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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 401717" data-attributes="member: 4720">Alternatively, you could treat the Hebrew God as not being much different from the other gods, other than that he has more worshippers.  In this case it wouldn't be his mourning that blocked magic, but simply a side-effect of the death of Christ.  As they say, Christ died and descended into Hell.  I've heard a variety of explanations for precisely why that occurred, but my personal favorite is that it was something of a one-man assault on the Gates of Hell.  In breaking himself free of Hell, he broke the bonds that kept men there (ever since the expulsion from Paradise, if I remember correctly) and allowed them to ascend to Heaven.  So, we could set it up in such a way that somehow, the fiends of this cosmology's Lower Plane (Planes?) had managed to cut off access from Heaven (the Upper Planes?) to Earth, thus all souls were being funneled to Hell after death.  Not only was this a serious threat to Heaven, but it kinda sucked for Earth, too.  So, Christ managed to work around the blockade by arranging to have himself born as a human.  And then his sacrifice and the faith of his followers empowered him such that he was able to destroy the blockade (and even free the souls of the faithful who had been taken to Hell since the blockade went up centuries or eons ago.  This necessitated the wielding of AWESOME divine energies, and the backwash of the destroyed blockade cut off ALL access to Earth from ANY other plane until the energy dissipated at the time of the Flowering.This could be modified in a couple different ways.  For example, perhaps only the Hebrew God was cut off from Earth.  In this case, the other good deities wouldn't have been invested in the issue, and would be pretty ticked off about being cut off from their followers for a millennium or so because of one uppity god and his arguments with the neighbors downstairs.  Of course, while they were blocked off, his followers increased in number dramatically.  At the time of the Flowering, he's definitely Big God on the block, and there's really not much they can do about it.Alternatively, all the gods were cut off, and Christ's sacrifice, while having some troublesome side effects, was ultimately a good thing for everybody, and they've all developed a great respect for him.  Of course, this doesn't leave much room for conflict between good deities, and is therefore, IMO, less fun.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Or you could mix the two.  using a variant of the Great Wheel, maybe it was only the Lawful Good gods of Mount Celestia who were cut off, and now Christ is something of a champion for them, but the gods of Ysgard, for example, are rather unhappy with him (not just for the blockage, but also because in their absence, most of their followers went and became his followers).  In this cosmology, I have a recurring vision of my head of Christ sitting on a mountaintop in the Upper Planes, rapping with one or the other of the various Buddhas, while the Father's busy getting back to his smiting roots by empowering clerics and paladins in their war against the corrupt Church elders.  The Holy Spirit would probably be wandering about, inspiring various teachers among the Faithful and giving various monks a nudge down the path to Psionics or Druidism.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  I'll take that as a compliment.As for Dr. Strangemonkey's Monastic Druids in the Church, that wouldn't be all that rare, now that I think about it.  Gregor Mendel definitely had some ranks in Knowledge: Nature.  And many monastic orders were heavily involved in cultivation and even herb lore.  There were those who took the idea that the way to understand the mind of God was to study his Creation, Nature.  And even though they were mostly conversions of local myth, many Saints demonstrated power over nature that is most easily explained if they were druids.  Perhaps a monk who tried to emulate the virtues of one of these saints would find the druidic path.This is getting even more confusing for the poor Christians.  Suddenly they've got Clerics and Paladins.  Then along come these psionic monks.  And then a bunch of nature-boy monks go all druidic on them.  Can you say "impending Reformation"?That's just how I think Holy Text should sound.  Lots of stuff with the emphasis that proper nouns get.  When you're reading it out loud, "the Faithful" just has a different meaning than "the faithful."  "the faithful" are just the regular old believers that kept to the line.  "The Faithful" are the ones who went above and beyond the call of their faith and "have been empowered by God to right the wrongs committed in His name."  And "the Flowering" just has more the feel of an EVENT when it's capitalized.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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