#clericweek Share your greatest stories of why your Clerics wielded divine power!
I have GM’ed for precious few Clerics, but I have GM’ed for one, and she was a Cleric of the Unknown God, the god of secrets and power.
Her story was that she discovered a powerful secret, and she called upon the god to make a bargain. She would trade the secret in return for great power, and she would serve the god for eternity.
The god agreed to the bargain and gave her great power, then snatched the secret from her memory and made sure she would never learn it again.
Now, tell me your stories!
I’ve had a few clerics. Every single one has turned into a bloodthirsty maniac obsessed with raising the undead who keep forgetting the name of their own gods. I know you’re supposed to play to find out what happens, but this has kind of lead me to the conclusion my friends should not be trusted with divine power.
tl;dr: My cleric weilded divine power because he believes in the greatness of his empire and its patron god.
I played a cleric/priest that was all about “Peace Through Superior Firepower”. He was a high cleric of the official god of the empire (it was a home game setting and I can’t remember the names to save my life). He was forced into the service of the church at a young age when his parents could no longer afford to feed him. They signed him up and that was the life he mostly knew.
Over the years he became one of the most faithful/powerful clerics in the church. Many speculated I was chosen but the magic of clerics was simply powered by faith. Didn’t matter what you believed, cause if you believed it hard enough you could cast divine spells.
Right before the adventure began this cleric had a crisis of faith. He believed that his god was all about helping the empire and smiting those who would bring it down, but when he discovered other clerics using their divine gifts to help themselves and not the empire. He thought, “How could our god allow this?” That night he left the church and decided that he was one of the few true clerics of god and he would work outside the church to bring the empire to new heights.
He was pretty fantastic to play since the church was peeved at him, but they couldn’t do much to him since the government loved the work he did.
I remember a Cleric of Zeus that threw lightning bolts and blessed his allies weapons with divine lightning.
Tim Franzke me too 😉
I played a cleric-bard (3rd edition) who was a surface elf who believed the drow were only evil because they oppressed their males. Whenever we encountered an intelligent monster who was evil, she would try to figure out why they were so disenfranchised as to do evil things.
She was essentially a cleric of socialism.
In a live DW campaign I play in, my recently deceased cleric, Jean-Claude, was a Red Cleric of Drakor’ai the Conqueror. In our world, all the gods presented themselves as dragons, and Jean-Claude worshipped the God of Fiery Destruction and Bloody Conquest. JC was actually the Chosen One, told to destroy and conquer his god’s enemies, and he soon acquired access to Drakor’ai’s gift to be able to burn his enemies away (fireball via human racial ability + Chosen One). JC diligently trained and constantly fought to acquire wisdom.
Funny enough, he wasn’t the least bit nimble and had two left feet. One of the other PCs had to help him cheat on one of his dexterous trials in order to join the Order of the Drakor’ai, even though he was destined by the god himself. The trial involved catching a loose bird inside the temple, so the PC (a Druid) became said bird and helped Jean-Claude convincingly cheat and complete the trial.
He certainly wasn’t your typical cleric.
Nothing like faking your way through cleric school 😛
I’m doing indie oneshots at my FLGS. When somebody wanted to play a cleric for an undead-themed one, I suggested the Lady of Winter, an expy of Lorminstra if anybody knows who that is.
They got into it pretty nice. Highlight was ritually blessing a common crypt (wrapping the corpses in a shroud like a scarf and touching their lips with a holy snowflake) to keep them out of the reach of the necromancer, then snuffing out the giant fiery skeleton with a snowball from their transfigured waterskin.