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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 7725831" data-attributes="member: 58172">I am wrestling with this quote with a mix of hope and perplexity. I am parsing its sentences as follows."What we've established in the cosmology of Dungeons & Dragons, is that clerics are tied to the divine beings − gods or concepts − and [clerics are] viewed [as] with the divine. So it [as a ‘concept’ of divine being] might be like the silver flame from Eberron.The celestial [warlock] though is [viewed as with a celestial creature] − rather than [it] being a divine being, per se − it's a celestial being. So it could be something like an angel, a ki-rin, a unicorn, or anything else that's a powerful good aligned creature. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a God."A ‘divine being’ can instead be an abstract ‘concept’ of divinity. Impersonal, rather than personal.To be fair, the Players Handbook fails to ‘establish’ a link between the cleric class and any divine ‘concept’. It explicitly and persistently explains the cleric as a polytheistic idolator. Clerics worship a creature, typically a humanoid. Many examples, reinforce this. The lists of polytheistic gods that probably should have been in the Dungeon Masters Guide as part of the setting cosmology, are instead part of the Cleric class in the Players Handbook.Note, the Paladin accesses the Divine as a ‘concept’, namely alignment, as an ethical ideal and behavior. The Druid is a bit mixed, but the class can understand Nature itself as a divine force of life and variety, thus an abstract divine ‘concept’ where the Druid encounters the divine via Nature.That said, with regard to the Cleric, what the quote seems to emphasize is, the Cleric class ‘established’ the Cleric as being connected with the *divine*, a deity. The quote goes beyond the Players Handbook rules as written, and instead offers the possibility that this ‘deity’ might instead be impersonal rather than personal, thus more like the ‘concept’ of Silver Flame, in the sense of the concept that ‘God is Light’.Other divine concepts might be ‘God is Love’, ‘God is compassionate actions’, so whenever someone experiences altruistic love in this material world, this experience itself is understood to be a direct encounter with the infinite Divine that manifests in this abstract way in the forms of any physical acts of kindness. Or so on. In this way, domains work well with monotheism − the divine might be ‘creator’ the creative principle, ‘light’, ‘healing’, ‘compassion’, warrior ‘protector’, and many other ways to express the divine.By contrast, the Warlock has no contact with any sense of the Divine, but instead relates to actual heavenly creatures, whether they be an angel, kirin, spiritual guardian, perhaps a righteous ancestor, saint, or so on.I want the Players Hanbook to include errata that explicitly offers examples of how the Cleric might access the divine as an abstract ‘concept’.The default 5e setting imports many elements from other settings: mainly Forgotten Realms, but splicing it with Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Planescape, and so on. I would love to see elements of Eberron also spliced into the default 5e setting. There are things Eberron did well that are worth emulating. The different kinds of religions help cultures and subcultures feel palpably different form each other. The animistic traditions, the macabre elven ancestor veneration. And monotheistic (or perhaps monistic) Silver Flame.With regard to the Silver Flame, I love the abstraction. To be honest, I am less a fan of its hierarchical dictatorship model of its organization, where one ‘prophet’ has a monopoly on Truth (with a capital T) and tells everybody else what to do.If importing Silver Flame into the 5e default setting, I would rather have the organizational structure be a Great Assembly − a Jedi Council − of sages, who arrive at Truth by votes and occasionally a consensus or two. The members of the Council view the divine from different perspectives, have different opinions, different things they want to accomplish, and different agendas. But each sage recognizes the infinite divine is also present among those other sages of the Council, who oneself disagrees with, and the holiness is more in the open-ended discussion about the divine, striving toward the infinite, rather than in happening to arrive at any particular ‘right’ answer, here or there. The Council − and really the entire community that the Council represents − is together the collective prophetic entity, rather than any particular person.I want the Players Handbook to have the Cleric class description with errata to include examples of divine ‘concepts’, such as the Silver Flame. Eberron is a great place to start.I want the ‘cosmology’ of D&D 5e to ‘establish’ divine ‘concepts’ as an abstract option for a kind of ‘divine beings’. Officially.</blockquote>

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