Cleric Racial Moves Story Implications
#ClericWeek
Dwarf:
You are one with stone
Lets let us think about that first. Why are you One With Stone? And how?
Is this a general dwarven thing you are just better at then other dwarves? Is it because of your Deity? A special gift to his/her/its Priests? So is a deity connected to Stone? Are all dwarven deities? Are they primordial forces of the earth? Or the stoneforged Dwarven ancestors, the first of the dwarves!
Or is it a glitch in the divine spell delivery mechanics? A twist of Fate that gives dwarves these gifts?
Is it maybe only because YOU are THE Cleric and you were able to talk to stones since you were an Acolyte, proving to everyone that you are indeed destined/a chosen one.
It might be because you are literally one with Stone. A Soul of a perished dwarven saint, bound to a masterfully crafted statue and given new life through ritual. If so, are you that Saint, just reborn or are you a new person with the same soul? Do you remember what happened to you in a former life or do you see everything through fresh eyes? Why was this done? Is it an old practise or an act of desperation in the eye of the doom of all dwarves as the dragons reappeared. Maybe it was done by a weird sect?
But you my friend, for whatever reason, are One With Stone. Make it something cool!
On a related note, what does it mean that human faith is diverse? And why do they get to cast Wizard spells? Do they cast them like Wizards or is it seen through a divine lens?
Please tell me how you think it works or other ideas about the Dwarven Racial move.
What does Granite really want to talk about? And does it rock to speak to it?
Ezio Melega because he surely has ideas.
Well a great thing to put the dwarf clerics move on is statues or carvings. They have things to say on what they’ve seen besides complaints on the birds nearby.
Another thought is what would the dwarf ability do if you put a clay face on something? Would it work the same or be partially broken?
On a side note is one of the Xbox 360 Fable games where there were carved heads (on arches or bridges), stone gargoyles and giant stone faces carved into a door. The doors would have certain tasks to do for entry (entertain it with a short play, kill the birds nearby, do something evil in front of it, prove love exists by getting married at the door, make it laugh) where the gargoyles or small heads would taunt you until you smashed it. Fable 2 is out on pc now at Steam & highly recommended.
I was watching Cosmos by Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Hulu yesterday and I was thinking about the realistic sensory equipment that a sentient rock would have. Tremor sense, heat detection and … perhaps something similar to taste.
Trying to talk with a Stone would be similar to talking to a very old, slow blind person whom even the Ents couldn’t understand.
Dwarf Cleric: “Hey Rock, did anyone pass this area recently? Like a group of goblins?”
River Stone: “Mountains shift from the Great Heat below. Tumbling out from the strata, split was I from the peak by the whispering cold. Rolling, traveling, resting, slumbering and drinking the icy creek floes until ground to sand will I be, but lo! Sudden Questions… perturbed by a digger beast that cracks the Stone. Harrumph. The thumping and bumping of many Beasts disturbed the river rocks within the last period of brief warmth. Smaller than a boulder were they, but larger than a pebble. All carried the bones and blood of the Earth upon them.”
[Translation: A lot of time has passed since I erupted from a volcano. I just wanted you to know how inconsequential your question really is in the grand scheme of things. Many creatures carrying metal passed this way in the past day, but numbers, sizes and other measurements you seek are foreign concepts to me.]
Great spot too for lore with the world and this ability as time would be tougher to have a stone statue for example recall things. Example would be the cleric in a group looking for lost princess pinky gown (or whatever her name is) in a ruined castle, ask the statue nearby well it recalls people nearby going past but might have been decades ago or yesterday or at another castle before it was moved here.
/sub
Cleric is actually the class I’ve handed less, so I don’t have cool stories and answers for those questions, but I can think bout different kinds of Clerics, just for the sake of the exercise.
I’m thinking about that one game we played in the archipelago colonized by Dwarves from a distant land. We didn’t play a Cleric in that game, but let’s play pretend with what we learned about the world and look into racial moves.
DWARVES: Dwarves come from a distant land in ginormous ship an took over the human civilization with superior technology (no metal though, metals were Elves’ secret). They wore coloured dresses and squared beards painted with clan’s colours but otherwise were pretty much your standard Dwarves, se the basic racial move sounds quite appropriate.
If we want to play on we know that the Dwarves worship Law, their priests are judges and their temples tribunals and prisons, defended by an Holy Legion of female warrior/lovers in the way of Thebes Holy Band.
So maybe something to talk about Law and Crimes, I’m thinking about a positioning move, like the Human Bard one…
You are the Word of Law. When you sit in righteous judgement and separate the Just from the Unjust, your voice is Law of the Dwarven People
HUMANS: They were technological primitive, scattered in warring tribes with slightly different uses and customs. At the moment they are second-class citizens in their own lands and are as a whole dominated by Dwarven colonists.
They have a death and ancestors cult, guided by shamans more than priests and clergy.
I don’t see a space for a Cleric here, and I would probably bar the Humans from the Clericraces, unless I’ll not think laterally.
Maybe gods are a new thing for Humans, they are entering just now in a transitional phase from a kind of spirituality to another. The Human Claric, so, is different, out of there, and follow a totally differen path. We have seen the Shaman talking with the death, killing people to reinforce his ghost powers, so I want to play a contrast with that.
You are here to walk the Path of Life, when you heal someone you heal an additional 1d6 HP
ELVES: Elves are alien predators. They have jetblack skins, sleek features and a roster of pointed, teeth. They are sea nomad who only eat meat and even if they are usually content tolive in the sea they occasionally are known to gather in deadly raid-bands. They seem to have a “purple and orange” morality and even if they are few and scattered in the sea between the islands they are the only one to know the secret of metalworking, a techonological advantage that makes them even more dangerous.
I like the hungry, predatory angle of these Elves, so I’ll come out with something to suit it, and I see possibilities on the classic Darves racial move.
Your faith is the faith of predators, of the shark and the barracuda. You get a version of Divination as a, oration that will reveal you the position of anyone whose blood you have tasted
HALFLINGS: We know little of the high-sea Halflings. They are a race of savages who paint, tatoo and mutilate themselves, that lives in great barges sailing far from the islands. They are violent and anthropofagic. They literally catapult their own on the ships that have the misfortune to meet them: imagine savage, biting halflings boarding you, flying over waters, drooling for your meat.
I want to rapresent these violent Halfling through their Clerics. If the Elves talk about hunt and inescapability I want the Halfling to be all about blind violence.
Your gods are pleased with violence, fear and blood. Take +1 forward when you use magic to hurt someone
On another note I worked on custom classes moves for custom monster created by the backers of the higesrt tiers of the Italian edition of DW, and some of those are Clerics. I toyed with them creating new moves or adapting existing ones.
The Scourge Keeper is a masked monstruosity that commands over legion of deads, and I choose to make it a Cleric because these kind of undeath things are very clerical. It’s move is
Death is your toy: for you Talking with the Death is an Oration
The Traveller Prince is a half demonic creature, son of a powerful demon and a queen of faerie. Demons and powerful faes are just gods in my book, so I gave him a Cleric move: Your nature is divine and your prayers are granted with more strength. When you commune with your god choose a First Level spell: its effects are doubled as described by the GM
Hatamars are an artificial race created by gods to keep safe their treasures. This just screamed Cleric to me, so: You have an incomparable knowledge of divine artifacts: for you Magic Weapon is an Oration
Sirens are all played on the theme of shapechanging. They can be Bards, Wizards, Druids and Clerics and their Cleric move is: You can assume the form of vengance. When you take human form and you think that someone is disrespecting you, your god or the person you love, take +1 forward to the rolls made to exact revenge on that