Post/Author/DateTime	Post
PiedmonSama 09-15-06, 10:11 PM	So I'm rolling up a brand new 1st-level character, and I've decided to go with a 1st level female cleric of Nerull. This isn't for an evil campaign--in fact the rest of the party will be neutral or good. But I've decided I want to try playing an evil cleric/wizard and shoot for the True Necromancer PrC, with Papa Nerull's blessing.... I'm not trying to be a disruptive player, so to avoid any overt clashes I'm thinking of my Cleric starting out en cognito. I've already equipped her with a mace and given her ranks in healing and bluff, so she'll be able to effectively pose as a Cleric of Pelor. My DM already told me that Nerull approves of trickery and will grant her spells through a desecrated holy symbol of Pelor, so that's not a problem. What I'm struggling with right now is.... why? I need an effective motivation for my Cleric to be 1. worshipping a death god in the first place and, B. pretending to be a cleric of Pelor. All I know right now is that she spent hours as a teenager training and toughening her body for an adventuring career (Endurance feat) and she looks like a young Siouxsie Sue (you don't know? She was a singer? Nevermind...) So I turn to you, friends and neighbors, for ideas, inspiration, hints? Thanks in advance.
TheChilliGod 09-16-06, 12:49 AM	*Wrings hands* Allrighty, then. Here's a few ideas to toss into the field: —I like to fancy that Nerull and Pelor are archenemies. And why not? Nerull brings death and darkness to the world, Pelor brings life and light. They clash, which is as good a reason as any for Nerull to want to destroy the influence of Pelor. And what better way for a secretive god of death to do that then by subterfuge and inner corruption? To that end, a little temple of Nerull in some remote region sent out a pair of agents to corrupt out a little temple of Pelor that spiritually guides the little village it's in. And guess who's in that pair? The other guy can be either a rival of your character's, which she plans to exterminate eventually (possibly by setting the party on him), or he could be your cleric's mentor, which she willingly tolerates because he gives her more power. —Why would a little girl worship Nerull? Many reasons. One could be that a passing cleric of Nerull rescued your character from a band of gnolls/orcs that destroyed her parent's farmhouse (the cleric most likely organized the attack himself, because he noticed your character's potential for serving Nerull), and he adopted her into his temple. Another could be that your character was simply fascinated with death since being a toddler, and killed her parents herself with a knife at a young age. She then either sought out Nerull after seeing the deity's cultists in action (perhaps during an undead raid on a village), or a cleric sought her out. Either way, you gotta have her parents being killed. It's part of being evil. :devil: —For the Endurance feat, some temples of Nerull have initiation rites that include being buried alive, before you can be taught the secrets of Nerull. Perhaps the training your cleric did was to prepare for this rite. Hope there was something in that ramble that inspired you. :D
Reversefigure4 09-16-06, 12:51 AM	She's posing as a Cleric of Pelor for the same reason you the player want her to - she knows that Clerics of evil death gods aren't popular, and going around openly demonstrating her loyalty to Nerull will cause her problems. Besides, what better way to mock the foolish initiates of the Light than to impersonate them for her own evil ends?
JulesCARV 09-16-06, 01:57 AM	It could be something as simple as her mommy and daddy were evil Nerull worshippers, who brought her up to be evil just like them and worship Nerull. Ever since she was six years old, she wanted to be a cleric or blackguard of Nerull, and now she's fulfilling her dreams. This works especially well if she's not particularly intelligent :). Or it could be some form of divine inspiration: she has dreams, visions, etc, of Nerull calling her to him. She eventually realizes that she's chosen, and decides to worship him. (whether she's just delusional, and started worshipping Nerull after having some disturbing, but otherwise normal dreams, or whether that really was Nerull sending her the messages, is an open question) Or it could be that she came from a sort of wartorn area where people regularly started worshipping Nerull in a sort of appeasement: "Pelor heal our wounds, Heironeous grant us justice, Nerull spare us your Scythe, Boccob grant us your wisdom, Hextor send us not your armies," etc. This eventually turned into a sort of pantheon religion, where all gods, good and evil, are worshipped, the former to petition for gifts, the latter to appease into not sending curses. People who go into the clergy regularly worship some god or another, and this woman became a cleric of Nerull. If this is the case, the cleric would have a relationship with Nerull not so much as a champion as a supplicant. "Nerull, if I offer you the lives of these savage orcs, will you spare my home?" That sort of attitude.
dragonwelp 09-18-06, 11:42 AM	I would first chose some things your charchter wants to reach in her life. so a priest of nerull could want to kill many people and other creatures for her god. this can go in silents, so she is prenting to be a priest of pelor offering her home or something else killing people in their sleep. :evillaugh
Galamere 09-21-06, 12:59 AM	1. worshipping a death god in the first place Alrighty, personally I like characters like this, even though you follow a god of death does not necessarially mean you are 'evil'. While I hate to steal a page from another's book, the idea of the monk in Neverwinter Nights was prety solid. Meaning that you simply experienced so much death, be it war, disease, famin, Etc. that you saw the terrible truth of the world. All things die, there is no avoiding that, even the gods themselves can be killed. Having the vail lifted in such a way can do profound things to a person. Perhaps you are seeking the one truth of what really happens when you die, do each of the gods have their own realms that you go to? Or is it a shared plane? Are you re-encarnated? who knows, but by staring it in the eye you are getting closer to 'knowing' (giving a reason to keep raising the dead...even though not all of them have eyes) Conversly perhaps you had a near death experience while you were doing all that hard training (your Endurence feat) a vision quest of sorts, in it your god came to you to and showed you the path you should walk. Demonstrating that without death there can be no life, after all, we all kill things to survive. Another fun idea is that you were kept as a pet of sorts by a lich, made to watch and learned from the ancient being and shown the power you might weild. After a time through his own growing madness he cast you out, thinking you an upsurer of some form (and giving a fun adventuring hood ^_^) Taking his knowlage with you you set out into the world and now have to deal with the fact that the world shuns one such as you, forcing you to find other ways of surviving (hence your second issue) B. pretending to be a cleric of Pelor. One simple reason for this is to survive, afterall everyone will see you as evil as raising undead are considered almost by all to be findamentally evil. In my first example perhaps you are doing so to study their methods, seeing if perhaps through drawing on death's powers they are creating life. Wanting to understand the nature of the soul (afterall many of the undead you will be raising will not have intelegence or souls) you delve into your 'enemy's' teachings, to you all it is is in depth research. Even if it is very dangerous. though your understanding of death you may wish to know what life, or the creation of that life is like. Afterall if everything dies then it must be born yes? In the second example it could be a mission from your god, infiltrating and burrowing your way deeply into your god's enemy's church to currupt it from the inside. Lastly perhaps you are wishing to learn the powers of the light to better bolster your powers to defend agaisnt them. Afterall raising a mighty undead army means next to nothig if they can all be destroyed by one cleric. those are just a few ideas that came to mind right off the bat, hope any of that may be of help.
PiedmonSama 09-22-06, 04:25 AM	Much thanks to all for the replies and advice. I've been playing young Hilda Rockstern for about two weeks now and the ruse is going marvelously (lolrz.) The DM keeps us in the dungeon without leaving much time for subtler interaction, so I haven't needed my bluff skill as much as I thought I would. I'm very proud of Hilda's progress---she's taken her second level and is now a Cleric 1/Wizard 1, in a campaign where half the party died in the first session... I eventually settled on a motive for her votive, so to say, and though it's not precisely anything suggested in this thread, your advice was instrumental in getting the ball rolling in this head of mine. Here for your critique or approval is the story of Hilda Rockstern: (Warning: Es muy largo) Hilda was born in the year 978, in the prosperous city of Leto during the rule of Archduke Drevinius I. This was a time when the merchant class was raking in tremendous amounts of wealth, and many of the old trading families were moving into districts that had once been home only to the aristocratic elite. Hilda was born into such a family, the Rocksterns owning a profitable mercantile company and the wealth of decades past more than enough for them to live comfortably. It can be said Hilda had as fine a childhood as any might. If she didn't see her parents often, it was only because duties social and mercantile kept them away. Still, she had nursemaids and other neighborhood children to play with, and the luxury of her home and toys were second only to the children of the highest nobles. She began her schooling at the age of six, and from the first year it was apparent the child had a prodigous--if undeveloped--mental talent. She became studious and quiet, which displeased her nurses mightily, even into the age where most girls began to notice boys, she only had eyes for books on philosophy, magical and scientific theory, economics. Curiously, she had an ill-disguised disdain for religion that was evident from her first struggles to avoid regular Church attendance. Though distant, her parents were adamant she receive the same religious doctrination as any other child of the Dukedom. Hilda was fourteen and just beginning her tenure at the Leto Academy of Economics and Trade when she experienced a great epiphany. It would define the course of the rest of her life. Hilda had always wondered why, if the Gods had created man, and the Gods were perfect, why man was often so poorly made. The Clerics preached that in the eyes of Pelor or St. Cuthbert, all men were as equals, king or commoner. But how could that be, when people were so clearly not equal? The fetid laborers in their fields, the cripples, the drunks and the deformed--they were certainly not her equal. Nor were her "peers" really that--she'd realised she was smarter than any other child she knew and most adults at a very young age. The epiphany was very simply made one night as she showered, enjoying the heated water of the Academy in her dorm quarters. Obviously all people weren't equal, and the hypocritical doctrines of the so-called Goodly Deities and their ecchlesiastical minions, it was really a means to keep things that way. Think about it. Who keeps the malformed and destitute alive? The temples. Who shields and shephards the weak against the strong? The temples. They were creating an unnatural state where Survival of the Fittest and the laws of nature were stymied. A society that kept its lowest elements active in the gene pool, and why else? So that those who'd built their power base on the adulation of the weak and the backs of the sheep could stay in power. Because if it came down to it, if the artificial laws of society were replaced with the Law of the Jungle, those old men in their robes and high towers would be the first to go! Imagine Hilda's delight when she found that she wasn't alone in this belief. Not at all. The Academy was a place where the Dukedom's young, wealthy and intellectually elite gathered and she found her position was supported by many sons of the noveu rich, a kind of Social Darwinism that was implicitly understood by all those enlightened by education but never mentioned in the high halls of the Academy. She fell in with a group called The Young Reapers, a sort of unofficial club who met in each others' dorm rooms to generally trade philosophical banter and theories on religion, politics or whatever. They smoked illegal Goblin Blackroot, snuck out to see Bard performances on the edge of town, made love like Wildebeests--it was all innocent childhood fun, until Hilda had the good fortune to get promoted into the Reapers' Inner Circle. She was barely fifteen at this point. Her intelligence and wit had impressed the Chapter leader, Damon Morgenstern, and it was he who introduced Hilda to the teachings of Nerull. She knew of the deity, of course, but not in any detail--that sort of knowledge was utterly verboten to the common populace. But the forbidden fruit tastes sweetest, and the spoiled Rockstern girl was always one to bite deep. The teachings of the Death God were a clarion answer to the questions that had burned in the girl's mind since childhood. Of course, she was right. The truth of the world was that some people were simply better--smarter, stronger, wealthier--than others. But the Pantheon humanity had foolishly adopted wanted to subvert that truth, playing the good shephards while keeping the best in mankind from rising to the top. Yet there were older, wiser Gods who remembered the way it had been and should be. The strong should devour the weak, and the world should belong to the quick and clever. Morality, the system of pity and charity encoded into every little boy and girl, was a lie to keep the system from working, to keep man from achieving true greatness. That was the world Nerull offered. A world where anything could be yours, if you were smart enough to grasp it. If you were special enough to see through the lies society fed you. Hilda was, of course, smart and special just like that. At age fifteen, young student Hilda Rockstern suffered a fatal accident when a lantern tipped over in her dorm chamber while she slept. Her remains were so badly charred as to be unrecognizable, to her parents' berivment. While those who had known her mourned, Hilda Rockstern was taken to a nameless plateau in the barren northeast, where a hidden temple of the reaper was shaded by the great rock. There she began rigorously training to become a Priestess of Nerull, a student of the Arcane Arts, and eventually to combine these two talents into the highest art of Necromancy. Mastery of life and death was the ultimate power, and as Nerull tought, power was all that mattered. The training wasn't all tomes and dogma, however--far from it. Hilda had to train her body with long hours spent running the winding mountain paths, swimming up icy streams and conditioning her body to hold tremendous stamina. She needed every ounce of it for her final test, being buried alive beneath the earth for one full day, being entomed in a wood coffin at dawn and liberated as the sun sank at dusk. Her body bound inside the coffin, it was enough to drive Hilda insane--perhaps it did, is madness not merely the rejection of society's hypocrisy and half-truths? She graduated this training at the age of 21. By that time, the girl had become a young woman, her scholar's mind now coupled with a strong and sturdy frame to bear it. Guided by a pure-hearted lust for power and frank disgust for the weak, she adopted the guise of a wandering Priestess of Pelor and began looking for means to increase her experience and acumen in the mystic arts. Devoid of weaknesses like pity, she is willing to take almost any assignment as a mercenary if it will bring her the power she seeks. Hilda Rockstern is not a fool, however, and understands that as long as the corrupt society stands, the appearance of morality is necessary. Thus, those who know Hilda Rockstern couldn't think of a sweeter, more giving young woman, who has devoted her life to Pelor and aiding those in need without recourse or thought of reward.