Friday, June 17, 2011

Fighting Chaos

In planning an encounter for one of the various sandbox areas around Milham I needed to take a quick look at the Divine spell list to see how players might deal with evil spirits.  Well apparently they really can't given the list of spells I have put together and this kind of pisses me off because I was trying to be careful when crafting the lists.  I did pair out a lot of the D&D alignment mythology type spells like Detect Evil and protection from Evil 10' Radius, and now I appear to be reaping what I sowed because the divine caster doesn't seem to be prepared to deal with the kind of Law vs Chaos war I wanted to portray in this campaign.  I can always throw in more spells from a campaign perspective - indeed this might be the best way of dealing with this sort of thing given that it's the campaign that will determine if clerics are holy defenders of Order or if they are the avatars of a specific god in a milieu of many such gods.  Still it bothers me that divine casters get a create food and water spell and a spell to preserve corpses, but nothing to protect against possession or to ward away spirits.  By the time the 6th level Banishment spell comes around really it's too late to start getting into spirits and stuff - the ship has sailed on being all scary with the bed sheets and moaning noises.  They need something to deal with lower level introductory threats like possessed villagers and ghostly visitors (which would also be much more fun than a big hairy demon anyway IMHO).

The other way I could deal with it would be to  take out some of the cure spells (really with spell points you don't need to have an HP restoring spell for every level) and replace them with a couple spells designed to deal with spirit issues (possession, protection, warding, etc.)  Maybe I can just figure out some spells in game and then decide whether to include them in the magic list or not later.  This also needs to cover some spirit ammo for the BADGUY divine casters too.  That evil witch in the swamp should be able to do something more interesting than spoiling your rations.

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