d8), good fort and will saves, and spellcasting up to ninth level, with spells being memorized ahead of time, but with no limit in spells known, unlike a wizard. For weapons and armor, it is simple weapons and all armor types along with shields. They don’t mention the tower shield as being something that the priest is not skilled in, but my default assumption is that they don’t get it.
They do get more skill points (four per level) and their skill selection, based on their spheres, can be quite different. It’s in terms of spell selection that things get interesting. Each priest gains access to three major spheres and two minor spheres. Each sphere has it’s own special power and spell list. The spheres special power takes up a number of slots of your “special” uses ability. It replaces the generic turning, but turning is one of the special abilities you can gain. Minor spheres only allow spell selection up to fourth level. Priests also gain access to a “Universe” listing.
When spells are listed on two spheres that the caster has, he casts those spells at plus two levels. Good deal, but still limiting on the spell selection.
Let’s say I wanted to update my priest of Tempus, Werthic. He now has strength and war as his domains and runs around using two battle-axes. He gets the strength boost ability and the weapon focus with the battle-axe.
Looking over the sample list of concept deities, I see war has the following spheres as major; Fire, Protection, War, and the following as minor: lies, life and death. Not sure I agree with that, but I can see where the author is coming from.
Since there is no strength sphere, I decide I’ll go with well, all three major, and life and death as minor. Looking at the sample list, I notice that most of the deity concepts don’t offer more than three major spheres and several only have two minor ones. This limits the utility of choice if you’re limited to the god’s concept and could probably be fleshed out a little more with more spheres.
Anyway, looking at the spheres I selected, brother Werthic gets the following now: Well, the first thing, is that there appears to be Fire and Flame spheres, but only Flame sphere has a listing of spells. I hope that we’ll get that fixed. Well, again, let’s see. From flame, he gets the power to turn water creatures as undead. For protection, he can create a protective ward, granting a bonus to a creature’s saving throw. For war, free martial proficiency if the deity wields a martial weapon, and the ability to smite.
For the minors, death gives him a supernatural death touch attack. You roll 1d6 per level and if you do more than the target his hit points, it dies. Life on the other hand, lets your turn undead. Looking at that, you’d think death would let you dominate them, but that ability is for the undead sphere.
In terms of spells, well, the cure spells aren’t on the universal list. The universal list has many utility spells, some which look like they’d be on other lists, and often are. Good for that plus two bonus I mentioned earlier. However, the lack of clerical healing at higher levels could be a major pain. War on the other hand, has some specific stuff that showcases how to inflict some buff on yourself to inflict pain on your enemies. For example, good old Righteous Might as a 5th level spell or Bull’s Strength as a 2nd spell. While the fire sphere does give you good old Wall of Fire, it doesn’t give you the famed fireball. Ah well, win some and lose some.
Looking over it, I’d keep Werthic as a cleric. The turning water creatures are definitely not part of his make up. The loss of the weapon focus ability stings. The protective ward is okay but not great. The big loss comes in the spells. If the priest class had the ability to spontaneously cast any spell he knew like a sorcerer, I can see it making up for the lose, but the limited amount of spells, and the sometimes strange benefits of the powers, are off. For example, why wouldn’t a flame sphere give you the ability to say, burn something? Perhaps the spheres need to let the user select from multiple powers once their picked or something, but I don’t see the spheres as being a big player selling point as much as a GM selling point.
A GM easily customizing the spheres to fit a particular campaign style.
In addition to the class and spheres, the author has included some new crunch for the reader to play with. This includes new feats to augment the spheres, and new spells to increase the number of spells from the standard PHB.
The sphere feats range from giving you more blessings per day, to giving your spells an effective bump in their DC saving throws via Sphere Focus. Spontaneous Sphere let you select one of your spheres and swap out prepared spells automatically for those on the sphere. Useful but it also takes up some of your blessings. It makes sense as each sphere level tends to have more than one spell, giving the caster more flexibility, but still puts the priest behidn the cleric in terms of utility.
Spells vary. Some of them seem like variants from the core book. For example, Death Link allows you to create a link between two creatures. One of them takes half the damage of the other. A variant of an existing cleric spell no? False death reminds me of the old Feign Death spell. Some are mass effecting, like Halt Undead, which makes them exactly like the standard spell, only mass.
Overall, it’s a good selection of spells and helps insure that the spheres aren’t completely overshadowed by the standard domains.
In terms of layout, it’s a crisp and clean product sized to be able for reading on your screen. That’s good and it’s bad. Good because it saves your eyes and makes reading through this a pleasant experience. Bad because it’s taken through all the way. For example, when looking at the summary spells, which are broken down by sphere and level, it takes up a lot of room. Some might even call it padding.I think that the Player’s Handbook’s layout, in terms of size, should be used in order to not have pages and pages of summary information spaced out so much. It makes using multiple spheres a page turning experience.
In terms of art, it’s a let down. It’s now that the piece by Beth is bad. No, it’s a solid piece. It’s that it looks like a wizard, down to the beard, staff, and robe. While the name priest indicates a robed man, a priest who can wear full plate and possibly swing a greatsword if his deity wields one would be a little more common as opposed to a robed priest and a staff. What’s worse for me is that there is no other art. I like PDF’s, but feel that too often, just because they’re PDFs, they don’t go that extra mile in presentation.
There are some odd choices when it comes to table placement. For example, on page five, while talking about the priest’s class skills, the table for class skills by domain cuts off the base class skills, forcing you to flip between pages. On page nine, it happens again, this time when starting the spell lists; we get a table of deities and their spheres. It doesn’t effect the file, merely the readability.
The writing is crisp and clear, and outside of the fire/flame bit in the sphere details, seems free of obscure references.
The book has a few bookmarks, much like the table of contents and makes navigation easy.
So in summary, things I don’t like.
*Lack of art.
*Needs more spheres (should be at least as many as there are domains)
*Sphere abilities need more flexibility.
*Deities need more sphere selections
*Needs some magic items to augment priests specifically.
Things I like
*Feats and spells lend great customization to priest.
*Spells have conversion notes for wizards and other spellcasters.
*Writing is smooth and entertaining.
*Product is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes.
Overall, I can see a GM wanting to initiate this change of class in his campaign. If you’re looking for some more options for divine spellcasters, the priest may be for you. The spells and feats allow a bit of customization, especially in original pantheon creation.
I can see an alternative Player’s Handbook style book with new core classes including this as it’s answer to the standard cleric. I just don’t see it replacing the cleric in my campaign anytime too soon.
Mouseferatu
Hero
Hey, Joe. As always, I appreciate your thoughts. 
Let's see if I can't address a few of your questions.
That's correct. It should include the standard "except tower shields" caveat.
You've just hit upon something that was a major design consideration when I was writing this. Specifically, while the sphere priest is very different from the cleric in many ways, I didn't want to step too much on the toes of other core "niche" classes. In other words, even the most battle-oriented war-priest should still be a cleric-type character. The "blasters" have always been the arcanists, and while some sphere priests may have flashier spells than a standard cleric, I didn't want to blur that line any more than I had to.
Mea culpa. That's a typo, pure and simple. There is no "Fire" sphere; all references should be to the "Flame" sphere.
And here we come to the crux of the matter, and one of the hardest parts of designing this class. I fully understand why you might feel the need for more spheres, but I'll be honest with you--I feel I came close to including too many already. (And actually, there's only two more core domains than there are spheres; or one, if you count the "universal" spell list as a sphere.)
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of functionality. With perhaps two or three exceptions, the spheres that I included incorporate every cleric spell in the PHB, as well as a number of spells from other class lists, and a variety of brand new spells as well. While the inclusion of new spheres might make the gods a bit more customizable, they'd ultimately be redundant. They'd do nothing but recombine the material already presented, and thus vastly increase the number of duplicate spells that any given sphere priest would have. As it was, I had to increase the number of spheres as compared to, say, the 2nd-edition priest in order to accomodate everything.
Additionally, it would be exceedingly difficult to make certain concepts into spheres, even if they work as domains. "Strength" is a good example. It's easy enough to find 9 spells in the PHB that focus on that general topic, but it's a little specific for an entire sphere. Sure, I could probably shoe-horn enough spells into to make it work--at least if I was willing to create a few new ones--but I tried to avoid that sort of forced meshing as much as possible. I really wanted the spheres to make sense in both an in-game and meta-game level.
In any case, don't take this as me trying to tell you you're "wrong." As I said, I can see why you might want to see more spheres. I just figured I'd share with you my reasoning for why things work as they do, and why I made the choices I did.
Hope you enjoy our next efforts more than you did this one.
Let's see if I can't address a few of your questions.
That's correct. It should include the standard "except tower shields" caveat.
You've just hit upon something that was a major design consideration when I was writing this. Specifically, while the sphere priest is very different from the cleric in many ways, I didn't want to step too much on the toes of other core "niche" classes. In other words, even the most battle-oriented war-priest should still be a cleric-type character. The "blasters" have always been the arcanists, and while some sphere priests may have flashier spells than a standard cleric, I didn't want to blur that line any more than I had to.
Mea culpa. That's a typo, pure and simple. There is no "Fire" sphere; all references should be to the "Flame" sphere.
And here we come to the crux of the matter, and one of the hardest parts of designing this class. I fully understand why you might feel the need for more spheres, but I'll be honest with you--I feel I came close to including too many already. (And actually, there's only two more core domains than there are spheres; or one, if you count the "universal" spell list as a sphere.)
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of functionality. With perhaps two or three exceptions, the spheres that I included incorporate every cleric spell in the PHB, as well as a number of spells from other class lists, and a variety of brand new spells as well. While the inclusion of new spheres might make the gods a bit more customizable, they'd ultimately be redundant. They'd do nothing but recombine the material already presented, and thus vastly increase the number of duplicate spells that any given sphere priest would have. As it was, I had to increase the number of spheres as compared to, say, the 2nd-edition priest in order to accomodate everything.
Additionally, it would be exceedingly difficult to make certain concepts into spheres, even if they work as domains. "Strength" is a good example. It's easy enough to find 9 spells in the PHB that focus on that general topic, but it's a little specific for an entire sphere. Sure, I could probably shoe-horn enough spells into to make it work--at least if I was willing to create a few new ones--but I tried to avoid that sort of forced meshing as much as possible. I really wanted the spheres to make sense in both an in-game and meta-game level.
In any case, don't take this as me trying to tell you you're "wrong." As I said, I can see why you might want to see more spheres. I just figured I'd share with you my reasoning for why things work as they do, and why I made the choices I did.
Hope you enjoy our next efforts more than you did this one.
JoeGKushner
Adventurer
I can see where there might be problems in detailing the spheres. For example, there's no strength sphere, something very common in terms of domains, but we have a summoning sphere. Off the top of my head, I don't recall too many mythological battles where deities are reknown for summoning. Strength on the other hand.
Part of that I imagine is simply game mechanics. There are a lot more summoning spells then there are strength boosting or based spells.
Part of that I imagine is simply game mechanics. There are a lot more summoning spells then there are strength boosting or based spells.
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