Holy magic comes from worship, but it need not be the worship of deities. The dying words of Sertrous revealed this...

>worship the old masters of painting
>suddenly gain masterful art skills

So you're saying that, if I spend the rest of my life trying to not get stuck in the wall, I might not get stuck in the wall?
Fucking might? Maybe? Chance?

And you haven't even given me any evidence this shit can work?

Yeah, naw, fuck off. I'm not risking my eternity over a might.

Sage'd, reported, called the angels, messaged the paladins, prayed to the cops.

The Wall of the Faithless doesn't require worship to be avoided in 5e, you need to be a special kind of dick in which literally no one, wants you in his plane of existence, not even the goddamn demons to end in the wall.

Asmodeus has a sweet deal going on right now, he offers skipping the lines, salvation from the wall and minor devilhood in exchange from favors in the prime material plane.

... Does that mean political extremists can derive divine power from their fringe beliefs?

Oath of Conquest and Oath of Treachery or Oath of the Crown.

Paladins, in 5e, derive power from absolute faith and action on a path that they swear to follow, so it doesn't matter if you rage against communism or a puppy kicker, a Vengeance paladin swears the same oath and goes in a rampage of "justice" and then repairing the colateral damage as best as he can.

>Empowered by his cult, Duncan paints a marine so well it comes to life
>By 2020, Duncan Rhodes is proclaimed paint-emperor of mankind
>Paintpriests oversee all Games Workshop premises and give blessings to those in need
>All wars are ended, and replaced with inter-country painting competitions
>The military industrial complex shifts to producing the finest tipped brushes possible
>By 2025, a Paintpriest manages to create a working webway portal
Duncan vult

The Elder Evil sertrous campaign notes that people who began to worship things other than the gods once they had the chance to were included among the Faithless who would qualify for being walled, didn't it?

glory to art

Seriously, kantian fedora paladins are pretty high on the retarded ideas list i've ever seen(worshiping the concept of X can be a cool concept to us from time to time, but 90% of it's applications are from people feeling itchy at the mention of theism and worship. IN A FANTASY SETTING, and trying to cover it with "but the gods don't babysit me enough/but are they REALLY gods?/I am skeptical of whatever" and other crappy, hamfisted excuses).
Seriously, pick a fucking god and pray from time to time.
Your hand won't fall off from playing along in a game.

You mean the Elemental Evil?

>The sole remaining group of dissidents in New Games Workshop™ are the Kirbyites
>They stand against Duncan's new order of better pricing and higher quality sculpts, riding into battle on their Giant Weeaboo Robots™ and screaming "WE ARE NOT A GAMES COMPANY"
>They have yet to pierce a Paintpriest's two thin coats of ceramite mail
>By 2050 Kirbyite resistance is crushed, and the reach of New Games Workshop™ extends throughout the galaxy
>Extraterrestrial life is contacted, and brought into the fold
>In 2200, an exploratory fleet headed by Duncan himself reaches Sagittarius A*
>They pass through the event horizon, and they find...
>New sororitas sculpts, and plastic thunderhawks
>Models for every major IG regiment and Ork clan
>And the Squats, in all their space biker glory.
Truly, the best timeline

dnd.rem.uz/3.5 D&D Books/Elder Evils.pdf
No.

>dnd.rem.uz/3.5 D&D Books/Elder Evils.pdf
That's 3.5, user.
Ao decided to tell the gods to stop fucking the Prime Material after fixing it for the last time in the Second Sundering. Of course the first thing that happens is Bhaal murdering the fuck out of Waterdeep, but that's Bhaal for you.

>fall of the faithless

Have none of you played Mask of the Betrayer

I don't really like this idea all that much honestly. If there's going to be a difference between holy magic and arcane magic then it should be that holy magic comes from God/gods, your channeling their power rather then your power.

Also I'm not against the idea of a war against the gods, but if your going with that kind of campaign then the gods better be assholes like the greek gods mythology made them out to be.

It's still perfectly valid, user.

After scouring the given tome, I can't find any reference to the wall. can you quote a page?

Neither can I. It seems I misremembered thanks to that quip about priests, it's actually been a loooong time since I read the book.
But at least the other stuff is still legit

Pandering to the fedora crowd was a mistake. Divine magic coming from "conviction" is stupid - it absolutely should come, in every case, from some manner of higher being. When Jim The Really Enthusiastic Atheist can do literally the exact same thing as Saint Holyman The Valiant, the Paladin loses a lot of its uniqueness, and basically becomes just another half-caster who happens to have strong beliefs about something, instead of the champion of a god, empowered with divine magic due to their piety and holiness.

Maybe Sertrous was an evil demon king who was trying to accomplish something bad by revealing this black truth?

>3.5 had something about clerics not actually having to worship gods but had to pick domains that encompassed what they worshiped instead
>Elements were domains

I get where they're coming from and don't dislike the whole thing, but a dude going "OH BOY SHIT HOWDY I SURE DO LOVE WATER *casts flame strike while praying into his canteen*" always struck a nerve with me

Pretty much this. There's no point to it, it's just fedorafags wanting to flip off the gods/God again. If conviction is all it takes for holy magic then your gonna have ludicrous amounts of paladins yet almost no moral code to guide them.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about Sertrous, you little bitch?

In 5e, it's granted by the gods, but filtered by the oath. By doing the oath justice and doing the will of the gods, you receive power, but which god grants it is unknown, it may not even be a god, after Ao threw his fit and told the gods to stop meddilng that directly. Depends on the oath. If you got an Oath of Treachery, you could end up working for the Princess of Hell, while a paladin sworn to Devotion would have Torm whispering in his ear. A paladin sworn to the Ancients may gain the attention of Sylvanus or Corellon.

But here Mara the malign, the god of craving and of death,intervenes; he enters into one of the celestial beings in Brahma's retinue and from here speaks to the Buddha:

>0 monk, beware of him. He is Brahma, the omniporent, the invincible, the all-seeing, rhe sovereign, the lord, the creator, the preserver, the father of all that has been and of all that will he. Long before you there were in the
world ascetics and priesrs who were enemies of the elements, of nature, of the gods, of the lord of generation, of Brahma; these, at the dissolution of the body, when their vital strengrh was exhausted, came to abject forms of
exisrence. And therefore I counsel you, 0 ascetic: beware, O worthy one! Whar Brahma has said to you, accept it, lest you contradict the word of Brahma. Should you, 0 ascetic, contradict the word of Brahma, it would he
as though a man were to approach a rock and beat on it with a stick, or as though a man, 0 ascetic. were to fall into an infernal abyss and to seek to grasp the earth with his hands and feet: thus, 0 monk, would it befall you.

But the Buddha discovers the plot, and speaks
thus to Mara:

>"Well I know you, Malign One, abandon your hope: 'He knows me not'; you are Mara, the Malign. Arid this Brahma here, 0 Malign One, these gods of Brahma: they are all in your hand, they are all in your power, You. O Malign One, certainly think: 'He also must he in my hand, in my power!' I, however, 0 Malign One, am not in your hand, I am not in your power."

Just because you may utilize fire to obliterate your enemies doesn't mean you respect fire as a concept.
We already have bigger bugs in the way domains lay already, since they're balanced for gameplay and not logic.
Hell, a cleric devoted to Kelemvor gets Animate Dead as a class spell due to his Death domain. Raising the undead is the greatest sin in Kelemvor's faith.

Translate this to plainspoken english?
I'm retarded so I don't really get it. Sorry.

>interchanging O with 0 intermittently

Is there a reason behind this, or are you just being a retard for shits'n'giggles?

>Onlookers: Buddha, beware, he is the ultimate god of everything! If you offend him you will die!
>Buddha: it's literally the god of jacking off lmao

I'll tell you the full story, in brief. Its an old Buddhist legend.

Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha, decides to visit the highest of the celestial worlds, the great realm of Brahma. Brahma is the greatest of the gods, he is indeed almost a Hindu Jehovah. He is the monotheistic God. The Buddha goes up and meets with Brahma and his retinue, which is numerous classes of gods, angels, and spirits. As Buddha is speaking with God, Mara, the demon of desire, enters into one of the gods/archangels/devas and tries to dissuade the Buddha from teaching, telling him that if he keeps preaching the dharma, he will eventually be sent to Hell when he dies.

The Buddha responds that although God and all His angels are in the power of desire, the Awakened One is not. He explains that all the gods, even Brahma, are subject to desire, craving, attachment, birth, and death, no matter how powerful they may be. He then challenges the great Brahma to prove His omnipotence by ceasing to exist, then coming back into existence.

When Brahma is unable to, Prince Siddhartha ceases to exist, then comes back into existence. All the gods are amazed, and the Buddha continues saying.

>"Nature, the gods, the lord of generation, Brahma, the Resplendent Ones, the Powerful Ones, the Ultrapowerful Ones, all things, I have known, how unsatisfying are all things: this have I recognized and 1 have renounced all things, abdicated from all things. detached myself
from all things, forsworn all things, disdained all things. And in this. 0 Brahma, not only
am I your equal in knowledge, not only am I not less than you. but I am far greater than
you,"51 And the words: "This is not mine, This am I not, this is not my self" must be said
by the "noble son" for the whole of that world too.52 It is still "samsara."

I copied it from an online source, alot of the letters were messed up.

This is pretty cool shit.
I sometimes forget that the original Buddha was just an ordinary mortal at first.

Enlightenment is one hell of a drug

Any time someone wants to play an atheist Cleric I always think of Buddha as the original archetype, because that is basically what he was.

If someone asked to play as a Cleric without a god in my game, I'd probably allow it if he was playing as some eastern ascetic instead of fedora wank.

What if I worshipped Zarus before he became a god?

we already had those, we called them gods
/s

Can I worship pascal's wager?

Yes, but there's only a 50% chance you'll be granted spells and you won't know the outcome until you die.

>no, patrick, mayonaise is not a divine power source

you're not wrong

This is a thread about the dnd setting you nigger

Elder Evils a shit.

Nigger you what?
Give THREE good reasons why elder evils is shit.

fpbp

A few of the evils were total misses (Leviathan was dumb [is real big! world ends because 2big] and the hulks of whatever were totally devoid of interest, literally just rock-men that made people go crazy) but on the whole the apocalypse factors were interesting and the storylines they had were great to staple onto campaigns.

I really, really liked that shit with mutative, corruptive positive energy. That whole thing with the mother of monsters is great and terrifying. I also enjoy that there's a bit where an army of sentient undead band together and try to fight off monster hordes coming for the cities like true bros.

I like how IK does it.

Arcane and divine magic are the same thing, just drawn from different sources. A sorcerer is accessing the divine spark inside themselves to do magic, whereas a pious priest is accessing the power of their god, and an Infernalist draws on the power of space demons. Arcane and divine magic are essentially the same thing, but gods have a much deeper well to draw from, and their ascended minds can work much more powerful effects (the flipside of this being that arcanists have the freedom to do what they want with their magic).

That's nice, user. Now pick a god to worship already. You're holding up the fucking game.

I was always a little annoyed how restrictive paladins were. A melee-focused class with a bit of magic is an interesting concept but playing a paladin forces you into a fairly small niche roleplay-wise. This sounds like a good way to circumvent that. Something like the Doom guy, a paladin-like class that's powered by how angry they are rather than divine power from the gods.

>a paladin-like class that's powered by how angry they are

Berserkers?

>the dnd setting

I guess? I've never played too much D&D apart from 3.5, and very few splat books for that so I'm not too familiar with that.

I think the nicest part of it is that dnd itself gives you plenty of precedence for it, so if your game is in Eberron or Forgotten Realms, it's totally legitimate and your dm can go fuck themselves if they say all clerics and paladins must worship gods

>he doesn't know that all the dnd settings are part of the same linked multiverse in-canon
>he doesn't know that planescape and spelljammer campaigns can lead you into any of the other settings

I am not a fan of magic just coming from your convictions, but I don't have a problem with divine magic being born of honest-to-god (padum-tsh) faith regardless of the involvement of an actual deity. Believing isn't enough, conviction isn't enough, you need to be literally religious about your belief. You need to peer constantly into the metaphysical, you need to find a thing you have faith in, and you need to pray to focus your powers just like anybody else.

Gods are a really really convenient focus with ritual, tradition, and an ethical code and concept to have faith in which is why so many clerics worship gods. But you can give of your self and your faith to other things and still gain power. It helps explain why, in my campaign setting, a city of people who culturally never adopted the concept of "gods" still have clerics who are ordained civic ministers that lead the populace in philosophical symposiums and organize social services.

Across the way from them, people worship the actual factual gods, and on the border, people worship the gods as saints/demons within the philosophy, or ascribe the philosophy as the handiwork of a god, etc. Nobody knows who's right because any higher power contacted doesn't really seem to care to answer the question.

God (ha) tier elder evils.
Atropus- A fragment from the dawn of everything, the first death seeking to restore all to nothing. Good scale, nice and climatic.
Ragnorra- Mother of monsters, positive energy gone mad as the world warps and writhes from her approach.
Pandorym, assuming you touch things up a little to get rid of the plot stupidity because the inevitable responsible for the freeing would have been stopped by the other parts of mechanus.

Good tier
Sertous- the first heretic is a nice concept, but he's not that impressive as the cosmic scale of the others, seeing as you only fight an aspect of his mostly dead form and thats it.
Father lymic- needs a little bit of work, play up the cold between the stars angle, the vanishing of the sun and the slow creeping death of a lightless world do distract from his rather silly look.
The worm that walks- a fairly classic evil, a nice standard horror, not much to really say.
Zargon- ancient baatezu is pretty good, but he's not the most impressive scalewise and is kinda goofy looking.

Low tier
Leviathan- needs a lot of work to make it better- maybe tie it to the water elemental prince instead of the ice one- its from the darkest depths of the water plane, and hunts entire worlds, shattering continents, and when the rubble of the land has sunken into the water, it pulls the world into the plane of water, where it can feast on the broken world. Could maybe make it so this is where dagon or the abolths trace their lineage to, and should definitely play up the idea of "this is why people fear water / the ocean"
The hulks- for alien terraformers, theyre a bit shit. I'd say maybe tie them to the 4 main elemental princes, as thier world eaters, maybe scale them up massively in size so you believe they can properly break and rebuild the world. Have their sign being massive geological disruption- freak weather, disasters, climate change going in all directions at once, with new life forms at peak.

5e elder evils conversion when?

Sertrous feels mostly forgotten and abandoned

Having never played 5e I can't say when, but I think sertous's problem is that he doesn't play that much of a role- he's already dead and gone, and all you fight are his servants, with the climatic boss fight being the last gasp of his corpse trying to save itself.

Hmm- now that I think about it, you could maybe try combing him with zargon- if you make it so he can't be killed, the gods were forced to seal him away in the darkest depths of the world, in the long forgotten wastes where none tread, so his heretical whispers of rebellion against the heavens will go unheard. Maybe do it so he is just a perpetual force of rebellion, a manifestation of corruption, disorder
and the struggle against the current order of the gods. As long as one person still seeks to rise up against what is, he shall live etc etc.

Blah blah blah, he's able to turn his guards, but even they can't release them, so while the fallen angels there are his main servants, they're still trying to find a way to free him. Campaign involves investigating cult leaders, sertous eventually gets freed, starts planning to find a way of cutting the world off from the divine altogether- prayers will go unheard, clerics will be powerless, souls will wander eternally, unable to find an afterlife. PCs have to stop the rite, and then either return him to a prison or find a way to kill him for good.

Which on second thought, if you go with the "as long as one man rebels, I will live" you could go for a fairly ironic way of killing him- drawing power like that means that he is functionally equivalent to a god- use his own ritual against him- since asmodeus might have helped defeat him in the past if you fuse him with zargon, search the archives of baator for the rite (they have it but dont use it as archdevils can and do get power and souls like a gods does and the rite would stop them getting power that way- use this rite to find a way of altering sertous's own ritual to sever him from his power / get the edited version as the real one, swap them around- either way, either by getting to and disrupting the ritual, or by faking the ritual plans sertous carries out the rite, but all it does is sever him from his own power source, making him mortal. Mortal and killable. If the party either can't do thst or doesn't succeed, they'll need to seal him away once more.

/thread

>No one has posted the Kamen Rider page
>No one has talked about the hypercrisis yet

Cmon guys, this is easy shit. Man made God in his image. It's not that hard.

>Holy magic comes from worship, but it need not be the worship of deities.
This is just dumb. Call it spirits, great powers or whatever you want, they are the source of holy magic and grant to people who gained their favor through worship or deeds. Object of your worship doesn't have sentience? Tough luck, mate, you won't get any cool powers for that besides improved selfdelusion.

In 3.5e at least, there was a small bit of text about how a paladin could get their powers not from gods, but from their own goodness more or less. In 5e, it all comes from oaths now, so technically you don't need any sort of religious worship. Sometimes you're still stuck in certain niches, especially since 3.5e really stresses the Lawful Good part and puts restrictions on you, but you don't really have to have a deity to worship at all if you want.

4e's the only recent one that went 'you have to worship a deity as a paladin,' and that's because they made them more directly holy warriors, with their alignment tied to their deity's alignment

Well yeah

>A melee-focused class with a bit of magic is an interesting concept but playing a paladin forces you into a fairly small niche roleplay-wise.
What are Psychic Warrior and Eldritch Knight/Magus/Swordmage for the other magic types (psychic and arcane)? In addition these other types are much more open in their roleplaying since they aren't beholden to highly specific roleplay restrictions due to being holy warriors.

Stop playing in the ur-shitty setting.

Have you tried not filling your mouth with seventeen cocks?

...

OP, the Wall of the Faithless is very specific for FR. It does not exist in Eberron, Mystara, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Nentir Vale/PoL, Ravenloft, and Birthright. It only nominally exists in Spelljammer and Planescape due to being able to travel to Abeir-Toril, the world of Forgotten Realms.

This is retarded.
You can get power from gods, which is divine magic, but it's shit, because it can be taken away.
You can get power from demons, which is black magic, but it's shit, because it can be taken away.
You can get power from studying, which is arcane magic. You can learn from books, angels, demons, other magic users or just using trial/error, but if you don't have the "proper" mindset, it's virtually impossible.
Plain and simple, without excessive meddling and tip-toeing around issues.

This is a great system IMO. I like the idea that because humans (and elves and trolls and gatormen and basically everyone but shitty bald weeaboos) were created from the body of a god, they have divine potential within them that they can access if they're willing to do some real hard work and self-improvement for it.

It allows for deities like Morrow and Thamar, who cucked mankind's actual creator god out of his subjects, and whose entire doctrines are actually less about worship, and more about doing what they did and being such a great dude that you ascend to godhood.

Oh, look, little fundie upset his voodoo does nothing in real life, so he desperately wants others to at least pretend they are the same as him for a bit?

Look, if I don't follow retarded concept in real life, I won't follow it in game. I play for fun, and doing stuff you consider stupid is *not* fun. Especially when you took several years of comparative religion studies at university and see how shallow and stupid rambling of fundies is.

You already have great example of Buddha above, but there are dozens of pre-christian European religions that also had priests with special powers that - surprise, surprise, were not mailed from some Mzimu above.

If your fundie hat is so tight you see fedoras everywhere, maybe migrate to Syria of Afghanistan? They might be closer to your liking than first world.

Also, lol at imbecile who claims Atheists don't have morals. So far, I didn't seen a SINGLE religion without retarded and idiotic rules that make worshippers pretty much evil on the spot if followed, which the two fundies would knew if they didn't already didn't ignore 90% of their holy books they never read anyway.

Ironically, the closest to being 'neutral' religion is Judaism, as they one of rare sane religious rules "none of our voodoo applies if human life is in danger" but they still practice genital mutilation (that killed hundreds of thousands of kids along the way) so even they don't get a pass.