Content-Warning: This post mentions self-harm as one way to cast divine spells by NPCs in D&D. I don’t go into details and try to do it with respect and knowledge of what it represents.
During the week leading to our first session, my players and I exchanged a flurry of emails, shooting ideas about characters and backstories.
As players were picking their character’s classes, I noticed that no one was jostling to pick primary divine-powered classes like clerics or paladins. That gave me a new idea to support my Godless Lands setting. Wanting to let everyone play exactly what they wanted, I refrained from saying anything.
When my son, the last player to choose, picked a wizard, I decided to go forward with my idea:
Clerics and paladins are no longer PC classes. While rangers and druids can still tap into the “divine” aspects of the Material Plane itself to draw magic, clerics and paladins now need to perform dark, corrupted rituals to siphon divine energies from the husks of their deceased deities.
The world’s remaining divine spell casters fall into two categories: On the one hand, you have desperate believers that have reluctantly given into performing gruesome rituals in order to keep a semblance of the existence of the original gods for the common folk. On the other, you have hustlers, influence peddlers, and power-mad individuals happily burning through the dwindling power source for their own selfish purposes.
(I know I’m as subtle as a drunk rhino in a china warehouse with that one. I think my original idea came from a truck show where I saw 10 wheelers billowing coal black smoke from their exhausts.)
In game terms, non nature-based divine spells require verbal, somatic and material components that are closer to horror than fantasy themes. Alien-sounding, elaborate gestures (think the OA Netflix show) and offerings of blood, or sacrifice.
For example, should player require a cure wounds spell from a local cleric, it would likely require a form of self-harm on the part of the caster, but in a way that they would try to hide from the PCs to keep up the pretense that all was as it’s always been.
Necro-Tech
Like I mentioned in the original Godless Lands post, necromancers and artificiers are now encroaching on clerics’ “market shares”, so to speak, producing cheap healing potions, raising the dead and creating what they like to call “Necro-Tech”.
The idea behind Necro-Tech was to address one of the issues I often saw at my table, especially when we’re a large group: a player with a dying character is stuck doing just one thing per turn: Roll a Death Save. The Godless Lands setting brings an opportunity to create a new category of magic items that grants helpless characters (who by the Rules as Written, aren’t allowed an action during their turn) with new options.
The lore behind Necro-Tech is that they are activated by the user’s soul, when the body no longer functions. Wearable Necro-Tech also act as Soul Jars when the wearer dies, storing their souls until the item is recovered and, hopefully, is brought back to a Necromancer capable of swapping the soul into a ‘Carrier’s’ body (Altered Carbon-style).
At the start of the campaign, Nico’s wizard Samhain, an apprentice necromancer, has been tinkering with some of Necro-Tech parts he ‘borrowed” from his mentors.
He distributed the following to each of his companions:
Soul Bracelet of Healing
An ornate silver and tin bracelet that fits tightly on one’s arm close to the wrist. A custom glass vial containing a dose of healing potion is affixed to the bracelet.
As an action, the wearer or any adjacent ally can use the potion like a normal potion of healing (for 2d4+2 hp.)
When an unconscious or dying wearer of the bracelet makes a Death Save, it injects the content of the potion to heal them for 2d4+2 hp.
In both cases, the vial can be refiled or replaced for the cost of a healing potion.
When the wearer dies, the bracelet also serves as a Soul Jar, preserving the wearer’s soul until their bodies are somehow revived or they are transferred to a new body.
Variant: Some versions of the bracelet inflict intense pain upon activation, causing 1 hp of damage before delivering the potion. This automatically awakens the wearer if asleep (either naturally or under the effect of the Sleep spell).
The Soul Economy
The thing is, Necromancy is a LOT stronger in the Godless Lands than in standard D&D worlds. and magic items are a lot cheaper to produce. Why? Because two distinct powers sources are behind Necro-Tech and spells of the necromancy college: The Weave (AKA, the standard source of the Prime Material plane’s magic) and Souls.
With the Outer Planes destroyed, and the Astral Plane a hostile graveyard of long dead gods, souls have nowhere else to go when they depart their hosts. The souls of the rich, like adventurers, nobles and the rising bourgeois are often recuperated and transferred to a “willing” host’s body, letting the privileged get a second (or third, or dozens) life.
But the more necromancy accomplishes in this world, the more souls it must devour to power itself. These souls need to come from somewhere, and that source is also finite.
That’s where my son’s wizard and my fiance’s rogue come into play…
Up next: D&D Beyond, From Trial to Adoption.
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