Divine Intervention Pt. 2

Yesterday, I started to put together a scheme for codifying divine intervention in your campaign, trying to aim for a system that would make it impossible to keep the entire pantheon happy at once. I got as far as figuring out how to decide which gods care about which narrow set of behaviors, and put the rest off. Next step is figuring out A)how to keep track of the deities’ opinions and B)what sorts of blessings or curses they would use.

In the game Powder (the roguelike I’m swiping this whole concept from), the gods are constantly watching you and keeping a running tally of just how strongly they like or despise you, which normalizes over time if you do nothing. If you do enough good or bad shit (by that god’s standards) in a row, there is a blessing or curse. This is only okay if the referee is a computer.

Instead, the ref should just add divine interventions from each deity to their random encounter tables. When one comes up, the ref looks at each behavior that the deity cares about, and thinks about the party’s most recent actions only. The gods are fickle bastards and a track record counts for nothing.

So you could spend your whole life defending nature, but the gods of the forest will still smite the fuck out of you if the last thing you did before the intervention was start a forest fire. I’m finding myself to be strangely satisfied with that result. Moving on to B.

The boons and banes offered by Powder’s gods are also better suited to a CRPG than to tabletop play, but some of them are worth adapting. They include blessing and cursing items, for example, but that’s usually just a matter of adding a plus or minus one onto the end of it, which is obviously not a whole lot of fun.

Each god in that game has its own set of interventions, more or less tailored to its general concept, which is a good idea. So let’s take a look at the four that I rolled up (okay so I fudged like two die rolls sue me) yesterday.

1. Rewards those who carry out justice. Which, to the deities, is killing bad guys. Judge Dredd.
2. I was thinking St. Hubert before, but I’m looking at it again and seeing the lamest hippy there ever was. I dunno, Bob Ross?
3. Imagine Swamp Thing, but as the driving force behind the Environmental Liberation Front.
4. I’m gonna go with an ascended version of Queen Tiye to represent diplomacy, wealth and civilization.

Let’s just give them one blessing and curse each for now, and make them a little more interesting than the ones in Powder. I need to try and remember to make sure the blessings make PCs better at doing the sort of thing that deity likes, and the curses similarly get in the way of the sort of thing that deity hates. The effects of all these interventions persist until you get the same deity again and its opinion of you has reversed, so it’s impossible to have both the curse and the blessing from a single deity active at the same time.

Oh wait, actually— maybe if you roll a divine intervention from a deity that likes you, and you already have a curse active from a different deity, the one that likes you removes that curse instead? And there’s obviously no magic other than divine intervention that’s strong enough to get rid of a divine curse. OBVIOUSLY.

(Honestly I don't know about that last part. There could be situations where the PC feels ripped off and would have been perfectly happy to keep the curse and the blessing at the same time thank you very much, and that's not what I want. Whatever, that's what rule zero is for.)

Judge Dredd curse: Any evil you allow to go unpunished will befall you. This means that if you don’t follow up on a lead to hunt down some murderous highwaymen, you’ll end up their next target.

Judge Dredd blessing: You can smell lies on the breath of liars. You have to lean in really close and sniff the air they just lied with in a super creepy way that fucks up any further social interactions you have with that character. Except if you’re trying to make them think you’re dangerously insane, I suppose.

Bob Ross curse: Bad trips, all the time. Save to avoid nightmare hallucinations and projectile vomiting every time you’re in a stressful situation (such as combat). You often envision yourself being torn apart by madly gleeful animated trees.

Bob Ross blessing: You gain an uncanny knack for stumbling across naturally occurring narcotics. Once per day in a wilderness or underground area, you can stop to search for psychoactive plants or fungi, which always succeeds. Any hallucinations brought on by drugs found this way will contain some useful information, though the info is sometimes vague and open to interpretation. These drugs only maintain their potency for one day.

Swamp Thing curse: You become a powerful conduit for new plant life, which it turns out is incredibly annoying. Sure, walking around having flowers bloom wherever you tread looks good to the ladies at first, but if you stand in one spot to talk to them, they’ll be way too busy fighting off assassin vines to give a shit how many ogres you slew one handed just the other day. If you stay the night in town, the building you’re in will suffer massive structural damage and you probably won’t be allowed back.

Swamp Thing blessing: Lycanthropy (yeah I know but I’m not literally talking about Swamp Thing, I’m inventing a new divine being off the top of my head). Unlike most werewolves, you can transform at will, during which period you have to make periodic willpower checks to maintain control of your own actions. The light of the full moon causes you to transform involuntarily. If you spawn new werewolves, they have no control over the condition whatsoever, as usual. I guess that must be where regular werewolves come from.

Queen Tiye curse: In combat, take 1d2 points of damage for every regular die of damage (whatever that is for your character) you cause an opponent. This includes damage caused by melee & missile attacks, magic, dropping a safe on the bastard's head, etc. If you score a critical hit, you take 1d8 points of damage instead of 1d2. Better work on those people skills cause you don't wanna get in many fights for a while.

Queen Tiye blessing: You get an advantage to social interactions and a 150% value bonus to any treasure found. Sometimes you spend all day banging your head against a wall and don't get much good out of it. Such is life.

You know all those myths and modern stories where humans undertake some arduous journey or complete some complicated ritual to ask a favor of the gods? This should give players some pretty good reasons to do that.

Divine Intervention Pt. 1

I probably won’t use this for my own game, at least not in the near future. I’ve written about my issues with gods and clerics before, and how I like to deal with them. This is another way of approaching that facet of the game. I’m hoping it makes some sort of sense by the time I’m done but no promises.

There’s a roguelike called Powder (free trial version at the itunes app store) that I’ve been playing for a while now. It has an interesting set of mechanics that I don’t think I’ve seen before, which dictate divine intervention. Class selection is also folded in to this system, which makes sense because there’s a god of fighters, a god (no, none of them are goddesses. I didn’t write the game, I just play it.) of thieves, etc. Each time you level up, you pick which god you want to worship until next time, and your character advances according to those choices.

Powder also keeps track of what the gods think of your behavior. Cast a lot of spells, and the god of magic will become your protector, but the god of barbarians will constantly try to smite you. The gods of healing and necromancy are similarly opposed.

This actually works pretty well for a solo RPG, and as long as you don’t use too many or too vague triggers for divine judgement, similar deities might work as well at the table as on a tablet. Powder’s pantheon falls apart if you introduce standard D&D parties into the game, where not many PCs are members of the same class. You’d have to keep track of each deity’s opinion of each member of the party, and it would discourage players from trying to do anything that doesn’t follow their class tropes.

I think the way to get something useful out of this is probably to write a pantheon in the opposite order to what I’m used to using. In the past, when I’ve felt the need to come up with a specific set of deities for a game, I would start by thinking about what powers I would want their priests to have, and base everything else on that. This time, I’m going to try starting off with what behaviors they like and dislike, which is normally the last thing I would think about, or even leave it up to whoever's playing a cleric.

So what sort of behaviors should these deities care about? The main concerns are that each behavior must be something the whole party could be judged for, and that it has to be impossible to keep all of them happy at once. Now, the laziest and most obvious way to achieve both of those goals is to use moral/cosmic/political/whatever alignments. I completely hate codified alignment though, for more reasons than are worth discussing right now.

So here’s an incomplete list, off the top of my head, of things that A) a party could do to piss off some deities while ingratiating themselves to others, and B) are not as vague and morally simplistic as alignment:

• kill first talk later/avoid combat through diplomacy
• throw extravagant parties/hoard wealth
• acquire or use magical devices/destroy all traces of magic
• enforce justice/offer mercy to sinners
• protect mankind from nature/protect nature from mankind
• carefully gather information before acting/immediately act on a whim

Oh hey look there’s six of them. I think I’ll stop there and grab 3d6. Let’s say 8-12 is neutral.

9 9 12 14 10 11

8 15 11 6 8 8

12 10 9 13 6 16

6 6 12 12 13 11

Okay so the first deity doesn’t really give a shit what you do as long as you spend time punishing bad people. An unforgiving deity of justice and the afterlife, whose symbol is an iron scale.

The second one wants to blow your wealth partying, be merciful to sinners, protect nature from mankind, and act on the slightest whim. Huh. St Hubert maybe?

The third deity wants you to enforce justice, protect nature from mankind, and carefully gather information before acting. A more old-school vengeful nature spirit.

The last deity wants you to avoid combat through diplomacy, hoard wealth, and protect mankind from nature. Obviously a deity of civilization and wealth.

This tells us that deity 3 has issues with 2, but neither one of them likes 4 much. 3 is the only one that deity 1 thinks is basically okay. If your PC is running around smiting the sinful like there’s no tomorrow, deities 1 and 3 will be down with you, but deity 2 will want to put a stop to this madness. Deity 3 will turn on you if you ever decide to champion civilization over the wilderness, but deity 4 will be out to get you as long as you’re acting like a nature hippy. It’s up to the referee to create situations that force you to make those decisions.

Okay, that part actually worked pretty well. Despite the fact that they're neutral about most things, there's some divine conflict implied with a pantheon of just four beings. Adding more would lead to yet more conflict, but might be more of a pain for the ref to keep track of. I’m gonna stop while I’m ahead for now. Tomorrow I’ll get into some abilities that divine beings could use to fuck with or help you.

Death and Chaos Spell Cards for 52 Pages RPG

So if you’ve read my article on holy texts/codices, you know that the equivalents of clerics in my campaigns get two domains/schools of magic/whatever based on whatever it is they’re worshipping. You also know that I’ve been I’ve been using the spell cards from the 52 Pages RPG, which doesn’t include any sort of necromancy spells. Since I started out today (yesterday now actually) thinking about the abilities of priests of the various Aztec gods, several of whom shared influence over pestilence and death, this clearly could not do.

Looking at the spells that are already in the game, there are already spells written for the clerical domains of “restoration” and “abjuration.” I think the most painless and least game-breaking way to approach this will be to reverse each individual spell in those domains, renaming the domains “death” and “chaos,” respectively. Some of them don't quite translate directly into opposite spells that well (see Prayer vs Entropy Storm), but I think it works.

I could see using these as wizard spells if you play 52 Pages by the book, that is, using prophets (that game's version of clerics).

You can download printable pdfs of the death spells here and the chaos spells here.

I didn't make range icons like the ones on the original cards, mostly because the ranges all fit just fine in the spell descriptions in text form. Okay, fine, it was probably just laziness. Maybe I'll go back and change it up later. I also didn't make any attempt to make the files pretty in any way because they're for printing on cardstock and cutting up and playing with.

Holy Texts or Amputating My Game at the Cleric

My house game doesn’t have clerics. This is what I use instead.

The Madrid Codex, one of the only three Mayan texts that haven't been incinerated by white guys.

All characters can choose to become part of a religion at any point when it makes sense in the game, including during character creation (only if the players ask; their faith is vague by default). Mages who convert can then opt to trade in the spell book that every mage starts with for a holy text. This text can be a book, scroll, codex, tattoos all over the mage’s skin, a small abstract sculpture, whatever. It contains select spells all the way up to the maximum spell level of whatever game you’re playing, which should be chosen based on how well they conform to the philosophy of that religion.

A copy of the Torah that survived the Kristallnacht Pogrom in Leipzig, Germany.

The word "holy" is actually a little misleading. There's no distinction between divine magic and arcane magic in my game, so these are basically really powerful (but at the same time, limiting) spellbooks.

I use the spells from 52 Pages, which has a pretty flexible system for creating religions with customized cleric spell lists: the spells are divided into schools, and a cleric (or prophet, as that game calls them) of a new religion works with the dm to pick two or three schools of magic that make sense for that religion. You’re also supposed to come up with a guiding motto like “protect the weak” or “get out with the loot” which I don’t like or use, but the spell list part is simple and works perfectly for my purposes.

Catholic crusaders might have access to restoration and abjuration. Druids get restoration and nature.

So you get that holy text, which comes fully stocked with all the spells that priests of your religion are permitted to use. The text is enchanted to somehow “know” if you stray from the faith by casting a blasphemous non-kosher spell. If you do that, the words of the text will forevermore appear scrambled and illegible to you. Obviously, you can go back to using a spell book and being a regular old mage if this happens. The book also appears to scramble itself for those who haven’t gone through whatever initiation ritual is appropriate for priests of your chosen faith.

A religious text should probably also have some sort of loosely historical parables in it, which should probably provide some useful information. That sort of takes care of itself in my house game. Mages already get advantage to knowledge/lore checks, so maybe I could just say that the bonus is because they’re constantly collecting little scraps of lore and jotting down notes and ideas, and the stories in your holy text would function the same way.

It doesn't look like it has enough pages for 500 years but I'm guessing it's bigger on the inside.

I also don’t use paladins, but I do allow fighter-mage type characters. If you tell me you want to play as a paladin, I’ll tell you to make a “spellsword” (cause that’s what it’s called in my player handout) with a holy text instead of a spell book. Maybe you can go on a quest to find the divine blade of the demonslayer or something if you’re just in it for the smite evil ability.

Now that I think about it, I like using special items to create the equivalents of a lot of the fancier classes (by which I mean anything other than fighter/thief/mage). An axe of berserking basically makes you a barbarian, while a cloak of stealth and a magic bow turns a fighter or thief into a ranger, for all intents and purposes. If I’m drunk and unusually pliable I may give your thief an opportunity to find a magic keytar of illusions or something. I would also be cool with letting a character go train somewhere to get certain abilities. If you can’t create the character you want to play during character generation, start having your character ask around in-game.

Implications of the Cleric Thing

Normally, clerics get their powers directly from their deities, which makes the idea of atheism a non-starter in the campaign world (Lamentations of the Flame Princess sort of addresses this by saying that divine magic comes from some vague notion of faith and that gods still don’t necessarily exist). By the book, it doesn’t really make sense for me to write an npc or for you to play a pc that sees all religions as collections of lies and hates them, or politically powerful clergy members that secretly lost their faith long ago. By eliminating clerics and using holy texts (which don't necessarily imply the existence of a god), I open up the possibility that all religions are, in fact, scams, and leave the nature of life and death just as vague as it is in real life.

Religion no longer implies alignment. I hate alignment so much, for so many reasons. It will probably be its own post at some point. LotFP takes this on too, by explicitly stating that law and chaos refer to cosmic forces and have nothing to do with politics or behavior, and that everyone is neutral except lawful clerics and chaotic mages. I still don’t like it because it doesn’t make sense for them to be on the same team, unless your players bother to come up with something, which my players wouldn’t do. Kind of (by which I mean exactly) like saying that a witch hunter and a witch are lifelong friends without bothering to explain how that happened.

I use D&D 3/D&D 3.5/Pathfinder (3.x)’s threefold saving throw system for skills as well as saves. Eliminating the cleric leaves only three main classes, meaning that Reflex Saves, Fortitude Saves & Will Saves translate to Thief Stuff, Fighter Stuff, and Mage Stuff. This isn’t all that different from a free game I ran for a while called Warrior, Rogue and Mage, and it struck me as a really elegant solution for something that can get pretty messy. WRM sort of failed for me by using those three scores to replace the six core ability scores, and keeping something pretty close to 3.x’s skills and feats, the parts of 3.x I hated most when I was running it. I like the idea better as a threefold skill system.

Monotheistic religions which believe that "there is no god but god" don’t make sense in the setting implied by the cleric rules. Neither do ancestor worship, nature worship, or anything approaching an abstract pursuit of nirvana sans mythology.* Belief and ritual are incredibly diverse throughout the world. To limit the way it works to an odd mix of ancient polytheistic belief and medieval monotheistic practice is to waste a pretty huge opportunity.

One of the most iconic d&d scenarios is the one in which some powerful creature has set itself up as the deity of some cult. I like the idea of the beholdragon or whatever being able to build a cult of empowered priests by creating holy (unholy? whatever, not for me to judge) texts for their followers, which aren’t immediately useful to the party. Or kidnapping the pope and forcing him to do it since he obviously knows how.

I didn't feel like drawing a beholdragon so here's one by one "SPipes" on devart.

*Yeah yeah, I know d&d monks are basically buddhist martial artists or at least a collection of modern movie tropes about them BUT I don’t think any d&d edition’s manual treats it as a religion in and of itself. By my house rules, a fighter or fighter-mage with no armor or weapons already functions basically the same way as a d&d monk as far as combat bonuses go. If you got your fighter-mage a holy text with the right spells you’d end up with all the wuxia magic you would need.