Druids

necromancer
who is a really inspired city developer, and is building an undead city

>What abilities would they have?

Being Chinese?

But that's a Paladin who broke his Oath of the Acients.

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/7-myths-everyone-believes-about-druids.html

Nah. At least not me. I usually play druids that care for plants and animals that aren't dickbags but humans don't even ping on the radar that is their mind. If i gotta bulldoze a town to make a nice vegetable patch so be it, the orcs were making shit use of the land anyway but now they make nice fertilizer and i can see how many bushels of corn for the deer a single acre can make.

So druids are traitors to their people who want to destroy all traces of civilization and live like cavemen?
Sounds dumb.

Iron KIngdoms Circle of Orboros are very similar from this user's link They maintain natural order so that a god they worship wouldn't have to put his boot down on human world. To do that they raze civilized cities when they get too big, keep settlements that are small enough to be tolerated in fear and under control, keep an order of warriors bonded to them, take mad children to train into their ranks as well as plot and backstab each other for power and influence.

They're avatars of the natural order who lament the fact that their birth right puts them firmly outside of it. So they self loathe and feel they need to make up for their original sin.

yes like how IRL these cunts talk about nature as if humans are somehow not a part of nature (you know except for them, some activist from the suburbs who has showered all weel)

Druids are often perceived as neutral arbiters of nature.... But other planes also have their untamed forests and wilds.

Can a druid come from say.... A forest in the Nine Hells?

A drune, perhaps.

how about "druin"?

Best druids are all like
>Civilization is shit
>I'mma be a mufuggin' wolf and eat the face of cocksuckers entering muh forest
>Bears are great for cuddles
>You ever fucked a dryad? Dick splinters are worth it
>My best friend? This duck I named Quackers. He is the best wingman ever.
>Questing is for faggots
>BBEG wants to/has destroyed muh forest, time to fuck him up
>You know why it rains? I looks so good I make mother nature wet.
>Mounted cavalry coming to put my head on a spike for killing a prince who shot a bear in muh forest? Looks like I got about 100 new horse friends.
>Drank a whole bunch of wine with a bullfrog named Jeremiah once. He was worried about his ol' lady cheating on him. Bros before hoes, man. Hope someone eats that cunt's legs.

Nature doesn't give a shit whether you live or die. Why should I?

If your players are playing druids as tree hugging flower power hippies they're doing it wrong. Nature isn't kind. A good aligned druid can still exist but they shouldn't advocate no killing.

By the same respect an evil druid shouldn't really advocate destroying civilization. People are part of the natural order and the distinction between the wild and the civilized is an arbitrary one made by simple folk who do not truly understand the world.

No. I play Crazy Hobo Sewer Druids with Dire Rat animal companions because I value roleplaying over being a gamebreaker.

I believe the Druid's opposite is called a Blighter. They're more about destroying life and nature, though, and have nothing to do with cities. There is a Druid variant called an Urban Druid, though, but I'm not too familiar with them. I think they can only shapeshift into inanimate objects?

that was first character in 3.5 actually. Pretty fun.

> hippies
> laid back
> not unbearable moralising
What planet do you live on?

A Dwarf Engineer.

There are four main types of Druid people make:

1. Pacifistic hippie
2. Guardian of Nature
3. Pseudo-Darwinist asshole
4. Actual Darwinist

I'm tired of the dumb hippy druids who care more about nature than people, it's time to go back to the original celtic druids druids.
They're supposed to be spiritual guides to their people, not some faggot who will put the lives of some squirrels and the trees over them.

Most druids i've met are actually pretty laid back people.

As they are fucking supossed to be.

The issue isn't that humans aren't part of nature but the things we do almost entirely go against it.

By definition everything animals do is natural and everything we do isn't.
It's not a philosophical matter, just how "natural" is defined.

One in my current group is a misanthropic monster who'd sooner protect seaweed then lift a finger to save her friends.
She started off attempting to provoke a Fire Goddess into errupting a volcano to destroy a civilisation and only when it didn't work did she start to play nice with the rest of us.
We're still half expecting her to kill us for some blood and bone fertiliser though.

Merlin the enchanter was a druid in the beggining. in a show based on the legends (Kaamelott) He's a crappy enchanter thats always talking about how he could go back to the forest and live happily (he dosent)

Personally i think its like entropy. Natural order demands chaos and "wild" where humans promote order and "tame".

No, sometimes they're just animal fuckers. Or well, ours is just an animal fucker.

Did you just want to bitch about Marisha Ray, OP?

My first character was a druid. I tried to convince my party not to wipe out the eggs of a nest of shitty kobold raiders. I was just arguing that they're a natural part of the area and that we were only here to eliminate the problematic ones that had been mislead by a shitty kobold sorcerer. They grappled me, tied me up, and destroyed the eggs.

Plenty of animals shape their environment to their benefit.
We're just... better at it.

The Panther stalking it's prey, the stream feeding the forest, the young girl running through the streets to buy bread. To the uninitiated these are disconnected but to a druid these are all part of a greater whole. The beating heart of the world as pulses and moves with life. It is a druids duty to preserve life. Not an arbitrary definition of nature.

Not mine, he's unberable in a whole other way. Nihilistic and miserable. Believes nature is an ugly mess with no rhyme or reason, that life is a sensless and callous exercise in slavish submission to an instinctive drive to procreate for absolutely no higher purpose. But what are you gonna do about it?

Well shit. I guess i'm gonna have to go knocking birds nests down and pissing on anthills as well.

that could actually be great if roleplayed right

Third choice best choice

You see, a druid is a man who's decided to have sweet consensual intercourse with Nature instead of raping it or mind breaking it into submission (i.e. farming).

The most powerful of druids are said to even hold hands with Nature.

Is it rape if it's consensual hatefucking, hair pulling, skin gouging, possibly sodomitious, and more than frequently devolves into hardcore bloodletting style BDSM with no need for cuddling after?
What i'm asking is australian and african continent druids still consider druids by your definition?

If you're gonna post years-old OSR thoughts, don't forget the long-lost spirit guide:
joeskythedungeonbrawler.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/what-the-hell-druid-part-2/

I've always hate druids, or any nature focused things really.

They're all awful unless they don't really care about "druid things".

Define "druid things".

If humans are a part of nature, and are themselves natural, then it's almost rationally impossible for anything they do to go entirely against nature or even go against it in the least and slightest way.

If beavers and humans are both animals then tell me, how does a beaver damming up a river and causing the genocidal slaughter of a half dozen or more species of fish, bacteria water-loving animals downstream significantly differ from a human blowing up a nuclear reactor and killing the entire coastline of a continent? Last I checked both wood and uranium were natural resources.

I think the latest player handbook (5e) says it best. A druid is or aught to be "extensions of nature's indomitable will"

dndtools.pw/classes/blighter/
I hate 3.5, however

Anti paladin isn't really the opposite but the dark equivalent of a Paladin.
The opposite would be a dark sorcerer or a lich.

There's nothing unnatural about our behaviour. We're driven to expand, to use and exploit. All living things are. Locust swarms devour everything in their path because they can. Given the same abilities any animal will recklessly consume and expand until they can't anymore, and then they starve and die and that's how "balance" is restored. Truth is, druids don't have to do shit about it, they're entirely pintless in that regard.

>tfw everyone plays druids like stoners
I'm playing a LN Druid in a long-running 3.5 campaign, and that's about dead opposite. He still cares about nature, but realizes that there's a cycle of nature/"circle of life" sorta shit, so he doesn't go all Greenpeace on someone when they cut a tree down since people are a part of it, and need to live too. Excessive shit is still crossing the line, obviously, but it's only in extremes. I get to utterly hate Abberations and Undead, since they're perversions of the natural world/the cycle of life respectively.

I write my druids like mentally strained NEETs who live in the forest, reading the future in the starry skies, munching various questionable materials found on the forest floor, and detesting anyone that isn't friendly, welcoming, and the kind of person they want to talk to as the normie they are.

No, those are different. Those are Australians.

>ctrl+f
>"the knot"
>0 results

You're slipping, Veeky Forums.

I'd say we're actually rising, you degenerate mongoloid.

Face it, you're just not cut out for this environment.

No. Some are unbearable rapist bear landslide firestorms who are all FUCK YOU, TORNADO COMING THROUGH.

Didn't you just yourself prove that you're the one who sticks out like a boil?

So am I the only person that plays druids like nature priests that bless fields, help livestock with problem births and health issues, knows when the best time for hunting and fishing, and are generally bro tier?

I think I kind of have a problem with druids and think that any druid class restrictions are dumb, because I personally believe literally everything, including metal fucking equipment, civilization, and sapients fucking with the environment are parts of nature.

It's just also however a part of nature to decide you personally have a problem with people fucking with the outdoors and rip them apart for, say, killing endangered animals, causing undue suffering to animals, wasting their corpses, wastefully cutting down trees, or just entering the goddamn territory that is yours until someone else is strong enough to take it from you.

That's just me, though.

Nah. I do the same but like i mentioned earlier if a village is sitting on prime vegetable patch land i will just bulldoze the place and let the bodies fertilize the soil. I don't mind you civilizationing it up, just don't do it where i want my shit to go or where theres better uses for the land you put it on.
Honestly that probably leaves frozen tundra's, deserts, and ocean for you to buils and live off of, but again, fuck you i think thats prime oak tree land or a nice orchard.

Yep. My current setting has druids banned for being a general nuisance, as older druids tend to pseudo-"evolve" into elementals with all that entails in terms of inhumanity.

Or if they kill your bear wife purely for a trophy. Sure your wolf wife says go fuck them up but then your deer wife and squirrel wife are all balling their eyes out saying its "too dangerous!" Bitch i won a bear wife in a deathmatch you knew what this was going into this!

They understand they're bigger than themselves.

How that actually manifests, is best left out of savoury discussion.

Does the storm weep when it sees the destruction it's wrought or does it cry from laughter? Neither, it's a fucking storm fuck you.

I play my druids as people with very "new age" beliefs who don't hate technology or development, but instead just have a thing for nature. I bit nuts really, but friendly enough.

This sort of goes against the mechanical portrayal of druids in pretty much every system and game, except maybe certain portrayals of druids from the warcraft universe.

The worse is when druids lose their power from touching metal. That doesn't make any sense! If they sit on a rock with a high iron content to their powers go away? How about the iron in blood? The iron in their OWN blood?

Isn't it usually only *worked* metal that counts?

It's only wearing metal armor that does it.

How does "worked metal" trigger the druid code but, say, working leather and stone doesn't?

I wouldn't really think that ripping an elk's skin off, spilling its brain over its hide, and then crafting the braintanned hide into clothing is less "unnatural" than heating up metal and working it into shape and tempering it.

And you'd be right, but its a thematic, not a consistent philosophy.

You're making the kinds of arguments a Hermetic wizard would make to a Druid, who would answer said arguments by taking a shit on his summoning circle before getting drunk under a tree.

It's a cultural thing. Just accept it. Like how some people will eat cats and dogs and others find the thought abhorrent. In theory there shouldn't be that much of a divide between dogs and pigs as food animals, and in practice it's bacon bacon bacon bacon.

Ackshewuhlee, its family member or bacon. There's a big divide there and while both are engineered by us singlehandedly one is vastly more so and much more specialized to be one than the other.

You see, druids liked craftsmanship before metals were invented and it became cool.

who is this semen demon

And here we see the druid mentality in action: only instead of "worked metal is terrible, worked leather is fine" it's "this quadruped is food, this quadruped is family". Yeah, tell it to the Koreans.

We did. Why do you think their culture is stagnating?

I like the idea of druids who see nature not as something that needs protecting but as a powerful force that mortals and civilization must understand and appease if they want to survive. Cutting down too many trees isn't a bad idea because you'll kill off the forest, your shitty pre-industrial woodcutting can't really do that, it's a bad idea because if you aren't careful you may get fucking wrecked by dryads or something.

Beaver dams are actually extremely healthy for their surrounding areas:

youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q
The bit about beavers is about two minutes in, but the whole video is pretty interesting.

The tricky thing about druids is that the natural preservation theme doesn't apply as much to a fantasy world that hasn't undergone industrial consumption the way the real world has. There's still a place for them, though, especially with the kind of destructive shenanigans mages get up to. It's not just about "nature", it's about having healthy and diverse ecosystems.

Yes.

>Moralising downers
>Not eco-terrorist

>What abilities would they have?

Yea using industrial necromancy as a counterpoint to druidism is something I've always wanted to emphasize in a setting.

Don't forget that they ritualistically mutilate the tribesmen that revere them and turn them into mindslaved weremonster things.

And then there is the greatest crime of all - running eMorvahna.

They ought to be the opposite given how "it's nature" doesn't lend itself very well to moralizing at all, given its lack of, you know, morals.

Silly user, a Druid already uses green magic.

Picrelated best druid.

That is stupid, why would druids hate language?

Animals have languages, hell killer whales even have dialects that other groups cannot understand.

>That is stupid, why would druids hate language?

Because druids are generaly stupid, user.

That seems to be the opinion of OP and maybe, like, one other person. Everyone else thinks that's silly and druids are fine. Making up random bullshit like "druids hate language" isn't helping the case much.

No, most interpretations of druids are stupid. I guess that's what happens when people who never leave the city, or even their house, try to create nature-based characters.

>shitty pre-industrial woodcutting

Medieval people were more than capable of completely removing forests from the land, England now has more forest than it did in the late Middle Ages. The country was only 15% forest even before the Norman Conquest 1000 years ago.

Batman confirmed anti-druid.

I once played a Druid in Shadows of the Demon Lord. Kind of a tough old guy who really supported his local coven of druids, doing some light muscle work for them, giving out the healing spells, generally a really nice if kind of rude guy.

Unfortunately he was killed by a giant statue of an elf but that's just how life is.

It's explained in the post. It's abstract language what eventually might kill the world. Centerra,, the implied setting in that blog, is a world sprawling with memetic world-ending events waiting on people to activate them. Think about several King-In-Yellow-sort of texts that can become existential threats way beyond the reader. Think about LotFP's Summon Spell. Level one spell, can wreck an entire region. Extrapolate.

That's the reason why druids hate language, because the human sort of communication implies *abstraction* in a level that could trigger such effects.

But it's right there at the blog post, so I'm guess I was baited.

I'm sorry that the thread didn't end up that way.

nah just that one