A Dose of Verisimilitude: Fun to Read, Not Fun to Play

Ahoy, says Spawn:

In reading a great history of Christian missionization in Europe, Richard Fletcher's The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, I came across a passage that briefly lays out the logistical realities of a (presumably name-level) Cleric's retinue in the early medieval period, and then an outline of bookmaking. For our beloved readers I quote at length:

"Riches were necessary for furnishing and maintaining the infrastructure of a bishopric. We tend to think of episcopal accoutrements in terms of the few treasures that have survived, such as Cuthbert's pectoral cross and portable altar or the book at Fulda with which Boniface vainly tried to defend himself. We must not forget the less exotic but absolutely essential underpinning of an episcopal establishment. The large retinues, like those about which Alcuin complained, had to be clothed, fed, mounted and armed. How revealing that when Otto of Bamburg entered his chosen mission field in 1128 with thirty wagons in his train the Pomeranians took this for an enemy army. Retainers were not menials; so we must make allowance for  servants, grooms, cooks, laundrymaids. Already a lot of people, and somehow they must eat and drink and sleep. We may think of the carts as groaning under the weight of canvas and rope, poles and pegs, sheepskins and cooking pots and emergency fuel and candles, flour and bacon and beer. Axles break, tack frays, weapons rust. So there must be craftsmen who can exercise various skills as wheelwrights, saddlers, armourers and smiths; and they will need tools and anvils and horseshoes and nails and grease and leather and packthread. And this is but to consider the absolutely basic equipment of an itinerant episcopal household. If in turn we consider the more exotic activities of a cathedral establishment we can appreciate the need for resources on an ample scale. For example, the production of books was inseparable from the work of Christian evangelization. It was a long and complex series of operations from the slaughter of a calf and the messy and smelly business of turning its skin into vellum that could be written upon, to the final outcome in such masterpieces as the Codex Amiatinus or the Book of Kells. Neither should we forget the associated crafts (ink-making, mixing of pigments, bookbinding), nor the laborious training with quill and brush, nor the false starts, nor the sudden shower that ruined a day's work hung out to dry on the scriptorium's washing line. Amiatinus and Kells were of course luxury productions, among the very finest books which human skill has ever produced. But even everyday texts designed for use rather than ostentation or devotion - such as, say, the Weissenburg catechism alluded to in Chapter 8 - would have required precious resources of materials, training and skills in their making."

Fletcher, pp.459-60.

The passage appears fairly late in the book in Chapter 13 of 15 (Mission to Church) where Fletcher sort of steps back a bit and collects himself and the reader for a moment before heading into the home stretch. His history and analysis are not specifically economically focused before that point, and with this passage and much of the following material, he does treat the economic realities of the European church more directly. In a way, for most of the narrative (and I don't know if the above passage gets this across, but the guy has a great conversational writing style) those sorts of details are hand-waived in the interest of keeping the flow of the story moving.

I.e., basically the same way most of this stuff is treated in D&D except by the most pedantic simulationists. Or I should say precocious, uniquely-genius world-building DMs, for a more positive connotation. I admit, a part of me wants to worry and fret over all these details and play in a game world where all of these matters impinge on what PCs can do or can not.

You want to copy a scroll, Mr. Magic? Okay, well there's no vellum at the local VornMart. You've got to go find someone who will sell you a calf, then someone to slaughter it, then make vellum, mix ink, blah blah blah. Ah. But after Mr. Magic searches for a week, my random calf-birthing table (indexed to random tables of realistic daily weather conditions, history of grazing and pasturage, foddering regime, fodder quality, cattle pedigree, and so on) indicates that there are no surplus calves available in the area, nor have there been any for the last 15 years. This also explains why everyone in the town is extraordinarily poor and unfriendly to outsiders such as your party. You keep asking for veal when everyone is starving, you asshole.

The item that sticks out in the passage for me starts with "Axles break". Back when I used to be able to tolerate the abuse associated with reading the Tao of D&D (let alone posting a comment, for Christ's sake) I saw a post there about exactly this circumstance. Maybe it was a session recap or something, but for some reason an wagon axle broke, and the players wanted to say they replaced it with a tree branch they cut to size, or something like that, just good enough to get them back to town. And of course the impossibilities associated with this task were magnified in the telling (given the author, partly for rhetorical effect: to clearly explain how his players were the stupidest fucking people ever shat out upon the face of the Earth): none of you know how to make an axle; you don't have the tools; you don't have seasoned lumber, of the right part of the right tree; and you're obviously a bunch of total morons with your own feces smeared across your foreheads; etc.

At any rate, this has all been said before about verisimilitude in D&D (though I contend the forehead-feces tack is an original development, a true innovation). Should anything go? No. Maybe the PCs have to abandon the goddamned wagon, it can't be repaired in the field, and the other consequences of that have to play out. But the DM can hand-waive the details that may be important to her conception of how the world works by not mechanicalizing everything, or at least not subjecting the players to the mechanics themselves except as existing conditions and outcomes in the game world. That is, the intricacies of your own byzantine calf-birthing index may give you the most profound boner or luxuriantly swollen labia (or whatever genital configuration you might possess) but the players do not find themselves equally engorged by their encounter with the index, usually.

Here lies a bit of a split in the argument about attention to 'realistic' details bringing the game world to life. Since the mechanics of mustard-farming (or whatever) are basically a game for the DM who develops it and interacts directly with it, and not for the players, these sorts of mechanics, inflicted on players, don't bring the world to life for them. The distinction is subtle: the consequences of the DM playing his/her personal game of mechanics to determine the precise color of the sunset as perceived by each in turn the elf, the dwarf, the human and the dog in the party on day 249 are important. PCs can't agree on the qualities of the sunset, can't fix the wagon, and so on. That sucks, or is an opportunity for role-playing, or whatever. The players typically interact with the outcomes of these sorts of mechanics, not the mechanics themselves. This suggests that a form of hand-waiving resides in keeping the mechanics behind the screen, and thereby foregoing the occasion to share your awesomely detailed Faberge egg of a system with your friends. DMing is a hard, lonely and unheralded career, it would seem.

New Spell: Enhance Underpants

Le Spawn dit:

Enhance Underpants (Cleric 4)
Duration: Permanent or until dispelled; Range: Touch.

Enhance Underpants allows a cleric to bless a groinal undergarment (e.g., long johns, boxers, loincloths, furry barbarian speedos, chainmail panties, the diaper on the guy from White Plume Mountain) so that it offers magical protection when it is the primary article of clothing. Underpants thusly enhanced give a +3 to AC and act as a +2 ring of protection for the purposes of saving throws. If covered by other clothing, armor, etc., the PC receives no bonuses. Great for the barbarian loathe to part with traditional garb, and a boon to many Erol Otus subjects. Also comes in handy when a PC is captured by hostile forces, stripped to his or her skivvies, and chained up in a dungeon. Favored for romantic espionage operations, and situations where one's 'ass in left hanging in the breeze', as it were.

I Play A Cleric

So says the Spawn of Endra:

I play a cleric in Carter's Lands of Ara campaign, and Cleric is a class that back in the olden days always seemed fairly lame. Not really a super Fighter, not really a great Magic-user. Maybe with the passage of years I've figured out the mechanics that make a B/X/LL Cleric pretty awesome. Maybe I've figured out that in real life I generally act like a Cleric without meaning to. That's just how I behave. But what is it that I'm trying to do for rest of the team?

A few years back during my dissertation work in archaeology in Belize, I was talking to a newer project member who was trying to figure out how to get her project going. She had hundreds of questions about how she was going to understand the (seemingly infinitely complex) interactions between subsistence farming decisions and practices of the local Maya farmers in the village we were working with. One evening as we talked she had multiplied the questions and the possible confounding factors to the point of an intellectual deadlock. If there are hundreds of variables each varying along hundreds of confounding axes, you've instantly got tens or hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of variations to account for. And there is no way to conceive of a dissertation project that will account for them all.

I went through the ideas she had and laid it out, pragmatically. Here's what we (I) know about maize farming here. Given your interests and the questions you're posing, here's what I think you should focus on in this field season. I think you can advance these 2 or 3 ideas out of a million very productively in the next 4 to 6 weeks. You can make these the core of your proposed dissertation, and then you can elaborate on them as you learn more.

And she nodded her head and said "Okay, that sounds right. I'll focus on that."

After a little while she said to me "You're going to be a really good professor. You're really good at keeping people from freaking the fuck out."

As it turns out this is one of my talents as a teacher, in the lab or in the field. I hate intellectual panic. I hate fear of the unknown. I hate the idea that there are areas of knowledge that are only appropriate for some people and not others. I argue and act for the democratization of science, and the inherently democratizing nature of scientific practice when done well.

Coming to play a cleric after all these years of disdain for them I now see that what I describe above (i.e., my behavior) is inherently code-driven. If one doesn't want to attribute an over-arching moral code to it they don't have to. I don't have to, explicitly, when I play D&D. But I do play such a pragmatic and righteous cleric -- one who is willing to smash in heads of prisoners, fly headlong into battle, probe the inner workings of local politics on the off-days in town, to beat back panic, fear, ignorance, group-think, and superstition. Ostensibly in the furtherance of democracy. I suppose this is the Enlightenment ideal applied to D&D. (Or an Enlightenment ideal applied to D&D, anyway.)

And consider the role of Keeping People from Freaking the Fuck Out:
You Turn Undead, cast Bless, Prayer, Holy Chant, CLW, etc. You Detect Evil and Magic. Later Dispel Magic, Raise Dead, etc. Those spells cap the freak-out "Game over, Man!" levels for many encounters. And the cleric also bashes some heads in to boot. In these situations the cleric has to be the most tactically aware player to be effective -- for the party to be effective. Argues I.

So if I find myself acting like the Cleric in real life (in the field context anyway), this brings up the age-old question: "Why play yourself in a fantasy RPG when you could be anything else that you can't be in real life?"

Good point. I guess that consciously playing yourself well is a difficult first step in RPGs, and then playing someone you're not well is much more difficult. That's where I'm at.

Clerics and Detection, PART 1, or "If You've Stuck Yourself in Heal-Bot Mode You've Got Your Own Damn Self to Blame"

Thus does pronounce The Spawn of Endra!

[Okay, here's my Cleric cred, right off the bat. I've been playing the Cleric Innominus the Follower of Endra in Carter's game since January of 2010. I've read all the LabLord and AEC rules about Clerics closely, I compile all of Bat's Ancient Vaults and Eldritich Secrets Divine Spells, and I think about how to use my PC to do more interesting stuff all the time. Because of this, I am biased toward the view that Clerics are Bad-Ass.]

There's been a bit of a "Clerics ARE Bad-Ass" vibe going on in the blogospheroid, between Carter's last post on the subject and this one at Grognardia that really didn't have much to do with Clerics initially (it was about a Rients post on class generation). But a segment of the comments on Grognardia boiled down to the relative merits of Clerics, and how they are perceived by some as just heal-bots that no one wants to play. I made a comment there that was perhaps more abrasive than is appropriate for a Canada-based blog (just kidding, Canucks! I know you're not as civil as everyone thinks!):

Quoth I: As a person playing a LL cleric for the last year and a half, I have to say if your cleric is turned into a heal-bot, or never gets to fight, or never uses all the really useful detection spells to make yourself like f'ing Van Helsing then a) you suck as a player, b) you play in a pretty sorry game, with c) other pretty sorry players. If you can't make a B/X cleric awesome and fun, you've got serious problems.

Maybe that's harsh. A commenter suggested that they have a hard time elbowing in to get their way in a game ... and so I guess they get pressured into not fighting and just healing folks. Some folks suggested it's the MMOs that are the problem. Others said it goes further back. Well, I'm sorry but ... well, what I said. Something SUCKS: you, the GM, the other players, the gestalt of all that. B/X/LL Clerics are bad-ass and a lot of fun to play. They don't suck. Some human element of your game sucks.

Clerics apparently are terribly boring in later editions of D&D. I haven't played those editions, but I get that impression from such posts as this one at Rule of the Dice. There I read this rant, and I commented thusly:

Ahoy. I play a cleric in what are essentially B/X rules.... I'm not savvy with later editions, and have no opinions about their mechanics. But for the earlier editions, the magic isn't super spectacular, but the cleric whips ass in combat compared to many other classes (outside of fighters, of course). Yes they can cast Cure Light Wounds, but this idea that they hang back and offer first aid like M*A*S*H doesn't happen in play.

Is this a common thing in 3.x or later that the Cleric ... just ends up being a first aid kit? That's not my experience ... yes, there are times where my character heals a bunch of folks, but it's after my character crushed several skulls in a series of withering flail attacks.

And CDGallant_Knight (the author) responded:

Back in the "old days," clerics were the second-best option for combat, after fighters. (They had to do something once they ran out of spells, after all). The recent addition of so many other classes with specialized attacks and damage-dealing options, however, makes what little combat potential clerics had obsolete. The clerics are there to keep the strikers/DPS characters alive, so they can keep pouring on the damage.

And I said "Well, yeah then that DOES suck." (NB: I'm so old-school I have no idea what 'strikers/DPS characters' are, though I get the drift.)

But I'm not playing that edition. When we first started the Lands of Ara campaign back in January of 2010, I recall Carter mentioning that our party might want to have a Cleric, or even his setting-specific Sword Cleric of Frey, on board, and I took this off-handed remark to heart. I assumed he had some undead-heavy stuff planned. And I also was being that sort of "responsible player" that is alluded to in the Grognardia post comments: somebody has to be the stupid cleric or else we can't play, I'll take one for the team. But my motivation as one of two experienced gamers in the group with a bunch of almost total RPG newbies (two of whom choose to be house-ruled Bards off the bat ... humanities grad students!) was to make sure we were a well-balanced party, because I wanted the campaign to succeed at gaining and keeping new players and giving them enough time to figure out the game through play.

I NEVER played Clerics back in the day and I assume that it was because of all the god-damned (as it were) tonsured monk-looking fools with crosses and rosary beads that were depicted. And not having a spell at first level in B/X also seemed sucky (a topic well-treated in Rients' post and on Grognardia, and in Carter's last post). And no edged weapons. They seemed sucky, but now I know they weren't. The Lab Lord Cleric borrows the AD&D spell progression for the class, and so another layer of potential suck has been stripped away.

Before I get into the detection stuff, which is the point of PART 2 of this post, I'll touch on a few things that make Clerics play really cool. Many of these are not new ideas but there are enough *^$*)$#@ers out there crying about Clerics sucking that they need repeating yet again:

•  The blunt weapon restriction isn't that severe. In most B/X-style play you've lost only lost rare d10 weapons, d8 one-handed weapons, and d6 missile weapons. If you're JB and consider variable weapon damage optional (as written), it's almost completely an aesthetic choice.
• They aren't ^&@#@ing priests telling everyone to be nice and turn the other cheek, and they aren't paladins with a boring moral absolutism that has almost no place in a party of killers and looters. They are trying to destroy evil or chaos or whatever in the world. By smashing its fucking skull in with a blunt object. And with righteous fury, I would expect.
• They have access to all spells of the level they are able to cast each day. This is really important. As Carter has noted, this was one of the first insights I had about the cleric when I got back into the rules. Clerics don't have to find scrolls or buy spells to gain magic. They don't HAVE to slect CLW as their first spell (as opposed to MUs that logically really HAVE to choose Sleep as their first spell after Read Magic, since they are so weak in combat). They just have to pray and do what their deity wants (i.e., destroy enemies of the faith with righteous lust ... duh, what else were you planning to do?). 
• This means that Clerics are in a better position day-to-day to assess what sorts of spells will be useful in the adventure scenario, and are able to move the game forward in the non-combat sessions when detection is going to be more productive than healing or offensive spells. It's powerful because the Cleric never incurs long-term opportunity costs for selecting a 'lame' spell over and 'awesome' spell, like Magic Users might. You select spells for the day, if they aren't useful, so what? In fact, the ability to choose each day promotes experimentation and creative application of the spells because there is no long-term commitment to keeping those spells.
• The ability to customize the day's spells to suit the gaming situation (especially if you're using the AEC Wisdom bonuses too) means that around 3rd level and higher, the Cleric's player has a lot of strategic options to consider, whether they are going to be Abu Nidal jihadist or Christopher Lee Van Helsing that day. Nobody else gets that flexibility. And in my experience that is really FUN. At times this can put you in the party's driver's seat, but just as often you get to do your bad-ass thing while the other party members do THEIR bad-ass things and it's like the A-Team just showed up to save Prince Arkus from demons from Hell!

Next time I'll talk about my favorite daily spell lists for Cleric Detective, as well as for Cleric Holy Warrior. For now, let me re-emphasize that I play my Cleric for me,and though I have a sense of trying to support the whole party, I don't put it up to a vote what spells I'll choose for the day to help everyone else out. Van Helsing wouldn't. He's trying to save reality, not save Dungo the Fighter with a +2HP CLW so he can swing his sword one more time. Seriously, folks. Clerics have have bigger fish to fry.

LL Cleric = Powerful (and well it should be)

I ran my first ConstantCon game on Monday (play report forthcoming), and since we use Swords and Wizardry White Box rules for that, I got to talking with Spawn of Endra during the session about the relative power of the Cleric class across several D&D rules iterations and their retro-clones. It turns out that 1e AD&D and Labyrinth Lord favor giving clerics spells at first level, a privilege denied them by other systems like White Box, Swords and Wizardry in general, the LBBs, Holmes, and even Moldvay/Cook, upon which LL is primarily based!

Even James Raggi's LotFP Grindhouse, which has sparked much of my recent thinking on this matter, slightly de-powers the cleric from its LL / AD&D heights, NOT by denying clerics a spell at first level, but by making their Undead Turning ability into a spell. I think that is a very clever approach, and yet as I step back and reflect upon this whole cleric scenario, I find that in the end, I may actually prefer the "high-powered" cleric of LL and AD&D.

Why?

Well, this current campaign of mine is really the first time I have ever gamed with a cleric for any sustained period of time. I never realized how cool and versatile a class the Cleric was until this campaign. I will leave the particulars of my positive cleric experiences to our group's play reports and possibly Spawn (I am hoping he may eventually post on "The Cleric as Detective"), but I do want to note here why I think that clerics SHOULD be powerful, SHOULD get spells at first level as well as their Turn Undead ability.

It really boils down to their alignment, to whose team they're batting for. As I have recently outlined,

"All clerics, unless they serve demons or chaotic demigods, are aligned with Law. [. . .] Law is what 'naturally' occurs in one's home dimension, including its 'indigenous' gods, and Chaos always comes from without, crossing into a foreign dimension via the energies of Chaos."

So Lawful clerics worship the gods local to this dimension, the so-called "True Gods" or even "Lawful Gods" -- though recall that, at least for me, deities are NOT bound by strict alignment guidelines -- so it follows that their magic should flow more easily and "naturally" here than do the arcane forces of inter-dimensional Chaos. Clerics play by local rules and accrue benefits therefrom. Magic-users tamper with inter-dimensional forces and so should have a harder (and more dangerous) time of it.

May the Arandish gods bless Dan Proctor for going with the slightly more potent AD&D-style cleric for Labyrinth Lord. I can see why some folks prefer the lower-powered OD&D cleric -- for tradition's sake, or because of the "prove their faith before being granted the ability to work miracles" angle -- but I think that, now that clerics and the Lands of Ara have finally met, the spell-at-first-level-having, undead-turning cleric of Labyrinth Lord suits my campaign's (developing and evolving) assumptions quite well.

Beastarr the Bobcat: The Coolest Familiar in Ara

The Spawn of Endra lays down this profile of Innominus's familiar for quick reference:

As the avid readers of this blog know, Innominus the Follower of Endra recently cast one of Mr. Bat's great spells from his Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets blog, Conjure Familiar, while up on Greystone Mountain and thus Beastarr the Bobcat* joined the adventuring party as Innominus's familiar. It goes without saying that Beastarr is pretty cool, since he's a cat. Thanks to Bat's spell, Innominus can telepathically communicate with Beastarr, and see through his eyes for 100'. Carter has determined that even though a bobcat has better than human eyesight, he doesn't possess infravision per se. However, Beastarr has awesome sense of smell and can track over short distances if appropriate smell samples are provided (e.g., the hobgoblin general writes a note in his own feces saying "Fuck you , surface dwellers").

The other piece of awesomeness is that Innominus can cast "Animal Growth" on Beastarr, and he takes on Mountain Lion proportions for 2 hours (12 turns)! AAAAAGHHHH!!!! So COOoooollllllll!!!!1!1!1!!!!!  CLAW/CLAW/BITE Fools! It hurts!!

And for good measure:

And rest assured that a linear doubling in size equals a geometric increase in kicking ass. 

So the stats for Beastarr:
Bobcat form
AC: 5
HD: 1+2 (see Bat's spell desc.)
AT: Claw/claw/bite: 1d2 x3
HP: 7
SAV: F2  

Giant Bobcat form (as Mtn. Lion)
AC: 6
HD: 3+2
AT: Claw/claw/bite: 1d3/1d3/1d6
HP: 17
SAV: F2.

It has been ruled that Beastarr can't die from reverting back to the bobcat form, so that the loss of the 10 HP from enlarged to normal at worst reduces him to 1HP.

______________
*Beastarr derives his name from the ever-charming I Hit it With My Axe alumna Bobbi Starr (image from Wikipedia).Yes, I'm in a box. I've already been told once, thanks.

Here's what's nihilistic and amoral + Holy Water Bolas

Says Spawn: For all the pages of BS being written about these two concepts lately, I don't see any fucking Joesky tax being paid by anyone. So fuck you.

And since I'm just over 25 words, I'll lead by example. Here's a new weapon.

Holy Water Bolas
Holy water bolas were developed by Innominus the Follower of Endra in the Lands of Ara. Each set comprises 2 half-vials of holy water in specially blown containers on the end of two leads, and a third lead with an iron weight. When thrown against undead they can cause 1d8 damage as holy water, but will also entangle the abomination and reduce its movement. They are so bad-ass that when used against intelligent undead for the first time, they will be startled and say "Holy (or Unholy) Shit!". If the attack is successful, after the searing pain of righteous burning subsides, the undead will nod appreciatively and acknowledge the cleric's bad-assness by saying "Good one."

Holy Chant and Prayer with Your Hostess Ofra Haza (Cl-15)

Thine Spawn of Endra didst say:

Pardon the absence, but Carter was working away at the A-Z Challenge, and I'm trying to write a dissertation. Which is more painful? Who knows. (Actually Carter has done both, so he could tell you.)

In this process of being torn apart intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically and physically -- popularly known as "writing a dissertation" -- I've been finding myself susceptible to being moved by certain pieces of music. Though I'm not a theist, sometimes I feel these are spiritual experiences ... as if the beauty of the music itself is evidence of the possibility that compassion and mercy do exist in the universe, whether its source is a sentient being or not. So it went a few weeks ago, when I was listening to the Secret Agent station of SOMA.FM while trying to write, and a tune came on called Im Nin'alu, a remix by DJ Cheb I Sabbah of what I soon learned was a classic Yemenite Jewish song popularized by Ofra Haza in the 80s. (She was known as the "Madonna of the East", according to Wikipedia).

Ofra Haza - Level 15 Cleric

Having heard a club remix of this song and not knowing Hebrew, I had no idea that it was a religious poem written by Rabbi Shalem Shabbazi in the 17th C. in Yemen and set to music. Here's a YouTube version of it from 1978 (pre-nose job) on an Israeli TV show:

The striking melody line at 0:29 comprises two words stretched out over 3 or 4 bars: El Chai, translated as "The Living God" or "God is Alive". This early version has a sort of kibbutz campfire-song feel to it, but for some reason I find that line inordinately beautiful. The rest of the lyrics talk about the mercy of God (translation found here):

If there be no mercy left in the world,
The doors of heaven will never be barred.
The Creator reigns supreme, and is higher
than the angels
All, in His spirit, will rise

By His nearness, His life-giving breath
flows through them.
And they glory in His name
From the moment of genesis,
His creations grow,
Captivating and more beautiful.

The wheel in his circle thunders
Acclaiming His Holy name
Clothed in the glory of His radiance,
The six-winged cherubs surround Him,
Whirling in His honor
And with their free wings sweetly sing,
Together, in unison

This is the kind of thing I might expect a cleric to be invoking when s/he is casting spells like Holy Chant or Prayer. If Ofra Haza the Cleric was in there invoking the name (one of the names, actually) of her deity like that while the party engages the hobgoblin army, they are going to be inspired even if they don't know what's being said or who's being prayed to.

Well maybe she's a Bard, some of you are saying. No. She's a cleric. She went through compulsory military training in the Israeli Defense Force in 1979. So she'd be in there kicking ass, gouging eyes out with krav maga and all that stuff. And since she sings rather than playing a lute, she's got both hands free for a mace and holy symbol! Look out fools!

Plus, she's not a generic default Christian crusader-type cleric that many people envision (see comments to Matt Finch's post). Here we have a more dance-oriented arrangement from Yemenite Songs (1984) where she's got an awesome dungeoneering head-dress just perfect for scaring the shit out of undead and dishing out holy wrath. The iteration that has been sampled and remixed most heavily up until today is this one from 1988, which definitely has that late 80s VH1 'world music' studio production value to it:

But it shows three important things: 1) Ofra Haza can ride a horse, which is a good adventuring skill; 2) she's got a boss cleric's outfit with gold scale mail and nary a cross in sight; and 3) Holy Chant or Prayer are more powerful when you add reverb. I'd like to see a MU/Illusionist spell like Audible Glamer but that mimicked effects like reverb, echo, distortion, phaser, etc.

It's interesting that by this time the song was stripped down lyrically to the point where it's mostly a repetition of El Chai. Outside of all the production trappings, the thing that appeals to people (including DJs) about this song for the last 20 years is a woman holy-chanting "The Living God" over and over again. How many millions of people have danced while drunk or high to her invoking a name of the Hebrew God in clubs all over the world, while getting +1 on attacks, damage and saving throws, and their enemies also got -1 penalties? How would the Discotheque Wars have gone without her? We will never know.

So, here we end an Old School tribute to the late Ofra Haza (d. 2000). How Old School is she, REALLY?, I hear a few of you rotten bastards say. She covered Kashmir, okay? That's how Old School she is. You've covered LedZep in your campaign (your 'storied' Battle of Meverore, or whatever crappy anagram you came up with) so don't try to get coy. Show some respect.

Sincere thanks to the incomparable Ofra Haza for leaving something beautiful in this horrid world for me.

Command: Spaz Attack! [New Cleric Spell Variant]

Thine Spawn woke Monday a.m. too early with a rolling mind,
and before I could begin my useful incantations to stop the brain from rambling, I was half way into this post. The cleric spell Command came to mind: the caster says one word that makes sense as a command (jump, sleep, talk, bake, etc), and this affects one creature for one round. There's no d30 fanciness to apply and it's only one round and then the target's back to normal. If you say “die” the target just passes out for one round. So if you can't really think of something deadly to do with it (like make someone “plummet” off a cliff), then what could you do?

Early this morning, my addled brain thought, well if you could command a hobgoblin to "Spaz-out!" or just "Spaz!" what would that look like? Hmm. That’s pretty wide open, covering a wide range of literal and figurative spasms.

Almost immediately this random table materialized (I want to give the d12 some real game time). I figure you Command "Spaz!" and roll d12 twice, and the following effects occur, which are cumulative:

1. Arms flail wildly

2. Legs dance and kick wildly

3. Total appendage flail with headbanging

4. Grotesque contorting convulsions in place

5. Loss of bowel control, violent defecation

6. Loss of bladder control, wets him/herself

7. Projectile vomiting 20' range

8. Screaming nonsense babble at top of lungs

9-10. Spaz with berserker rage directed at foes , +2 to hit and damage

11-12. Spaz with berserker rage directed at allies, +2 to hit and damage

All effects last one round total. All results occur immediately after the spell is cast, no initiative is rolled, no other actions can be taken outside of the normal Save vs. Spells. Generally, results occur simultaneously. If you have a 9 and a 12, the target will attack twice -- once against foes, once against allies – before any other actions can occur. When in doubt, the GM can fall back on each effect takes half a round. Convulsions in place may occupy the first half round, followed by Projectile Vomiting, and so on. But, when not in obvious contradiction, effects are cumulative: two 11s equals 1 strike at +4 to hit and damage, not two strikes at +2.

This seems good for creating diversions, or just adding some zaniness to the average combat encounter. And it has the potential for negative outcomes for the caster, so it's not just a gimme.

Enjoy!

+1 Crowbar and Arandish Messenger Service

Two interesting tidbits from recent sessions:

1.  Two sessions ago -- Arandish Campaign 2010 Session 20 -- the party left Stonehell to re-provision and re-equip in the nearby Minochian town of Fortinbras.  One of the PCs (I forget who - possibly Yor the Dwarf?) asked if the local Enchanters' Guild could imbue a crowbar with magical properties -- in other words, could the party buy a +1 Crowbar?  Of course I said yes, charging the PC in question 202gp and a 2-day wait for the privilege of obtaining this custom item.  The +1 Crowbar gets a +1 bonus to certain tasks, like prying open doors and treasure chests, and functions as a +1 club in melee combat.

2.  Messenger / Courier Service in Ara:  Around the same time that Yor the Dwarf was buying his magic crowbar, another PC made an inquiry regarding the availability and cost of messenger service in the lands of Ara. The party's cleric, Innominus, wanted to get a message back to his Order, the Followers of Endra, about recent hobgoblin troop buildup activities in the area of Stonehell.  I ruled that since his Order, whose main temple is located in the distant Western Lands, must have at least a small shrine or sub-chapter in the nearby Free City of Kaladar (since everything can be found in Kaladar!), his request would only necessitate a courier willing to travel approximately 7-8 days from Fortinbras to Kaladar along well-traveled, well-patrolled roads.  I reasoned that such a service could be had at a rate of 2gp per travel day for the courier.  That rate would go up to 8-10gp per day if the route were through a monster-infested wilderness area, a war zone, or some other particularly dangerous region.

Does that sound reasonable?  Have any other DM's / Labyrinth Lords out there ever worked out a rate schedule for this type of service in your own campaigns?  I assume these charges are for the courier only, NOT for any armed guards/mercs to accompany the messenger.  I also assume the rate would go up significantly if the courier were asked to convey anything more heavy and /or valuable than a written (or verbal) message.

In Innominus' case, I assumed that he only needed to pay to have his note delivered as far as the shrine of the Followers of Endra in Kaladar -- his brethren in Kaladar could subsequently be counted on to relay his message onward to his parish in the Western Lands at no charge, kind of like free inter-office mail for clerics.

Playing Clerics Wrong All These Years?

Live and learn, that's what I say.

I have never been a great fan of clerics.  In fact, arguably I am no great of fan of clerics or magic-users, and I must admit that to this day I don't know how to play those character types well.  But to be honest, I have known very few clerics, on either side of the gaming table; most of the people I played with growing up had preferences for fighters, thieves and magic-users, so even cleric NPCs were rare.  I guess clerics were kind of seen as boring healer-types -- in no small part because my early gaming groups rarely bothered with substantively addressing the issue of gods in the game-world.  I think I played many years in the hobby in fairly atheistic gaming groups, so there just weren't many clerics around because none of us found the concept of gods or divine power very compelling.  Adding to this was the fact that we were all heavily influenced by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, so we all wanted to be Strider (rangers) or Gandalf (magic-users).  I knew a few guys who were really into playing druids, especially as I got a bit older, but it is not until very recently (this year) that I have really began to look carefully at clerics and realize how BADASS they are.

I owe my newfound admiration for clerics to one of the players in my current campaign, who is playing Innominus the cleric.  In what turned out to be a very humbling and educational exchange for me, Innominus' player emailed me recently to ask a couple questions about how cleric spell acquisition works:

What's the deal with spells? I've always assumed (though I never really played a cleric before, because I mistakenly viewed them as too priestly and therefore uninteresting) that e.g., the first level cleric selects one first level spell and that's the one spell they know, period. They pray to have use of it one time each day. In contrast to elves and MU, they don't need a spellbook, etc. But the wording of the [Labyrinth Lord] basic edition (p. 19) is maybe vague enough to leave room for me to overthink this:

"Clerics do not study spells from books, but instead receive the knowledge of how to cast specific spells through prayer to their gods. For this reason, clerics have access to all clerical spells they are capable of casting when they pray for spells."

So does 'all the clerical spells they are capable of casting' mean that one spell as I had been thinking of it (in the case of Innominus, Cure Light Wounds), or does that mean any of the 8 first level spells can be prayed for since Cleric-1 is capable in the abstract of casting any first level spell?

I dashed the player off a quick email response, saying that I

have tended to limit clerics to "knowing" one spell, so they pray for that same one back etc. and do not know a second one until they level up or get a scroll or whatever (I *think* AD&D set this in stone so that's probably where I got it from -- I will check my Player's Handbook for this). However, many DMs -- and note that I could easily be persuaded to play it this way -- interpret that passage you quote to mean that a cleric may pray for a different spell or spells every day, i.e., any of the any of the 8 first level spells that can be prayed for. Some refs. even add a twist to this and make the cleric roll *randomly* for his/her spell(s) each new day!

But then I read my Player's Handbook, and then went back once again to the Labyrinth Lord rulebook and read the spell acquisition passage very carefully, and realized that I HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT HOW CLERICAL SPELL ACQUISITION WORKS ALL THESE YEARS.  I think my early disinterest in clerics and personal tendency to avoid wizards and clerics has led me to assume that those two classes work more similarly to each other than they in fact do.  In my mind I overlaid the M-U spell restrictions (i.e., only the specific spells you memorize are castable) upon clerics, which is not how it reads in Holmes nor the AD&D PH!  I completely made this up, because of course clerics (in Holmes onward anyway) get access to all the spells they are capable of casting via divine caveat -- each day (or perhaps each adventure as per Holmes -- though that may also mean the same thing as "day") the cleric prays for an new spell or spells!  Combine this with their potent undead-turning abilities and now I see that CLERICS ARE BADASS!  And now I feel silly for not understanding them and for grossly overlooking their greatness all these years.