As a GM with a cleric in the party is your first front always that character’s god?
As a GM with a cleric in the party is your first front always that character’s god?
As a GM with a cleric in the party is your first front always that character’s god?
Haha, that’s a good observation.
I usually prefer to explore that character’s religious organization.
4 sessions in with a paladin and a cleric (with bonds to each other about religious differences) and we only now are starting to explore the religious organization let alone an actual front.
Yeah, gods are boring compared to the writhing sea of humanity that clusters around them with their selfish and misguidedly selfless desires.
I usually tend to go straight for an opposing deity. I agree that the humans caught up in it are far more interesting, but left to my own devices I tend to go pretty high-concept, big-idea. So twilight of the gods, rival gods, etc.
I’ve got a paladin and a cleric of the same god, pursuing dark secrets, and lawful, but kind of clearly lawful evil.
It’s also worthwhile to think about religion in a more interesting way than D&D traditionally does. D&D gods often act like the ones in the original Clash of the Titans; they’re a weird idealized British-storybook version of the Roman or Norse gods. They have fixed domains, they have specific groups of worshippers that apparently worship a single god (which isn’t really how those religions work, right? unless you’re in a crazy cult), they are constantly plotting against each other, etc. But religion in the real world doesn’t really work that way. I mean, ancient Roman and Norse religions didn’t really work that way, much less religion in the rest of the world. The first thing I do when thinking about clerics is do a lot of wikipedia browsing on real religious groups throughout history and in different parts of the world and try to put the cleric in the middle of some of that “bloody story meat,” because imagination is a great tool, but often it’s no match for how crazy life really is.
Syncretism equated Jesus Christ with Thor once upon a time. http://goo.gl/PGX1c Cool stuff. 🙂