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Tag Archives: Alignment

Clerics are Lawful Part 2

January 3, 2011 4:56 pm / 1 Comment / Chris
Kosh

Yesterday I decided that it makes all the sense in the world to make all clerics’ alignment lawful, provided you are playing in an old school sword and sorcery campaign where Law and Chaos are the important axis of conflict. I think this makes even more sense if you are playing LotFP Weird Fantasy, where all magic users and elves are aligned with chaos.

Mages and elves tap into chaos to get power and further their own ends, but clerics are ‘given’ power and must stay within certain boundaries in order to get that power. The gods are order manifest in various forms. They might be considered agents of a common source, inhabitants of a Plane of Law or anthropomorphic templates of competing laws. Even a god of luck or a god that seems fickle or destructive is lawful.

Law is mind. Chaos is mindless.

Kosh

"Yes"

Where does that leave druids? Good question! They are on the side of nature, which is neutral because it is made up of the two and is caught up in the struggle. A druid gets her power from hugging trees and cutting holly branches.

In the setting I am creating, the world is in a time period where the power has tilted away from chaos and is moving back toward the middle. The gods will be getting their power back and renewing ancient feuds, requiring artifacts found in old ruins and secret places. Great orders of knights and clerics will begin rooting out the agents of chaos, dispelling their miracles. Sorcerers and madmen will look for portals through which to summon chaos, the stuff of power. Druids will hope to protect the world and maintain the balance. The elves will fight for survival, questing for long lost elven magic, which was far superior to the human spells they’ve had to learn. Halflings will try to take control of the land from tall men and dwarves will hide below, hoping to avoid the whole damn showdown.

But that’s all big picture malarky. Adventurers? They’re hoping there’s some coin in it.

Everyone is excused from the rest of the post, but if you are interested in using some of the gods I’ve posted before, I listed them below as I checked for a chaotic god.

Adu and Adu-Nunna: Struggling to take over or free the world of suffering. Lawful (evil/good)

Owrox: Soul ransomer, devil. Lawful (evil)

No-God: Doesn’t exist, but the only follower believes in order without gods, so lawful (neutral).

The Six Gods of Slorrs: Ok, rolling randomly to see which deity you serve today might seem chaotic. But they each have their own rule and punishment for wayward clerics so they are each lawful (varies). Wow, I reread this one and pity any PC cleric who picks the Six!

Pallas is her own high priestess, so that sort of bootstrapping go-getter would be lawful (neutral).

The Church of the Aesir and the orthodox Odinites are lawful (varies).

Yuchen-Domma is lawful evil in the extreme. She works to bring the world under the spell of her dirge.

Poor, tortured Vantus grants spells under duress, but the clerics who have him captive are definitely lawful evil.

The Order of the Holy Rest (Crom) are lawful quiet.

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Posted in: house rules, legacy D&D, spells / Tagged: alignment, chaos, clerics, gods, house rules, law, lotfp wf rpg

All Clerics are Lawful

January 2, 2011 3:14 pm / 5 Comments / Chris

I started compiling a list of house rules and ideas for running a game just as soon as I finish school this spring. The ruleset will be LotFP Weird Fantasy, either boxed set or the upcoming grindhouse edition, but I could put forth this argument for any sword and sorcery, law vs. chaos campaign.

In LotFP, magic users (and elves) draw their magic from the forces of chaos. They are tapping into a power source to make reality not-as-it-should-be. They are using chaos to cheat reality.

I’d go further for my game and all clerics must be lawful (keeping in mind this doesn’t mean ‘good’). Why?

A cleric has aligned himself with a god or religious axiom that in most cases is seeking to grow and copy itself onto reality, making all of reality bend to the will of that god or belief set. Any cleric (or god, if they do actually independently exist in your setting)  would believe that his or her way is the right way, the way it should be. All other ways should be either destroyed, subjugated or exist only according to the terms set forth by a cleric’s god. There are no exceptions and this is no compromise.

This is the sort of will that is needed to become a cleric, with the power to cast spells, heal, etc. Anyone can be a priest, monk or mere believer. To be a cleric, it’s all or nothing on behalf of your religion.

That sounds lawful to me.

Notice I didn’t say all gods have to be lawful. Where would be without the gods of chaos? Perhaps. A god of chaos, it could be argued, can have lawful clerics because the every whim of that god is as good as law to that cleric.

But if we approach alignment not from a personal belief system and look at it as taking a side in a great cosmic struggle between two forces (which is how LotFP approaches it), then probably not. A chaotic god would not have clerics. She might have priests, mages, sorcerers  and shamans in her employ. She might be able to teach new arcane spells to her followers through ritual, she might even grant boons to her servants that function as spells, but she wouldn’t have clerics.

A recent post by James Raggi hints that the grindhouse edition of LotFP will be tweaked to put the cleric and the mage more at odds with one another, which is something I have been moving towards in this blog over the last year. It will take some work to make sure the two classes can work together in a single party.

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Posted in: legacy D&D, Uncategorized / Tagged: alignment, chaos, clerics, gods, house rules, law, lotfp wf rpg
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