Re: some help please (druid)

In article <1170775233.544951.35140@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Will in New Haven <bill.reich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>When playing an atheist, how do you deal with the rather common
>deistic intervention in typical fantasy setting?. Even if it is just
>the clerical "spells," they are supposed to be miracles coming from
>the gods. If you regard them as simply another kind of magic, you can
>get around that. However, the other players would have to be
>softplaying you, as a fellow-PC, if they didn't take strong exception
>to your expressing your lack of belief.

There was a (quiet but fairly widespread) heresy in our gameworld Kyris
that held that priests are simply a variant flavor of mages, and religions
are a con game constructed by the priesthood.  This explains the
magic (after all, wizards can do magic and no one needs to invoke
gods to explain that) and the very rare major miracles are also
attributable to very rare high-end sorcery.

Some religious people found this threatening, others just found it
goofy or pitiable.  Most of the Kyrisi gods were not prone to petty
retaliation, certainly not for reasons like this.  (The campaign
saw only one full-out divine miracle, and that was the striking down
of someone who tried to keep his priestly rank and position after
he had converted to an opposing religion.  He turned into a babbling
idiot at the altar one High Holy Day.  But a heretic could easily
attribute this to a human agent--either self-inflicted by a guilty
conscience, or done covertly by another priest.)

There is also the position (fairly reasonable, it strikes me, in
settings like Greyhawk) that those entities exist but they aren't
*gods*.  The line between demon-prince and evil god is so thin in
that cosmology anyway, it's fairly easy to suppose that the evil
gods are all glorified demons or superheroes, and from there it's not
too much of a stretch to suppose that the non-evil gods are the
same kinds of things.  After all, at least two of the pantheon
gods are explicitly known to be glorified superheroes (Vecna and
Cuthbert).  Why not the rest?

I have even seen clerical characters take that attitude; we met a
priestess of Vecna who said frankly, "Vecna is the way I am following;
if I succeed I will be a god too, and no longer serve him."

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]