Some bigger changes

Posting another update to the v7 rules.  You can get it on the Get Beacon page using the preview rules link (is stamped version 7.2).  I was trying to get this out to fix some issues with STR bonus for melee weapon damage but I also wound up making some pretty big changes, again based on the on going play-testing.  A bunch of stuff in this one but here is a summary of the changes:

• The 'biggest' change is also the smallest, Clerics will use their CHA bonus for casting divine spells.  I thought that was a really good idea since it makes sense that divine magic comes from personality and not smarts and also CHA was the odd one out with little mechanical effect hanging off it.
• Beastmen will be able to become clerics but they will also get a -2 CHA as a racial modifier.  I think this balances the extra HP but we will see.  I hated having Beastmen so limited to classes that I considered cutting them out, but I think this might work and give some more options while not inadvertently making them the go to race for clerics.  They still can't use arcane magics but everyone should be able to have a spiritual life.
• I added in the encumbrance rules but I dropped the numbers a bit and changed the 'stone' to 'weight' as a custom unit of bulk.  Average PC can carry 6 weight of stuff and not the 10stone/100lb situation I was talking about before.  I also put in a table of common weights which should make it simple to track.  This hopefully will remove any cultural/realism overhead but accomplish the same thing as the stone system.
• Made some additional balance changes to creature ACs, spell descriptions etc.
• Changes to costs of some items, notably hirelings, rations and ammo.
• I changed the way taking damage works.  Now you cannot choose to take STR damage instead of HP.  Casters can  however choose to spend STR instead of HP for spells.

So that last two obviously are obviously pretty big but I think that the system of choosing STR vs hp was not working at all and some players were burning out their STR and others were not and falling unconscious all based on how they saw the situation instead of arising from the situation.  I think this rule was totally destroying the feeling of immediate danger in combat and was forcing players to meta game at exactly the wrong moments.  It also was super confusing to those familiar with other d20 systems and it broke the whole low levels is deadly vibe I want the game to have.  Now you hit 0 and then the damage spills over to STR as you would expect.  

HOWEVER I don't want to entirely give up on the concept of pushing limits that the rule was supposed to foster so I also changed the casting rules allowing casters to choose to use their STR points for spells.  I think this accomplishes the same thing I wanted to have with the old rule but without the other bad effects.  It does give casters more spell power but the price is pretty high.  The new rules for STR damage conditions are still in place so casters using these points pay a high price with long recovery times and conditions.  Also since a critical miss or other situation could zap your STR unexpectedly using it for spells can be pretty dangerous, so this presents an interesting decision mechanic.  I may at some point figure out a feat for fighters to tap into this STR pool somehow for the same reasons.  SO I think that in the original rules the idea was good, but the implementation and the costing was bad.  We will see how this works out.

 

a possible 6th level cleric spell

Here's an idea I was thinking of for that 6th level divine spell from my last post.

Voice of God

Range: Hearing
Duration: Instant
Description:  The caster speaks the true language of their god(s) which causes all who hear it to take 2d6 damage and be deaf for 2d6 rounds.  In addition, creatures and entities opposed to the casters religion (e.g. undead, spirits, minor devils, lawful clerics) suffer the effects of Turn Undead/Cause Fear.  In addition, opposed creatures of less than 2 HD must make a magic resist check or be destroyed and opposed creatures of higher HD but still less than the caster's level must save or take 4d6 +1/ caster's level damage.

More messing with the cleric spells

First off I hate tinkering with the spells because it makes things different from other versions of the game, which makes people confused.  Also a lot of folks probably will use the d20 SRD spells, the Microlite spells or do their own tweaks based on their campaign setting and how rugged or fantastical they want things to be.  I can't just not adjust the spells when they appear broken however, and I can take some heart in the fact that many of the published D&D versions have absolute shit spell balance - even using Vancian magic which is easier to balance than a point system.  So the next draft - here are some more spell tweaks for divine casters.

• Prayer is a sucky spell for 3rd level - it's gone.  If you want to buff people use Bless.  
• Create Food and Water totally goes against the resource management vibe I'm working on in Beacon with it's 'Points of Light' and wandering about type game.  I can get into clerics making food and water for the party but I'm bumping the spell to 3rd level and cutting it's power by 30% to make it less of a daily meal replacement plan and more a survival option.
• Magic Weapon is an OK spell with a terrible name.  It is very useful to provide groups with a magical weapon to fight some creatures.  Also I kept the greater 4th level version instead of the first level version.  That was probably a mistake.  I'm going to make this a 2nd level spell (back filling Create Food and Water), change the range to touch, and change the name to Bless/Curse Weapon.
• Paralyzing Touch and Remove Paralysis are now the same spell, both touch based*.
•  Hold Person re-added to level 2 spells.  The level 4 Hold spell now more clearly defined as Hold Creatures.  Hold is a good spell for clerics - its essentially nonviolent but good in combat.
• Changing Circle of Protection and Divine Strike to make them more predictable and adjusted for point based and multiple daily castings (same reasons I adjusted Fireballs)
• Edited Spell Resistance to make it work more like I wanted it to.
• Added 4th level spell to Control Vermin to replace Magic Weapon.  It's a compromise between druid like animal control spells and insect plague.

Control Vermin:

Range: 400 ft. + 40 ft./level.
Duration: 1 min. / level.
Description:  Caster can summon and direct the emotions or reactions of swarms of small creatures such as ants, locusts, rats, spiders, etc.  These creatures can be made to attack a target, occupy an area, or flee in terror, but cannot be made to perform complex actions such as opening doors or fetching unseen items.

• Hero's Feast is lame.  Replacing that with something else.  I thought maybe Forbiddance would be good, but then I thought it's not that common to use that one and wow 6th level spells should be awesome.  I think I should make it a good one.  Any suggestions?

I also think that the 5th level ritual I was trying to come up with was staring me in the face all along.  Commune is a wishy-washy 5th level spell.  It would make a much better multi-hour meditative type ritual.  I mean are you gonna ring up the Lords or Order while your waiting for the wench to bring your ale or are you going to retire to your tent to pray all night for guidance?  I know which one the Lords of Order would prefer!

Level 5 - Ritual of Communion

Range: N/A.
Duration: N/A.
Description: When attempting the Commune ritual, the caster enters a trance like dream state for a number of hours and consults with their deity or agents of their deity on a question or state of affairs they wish guidance on.  The greater the question, the greater the length of the meditation.  The more powerful the caster the more clear and informative the consultation, although the communion will never be simple and direct, but more symbolic in nature.  At lower levels the communion will give general impressions and feelings about the issues in question, but at higher levels the caster will have receive more definite images and impressions or even verbal answers and prophecy.  

To replace it I added Plane Shift.  Pretty much right out of the SRD except its a projection.  I feel otherwise it would be too powerful.  I don't get how this spell is level 5 but Astral Projection and Etherealness are level 9 in the SRD but I think a generic 'projection' spell is much more useful and can be applied to more settings.  Plane Shift as a soul projection spell seems about right.

I also have been tooting around with the character sheet that includes Fabrication and doing the necessary rule editing.  So that's moving closer to the fifth draft version of the PDF - I promise I'll have something out for you to play before Christmas if not the end of November.



*I like the idea of many divine spells being touch based - it's something about imbuing life energy into things I guess.

Divine Rituals pt. 2

OK, last post I got the rituals for level 1-3, so today hopefully I can get to level 6.  I guess it's not clear but the casting chance and cost of these rituals would be the same as the spells for that level - rituals that take more than a day would require that cost each day.  If you are performing something like consecration over a weeks time you would probably need someone to share the load vis casting, although I do like the idea of the sleepless fasting cleric muttering prayers in a week long endurance-fest.

I'm not explicitly tyring to make all the rituals equal opportunity and I'm strongly suggesting that GMs add in additional rituals to their campaigns for their evil cultists and dark flower god worshippers to use.

Level 4 - Remove Curse

Range: Touch.
Duration: N/A
Description:  The remove curse ritual takes one hour.  This ritual will remove or block the effects of curses and enchantments on the subject.  It will allow minor cursed objects to cleansed or destroyed and major cursed objects to be safely removed or interred.  Materials required for this spell should be in the 500-1000 sp. range.  Exceptional curses may require additional materials or conditions to be met (or repeated castings of the ritual).

Level 5 - seriously I got nothing, maybe some sort of investment spell for making items?  Is there any divine aspects I'm really missing out on here?  Demons?  Bingo?

Level 6 - Resurrection

Range: Touch.
Duration: N/A.
Description:  This ritual requires at least 3 clerics of the same faith to perform and takes one day to perform for every 10 years since the subject's death.  The subject returns to life fully restored and with full HP.  Some piece of the body must be used to restore it and the target creature must have a soul available and not trapped or otherwise destroyed (or have a soul provided for them...).  The material cost of this ceremony is very great (> 100,000 sp.) and usually not payable in cash - only the most worthy (or heinous) applicants would be considered.

Divine rituals

So since I've pretty much decided I'm going to put divine rituals into my setting, I figured what the hell I'll put them into the Beacon rules as well*.  These rituals are basically spells that a divine caster (read cleric) gets that are not castable in a single round but which add a lot to the class or which replace some spells from the SRD that were removed from Beacon but which would still be useful game abilities.  As mentioned Rituals require more time than a 'spell' and may also require some sort of components or conditions that general spells would not (like requiring a circle of clerics to cast).  Again, I expect people running Beacon games would change these to suit.

There is one divine ritual per spell level (excepting the orisons which are really 'training' spells).  No reason for this except it's nice and neat.  Here's the first three rituals:

Level 1 - Liturgy

Range: Sight and hearing.
Duration: 1 day.
Description: The Liturgy is a religious service performed by an initiated cleric in which blessing and instructions are conferred upon the faithful.  For every 30 minutes spent preaching (max 3 hours) people present at a liturgy will respond favourably to the caster as if he had +1 charisma.  It may also confer the effects of a Bless spell for it's duration and an equal length of time afterwards.

Level 2 - Anoint

Range: Touch.
Duration: Permanent
Description:  Anoint is a 30 minute ritual that allows a divine caster to mark a person as a follower of the faith.  This ritual is used to invest new clerics to the religion as well as protect (or maybe harvest) the souls  of the dying.  Anointing will grant an additional save at +2 against the death effects caused by certain undead or the effects of lycanthropy (or an additional chance for the subject to be effected).  Requires holy/unholy water or oil.

Level 3 - Consecration

Range: Touch and/or area 100 ft. + 10 ft. /level.
Duration: Permanent.
Description:  The Consecration ritual allows a caster to dedicate a building or altar fit to be used in rituals of the faith.   Consecrated areas act as Cause Fear to beings of opposing faiths and also make it difficult (DC +5) for them to cast spells, or resist spells of the consecrated faith.  Consecrated areas are also immune to some arcane effects such as scrying and area effect spells such as Restful Glade or Hallucinatory Terrain.
A consecration ceremony takes at least a full week of uninterrupted prayer and fasting.  An area already consecrated by a rival faith must first be cleansed both physically (by removing offending materials) and spiritually before it can be consecrated in the casters faith - a process that can be time consuming and expensive.

*ok I still reserve the right to change my mind on this.

Preachin'

An interesting comment showed up on the Tao of D&D blog about non-spell cleric powers which immediately brought me to mind of the clerical rituals I want to draft up for my game setting (if not for Beacon proper).  Rituals would be magical effects that would take hours or days instead of one round as a spell would.  They would be used to flesh out the magic system without buggering up combat so much.  I had already thought that one of the rituals should deal with consecration or sanctification - that would be a second or third level ritual.  There should be a ritual for messing with souls (possibly resurrection) and a ritual for imbuing items with magic (hence certain magic items...).  I'd like to find one for each magic level and make them part of church training but very hard to attain (questy).   After reading that discussion, I figured out where to start. The first ritual should be preaching.

Saying a sermon or a mass, and being able to influence players and NPCs should be the first divine 'ritual'.  It's the way the religion is spread and the primary contact between the church and the population at large so it would be taught early.  Anyone can give a speech but for a real fire and brimstone footstomper you would need a invested cleric.  Game-wise, it would be something that the character could do, it would be something the locals would seek out - a service.  It would be something they would do when the townsfolk are bracing for an attack, or for solders before the battle, or for a good harvest, or a wedding, or even before a ship leaves port.  Mechanically it would be some sort of morale boost - I can see it used by NPC priests to whip their minions into a frenzy.  It could also sway opinion towards the players and increase the possibility of henchmen and retainers being retained by a party - and it could influence these retainers during the dungeon crawl.  I can see this as working in conjunction with the cleric's bonus to the communication skill in Beacon to make them the leaders that motivate and muster the troops.  So it would be a low level mass charm - in effect making the audience slightly more disposed towards the cleric and increasing their morale for a short time.  Since it would take an hour or more to perform and be a loud affair I'm not too worried that it would devalue the Enchanter's charm spell.

I probably won't call it preachin' however.

Curses!

You might notice that in the Beacon divine spell list there is no Bestow/Remove Curse.  My noble play testers remarked on this recently.  I might be wrong, but I believe I did this for a reason. If you are running a game it's only natural to want to have actionable mechanics like "ah ha!  He casts Bestow Curse: take -6 to your ummm Dex and -4 to all your rolls Chumley."  Yes yes I realize that this is just a quick spell description and you would skin this to make it much more freakalicious in your game and all, but it still really limits the vast boundlessness of Curses into a simple fighting mechanic and thus not really scary.  Curses can cover a lot of ground - pricking your finger on a spindle and falling asleep, turning into a frog, objects possessed by spirits of past owners, objects that try to eat your spirit- oh there really are so many storytelling type things that could fall into this.  In the stories however folks are pretty freaked out by curses.  There's also the problem that  removing curses is really YMMV even in the SRD.  You can cast Remove Curse at 5th level and remove the effects of a cursed item, or maybe you can if you are high enough level compared to the curse, or maybe if it's not a special curse, or maybe something else entirely, on Tuesdays perhaps.  I just don't think it's a good mechanic. Lastly, a lot of traditional curses are simply spells or enchantments (for example Blind, Baleful Polymorph or Flesh to Stone) - and these all have their in game remedies and would just get buggered up by treating them as also as curses.  So I want to stay away from generic Curses and instead try to focus on types of 'curses' not already covered,  for example spiritual possession and influence.

Boogity boogity you interlopers!

Specifics time:  Over the last few game sessions, Thedric found a helmet you might consider to be cursed.  I had an idea that it should be haunted by a dwarven spirit.  There was no actual curse flag attached to his character sheet like in a video game - it wasn't physically welded to his head and impossible to remove/destroy but you can bet that if it was removed and given to someone else it wouldn't make him all better suddenly either.  It didn't effect his stats (yet) but it did make him all creepy and stuff.  I didn't think that a cleric would be able to simply whip off a remove curse and they would all be off on their way.  I suppose I had some idea that it would make use of the spirit related spells I was working on lately, especially Manifest.

So I kind of dropped the ball on this one.  They had the head cleric of Foxhollow remove the helmet - it was all behind closed doors and howling and spooky lights - but it was off camera.  I should really have had the party be in the room with the master cleric when he cast his Manifest spell and then they could have had a good duke it out with the dwarven spirit.  To be honest I hadn't thought the issue would come up so quickly and I figured that they would have left poor Thedric alone for a while longer.  If Henril hadn't been so eager to pull the helm off Thedric's head and causing him to do the funky chicken - or if he hadn't offered gold to a poor peasant woman to try to slap the helm on her head I probably would have gotten around to basing an adventure around speaking to the spirit in the helm, having it made manifest and then beating it up.  No blame on the players - they will always do the unexpected and focus on the things you aren't prepared for.  I wasn't prepared - so we lost an opportunity there.

Thinking back on it however I can see how those spells would work out, at least with possession type curses.  They would be fun. I don't know if they solve the entire 'curse' question however.  For example I can see needing some way to sanitize or corrupt areas in the name of religion.  I can see having ways to confound demonic imps much as as you would confound the undead.  The problem being this is mostly setting based and not universal game mechanic.  Not all setting would be interested in the old order/chaos pseudo christian religion I'm using in my game and so not all the spells I might like to have clerics use would be generally useful.  Yes yes, people can always DIY things and add them into their campaign but I also think the basic game should cover most of the bases.  

I don't have an answer for this right now but I am considering adding in some Rituals to the Divine spell list.  Rituals would be different than spells in that they would take longer to cast - hours not rounds.  They would also possibly have material components.  Either there would be one per spell level, say some sort of Cleansing ritual at first level,  or there would be a small number that could be learned as character advanced though the church.   These rituals would be primarily there to deal with weird religious shit like more traditionally cursed items or effects, 'evil' presences, keeping out chaos minions etc. My initial instinct is to make this setting material and not put it in the Beacon rules - but if they turn out really good and useful I might change that opinion.

Tweaking the Divine...spells

I'm still on a spell kick and I have an idea to address a couple things three things I've wanted to do for a while.  The first thing came up in game as a discussion on potions of healing and cure light wounds - it seemed a bit cheap force a roll for a Cure Light Wounds potion - I mean you spend over 100gp for one of these it had better do more than heal 1 point of damage on a crappy roll.  The same applies to the spell  - you spend 3 hp to cast a Cure Light Wounds spell and then roll and heal up 1 point - that blows.

Secondly I have been wondering if it is appropriate in a spell point system to have the full list of Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Quite Small But Serious Wounds, Cure Silent But Deadly Wounds...  Really, if you need to cure some wounds cast Cure Light Wounds a couple times - it's not like you have to have them prepared.  Also, I know there are probably folks who will crunch some numbers and figure out which cure spells give you the best ratio per cost and everyone will stop using the others and they will be wasted space in the rule-book.

Thirdly I was thinking that clerics should have some spells to deal with 'spirits'.  I don't know why this is the case, maybe I have something from The Exorcist stuck in my subconsciousness  but I think that it just feels right to have some freaky ass ghost crap going down sometimes instead of having players just chopping up bed sheets.  However in order to do that kind of thing you need to give them tools to deal with it.  The cleric seems a natural fit for this.

Fourthly I have been looking at all the bipolar spells in the rulebook rethinking the idea that good clerics should cast the 'good' version of a spell and bad clerics cast the 'bad' version of it.  I mean really?  Wouldn't a bad cleric want to heal or buff his minions sometimes? It's not like bad creatures use negative hit points or anything.  I know a good cleric wouldn't want to use a Cause Serious Wounds spell on an enemy - but maybe a weak willed or misguided one would do it.  And really what's the difference between that and smashing in their head with your mace?

So I believe I'm going to do the following to deal with these things:

1. Change the wording in the note about reversing spells to make it more clear that this is a setting/character thing and not a 'rule' thing.
2. The Level 1 Cure/Cause Light Wounds will now do 4+1d4 hp damage.
3. The Level 2 Cure/Cause Moderate Wounds is gone to be replaced with Detect Spirits.
4. The Level 3 Cure/Cause Serious Wounds will now do 8+2d8 hp damage.
5. The Level 4 Cure/Cause Critical Wounds is gone to be replaced with Manifest

Detect Spirits (level 2 Divine spell)
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft. /2 levels.
Duration: Concentration.
Description:  Reveals to the caster the presence of unseen spirits or ghosts and an impression of their nature/intent.  Can be used to determine if a creature or object is possessed.  Cannot be used to detect the presence of normal creatures that are hidden or invisible.

Manifest (level 4 Divine spell)
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft. /2 levels.
Duration: Concentration + 1 round.
Description:  Causes spirits, or other incorporeal beings of HD lower than the casters level to be made corporeal. Entities possessing objects or creatures will be forced out of them and stunned for 1 round.

At the rate I'm going It will probably be like 900 years before this gets play tested properly but what the hell I think might be cool.

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.

Religion

One thing that really bugs me in many settings is the pantheon of gods idea where you have a section in the setting book about all the gods the clerics can select from.  Gods like Chauncey: God of Light Transport, and Swee-tah: Goddess of Those Who Died from Poor Dental Hygiene.  Don't get me wrong - I love things like the Street of the Gods in Lankhmar, but in a campaign it doesn't work for me unless the different clerics had play differences and/or unique powers - or if there were no clerics.  That being said, I think for setting materials I will be going with a single church model.  A single model doesn't mean that all the clerics are of one mind or on the same sides - I would certainly expect factions or even different orders within this church.  I don't think that the concept of a personal (even chatty) relationship with a Deity is the right one for this model because having a very aware and communicative God would have too much impact on the world.  If a God was to take part and speak plain and direct to their flock like this, the world would become something more like a game of Populous or Civilization.  Leave a little mystery I say.

I'm going with something like... the Lords of Order.  Who are they?   Well they carved the world out of Chaos.  What are they? We don't really know.  What do they want?  They want to keep Chaos at bay.  What is Chaos?  That's what exists outside the world, from before the world - that's where Demons come from.  Are they good and just or cunning and evil?  Well um... both - that's why we cure and heal people and worship them but also that's why there are devils and suffering and injustice.  Why both - because both might and mercy are required to establish order.  Do we have free will to choose?  Yes you can choose to be good and merciful or mighty and evil, however both good and evil must be opposed to the destruction of chaos.  Is the Church good or evil?  The church strives to spread mercy, might needs no help to spread.  How many Lords of Order are there?  We don't know.  How do they grant you special powers?  We don't know, they choose people some for mercy, some for valor, some to smite chaos and some for reasons we don't understand.    Do demons also grant special powers?  Yes to some - those are cults and they need to be stopped from bringing chaos upon us.

Some of the 'Lords of Order' are going to be Godly and angelic beings, however some are just as obviously going to be Devils and Lords of Hell.  All beings of Order have their place in their hierarchy and abide by rules when dealing with people and each other.  A devil can't corrupt a soul by force and won't forswear themselves even if they will try to trick or intimidate a character.  On the other hand, demons are just in it for the destruction and have no problem with creating undead or possessing characters or going back on their word.

So one church and yes, I'm sure GM's and players will invent doctrine and saints to follow or invest particular attributes to certain Lords of Order to make things interesting.  Given that you have a church that can actually grant miracles, it will be assumed that they are very influential socially and the only thing stopping them from being the major force in society is this ambiguous theology, well that and the three way struggle between mercy-might and chaos. 

This goes back to an old school small scale vibe where you have the forces of Chaos nibbling at the periphery of  society in the form of goblin bands and mad cultists and horrible demons - and the adventurers are going in and stomping them down.  No alignments in Beacon so players can play selfless paragons just as easily as opportunist swords-for-hire.  They are all skulls for the skull throne.

Divine Magic

The Cleric class is one of the most problematic because it has the potential to be very interesting or very uninteresting depending on how it's executed in the setting.  In a detailed in campaign world there is usually a detailed and balanced pantheon of Gods (or whatnot) for clerics to play off of. In a minimalist campaign there usually isn't a lot of thought put into it and generic gods are pulled out.  In both cases there can a be a problem because in the detailed world all these divine entities would require custom versions of the cleric to carry their various philosophies/powers into the world -  something not much supported in the general rules.  In the minimalist campaign the Cleric is simply is the holy magic guy - an armour wearing magic user who heals and touts the laws of a generic god - something which is supported in the rules but can be a drag. The SRD is least helpful in this, as a lot of cleric spells are duplicates of magic user spells anyway - so the perception of  is reinforced. Sure all this can be overcome by good players and GMs in either instance, but I think that the deck is stacked against it.  Ideally a cleric spell list would be a list of spells rituals that derived from their religion and the more religions in the setting the more spells and rituals you would have to deal with.  That's hard on the GM and hard on the players however and I tip my hat to those that can pull it off well.  I can't offer many solutions to this here.  I did have the idea of making the cleric spells over entirely but I am trying to make Beacon as compatible with d20 references as I can so I settled with working over the SRD spells, trying to find ways to highlight the class.  I did put back in a lot of dualism in the spells which I think follows from the older game - I can't recall if there was an actual cause light woulds in old d&d spell lists but it was implied (or imagined) a bad cleric could reverse the cure spells.

In Beacon, Arcane magic is the magic of Words, Divine magic is the magic of Souls.  The spells come from outside the caster and can be channeled by will alone.  Divine magic spells can be made into potions, they can be imbued into objects - but they cannot be written down.   Following from this a cleric can't add spells to their spell book - they either simply know all the spells as a product of their faith or have had religious training to access them.  I am willing to go either way on this - perhaps a mixture of the two if I was running the campaign.

As for the holy avenger role - in D&D the paladin fills that role, something that always bugged me.  I mean isn't the cleric really supposed to be the paladin?  If he wasn't he wouldn't be allowed to wear plate armour and beat the hell out of things- he'd be in the back with the wizards.  They needed a whole other class just because they won't let the poor bastard use sharp objects?

So a Beacon Cleric can use sharp objects (unless his faith prohibits), and can use armour (unless his faith prohibits) and can cast spells (the ones his faith gives him).  He can be the terrible dude in black mail on the black horse with the fiery sword - or he can be the nearsighted monk with surprising strength of will.  Or the swamp witch who prays to the fen spirits to take away your blindness.  Or something else entirely.