I love feats, an interesting feat that comes up often can help my character feel unique even when their role is also done by others in the party. But yeah, "is often useful" means it's very hard to then have a lot of these without either creating broken combos (4th was pretty bad for that) or having single feats so good everyone feels they need to take them.
I'm not really sure how you balance that, but I'd be sad if they went away. We're playing Starfinder right now and the vast majority of feats are all function, no fun (you can use X equipment, you get a small boost to Y, etc), which isn't nearly as interesting a choice as I would have liked.
I love feats, an interesting feat that comes up often can help my character feel unique even when their role is also done by others in the party. But yeah, "is often useful" means it's very hard to then have a lot of these without either creating broken combos (4th was pretty bad for that) or having single feats so good everyone feels they need to take them.
I'm not really sure how you balance that, but I'd be sad if they went away. We're playing Starfinder right now and the vast majority of feats are all function, no fun (you can use X equipment, you get a small boost to Y, etc), which isn't nearly as interesting a choice as I would have liked.
While i agree with the thrust of that, i'd say the issue with Feats as they stand is you're trying to balance them across all character classes. Which is a fools errand. Either you end up with stuff like Lucky/Great Weapon Master, or you end up with.. the feats no oen ever bothers to take.
I'd bake them into the characters, with some being to the archtypes (I'd also actually say archtypes should all start at level one). This gives a lot more room to really make your fighter different from bob's fighter, and makes the balance issue a lot simpler (it doesnt solve multiclass shennagins, but that's a whole other kettle of fish)
I mean, 4th already had class (and racial) feats. The issue there is that they inherently limit the general nature of feats, since they turn them into "the designers thought of X ways for you to further customise your class. Pick which corridor you want to walk down".
Which is fine, but I like to feel like I'm making a character my own, not just picking which predesignated corridor to walk down. After the dearth of options that was 5th in its first few years (without dipping into UA) I don't want them to narrow those down further still with future editions. I'll take imbalance due to too many options over the balance of bland, at least the former can be DM'd and talked into submission.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
For my Eberron game I am doing the initial ability score increases through a combination of the player's race, background, and 1st-level class. Any such combinations are allowed, with the only provision being the prohibition of increasing any single ability score by +3 (so for example you could allot yourself +1 Int/+1 Dex/+1 Wis, or +2 Int/+1 Dex, but not +3 Int).
So, for example: If a player has chosen to make a Dwarven Merchant Rogue, they'd have this base pool to draw from:
-- Dwarven Ability Score Increase: Your Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom increases by 1 (your choice).
-- Merchant Ability Score Increase: Your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma increases by 1 (your choice).
-- Rogue Ability Score Increase: Your Dexterity, Intelligence, or Charisma increases by 1 (your choice).
And on top of that, each character gets a free feat at first level, so there is an additional opportunity for another +1 ability score increase through that.
I wanted to ask you about this. Why Wisdom for Paladin instead of Charisma?
Let me go revise it (as it should be Str, Con, or Cha for Paladins).
It's not wrong that "evil gods" is comes from a very specific and polarized view of the world. Your gods are never evil; it's that band of Other People who worship evil gods and false idols. All the more reason to kill them and take their stuff, or at the very least force them to convert to a true faith. For their own good of course.
If I were going to design a setting from scratch... yeah I'd totally do away with evil gods that only monsters and villains worship. Which is not to say that all gods will be good. No, I'd set it up so you have a united pantheon of gods that are generally respected as a whole. Just the one, no racial gods. Some are more benevolent and are begged for favors. Others are less nice and people pray to them to avoid misfortune or avert their attention. But the gods are the gods, and while many variant expressions of faith exist everyone agrees they're all worshiping the same pantheon. It's those lousy archfiends that sponsor malign cultists who have to be thwarted by brave heroes before they unleash monsters and destruction. Everyone can agree that those guys suck.
That's pretty much how most of the gods worked in 4E's default setting.
Even the Dawn War of 4E and the Founding Myth of Exandria can easily be interpreted as "the gods showed up, saw the world the primordials were making, created their own races to colonize it, and committed genocide against the primordials when they fought back against the divinely sponsored invasion". Heck, maybe even some of the so-called Betrayer Gods joined the side of the primordials because they realized their counterparts among the Prime Deities were more-or-less colonialist conquerors.
In particular, I find the Betrayer Gods category very suspect when it implies the Lawful Asmodeus and Bane were working alongside the likes of the Chaotic Lolth and Zehir. Plus, if Torog's origin in Exandria is anything like his origin in 4E, he was pretty much just a god of healing fighting a primordial in the Underdark during the war who was cursed by his opponent to be trapped in the Underdark, causing the other gods to assume he'd just died or something until he started going crazy and dragging whole cities underground to torture people. Couple that with the Exandrian lore that Torog was defeated by the Prime Deities in the Calamity and imprisoned in the Far Realm and you've got a very tragic backstory for a "Betrayer God".
EDIT: I've hardly listened to any of Critical Role but I suddenly really want to pick Matt Mercer's brain concerning the Betrayer Gods and the Primordials. I don't guess anyone know if he does AMAs or anything? Maybe I should post a thread on the Critical Role reddit.
I think it's.... incredibly questionable to paint the betrayer gods as anything other than evil. They wanted to obliterate all life because it was flawed and start over. Asmodeus switched sides over and over.
I don't think for the average D&D player this is an area where we really need to worry, I doubt the.... religious righteousness is a thing among the median player lol, the religion most noted for deciding to teabag other religions hasn't exactly been friendly to D&D
I mean, yes you CAN do that, but that's a different setting entirely. Most evil gods are worshipped by humans, and their worship is generally outlawed.
People who worship asmodeus know they're doing evil, they just know that they're going to probably end up in hell anyway, and by worshipping him, they might get a desk job instead of the meat grinder of the blood war
I’m okay with evil gods, honestly, but a robust pantheon for all nations and a set of cults is always the most fun.
Like, if X only worship the Murder God, how they survive as a civilised people is called into question, but could X have an evil god that’s recognised? Sure.
Thinking about it, I reckon you could justify Zeus as Chaotic Evil, with the likes of Athena and Hermes actually keeping the Greek pantheon together and worthy of worship.
In my SKT game, the orcs are... well its exandria so, I've been trying to stretch it out
The orcs kidnapped their apprentice friend/collective child, and a noble lord's son, and put them in a tower.
The reason the orc queen did this is because she wants her villages and underdark towns to be seen as legitimate, so she wants to act how humans do, and has a bunch of of (fictional) books about the kingdom's history, mostly centered around damsels in distress, and wanted to do what the humans do. This is how your empires negotiate right?
The party figured out the invading orcs went out of their way to avoid killing anyone, with over 50 orcs attacking and only 2 dead in the town. They ended up negotiating a peace, and the players being great, asked about Gruumsh, as it seemed like they had a cleric of Tempus. I told them that those orcs/half-orcs/goliaths worshipped Gruumsh, Kord, Tempus, and Tymora, but they don't really care who someone worships as long as they pull their weight - you don't work you don't eat.
She had killed her brother, the old warchief, and his high-cleric of Gruumsh, for attempting to create some grand coalition of marginalized races "to take things back to the glory days" and assault the Dwarfholds, and taken charge. Changing her title from warchief to queen.
The great human republic hadn't attacked them since before the Dragon conquest of Tal'dorei, 40 years ago. Orcs, goblins, kobolds, goliaths, and drow had been flooding into the human cities to provide much needed labor to rebuild their shattered civilization, and she reasoned that now was the time for a lasting peace
Storm King's Thunder is supposed to, near as I can tell, be about "yeah we should bring back the caste system". I'm running it in Exandria and going the opposite way
I have made it about breaking all of the chains left over from the divergence war. Betrayer races? What does that even mean? Dozens of generations ago their forebears sided against your forebears in a war? One in which they were tricked or forced to anyway? Nah it's just prejudice and traditionalism, on all sides, that keeps things the way they are.
I've mentioned it before but the great primarily hobgoblin nation to the far south is a thriving collection of city states having long since cast off their god's calls to Acheron, and they're far enough from the human civilizations to not have been at perpetual war during this time. They consider themselves heroes, their legions keeping the existential threat of the Yuan-Ti of Dendar and Zehir at bay (the yuan-ti are alien enough where I don't have any moral pangs about making them evil. They aren't even mammals. Evil doesn't enter into it, other demihumans are a food source for them and a threat to them.)
Edit: I have the Drow still having thier matriarchal structure and lolth worship, at least their civilization, exandria is full of lots of non lolth drow, but their role in the world is basically nicholas cage's character from lord of war. They keep running into drow trying to sell pre-divergence magical weapons and wands of power and such to everything from Cloud Giants to the party itself
Edit 2: This isn't to say there aren't other groups of Gruumsh loving orcs that beat drums around a fire and come of age when they murder a halfling together, but I have a strong anti-traditionalist message in this campaign. Those orcs believe that they once had greatness and have lost it because they aren't as violent as they used to be. This is bullshit, of course, back "in the good old days" they lived 15 years at most before dying violently, they had no community or family, and unlike now where women are considered equal, back the they were expected to stay in the camp and be baby factories while their sons went off to die. The human traditionalists are't portrayed any better, their myths about their past are even more laughable. They have run into people who exalt The Dread Emperor, you know, the entity that drags children around on chains so he can devour their souls to power his spellcasting, because "we were strong at least when he was in charge". There are statues to the dread emperor the party has run into, the statues always leave out the chained up children part, quite inconvenient for their narrative. The party knows this guy was basically magical hitler, and every educated person they talk to knows it to, but the popular myth is completely at odds with the bloody and disgraceful history of the ruler that tried to exterminate all non-humans from the land.
Silly things you definitely shouldn't use in your game:
Defenestration Mimics.
Unlike normal, run of the mill mimics, Defenestration mimics take the appearance of a door, window, or other aperture over looking a long drop of some kind. Should something be so foolish as to to look out or even walk throguh, the top layer of the aperture will wrap a noose of tentacles around the poor soul's head and then yank them out said aperture.
Hanging promptly occurs, at which point the Defenestration mimic will proceed to reel the body back in and happily devour it, spitting the bones back into the abyss.
Box of Dehydrated Piranhas
This is a box of flash dehydrated piranhas. Any exposure to moisture will result in them a: rapidly re-hydrating, and b: being very upset and taking it out on whoever's closest.
(...apparently in the friends game i invented this for, one of the adventurers found a box, pulled one out, and licked it. Why, i'm not sure)
I mean, yes you CAN do that, but that's a different setting entirely. Most evil gods are worshipped by humans, and their worship is generally outlawed.
People who worship asmodeus know they're doing evil, they just know that they're going to probably end up in hell anyway, and by worshipping him, they might get a desk job instead of the meat grinder of the blood war
How's Eberron handle it?
Hella pulp. So evil cultists are evil because theyre evil
I think it's.... incredibly questionable to paint the betrayer gods as anything other than evil. They wanted to obliterate all life because it was flawed and start over. Asmodeus switched sides over and over.
I'll admit that I've not listened to hardly any of Critical Role and that my knowledge is based almost entirely on the Tal'Dorei book, the Wildemount book, and the wiki. I'm in the midst of reading the episode recap entries on the wiki. I'm interested for more information on Asmodeus' treachery in particularly if you have a convenient resource or the time to summarize.
Now for a very long analysis piece that I'm spending a long-time writing despite having a lot of other things I need to do.
The Wildemount book features this quote in the section titled "The Founding":
Some gods were so full of grief and anger that they wished to leave this world behind and start anew. They tried to convince their divine kindred to join with the Primordials, allowing chaos to reclaim the realm.
I find it odd to lump all these gods together when in these two sentences some Betrayer Gods seem to just want to leave and start over somewhere else while others want join in with the Primordials.
Let's look at each one individually:
- Asmodeus was an angel who fought against the forces of the Abyss that were called forth by the war between gods and primordials, perhaps freeing the other gods to ignore the demons and focus on the Primordials. He somehow became a god during this time (in 4E lore, Asmodeus also guarded the prison of Tharizdun in the Abyss until he was convinced by the demon lord Pazuzu to kill his god and become a god himself). Asmodeus still keeps the demons occupied to this day, but if he usurped his god I'm sure it wouldn't have gone over well with the Prime Deities (on the other hand, it worked out well for the Raven Queen).
- Bane, as a Lawful Evil god of war and conquest, simply doesn't seem like the type to give up or ally with the Chaotic Primordials. In 4E lore he even served as the general organizing all the gods in defeating the primordials. His crime against the Prime Deities seems to be that he would want supreme authority.
- Gruumsh is a Chaotic Evil god of slaughter. I could see him joining the side of the Primordials. In 4E lore he also wages war against Bane, so I can't see him following Bane's leadership in a campaign against the primordials.
- Lolth's established backstory in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes basically amounts to her convincing the original elves to take defined, mortal forms, which angered Corellon so much that he cast the primal elves out and won't let their souls remain long in his realm after death. Lolth tried to kill Corellon over this, escaped, and creates her Demonweb tethered to the Abyss while her followers were driven by Correlon's followers into the Underdark. In 4E lore, Torog welcomed the drow to the Underdark on the condition that they stay mostly loyal to Lolth (as the god of torture, Torog's condition that the drow stay true to their cruel goddess was his way of torturing the drow race). Lolth obviously despises Corellon, but beyond controlling the drow race her motivations are hard to pin down. It's difficult to say when her chosen people entered the Underdark; regardless, the Tal'Dorei setting book depicts Lolthite drow civilization as on the brink of annihilation by the monsters of the Underdark, and the Wildemount setting book establishes that so many drow have abandoned her for the Luxon that she's been forced to call non-drow to her service. I imagine that Lolth would have liked to leave with her drow for another world, but didn't have the opportunity. Her Betrayer God status could be less because she joined the Primordials and more that she and her followers didn't help the Prime Deities.
- Tharizdun is established to have already been imprisoned by the gods before the war with the Primordials even happened. He dreamed the Abyss into reality around his prison, and demons did not emerge from the Abyss until the start of the war. These details amusingly contradict the 4E lore of the Dawn War, where Tharizdun was the only betrayer god to join the side of the Primordials and after the Primordials were defeated created the Abyss with a Seed of Evil granted to him by the last demon lords of a dying multiverse.
- Tiamat is listed as Lawful Evil in Exandria, which already contradicts multiple 5E sources giving her alignment as Chaotic Evil. The metallic dragons, which are associated with Tiamat's rival Bahamut, are said to have already been created before the war with the primordials. Tiamat is also said to have been imprisoned by Bahamut in Avernus, which presumably happened sometime after Asmodeus became a god, which would put the timeframe after the beginning of the war with the primordials. I can't see any reference as to what her crime was, but given that Bahamut and the metallic dragons were around and in a role of guardianship before the start of the war it may be possible that Tiamat had sided with the Primordials. Maybe Tiamat believed her chromatic dragon children would thrive in the Primordials' world, or that after the Prime Deities were defeated she and her children could defeat the remaining primordials and rule unopposed. In 4E lore, Bahamut and Tiamat were created when a dragon god called Io was split in half while fighting a primordial. I only mention this because it was one of my favorite details of the Dawn War setting. Perhaps Io once existed in Exandria's history as well, but split into Bahamut and Tiamat over an internal conflict whether dragons should protect the other races or rule over them. BTW, seeing as Tiamat has been imprisoned in Avernus for so long, did she miss out on the Calamity?
- Until I find a source stating otherwise, I'm assuming Torog's backstory mirrors the one he was created within in 4E. He was a god of health and vitality who fought a Primordial deep within the world. Torog won, but was cursed by his Primordial foe to be trapped in the Underdark with wounds whose pain would never go away. The gods assumed Torog had either died in the war with the Primordials and fled until he started pulling pieces of the surface world down into the Underdark. He eventually allowed the drow to enter the Underdark on the condition they continue serving Lolth. Jumping forward to official Exandrian lore, Torog finally breached the surface of the world during the Calamity only for Pelor and Raei to team up and banish Torog to the Far Realm. All in all, it seems less like Torog betrayed the gods and more like he was presumed to be dead or a deserter until he unexpectedly reappeared as an insane sadist.
- Finally we get to Zehir. I can one hundred percent believe that he sided with the Primordials. Further, the Tal'Dorei and Wildemount books both mention that worshipers of Lolth and Torog alike hunt down Zehir worshipers, implying that the god and his followers used to frequent the Underdark. Zehir's yuan-ti race also left behind a number of temples, but most yuan-ti are apparently hidden in suspended animation somewhere.
- Vecna is also considered a Betrayer God, despite not having even achieved godhood until a few decades ago (as of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount).
So to sum my analysis up:
- Asmodeus probably killed an unknown Prime Deity and may have used the threat of ending his devilish forces' subdual of the demons as leverage.
- Bane would oppose the Primordials but demand absolute control.
- Gruumsh and Zehir were most likely aligned with the Primordials. Tiamat is a maybe.
- Torog and Lolth were either unwilling or unable to fight the Primordials. However, given their followers shared hatred of Zehir worshipers and the likelihood Zehir was aligned with the Primordials, perhaps they contributed to the war effort in a way the Prime Deities did not recognize.
- Tharizdun was imprisoned for the entirety of the war.
- Vecna did not exist.
My own personal headcanon so far is that the Myth of the Founding is largely a sanitized version of events told by the followers of the Prime Deities that leaves out a lot of details, moral ambiguity, and divine casualties. We know, for example, that there was a god of the dead the Raven Queen replaced in the Age of Arcanum, but we get no details about him otherwise, leaving me to believe there were multiple gods who died in the war against the Primordials but whose existence has been long forgotten (BTW, I find it interesting that the Raven Queen was a mortal who killed a god only to be rewarded with a spot among the Prime Deities; was the previous god of the dead one of the so-called Betrayer Gods, or what?). Even Raei, who was injured by Asmodeus as recently as the Calamity, is stated to have largely been forgotten by the world until her recent "rediscovery".
In the end, we really know much more about the events of the Calamity than we do the war between gods and primordials. We also don't know that much about the nature of the Betrayer Gods' alliance and individual goals during the Calamity. We know the Betrayer Gods generally don't work well together, but the opportunity granted to them at the time caused at least most of them to temporarily cooperate.
EDIT: I have just learned about a campaign 2 NPC who was a drow empowered by a contract between Lolth and Asmodeus. I want to know what her deal was!
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I mean, yes you CAN do that, but that's a different setting entirely. Most evil gods are worshipped by humans, and their worship is generally outlawed.
People who worship asmodeus know they're doing evil, they just know that they're going to probably end up in hell anyway, and by worshipping him, they might get a desk job instead of the meat grinder of the blood war
How's Eberron handle it?
So, Eberron still has evil gods. But they aren't physically known, just like the good gods.
They are the godly manifestation of things like passion, destruction, individuality, fear, vengeance. ect...
But something like the Blood of Vol? They are an "evil" organization but they have a legitimate reason to want to practice necromancy.
In Eberron all souls go to Dolurrh, the Plane of the Dead, regardless of their virtue in life, where they eventually lose their memories & transform into shades.
So, becoming a lich or vampire is seen as an escape from that.
If you are looking for pure evil creatures though in Eberron, that'd be the Inspired, the Quori, fiends, and the The Lords of Dust (the secret cabal of rakshasa and other fiends).
The more I'm researching into Exandria the more ideas I get for my campaign.
- The southern half of Tal'Dorei was controlled by a yuan-ti empire in the Age of Arcanum. During the Calamity this empire hid individuals deemed worthy in secret vaults where they sleep to this day, waiting to be awakened. There's no known yuan-ti presence on the continent otherwise.
- The Ki'Nau people of Wildemount's Menagerie Coast had Uk'otoa, a rogue creation of Zehir, as their patron until foreign followers of Zehir bound Uk'otoa and rededicated the temple of Urukayxl to the Cloaked Serpent.
- The Lushgut Forest was the site of a battle between Melora and Zehir during the Calamity. A sect of Melorite yuan-ti watch over a sunken temple of Zehir and are cursed with short lives by whatever force lurks within.
- An active yuan-ti city exists on an island near Blightshore, the eastern coast of Wildemount. The city is known as Sariss, and its yuan-ti possess wings.
The Cauldron Sea of Blightshore is pretty interesting, too. Apparently it is affected by the planar influence of both the Plane of Water and the Abyss. Maybe it's like Eberron's manifest zones?
I'm a bit surprised to see a dearth of information on the Underdark of Exandria. The only information I've been able to find comes from the Tal'Dorei book, which implies that Exandria's Underdark is so dangerous that the kinds of societies drow have in worlds like the Forgotten Realms are impossible to defend and maintain.
I think something might come of that in Exandrian lore, the Chained Oblivion is slowly eradicating the Lolth worshipping territory of Drow in the underdark, as more and more hopeless Drow fall to the madness of Therzidun and turn into abominations
I have a feeling Matt planned to have drow stuff in Campaign 1 but it never really planned out, and his future plans probably includes a complete reinvention of their underdark societies in order to survive - namely, they need allies
hence in my Taldorei SKT game, the drow are frantically making surface alliances
It strikes me that I would love a new Tal'dorei book that's officially licensed, I don't know if that's even doable
Oh neat. Letting some ideas stew in my head and realising that devils who are more on the Good side of the spectrum probably look a lot like Minds from The Culture in terms of morality.
Spliced wth a heavy helping of being bodhisattvas. Nice!
This pleases me immensely, I'm really happy with all the of my supernatural factions (and I don't think theres any real need for me to stick in angels or similar)
I've decided for my next campaign I'm going to try and enforce many of the rules on thing such as carrying capacity, encumbrance, sleeping in armor, rations, etc.
In the process I've found an anomaly.
In the PHB, the equipment list says that a day's ration weighs 2 pounds. However, page 185 says that only 1 pound of food is required per day:
A character needs one pound of food per day and can make food last longer by subsisting on half rations. Eating half a pound of food in a day counts as half a day without food.
If a character only needs 1 pound of food each day, why does a day's ration weigh 2 pounds?
A day's rations include both food and a water skin if I'm not mistaken
My slightly unoptimized hexblade PC in the Ravenloft game I'm in is finally level 3 now and I can use my glaive to its fullest potential. I went from having +2 attack bonus to taking the blade pact and finally getting to use a two handed weapon as my hex weapon and now my attack is +6. Whee!
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
My slightly unoptimized hexblade PC in the Ravenloft game I'm in is finally level 3 now and I can use my glaive to its fullest potential. I went from having +2 attack bonus to taking the blade pact and finally getting to use a two handed weapon as my hex weapon and now my attack is +6. Whee!
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
pretty sure the ghost and hostile suit of armor will do things to you in your sleep, too.
My slightly unoptimized hexblade PC in the Ravenloft game I'm in is finally level 3 now and I can use my glaive to its fullest potential. I went from having +2 attack bonus to taking the blade pact and finally getting to use a two handed weapon as my hex weapon and now my attack is +6. Whee!
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
pretty sure the ghost and hostile suit of armor will do things to you in your sleep, too.
Nah. We took care of those already. Armor, handled. Spectre, handled. Basement ghosts & sacrificial alter? Handled.
My slightly unoptimized hexblade PC in the Ravenloft game I'm in is finally level 3 now and I can use my glaive to its fullest potential. I went from having +2 attack bonus to taking the blade pact and finally getting to use a two handed weapon as my hex weapon and now my attack is +6. Whee!
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
pretty sure the ghost and hostile suit of armor will do things to you in your sleep, too.
Nah. We took care of those already. Armor, handled. Spectre, handled. Basement ghosts & sacrificial alter? Handled.
Errr you realise the house resets/rebuilds itself, right?
The people of Barovia have burnt it down many times, it keeps coming back, horrors and all.
My slightly unoptimized hexblade PC in the Ravenloft game I'm in is finally level 3 now and I can use my glaive to its fullest potential. I went from having +2 attack bonus to taking the blade pact and finally getting to use a two handed weapon as my hex weapon and now my attack is +6. Whee!
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
pretty sure the ghost and hostile suit of armor will do things to you in your sleep, too.
Nah. We took care of those already. Armor, handled. Spectre, handled. Basement ghosts & sacrificial alter? Handled.
Errr you realise the house resets/rebuilds itself, right?
The people of Barovia have burnt it down many times, it keeps coming back, horrors and all.
I did not know that!!! We broke the curse though....sacrificed the shambling mound on the altar (which was a bitch for some 2nd level characters to keep it in place so its death would be on the altar), appeasing the ghosts and breaking the curse. My DM, now that it was cleared, presented the house to us a base of operations as we start to go through the campaign proper. Either he changed things to suit his campaign, or I will need to act very surprised when he starts to fuck with us down the line.
I think it would help a lot to make sense of the issues around Good vs Evil gods and such in D&D to look into what pre-christian religion was like in the roman empire and the older cultures it was based on. I say the roman empire rather than just western europe as whole because, when we get down to it, there is almost nothing at all known about pre-christian religion outside the empire in europe. A few stories and myths are known or can be inferred from patchy evidence but we know almost nothing about how the religion was practiced. Even in iceland, which was about the most tolerant place in europe to pre-christian stories and myths, we only get those stories. we know a little about some stuff Thor did bit almost nothing whatsoever about what it meant to worship Thor. Any information about how norse religion actually works has been carefully left out of the sagas and eddas except for a few hints. Elsewhere the erasure was even more complete.
The modern religions that grew up in the victorian period or later (the druids, wiccans, astratu, the various kinds of "witchcraft", satanism etc...) are as rooted in a christian way of viewing religion as is any actual christian sect. There was no actual survival of pre-christian traditions that these are based on. And the culture in which they now exist has been so totally steeped in ~1700 years of christianity that there is no escaping it. Things like the "witch cults" or writing from the victorian era about satanist spells and such are just as much a part of the christian worldview as they only can exist in opposition to that majority. The idea of a devil only works in opposition to a god. Otherwise he's just a rather grumpy god.
One big problem with trying to figure out Gods and how they interact with mortals in D&D is that the entire idea of What Religion Is that we've had impressed on us for those 1700 years doesn't work with polytheism. The more modern forms of monotheist religion (say, the last 500 years) don't even work in a world where there are literal clerics capable of channeling supernatural power for all to see. Where the works of the God(s) are physically manifest in peoples lives. Faith, as we know it, is unnecessary and impossible in a world where the parish priest who live up the road and does weekly services can cast Cure Light Wounds. For an idea of how christianity worked in a more D&D like setting see this lecture and especially the remarks about "Thugs and Miracles".
So what about pre-christian religion can be useful in thinking about RPGs which are loosely based on pre-modern european culture? Most importantly, religion is about what you do not what you believe or intend. It doesn't matter if you believe the gods are real or not. Religion is to take part in ritual and ceremony and festival. The word "cult" derives from cultus deorum which means "care of the gods" (and worth noting that even today among scholars "cult" is not an insult and does not imply invalid-religion. whereas the word "pagan" does derive from an insult). Religion is what the Gods demand and require. And when the Gods are not cared for they go in for communal punishment in a big way. Participating in the proper rituals, which are often public and a strong part of what binds together families and towns and cities and even empires, is Religion. The rituals are not there to remind you of the correct beliefs or to have faith the rituals are the point. The rituals keep the pax deorum (peace of the gods) and ensure the gods will not punish the world with poor harvests, eathquakes, plagues, death in childbirth etc...
The rituals of christianity were usually a co-option of the earlier rituals. It is no coincidence that the new testament was written in Greek and there is only a single sentence in the entire work in the language of early 1st century Palestine ("Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" which means "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"). So we can use some of the experience of ritual in christian religion for ideas. The most basic christian ritual, just about the only one actually from the new testament, is the common meal of the community on a regular basis. if you imagine at the start of such a common meal a small portion of the best meat burnt as sacrifice before "grace" and then everyone digs in that could just as easily be (and was) what a lot of pre-christian greek speaking people did who would later become christians. or burning a "votive" candle or oil lamp or incense in a little niche of your home with painting / mosaic / symbol / statuette of some very local god(s). All the way on up to impressive rituals in massive monumental architecture with costly costumes for the officiants, the whole community in attendance in their best clothing, singing and music, stories told of the gods and their representatives etc... Whether you have some wine and a cracker at the end or burn a small offering doesn't make much of a difference to the ritual.
edit: Just wanted to emphasize that the most common kind of ritual across many cultures and times and places is a sacrifice. Taking something of value and destroying it (eg: by burning, or creating a monument or standing stone for the express purpose of breaking it etc..) or making it otherwise unavailable (dropping into a bog or water, placing in a grave etc..). Grave goods don't have to be about what a person is taking to the afterlife they can also be a sacrifice by the people doing the burying. Very often sacrifices are of animals which are killed as part of the ritual. Sometimes their entire carcass is sacrificed, more often part of it is and the rest goes to the people taking part for a meal or festival. This can include sacrificing people who are killed in a specific way (though very very rarely then eaten). About the only ritual we know of from the worship of Odin is to sacrifice a man by hanging.
Such religion is eclectic. Worshipping one god (which remember doesn't have anything to do with belief or faith, its about participating in ritual) in no way prevents worshipping another tomorrow. Different gods offer help or prevent harm for different causes or seasons or life events. Note that if what you believe doesn't matter, just what you do, then there is no such thing as either Heresy or Orthodoxy. It is also tolerant. Many gods and their shrines and temples can exist side by side without contradiction. Gods of other cultures do not represent an inherent threat. Some polytheistic religions go in for Syncretism where they just take onboard any new gods they encounter from other cultures and claim they were different names for the gods they know. Though not everyone does that and the Roman tendency to do so during their period of Empire can erase some of the real differences that existed. About the only threat to this kind of Civic Polytheism are monotheisms or other intolerant religions. When the pax deorum is broken everyone is punished. Not just those who causes the disruption (the kind of people who claim God sends the floods because of the Gays or whatever were around back then too).
In some polytheistic religions there is a divide between religion and ethics. What is good and evil or right and wrong doesn't have to have anything to do with gods or their rituals. Which is why its not a contradiction that in most myths the gods are generally doing things that are morally suspect at best.
Another thing to note is that most of these religions were not predicated on an afterlife. A few did, most didn't. An afterlife is not a necessary part of religion. Augustine of Hippo, still probably the most important theologian to the course of christianity, was very much of the opinion that any christian who was worshipping out of fear of hell or hope of heaven was no better than a pagan. Because religion as a means of seeking reward or avoiding punishment was a pre-christian view of religion.
So look to pre-christian rome, greece, egypt, babylon, hatti, etc... for ideas and try to at least be aware of the incredibly narrow set of views that we today think comprises all of "religion". Religion usually wasn't about Faith. It doesn't need to be about ethics or an afterlife.
Afterlives are usually included in most d&d cosmologies however.
yeah but the point is that D&D gods and religions are almost always totally rooted in the christian view of religion. because our entire culture has been for 1700 years. its inescapable. ie: being about faith and ethics, having Good and Evil gods, having an afterlife and especially an afterlife influenced by ones behavior in life etc... that's why a lot of it doesn't really work and we end up in the kind of problems people have been talking about. cause when you introduce Gods (plural) and real spiritual power manifest in the world our ideas of religion just stop working right.
edit: one tiny example, in his letters Tolkien mentioned that he had added a supreme creator deity above the others (Eru or Illuvitar) because the modern mind just is not capable of taking polytheism seriously. that deep down we think religion has to be about God.
@RiemannLives - Just wanted to say thanks for that big post! It's actually super helpful for my current Terror Incognita setting (Where the gods are explcilty distant, and while clerics maintain their power etc (Inteitonal shades of planescape belief is a power all of it's own here), you cant actually /prove/ a god exists or does not - not in the way other dnd settings would have gods as ironclad things that exist). Gives me all kind of ideas. Thank you!
RiemannLives - Just wanted to say thanks for that big post! It's actually super helpful for my current Terror Incognita setting (Where the gods are explcilty distant, and while clerics maintain their power etc (Inteitonal shades of planescape belief is a power all of it's own here), you cant actually /prove/ a god exists or does not - not in the way other dnd settings would have gods as ironclad things that exist). Gives me all kind of ideas. Thank you!
Cool! Now that is a setting where Faith as the core of religion makes sense.
I've always felt like the D&D concept of faith and religion was kind of silly when you had actual Gods that actually (and frequently) made their presence and power known and could straight up just talk to you. Almost all "traditional" views of worship and faith would be nonsensical in a world where magic exists and your priest can honestly say "Oh yes once a day I commune with Melora. I know what she looks like, she speaks to me, this is what she wants me to do, and here is one of the ways I can display the power she has given me. Watch as I create food and water out of literally nothing."
Like imagine what church in our world would look like if Jesus actually just showed up at services once in a while and was like "Okay here's the deal, this is what I'm about, this is what I want you to do, oh and these people over here can now walk on water and create things out of nothing."
Now I could see a system in D&D where deities derive power not from faith but from religion, where they have an incentive to be active in the lives of mortals because it inspires religious practice. If they're aloof and silent no one knows about them or cares about their influence and thus wouldn't worship them. But if they're around all the time and their clerics and paladins are out there flinging around ghost hammers and shooting divine laser beams? That'll get some attention.
I've always felt like the D&D concept of faith and religion was kind of silly when you had actual Gods that actually (and frequently) made their presence and power known and could straight up just talk to you. Almost all "traditional" views of worship and faith would be nonsensical in a world where magic exists and your priest can honestly say "Oh yes once a day I commune with Melora. I know what she looks like, she speaks to me, this is what she wants me to do, and here is one of the ways I can display the power she has given me. Watch as I create food and water out of literally nothing."
Like imagine what church in our world would look like if Jesus actually just showed up at services once in a while and was like "Okay here's the deal, this is what I'm about, this is what I want you to do, oh and these people over here can now walk on water and create things out of nothing."
Now I could see a system in D&D where deities derive power not from faith but from religion, where they have an incentive to be active in the lives of mortals because it inspires religious practice. If they're aloof and silent no one knows about them or cares about their influence and thus wouldn't worship them. But if they're around all the time and their clerics and paladins are out there flinging around ghost hammers and shooting divine laser beams? That'll get some attention.
That kind of thing would work with and make a system such as Roman Civic Polytheism even stronger. Rather than just trying to avoid a bad harvest or ensure the good health of the emperor in a rather remote way it becomes a lot more important to do the rituals when a cleric of a pissed off god can literally bring the storms. Because the gods in the myths (and not just the ones we call "pagan") are generally really touchy about their rituals and often quite childish and excessive when angry.
RiemannLives - Just wanted to say thanks for that big post! It's actually super helpful for my current Terror Incognita setting (Where the gods are explcilty distant, and while clerics maintain their power etc (Inteitonal shades of planescape belief is a power all of it's own here), you cant actually /prove/ a god exists or does not - not in the way other dnd settings would have gods as ironclad things that exist). Gives me all kind of ideas. Thank you!
Cool! Now that is a setting where Faith as the core of religion makes sense.
It's also worth pointing out that the huge amount of people from across the multiverse getting dumped on it's shores means i'd expect to find all kinds of little shrines and things. I'm actually reminded here of how at least locally, a lot of chinese run shops will have small shrines visible in them - Guan Yu is one i've spotted a number of times.
I suppose it depends on which story you're currently reading/playing through but faith totally works in toril.
Because the average farmer doesn't get to see Chauntea. Maybe a priest comes by now and again and blesses the soil.
Him casting spells doesn't prove her existence, however. He could just be a snake oil seller. As could all the other clergy.
See Columbus and his eclipse prediction for a practical example.
I'd guess for the average person living on Toril you only get confirmation once you die and end up in the city of the dead.
Which differs no way from what people on earth deal with. You either buy in because of fear or you don't.
I suppose it depends on which story you're currently reading/playing through but faith totally works in toril.
Because the average farmer doesn't get to see Chauntea. Maybe a priest comes by now and again and blesses the soil.
Him casting spells doesn't prove her existence, however. He could just be a snake oil seller. As could all the other clergy.
See Columbus and his eclipse prediction for a practical example.
I'd guess for the average person living on Toril you only get confirmation once you die and end up in the city of the dead.
Which differs no way from what people on earth deal with. You either buy in because of fear or you don't.
Indeed. It's a christian view of religion kind of hamfistedly squashed into a supposedly polytheistic / magical world.
I've always felt like the D&D concept of faith and religion was kind of silly when you had actual Gods that actually (and frequently) made their presence and power known and could straight up just talk to you. Almost all "traditional" views of worship and faith would be nonsensical in a world where magic exists and your priest can honestly say "Oh yes once a day I commune with Melora. I know what she looks like, she speaks to me, this is what she wants me to do, and here is one of the ways I can display the power she has given me. Watch as I create food and water out of literally nothing."
Like imagine what church in our world would look like if Jesus actually just showed up at services once in a while and was like "Okay here's the deal, this is what I'm about, this is what I want you to do, oh and these people over here can now walk on water and create things out of nothing."
Now I could see a system in D&D where deities derive power not from faith but from religion, where they have an incentive to be active in the lives of mortals because it inspires religious practice. If they're aloof and silent no one knows about them or cares about their influence and thus wouldn't worship them. But if they're around all the time and their clerics and paladins are out there flinging around ghost hammers and shooting divine laser beams? That'll get some attention.
That's not the case in D&D though
there are very few gods that directly talk to people, even fewer people they directly talk to, and when they show up in avatars they are basically fragments of the true being
Even after communing telepathically with Mielikki, in the afterlife, Drizzt's wife only had a pretty solid gist of her designs
Even the priestesses of Lolth don't really know whats up with Lolth most of the time, the only time they talked to her directly was the Time of Troubles when she was cast down and walked as a mortal
Clerics get broad strokes from their gods: "help those people", "hold a sick ass set of olympic games", "raze the village and eat their hearts", etc, but they aren't getting 1 on 1s with them
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I'm not really sure how you balance that, but I'd be sad if they went away. We're playing Starfinder right now and the vast majority of feats are all function, no fun (you can use X equipment, you get a small boost to Y, etc), which isn't nearly as interesting a choice as I would have liked.
If we're talking halfling sword names, a short musical phrase is also known as a sting :P
Licc
...like, 3 people are gonna get that joke. 5 if you use the name Neely as well, somehow
While i agree with the thrust of that, i'd say the issue with Feats as they stand is you're trying to balance them across all character classes. Which is a fools errand. Either you end up with stuff like Lucky/Great Weapon Master, or you end up with.. the feats no oen ever bothers to take.
I'd bake them into the characters, with some being to the archtypes (I'd also actually say archtypes should all start at level one). This gives a lot more room to really make your fighter different from bob's fighter, and makes the balance issue a lot simpler (it doesnt solve multiclass shennagins, but that's a whole other kettle of fish)
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Which is fine, but I like to feel like I'm making a character my own, not just picking which predesignated corridor to walk down. After the dearth of options that was 5th in its first few years (without dipping into UA) I don't want them to narrow those down further still with future editions. I'll take imbalance due to too many options over the balance of bland, at least the former can be DM'd and talked into submission.
Let me go revise it (as it should be Str, Con, or Cha for Paladins).
That's pretty much how most of the gods worked in 4E's default setting.
Even the Dawn War of 4E and the Founding Myth of Exandria can easily be interpreted as "the gods showed up, saw the world the primordials were making, created their own races to colonize it, and committed genocide against the primordials when they fought back against the divinely sponsored invasion". Heck, maybe even some of the so-called Betrayer Gods joined the side of the primordials because they realized their counterparts among the Prime Deities were more-or-less colonialist conquerors.
In particular, I find the Betrayer Gods category very suspect when it implies the Lawful Asmodeus and Bane were working alongside the likes of the Chaotic Lolth and Zehir. Plus, if Torog's origin in Exandria is anything like his origin in 4E, he was pretty much just a god of healing fighting a primordial in the Underdark during the war who was cursed by his opponent to be trapped in the Underdark, causing the other gods to assume he'd just died or something until he started going crazy and dragging whole cities underground to torture people. Couple that with the Exandrian lore that Torog was defeated by the Prime Deities in the Calamity and imprisoned in the Far Realm and you've got a very tragic backstory for a "Betrayer God".
EDIT: I've hardly listened to any of Critical Role but I suddenly really want to pick Matt Mercer's brain concerning the Betrayer Gods and the Primordials. I don't guess anyone know if he does AMAs or anything? Maybe I should post a thread on the Critical Role reddit.
I don't think for the average D&D player this is an area where we really need to worry, I doubt the.... religious righteousness is a thing among the median player lol, the religion most noted for deciding to teabag other religions hasn't exactly been friendly to D&D
But its not also without precedence in history or “contemporary civic fiction” that there are both evil gods and people who “worship” them.
That bing said i support more thought out pantheons as well as better constructions for the primary alignment dichotomy
People who worship asmodeus know they're doing evil, they just know that they're going to probably end up in hell anyway, and by worshipping him, they might get a desk job instead of the meat grinder of the blood war
How's Eberron handle it?
Like, if X only worship the Murder God, how they survive as a civilised people is called into question, but could X have an evil god that’s recognised? Sure.
Thinking about it, I reckon you could justify Zeus as Chaotic Evil, with the likes of Athena and Hermes actually keeping the Greek pantheon together and worthy of worship.
The orcs kidnapped their apprentice friend/collective child, and a noble lord's son, and put them in a tower.
The reason the orc queen did this is because she wants her villages and underdark towns to be seen as legitimate, so she wants to act how humans do, and has a bunch of of (fictional) books about the kingdom's history, mostly centered around damsels in distress, and wanted to do what the humans do. This is how your empires negotiate right?
The party figured out the invading orcs went out of their way to avoid killing anyone, with over 50 orcs attacking and only 2 dead in the town. They ended up negotiating a peace, and the players being great, asked about Gruumsh, as it seemed like they had a cleric of Tempus. I told them that those orcs/half-orcs/goliaths worshipped Gruumsh, Kord, Tempus, and Tymora, but they don't really care who someone worships as long as they pull their weight - you don't work you don't eat.
She had killed her brother, the old warchief, and his high-cleric of Gruumsh, for attempting to create some grand coalition of marginalized races "to take things back to the glory days" and assault the Dwarfholds, and taken charge. Changing her title from warchief to queen.
The great human republic hadn't attacked them since before the Dragon conquest of Tal'dorei, 40 years ago. Orcs, goblins, kobolds, goliaths, and drow had been flooding into the human cities to provide much needed labor to rebuild their shattered civilization, and she reasoned that now was the time for a lasting peace
Storm King's Thunder is supposed to, near as I can tell, be about "yeah we should bring back the caste system". I'm running it in Exandria and going the opposite way
I have made it about breaking all of the chains left over from the divergence war. Betrayer races? What does that even mean? Dozens of generations ago their forebears sided against your forebears in a war? One in which they were tricked or forced to anyway? Nah it's just prejudice and traditionalism, on all sides, that keeps things the way they are.
I've mentioned it before but the great primarily hobgoblin nation to the far south is a thriving collection of city states having long since cast off their god's calls to Acheron, and they're far enough from the human civilizations to not have been at perpetual war during this time. They consider themselves heroes, their legions keeping the existential threat of the Yuan-Ti of Dendar and Zehir at bay (the yuan-ti are alien enough where I don't have any moral pangs about making them evil. They aren't even mammals. Evil doesn't enter into it, other demihumans are a food source for them and a threat to them.)
Edit: I have the Drow still having thier matriarchal structure and lolth worship, at least their civilization, exandria is full of lots of non lolth drow, but their role in the world is basically nicholas cage's character from lord of war. They keep running into drow trying to sell pre-divergence magical weapons and wands of power and such to everything from Cloud Giants to the party itself
Edit 2: This isn't to say there aren't other groups of Gruumsh loving orcs that beat drums around a fire and come of age when they murder a halfling together, but I have a strong anti-traditionalist message in this campaign. Those orcs believe that they once had greatness and have lost it because they aren't as violent as they used to be. This is bullshit, of course, back "in the good old days" they lived 15 years at most before dying violently, they had no community or family, and unlike now where women are considered equal, back the they were expected to stay in the camp and be baby factories while their sons went off to die. The human traditionalists are't portrayed any better, their myths about their past are even more laughable. They have run into people who exalt The Dread Emperor, you know, the entity that drags children around on chains so he can devour their souls to power his spellcasting, because "we were strong at least when he was in charge". There are statues to the dread emperor the party has run into, the statues always leave out the chained up children part, quite inconvenient for their narrative. The party knows this guy was basically magical hitler, and every educated person they talk to knows it to, but the popular myth is completely at odds with the bloody and disgraceful history of the ruler that tried to exterminate all non-humans from the land.
Defenestration Mimics.
Unlike normal, run of the mill mimics, Defenestration mimics take the appearance of a door, window, or other aperture over looking a long drop of some kind. Should something be so foolish as to to look out or even walk throguh, the top layer of the aperture will wrap a noose of tentacles around the poor soul's head and then yank them out said aperture.
Hanging promptly occurs, at which point the Defenestration mimic will proceed to reel the body back in and happily devour it, spitting the bones back into the abyss.
Box of Dehydrated Piranhas
This is a box of flash dehydrated piranhas. Any exposure to moisture will result in them a: rapidly re-hydrating, and b: being very upset and taking it out on whoever's closest.
(...apparently in the friends game i invented this for, one of the adventurers found a box, pulled one out, and licked it. Why, i'm not sure)
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Hella pulp. So evil cultists are evil because theyre evil
I'll admit that I've not listened to hardly any of Critical Role and that my knowledge is based almost entirely on the Tal'Dorei book, the Wildemount book, and the wiki. I'm in the midst of reading the episode recap entries on the wiki. I'm interested for more information on Asmodeus' treachery in particularly if you have a convenient resource or the time to summarize.
Now for a very long analysis piece that I'm spending a long-time writing despite having a lot of other things I need to do.
The Wildemount book features this quote in the section titled "The Founding":
I find it odd to lump all these gods together when in these two sentences some Betrayer Gods seem to just want to leave and start over somewhere else while others want join in with the Primordials.
Let's look at each one individually:
- Asmodeus was an angel who fought against the forces of the Abyss that were called forth by the war between gods and primordials, perhaps freeing the other gods to ignore the demons and focus on the Primordials. He somehow became a god during this time (in 4E lore, Asmodeus also guarded the prison of Tharizdun in the Abyss until he was convinced by the demon lord Pazuzu to kill his god and become a god himself). Asmodeus still keeps the demons occupied to this day, but if he usurped his god I'm sure it wouldn't have gone over well with the Prime Deities (on the other hand, it worked out well for the Raven Queen).
- Bane, as a Lawful Evil god of war and conquest, simply doesn't seem like the type to give up or ally with the Chaotic Primordials. In 4E lore he even served as the general organizing all the gods in defeating the primordials. His crime against the Prime Deities seems to be that he would want supreme authority.
- Gruumsh is a Chaotic Evil god of slaughter. I could see him joining the side of the Primordials. In 4E lore he also wages war against Bane, so I can't see him following Bane's leadership in a campaign against the primordials.
- Lolth's established backstory in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes basically amounts to her convincing the original elves to take defined, mortal forms, which angered Corellon so much that he cast the primal elves out and won't let their souls remain long in his realm after death. Lolth tried to kill Corellon over this, escaped, and creates her Demonweb tethered to the Abyss while her followers were driven by Correlon's followers into the Underdark. In 4E lore, Torog welcomed the drow to the Underdark on the condition that they stay mostly loyal to Lolth (as the god of torture, Torog's condition that the drow stay true to their cruel goddess was his way of torturing the drow race). Lolth obviously despises Corellon, but beyond controlling the drow race her motivations are hard to pin down. It's difficult to say when her chosen people entered the Underdark; regardless, the Tal'Dorei setting book depicts Lolthite drow civilization as on the brink of annihilation by the monsters of the Underdark, and the Wildemount setting book establishes that so many drow have abandoned her for the Luxon that she's been forced to call non-drow to her service. I imagine that Lolth would have liked to leave with her drow for another world, but didn't have the opportunity. Her Betrayer God status could be less because she joined the Primordials and more that she and her followers didn't help the Prime Deities.
- Tharizdun is established to have already been imprisoned by the gods before the war with the Primordials even happened. He dreamed the Abyss into reality around his prison, and demons did not emerge from the Abyss until the start of the war. These details amusingly contradict the 4E lore of the Dawn War, where Tharizdun was the only betrayer god to join the side of the Primordials and after the Primordials were defeated created the Abyss with a Seed of Evil granted to him by the last demon lords of a dying multiverse.
- Tiamat is listed as Lawful Evil in Exandria, which already contradicts multiple 5E sources giving her alignment as Chaotic Evil. The metallic dragons, which are associated with Tiamat's rival Bahamut, are said to have already been created before the war with the primordials. Tiamat is also said to have been imprisoned by Bahamut in Avernus, which presumably happened sometime after Asmodeus became a god, which would put the timeframe after the beginning of the war with the primordials. I can't see any reference as to what her crime was, but given that Bahamut and the metallic dragons were around and in a role of guardianship before the start of the war it may be possible that Tiamat had sided with the Primordials. Maybe Tiamat believed her chromatic dragon children would thrive in the Primordials' world, or that after the Prime Deities were defeated she and her children could defeat the remaining primordials and rule unopposed. In 4E lore, Bahamut and Tiamat were created when a dragon god called Io was split in half while fighting a primordial. I only mention this because it was one of my favorite details of the Dawn War setting. Perhaps Io once existed in Exandria's history as well, but split into Bahamut and Tiamat over an internal conflict whether dragons should protect the other races or rule over them. BTW, seeing as Tiamat has been imprisoned in Avernus for so long, did she miss out on the Calamity?
- Until I find a source stating otherwise, I'm assuming Torog's backstory mirrors the one he was created within in 4E. He was a god of health and vitality who fought a Primordial deep within the world. Torog won, but was cursed by his Primordial foe to be trapped in the Underdark with wounds whose pain would never go away. The gods assumed Torog had either died in the war with the Primordials and fled until he started pulling pieces of the surface world down into the Underdark. He eventually allowed the drow to enter the Underdark on the condition they continue serving Lolth. Jumping forward to official Exandrian lore, Torog finally breached the surface of the world during the Calamity only for Pelor and Raei to team up and banish Torog to the Far Realm. All in all, it seems less like Torog betrayed the gods and more like he was presumed to be dead or a deserter until he unexpectedly reappeared as an insane sadist.
- Finally we get to Zehir. I can one hundred percent believe that he sided with the Primordials. Further, the Tal'Dorei and Wildemount books both mention that worshipers of Lolth and Torog alike hunt down Zehir worshipers, implying that the god and his followers used to frequent the Underdark. Zehir's yuan-ti race also left behind a number of temples, but most yuan-ti are apparently hidden in suspended animation somewhere.
- Vecna is also considered a Betrayer God, despite not having even achieved godhood until a few decades ago (as of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount).
So to sum my analysis up:
- Asmodeus probably killed an unknown Prime Deity and may have used the threat of ending his devilish forces' subdual of the demons as leverage.
- Bane would oppose the Primordials but demand absolute control.
- Gruumsh and Zehir were most likely aligned with the Primordials. Tiamat is a maybe.
- Torog and Lolth were either unwilling or unable to fight the Primordials. However, given their followers shared hatred of Zehir worshipers and the likelihood Zehir was aligned with the Primordials, perhaps they contributed to the war effort in a way the Prime Deities did not recognize.
- Tharizdun was imprisoned for the entirety of the war.
- Vecna did not exist.
My own personal headcanon so far is that the Myth of the Founding is largely a sanitized version of events told by the followers of the Prime Deities that leaves out a lot of details, moral ambiguity, and divine casualties. We know, for example, that there was a god of the dead the Raven Queen replaced in the Age of Arcanum, but we get no details about him otherwise, leaving me to believe there were multiple gods who died in the war against the Primordials but whose existence has been long forgotten (BTW, I find it interesting that the Raven Queen was a mortal who killed a god only to be rewarded with a spot among the Prime Deities; was the previous god of the dead one of the so-called Betrayer Gods, or what?). Even Raei, who was injured by Asmodeus as recently as the Calamity, is stated to have largely been forgotten by the world until her recent "rediscovery".
In the end, we really know much more about the events of the Calamity than we do the war between gods and primordials. We also don't know that much about the nature of the Betrayer Gods' alliance and individual goals during the Calamity. We know the Betrayer Gods generally don't work well together, but the opportunity granted to them at the time caused at least most of them to temporarily cooperate.
EDIT: I have just learned about a campaign 2 NPC who was a drow empowered by a contract between Lolth and Asmodeus. I want to know what her deal was!
So, Eberron still has evil gods. But they aren't physically known, just like the good gods.
They are the godly manifestation of things like passion, destruction, individuality, fear, vengeance. ect...
But something like the Blood of Vol? They are an "evil" organization but they have a legitimate reason to want to practice necromancy.
In Eberron all souls go to Dolurrh, the Plane of the Dead, regardless of their virtue in life, where they eventually lose their memories & transform into shades.
So, becoming a lich or vampire is seen as an escape from that.
If you are looking for pure evil creatures though in Eberron, that'd be the Inspired, the Quori, fiends, and the The Lords of Dust (the secret cabal of rakshasa and other fiends).
- The southern half of Tal'Dorei was controlled by a yuan-ti empire in the Age of Arcanum. During the Calamity this empire hid individuals deemed worthy in secret vaults where they sleep to this day, waiting to be awakened. There's no known yuan-ti presence on the continent otherwise.
- The Ki'Nau people of Wildemount's Menagerie Coast had Uk'otoa, a rogue creation of Zehir, as their patron until foreign followers of Zehir bound Uk'otoa and rededicated the temple of Urukayxl to the Cloaked Serpent.
- The Lushgut Forest was the site of a battle between Melora and Zehir during the Calamity. A sect of Melorite yuan-ti watch over a sunken temple of Zehir and are cursed with short lives by whatever force lurks within.
- An active yuan-ti city exists on an island near Blightshore, the eastern coast of Wildemount. The city is known as Sariss, and its yuan-ti possess wings.
The Cauldron Sea of Blightshore is pretty interesting, too. Apparently it is affected by the planar influence of both the Plane of Water and the Abyss. Maybe it's like Eberron's manifest zones?
I'm a bit surprised to see a dearth of information on the Underdark of Exandria. The only information I've been able to find comes from the Tal'Dorei book, which implies that Exandria's Underdark is so dangerous that the kinds of societies drow have in worlds like the Forgotten Realms are impossible to defend and maintain.
I have a feeling Matt planned to have drow stuff in Campaign 1 but it never really planned out, and his future plans probably includes a complete reinvention of their underdark societies in order to survive - namely, they need allies
hence in my Taldorei SKT game, the drow are frantically making surface alliances
It strikes me that I would love a new Tal'dorei book that's officially licensed, I don't know if that's even doable
Spliced wth a heavy helping of being bodhisattvas. Nice!
This pleases me immensely, I'm really happy with all the of my supernatural factions (and I don't think theres any real need for me to stick in angels or similar)
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A day's rations include both food and a water skin if I'm not mistaken
Also, my abandoned street urchin turned bonded asskicker for an Angel (Fluffed up an Angel Lord of Lost Causes to act as a my Patron, who gave me the hexblade powers) now owns the Death House. "Yeah, yeah. The deed to the house belongs to the party, sure. But we'll keep it in my pack, OK?" says the girl who never dreamed of owning a home before and how has a 4 story mansion to her name. Admittedly with a problematic basement, but we can work on that.
The people of Barovia have burnt it down many times, it keeps coming back, horrors and all.
My dignity?
Hope your charisma is high...
The modern religions that grew up in the victorian period or later (the druids, wiccans, astratu, the various kinds of "witchcraft", satanism etc...) are as rooted in a christian way of viewing religion as is any actual christian sect. There was no actual survival of pre-christian traditions that these are based on. And the culture in which they now exist has been so totally steeped in ~1700 years of christianity that there is no escaping it. Things like the "witch cults" or writing from the victorian era about satanist spells and such are just as much a part of the christian worldview as they only can exist in opposition to that majority. The idea of a devil only works in opposition to a god. Otherwise he's just a rather grumpy god.
One big problem with trying to figure out Gods and how they interact with mortals in D&D is that the entire idea of What Religion Is that we've had impressed on us for those 1700 years doesn't work with polytheism. The more modern forms of monotheist religion (say, the last 500 years) don't even work in a world where there are literal clerics capable of channeling supernatural power for all to see. Where the works of the God(s) are physically manifest in peoples lives. Faith, as we know it, is unnecessary and impossible in a world where the parish priest who live up the road and does weekly services can cast Cure Light Wounds. For an idea of how christianity worked in a more D&D like setting see this lecture and especially the remarks about "Thugs and Miracles".
So what about pre-christian religion can be useful in thinking about RPGs which are loosely based on pre-modern european culture? Most importantly, religion is about what you do not what you believe or intend. It doesn't matter if you believe the gods are real or not. Religion is to take part in ritual and ceremony and festival. The word "cult" derives from cultus deorum which means "care of the gods" (and worth noting that even today among scholars "cult" is not an insult and does not imply invalid-religion. whereas the word "pagan" does derive from an insult). Religion is what the Gods demand and require. And when the Gods are not cared for they go in for communal punishment in a big way. Participating in the proper rituals, which are often public and a strong part of what binds together families and towns and cities and even empires, is Religion. The rituals are not there to remind you of the correct beliefs or to have faith the rituals are the point. The rituals keep the pax deorum (peace of the gods) and ensure the gods will not punish the world with poor harvests, eathquakes, plagues, death in childbirth etc...
The rituals of christianity were usually a co-option of the earlier rituals. It is no coincidence that the new testament was written in Greek and there is only a single sentence in the entire work in the language of early 1st century Palestine ("Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" which means "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"). So we can use some of the experience of ritual in christian religion for ideas. The most basic christian ritual, just about the only one actually from the new testament, is the common meal of the community on a regular basis. if you imagine at the start of such a common meal a small portion of the best meat burnt as sacrifice before "grace" and then everyone digs in that could just as easily be (and was) what a lot of pre-christian greek speaking people did who would later become christians. or burning a "votive" candle or oil lamp or incense in a little niche of your home with painting / mosaic / symbol / statuette of some very local god(s). All the way on up to impressive rituals in massive monumental architecture with costly costumes for the officiants, the whole community in attendance in their best clothing, singing and music, stories told of the gods and their representatives etc... Whether you have some wine and a cracker at the end or burn a small offering doesn't make much of a difference to the ritual.
edit: Just wanted to emphasize that the most common kind of ritual across many cultures and times and places is a sacrifice. Taking something of value and destroying it (eg: by burning, or creating a monument or standing stone for the express purpose of breaking it etc..) or making it otherwise unavailable (dropping into a bog or water, placing in a grave etc..). Grave goods don't have to be about what a person is taking to the afterlife they can also be a sacrifice by the people doing the burying. Very often sacrifices are of animals which are killed as part of the ritual. Sometimes their entire carcass is sacrificed, more often part of it is and the rest goes to the people taking part for a meal or festival. This can include sacrificing people who are killed in a specific way (though very very rarely then eaten). About the only ritual we know of from the worship of Odin is to sacrifice a man by hanging.
Such religion is eclectic. Worshipping one god (which remember doesn't have anything to do with belief or faith, its about participating in ritual) in no way prevents worshipping another tomorrow. Different gods offer help or prevent harm for different causes or seasons or life events. Note that if what you believe doesn't matter, just what you do, then there is no such thing as either Heresy or Orthodoxy. It is also tolerant. Many gods and their shrines and temples can exist side by side without contradiction. Gods of other cultures do not represent an inherent threat. Some polytheistic religions go in for Syncretism where they just take onboard any new gods they encounter from other cultures and claim they were different names for the gods they know. Though not everyone does that and the Roman tendency to do so during their period of Empire can erase some of the real differences that existed. About the only threat to this kind of Civic Polytheism are monotheisms or other intolerant religions. When the pax deorum is broken everyone is punished. Not just those who causes the disruption (the kind of people who claim God sends the floods because of the Gays or whatever were around back then too).
In some polytheistic religions there is a divide between religion and ethics. What is good and evil or right and wrong doesn't have to have anything to do with gods or their rituals. Which is why its not a contradiction that in most myths the gods are generally doing things that are morally suspect at best.
Another thing to note is that most of these religions were not predicated on an afterlife. A few did, most didn't. An afterlife is not a necessary part of religion. Augustine of Hippo, still probably the most important theologian to the course of christianity, was very much of the opinion that any christian who was worshipping out of fear of hell or hope of heaven was no better than a pagan. Because religion as a means of seeking reward or avoiding punishment was a pre-christian view of religion.
So look to pre-christian rome, greece, egypt, babylon, hatti, etc... for ideas and try to at least be aware of the incredibly narrow set of views that we today think comprises all of "religion". Religion usually wasn't about Faith. It doesn't need to be about ethics or an afterlife.
yeah but the point is that D&D gods and religions are almost always totally rooted in the christian view of religion. because our entire culture has been for 1700 years. its inescapable. ie: being about faith and ethics, having Good and Evil gods, having an afterlife and especially an afterlife influenced by ones behavior in life etc... that's why a lot of it doesn't really work and we end up in the kind of problems people have been talking about. cause when you introduce Gods (plural) and real spiritual power manifest in the world our ideas of religion just stop working right.
edit: one tiny example, in his letters Tolkien mentioned that he had added a supreme creator deity above the others (Eru or Illuvitar) because the modern mind just is not capable of taking polytheism seriously. that deep down we think religion has to be about God.
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Cool! Now that is a setting where Faith as the core of religion makes sense.
Like imagine what church in our world would look like if Jesus actually just showed up at services once in a while and was like "Okay here's the deal, this is what I'm about, this is what I want you to do, oh and these people over here can now walk on water and create things out of nothing."
Now I could see a system in D&D where deities derive power not from faith but from religion, where they have an incentive to be active in the lives of mortals because it inspires religious practice. If they're aloof and silent no one knows about them or cares about their influence and thus wouldn't worship them. But if they're around all the time and their clerics and paladins are out there flinging around ghost hammers and shooting divine laser beams? That'll get some attention.
That kind of thing would work with and make a system such as Roman Civic Polytheism even stronger. Rather than just trying to avoid a bad harvest or ensure the good health of the emperor in a rather remote way it becomes a lot more important to do the rituals when a cleric of a pissed off god can literally bring the storms. Because the gods in the myths (and not just the ones we call "pagan") are generally really touchy about their rituals and often quite childish and excessive when angry.
It's also worth pointing out that the huge amount of people from across the multiverse getting dumped on it's shores means i'd expect to find all kinds of little shrines and things. I'm actually reminded here of how at least locally, a lot of chinese run shops will have small shrines visible in them - Guan Yu is one i've spotted a number of times.
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Because the average farmer doesn't get to see Chauntea. Maybe a priest comes by now and again and blesses the soil.
Him casting spells doesn't prove her existence, however. He could just be a snake oil seller. As could all the other clergy.
See Columbus and his eclipse prediction for a practical example.
I'd guess for the average person living on Toril you only get confirmation once you die and end up in the city of the dead.
Which differs no way from what people on earth deal with. You either buy in because of fear or you don't.
Indeed. It's a christian view of religion kind of hamfistedly squashed into a supposedly polytheistic / magical world.
That's not the case in D&D though
there are very few gods that directly talk to people, even fewer people they directly talk to, and when they show up in avatars they are basically fragments of the true being
Even after communing telepathically with Mielikki, in the afterlife, Drizzt's wife only had a pretty solid gist of her designs
Even the priestesses of Lolth don't really know whats up with Lolth most of the time, the only time they talked to her directly was the Time of Troubles when she was cast down and walked as a mortal
Clerics get broad strokes from their gods: "help those people", "hold a sick ass set of olympic games", "raze the village and eat their hearts", etc, but they aren't getting 1 on 1s with them