Personable Thoughts

  The Pope is deader than the OSR, and we're posting through it. For this year's conclave, here's a post about hierarchies in organised religion and how to make it gameable. In fantasy role-playing games, we are likely to be presented with a pantheon of gods (even if the depiction of polytheism does not match how it has been practised historically, or indeed today). Dungeons and Dragons also has strong Christian underpinnings , even if it is not explicitly written. Taking what we have and running with it, the Cleric class should thus bear some resemblance to the clerics of real-world religions - that is, they are a member of a religious organisation with a hierarchy, in which they have a specific role and rank. Following a Christian template, this means that they should be ordained - otherwise, you are a lay preacher and explicitly not a member of the clergy . Of course, playing a parish priest is not necessarily conducive to fun dungeon-crawling adventures, so they wou...

Liden Gunver og Havmanden , 1841, Edvard Lehmann Like all good recipe bloggers, I have added a big preamble about why I wrote this, and my thoughts on Cairn 2e backgrounds. If you just want the advancements, scroll down! I have been reading the Cairn 2e books (more on that in a later blogpost), and something about Cairn that has always been frustrating me a bit is the lack of special traits or similar to make characters unique, rather than blank slates defined only by their items and a handful of stats, and whatever the player puts into them. For a long time, people have told me, "Cairn 2e backgrounds fixes this", and I have stubbornly told them, "I will read that when I get my box set, then." Lo and behold, my box arrived a few weeks ago, and indeed, some of the backgrounds contains what I want. But only a few of them, and often just as one or two entries on the roll table. Many backgrounds contains the kind of abilities or traits I want, but tie them to items with...